USA > California > Merced County > A history of Merced County, California : with a biographical review of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present > Part 22
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"Henry Miller was the greatest builder who ever lived on the Pacific Coast, and I'll except no one. He dug canals enough, lay them end to end, to reach from here to New York. He added forty or fifty million dollars to the wealth of the people on the West Side,
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for which he did not receive a nickel. He is the only man I ever knew or ever head of who built canals for people for nothing and then gave them the benefit of them. After he built our canal, called the Upper Canal, he extended it on to Cottonwood, where he didn't own a foot of land, simply because the people asked him to. Just after that he built the canal from Los Banos to Orestimba, just because the people asked him to build up the country. Sometimes I think of what a man told me of the Indian language-that there is no word in it to cor- respond with our word 'gratitude,' and I wonder if it shouldn't be struck out of our dictionary as well.
"After Mr. Miller built the canal down to Newman there wasn't water enough, so he went through and double-lined the canal from Los Banos to Firebaugh. He spent $70,000 making the canal to Orestimba larger, and then they sued him for a reduction in the price of water, when it had raised the price of their land from $10 to $200 an acre. That Orestimba land to-day, I'll put side by side with any land in the State of California; there are trees down there six feet thick. They took a physical valuation of the canal and although it had cost a million and a quarter of dollars, they valued it at $325,000 and on that allowed him 6 per cent, or $1.50 an acre. He waited for four years, then he had another valuation taken with the same witnesses, and they pronounced it worth $600,000. On that basis, of course, they should have allowed him $5 an acre; but they weren't that kind of people. They allowed him the same old $1.50.
"Mr. Stevinson got a judgment against Mr. Miller for $425,000 for taking the water off of 1500 acres of his land, which never had any water on it in the first place. Then too, Mr. Miller had offered to put water on to the land. The judment was so absurd it was thrown out of court, and was later retried in Mariposa County. Jim Peck, in speaking of how Mr. Miller had robbed Mr. Stevinson, who he said had gone through many hardships, when he settled down there in 1854, was so moved that the tears rolled down his checks, as big as apples. If Mr. Stevinson had had more money I guess they would have been as big as pumpkins.
"Now I am going to tell you what I think is the greatest thing Mr. Miller ever did. You remember Bryan, free silver, 16 to 1, etc. Mr. Bryan never had anything to do with it. He was only called in like a doctor, after the patient was dead. The demonetizing of silver absolutely ruined every farmer in the United States. They had better have taken everything that the farmers had and burned it up. A pestilence had better have come along and killed every head of stock they had, cattle, horses and sheep, and it would have been better for them than to have the country put on the gold standard at that time. You see, it came on just after the war when there was absolutely no
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gold in the United States except that which was being dug out in California and Colorado. I myself was considered a farmer of aver- age means. I was probably worth $20,000; yet I went clear 'broke' inside of three years, and gave Miller & Lux my note for $3200, after I had sold everything in the world that I possessed. I sold a six-horse team that cost me nearly $2000 for $40. I sold 400 tons of barley for $11 a ton that had cost me more than $20 to produce.
"I am not telling this for political reasons, but simply to show what Mr. Miller did for the people. There wasn't a man in Los Banos or Dos Palos who could have paid his debts to save his life, and there were no exceptions. The only thing in the world left to any of them was a credit account in Miller & Lux's store. For five solid years they didn't even send out store bills. If a man was of any account, they would help him out; if he wasn't, they helped him anyway. If it hadn't been for Miller, the people would have actually suffered for the neces- sities of life. There must have been at least 3000 people in that part of the country. Of course such conditions couldn't last.
"I met Mr. Miller one day, and he said to me, 'I am eighty-four years old and I don't want any of my old friends to be in trouble after I pass away. Now, Mr. Stockton, you owe me $9000. How much can you pay ?' 'Mr. Miller, you know my business just as well as I know it myself.' 'Well,' he said, 'Give me two pieces of property that you hold which are mortgaged to me and $1000 in cash, and I'll call it square.' I went to my friends and borrowed the money in twenty minutes, and had it in the bank. That mortgage had been such a nightmare to me that when I went home that night and tried to tell my wife what had happened, I couldn't do it. I lay down on the bed and cried like a baby.
"I've never been afraid of anybody that I know of, and I've heard bullets whistle pretty close sometimes, but that debt made as pitiful a coward of me as ever walked the earth. I went to town next morning and one of my neighbors said to me, 'Bill, I've paid Miller and Lux, I don't owe them a cent.' This is the way that he paid : He gave Mr. Miller $500, and Mr. Miller gave him $8000. One of my neighbors-I can use his name, because he told it himself, and is something of a financier himself-Mr. Chappell, said he owed him $3000. Mr. Miller asked him how much he could pay. He said he couldn't pay very much, he was too poor. Mr. Miller then asked him if he could give him $500, and he said he didn't have it. ‘Can you give me $250?' Mr. Chappell said, 'No, I haven't that much money.' Then Mr. Miller said 'Can you give me $125 ?' He said he thought he could, so they settled for that amount. He gave $125 for the $3000 Mr. Miller had given him.
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"I was on the inside, in many of his business affairs. Mr. Shannon told me that he scratched $350,000 off the books, in mortgages and notes together, at that time enough to have bought the whole Mitchell ranch; and I expect today it is worth forty or fifty million dollars, isn'tit?
"There is another story of his earlier life. When the Western Meat Company went to exploit San Francisco as they had the Eastern cities, they put the price of beef down to almost nothing. Miller had at that time 40,000 beef cattle. He turned them out on the range, and without the meat company knowing what he was doing he started in buying beef from them, and reselling it. At times he took a whole ship load. He had been buying from them for about six months before they really realized what they were doing. Then they undertook to raise the price. Mr. Miller told them that the people of San Francisco were his friends, and that they should not be robbed. The consequence was that beef was from three to five cents a pound cheaper in San Francisco than it was in Kansas City, Omaha, St Louis, Chicago, or any of the Eastern cities, and the Western Meat Company lay down like licked dogs.
"I think the most remarkable thing he ever did was to make $30,000 in New York before he was a grown man. He told my wife that when he was eighteen years old he had 100 men working for him. Old, gray-headed men seventy years old called him 'the old man' then. He sold out in New York and went home to Germany; but he found that if he stayed there he would have to serve in the army, so he disappeared, and wasn't heard of for two years by any of his people. As a matter of fact he was in Panama, where he had gone into business. He got the Panama fever ; and when he got over it, he found that he had been sick so long that his partner by bad management had brought their business to a condition where it was necessary to close out. He bought a ticket to San Francisco, and took with him $5, all the money he had in the world, and a walking-stick. The reason he had the walking-stick was because he couldn't walk without it. He landed in San Francisco in 1850.
"Mr. Miller first went into the butcher business, started out working for wages, but soon had shops of his own. He would run one shop for a while, and then buy another one. In those days the wholesalers would go out into the country in the fall of the year and buy up enough stock to last them through the winter. They would drive them as near to San Francisco as they could and keep them there, slaughtering them as they were needed for the market. Mr. Miller went out one fall and bonded all the fat cattle that there were in the State. Mr. Lux at that time was the biggest wholesale butcher in San Francisco. When he sent men out after beef cattle, there were
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none to be had. Lux went to Mr. Miller and told him that he must have beef. Mr. Miller told him he would let him have beef on one condition only, that he would furnish him the money to pay for those cattle and take him into full partnership. Mr. Lux fulfilled these conditions ; hence the firm name of Miller & Lux.
"Soon afterwards they bought out the firm of Hildreth & Hildreth of the H H brand, who were at that time the largest cattle men in the State of California. From that time forward Miller & Lux were the cattle kings of this State.
"I am in communication with Mr. Conan Doyle, and consequently I can tell you what happened to Mr. Miller after he passed into the Land of Shadows. Being a very wicked man, he cussed and swore sometimes ; consequently he went down yonder. The old devil looked at him and said, 'Who are you?'
"He said, 'I am Henry Miller.'
"The Devil said, 'What do you expect to do down here?'
" 'Well, every place I have been I have always built canals ; per- haps I can build some here.'
"Old Nick said, 'We certainly don't want any canals down here: I've got too many lawyers and preachers to burn. So I guess you had better go on up above; maybe Peter can find something for you to do.'
"So he climbed the golden stairs and knocked at the pearly gates. He was told to come in, and Peter turned to Gabriel and said :
" 'Gabriel, open the book of life and we'll see what Mr. Miller has been doing.
" 'I find that he has cussed and swore some.'
" 'Never mind that; I want to know the good things that he has done. Anybody is apt to get aggravated sometimes.'
""'I find that he has dug a great many canals.'
" 'Then Peter turned to Mr. Miller and said to him:
"'Come over here. What is that long line of water I see down there, and those villages I see stretched along the line of water ?'
" 'That is the San Joaquin and Kings River Canal. When I went there that was a desert. When we built that canal, people could come and settle and make a living; so they built those schoolhouses and towns and farm houses you see down there.'
" 'What is that line of men I see down there-a long enough line, if standing side of side, to reach around the world?'
" 'Those are the tramps that I have fed. I have taken care of more of them at one time than the whole city of San Francisco put together sometimes.'
" 'What is that other long line of men that I see, thousands and thousands of them?'
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" 'Those are the men who worked for me.'
" 'How is it that so many men were willing to work for you instead of working for themselves ? They seem to be intelligent men.'
" 'Well, I suppose they could make more money working for me than they could working for themselves, and so they worked for me.'
" 'Mr. Miller, did you make much money in the other world? Tell me about how much.'
"'About $100,000,000.'
" 'What did you do with it all ?'
" 'I had about $25,000,000 stolen from me, about $25,000,000 I paid out defending myself in lawsuits, and I left about $50,000,000 to my heirs.'
" 'How did you make your money, Mr. Miller ?'
" 'I made it in the cattle business.'
"Peter said to him, 'Do you see those Elysian fields over yonder ?' "He said, 'Yes.'
"'Well,' said St. Peter, 'you go over there and take charge of the cattle ; Jacob's getting pretty old for the cattle business anyway.'"
CHAPTER XIII
THE CATTLE INDUSTRY AND THE NO-FENCE LAW
When those wagon-loads of immigrants began in 1868 and 1869 to pour into the country south of the Merced River, along Bear Creek and Mariposa Creek and down in the Sandy Mush and Dover coun- tries, they found a situation existing such that there was bound to be a conflict before they could conquer the plains for wheat. Expressed in one word, the situation was "cattle." Wild horses likewise added to the picturesqueness of the situation, just as did also antelope, but these were no man's property-there was no one to raise his voice if the new grain-raisers dispossessed them. The cattle, while they may have looked just as wild to the casual eye, were property with strong and determined owners to fight for the wide pastures that made the cattle fat and the owners rich.
We have caught a good many glimpses of this situation, along through earlier chapters, have seen how such men as John M. Mont- gomery, John B. Cocanour, John Ruddle, the Stevinsons and the Hildreths made trips to the States, largely to Missouri, and drove out bands of cattle along the long route which it took from early spring until fall to travel one way. These men knew pasture when they saw it, and it will help explain the growth of the cattle industry here if we remember the statement made advisedly by an experienced cattle man in 1924, that there are more cattle shipped from within a radius of twenty-five miles of Merced than from any other equal area in the world. Henry Miller knew cattle and cattle country, and it was not by accident that the Santa Rita, on the West Side of the county, be- came Miller's pride. The country was a cattle paradise, and men grew rich raising them. Cattle were the basis of practically all the fortunes built up in the county during the first fifteen years of its history.
Cattle and Free Pasture .- The great plains, which later were to be reduced to private ownership and become the great wheat fields, were public domain, and the cattle roamed over them without charge or restriction and grew fat and multiplied. We have seen how, on the 1857 assessment roll, J. M. Montgomery was the richest man in the county, and how he was assessed for nearly 5000 head of stock and only 640 acres of land, the home ranch upon Bear Creek to which he brought his bride in the summer of 1854. The ranch was just a place to live, a base of operations. Even his rodeo ground was appar-
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ently not on this section but lower down the creek on public land. Before the end of the sixties Montgomery had come to be known as the Money and Cattle King of Merced County. Above him on Bear Creek and down near the modern Lingard were the Givens family; out in the Le Grand section were William Johnson and Stoneroad and Kelly, down on Lower Bear Creek was John B. Concanour; at what is called the Shaffer Ranch now, were Neill Brothers, William and James; on the lower Merced were the Stevinsons, father and son; out towards where Planada is now was Harvey J. Ostrander, to mention only a few. Their cattle ran at will over the plains, mingled together. Once a year they held rodeos, gathered them up, branded them, sorted out one owner's stock from another's. Peter Fee, who was himself a cattle man in a small way, tells of attending a number of rodeos, and he quite frequently brought home a few head of his stock. By this annual roundup, aided by the gregarious instinct of the ani- mals, did the owners convey to their stock the gentlest of hints about where home was. Naturally, except that they had less speed, the cattle roamed just about as freely and as far as the horses or the antelope. Not all were of the stock brought out from Missouri. We see on the 1857 assessment roll how stock cattle are divided into "American" and "Spanish." Some classified as "Spanish" probably were driven out from Texas; the greater part were doubtless of the stock brought in earlier by the Spaniards and Mexicans to the country just across the Pacheco Pass.
A style of farming that raised such a product did not need much in the way of roads; the product walked to market on its own feet. The first market that attracted the pioneers of the industry was doubt- less the mines in the nearby hills. Most of the cattle men had taken a brief try at the mines and knew from their own experience that there was a demand for meat. But the business outgrew this market and they drove cattle to San Francisco, Sacramento and Stockton. Sometimes it was the owners who drove them, sometimes professional drovers who came out into the cattle country and bought the stock. There were regular routes, regular stopping-places, varied sometimes as food and water requirements dictated. There were no banks except in the large cities, and payments were made in gold. Up in a big bend on the Cosumnes River a few miles this side of Sacramento, they used to hold the cattle on the way to that market for a few days to recoup from the long drive. E. W. Stockird, a grandson of Colonel Stevin- son, tells or driving some three hundred head to Sacramento on one occasion and getting paid for them in gold-something like $15,000, and they carried it home on a horse in the saddle-bags on the horn of the saddle, and ruined the horse with the heavy weight on his
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shoulders. For the San Francisco market they used to drive the cattle to the Oakland side of the Bay, and the buyers would take them there.
They began pretty early to run cattle and sheep into the Sierra Nevadas in the summer. Ostrander Lake and Peregoy Meadows are samples of place names in the mountains which commemorate this practice. John Muir, in his first summer in the Sierra Nevadas, went in to Tuolumne Meadows as a sort of consulting engineer to the sheep herder, and that was in 1869. Dr. J. B. Campbell, writing in Outdoor Life in August, 1922, tells of taking a band of horses from down towards San Luis Obispo across the San Joaquin Valley through Merced County and up the Stanislaus and down the Walker River into Nevada. When they reached the Walker they hadn't had any fresh meat for quite a while, and Dr. Campbell killed a calf. He says if Colonel Stevinson or any of his descendants are alive he extends his apologies for taking their calf. One of Colonel Stevinson's de- scendants, who is very much alive, assures us that such an apology would have been accepted as a matter of course-that it was the cus- tom of the country to take an animal for food by anyone who was thus in need of it.
But while such retail taking was entirely all right, woe to the taker who extended his operations to a wholesale scale. Down on the San Joaquin River near Fremont's Ford there stood for many years after the American occupation a bleached dead tree that was at once a landmark and a warning to cattle rustlers. In the latter part of 1852 the tree was alive; the country was then of course a part of Mariposa County. Sometime between August of that year, when J. J. Stevinson bought James Waters' place, and December, when he mar- ried Louisa Jane Cox, he was one of a group of cattle men who caught six Mexicans and a German rustling cattle. The seven were tried, found guilty and hanged to the branches of the tree. That the tree shortly afterwards died may perhaps have been taken as a grim omen by any gentleman inclined to go and take some other gentleman's cattle. Summary and outside the letter of the law, of course; but the main point, and the one usually missed by those who make novels or movies out of the story of the West, is that these men here on the plains, just as the miners were doing in the hills, were working out, with de- liberation and their Anglo-Saxon capacity for self-government, the problem of supplying an orderly government where that which was more formally established was too far away and too weak to extend its arm to cover the situation. They went openly by day where the modern lyncher goes secretly by night, and that was the measure of the difference between them. These pioneers were working out one of the community's problems-and by and large, working it out justly, even if roughly. If most of the hanged were Mexicans, that was be-
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cause most of the rustlers were Mexicans. Up between Snelling and Merced Falls the present county road runs between two large oak trees, and a story from early times that some stock rustlers had been hanged on their boughs, received practical corroboration a few years ago when some human bones were brought to light when the road was being graded.
As all human institutions are imperfect, however, this rough and ready justice sometimes made mistakes, and when it did they were hard to correct. Oldtimers over Snelling way tell of two Mexicans having been caught. By way of cross examination one of them had had a noose placed around his neck and the other end placed over a limb. His captors had just lifted him off the ground when the other Mexican chose that moment to make a demonstration by dashing off and firing a revolver which had not been taken away from him. As the demonstrator had expected, all of the Americans joined in chasing him; but as he had not expected, the one who had been holding the rope took a turn around a snag before joining the chase, and by the time the running Mexican had been caught the hanging one was dead. There were enough Mexicans who were lawless; and there was enough race feeling, so that old time cattlemen will tell you they used to be careful to keep their eyes on every Mexican they met so long as he was within the length of a riata of them. But it should not be concluded that all Mexicans were lawless, or that those who were law-abiding did not get a square deal. We have read in the files of the paper how Judge Belt shot a Mexican and gave himself up, and was discharged after an examination before a magistrate. We can also read in the files of a Mexican shooting and killing a county official and walking into Snelling and giving himself up, and plead- ing self-defense and being released by the examining magistrate.
Square dealing and the capacity to govern themselves distinguished the men of those days, and it was this that enabled them, when the problem of adjusting themselves to the new order of things arose with the coming of the grain-growers, to settle that problem without human bloodshed. The grain men killed a considerable number of cattle; the cattle men or their vaqueros drove their cattle in the be- ginning upon some grain crops by night. But the representative men on both sides approached the problem soberly and with a real desire to solve it justly and peaceably. The nearest approach to human bloodshed seems, from the testimony of reliable men who were here at the time, to have been that referred to in the following particularly poor specimen of writing from the Argus of June 18, 1870, and with reference to this it may be truly said that the matter had been settled before this time.
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"Fight on the Plains .- A couple of ordinarily peaceable citizens of this county, residing near Plainsburg, having each fancied himself ag- grieved, in consequence of the operation of the Trespass Law, got at loggerheads, and meeting on the open prairies a few miles south of that place, concluded to settle the dispute between the farmrs and stockmen by single combat. Each being armed with a Colt's re- volver, they exchanged several shots, when both coming to the con- clusion that prudence would dictate to them the necessity of holding one or two loads in reserve, ceased firing, as if by mutual consent. They fought on horseback, and charged and countercharged furiously as the battle progressed. Both the combatants escaped uninjured, we are pleased to say, yet it is reported that horseflesh suffered con- siderably."
A reporter on a paper today who should turn in a story which concealed so many interesting facts, including the names of the fight- ers, would probably lose his job; but if you should chance to find a man now who was here at this time, it is probable you would find him just as reticent as Steele was in this story in the Argus. This incident, as already remarked, occurred after the fight was really all over with.
Anyone who makes an examination of the early laws of California as to what should constitute a lawful fence, must be struck with the fact that an exceedingly good fence was required, better almost than might be expected to be required today. He will probably be surprised at this until he realizes that the few farmers had to fence the stock out instead of the owners fencing it in, and that the strength of the fences required before they should be liable before the law for the trespasses of their animals reflected the strength of the stockmen politi- cally. The Trespass Law, the so-called No Fence Law, first passed in. 1866 and applied to Marin, Yolo and part of Sacramento Counties, was therefore a revolutionary piece of legislation. It marked the beginning of the end of the old unrestricted cattle ranging. The act was entitled "An Act to Protect Agriculture, and to Prevent the Trespassing of Animals upon Private Property." It provided that an owner or occupant could take up animals trespassing upon his land, hold them a given number of days, give notice to a justice of the peace, and if the owner did not pay the damage they had done and pay for their keep at a rate provided, could have the trespassing animals sold to pay the damage and keep. It was by an amendment approved March 26, 1870, that this act was extended to apply to the part of Merced County east of the San Joaquin, as well as to some half a dozen other counties and parts of counties-Stanislaus, San Joaquin and parts of Solano, Santa Barbara, San Diego, and Los Angeles. This extension of the act to these counties marked the end rather than
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