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 4
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"The agricultural capabilities of California are but very im- perfectly developed. The whole of it is remarkably adapted to the culture of the vine. Wine and brandy of excellent quality are made in considerable quantities. Olives, figs, and almonds grow well. Apples, pears, and peaches are abundant, and in the southern part oranges. Cotton is beginning to be cultivated and succeeds well. It is the finest country for wheat I have ever seen. Fifty for one is an average crop, with very imperfect cultivation. One hundred fold is not uncommon, and even one hundred and fifty has been produced. Maize produces tolerably well, but not equal to some parts of the United States. Hemp, flax, and tobacco have been cultivated on a small scale, and succeed well. The raising of cattle is the principal pursuit of the inhabitants, and the most profitable.
"The foreign commerce of Upper California employs from ten to fifteen sail of vessels, mostly large ships. Somewhat more than half of these are American, and belong exclusively to the port of Boston. The others are English, French, Russian, Mexican, Peru- vian, and Hawaiian. The French from their islands in the Pacific and the Russians from Kamtschatka, and their establishments on the northwest coast, resort here for provisions and live stock. The ex- ports consist of hides and tallow, cows, lard, wheat, soap, timber, and furs. There are slaughtered annually about one hundred thous- and head of cattle, worth $800,000. The whole value of the exports annually amounts to about $1,000,000. The largest item of imports is American cotton goods. The duties on imports are enormously high, amounting on most important articles to one hundred and fifty per cent on the original cost, and in many instances to four or five hun- dred. Thus, as in most Spanish countries, a high bounty is paid to encourage smuggling. Whale ships visit St. Francisco annually in considerable numbers for refreshments, and fail not to profit by the facilities for illicit commerce.
"California, although nominally belonging to Mexico, is about as independent of it as Texas, and must ere long share the same fate. Since my residence here, no less than four Mexican governors have been driven from the country by force of arms. The last of these, Micheltorena, with about four hundred of his soldiers and one hun- dred employes, were driven away about a year ago.
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"This occurred at the time that the rest of the nation was ex- pelling his master, Santa Ana, although nothing of this was known here at the time. The new administration, therefore, with a good grace, highly approved of our conduct. In fact, the successive ad- ministrations in Mexico have always shown a disposition to sanction and approve of whatever we may do here, from a conscious inability to retain even a nominal dominion over the country by any other means. Upper California has been governed for the last year entirely by its own citizens. Lower California is in general an un- inhabited and uninhabitable desert. The scanty population it con- tains lives near the extremity of the Cape, and has no connection and little intercourse with this part of the country.
"Upper California has a productive gold mine, and silver ore has been found in many places. A mine of quicksilver has been very lately found in this vicinity, which promises to be very valuable.
"I know not, since you have been so long engaged in more weighty concerns, if you take the same interest as formerly in Indian affairs, but since I have supposed your personal identity to remain, I shall venture a few remarks on the aborigines of California. In stature the California Indian rather exceeds the average of the tribes east of the mountains. He is heavier limbed and stouter built. They are a hairy race, and some of them have beards that would do honor to a Turk. The color similar to that of the Algonquin race, or per- haps rather lighter. The visage, short and broad, with wide mouth, thick lips, broad nose, and extremely low forehead. In some individ- uals the hair grows quite down to the eyebrows, and they may be said to have no forehead at all. Some few have that peculiar conforma- tion of the eye so remarkable in the Chinese and Tartar races, and entirely different from the common American Indian or the Polyne- sian; and with this unpromising set of features, some have an ani- mated and agreeable expression of countenance. The general ex- pression of the wild Indian has nothing of the proud and lofty bear- ing, or the haughtiness and ferocity so often seen east of the moun- tains. It is more commonly indicative of timidity and stupidity.
"The men and children are absolutely and entirely naked, and the dress of the women is the least possible or conceivable remove from nudity. Their food varies with the season. In February and March they live on grass and herbage; clover and wild pea-vine are among the best kinds of their pasturage. I have often seen hun- dreds of them grazing together in a meadow, like so many cattle.
"They are very poor hunters of the larger animals, but very skillful in making and managing nets for fish and fowl. They also collect in their season great quantities of the seeds of various grasses, which are particularly abundant. Acorns are another principal ar- ticle of food, which are larger, more abundant, and of better quality
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than I have seen elsewhere. The Californian is not more different from the tribes east of the mountains in his physical than in his moral and intellectual qualities. They are easily domesticated, not averse to labor, have a natural aptitude to learn mechanical trades, and, I believe, universally a fondness for music, and a facility in acquiring it.
"The Mission of St. Joseph, when in its prosperity, had one hundred plough-men, and I have often seen them all at work in one field, each with his plow. It had also fifty weavers, twenty tan- ners, thirty shoe-makers, forty masons, twenty carpenters, ten black- smiths, and various other mechanics. They are not nearly so much addicted to intoxication as is common to other Indians. I was for some years of the opinion that they were of an entirely different race from those east of the mountains, and they certainly have but little similarity. The only thing that caused me to think differently is that they have the same Moccasin game that is so common on the Mississippi, and what is more remarkable, they accompany it by singing precisely the same tune! The diversity of language among them is very great. It is seldom an Indian can understand another who lives fifty miles distant; within the limits of California are at least a hundred dialects, apparently entirely dissimilar. Few or no white persons have taken any pains to learn them, as there are in- dividuals in all the tribes which have communication with the settle- ments who speak Spanish.
"The children, when caught young, are most easily domesticated, and manifest a great aptitude to learn whatever is taught them; when taken into Spanish families, and treated with kindness, in a few months they learn the language and habits of their masters. When they come to maturity they show no disposition to return to the savage state. The mind of the wild Indian, of whatever age, appears to be a tabula rasa, on which no impressions, except those of a mere animal nature, have been made, and ready to receive any impress whatever. I remember a remark of yours some years ago, that "Indians were only grown-up children." Here we have a real race of infants. In many recent instances when a family of white people have taken a farm in the vicinity of an Indian village, in a short time they would have the whole tribe for willing serfs. They submit to flagellation with more humility than the negroes. Nothing more is necessary for their complete subjugation but kind- ness in the beginning, and a little well-timed severity when manifestly deserved. It is common for the white man to ask the Indian, when the latter has committed any fault, how many lashes he thinks he deserves. The Indian, with a simplicity and humility almost incon- ceivable, replies ten or twenty, according to his opinion of the magni- tude of the offense. The white man then orders another Indian to inflict the punishment, which is received without the least sign of
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resentment or discontent. This I have myself witnessed or I could hardly have believed it. Throughout all California the Indians are the principal laborers ; without them the business of the country could hardly be carried on.
"I fear the unexpected length of this desultory epistle will be tedious to you, but I hope it will serve at least to diversify your correspondence. If I can afford you any information, or be servicable to you in any way, I beg you to command me. Any communication to me can be sent through the American Minister at Mexico, or the Commanding Officer of the Squadron of the Pacific, directed to the care of T. O. Larkin, Esq., American Consul in Monterey. I am, sir, very respectfully,
"Your obedient servant, "John Marsh. "Hon. Lewis Cass."
A careful reading of this letter, an immersion of himself in it so far as posible, will do much to put the present-day reader back in that period, only eighty-two years distant in point of actual time, yet so remote in all its factors from the age in which we live. We are in a time when the western boundary of the United States was the Rocky Mountains, and what it is even harder to remember when the eastern boundary of California was the so-called Diablo Range, the most easterly of the Coast Range summits. The country be- tween was of course claimed by Spain, and after 1823, by Mexico in her turn; but the weakness of the whole scheme of Spanish coloniza- tion stands out in the practically nothing which either had done to actually take it, or even to find out what it was like.
The Spaniard and the Mexican had done something to give place names to the streams and other geographical features of the region; but already the enterprising Gringo, heir to another and a far more effective idea of colonization, had done more to subject it than the top-heavy centralized system of the Dons had been able to accomplish in more than three centuries.
It is apparent from Dr. Marsh's letter that he was a man of both education and intelligence, which makes it all the more interest- ing and significant to note some of the limitations of his information, in the face of his statement that he had been pretty well all over the country. Perhaps the two most glaring inaccuracies are his six thous- and feet as the maximum altitude of the mountains, showing familiar- ity with the Coast Range but not much with the Sierras, and his naïve estimate of the wild Indian population as probably a million and perhaps double that number-a figure several times as large as that which scholars now assign as the Indian population of the entire con- tinent in the aborigines' palmiest days. Gabriel Moraga was in all probability the man who had found out more than any other about
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the interior up to that time, and the very cursory nature of some of his explorations has already been suggested. It was hardly to be expected that Dr. Marsh should have more knowledge of the country than he displays, after a residence of some five years in it.
It is interesting to note that the northern and southeastern limits which he mentions when estimating the Indian population are the present northern and southeastern boundaries of the State, but there is nothing in the estimate to indicate very definitely how far east he considered the country he was describing extended. The present eastern boundary of the State was never heard of until the first con- stitutional convention in 1849, when its location was the cause of no little argument. He clearly means to include materially more country than that which the Spaniards and the Mexicans had reduced to actual occupation ; he knew, of course, though inexactly, of the exist- ence of the Sierra Nevadas, the most likely natural limit, and beyond that we cannot go from his letter.
He mentions a party of fifty-three wagons and as many families which arrived "this year," and as he writes under date of February 1, 1842, and the parties, starting invariably in the spring or early summer, arrived as invariably in the fall, he is most likely referring to what was the first company which history has clearly written down among those who come entirely as settlers-the Bartleson-Bidwell expedition, which reached his ranch November 4, 1841.
Though there is no reason to believe that any member of the Bartleson-Bidwell party reached Merced County, their story may fairly be told here as typical of the stories of other similar parties, of which it was the first. There had been a good deal of advertising of California in the United States. Dr. John Marsh's letter quoted above is only one sample of a considerable number, from one source and another, which received a wide publicity among a people decidedly likely to be stirred by them. Richard Henry Dana, to mention only one other, in "Two Years Before the Mast," first published in 1840, has the following paragraph :
"Such are the people who inhabit a country embracing four or five hundred miles of sea-coast, with several good harbors; with fine forests in the north ; the waters filled with fish, and the plains covered with thousands of head of cattle; blessed with a climate than which there can be no better in the world; free from all manner of diseases, whether epidemic or endemic; and with a soil in which corn yields from seventy to eighty fold. In the hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be !"
In Platte County, Missouri, in the months preceding the spring of 1841, the Western Immigration Society was organized, with a good deal of enthusiasm, for the purpose of enlisting recruits and pro- viding a systematic program for an expedition to this wonderful
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country. A trapper named Robidoux, recently returned from the coast, who, says Cleland, appeared to be a 'calm, considerate man,' so impressed his Platte County hearers that he was asked to speak before a large assembly of settlers. He described California as a land of 'perennial spring and boundless fertility.' Several hundred people from several of the western States were signed up; but a reaction set in, with landowners and merchants, alarmed at the idea of a wholesale exodus of their people, throwing more or less cold water on the enthusiasm which had been kindled. Many drew back. Of the sixty-nine who gathered at the appointed rendezvous at Sap- ling Grove, in what is now eastern Kansas, in May, 1841, only one, a young man named John Bidwell, from Ohio, had signed the original pledge of the Emigrant Society.
None of the party were experienced mountain men. "We knew," says Bidwell, "that California lay west, and that was the extent of our knowledge. Some of the maps consulted, supposed to be correct, showed a lake in the vicinity of where Salt Lake now is ; it was represented as a long lake, three or four hundred miles in extent, narrow, and with two outlets, both running into the Pacific ocean, either apparanetly larger than the Mississippi River."
So prevalent, says Cleland, was this conception of western geography, that Bidwell was advised to take tools along with which to construct canoes for the navigation of one of these rivers from Salt Lake to the Pacific!
Poor leadership added to their troubles. John Bartleson, of Jackson County Missouri, had been elected company commander, to prevent the withdrawal of himself and his supporters and the breakup of the company. Fifteen women and children intensified the problem. Each member supplied his own equipment-wagon, animals, pro- visions, arms. The animals were a mixed bunch of horses, mules, and oxen; the provisions were limited to essentials. Money was almost entirely lacking. They went from Westport, the present Kansas City up the Platte far north to the vicinity of the present town of Pocatello, then called Soda Springs. The party split here, part going further north. Less than half of the sixty-nine, including one woman, Mrs. Benjamin Kelsey, with her little daughter, started south- west for California. Their journey was one of unbroken hardships across the Utah and Nevada deserts: their party became separated when Bartleson with eight others on horseback struck out by them- selves. They were united again, well along in September, on the Walker River, or, as they called it, the Balm-recalling in this ap- preciative naming of the stream the circumstances under which Gabriel Moraga had named the Merced thirty-five years earlier.
They slaughtered their remaining oxen, jerked the meat, and went up the Walker River and over the summit of the Sierras to the
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headwaters of the South Fork of the Stanislaus. They became en- tangled in the gorges of this stream; food was so scarce that they they were forced to eat crows, wild cats, and anything else they could get. One member of the party became separated from the rest and turned up later at Sutter's Fort. Their animals could scarcely travel : they dragged themselves wearily down across the foothills, discour- aged by the idea that they must still cross the range they could see to the westward in order to reach California. Bidwell tells how they came to the San Joaquin :
"When morning came the foremost of the party waited for the others to come up. They had found water in a stagnant pond, and what was better, they had shot a fat coyote, and with us it was any- thing but mule meat. As for myself, I was unfortunate, being among those in the rear and not aware of the feast in the advance. I did not reach it in time to get any of the coyote except the lights and the windpipe. Longing for fat meat and willing to eat anything but poor mule meat, and seeing a little fat on the windpipe of the coyote, I threw it on the coals to warm it and greedily devoured it.
"But halcyon days were at hand. We turned directly to the north to reach what seemed to be the nearest timber. This was at a distance of ten miles or so, which in our weakened condition it took us nearly all day to travel. It brought us to the Stanislaus River at a point not far from the foothills. Here the rich alluvial bottom was more than a mile wide. It had been burned over, but the new grass was starting up and growing luxuriously, but sparsely, like thinly sown grain. But what gladdened our eyes most was the abund- ance of game in sight, principally antelope. Before dark we had killed two of them and two sand hill cranes, and besides there was an abundance of wild grapes. Still we had no idea that we were yet in California, but supposed we had yet to cross the range of mountains to the west."
With the guidance of a friendly Indian, however, they came in a few days to Dr. John Marsh's ranch at the foot of Mt. Diablo. They reached it on November 4, 1841, after having been six months on the way. Marsh secured passports for them from General Val- lejo, though Bidwell did not get his until he had been in the San Jose jail for three days, without food and much annoyed by fleas. It was merely an official oversight, soon set right.
"Northwest America," Richman tells us ("California under Spain and Mexico," page 270), " including what is now Washington, Ore- gon, and Montana, was the field of the Hudson's Bay Company. Relations between the latter and Alta California were friendly, even cordial. The Company never encroached, and early in 1841 an
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agreement was made with Alvarado whereby its trappers might operate along the Sacramento."
Captain Johann August Sutter had already established himself at New Helvetia, the present Sacramento, in 1839. Sutter objected to the agreement mentioned. That he felt himself pretty strongly established in the country is indicated by a letter which Richman gives at length, warning the Mexican government "to explain these ignor- ant people," he puts it, "what would be the consequence if they do injure me, the first french freggate who came here will do me justice."
Alarm amongst the Mexicans at the increasing influx of Ameri- cans was growing. On July 4, 1842, President Santa Ana issued instructions to Governor Micheltorena that from and after a date to be fixed by him no individuals belonging to the United States were to be admitted to his department. The Mexican counsul at New Orleans, as early as January 9 of the same year, had written to the Minister of Relations that the American Government had ex- pressed a determination to acquire territory for a naval station on the Pacific coast between the Columbia River and Guayaquil. He advised that Americans be denied admission to the territory and that all such as were domiciled without passports be expelled. On May 7, the same official called attention to statements in the New Orleans papers that thirty American emigrants who had reached California without passports had at first been arrested but later set free and given passports-referring to the Bartleson-Bidwell party.
On October 2 of the same year, Juan N. Almonte, Mexican representative at Washington, wrote to his government: "There can be no doubt that of the thousand families that this year have emigrated from the States of Arkansas and Missouri, and the Terri- tories of Tova (Iowa?) and Wisconseis in the direction of Oregon, more than a third part have gone with the intention of establishing themselves in Alta California. ... I infer that the objects of these emigrants are not pure, and that there is involved a project that time will disclose. This I communicate to the end that the comandante-general of the department may be forwarned, not losing sight of the fact that this scheme of emigration may be in con- sonance with plans that the Texans some time since entertained con- cerning that beautiful land."
There appears to have been real cause for his alarm. In 1843, of some 800 emigrants to the Northwest, the Hastings party (thirty- six strong) and the Chiles-Walker company (about fifty) came to California, the first in one division from Oregon, and the second in two, one by way of Fort Boise and New Helvetia, and the other by Owens River and Lake, the Tulares, and Gilroy's Rancho, where the present town of Gilroy stands. The latter therefore probably
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passed through part of the present Merced County, most likely crossing the Diablo Range by Pacheco Pass.
"In 1844 three companies came," Richman tells us, "one twenty-five strong, under Lieutenant John C. Fremont by way of the Carson River; a Kelsey contingent (thirty-six strong) by a route not definitely known; and the Stevens party (over fifty strong) by way of Truckee and Bear Rivers-line of the modern railway."
In 1845 Richman mentioned six or seven parties, totaling per- haps 250 persons. One, under Green McMahon, included James W. Marshall, the discoverer of gold, and came from Oregon. Among the others were the Sublette party, the Grigsby party (including William B. Ide of Bear Flag fame), the Fremont-Walker party, and the Lanford W. Hastings party. All of these except the one from Oregon came in by the routes of the Sacramento or lower San Joaquin, except the Walker party, which came by way of the Owens River and Lake.
Parties become yearly more numerous. We have shown enough to correct the idea, sometimes held, that immigration from across the plains was negligible before the discovery of gold, and enough also to give some notion of the haziness of the ideas about California and especially about the route to it. These things of course were among those which the early pioneers of this county shared with the rest.
An incident which occurred about this time illustrates the ex- tent to which the more energetic American had taken over the work of the region and the extent to which the easy-going Mexican gov- ernment acquiesced in it, besides giving us another look at the Indian situation and, most important for our purpose, touching Merced County directly. In 1845, after the surrender of Micheltorena, Pio Pico, resolved to put a stop to horse-stealing depredations, made a compact with Captain John Gantt and Dr. John Marsh to attack the rancherias of the lower San Joaquin and of the Merced Rivers, and to deliver the captives to "Senor Sutter." Pio Pico, on his part, organized a movement further south. What the result of either expedition was, we are not told.
Some idea of how the number of Americans by this time in California compared with the number of Spaniards or Mexicans- Californians, as they were then called-is given in Dr. Marsh's letter in the statement of the Spanish population which he there makes. The number was exceedingly small. Richman (page 226), says that under Sola, the last of the Spanish governors, who became also the first of the Mexican governors, the State Secular, which in 1779 could claim a total white population of about 500 persons, and by 1783 not over 1000, could in 1820 claim 3270, of whom
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