USA > California > Glenn County > History of Colusa and Glenn counties, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the counties who have been identified with their growth and development from the early days to the present > Part 4
USA > California > Colusa County > History of Colusa and Glenn counties, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the counties who have been identified with their growth and development from the early days to the present > Part 4
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The present County of Colnsa has its northwest corner on the summit of the Coast Range Mountains, in township 18, north, range 8, west, from the Mount Diablo base and meridian. The northern boundary runs parallel with, and a mile and a half north of, the line dividing townships 17 and 18, and is a straight line except near Princeton, where a section of it about six miles long is moved about two miles north. The intersection of this north boundary and Butte Creek constitutes the northeast corner of the county, and the east boundary is composed of Butte Creek and the Sacramento River. The south boundary is the line between townships 12 and 13, and the west boundary runs along the sum- mit of the Coast Range Mountains to the northwest corner, the "place of beginning," as the land descriptions say. It is about thirty-one and a half miles in a straight line through the county from north to south, and about forty-eight miles from east to west at the widest point.
Having thus fixed the limits of the territory we are dealing with, we shall see that this history must differ with earlier his- tories of the county in that it takes in a great deal less territory For at the time those earlier works were written, Colusa County included what is now Glenn County, the historical record of which will be found in a separate department of this volume. The
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narrative that is to follow herein will deal only with what is now Colusa County.
Three hundred years passed after Cabrillo landed in Cali- fornia, and still the land that is called Colusa County remained unseen by white man. If you, dear reader, had happened along here only seventy-five years ago, you would have owned the first white man's eyes to gaze upon the broad expanse of your county. Possibly your eyes were not in seeing condition seventy-five years ago, but your father or mother might well have done so-so short is the time it has taken this county to emerge out of the wilder- ness and evolve into the highly civilized community that it is today! At the beginning of 1843, this part of the world lay ex- actly as it had been created by Nature. No white man had ever set foot upon it, although it may be that this statement requires some qualification. We have some rather hazy accounts of a band or two of trappers who passed up and down the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys; but there is no record of their route through this valley, and as they were on the east side of the San Joaquin, they no doubt kept the east side of the Sacramento and of Butte Creek, and thus missed Colusa County altogether.
The first whites of whose entry upon Colnsa County soil there is definite record are told of by Gen. John Bidwell. They were a party that had come from the Eastern States to Oregon in 1842, and in 1843 made the trip overland from Oregon down through the Sacramento Valley to Sutter's ranch, where Sacra- mento now stands. Their conduct seems to have been of such a nature as to inspire anything but pride in their achievements. Gen- eral Bidwell tells rather fully of their journey through the valley; and as they were the first authenticated explorers of this county, and the story of their treatment of the Indians explains quite comprehensively why the Indian has not been able to withstand the advance of "civilization," I quote at some length from General Bidwell's narrative:
"This party had with them men, two at least, who might be styled 'Indian killers,' and on the way very frequently fired at Indians seen in the distance. The better portion tried to dis- snade them from this uncalled-for conduct, with, however, only partial success. On arriving at the present site of Red Bluff, the company camped early in the day, intending to remain dur- ing the night, but broke up camp hastily owing to the following incident : One of the 'Indian killers,' seeing an Indian on the opposite side of the river, swam over, carrying a butcher-knife in his mouth. The Indian allowed him to approach till he came very close, but at last ran away. The man with the knife pur- sued him, threw a stone, and, crippling the Indian, completed
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his barbarous work by killing him with his knife. The party in camp, now fearing Indian retaliation, concluded to travel on. After a few miles an Indian was observed following them, no doubt out of curiosity and not because he had heard of the kill- ing of a member of his tribe a few hours previously. One of the 'Indian killers,' seeing the opportunity for another murder, hid in the brush till the Indian came up, and shot him. The company continued to travel on the west side of the Sacramento River with more than ordinary haste, feeling very insecure lest the Indians, who were very numerous in the valley at that time, should exhibit hostility on account of what had occurred. One of the encampments, I remember, was near the river, below what is now called Stony Creek, then Capay River, in Colusa County. The Indians, however, came near in considerable num- bers, and hence evidently had not heard of the shooting and kniving just mentioned. In the morning, as they were packing up to leave camp, one of the 'Indian killers' missed his bridle and swore the 'damned Indians' had stolen it-a most unrea- sonable thing, since the Indians had no horses and never had. In his rage he fired at an Indian who stood by a tree about one hundred yards distant. The Indian fell back into the brush, while the rest of his frightened companions fled in great haste. The company was again rendered panicky by the blood-thirsty imprudence of the 'Indian killer,' hastened on their journey, and found the missing bridle in a few minutes under a pile of blankets.
"All that day the Indians on the east side of the river mani- fested great excitement as the company moved along down on the west side. For more than forty miles there was at that time no place where water could be found for the horses to drink, the banks being so steep or so grown up with jungle and grape-vine as to be mapproachable. The day following, how- ever, the company encamped on the spot where Colusa now stands. The excitement among the Indians had now preceded them, and consequently numbers of them swarmed on the oppo- site side of the river. When the horses were led down to get water, in an almost famished condition, the Indians fired at them with their arrows, but no one was hit or hurt.
"The immigrants told their story at Sutter's place, and some here thought that the Indians where the shooting was done were hostile; but most of them, and the best-informed as I thought, did not blame the Indians, in view of previous occurrences. Sut- ter, however, concluded to punish them, and went, with about fifty men, and attacked the Indian camp at daylight. His forces were divided, a part of them going above and crossing on the
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Indian bridge. They were ready to begin a simultaneous attack at daybreak. The Indians fled and mostly jumped into the river, where they were fired on, and great numbers of them killed, after which the Indians in that part of the valley were never known to exhibit any purpose of hostility. I do not believe there was sufficient reason to consider them hostile before. At any rate, I remember no offensive act on their part, having occasion to go among them almost a year afterward, twice at least, and once with only five men with me, when we camped all night near a village without any molestation. Two years later, in 1846, I went from Sacramento. during the prevalence of a great flood, passing not up the river but over the plains, which were like a sea of waters, and arriving in a canoe near the place where the Indians were killed in 1843, to trade for Indian twine, with which to make seines for taking salmon. No white man was with me, only two Indians to paddle the canoe, and I found the natives perfectly friendly."
The above account of the first visit of white men to Colusa does not constitute a particularly brilliant or satisfying chapter in the county's history; but as General Bidwell was a most intelli- gent observer, and a man of the highest character, we must accept the story as it is, although the reading of it should make a decent white man blush for his race.
It may be stated here, for the sake of clearness and ac- curacy, that although General Bidwell states in his writings that he passed through what afterward became Colusa County on his trip to the Red Bluffs in March of 1843, the route that he gives of that trip leads to the conviction that he did not pass through any part of what we of today know as Colusa County; for it must be remembered that the Colusa County of the present is much smaller than the original county.
But the next year, 1844. General Bidwell, executing a commis- sion to locate a grant of land for the children of Thomas O. Larkin, merchant and United States consul at Monterey, did visit the county, and explored it rather thoroughly. Accompanied by an Indian, he came up the west side of the valley to a point west of where Colusa now stands, camped over night, and the next morning headed westward across the plains to see what sort of country lay between him and the Coast Range Mountains, which he could see in the distance. He struck the Stony Creek Valley, followed the greek down to its confluence with the Sacra- mento River, and there met Edward A. Farwell and Thomas Fallon, who had come up the river in a canoe to settle on a grant that they had obtained further up the river. These men must also have passed, though by water, through Colusa County.
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General Bidwell fulfilled his mission by mapping out and locating a large body of land lying west of the river in the vicinity of the present town of Princeton; and this territory is known to this day as the Larkin's Children's Rancho, although many years have passed since any of the Larkin children had anything to do with it. Then the explorer returned to Sutter's and told what he had seen.
Bidwell's story so interested a trapper named Jack Myers that he organized a party of trappers and came up to the scene of Bidwell's explorations to catch beaver, which were very plentiful. But these men had much less intelligence, humanity and patience than Bidwell, and were soon in a quarrel with the Indians, the result being the death of several of the Indians and the hasty withdrawal of the trappers. But they saw the future Colusa County, and are mentioned to make the list complete.
Peter Lassen, for whom Lassen County and Mount Lassen were named, with William C. Moon and a man named Merritt, came up to Stony Creek in 1845, and on a branch of that stream, now called Grindstone Creek, made a canoe load of grindstones, which they took down the river for sale at Sutter's and San Francisco. These men also passed through and saw the domain that was to be Colusa County, although there is no record of their being particularly impressed with it.
The exploration that was to bear immediate and lasting fruit in the way of colonization and settlement was made in 1847 by Dr. Robert Semple, a Kentuckian, who had been residing for some years at Benicia. Dr. Semple had occasion, in the year mentioned, to visit some friends who were located near where Red Bluff now stands. He made the trip up the valley on horse- back, and was deeply impressed with the beauty and fertility of the land through which he passed. The Inxuriance of the vege- tation in the vicinity of the Colus Indian village convinced him that here would be a good place for a settlement. When he had finished his visit at the northern end of the valley, he determined to return by water and explore the course of the river thoroughly, to see whether it was navigable or not. Accordingly he made a raft of logs and floated all the way down to Sacramento, or Sut- ter's Fort, as it was then called, making careful observations, fre- quent soundings and many notes. He found navigation rather precarious till he reached the Indian village above mentioned, after which the channel was broader and deeper, and, in the explorer's opinion, capable of sustaining navigation the year round. This confirmed him in his belief that the site of the Colus village was an ideal location for a city, and he kept these
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facts in mind. When, two years later, his brother, C. D. Semple, arrived from Kentucky to settle in California, the Doctor had a location already chosen for him, and easily persuaded him to take it; and the result was the founding of the city and county of Colusa. Had it not been for the visit of Dr. Semple up the valley in 1847, the course of empire, as far as Colusa County is con- cerned, might, indeed would, have taken a vastly different way.
The First Settlers
This ends the list of travelers and explorers, so far as they are known, and brings us to the days of the actual settlers. And of these, a man named John S. Williams has the honor of being the first. In addition to being the first settler in the county, Mr. Williams built the first house ever erected in the county, and his wife was the first white woman who ever lived here.
John S. Williams was sent from Monterey by Thomas O. Larkin to settle upon and condnet as a cattle ranch the grant of land the Mexican government had given to the Larkin children, Larkin furnishing the cattle to Williams on shares. Williams, in the summer of 1847, brought his wife and his cattle up the valley to the Larkin grant, and selected as his headquarters a spot on the John Boggs ranch, where W. A. Yerxa now lives, a mile and a half sonth of Princeton on the west side of the river. Here he built himself a comfortable adobe house, and established the first home in Colusa County. The live-stock business prospered, and the Larkin stock soon covered the plains by thousands, where formerly herds of elk and antelope had been.
The live-stock business, though eminently successful, was not sufficiently attractive to counteract the Inre of the gold fields, once Marshall's great discovery became known; and in 1848 Mr. Williams went over to the Feather River to pick up a fortune in nuggets. Charles B. Sterling was sent np to take Williams' place on the ranch, and became the second settler of Colusa County, although as yet there was only one settlement. He stayed for several years at this location, which became well known up and down the valley as "Sterling's Ranch."
Besides the settlement at Sterling's Ranch, there were only two other homes established in the county before the gold rush began. One of these was located on the east side of the river, about opposite where the Packer schoolhouse now stands, and was the home of William B. Ide, a man who took a very prominent part in the affairs of his time. He was one of the leaders of the Bear Flag army. Upon the organization of Colusa County, he was selected as one of the judges of the courts, and abandoned
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his home on the east side. The other settlement was where Syca- more is now located, and was the home of a man named Watt Anderson, whom Will S. Green describes as one who "had been all of his life a pioneer; and while he liked neighbors, he said he did not like to be crowded, and when settlers got within five or six miles of him he left for the mountains of Mendocino County."
Thus, if we have an idea of Colusa County in its primitive state, it is not hard to form a mental picture of the country as the first of the forty-niners saw it: one lone habitation a mile and a half below Princeton, on what is now the W. A. Yerxa place; another across the river, and two or three miles below this first one; and a third-where the village of Sycamore now stands. The rest of the county had much the same aspect as before Columbus discovered America, except that a few hundred cattle and horses were roaming the plains and mingling with the many herds of deer that fed on the rich grasses. And this would probably be the best place to diverge and give a brief description of the geography, the flora and fauna, the natives, and the general appearance of the county as the white men found it.
CHAPTER III
GEOGRAPHY, AND FLORA AND FAUNA
Geography
Something has already been said of the location and bound- aries of Colusa County, but something further should be said of the topography of the county. The Sacramento Valley might be represented by taking a piece of cloth, tacking it to two parallel pieces of wood, allowing it to sag slightly between them, and then placing a crooked wire under the middle of the sagging cloth and raising it slightly. The cloth represents the floor of the Sacramento Valley; the pieces of wood, the mountain ranges on either side of the valley; and the crooked wire, the river, which comes down the middle of the valley on a ridge which it has built for itself out of the sediment that it brings along with it from further up in its course. This ridge, on the erest of which the river runs, forms a broad, shallow depression, or "trongh," on each side of it. The surface of Colusa County, then, roughly speaking, is a shallow trongh, with its western side tipped up very high and resting on the top of the Coast Range Mountains, and its eastern side formed by the low ridge of the
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river, with a small piece extending across the river and sloping down to Butte Creek. The lowest part of this great trough lies about four miles west of the river, and is locally known as the "Trough." Into the Trough all the foothill and mountain streams of the county pour their waters, for be it known that south of Stony Creek no stream from the west side finds its way into the Sacramento River-not even Cache Creek, the outlet of the great Clear Lake of Lake County. The waters of all of them are lost, in summer time, in the great plains they must cross; and in winter time they flow to the lowest land, which is the Trough. The overflow of the river also goes into the Trough, with the result that in a wet winter there is a great deal more water to be seen in the Trough than in the river.
I do not mean to say that the surface of the county is as regular as a piece of cloth hung between two sticks. It is far from that. About half of it is foothill and mountain country, in places extremely rough and rugged. The other half lies in the floor of the valley; but its surface is cut by low ridges putting out from the foothills with each stream, these smaller streams building for themselves ridges upon which to run, just as the river does. But the slope from the Trough to the foothills is so gradual, and the ridges of the small streams are so far apart and so low (probably fifteen to twenty feet high at the highest), that the general appearance of the valley part of the county is that of a great plain. The average distance from the river to the foothills, which is also the width of this plain, is about twenty miles. But the term "plains" is generally applied only to that part of it lying west of the Trough.
At its western edge this great plain runs into a range of hills or low mountains, the advance guard of the Coast Range. Back of these hills are a number of small valleys drained by the small creeks mentioned above; and then come the mountains proper, upon which the western boundary of the county rests.
Colusa County is seventy-eight miles north of San Francisco, and twenty-four miles north of Sacramento. The thirty-ninth parallel, north latitude, and the one hundred and twenty-second meridian, west longitude, pass through the county. The Mount Diablo meridian also passes through it, near the eastern border. The distance from the western border of the county to the Pacific Ocean, in a straight line, is fifty-four miles; and the distance from the eastern border to the base of the Sierra Nevada Moun- tains is about thirty miles. So much for the location of the county.
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Vegetation
How the country looked when the white man first came depended very much upon the season of the year. If he came in winter, after a wet spell, he may well have concluded that the Sacramento Valley was a vast inland sea, for he might have traveled for miles in any direction in a boat. Indeed, some of the early explorers did traverse a good deal of the county's sur- face by boat. In those days, it must be remembered, there were no levees, and it did not take much of a flood to send the waters of the river out over the adjacent land. If the early explorer came in the late summer time, he would have been justified in concluding that moisture never touched a large part of this fruitful county; for one old pioneer testifies that he traveled from near the river to the foothills without seeing "a spear of vegetation." He says the north winds had blown the plains as dry and bare as Sahara Desert, and it was not till he struck the protecting projections of the foothills that he found grasses and other herbage. His experience seems to have been an extreme one, yet there is no doubt that this territory must have looked rather forbidding to those who saw it at such a time. The plains still get rather hot and dry by the latter part of August, although conditions have greatly improved since 1843. It was the travelers who landed in the spring or early summer who saw the country at its best. Then it looked like a perfect para- dise. Wild grasses, especially wild oats and burr clover, were so thick and tall that an antelope fawn could hide in them, so that it couldn't be found. A man riding on horseback could tie the tops of the oats over his horse's withers, and in many places the early adventurers found difficulty in forcing their saddle horses through the heavy growth.
Along the river there was a strip of timber abont a mile wide, and in some spots the trees were so interlaced with wild grape-vines and other vines as to form an almost impenetrable jungle. On the higher lands were oak trees, while on the lower, wetter lands there were willows, and some sycamores and others. The overflowed, swampy lands were covered with a rank growth of "tule," a species of huge bulrnsh about as thick as a man's finger, and sometimes eight or ten feet high. These "tule lands" were often hundreds of acres in extent, but much of their area is now drained and farmed. They have been, in their time, a paradise for duck-hunters.
The foothill country in the western part of the county was covered, more or less densely, with a growth of scrub oak,
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chamisal and manzanita; and in the extreme southern part of the county this growth extended well down toward the Trough, the oak trees in this section attaining such size as to make the land very valuable to the early settlers for the wood it supplied. The extreme western edge of the county, which lies near the summit of the mountains, was, and still is, covered with a magnificent growth of pine, which to the present date has escaped the lum- berman because of its inaccessibility.
Everywhere, especially in the spring and early summer, there was a profusion of wild flowers. Great patches of color- blue, purple, white, yellow-often acres in extent, were set in the green carpet of the valley. The most famous of these blossoms, possibly the only really famous one, is, of course, the California poppy, which makes the fields gay in some sections of the county. But there are other varieties that make almost as brilliant a showing in their season,
I do not mean to say that the early explorers and settlers found this verdant "carpet," of which I have spoken, entirely unbroken. The fact is, that there were many holes in it-spots where a superabundance of alkali or an excess of moisture hin- dered or entirely prevented vegetable growth. Other areas pro- duced only a sparse growth of small weeds; and these areas later came to be known as "goose lands." Most of these barren spots occurred in the vicinity of the Trough, nearly all of the river, plain and foothill land being extremely fertile and productive, and covered with an abundant wild vegetable growth.
The Wild Animals of the County
Colusa County, in common with the rest of California, was abundantly stocked with wild animals, both carnivorous and her- bivorous, when the white man came. There was no lack of game; and it was well for the newcomers that it was so, for oftentimes game was the only food obtainable. And here again the white man did what he has so often done in other times, and other places, and other circumstances: he acted like an irresponsible, thoughtless, viciously spoiled child; and instead of conserving this beneficent gift of nature, he hastened with all speed to destroy it and put an end to it. Undoubtedly not all of the pioneers were offenders in this respect, but many of them seemed to be unable to resist the temptation to take a shot at any wild thing that crossed their path, with the result that thousands of game animals were slaughtered for the mere fun of killing. Even so sane and well-balanced a man as John Bidwell confesses that he chased a grizzly bear till it plunged into the river and swam across,
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