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 6
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"The foliage of the oak is getting darker; and everything, except that the weather is a little cool, shows that spring is rapidly advanc- ing; and to-day we had quite a summer rain.
"4th .- Commenced to rain at daylight, but cleared off brightly at sunrise. We ferried the river without any difficulty, and continued up the San Joaquin. Elk were running in bands over the prairie and in the skirt of the timber. We reached the river at the mouth of a large slough, which we were unable to ford, and made a circuit of several miles around." (Probably the mouth of Bear Creek at the John Dugain ranch. ) "Here the country appears very flat; oak- trees have entirely disappeared, and are replaced by a large willow, nearly equal to it in size. The river is about a hundred yards in breadth, branching into sloughs, and interspersed with islands. At
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this time it appears sufficiently deep for a small steamer, but its navigation would be broken by shallows at low water. Bearing in towards the river, we were again forced off by another slough; and passing around, steered towards a clump of trees on the river, and finding there good grass, encamped. The prairies along the left bank" (the Miller & Lux ranches now) "are alive with immense droves of wild horses; and they had been seen during the day at every open- ing which afforded us a view across the river. Latitude, by obser- vation, 37° 08' 00"; longitude 120° 45' 22"." (Note: This is 30"-about half a mile-south, and 22" west, of the southeast corner of the San Luis Ranch quadrangle and the southwest corner of the Turner Ranch quadrangle of the topographical map of the U. S. Geological Survey.)
"5 th .- During the earlier part of the day's ride, the country presented a lacustrine appearance; the river was deep, and nearly on a level with the surrounding country ; its banks raised like a levee, and fringed with willows. Over the bordering plain were inter- spersed spots of prairie among fields of tule (bulrushes), which in this country are called tulares, and little ponds. On the opposite side, a line of timber was visible which, according to information, points out the course of the slough, which at times of high water connects with the San Joaquin River-a large body of water in the upper part of the valley, called the Tule Lakes." (Evidently Fresno Slough). "The river and all its sloughs are very full, and it is probable that the lake is now discharging." (On the contrary, prob- ably at this season of heavy melting snows water was flowing from the river into the lake.) "Here elk were frequently started, and one was shot out of a band which ran around us. On our left, the Sierra maintains its snowy height, and masses of snow appear to descend very low towards the plains; probably the late rains in the valley were snow on the mountains. We traveled 37 miles, and encamped on the river. Longitude of the camp: 120° 28' 34", and latitude, 36° 49' 12".
"6th .- After having traveled fifteen miles along the river, we made an early halt, under the shade of sycamore-trees." (Native sycamores on the San Joaquin?) "Here we found the San Joaquin coming down from the Sierra with a westerly course, and checking our way, as all its tributaries had previously done. We had expected to raft the river ; but found a good ford, and encamped on the opposite bank, where droves of wild horses were raising clouds of dust on the prairie. Columns of smoke were visible in the direction of the Tule Lakes to the southward-probably kindled in the tulares by the Indians, as signals that there were strangers in the valley."
It is hard to realize that this strange world in which Fremont and his men thus made reconnaissance of the unknown streams, and
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where they found herds of elk and antelope, great droves of wild horses, and numerous tracks of grizzly bear, is our own Merced County only eighty years ago-within the lifetime of a considerable number of people still living. The course of history was to move rapidly in the decade following Fremont's trip. Within less than four years Marshall was to make in the gravels of that same Rio de los Americanos down which Fremont and his men came to Sutter's fort, the discovery which brought the gold rush. Within two or three years the United States was to become the owner of California, within little over six it was to be a State, within seven Mariposa County was to be created, and within eleven, Merced County. Much of this Fremont could not dream, and some that he knew he could never tell. One of the most interesting things in all our country's history would be to know just what conversations there were between Fremont, the "Pathfinder" to California, and his illustrious father- in-law, Senator Benton, about the part which the former was to play in the swift drama of the next few years after this expedition. We have seen Dr. John Marsh's letter of 1842, with its warning to one high in the country's administration, that the plum was ripe and ready to fall, and that both England and Russia were waiting for it.
That Fremont, even in this early expedition-even in the very casualness and apparent lack of premediated purpose in his coming into California at all-may have been here to keep a weather eye on the situation is not unlikely. That this was the chief purpose of his later expedition is practically certain. But the United States could not offend a friendly nation. Mexico was the owner of the territory ; our, government could not say to her that we stood ready to take it when she could hold it no longer ; and from the very nature of the case no scratch of a pen put to paper any of Fremont's instruc- tions on this subject, so that the realm is left one of pure speculation.
A few weeks before Fremont and his men crossed the "large tributary of the San Joaquin" near the present Stevinson ranch, on February 29, 1844, Manuel Micheltorena, Governor of the Cali- fornias, granted to ex-Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado ten sitios de granado mayor, or Spanish square leagues, within the limits of the River San Joaquin, the Snow Mountain, the Merced River, and the River Chanchillas. The Snow Mountain is of course the Sierra Nevada, and the Chanchillas is only another spelling for the Chow- chilla. The grant was made in consideration of patriotic services performed. From the fact that Governor Micheltorena made a good many grants during the forties, after settlers from the United States had begun to come into the territory, we may infer without stretching the probabilities very far that the grants were also made on the tacit condition of further patriotic service yet to be rendered; in short, that the Governor had reached the conclusion that the
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Mexican government would have a better chance of holding the land against the invaders if it was the private property of Mexican citi- zens than if it was part of the public domain. There were several other conditions attached to the grant to Alvarado: he was to build a house within a year, and it was to be inhabited; he was to cause the ten square leagues to be surveyed, which of course implied that he was definitely to locate it within the large limits named; he was not to alienate nor mortgage it.
On February 10, 1847, Alvarado sold and conveyed his interest to John C. Fremont. Fremont's claim, based upon the grant to Alvarado and this conveyance to him, was confirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Fremont against the United States, in 1854. From the report of that case it is pretty obvious that Alvarado had never selected his particular ten leagues or sur- veyed it or built the required house. The grant was not confirmed to Fremont without dissent-two justices, Catron and Campbell, dissented. The majority of the court, however, concurred in the opinion written by Mr. Chief Justice Taney, later of Dred Scott fame, and Fremont was confirmed in the ownership of the grant. "Las Mariposas, the Mariposa Estate," says Hittell, "or Fremont Grant, as it was sometimes called . .. was represented by its owner and until the decadence of the mines was believed to be one of the most valuable bodies of land belonging to a single individual in the world."
It is understandable enough that Fremont did not allow anything to creep into the record in the case before the Supreme Court about it, but as a matter of fact he had made apparently two starts to locate the grant down in the valley lands of the San Joaquin Valley. The first attempt appears to have been to locate it in the vicinity of Stevinson, near the junction of the Merced with the San Joaquin. We have found nothing of record about this attempt, though there is still Fremont's Ford across the San Joaquin between the mouth of the Merced and the site where Dover was later to have its short existence. The other attempt to locate the grant on the lands of the valley was made in the vicinity of Le Grand and Plainsburg. Oldtimers out there will tell you that there used to be more or less uneasiness felt because they feared this attempt made a cloud on their titles, but of course this has long since passed away. The most definite record left of this attempt is to be found on the township plat of Township 8 South, Range 16 East, Mount Diablo Base and Meridian. The township lines of this township were surveyed in 1852 and 1853, and the section lines in 1854. In the southwest quarter of the northeast quarter of Section 10, in that township, on the south bank of Mariposa Creek, or the Mariposa River as it is there designated, appear the representation of a house, and the words "Fremont's Ranch." The land, on the 1919 county map drawn by
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G. E. Winton, stands in the name of G. B. Stanford, as to the northeast quarter of the section, and of W. C. and C. L. Dallas as to the other three-quarters. This detail, in the interior part of the township, and therefore probably not mapped until 1854, is probably not to be understood as meaning that at that time Fremont owned or claimed to own the ranch, but that there was a building there which with the locality around it was generally known in the vicinity as "Fremont's Ranch" because Fremont had earlier made some start at locating his grant there. Perhaps he had built this house in fulfill- ment of the condition in Alvarado's grant that he must build a house. It was simply the name of that particular place, apparently, just as one might still hear oldtimers speak of Snelling's or Snelling's Ranch, long after the latter place had passed from the ownership of the Snelling family.
It is pretty obvious that Fremont must have made his final location in the present limits of Mariposa County where the grant is now located, at a pretty early date, and the convincing proof of that is the fact that he successfully held it against the miners who claimed against him, which he could hardly have done if their rights had ripened very far. Also there could have been but one reason for "floating" the grant, as it is sometimes spoken of, from the fine lands of the valley to the foothills, and that reason was the discovery of gold. Sometime between the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848, and the very early history of the gold rush, in all probability, was when Fremont took such steps as he did take to locate the grant in what is now Merced County. He probably built the house on Mariposa Creek; just as probably, with all his multi- farious affairs, he never occupied it very much, but probably he did occupy it, and probably that made him the first American inhabitant of what afterwards became Merced County. He is the only one, so far as we can very well discover now, whose reason for coming ante- dates the gold discovery, unless it may have been some such as the hunter McPherson, who worked for William L. Means in his hunting business at Robla in 1851, and who we are told had lived for some years with the Indians-and who, evidently, had therefore dropped out of one of the earlier trapping expeditions of Jedediah Smith or his successors.
CHAPTER V
MOTHER MARIPOSA
Chapter 15 of the California Statutes of 1850 was "An Act Subdividing the State into Counties and establishing the Seats of Justice therein." It was approved February 18, 1850. Section 1 read: "The following shall be the boundaries and seats of justice of the several Counties of the State of California until otherwise de- termined by law" :
Section 28 was as follows: "County of Mariposa .- Beginning on the summit of the Coast Range at the southwest corner of Tuo- lumne County, and running thence along the southern boundary of said county, to the summit of the Sierra Nevada; thence along the summit of the Sierra Nevada to the parallel of thirty-eight degrees of north latitude ; thence due east, on the said parallel, to the boundary of the State; thence in a southeasterly direction, following said boun- dary, to the northwest corner of San Diego County; thence due south, along the boundary of San Diego County, to the northeast corner of Los Angeles County ; and thence in a northwesterly direction along the summit of the Coast Range to the place of beginning. The seat of justice shall be Agua Fria."
There were twenty-seven counties established under that act. Mariposa, as will be seen, stretched from the Coast Range to the State's eastern boundary, and from substantially the northern boun- dary of Mariposa and Merced Counties as they are at present to San Diego and Los Angeles Counties. More than a dozen of the counties of to-day have taken all or a part of their territory from the original Mariposa.
To understand how the line could hit the northwest corner of San Diego by following southeast along the eastern boundary of the State, we need to remember that there was than no San Bernardino County, and to read the first clause of the description of the boundary of San Diego County in the same Act-"Commencing on the coast of the Pacific, at the mouth of the creek called San Mateo, and running up said creek to its source; thence due north to the northeast boundary of the State .. . " San Diego County took in all of the State south and east of that line. San Mateo Creek, mentioned in the description, is not far from the present Orange-San Diego border; it is a short creek, and its head is between 117° 20' and 117° 30' west. The line passing due north from its head would apparently have passed about two miles west of the city of San Bernardino, or about twenty- three miles west of the San Bernardino meridian.
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South of Mariposa there were only San Diego and Los Angeles ; up along the coast came Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Monterey, Santa Clara, Branciforte (soon to become Santa Cruz ), Contra Costa, and San Francisco. Seventeen of the original twenty-seven counties lay north of Mariposa and the Bay, and perhaps as graphic an illustra- tion of the distribution of population in the State at that time is found in the fact that in the vote upon the question of adoping the State constitution of 1849, Mokelumne Hill cast more than twice as many ballots as Los Angeles.
By an act passed April 25, 1851, the early act and the acts amenda- tory of it were repealed, after redividing the State into counties and providing for seats of government. This act made some slight changes in the description of the boundary of Mariposa County in its southern part, and provided : "The seat of government shall be at such place as may be chosen by the qualified electors of the County at the next general election."
Agua Fria, the first county seat, has vanished almost completely off the face of the earth. It was situated well up towards the head of Agua Fria Creek, which the State highway to Mariposa now crosses on the fine concrete bridge at Bridgeport, four miles below Mormon Bar. Some five miles up the creek from this bridge was the former county seat. Mariposa soon succeeded it as the seat of justice, but Agua Fria flourished during the mining days.
Carson City, another town which is no more, was a flourishing Mariposa County town of the mining days.
If we look at the original counties lying north of this huge Mari- posa of 1850 in the Sierra Nevada-Tuolumne, Calaveras, El Do- rado, with Nevada and Placer added in 1851, Sierra in 1852, and Amador and Plumas in 1854-we shall realize, from Mariposa's large extent southward alone, that this was near the limit of the Southern Mines.
Population had flowed into the Sierra foothills in thousands in 1849 and 1850. Sonora's population, Hittell says, was 5000 before the end of 1849; sometimes up to 10,000 on Sundays-a statement which gives us a pretty clear idea of both the amount of population in the mining camps and its transitory character.
"Hornitos," we quote Hittell again, "twelve or fifteen miles west of Mariposa, was one of the richest localities for placer mining as well as one of the largest and most attractive towns in the southern mines. . . . One spot, . . . Horseshoe Bend, . . . had ... four hundred miners in 1850."
North of the Merced River, Coulterville flourished. Below Horse- shoe Bend on the river, a few miles above Merced Falls, there was a rich camp below Barrett's, the ruins of which the hawker on the Yo- semite Valley train now points out, and tells tourists about through his
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megaphone. You may judge that it was rich from the depth to which the ground was worked back into the steep canyon sides, and you may see the dry-laid walls of its old ditch along the south side of the river across from the railroad. A portion of this old ditch wall has recently been torn out in the work of stripping the side hills preparatory to pouring the concrete of the big Exchequer Dam of the Merced Irri- gation District.
Just above Hornitos, which originally was largely Mexican in population, was the American town of Quartzberg. It was later aban- doned and the population moved to Hornitos. S. L. Givens, now over eighty and a resident on his ranch on Bear Creek a few miles below the Mariposa County line since pioneer days, states that two present residents of Merced County attended school as children at Quartz- berg-himself, and Mrs. J. J. Stevinson of the Merced River, who was a daughter of that Cox who gave his name to Cox's Ferry and the Cox Ferry bridge on the Merced.
A rather vivid idea of early Mariposa County in some of its aspects is to be had from Dr. Lafayette Houghton Bunnell's book on "The Discovery of the Yosemite and the Indian War of 1851." Bun- nell begins with an account of how he first saw El Capitan during the winter of 1849-1850, "while ascending the old Bear Valley trail from Ridley's ferry, on the Merced River."
James D. Savage, a trader, in 1849-1850 was located in the moun- tains near the mouth of the South Fork of the Merced, Bunnell tells us, some fifteen miles below Yosemite Valley. He was engaged in mining for gold and had a party of native Indians working for him. Early in 1850 a band of Yosemite Indians attacked his trading post and mining camp. They claimed the land in the vicinity and tried to drive Savage off. Bunnell says their real object was plunder. Sav- age and his Indians repulsed them, but he came to regard the neighbor- hood as dangerous, and "removed to Mariposa Creek, not far from the junction of the Aqua (sic) Fria, and near the site of the old stone fort."
Bunnell wrote his book about 1880, and whether he meant that the "stone fort" was old in 1850 or not until 1880 is not altogether clear. If it was old in 1850, we have no account of how it had come to be there long enough at that early date to merit such a description. This location would be perhaps two miles south of the highway bridge across Agua Fria Creek already referred to.
Savage soon built up a prosperous business. He had a branch further south, in what is now Madera County, in charge of a man named Greeley. Savage had several Indian wives. From them he learned that the Indians were planning a general uprising to drive the whites from the diggings. Savage went to the Bay to purchase a stock of goods and took along two of his wives and a chief called
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Jose Juarez, to show him how many whites there were, with the idea of convincing him and the other Indians of the hopelessness of their plans.
But they were not convinced and rose against the miners as they had planned. The war extended far south. A battalion of two hundred mounted men was formed at Agua Fria, what was lacked to make the quota being made up by a party which Major Savage brought over from Cassady's Bar on the San Joaquin. Another battalion was organized for Los Angeles. These bodies were or- ganized in response to a proclamation by Governor McDougal, occa- sioned by the growing depredations of the Indians. The Agua Fria portion of the Mariposa Battalion had already fought a battle in the mountains with the Indians.
The outbreak began after a conference immediately following the return of Savage and Jose Juarez from San Francisco. One of Savage's men, known as "Long Haired Brown," brought him word at Agua Fria shortly after that his trading post on the Fresno had been attacked and all the inmates killed except Brown himself. Shortly afterwards a report was circulated that Savage's post on Mariposa Creek had been attacked and everybody there killed; Savage himself soon appeared at Quartzberg, however, and corrected this rumor. He sought aid from personal friends at Horseshoe Bend. At Quartz- berg, Mariposa, and Agua Fria the miners were little moved by the reports. However, besides Greeley, two other men of Savage's, Stiffner and Kennedy, were killed. Shortly after came the news of the murder of Cassady and four others on the San Joaquin. From another attack an immigrant who had just arrived escaped to Cas- sady's Bar with a broken arm, and this and his hard-ridden and pant- ing horse excited some sympathy among the settlers, and roused the community.
After the attack of the Yosemite Indians upon Savage's camp on the lower South Fork, Col. Adam Johnston, a special agent rep- resenting Governor Peter H. Burnett, came into the country to look the situation over, and upon his return to San Jose, then the capital of the State, reported to the Governor on January 2, 1851, as follows :
"Sir: I have the honor to submit to you, as executive of the State of California, some facts connected with the recent depredations committed by the Indians, within the bounds of the State, upon the persons and property of her citizens. The immediate scenes of their hostile movements are at and in the vicinity of the Mariposa and Fresno. The Indians in that portion of your State have, for some time past, exhibited disaffection and a restless feeling towards the whites. Thefts were continually being perpetrated by them, but no act of hostility had been committed by them on the person of any individual which indicated general enmity on the part of the Indians,
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until the night of the 17th December last. I was then at the camp of Mr. James D. Savage, on the Mariposa, where I had gone for the purpose of reconciling any difficulty that might exist between the Indians and the whites in that vicinity. From various conversations which I had held with different chiefs, I concluded there was no im- mediate danger to be apprehended. One the evening of the 17th of December, we were, however, surprised by the sudden disappearance of the Indians. They left in a body, but no one knew why, or where they had gone. From the fact that Mr. Savage's domestic Indians had forsaken him and gone with those of the rancheria or village, he immediately suspected that something of a serious nature was in con- templation, or had already been committed by them.
"The manner of their leaving, in the night, and by stealth, induced Mr. Savage to believe that whatever act they had committed or intended to commit, might be connected with himself. Believing that he could overhaul his Indians before others could join them, and defeat any depredations on their part, he, with sixteen men, started in pursuit. He continued upon their traces for about thirty miles, when he came upon their encampment. The Indians had discovered his approach, and fled to an adjacent mountain, leaving behind them two small boys asleep, and the remains of an aged female, who had died, no doubt from fatigue. Near to the encampment Mr. Savage ascended a mountain in pursuit of the Indians, from which he dis- covered them upon another mountain at a distance. From these two mountain tops, conversation was commenced and kept up for some time between Mr. Savage and the chief, who told him that they had murdered the men on the Fresno, and robbed the camp. The chief had formerly been on the most friendly terms with Savage, but would not now permit him to approach him. Savage said to them it would be better for them to return to their village-that with very little labor daily, they could procure sufficient gold to purchase them clothing and food. To this the chief replied it was a hard way to get a living, and that they could more easily supply their wants by stealing from the whites. He also said to Savage he must not de- ceive the whites by telling them lies, he must not tell them that the Indians were friendly; they were not, but on the contrary were their deadly enemies, and that they intended killing and plundering them so long as a white face was seen in the country. Finding all efforts to induce them to return, or to otherwise reach them, had failed, Mr. Savage and his company concluded to return. When about leaving, they discovered a body of Indians, numbering about two hundred, on a distant mountain, who seemed to be approaching those with whom he had been talking.
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