goldfields

In October 1860 John Bidwell acquired title to “Potter’s Half-League,” a portion of Rancho de Farwell situated on the south bank of Chico Creek. That same year he had finally had his title to Rancho Chico on the north side of the creek confirmed, and now he owned land on the south side too. It was just what he needed to carry out his plans to create a town. He didn’t hesitate. On December 5th, 1860, he filed the plan for the town of Chico at the courthouse in Oroville.

As his ranch operations had grown, more and more employees were living on the ranch, clustered around ranch headquarters and his residence (pre-mansion). Bidwell’s plan was to create a town — a place for shops and businesses and churches, and most of all, houses — and move everybody off his ranch.

The Barham family lived just behind the mill, on the east side of the Shasta-Marysville Road (now The Esplanade). In 1918, Mrs. Arabella Barham recalled those days:

You see it was this way. General Bidwell away back in ’61 and ’62 was very anxious to have a town started here. He had built up quite a little settlement on the north side of Big Chico Creek but there was nothing on this side. There were numerous houses there including the hotel, the barns, blacksmith shops and a lot of other adobe shacks. The mill was there and we lived just back of it. My husband sold the grain and flour for Bidwell and was quite intimate with him. One day Bidwell said to my husband, “John, if you will go across the creek and build a home for yourself and wife I’ll give you a lot free.”

Arabella was not keen on the idea.

John came and told me about it and I felt just then as though I didn’t want to be starting a town for anybody and was perfectly satisfied to stay where I was.

She thought about the expense of building with lumber and the effort of hauling the lumber from Hupp’s sawmill in the mountains. Why go to all that work when they already had a house? But Bidwell was determined.

Bidwell kept after John, however, and finally he consented. The house is the one we live in and still stands on Main Street near Fifth, and all the original lumber is in it. My husband and a one-horse carpenter named Manser did the work. The house was completed in April 1862 and we moved in. It was the only house in the present site of where Chico now stands, at that time.

House building in those days was some task. Such a thing as millwork in lumber was unknown. All of the timbers which went into our house came down from the mills as rough as could be. Such a thing as a planing mill was unknown and in consequence, every piece of lumber and every board that needed a smooth surface was submitted to a hand planing by the carpenters.

The Barham property stretched along Fifth Street from Main to Wall Street. The house address was 529 Main Street. In 1960 the house was moved to the Silver Dollar Fairgrounds — does anyone know what became of it there? — and the site was turned into a parking lot for the Senator Theater.

Sources: Chico Enterprise-Record, January 3, 1918 and July 12, 1960. Photographs: Northeastern California Historical Photograph Collection, Meriam Library. California State University, Chico.

More about the early growth of Chico next time.

Yesterday I went to the California State Library in Sacramento to look at a variety of Rancho Chico ledgers. I had no idea that there were so many! I only wanted ledgers from 1865-1868 because I wanted to see if I could find anything that related to the building of Bidwell Mansion. They gave me eight huge heavy ledgers on a cart, and another eight smaller day books from the Bidwell store.

I don’t have a good grasp of the difference between blotters, day books, ledgers, and journals (in the bookkeeping sense). And John Bidwell was running a large enterprise, with income and expenses from the flour mill, the lumber company, the Chico & Humboldt Wagon Road, and various aspects of the ranch — livestock, dairy, orchards, etc. It was tricky for me to get my head around.

The most useful one for my purpose was the one you see at the top of the page, Journal F, which listed transactions from September 1863 to December 1867. Expenses for the building of Bidwell Mansion were listed as “New Residence.” It’s going to take me quite a while to go through the photos I took and analyze the data. Here is just one–

On July 7, 1865, Bidwell spent $2.50 for 2 yards of wire cloth for the Mansion from Baker & Hamilton, a supplier of hardware in Sacramento and San Francisco.

Toward the end of the day I went back to the store blotters. They didn’t have anything to do with my project, so I had set them aside at first, but I find it so fascinating to see what people were buying in the 1860s and how much things cost. For instance, eggs were selling for 25 cents a dozen. I could look at those books all day. Finally my daughter had to drag me away so that we could get going on the freeway before rush hour traffic set it.

Just for instance– here we have Major Hancock buying a chopping axe for $2, a Chinese man named Ah Jake stocking up on rice, brandy, and matches, and getting a pair of overalls and 2 pairs of socks, and a Mrs. Marriott doing her daily shopping for coffee, tea, nutmeg, candles, matches, and beans and spending a total of $3.88. I don’t know who any of these people are, but they were living in Chico one hundred and sixty years ago.

If you like books, this is the place to be next Saturday. Peruse books, meet authors, and enjoy a bookish day in Sacramento. I’ll be there with my books, so I hope I’ll see you.

The festival is sponsored by the Sacramento Branch of the California Writers Club and features an impressive list of authors in all genres and for all ages. See their list of authors here. There will also be plenty of yummy food from a variety of food trucks. Something for everyone!

The event is easy to get to. McKinley Park is just off Hwy. 80 between H and E Streets. There is parking at the park and on the street.

If you need more information, take a look at their webpage. Everything you need to know is there. See you soon!

Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914-2003) was a British historian best known as the author of The Last Days of Hitler (1947). He wrote extensively on Nazi Germany and on England in the 16th and 17th centuries. His Ten Commandments for History Writers is lengthy, but well worth studying and taking to heart. It is written in the English of the King James Version of the Bible, which he handles accurately and admirably. For those of you in the TL:DR crowd, I’ll summarize by saying that he stresses writing in an orderly manner, with clarity and precision, and always keeping the needs of the reader in mind.

I particularly like commandments eight and nine: visualize your metaphors and listen to the sound of your words. Reading your work aloud is always helpful.

1. Thou shalt know thine own argument and cleave fast to it, and shalt not digress nor deviate from it without the knowledge and consent of the reader, whom at all times thou shalt lead at a pace which he can follow and by a route which is made clear to him as he goeth.

2. Thou shalt respect the autonomy of the paragraph, as commanded by the authority and example of the prophet Edward Gibbon, for it is the essential unit in the chain of argument. Therefore thou shalt keep it pure and self-contained, each paragraph having within it a single central point to which all other observations in it shall be exactly subordinated by the proper use of the particles and inflections given to us for this purpose.

3. Thou shalt aim always at clarity of exposition, to which all other literary aims shall be subordinated, remembering the words of the prophet commandant Black, “clarté prime, longueur secondaire.” [clarity is primary, length secondary] To this end thou shalt strive that no sentence be syntactically capable of any unintended meaning, and that no reader be obliged to read any sentence twice to be sure of its true meaning. To this end also thou shalt not fear to repeat thyself, if clarity require it, nor to state facts which thou thinkest as well known to others as to thyself, for it is better to remind the learned than to leave the unlearned in perplexity.

4. Thou shalt keep the structure of thy sentences clear, preferring short sentences to long and simple structures to complex, lest the reader lose his way in a labyrinth of subordinate clauses; and, in particular, thou shalt not enclose one relative clause in another, for this both betrays crudity of expression and is a fertile source of ambiguity.

5. Thou shalt preserve the unities of time and place, as commended by the High Priest Nicholas Boileau, placing thyself, in imagination, in one time and place, and distinguishing all others to which thou mayest refer by a proper use of tenses and other forms of speech devised for this purpose; for unless we exploit the distinction between past and pluperfect tenses, and between imperfect and future conditional, we cannot attain perfect limpidity of style and argument.

6. Thou shalt not despise the subjunctive mood, a useful, subtle and graceful mood, blessed by Erasmus and venerated by George Moore, though cursed and anathematised by the Holy Inquisition, Pravda, and the late Lord Beaverbrook.

7. Thou shalt always proceed in an orderly fashion, according to the rules of right reason; as, from the general to the particular when a generality is to be illustrated, but from the particular to the general when a generality is to be proved.

8. Thou shalt see what thou writest; and therefore thou shalt not mix thy metaphors. For a mixed metaphor is proof that the image therein contained has not been seen with the inner eye, and therefore such a metaphor is not a true metaphor, created by the active eye of imagination, but stale jargon drawn up from the stagnant sump of common-place.

9. Thou shalt also hear what thou writest, with thine inner ear, so that no outer ear may be offended by jarring syllables or unmelodious rhythm; remembering therein with piety, though not striving to imitate, the routines of Sir Thomas Browne and the clausulae of Cicero.

10. Thou shalt carefully expunge from thy writing all consciously written purple passages, lest they rise up to shame thee in thine old age. [This is otherwise known as “kill your darlings.”]

(Lord Dacre of Glanton [Hugh Trevor-Roper], 1914-2003; historian – Christ Church College, Oxford, 1946-57; and Regius Professor of History and Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, 1957-80; Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, 1980-87)

I was listening to a podcast from This American Life (April 20) about the Ten Commandments in today’s world. The host, Ira Glass, began the story with examples of other versions of the ten commandments that people have come up with, such as The Miner’s Ten Commandments. Someday it would be fun to write about those.

He mentioned the ten commandments for history writers, and as an amateur historian, I thought I should find out what those are. More than one version is out there — the first one I found is by William B. Hesseltine (1902-1963), a noted American historian who taught at the University of Wisconsin. In my online search, I didn’t find his original ten, but I found a “revised and enlarged” version.

1. Thou shalt not use the passive voice.

2. Thou shalt not use the present voice.

3. Thou shalt not quote anything thou canst say better thyself. Thou shalt not quote to carry thy story. Thou shalt, in short, quote only to season thy story.

4. Thou shalt not pass judgments on mankind in general nor shalt thou pardon anyone for anything.

5. Thou shalt cite material to the standard source.

6. Thou shalt combine footnotes whenever possible.

7. Thou shalt strike thy reader hard with thy first sentence.

8. Thou shalt not use slang–nor split thy infinitives.

9. Thou shalt not use the first or second personal pronoun either explicitly or implicitly.

10. Thou shalt not use the rhetorical question to avoid an intelligent transition.

Someone added these next six commandments, which are helpful, but wordy and too specific. I like the first ten for their concision. Here are the rest of them anyway.

11. Thou shalt set down things as they happen; thou shalt have no references later in time than the subject thou art dealing with.

12. Thou shalt be neither a no-er nor a not-er–i.e., thou shalt avoid negations whenever possible.

13. Thou shalt never use THIS for THE, nor THE for A.

14. Thou shalt never spell MEDIEVAL or RENAISSANCE incorrectly.

15. Thou shalt always capitalize Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Crusades when such terms refer to a specific historical period.

16. Thou shalt never capitalize medieval or renaissance when they are used as adjectives; neither shalt thou capitalize the names of centuries.

Which of these commandments am I guilty of breaking? #1 — It’s easy to fall into the passive voice as a way of sidestepping responsibility. #3 — I am editing a book with many violations of this commandment (i.e.; far too many quotations) so my job is to work them into the narrative. #10 — See how I started this paragraph with a rhetorical question? Probably shouldn’t do that.

I like #7. I am not by nature a hard-hitting writer so I’ll keep this in mind. I went looking through some history books on my shelf for a great first sentence. Here is Jon Meacham in And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle: “The storm had come from the south.” That’s from the prologue (p. xvii). Chapter One begins: “The roads were rough, the conversation unusual.” (p. 5) Those are sentences, short and punchy, that pull the reader in.

Next time: The Ten Commandments of historian Hugh Trevor-Roper