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 8
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and its north and east and section lines in 1855. "Beagle's" (Bieghle's) house is shown in the northeast of the northwest of 19. The Stockton and Fort Miller road, which became the Merced-Mari- posa division line in 1855, enters this township in section 7 and leaves it at 36. The house of the Antelope Rancho is shown on the south side of Deadman's Creek in the northwest of the southeast of 17. Dutchman's Creek is shown. Passing on out of Merced County, we find in 8/18, surveyed in 1853 and 1856, the town of Buchanan and a copper smelting works in the northeast quarter of 33, south of the Chowchilla River.
Township 9 South, Range 7 East, was not surveyed until 1858 and 1859; it shows Quinto and Romero Creeks. The east line of 9/8 was surveyed in 1853, the rest in 1858 and 1859. There is a road along the north side in 3 and 4, a house on the south side in the southeast of 8, and a road to Hill's Ferry in 36. There is no culture in 9/9. In 9/10, surveyed, township lines in 1853 and 1854, and section lines in 1861, appear the road to Visalia in 2 and 1, and part of the Santa Rita Grant in 1, 12, and half of 13. No culture appears on the next six townships east. In 9/17, surveyed in the first quarter of 1854, appears Warren's barley field, south of the Chowchilla, in the southwest quarter of 2 and the northwest of 11.
The San Luis Gonzaga appears in part on 10/7, but no houses or fields. Not surveyed until 1858 to 1878. In 10/8, surveyed, part of east township line in 1854, balance in 1858 and 1859, appear the overland stage road and the telegraph line, going northeasterly, vicin- ity of San Luis ranch house. In 10/9 appears the San Luis and Stockton road. There are also several houses, but the township was resurveyed in 1886, after surveys in 1853, 1854, and 1858, and these are probably not early, except perhaps the "old s. corral," in the southeast of 34. No culture is shown on the next four townships run- ning easterly.
A number of houses and roads are shown in townships 11 and 12 south, but so much of the surveying was done later, a good deal of it during the seventies, that it is doubtful if any of the culture dates back to the fifties.
Very briefly, then, there are shown on these surveys, before the county was organized, houses and other works of man all along the Merced from Merced Falls to the San Joaquin, down Bear Creek towards where Merced now is, and Richardson's about three miles further down, down Mariposa Creek to the Central Pacific and the State Highway, with three houses further down. On the West Side, Hill's Ferry, the San Luis Ranch, the roads to Stockton and to Visalia; but on account of the later dates of the greater part of the surveys, perhaps nothing else that we dare assert, on the authority of the surveys, was there in 1855.
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We turn now from geography to biography. If we except the very slight and soon abandoned start towards settlement which ap- pears to have been made by John C. Fremont, in all probability before that date, the first settlement by Americans in what is now Merced County appears pretty conclusively to have been made by John M. Montgomery and Col. Samuel Scott in the fall of 1849. The sketch of Scott in the 1881 History, which was published in the year of Scott's death, says he "in 1849 came to Merced, then Mariposa County, and entered into the stock business." This sketch tells of his partnership with Montgomery. The sketch of Mr. Montgomery in the 1905 History and Biography, says: "In the fall of 1849 Mr. Montgomery, with Samuel Scott, located in probably the first settle- ment in what is now Merced County, being but a short distance below the present site of Snelling." Both men were born in Kentucky, Scott in 1809, Montgomery in 1816, and they came to California in 1847, to Monterey, and engaged in business there until the discovery of gold drew them across the Coast Range to the Merced River. Mr. Montgomery does not appear to have done any mining. His sketch in the 1905 History says he hauled freight instead; and after he and Scott had located on the Merced, he engaged in farming and stock-raising. We have seen how he appears to have been the richest man in the county in 1857; and later, up to the time of the beginning of grain-raising on a large scale about the end of the sixties, he was called the money and cattle king of Merced County. Mr. Mont- gomery returned to Missouri in 1852 and married Elizabeth Arm- strong. On their return to California in 1854 their daughter Mary, now Mrs. I. J. Buckley, was born in the month of June at the sink of the Carson, in what was then part of Utah Territory. Mr. Mont- gomery established his family in the home on Bear Creek which he had made ready before he went East, and which in more recent years is known as the Wolfsen Ranch.
Montgomery and Scott, when they arrived on the Merced River in the fall of 1849, camped, it is said, under one of the large water- oak trees which serve so greatly to beautify and give character to the river bottom all the way from Merced Falls to the San Joaquin. The place was a short distance north of the present Cox Ferry bridge, on the left-hand side of the road leading from the bridge out to the paved county highway which leads from Hopeton to Snelling. The tree was standing, up until a few years ago, but has now fallen and disappeared. A short distance up the river from where the gravel pit is now located from which the gravel for the Exchequer Dam is being obtained, still stands a house known as "the old Montgomery house." It is not on its original site, however. The large brick house just at the lower edge of Snelling was of course much later ; we read elsewhere of when Mr. Montomery built it about the end of
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the sixties. Colonel Scott's farm on the Merced came to be called "Baluerte," and was a splendid estate alone in the late sixties, where the owner appears to have dispensed a hospitality very characteristic of the old South. Mrs. Rowena Granice Steele made the place the scene of a romance, "Baluerte," and it figured in another book or two which she also wrote. The place is what is now known as the Cook & Dale place. Colonel Scott's operations on the Merced were inter- rupted, after his arrival with Montgomery in 1849, by a period of mining, at Placerville, El Dorado County, among other places.
Montgomery and Scott and Dr. David Wallace Lewis established a house of entertainment which was the beginning of Snelling, in the spring of 1851, Steele tells us in the "Argus" of June 18, 1870- early in the spring, he says. The place was kept by Dr. Lewis. It was first a brush tent, but shortly Dr. Lewis built what was afterwards known as Snelling's Hotel. The Snelling family arrived in the fall of 1851, Steele says, and purchased the property.
Meanwhile, in September, 1850, Dr. Joshua Griffith settled on the Merced. The biographical sketch of him in the 1881 History says that when he settled on the Merced there were only three other men on the river; namely, Samuel Scott, J. M. Montgomery, and James Waters. Montgomery and Scott are names well known, but the name of James Waters soon disappears, so far as we have been able to find. The sketch of W. C. Turner in the 1881 History says that James. Waters was the leader of the party with which Mr. Turner came to California-from Salt Lake to Los Angeles, at least. The party was at Salt Lake in September, 1849, and came on to Los Angeles. They came over the Tejon Pass and to Fort Miller, and, says the sketch, "Here resting a few days, they went to a place called Fine Gold Gulch and did some prospecting. From there they went on to Mariposa County." Mrs. Louisa Stevinson is the only person, so far as we have been able to find, who knows of James Waters now; and from her we learn that he owned the place where James J. Stevin- son settled on the lower Merced in August, 1852. Stevinson bought him out, and presumably Waters moved away from this vicinity.
The 1881 History tells of a "Strange Meeting on the Merced," relating that "Joseph Griffith" and "William Hawkins" both were members of the Ashley expedition, it says in 1823. This was the Ashley who was a partner of Jedediah Smith, who led a party through the San Joaquin Valley in 1827. There is in the 1881 book a short sketch of John Hawkins, which states that he settled on the Merced about three miles from its mouth in June, 1852, and established Haw- kins' Ferry, and died in 1858, leaving a widow, three sons, and four daughters. The sketch of Joshua Griffith says that Griffith went to Missouri in 1820 (he was born in Pennsylvania in 1800 and moved to Ohio in 1810), and that "Here he met John Hawkins, and these
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two finally found themselves settled on the Merced River in 1852."
Judge James Wood Robertson, a Mississippi man, came to Cali- fornia by way of Mexico and by ship to San Francisco in the summer of 1849; mined in Tuolumne County, at Jacksonville; returned to Stockton when the rainy season began; and reached the old California Ferry on the Merced River, afterwards known as Young's Ferry, in January, 1850, where he remained until summer. "In the fall of 1850," says the sketch about him in the Elliott & Moore history, "he took a trip to the northern mines. The next winter and summer he tried mining at Canyon Creek, near Georgetown, El Dorado County, but returned again in 1857 to the Merced River, and has remained there ever since. In 1855, on the organization of the county, he was elected Assessor . " From the context, it seems probable that the "1857" was a misprint for 1851.
N. B. Stoneroad, an Arkansas man, came across the plains to Los Angeles and up the coast to San Jose, where he arrived during Octo- ber, 1849. He left San Jose on November 1, 1849, for the Mari- posa County mines, came by way of Pacheco Pass, and arrived at Agua Fria in the latter part of the month. He mined at Agua Fria for several months, then established a store at Horseshoe Bend, on the Merced River, in what will be a part of the Exchequer reservoir when the dam now under construction is completed. In October, 1850, he moved to Garota No. 2 in Tuolumne County and kept a store there for a year, and then in the fall of 1851 returned to Arkan- sas, from which State he returned during the summer of 1852 across the plains by the southern route, with the loss of their stock, which was driven off by Indians west of El Paso. He reached Mariposa County again in the fall of 1852, mined during the winter, and in the spring, with his father and three other gentlemen, formed the partner- ship of Stoneroads, Cathey, McCreary & Kelly. Cathey and Mc- Creary drew out the next spring, and Stoneroad & Kelly continued the business until 1860. They had a tract of land, bought in 1853, about five miles southeast of Plainsburg. Stoneroad continued in the cattle business until the late sixties, when grain-raising began to take up the range, and then went to grain-raising himself, on two sections on Mari- posa Creek. He raised a lot of sheep also in this and Fresno Coun- ties, and in 1876, with two brothers, George W. and Thomas, and William Dickenson, his brother-in-law, drove 10,000 sheep to New Mexico, where they bought a tract of land and went into the sheep business. N. B. Stoneroad, however, continued to live on his ranch in this county. His wife, whom he married in 1867, was a daughter of Gallant D. and Isabella Dickenson, and was also an early pioneer, a member of the party who crossed the Sierras in 1846, just a few days ahead of the Donner party. Mrs. F. H. Farrar is a daughter of Mrs. Stoneroad, by a former marriage with a man named Peck.
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Eleazer T. Givens, born in Kentucky in 1828, came to California across the plains by way of St. Louis and Salt Lake in 1849. He came to the southern mines in 1850; working first on Coarse Gold Gulch, in what is now Madera County, and later on Auga Fria and Whitlock's Creeks in Mariposa County. It was on October 11, 1850, that he went hunting a grizzly with three other men. One of them, named Childs, and Givens, wounded the bear, and later came up with it in the chaparral, where it attacked Givens. He lost half his scalp and was otherwise badly bitten before Childs succeeded in killing the animal. This ended Givens' mining. In 1851, after recovering from his wounds, he returned to Kentucky, to his father's home. His parents came to California in 1852. He himself mar- ried Miss Martha Pratt of Morganfield, Kentucky, in 1853, and they returned to California, to the old Texas Ranch, or Texas Tent, between Hornitos and Indian Gulch, then owned by his father. In 1854 he settled on Bear Creek and in 1856 on Mariposa Creek. It was on this latter ranch, then the Turner & Osborn ranch, where the first county seat was located in 1855. The ranch is still owned by Mr. Givens' children.
William C. Turner, a Missouri man, settled on the Merced River in September, 1852. He crossed the plains in 1849, and from Salt Lake the party, under the guidance of James Waters, came on to Los Angeles, and then north over the Tejon Pass and to Fort Miller and Fine Gold Gulch. Mr. Turner reached Sherlock's Creek in Mari- posa County, December 8, 1849, and remained in Mariposa County until 1852, when he came to the Merced River.
W. L. Means, born in Alabama in 1827, arrived in San Francisco by way of Mexico in August, 1850. He came to Don Pedro Bar, and then to the Mariposa County mines, first on the Merced River and later at Agua Fria. In 1851 he came down to the present Robla, on Bear Creek about ten miles west of Merced, and went to hunting elk and antelope to supply meat to the mines. He built the adobe house at Robla. To help him he had several Indians hired, and a white man named McPherson, who had lived a number of years among the Indians, presumably a member of one of the earlier trap- ping parties who had chosen to remain in California.
Col. Archibald Stevinson, a Kentuckian, and his son, James J. Stevinson, born in Missouri, came to California in 1849. James J. arrived early in the year, and mined at Mormon Gulch, Tuolumne County, in April and May of that year. For three months thereafter he acted as agent for Colonel Jackson at Jacksonville on the Tuo- lumne River. Then his father arrived from Chihuahua, Mexico, and the two in November, 1849, entered into partnership in a storekeep- ing venture. The Elliott & Moore history says they remained there until August, 1852, but E. W. Stockird says his grandfather left there
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in 1850 or 1851. At any rate J. J. Stevinson located on the Merced River on August 1, 1852, and A. Stevinson on September 23 of the same year. J. J. Stevinson, on December 27, 1855, married Miss Louisa Jane Cox, daughter of Isom J. Cox, who conducted Cox's Ferry across the Merced. Mrs. Stevinson has already been men- tioned as one of the few pioneers remaining who date their residence here from before the County's organization.
Erastus Kelsey settled on his farm near Merced Falls in 1853. He was born in Oneida County, New York, in 1827. He crossed the plains, and arrived at Sacramento on August 18, 1849. He joined the Quincy Mining Company in 1849, and then, in November of the same year, settled on a ranch on the west side of the Sacramento in company with Joel D. Nichols, J. W. H. Campbell, and a man named Shryer, under the firm name of Nichols, Campbell & Co. The next April, with Nichols and Campbell, he went to Auburn and Spanish Flats and again went to mining. He returned east, to Illinois, in the fall of 1850, married Miss Malinda Powers in 1851, and returned to California in 1852. Four sons were born to Mr. and Mrs. Kelsey : Charles, George P., Horace G., and Arthur L. Kelsey.
William Nelson, born in New Hampshire in 1812, came to Cali- fornia in 1849 from New Brunswick around the Horn. With his wife and his son, Henry, he arrived in San Francisco in May, 1850. He mined for two years, and then went to Humboldt Bay in the winter of 1852 on the steamer Santa Clara, which he converted into a saw- mill for Ryan, Dupp & Co. He had learned the trade of a mill- wright in the East. After several months in the Humboldt Bay sec- tion, he returned to San Francisco in the fall of 1852 and built a flour mill on Jackson Street, which he ran for three months. In 1854 he came to Merced Falls and built the flour mill which started the business of thirty-nine years in that line there conducted by him and his son, Henry, whom he took in as a partner in 1866, when the son was twenty-two years of age. It was in March, 1854, that Mr. Nel- son came to Merced Falls. In 1867 the Nelsons took part in organiz- ing a company and building a woolen mill adjoining their flour mill. Both were destroyed by fire in 1872, and the rebuilt mills were burned in 1893.
Henry Nelson, the son mentioned, is one of the earliest pioneers of the county now living. He married Miss Lola A. Lawrence in 1870. One son and four daughters were born to them : William N., Lola, Almah, Inez, and Etta. After 1893, when the Nelson & Son's second mill was burned, Henry Nelson helped run the Ruddle mill on the south side of the river below Snelling, which has only recently been torn down. During his milling days he hauled flour to the mar- ket in the mining country from Sonora to Coarse Gold. Mount Ophir, where John C. Fremont was a customer, Mariposa, and Princeton,
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now called Mt. Bullion, are among the places he mentions to which his flour team went. Mr. Nelson recalls the beginning of the town of Merced and relates that after the burning of their mill in 1872, Merced's first year of existence, their team being short of work in the way of hauling flour, he brought it over here and for two months that summer hauled wheat from the ranches out in the present Tuttle sec- tion to the new warehouse here for shipment. He made two trips a day with two wagons, carrying 10,000 and 7,000 pounds respec- tively. In this grain we see the reason for the coming of the railroad and the moving of the county seat from Merced River bottom to the plains. Henry Nelson has been a resident of Merced for a number of years and up to the end of 1924 was actively engaged in the real estate and insurance business. A few months ago he retired from business on account of being troubled with neuritis. Mrs. Nelson died in May, 1925.
Thomas Claiborne Deane, born in Kentucky in 1826, came to California by the southern route in 1849. He lived in what was then Mariposa County until the formation of Merced, and engaged in stock-raising. In the sketch of him in the 1881 History we read that he was one of those who encouraged cotton-raising in the county, and that there were then between 2500 and 3000 acres of cotton in Merced County. Henry Nelson recalls that Mr. Dean was known as "Claibe" to his intimates.
Whether that interesting early figure, James Capen Adams, known as "Grizzly Adams," was ever in what is now Merced County, we can- not tell; but he tells in his Life, written by Theodore Hittell and published in San Francisco, we believe in the sixties, of coming down from the mountains and outfitting at a place called Howard's Ranch, and then returning to Strawberry in Tuolumne County. He hunted on the Merced River in the mountains, and tells of killing and captur- ing alive grizzly bears there.
Thomas Price came to this county on August 25, 1854; it was of course then a part of Mariposa County. He was an Arkansas man, and came across the plains in 1853. He seems to have been one of the comparatively few who did not follow mining. He went to stock- raising at once, and in 1855 went to Texas and bought a drove of cattle and drove them here. This is one of the recorded cases of driv- ing stock out from the East. Whether his Texas cattle would classify in the 1857 assessment roll as "American" or "Spanish," we may won- der, but the presence of considerable numbers of "American" stock cattle by that year shows that numbers of others must probably have driven cattle here across the plains.
Samuel L. Givens, one of the pioneers who came prior to the form- ' ation of Merced County and who is still living, came with his parents from their former home near Caseyville, Kentucky, by New Orleans
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and the Isthmus in 1853. They arrived at San Francisco February 2 of that year, and at the Texas Ranch near Hornitos five days later. Two older brothers, Eleazer T. and Robert Robinson Givens, the former already mentioned, had come out in 1849 for the first time. Other brothers were Tom and John; and there were four sisters: Matilda L., who died in 1853 ; Jane R., Mrs. D. M. Poole, of Stock- ton; Catherine D., Mrs. A. J. Gregory, of Mariposa; and Mary Richards, Mrs. Eli E. Thrift, of Stockton. Mr. Givens lives on his ranch on Bear Creek, twelve or thirteen miles above Merced; and while the Texas Ranch was the family home, they had a stock ranch within what is now Merced County, on Bear Creek, since the early fifties. A man named M. O. Barbour formerly owned the S. L. Givens place. A short distance down Bear Creek from Mr. Givens' place, J. M. Montgomery lived in 1857, on the present Wolfsen place ; and Mr. Givens relates that there was in that vicinity, in the creek bottom, a corral for the capture of wild horses, with a long "wing" fence running out into the plains to turn them towards the corral. A low fence was sufficient to turn them, he states. The Mexicans used to catch the horses here. Until 1867, Mr. Givens himself rode a horse which J. B. Cocanour caught between the Montgomery Ranch and Lone Tree in 1854. He recalls that he went through Pacheco Pass twice in the early days : once in 1858, on his way to college at Santa Clara, when he was about fifteen years old, and a second time in 1869, in pursuit of some horse-thieves who had run off some horses from the Texas Ranch. These two trips were on horseback. He relates that when he was on his way across in 1858, as a boy, he remembers a stage drawing up at the San Luis Ranch, a four-in-hand, with four men and four women passengers, Castilians, the women as fine-looking as he ever saw, with black eyes and very fair skins. We are indebted to Mr. Givens for some information about the early surveys in the county. Jack Hays was United States deputy surveyor and ran the township lines in 1853. A man named Reed afterwards surveyed the sections. General J. W. Bost and Richard Thomas surveyed Mr. Givens' place.
E. W. Healy, born in New York State in 1820, crossed the plains from Illinois in 1853. At Salt Lake he left his party to join J. M. Montgomery's train-this was not, of course, Mr. Montgomery's first trip-and came through with him to his ranch on Bear Creek, where they arrived August 14, 1854. Healy mined in Mariposa County during the dry winter of 1854-1855. He barely made expenses, and returned to work for Mr. Montgomery in 1856.
Alexander George Black, while not a pioneer of Merced prior to the county's formation, yet crossed the county in the year of its formation. He came around the Horn to San Francisco from Boston in 1853, farmed two years in the Pajaro Valley, and then came across the Pacheco Pass to Mariposa County in 1855, hauled lumber for
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Clark's sawmill, and in 1856 built a stable at Hornitos, and after- wards kept a grocery store and teamed until 1865.
Henry Clay Daulton, a pioneer of Fresno County since 1858, also fails to qualify as a pioneer of Merced prior to 1855, but his story must be mentioned briefly. He came to California in 1850 and mined in the vicinity of Hangtown and Coloma. In 1852 he returned home; in 1853 again he started west, having hired out to Thomas Hildreth at New London, Missouri, to drive an ox team across the plains for fifteen dollars a month. They brought a heavy train of cattle and sheep, left New London May 17, 1853, came by way of Salt Lake, and reached Los Angeles November 24 of the same year. He came to Fresno County, to the part that is now Madera County, from Los Angeles in 1858. The Daulton Ranch, one of the best- known in Madera, and Daulton Station in the foothills on the rail- road to Raymond, perpetuate his name.
Thomas Givens, a brother of Eleazer T. and Samuel L. Givens, while he came with his father's family to the Texas Ranch in 1853, appears hardly to have qualified as a resident of Merced County before its organization. He mined in the Mariposa hills for a few years, and in 1858 went to Santa Clara County and began farming there, and then shortly afterwards came back to the San Joaquin Valley and located in this county.
Edward Wheaton Buffum and Nathaniel Stephenson Stockton, the former a New Hampshire man and the latter from Alabama, came to Mariposa County in the summer of 1854 and went into partner- ship, built a water ditch to supply the miners, and operated that for several years, and also a stock ranch about four miles from Hornitos, raising cattle, horses, mules, hogs, and goats, notably Angora goats. They also had a ranch in Merced County, in the country out towards Plainsburg, but apparently not early enough to qualify them as pio- neers from before the formation of Merced County.
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