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THE HISTORY OF CONTRA COSTA COUNTY
CALIFORNIA
EDITED BY F. J. HULANISKI
OF
SEAL
EUREKA
THE
GREAT
STATE
THE
OF
CALIFOR
A
IN ONE VOLUME ILLUSTRATED
Published by THE ELMS PUBLISHING CO., INC. BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 1 9 1 7
F868
Printed by TAYLOR & TAYLOR, San Francisco
247365 19
A 18-352
PREFACE
IN PRESENTING this new history of Contra Costa County to the public, we do so in the earnest hope that it will prove to be the most complete compilation of local chronicles that has up to this time been offered to our citizens. The authenticity of the facts contained in the various arti- cles is as absolute as the utmost care could make it. The data have been procured from the best-known authorities, and the biographical sketches, when completed, were subjected to the most searching exami- nation for verification and correction. That no errors will be discovered in this production is too much to hope for; but we do most certainly trust that if any misstatements there be, either in number or by their na- ture, they will not be found sufficiently important to detract from that character for reliability which it has been our constant aim and en- deavor to impart to this history.
In this new work the design has been to make clear the development of ideas and institutions from epoch to epoch. The social and economic conditions of the people have been preserved in the narrative, and much attention has been paid to describing the civil characteristics of the sev- eral towns and cities, both in the conduct of their local affairs and in the relation to each other and the county at large. It has been our object in this work to hew straight to the line, simply satisfied to furnish such in- formation as we were able to gather concerning important matters or interesting events, and where the desired materials were lacking we have not attempted to supply the deficiency by filling in the vacant niches with products of the imagination. We have not striven for effect ; our object is merely to give an authentic account of facts recent and remote, disposed in a proper and orderly manner, so as to enable our readers to clearly understand the history of their community from its origin down to the present day.
This work is a collection of data by a staff of contributors consisting of the most accurate and capable writers in their respective fields in the county, who here crystallize and preserve the material they have gath- ered from many sources.
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PREFACE
Never, so far as I am aware, has any local history in any county been prepared as this has been. Each writer is in a position to speak with absolute authority upon the subject of which he treats, and it was the intention of the editor that each should present in the most attractive and concise form such material relative to the matter of which he writes as had not appeared in any previous publication. How far that hope has been realized the critical reader may judge. It has also been the aim of the editor to limit the sketches to a statement of such facts as will be of interest to the readers of today and of importance to those of the years to come.
In sending forth this volume we trust that, in addition to its value as a depository of accurate information and useful knowledge, it will prove an effective instrument in creating a more lively public sentiment re- garding historical subjects, and that it will especially foster an interest in the annals of our own county. If my collaborators and myself have helped to perpetuate the memory of the heroism, the fortitude, the suf- fering, and the achievement of the men and women who placed Contra Costa County, California, in the foremost rank of the counties of this State, we shall be content.
F. J. HULANISKI, Editor.
CONTENTS
PART I
The Indians
CHAPTER I
PAGE
Early History of California
CHAPTER II
6
Mexican Land Grants-Pen-pictures of Early Days.
IO
Pioneer Citizens
CHAPTER IV
19
The Bear Flag War
CHAPTER V
30
CHAPTER VI
Extracts from General John A. Sutter's Diary.
66
Settlement and Early History
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
Climate-Soil-Horticulture-Agriculture
88
Mines and Minerals
CHAPTER IX
92
San Ramon Valley
CHAPTER X
Central Contra Costa County
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
II6
Doctor John Marsh
CHAPTER XIII
I33
Mount Diablo
CHAPTER XIV
136
CHAPTER XV
Summary of the County's Resources.
14I
Early Criminal History
I45
Bench and Bar
CHAPTER XVII
194
Educational
CHAPTER XVIII
205
CHAPTER XIX
Library Development
229
I
CHAPTER III
79
97
102
Eastern Contra Costa County
CHAPTER XVI
vi
CONTENTS
Religious
CHAPTER XXI
The Medical Profession
CHAPTER XXII
Banking
CHAPTER XXIII
Transportation
CHAPTER XXIV
296
Martinez
CHAPTER XXVI
326
Antioch
CHAPTER XXVIII
Danville
CHAPTER XXIX
383
Bay Point
CHAPTER XXXI
Crockett
CHAPTER XXXII
399
CHAPTER XXXIII
Knightsen
CHAPTER XXXIV
Rodeo
CHAPTER XXXV
Walnut Creek
CHAPTER XXXVI
Pinole
CHAPTER XXXVII
423
Avon
CHAPTER XXXIX
426
PART II
Biographical 431
407
412
421
Port Costa
CHAPTER XXXVIII
424
Byron
CHAPTER XX
PAGE
236
248
271
283
Fraternal Societies
CHAPTER XXV
309
Richmond
CHAPTER XXVII
355
381
Pittsburg
CHAPTER XXX
390
393
Oakley and Sand Lands
404
INTRODUCTORY
BY THE EDITOR
I CAME to California the first time many years ago, before the trans- continental railroads had laid their span across the Great American Desert, coming from New York to San Francisco by way of the Isth- mus of Panama. There is as great a difference between the California of today and the California of the days of ox-teams and "prairie schoon- ers" as there is between the aforenamed desert and the Garden of Eden as allegorically described.
Contra Costa County was at that time composed in the main of sev- eral large cattle ranches, owned by Spaniards, Mexicans, and Portu- guese, with here and there a tiny country crossroads village. It shipped a little wheat and barley to San Francisco in a primitive way, by small sailboats ; but agriculture was secondary to the live-stock interests. A cattle ranch in the olden days consisted generally of what might be con- sidered now a fair-sized township, or even a county. There were miles upon miles of as good and fair land as ever lay out of doors then only a barren waste.
People came clear around the Horn in sailing-ships, taking months for the journey, or took a short cut across the Isthmus, as I did, to get here quickly-in about two months. It was at the end of the earth- "No Man's Land," the jumping-off place of creation. Only those who were seeking adventure, or those who joined the gold rush of 1849 and came via ox-team, or those whose health and longevity might be pro- moted by an exile from civilization and a change of name as well as en- vironment and climate, ventured to where the sun went to bed in efful- gent splendor in or apparently near the Golden Gate. I was not actuated, I desire to add by way of parenthesis, by the latter reason.
My second journey to the then famous though still more or less mys- terious land of the setting sun, the yellow poppy, the luscious fruits and myriad flowers was six years ago, in search of health, climate, and sea-level, and I found them all here in Contra Costa County, where any-
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INTRODUCTORY
body may find them, with long life, happiness, and comparative riches thrown in for good measure.
Because it was so far west of the center of the country's population, for half a century or more California and Contra Costa County lay basking in sunshine and soft sea-breezes, almost unknown, compara- tively speaking, to the outside world. Nearly all the immigrants from over the Atlantic poured through Castle Garden into New York, and from there a few of them gradually drifted westward; but the West of former days was in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. Beyond that was a trackless waste ranged by buffalo and peopled by Indians, across which the pony express dashed its perilous way.
When it is considered that two thousand miles of barren mountains, plains, and deserts lay between California and the States east of the Mississippi, not even a railroad crossing them until the rest of the coun- try began to get thickly populated, there should be little wonder that this region was slow in gaining settlers. All that vast domain had to be populated before the restless tide of immigration reached the Pacific Coast. Years passed, new generations grew up, and still this great re- gion, as large as an empire in itself, was sparsely inhabited, its match- less climate and wonderful resources neglected save by the natives and practically unknown to mankind. The rush of the gold-seekers in 1849 started the tide in this direction; then came the railroads, then the peo- ple, slowly but surely, when the history of this peerless climate and these heretofore unheard-of natural resources began to leak out to a small extent in the outside world.
Nevertheless, the flow of immigration for a time came at a slow pace. In recent years, however, a great change has taken place, the result of conditions in the crowded East and the rapid settling of the Middle West. A telegram is now delivered in an hour ; a letter in three or four days, instead of a month or longer. New York and San Francisco bus- iness men visit one another personally every day in the year, and think no more of it than the former did in going out west to Chicago.
In noting the wondrous changes which have taken place even within my own memory, which in matters historical includes comparatively but a fleeting second of time, I feel that it is quite reasonable, and even conservative, to predict that in another such "second of time," during the lives of our children of today, as great changes, or even greater,
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INTRODUCTORY
because this is a more progressive age, are sure to take place, and just as large and important cities as New York and Chicago will be builded here in California, at least one of them right here in Contra Costa Coun- ty-at Richmond, which has grown from nothing a dozen years ago to a city of 23,000 inhabitants as this book is written.
I lived in Chicago before its great fire, and in San Francisco before the railroads crossed the country intervening, and neither of them was very much in the way of a city then. Both these cities had street-cars drawn by horses with bells tinkling on their necks ; both had men carry- ing little ladders which they climbed and lighted with sulphur matches the gas-lamps on the street corners; the telegrapher printed his mes- sages on a long roll of white paper in dots and dashes; of telephones there were none; a bathtub was a luxury of the rich ; and if you had as much as five thousand dollars you were in the plutocratic class. And all that was merely as of yesterday, as time is considered, and yet the on- ward march of civilization has removed all of these difficulties and many more. Now one can buy a ticket to San Francisco from Chicago or other common points for about fifty dollars and roll in here in a palace car containing bath, barber-shop, dining-car, library-car, and brunette porters with blonde whisk-brooms to brush you off at "two- bits" per.
Now the farmers and fruit-growers of Contra Costa County are rid- ing around in two automobiles, one to take the family to the moving- picture show in town and the other for the hired man to honk-honk the butter and eggs and turnips and baled hay and strawberries and several hundred other nice things in and exchange them for bank stock, mort- gages on brick blocks, and machines which cut the wheat, thresh it, and sack it ready for market all at the same time-and probably for the next generation they will also grind it into flour, bake it into biscuits, and spread thereon the butter and jam.
In Contra Costa County, California, there is no winter, unless one climbs a high mountain in search of it-just a nice, equitable, refresh- ing rainy season in the so-called winter months to give old Mother Na- ture a bath and make the hills and valleys still greener. The only way one can tell it is Christmas-time here is when the merchants make a noise about it in the advertising columns of the newspapers and admon- ish all to do their Christmas shopping early.
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Here one works out of doors every day in the year, if one wants to, in shirt-sleeves, and the markets abound with luscious fruits and vege- tables fresh out of the garden 365 days of the year. One can get a big mess of strawberries almost any day, winter or summer, grown in this county and as fine as were ever embellished by cream and sugar, for ten cents a box on an average.
Summer is just the same-bracing breezes from the Pacific come just strong enough to wave the grass and grain and flowers and keep away malaria, the blistering hot winds of the Middle West plains, and the sunstroke and prostration of the Far East. Roses and millions of other beautiful flowers give their beauty to the scene and their fragrance to the breeze. Pick a ripe orange off the tree in your back yard and the blossoms for others are right there at the same time. Times are good, work is plentiful for all who desire work, and good wages are paid. Surely it is a favored land !
It is a fair land, also, this county of Contra Costa, California. It sig- nifies "Across the Coast," and so it is-across the coast one way from the world-famous cosmopolitan city of San Francisco, and across the coast in another way from a goodly country stretching out toward the north to Oregon, famous also for its apples and umbrellas. I have trav- eled much and far and for many years, searching always for the coun- try that combined the ideals, and if I have not found it here, then I at least have the satisfaction of knowing that it does not exist on this mun- dane sphere, but that it is on beyond the clouds, where gold is used for street-paving, where the graphophone is succeeded by harps and horns, where Paris does not set the fashion of crowns and gowns, and where one has to die to get a one-way ticket in Charon's boat thereto.
And after reaching such a land as this golden and glorious California, still I traveled, searching out its most favored spot, and found it, too, right here in the county of Contra Costa, a veritable Western empire in itself, as the reader may judge by a perusal of the succeeding pages of its history. One must travel, even after reaching California, to find the combination of ideals he may have in mind, for this State is approxi- mately four hundred miles wide and seven hundred miles long, and em- braces every type of scenery, climate, altitude, and condition imagin- able, all within its own boundaries.
In the high Sierras are the snow, the towering mighty mountains, the
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rocks and altitudes, and the gold, silver, lead, copper, zinc, tungsten, and other precious minerals which pour out their constant stream to en- rich the world and all mankind. To the south stretches hundreds of miles of yellow oranges, lemons, and other semi-tropical fruits in or- chards laden with a lusciousness known wherever in the world man dwells in civilization. Between are more hundreds of miles of melons, of grapes, of nuts, of vegetables, and of fruitage and flowers such as no other country on the globe produces. And here in Contra Costa they all are combined and rolled into one glorious whole !
Here is gold in the sands of the streams, silver and lead and other metals in the hills, coal beds rich in bitumen, oranges a-plenty for home consumption, grapes that excel the vineyards of Italy, and in such pro- fusion that here is located the largest winery in the world, besides many smaller ones. Here one looks down from the hills at the clouds and mists of the bay below, and then comes down into eternal summer and perennial sunshine and genial warmth. Here the walnut and the almond grow in such profusion that hundreds of carloads of them are shipped to the markets of the world every season, with a growth of almost every known vegetable so plentiful that they go out by trainloads and shiploads far and near. In the Antioch section of this history it will be noted that celery and asparagus are shipped to the Atlantic seaboard, not by the carload but by the trainload, and that the trains are many and long. This county has seventy miles of water-front, on the San Francis- co Bay, the San Pablo Bay, the Carquinez Straits, and the Sacramento River, and at Pittsburg and Bay Point the fisheries maintained are so immense in their output and value as to rival the countries of the North or East, the large cities being supplied with fresh fish every day in the year, and the canneries there employing hundreds of men and women. Richmond is known far and wide as "the Pittsburg of the West," be- cause of its great manufacturing interests, where such industries as the Standard Oil works, with the second largest oil refinery in the world, the Pullman car-shops, the great pipe and steel works, porcelain fac- tories, and dozens of others pour out to ports all over the world a con- tinual stream of manufactured products, have hundreds of millions in- vested, employ thousands of skilled artizans, and maintain pay-rolls ag- gregating close to a million a month.
So, it will be seen, this marvelous county not only combines a vast
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diversity of industries and opportunities, but a diversity of products and vocations, a diversity of hill and dale, of orange groves and mines, of ocean, bay, and river, of agriculture, viniculture, and live-stock, al- most anything on earth one may be looking for or desirous of obtaining. And above all and over all floats serene and ever joyful and salubrious a climate made to order for the enjoyment of mankind by some higher power than we know of save by tradition and intuition.
Now, just a few words about scenery, for scenery is always interest- ing. There is more scenery here in this county of Contra Costa than in any other one spot of equal area this writer has ever visited, and the great Yosemite, the Grand Cañon, and the Garden of the Gods are all old acquaintances. Here the scenery of mountain, of valley, and of sea are all rolled together in one brain-tangling profusion and immensity like some vast scroll, until one becomes lost in the labyrinth of kaleido- scopic vistas spread out to view from all points of the compass-and it is, like the climate, all free!
And speaking of "The Garden of the Gods," it shall here be asserted and set down as a fact that Contra Costa County, California, is more entitled to that name than any spot in Colorado or elsewhere. For that reason, and because of its entire appropriateness to this favored section, I shall appropriate it here and now, and trust that succeeding genera- tions and other historians who shall come upon the scene when we of today have earned and gone to eternal rest, may hand it down to other' generations and historians-The Garden of the Gods!
At Colorado Springs they have a Garden of the Gods, composed of a "cave of the winds," a balancing rock, and several other freaks of na- ture hewn out of red sandstone by the waters of early ages, and these they capitalized for many thousands, and got the money, and will get more thousands, but the gods have moved away. And no one could blame the gods, after comparing that garden with this one, from the viewpoint of both gods and men, as near as mere man can make such a calculation. You cannot see the gods here in their new abiding-place ; but if you are in touch with Nature and Nature's wondrous and beauti- ful things, you can feel their presence and talk to them, and hear them talk to you, in the same language that the little pink mystery murmurs to you out of the whispering depths of the seashell ; the same language as the twang on the harp of godlike inspiration which comes to you out
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of the panorama of a scenic magnificence and grandeur spread out to view like a leaf torn from one of Milton's great epic poems, or the sigh- ing of the pines and redwoods on the high hilltops in the soft breezes of the sea.
If you would view this Garden of the Gods, go high up on the serpen- tine boulevard around and on top of the Sobrante hills, overlooking the bays and ocean, high above Oakland, above Berkeley, Piedmont, and Richmond, or on over the Pinole hills to Martinez, or to Mount Diablo in the Concord and Walnut Creek sections of the county, and there eight or nine great California counties lift up their scenic marvels of beauteous splendor for a mixture of awe and admiration - surely a fit habitation for the gods. And there the nodding palms and pines and myriads of sweet-faced poppies and other flowers say that the gods are at home and bid you welcome.
A magnificent boulevard, costing the capitalists who built it something like thirty thousand dollars a mile, winds around, through, and over most of these hills now, from Oakland to and beyond Richmond. The builders of this boulevard have not only opened the most startling vista to the public view ; they have caused thousands of trees and millions of shrubs to grow where none grew before, and pink and red and white and yellow flowers, and green bond coupons, to blossom where erst- while only the sad refrain of the lonely coyote was heard screaming to its mate that it had been three days and a hundred miles between meals. This boulevard rises to imposing summits and there spreads out to view a scene that would take poets, painters, and musicians, as well as writ- ers, to adequately portray.
This scribe put in years in the Rocky Mountains, and viewed much wondrous scenery, but out here by the placid Pacific, in Contra Costa County, California, I have seen the Royal Gorge, Marshall Pass, the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, Eagle Pass, Toltic Gorge, and all the other marvels of the Rockies rolled into one, and then excelled! Why should I not maintain that the name, "The Garden of the Gods," be- longs to it ?
From the view spread out from any of these Contra Costa hills, over the placid bosom of the bay, lies San Francisco, risen Phoenix-like from its ashes, with its half-million people running a Marathon race of commercial activity. Laving its feet are the waters of the Golden Gate,
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and far out beyond is the blue sky-line coming down to kiss the bluer ocean somewhere toward Hawaii. Yerba Buena, Alcatraz, Mare Island, San Quentin, the Sonoma hills, college-gowned Berkeley in the foot- hills below-Oakland, with madding marts of men rife with tremen- dous traffic, and the white pinnacle of its municipal tower piercing the haze, a monument to man's ambition-Richmond, with two deep-water bays embracing it, belching smoke from a thousand factory furnaces along the water-front and then stretching out in peaceful homelike serenity toward the hills to the east and north ! Miles and miles of state- ly hills and fertile valleys, trees and shrubs and flowers on beyond. If old Satan should take me up there and say, as he is quoted as saying once before, "Fall down and worship me and all you see shall be yours," I am afraid there would be a loud bump heard upon the salty, fragrant air, which would be that of my falling down !
The time is near, and already approaching, when much of this start- ling grandeur will be marred, from a natural standpoint, by the inroads upon it of commercial activity, for the rapid growth of the near-by cit- ies is reaching out to the hills and hill-surrounded vales, and spreading out to still more hills and vales, and the honk of the automobile, the clank of the trolley-car, and the pop and whang of the street-macadam- izing machine will soon drive the gods on over into other gardens as yet untrodden by even the moccasin of the aborigine.
But for ages in the past, at present, and for a few years yet into the future, the roads and trails lead up and up and around among Nature's fairest spots on earth, up over cities, villages, hills, valleys, bays, the ocean-up almost to the clouds, where Nature speaks a language of her own, and where is spread out to view hundreds of miles of this fair Contra Costa County, California, a veritable Garden of the Gods.
CHAPTER I
THE INDIANS
I T IS generally conceded by both the early and modern California historians that the Pacific Coast Indians were far inferior as a race to the stalwart Eastern Indians, idealized by Fenimore Cooper. The Indians of the San Francisco Bay region formed no exception to this rule. They lived under the most primitive conditions, with apparent- ly no aspiration for the higher civilization that characterized the Aztecs and Peruvians.
When the white man came upon the scene there were four tribes of Indians in Contra Costa County. These were the Juchiyunes, Acalanes, Bolgones, and Carquinez Indians. They knew practically nothing of the arts of civilization. All the historians of the period describe them as go- ing about in a state of semi-nudity, if not entirely naked. Occasionally the men wore a crude sort of loin-cloth and the women fashioned an apron from tules ; these hung from the waist to the knees fore and aft, and were open at the sides. In the winter they wore crude garments made from deerskins or feathers of waterfowls.
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