History of Fresno County, California, with biographical sketches 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, Volume I, Part 17

Author: Vandor, Paul E., 1858-
Publication date: 1919
Publisher: Los Angeles, Calif., Historic Record Company
Number of Pages: 1362

USA > California > Fresno County > History of Fresno County, California, with biographical sketches 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, Volume I > Part 17

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A tradition is that because of heavy rains a timber covered hillside had slid into the river damming up the channel, some twenty miles up in the mountains above Millerton, until the accumulated back mountain drainage and the stream flow broke through the dam, liberating the stored up water to overwhelm the village. The onrush was swift carrying on the crest of the huge wave an immense raft of uprooted trees. The channel could not carry water and timber, and so the flood water spread to a height of thirty feet, covering townsite to the very steps of the courthouse on the highest ground, the oncoming backwater propelling the trees as battering rams.

This great mass of tree logs was left stranded where the river lost its velocity by spreading over the low plains on the Chidester place, near where Kerman and the Skaggs concrete bridge are today, probably fifteen or twenty miles below Millerton. So great was the accumulation that Badger & Bellus, with whom one Jenkins was associated, erected a small saw mill there, and for a season and longer cut up the trees into lumber. Much of it was used by Majors S. A. Holmes, W. B. Dennett and others for fencing and buildings in the newly colonized Alabama Settlement at Borden (in Madera now). Even thereafter, the tops and trimmings served the cattle and sheepmen as fuel for years. These flood logs may have been treasure trove, but in the flood descent they gathered so much gravel and stones in the grind that they were ruinous of the saws in the mill.

A BLESSING AND ALSO A CURSE

And thus the San Joaquin, which helped to make Millerton with gift of its rich placers, also led to its undoing-was its blessing and also its curse. What stories that stream suggests of human hopes and disappointments! Its romance is interwoven with that of the men who made fortunes out of it, and of those who failed in the effort to wring more gold from its bed. To this day may be seen in the river, several hundred yards above the fort, the remains on the south bank of the Fort Miller Mining and Water Company, ambitious enterprise of 1853 of Quartermaster Thomas Jordan, "shrewd, cunning and crafty," to dam the stream, divert the water into the ditch and glean the gold from the shallowed stream. The enterprise failed, and "no one came ahead except Jordan."

Across the river from the old fort, the bluff is all but washed away. In a corner stands remnant base of a brick chimney, and along the brow of the bluff a six-mile ditch to Fine Gold Creek-another promising scheme of the Kentucky Gold Mine. Water was brought by ditch for ground sluic- ing away the bluff. It was sluiced away, but it is not recorded that the sluicers were rewarded.

Above Pollasky on the river bank, lay corroding, for some twenty years, a huge, iron-riveted, boiler-like, bottle-shaped structure, all that is left to recall another enterprise to take gold out of the shifting bed of the river. The boiler was the invention of a local genius, Peter Donahoo. It was to be set upright in the water, sand and gravel pumped out to be worked over for the gold, boiler sinking deeper to bedrock as the pumping proceeded. Ingenious, but a failure, and good money was sunk.

Then there was later the magnificent scheme of the Ohio Mining Com- pany. It swallowed up $200,000 of eastern money and was exploited by W. C. Barrett and Karl Brown. Where Fine Gold Creek, once a rich placer, joins the San Joaquin a whirlpool is formed. If the creek was once so rich, why should not be the deep hole at the confluence of the streams? Capital was interested on the showing of a diver, who had brought up from the bottom of the whirlpool a pan of gravel which showed up twelve dollars of gold. A dam was built above the whirlpool and the banks cut into to divert the creek water-a laborious and costly undertaking. The

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rush waters of two winter floods carried away ditch and dam. A third season and the hole was pumped dry. The first panful showed up about eighty cents worth of gold. Another fiasco was recorded.

The Ohio tried another plan later with local capitalists interested to the tune of many thousands to sluice gold out of the river bank, four miles above Cassady's bar. A costly pumping plant was erected, and when all was ready to hydraulic away the bank discovery of a fatal error was made. The power plant had been so placed that the gravel washings worked in on the pumping apparatus and placed it out of commission. Disgusted with the outcome and doubtful of its ultimate successful operation, the Iowa marked another failure.

These costly ventures cover a period of many years. Yet gold has been taken out of the river in paying quantities since the mining days, and suc- cess made with primitive means. A notable one in this line was about 1898 when the late Charles A. Hart hired a crew of Chinese, who constructed their own devices and midway between Millerton and the fort placered gold in remunerative returns out of the river sand and gravel. Operations have been pursued as late as 1908 from floating dredges, but not with known sticcess.

The most gigantic failure connected with the San Joaquin-though not a mining venture-was that of the Sunset Irrigation Company, exploited in the early 80's. It voted $200,000 bonds for the largest irrigation scheme in the world under one management to reclaim by irrigation 400,000 acres of arid West Side lands by an immense ditch, miles and miles long, tapping the river a mile or so below Pollasky. The ruins of the granite dam are there, so is the great ditch scooped out of the sides of the hills, but the lands are as arid as ever they were. The water would not stay in the ditch. There were costly wash outs of dam and ditch, the surface soil of the latter so frequently volcanic ash which water would not solidify or hold.

Engineering errors were made, discovered too late in the attempted prac- tical demonstration and not to be remedied save at great cost. The project was given fair test, but in the end was abandoned after an immense loss of money, time and labor. The ditch is grass grown and honeycombed with squirrel holes, and the river flows by as ever.

Sporadic efforts have been made at various periods in the years gone by, more especially during and after the Civil War times, to wash the sands of the river for gold. Chinese were employed in this labor. Experiments were made in even much later years in the line of dredging for gold but never with compensating returns. Possibly the most ambitious effort at a revival of river sand gold washing was the one in the summer of 1878 as recorded incidentally in a newspaper brief of forty years ago in the following words:

"The San Joaquin River is falling rapidly and is now fordable at many points. About 300 Chinamen are scattered along both banks of the river for a distance of thirty miles, beginning about five miles below Millerton and extending up into the mountains, and are washing the sand along each bank in rockers just as fast as the waters recede. By careful inquiry among them they are found to gather from $1.50 to $2.50 a day each, and this will continue till the water rises next winter-and each succeeding rise deposits a new supply of gold."

The wealth production of the river as a gold vielder has passed into a tradition. Its present day contribution to the wealth production of the valley and for years to come is in the use of its snow melted waters from the High Sierras for the irrigation of the cultivated areas of the plains which it traverses in its long course to the Pacific Ocean. In that wealth production aid, it is a greater yielder annually than all the gold ever washed out of its sand and gravel banks.

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CHAPTER XXII

THREE FAMILIES SINGULARLY LINKED WITH MILLERTON'S HISTORY. NOTABLY SO THE MCKENZIES, HARTS AND HOXIES. THEY WERE AMONG THE EARLIEST PROMINENT SETTLERS. PERSONAL RECOL- LECTIONS OF THEM AND OTHER LOCATED FAMILIES. GILLUM BALEY ELECTED COUNTY JUDGE, THOUGH NO PRACTICING LAWYER. SHANNON A PROMINENT CITIZEN AND MORROW A PIC- TURESQUE CHARACTER. PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF OTHERS WHO FILLED IMPORTANT PLACES IN THE EARLY POLITICS AND HISTORIC PERIODS OF THE COUNTY.

As in every small settlement, so at Millerton certain families were first and foremost in the history and activities of the community as people to be looked up to, as it were. Three in particular are linked with Miller- ton's history whether as pioneers, by marriage connections, by present day ownership of the land, or by subsequent prominence in person as well as through their descendants in the later history of Fresno, of which they are also pioneers. The three families are the Mckenzies, Harts and Hoxies; but notable also besides them are the Baley. Shannon, Morrow, Musick, Winchell, Ashman, Boutwell, S. H. and W. W. Hill, McClelland, Henry, R. H. Daly, McCardle, Bernhard, Borden, Blasingame, Braley, Birkhead, Collins, Cole, Darwin, Donahoo, Dixon, Dusy, Draper, the Fergusons, Fay- monville, Firebaugh, Goldstein, Gundelfinger, Hedgpeth, Hughes, Kutner, Nelson, Smoot, Statham, Sutherland, Tupper, Wickersham, White and the Yancey families to mention only at random a comparative few. There were other notable resident families in the county in the days before and after Millerton. To enumerate them would make a long list and tax the memory. As pioneers they all contributed to the slow development of the county in its various material and spiritual periods. And this is not to say that there were not others whose past may not be too closely inquired into for the disclosures that inquiry would reveal.

James McKenzie, who died in January, 1864, aged only thirty-three, was of the pioneer Fort Miller garrison, and after termination of his mili- tary service in 1858, located above the fort as a stockraiser. He entered the army in 1852, and his regiment was ordered from New York that year to this coast to subjugate the Indians. The travel was by steamer to Aspin- wall, by mule across the isthmus, thence by steamer to San Francisco and the arsenal at Benicia Barracks and thence by land to Fort Miller. He was a sergeant in Lieut. Lucien Loeser's battery of the Third Artillery, serving also in Oregon in the Indian hostilities. A son, Edward P., who died in 1888, may be recalled, if at all, only by early pioneers as the storekeeper at Hamptonville, the settlement charted on early maps at the ferry cross- ing, where now stands the enclosed park at Pollasky.

William H. Mckenzie

The other son, William H., born at the fort in March, 1857, left five children to perpetuate the name. Alfred H., an enterprising young business man being the active executor of his father's trust estate. He lived at the fort home until 1874, when he came to Fresno as a deputy of Sheriff Ash- man. Two years later, he was a deputy under Assessor J. A. Stroud, con- tinuing in various official deputyships until 1880, when he was elected county

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assessor for three years under the new constitution. In 1882, he was asso- ciated with A. M. Clark in the land title abstract business, which they incorporated and expanded. They also secured an interest in the Fresno Loan and Savings Bank, incorporated in January, 1884, Mr. Mckenzie being cashier and manager. The bank has long since been liquidated.

With Fresno's city incorporation, Mr. Mckenzie was appointed treas- urer, continuing for twelve years. He was interested with Clark and John C. Hoxie in mining operations, and at his death left a valuable estate, with notable chief assets the expanded abstract business, a large interest in the $300,000, Griffith-Mckenzie ten-story sky-scraper, which is such a dis- tinctive object in Fresno's sky line, and the 12,000-acre cattle range which includes Millerton and fort sites. Neither of these would he part with for sentimental reasons. Various efforts have been made, plausible but not always practical, by the Pioneers' Society and the Native Sons of the Golden West to gift the old courthouse with a site of two acres as a public park and a monument and with restoration and preservation make it a museum of pioneer antiquities. The widow was born at Millerton and was Carrie E. Hoxie before marriage. An only sister is Mrs. Mary J. Hoxie, widow of John C. Hoxie, pioneer and expert quartz miner of the county, and one time inexhaustible treasure mine of information on early Fresno history.

Mrs. Ann Mckenzie, the mother, who was eighty-five years of age at death in November, 1910, married Charles A. Hart at Millerton in March, 1865, and as the result of this union was born, at the fort, in April, 1866, Truman G. Hart, prominent citizen of Fresno of the younger genera- tion of the old county seat, in his earlier days connected with the national guard : also with the volunteer fire department and as its chief, elected in 1894 county clerk, later a city trustee and identified prominently with the Republican party, and a pioneer in oil well development, besides general mining ventures. He is an administrator of the valuable trust estate of his half-brother, W. H. Mckenzie.

Mrs. McKenzie-Hart came to New York from Ireland, in 1848, to visit a sister ; her first husband and she were natives of County Sligo. The wed- ding journey across the isthmus was made on mule back. The Mckenzies and Harts lived at the fort until 1861, when they located on a nearby 3,000- acre ranch and range. Besides farming the home place, young McKenzie became extensively interested in mining. With S. N. Griffith, the Fresno Electric Railway Company was capitalized and the system expanded to one of twelve miles when they sold out in May, 1903. He aided to develop the Kern River oil resources, sinking the first wells at Bakersfield and at McKitt- rick, was financially interested in the Four Oil Company and in two other locations adjoining the Kern River property, also in the famous Section 28 in the Coalinga field, all of which yielded rich returns. He was moreover a leader in Democratic politics, county and city.

Charles A. Hart

The late Charles A. Hart was for years after county seat removal, the lone resident of the fort and of once prosperous Millerton, living in easy contentment his declining days at the old homestead, which was his love and pride and to abandon which in life seemed to him a sacrilege. He was a graduate of the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary at Lima, N. Y., took up sur- veying and engineering as a special study, for a time surveyed and set grades on the New York and Erie Railroad in 1841, returned home to Palmyra, N. Y., studied law for four years, practiced for one year and then entered the wool and hide commission business in New York. He joined a party of forty from Massachusetts that, in December, 1848, started for California via steamer to Brazos, Texas, overland through the Lone Star State and what is now Arizona, across the big desert, entered California by

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the southern route, journeyed north through Los Angeles, then only a Mexican pueblo, to the San Joaquin Valley and arrived at Hill's Ferry in Merced County, August, 1849, after numerous skirmishes on the journey with Navajo and Apache Indians.

For two seasons, he and party mined on the Merced, their efforts with old fashioned rockers yielding a pound of gold to the man daily. In 1853 he settled at Millerton, and upon county organization was elected the first county judge. After his term, he returned to the law until 1874, when with removal of the seat he devoted himself to ranching, cattle and horse raising on 2,000 acres of land. He was the first fruit grower in the county at the fort, experimentally planting oranges and figs about 1878, and himself carrying the water in buckets for irrigation from a nearby spring. The fort being abandoned in 1863. he bought all the improvements at auction. By homesteading, purchase of the McClelland homestead covering the vil- lage site, and by inheritance and other acquisitions the Mckenzies and Harts became the owners of the 12,000-acre cattle range on both sides of the river, and all thereon.

Clark Hoxie

Clark Hoxie, who died in 1866 at Sandwich, Mass .. at the ancestral home, came to California via the isthmus in 1852 and locating at Tuttletown in Tuolumne County built the first quartz mill in that locality, besides engag- ing in mining. In 1856 he was at one of the Fresno reservations to teach the redman carpentering, but by 1858 was located at Millerton as a black- smith and wagonmaker, and participating in local administration affairs. He earned the title of judge as a justice of the peace, and tradition has it that court was held not infrequently on short notice in the shop, the judge astraddle of a wooden horse as a judicial bench and the litigants and others similarly accommodated. Clark Hoxie was a supervisor in 1857, chairman of the board during the term, and a true type of the sturdy and honest pioneer. His descendants are :

John C. Hoxie, who married a Mckenzie, and aforementioned.

Sewell H. Hoxie, who resided in later years at Pasadena, Cal.

George L. Hoxie, for successive years county surveyor, afterward city engineer of Fresno, planned its enlarged sewer system with septic tank plant at the city sewer farm, and at present lumbering in Trinity County.

Mrs. Elizabeth J. Hoxie-Barth, who at Fort Miller in 1865 married Capt. Charles Barth of the quartermaster's department of the United States Army and later moved to San Francisco.

And her sister Mrs. Carrie E. Hoxie-Mckenzie, the younger daughter, who married W. H. Mckenzie and was born in the old wooden hotel and courthouse building that was moved in part, miles below Millerton on the banks of Little Dry Creek.

John C. Hoxie prided himself that all his education was received from his mother, who in 1859 was postmistress at Millerton, also organized the undenominational first Sabbath school and among the early white women in the district was looked up to intellectually as a superior personage.

Gillum Baley

High in public esteem and regard in Millerton as well as in Fresno, the career of the late Gillum Baley. an Illinoisian, born in 1813, was typical of the adventurous early comer. At the age of nineteen, he participated until its close in the Black Hawk War, and in 1835 married in Missouri, the wife who died during the second year of the union, leaving a son Moses, who died in 1885 in California. Following farming in Missouri, Gillum mar-

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ried in 1837 Miss P. E. Myers of Jackson County, the companion of his later davs, and the mother of eleven children. It was in 1849 that he came overland, for two years followed mining and rejoined his family in Missouri. The call to California was, however, too insistent, so in April, 1858, via the southern route the second overland journey was undertaken with wife, nine children and a brother, W. R., the five ox team wagons with 100 head of cows and stock cattle joining the L. J. Rose party in the Colorado River Valley.

The sufferings of the party were great because of the heat and super- induced thirst. Besides, the party of sixty was fiercely attacked and as determinedly repulsed an assault on the camp by 800 Mojave Indians, with loss to the party of nine dead and seventeen wounded and of savages eighty- seven killed, wounded unknown. Having escaped massacre, the route was changed by retreat to Albuquerque,N. M., the men trudging along barefooted with feet lacerated by the cactus thorns and sleeping at night on the sand under the wagons. The Baley party recuperated for seven months at Albu- querque, and finally set out for California, resting at Visalia, locating on the Chowchilla in mining, then moving to the Tollhouse, where he farmed and raised stock, eventually settling at Millerton. It was in February, 1861, that he entered upon public life as appointed justice of the peace to suc- ceed John Letford in the second township.

A notable incident in his long and honorable career was his election in October, 1867, as county judge.

A remarkable story has always attached to this worthy man that he was elected judge though having no knowledge of the law and untrained as a lawyer. The truth is that he had read law in Missouri and had been jus- tice-court bench-rider. Experience as a practitioner he had none, nor was he familiar with the technical forms of procedure. He was admitted to practice at Sacramento, Cal., after an examination as to his qualifications by a committee of three lawyers appointed by the supreme court on his application for admission to the bar as was the practice of the day and the times.

Yet with an interim, he occupied a seat on the county bench for twelve years, and his decisions met with general approval. The historical fact is that few, if any, of his judgments were reversed on appeal. The lack of tech- nical knowledge was replaced in the man by an intuitive insight into human nature, judged by experience and common sense. Retiring from the bench, Baley followed the grocery business for eight years in Fresno, located on the ground floor of the Odd Fellows' hall building at the corner of Mariposa and I Streets where now stands the Farmers' National Bank, part of the time associated with the son Charles, during this period serving a term as county treasurer, elected November, 1884, and in 1888 withdrawing from business activity. He died at the age of eighty-five.

He was the organizer of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in Fresno in 1872, with twelve members and a start with five, four of these of his own family. The house of worship, the first in Fresno, in the erection of which he was instrumental, was completed in 1876 and the first sermon preached in it on March 3. There were eleven children by the second mar- riage. The dead are: an infant that passed away on the overland journey ; Mrs. Elizabeth Ashman that was the wife of the sheriff; Lewis Leach Baley who died at the age of seventeen, Mrs. Rebecca M. Shannon of Alameda, who has been dead for a decade, and Mrs. Catherine Krug of Brazil, who left Millerton in 1871-72 and is survived by four children. The living of the Balev family are:

Mrs. Frances Yancey, widow of Charles Abraham Yancey, of Toll- house.

George Baley, rancher of Sentinel.

Mrs. Ellen G. McCardle, widow of James McCardle, millman of early

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days, and mother of Miss Sarah McCardle, the county librarian of Fresno and of Edward McCardle, the title abstractor of Madera and historical authority, and of James who was county recorder of Fresno for a term.

Charles C. Baley, long with Las Palmas winery and now watchman at the courthouse park, one of the few reliable authorities on early Fresno his- tory. At the old Academy school he was known as "Dates" because of his gift for recollecting dates in history. This gift he inherited from his mother. Of her it is said that she had at her finger's ends the birthdays of her eleven children and was an authority on the marriage, birth and death dates of the pioneer acquaintances of her day.

Mrs. Nancy J. Greenup-Black of Academy.

Mrs. Parthenia Hill-Mckeon, widow of Spencer J. Hill, and wife of R. B. Mckeon of Los Angeles.

Jefferson M. Shannon

Prominent in political and public life was Jefferson M. Shannon, a Missourian born, of whom they tell so many amusing tales that he must have measured up to Hamlet's description of Yorick as "a fellow of infinite jest and of most excellent fancy." Shannon first appears on the local hori- zon as a pork raiser and seller in 1854 at Coarse Gold Gulch, "making money hand over fist" in his dealings with the Chinese. He crossed the plains in the spring of 1850, as did his father before him, though the son did not learn of his death in the fall of '49 in El Dorado County until his later arrival. Jefferson located in Sonoma County as a butcher, and then came to Fort Miller, after a time serving two terms as under and deputy sheriff and collector of the foreign miners' license tax. .

After removal to Fresno in 1873, he became connected with the land department of the Southern Pacific as general townsite agent for California, Arizona and New Mexico, also engaging in the new county seat in the wholesale and retail liquor trade. Removing to Alameda in 1888, he con- tinued as land and confidential agent until his death in June, 1902. At one time at Millerton, he reopened McCray's blacksmith shop with "an experi- enced and skilful workman," one Ah Kit, the most expert in his line in the county, and devoting special attention to the shoeing of horses and oxen. Shannon's dealings with the Chinese were so extensive and covered so many years that he came to speak their language fairly well. Business relations with Kit were so cordial that in appreciation the latter named his Millerton first-born, Jefferson Shannon Kit. This Chinese-American youth, who died in Fresno in January, 1908, was given a notable funeral, which was a curious combination of the modern and barbaric, the cortege led by a band which played rag-time and quick steps for dirges. Shannon died well-to-do as the result of judicious land investments. Children that survived him:

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History of Fresno County, California, with biographical sketches 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, Volume I, Part 17

Author: Vandor, Paul E., 1858- Publication date: 1919 Publisher: Los Angeles, Calif., Historic Record Company Number of Pages: 1362

Author: Vandor, Paul E., 1858-
Publication date: 1919
Publisher: Los Angeles, Calif., Historic Record Company
Number of Pages: 1362