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 20

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 20

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to test popularity with him at elections. The coronership was peculiar in that in the very early days the office sought the man, and by tacit consent the award was to the most popular saloon man.

The Oak Hotel was the popular resort. No bar was better equipped for the times. It was so commodious that four billiard tables were set out on one floor. Any game of chance was at call. There were card dealers under regular stipend, and one of these, it was said, was a backsliding Stock- ton preacher who had been a professional gambler before conversion. The Oak may not have been as luxuriously equipped as the modern hotel, but it was comfortable and well kept. It was prominently located across the way from the courthouse, the rear overhanging the river. Alongside were capacious stable and barn and the ferry, the river bank shaded, and con- nected with the house a park like retreat, very popular in the hot summer evenings. McCray was not a hotelman. He was a bachelor, accounting in part for the easy code of morals that reigned in the house. His factotum was a dandified negro known as Tom, such an amusing and forward fellow that he presumed at times on his familiarity with the whites in those easy and loose times.

Various were the enterprises of McCray. He grubstaked miners and lumber prospectors, ran stages, including one to the discovered gold deposits at Sycamore Creek in the county in 1865. In the 60's he was in the zenith of full prosperity. The 1861-62 flood was only a temporary setback which was overcome for the overwhelming with other financial complications by the greater flood of that Christmas eve night, necessitating razing the hotel to one story, and ferry carried down stream and left a wreck at Con- verse's ferry at Rancheria Flat. His affairs had not prospered in the later 60's. He was struck a hard blow in this flood, at a period when he could least bear it. Neither he nor the village recovered from the disaster. His losses drove him to drink, and he never again took courage. Efforts were made to recoup but it was a vain effort to retrieve a lost fortune. The Henry hotel opposition was enjoying the trade. Intoxicated with popularity and prosperity, McCray had neglected his own interests, being much of the time an absentee-known over the route to San Francisco as a prodigal spender, and his clerk, named Sullivan, equally as neglectful in his absence. The downgrade was swift and litigation followed on inability to realize on out- standing loans, accelerating closing out by the sheriff while on the brink of bankruptcy.

McCray was probably the first man to set out a vineyard in the county. It went out in the 1861-62 flood of the Kings. But dejected over his deser- tion by fickle fortune, McCray closed out his affairs and as a practically pen- niless man disappeared in the summer of 1874 from Millerton. Report had it that he was mining in Arizona. He is back again in August, 1877. The prodigal had returned but Millerton was no more, those he once knew were scattered, and he, broken in spirit, health and purse, a dependent on the cold charities of the world. He tarried awhile with charitably inclined friends near Kingston, was also given shelter by the Baleys in Fresno, and was a sufferer from cancer of the right hand which Dr. J. A. Davidson of Kingston amputated.

So wretchedly poor was he, that his removal in September, to the county hospital at Fresno City was at public expense. McCray was dying of cancer and a broken heart, an inmate at the hospital on the bounty of his old time friend, Dr. Leach. The thought of neglect and desertion by those whom he had aided and befriended in the days of affluence, when they were in need, embittered him and made him cynical. The cancer on the back of the hand was rapid in the developing, and despite the amputation spread and fastened upon him in the back of the right shoulder. He realized that the end was approaching. He was at the hospital less than three months and died on October 5, 1877, at the age of fifty years. Seven days after publication of his

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obituary, appeal was made in behalf of a raffle of an oil painting to raise money to fence in the grave.

Even in the expressed choice of a last resting place, fate denied him. McCray and a boon companion named McLeod had chosen their burial spots on the banks of the San Joaquin River, where two oaks grew which for some unexplained reason leaved in the spring earlier than the surround- ing trees. McLeod was interred at the chosen spot on the Madera side of the river. McCray was to have been on the Millerton side on the sloping hill that merges into the river bank townsite and beyond the Baley residence. He was fated not to rest at peace even in the grave.

The first interment was in the Fresno pioneer cemetery on what is now Elm Avenue, embracing part of Russiantown. With the building up of this quarter the cemetery was closed for a new one in the hollow east of town, in the vicinity of the Pollasky depot, including a portion of Hazel- ton Addition. The remains were presumably exhumed and removed thither. The living crowded out the dead even there, and when M. J. Church donated for a public cemetery a portion of the sandy tract, now in Mountain View Cemetery, northwest of town, McCray's remains were supposedly a second time taken up for a third burial in a spot that no one could locate today.

McLeod was a clerk for the L. G. Hughes merchandizing firm at Mil- lerton and the son of a Hudson Bay Company trapper, inheriting the roving spirit of his parent and Indian mother. He returned to the Far West after his education in Scotland, allured by the discovery of gold. McCray being of Scotch ancestry, a natural bond of union sprung up between them, sev- ered only by death.

After closing out his sawmill interests at Sawmill Flat, Tuolumne County, in 1852, McCray set out for Texas with his accumulations amount- ing to $40,000, purchased cattle and drove the band to California, locating in the valley and starting out on his early career of prosperity. He left no known kin. He ended his career as a pauper, when once he did not value money save for the pleasures it commanded. And yet from another viewpoint, it can be and has been said of him that the good in him outbalanced the bad.

As with Gaster, so with Converse and equally so with McCray: "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is often interred with their bones."

CHAPTER XXV

SOUTHERN SECESSION SENTIMENT STRONG IN THE COUNTY. MIL- LERTON BORN NEWSPAPERS KEPT ALIVE THE POLITICAL RANCOR AND PERSONAL ANIMOSITIES ENGENDERED BY THE WAR. DESE- CRATION OF THE FLAG INCIDENTS. FORT MILLER REOCCUPIED BY SOLDIERY IN 1863. FIRST TWO PUBLICATIONS OF THE SWASH- BUCKLER CLASS REVILED AND VILLIFIED THE ADMINISTRATION. FRESNO A GRAVEYARD FOR NEWSPAPERS. ASSASSINATION OF EDITOR McWHIRTER, A BOURBON REFORM DEMOCRAT. THE ALL SURVIVING REPUBLICAN, THE CONSPICUOUS JOURNALISTIC SUCCESS IN THE COUNTY.

If it was the covert design of the Millerton born newspapers to stir up and keep alive the rancor, personal animosities and political hatreds unfortunately engendered by the Civil War, they succeeded. As news givers, they were parodies.

It is to smile to read in historical reviews that "the earlier settlers of

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the county cared little for politics." Fresno was ever a Democratic hotbed of politics, and things were done and said sometimes that were repented of in later years. This subject phase is one that conservative old-timers prefer to gloss over in charity. Like the record of "crime and deeds of blood and violence" that marks the first twenty-eight years of the county's history, it did much to retard progress, and it was longer than a generation before the evil effect was lived down. And in this chapter, the term "Secesh" is employed in no detractive sense, but is used as an expression that was on the tip of the tongue more often then than it is today.

The people of the South suffered poignantly as the result of the war and the subsequent "Reconstruction Period." All honor is due the brave and chivalrous, who staked their lives, health and property in upholding what they religiously regarded as a just cause and a principle. It was nat- ural that they should stand with their native states. But the early Democ- racy in Fresno of some swashbucklers, who had placed nothing at stake for the cause and kept a continent between them and the scenes of battle strife, was not always a sane, rational or safe one. It was of the fire-eating, un- forgiving, seditional brand that lived up to the declaration that the war was a failure, that reviled Lincoln as a despot and tyrant, even secretly exulted over his assassination.

The two Millerton papers were of the stamp that never made allusion to the Republican administration-Radical they called it-save to abuse and vilify. The short-lived Times was the fiercer, the Expositor the milder of the swashbucklers. The honest conservatives-the Democrat and South- erner from principle for principle's sake-were not with them. So bitter was the hostility that in the face of this "Secesh Democracy" in control, ever rolling under tongue its "constitutional rights and privileges" as a tender morsel, and holding on to office, it was not always safe to proclaim one's self a Republican or a sympathizer with the Union cause. This state of affairs was not singular to Fresno. It was duplicated in other localities in the state. Fresno had as loval and high minded citizens as there were in the land, whatever their politics, but they were sometimes in the minority in places as against the bravos. There was no lack of desperate adventurers as shown in the recruiting for various Central American filibustering expe- ditions in California.

A great change has, since the old days, come about in public sentiment. What with the population accessions, Fresno cannot be absolutely reckoned as once as in the Democratic ranks. In county and municipal affairs, party is no longer a fetich, but non-partisanship rules-it is the man and not his party. The old time party-line distinctions are not drawn or considered in home government affairs, and Fresno with county offices fairly well divided as between Democrats and Republicans has boasted for some years of its government administrations. Party lines are not even so strictly adhered to on legislative and representative offices. The ideal has not yet been at- tained, but the progress toward it has been more than satisfactory.

Of the things above referred to there is no hint or suggestion in the local prints or reviews. The military administration kept watchful eye and ear, and took measures accordingly as in the reoccupation under Col. War- ren Olney of Fort Miller, in August, 1863, owing to a rumor of an intended uprising in the valley in support of the Confederacy. Possibly it was an exaggerated report, but nevertheless serious enough to be acted upon, with no telling what repressive effect the presence of the military had, even though it was well disposed enough toward the citizenship to aid in getting out a seditious Times paper publication.

It was reported about this time there was at Millerton a military com- pany that drilled in secret, composed of avowed Southern sympathizers, and that when the federal soldiers came it disbanded and concealed its arms.

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As late as in the 70's, there was another, or perhaps the same, secret society, oathbound never to assist at the political preferment of one who had ever borne arms against the Confederacy. The flag was desecrated and worse than dragged in the mire. A show of the banner on the national holiday was as likely as not to invite a demand to lower it, enforcing the mandate with show of Derringer or Colt revolvers. These are facts. There is no record proof of them. You have to learn them from living survivors of the times.

Such an incident occurred at Centerville at a popular gathering. The flag was torn down, trampled upon, tobacco juice spit upon it as one version has it, defiled with human ordure according to another. The offender was a Confederate veteran, but a later loyal man, who deeply repented his act. At Arcola, where Borden stands today, the townsite of the Alabama Settle- ment, one of the first agricultural communities of Southerners after the war, the German hotel keeper, a Union man, was almost beaten to death in a general melee over his refusal to lower the flag on the 4th of July after demand.

At Merced, Harvey J. Ostrander, a pioneer, the father of ex-Judge F. G. Ostrander, a former attorney of Fresno, and one who cast his presidential vote for Fremont in 1856 at the mouth of a six-shooter, vowed he would kill whoever pulled down the flag to be raised on the news of the firing on Fort Sumter in April, 1861. The excitement was so intense that the Unionists decided to defer the flag raising until the 4th of July, but the night before the pole was chopped down. In 1862, with the consent of those who had contributed to the buying of the flag, Ostrander unfurled it on his premises. It was not molested, but was kept flying during the war. Ostrander was a man whose word was not to be doubted. He died at the age of ninety-one, remarrying at eighty-three.

The late Frank Dusy, who was in many early day fields of activity, had a more pleasing ending to his experience at Hornitas in Mariposa on the national holiday, when he drove into town, displaying two little flags in the harness of his mules. He was commanded to remove them. He gave re- minder of the day, and announced he would display them in his drive through town, and let the man beware that touched them. Dusy whipped out two revolvers and with one in each hand drove through the village street from one end to the other with flags and revolvers in defiance. His spirit and courage won the day. An impromptu parade formed, and those that had gathered to molest him tarried to listen to the village orator spread eagle harangue. Snelling, former county seat of Merced, was another hotbed of Secessionists. When the news came on August 9, 1861, of the bloody defeat at Manassas Junction, the Snellingites fired salvos of cannon in rejoicing over the slaughter of 10,000 "Yanks." P. D. Wigginton stumped the county several times for the anti-union candidates, aided by one Jim Wilson, who fiddled to songs. Two of his favorites were: "We'll Hang Abe Lincoln to a Tree," and "We'll Drive the Bloody Tyrant, Lincoln, from Our Native Soil."

Wigginton became, in 1886, the candidate for governor after the Fresno state convention of the new born American party, and John F. Swift was the Republican nominee for governor, and Bartlett the Democratic. The vote was: Bartlett (D), 84,970; Swift (R), 84,316; and Wigginton (A), 7,347.

The Merced Banner was the war time sedition spreader. William Hall of the Merced Democrat was arrested in July, 1864, for uttering treasonable language and cooled off on Alcatraz Island. The day after, Charles L. Wel- ler, chairman of the Democratic state central committee, was also arrested on a similar charge in San Francisco. He took the oath of allegiance and was liberated after three weeks spent on the island. 8

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One form of disloyalty among the so-called Copperheads in California was the advocacy of a Pacific Republic by northern men with secession leanings. There was not infrequent reference to this movement in the Demo- cratic journals. It was a thinly disguised one in aid of the Confederacy. Its flag was actually raised at Stockton on January 16, 1861, on a craft in Mor- mon Slough, but the halyards were cut down and a small boy climbed the mast and hauled down the banner. But while other instances can be cited, sufficient as showing the intolerant spirit of the times. The subject is not a pleasant one, and is dismissed with the following quotation from an Ex- positor editorial of January, 1871, defining its attitude. It said :

"We are not in favor of Union, if it means that we must unite with a party composed of scalawags, political demagogues of the meanest and most corrupt order, negroes, thieves and every other class of nondescript, such as are found in the ranks of the so-called Union party."

And as late as 1879, when war animosities should have been mollified, the Expositor had this contemptible allusion in a historical review to the military reoccupation of Fort Miller :

"When President Lincoln died, men had to be very careful about ex- pressing themselves in regard to the matter, for spies were employed to re- port to headquarters any thoughtless or inadvertent expression of satis- faction at Lincoln's death."

Lincoln's assassination referred to as a "death!" That "any expression of satisfaction" over a murder should be mitigated as "thoughtless and in- advertent !"

Fort Miller was evacuated September 10, 1856, after the Indian troubles and placed in charge of T. C. Stallo as government caretaker. It was re- occupied in August, 1863, by the Second California Infantry under Lieut. Col. James E. Olney and garrisoned during the war by various organiza- tions as late as November, 1865, when again abandoned to a caretaker, Clark Hoxie, and the buildings sold later to Charles A. Hart as the best bidder for a bagatelle.

CALIFORNIA IN THE WAR

Fort Miller was the first permanent post south of the next nearest mili- tary establishment at Benicia Barracks and the arsenal there. There is no disguising the fact that the military authorities kept watchful eye on the region in the San Joaquin Valley which was believed to be a stronghold of Southern sympathizers with nests at Snelling, Millerton, Visalia and in Kern County. Camp Babbitt was located in Tulare County as next to Fort Miller, and Fort Tejon as the last in the string in Kern. There is no record proof of the fact but the incident was a matter of common knowledge as indicative of the spirit of the times and recalled by old timers that early in the war a lot of young university students, including a handful from Fresno, enlisted in the army (Second California Infantry) organized at San Fran- cisco and Carson City, Nev., in October and November, 1861, with earliest enlistments in September. The plot was to enlist ostensibly to be sent to fight the Indians notably the Apaches that were on the war path, but to desert en masse in the field and join the Confederate troops. The story is that the plot was discovered and instead the program was changed after regimental organization by sending five companies to Oregon and Washing- ton territory to relieve the regulars and two to Santa Barbara. Thus the plot was foiled.

The Second's first colonel was Francis J. Lippitt, who was mustered out in October, 1864, and in March, 1865, brevetted brigadier general. He had come to California as a captain in Stevenson's New York regiment in 1847 to occupy California after the war in Mexico. He was also a member of

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the 1849 constitutional convention at Monterey. After the muster out of the original regiment, the veterans were reorganized with new recruits into a regiment with Thomas F. Wright as colonel. He was a son of Brigadier General George Wright of the Ninth Infantry regiment who during the war commanded the Department of the Pacific. The son was brevetted a briga- dier in 1865, was mustered out in the spring of 1866, subsequently became a lieutenant in the regular army and was assassinated at the peace palaver with the Modoc Indians in the Lava Beds in Northern California April 26, 1872. Gen. Geo. Wright was drowned July 30, 1865, in the wreck of the Brother Jonathan en route to assume command of the Department of the Columbia.

To nip in the bud any Confederate uprising in the valley region the Second California Infantry garrisoned Fort Miller during the following periods :

Regimental headquarters and Company A, August 3, 1863, to October 9, 1864; Company B, August to December, 1863; Company G, August 1 to August 23, 1863 ; Company K, December 26, 1863 to October 1, 1864.

Company A, Second California Cavalry, September 30 to November 31, 1865, then moving to Camp Babbitt, near Visalia, until called to Camp Union, near Sacramento, for muster ont in April, 1866. The following troops of the regiment also garrisoned Camp Babbitt: E from August 31 to Oc- tober 31, 1865: G from February 1, 1864, to August 1, 1864, and I from April 30, 1863, to January 1, 1864.

Fort Tejon was occupied at various times during this period and July 24, 1864, a detachment of Troop F of the Second Cavalry was sent to Snell- ing, Merced County, from Camp Union to arrest William Hall of the Merced Democrat for treasonable publications and to convey him to the military prison at Alcatraz Island.

Located so far away from the more active scenes of the war, California was not called upon to furnish troops for immediate service against the Confederacy. No quota was assigned it. Yet during the war calls were made upon it for two regiments of cavalry, a battalion of four companies of Native Cavalry notable for the "unusually large number of desertions from it." about eighty from one and more than fifty from another troop, eight regi- ments of infantry, a battalion of seven companies of Veteran Infantry, and one of six companies of Mountaineers, serving in the northernmost counties as infantry. There was also the "California Hundred" company that went East accepted as Troop A of the Second Massachusetts Cavalry and later the California Battalion also attached to the Massachusetts regiment as Troops E, F. L, and M. These Californians were in hard service for nearly two and one-half years participating in over fifty engagements. They were at the surrender at Appomattox courthouse and in the grand review at Washington on May 23, 1865, when and where "the California companies' colors were greeted with enthusiasm by the highest and bravest in the land." Eight companies of the First Regiment of Washington Territory Infantry Volunteers were also recruited in California, making altogether 17,725 volun- teers furnished by the Golden State.

With the exception of those in the Massachusetts regiment, the Cali- fornians took no part in the great battles. Their service was notwithstanding of as great importance as that rendered by those from other states. It was as severe and entailed long and fatiguing marches across burning deserts and over almost inaccessible mountains. They were engaged in hundreds of fights with Indians and small forces of Confederate troops on the frontiers in Texas and New Mexico. They never knew defeat. The government for good reasons deemed it wisest to keep them on the Pacific Coast and in the territories. They occupied nearly all posts from Puget Sound to San Elizario,

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Texas, and by their loyalty preserved peace in the western states and terri- tories and drove the flag of rebellion beyond the Rio Grande.

It will be recalled that at the outbreak of the war the United States forces on the Pacific Coast were under command of Brev. Brig. Gen. Albert S. Johnston. His loyalty was in doubt because he was a southern man. Brig. Gen. E. V. Sumner was ordered under date of March 22, 1861, to leave New York April 1 to relieve Johnston and "for confidential reasons" the order to sail was to remain unpublished until his arrival at San Francisco. Having arrived Sumner reported officially that it gave him pleasure to state that the command was turned over to him in good order. In a later report he stated :

"There is a strong Union feeling with the majority of the people of this state, but the Secessionists are much the most active and zealous party, which gives them more influence than they ought to have from their num- bers. I have no doubt there is some deep scheming to draw California into the secession movement; in the first place as the 'Republic of the Pacific,' expecting afterwards to induce her to join the Southern Confederacy. . . . I think the course of events at the East will control events here. So long as the general government is sustained and holds the capital the Secession- ists cannot carry this state out of the Union."

General Johnston was a high minded man. History has done him in- justice. He was committed to the doctrine of state allegiance. He had de- clined the command of the Southwestern Department because he held that if Texas seceded he would be bound in honor to surrender to the national authorities the public property intrusted to his care. Persuaded that his na- tive state had a permanent claim on him he would not place himself in the position where he might be compelled to antagonize it. Letters written by him at the time viewed with alarm the threatening dissolution of the Union and many believed that he had asked assignment to the Pacific Department that he might be removed from participation in the impending issue. He always congratulated himself that no act of his contributed in bringing on the issue.

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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 20

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