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 23

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 23

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From 1892 to 1907-A. T. Moore, Theodore de Marias, W. H. Hollen- beck, E. E. Bush, Martin Fahey, Al McMurdongh, Bert. Moore, C. B. Shaver for the Fresno Flume and Irrigation Company, later changing the name by substituting the word "Lumber" for "Irrigation," M. W. Madary, W. W. Wilson, Frank, George and James Landale, Conn Short, C. G. Sayles, S. Lehman, E. C. Winchell, Lew Roland, Elmer Damon, Frank Bacon, J. F. Rouch, Walter Pixley, W. H. Walsh, J. C. Huston, C. C. Cor- lew, W. H. Barnes, William McKinzie, A. W. Petrea, Daniel and Forest Dake, B. Payne, Marshall Cardwell, J. F. and L. Shafer, S. J. Finley, Ed- ward and George Chambers, Ray and John Humphrey Jr., Renben Morgan, T. J. Ockenden, E. J. Van Vlette, Roy and Arthur Bennett and John Beguhl -forty-five: total eighty-seven.

Great have been the modus operandi changes since the early efforts by individual partnerships. Today a lumber enterprise can be only under- taken by associated capital, so costly is the initiative outlay. The 1874 California Lumber Company laid out in 1876 the town of Madera and there terminated its flume on the gift of WV. S. Chapman and Isaac Friedlander who owned the land site and nearly all the adjacent territory. It became the Madera Flume and Trading Company of 1878 with its two mills, fifty-two miles east of Madera, on the headwaters of the Fresno and on the north fork of the San Joaquin. They are connected with the town yards by a thirty-inch V flume constructed in 1876 at a reported cost of $460,000, with a daily transportation capacity of 50,000 to 75,000 feet. It was the longest flume in the world. Mills had an annual capacity of 10,000,000 to 12,000,000 feet of yellow and sugar pine and fir. The original Soquel mill has moved location innumerable times. The two mills had a daily productive capacity of 130,000 feet of lumber. In 1881 the company made a cut of over 11,000,000 feet.

Sanger of 1888, fifteen miles from Fresno, is the fiume terminal of the original Kings River Lumber Company of A. D. Moore and H. C. Smith, with timber interests and two mills on the head waters of the Kings and mill at Millwood, sixty-five miles from Fresno. Running ten hours a day, they had a capacity of about 3,000,000 feet a month. Its fiume with a daily capacity of 250,000 feet was sixty miles long with laterals. Mills and property passed into the hands by purchase of the Hume-Bennett Lum- ber Company of Michigan capitalists, who moved the plant across a moun- tain ridge, greatly improved and enlarged it and founded the settlement at Hume on Ten-Mile Creek, a lumber mill mountain community, seventy-five miles away in the Sierras. Its annual approximate output is 35,000,000 feet. Its flume is the longest in the world. The company filed amended articles of incorporation in February, 1917, with name changed to the Sanger Lum- ber Company.

The lumber mill town of Clovis, eleven miles from Fresno, is the ter- minal of the forty-five-mile flume of the Fresno Flume & Lumber Company at Shaver, where it operates a tow steamer on the lake in the Sierras and a twelve-mile mountain logging railroad. Mill capacity is 35,000,000 feet yearly and fiume capacity 200,000 daily. The Shaver-Swift interests sold the property a few years ago to Michigan capitalists through Ira Bennett.

These large enterprises introduced two new features-the sinuous flume traversing mountain, valley and dale, ravine, gulch and stream like a huge

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HISTORY OF FRESNO COUNTY

serpent for the floating of the cut lumber to the mill; and the damming of creeks to conserve the water in artificial lakes for the reception of the logs, where practical, and to furnish water for the flume to be used for irrigation after it has served the transportation purpose. Ten-Mile Creek feeds Hume Lake, Stephenson and other rivulets form Shaver Lake, and at Millwood at the edge of General Grant Park is Sequoia Lake. These sheets of water are stocked and are popular trout fishing grounds. Eastern visiting journalists have made much in their write ups of the mountains of the hair- raising flume journeys in a trough shaped shell, a sensation compared with which the descent on a scenic railway is as slow running as molasses in December.

Lumber making was next to agriculture and mining a leading industry, and the annual output, up to the time after 1890 when the business was con- centrated in the hands of a few of the larger companies, now reduced to two, of the leading mills was: Ockenden 1.200,000. Smyth & McCardle 1,000,000, Stephenson 1,200,000, Musick 3,000,000, Humphrey 4,000,000, North Fork Lumber Company 2.000.000, Kings River Lumber Company 30,000,000, and the Comstock mill above Camp Badger at the edge of Tulare County across the line with timber region about Mill Creek in Fresno, about 3,000,000. The flume solved the question of freight teaming and the lack of railroad transportation from the foothills and crowded the smaller con- cerns out of the field.

The horse and mule killing Tollhouse grade was sold in 1878 to the county for $5,000. In July, 1892, A. M. Clark, George L. Hoxie and others incorporated the Fresno and Pine Ridge Toll Road Company and furnished a much easier graded mountain road, which in December. 1896, was sold to the county for $7,500. Both roads became free and opened the mountains to the public.

The county's annual lumber output ranges from 60,000,000 to 75.000,000 feet, including 5,000,000 in shakes, shingles and box and tray material, representing a value of from one and one-half to two millions or more- almost ten percent. of the state's lumber production, a material addition, but at the sorry expense of denuding the forest shaded slopes of the Sierra Nevadas.

CHAPTER XXVIII

PASTORAL PERIOD NATURALLY SUCCEEDS PLACER MINING IN 1864. STOCKRAISING BECOMES THE DOMINANT INDUSTRY. DAIRYING IS PRACTICALLY NEGLECTED. EARLY STOCK WAS OF INFERIOR BREEDS. UNLIMITED WAS THE RANGE. THE "NO FENCE" LAW PROVED THE TURNING POINT TO FAVOR AGRICULTURE. IT TOLLED THE REQUIEM OF THE STOCK BUSINESS. THE "SAND- LAPPER" COMES TO THE FORE. TRIBULATIONS OF CATTLE AND SHEEP MEN. WOOL RAISING AN IMPORTANT CONSIDERATION. PROMINENT STOCKMEN LISTED. THEY DISCOVERED THE SIER- RA'S SCENIC WONDERS IN THE QUEST FOR PASTURE.

It was natural that with the passing of placer mining in 1864, except for sporadic and speculative efforts, the people of the county should turn next to stockraising and make it the dominant industry. Every condition favored it. There was the suggestive precedent of the mission fathers and of the Spanish and Mexican eras, when herds counting up in the thousands were slaughtered for beef, or for the tallow and hides as the territory's sole export. There was a limitless open range on the plains. Climatic conditions the year around were ideal. There was no need for herding. The owner

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HISTORY OF FRESNO COUNTY

concerned himself about the stock once a year only at the spring rodeo for the counting and branding.

A market was always to be found by simply driving the cattle there. The stockman waxed fat and was the monarch of the plains and the grassy foothills. It was in one sense of the word an ideal existence, with nature an important member of the business copartnership. Cattle of every kind and age ran wild. They multiplied and in great herds grazed on the hills and roamed the valleys and plains as freely as deer. The industry in Fresno County was at its height in 1870. The early Californians introduced their cattle from Spain and Mexico: the Americans, the longhorns from Texas, driving the herds across the desert and the plains. To market, they were driven in the summer to the mining camps, or to San Francisco, following the river courses and foothill creeks for convenient camps and water en route. In this county the range was an immense one, extending from the Chowchilla to the Kings River and from the foothills of the Sierras to those of the Coast Range.

In the 70's and the days before the introduction of superior stock had absorbed the original Spanish cattle, herds of these and mixed cattle yet ran wild, especially in the southern part of the state. These "resembled the wild beasts of the forest more than cows," it is said, and as herders and vaqueros were always mounted these beasts unaccustomed to seeing man afoot would encircle him and often furiously attack him. Cattle, as well as other live stock in California, ran at large, never were housed, and had no food other than that which nature spontaneously provided, and this was ample save in dry seasons. In periods when pasturage was scarce, or in summer when the plains were parched and feed lacking, bands in great number were driven into the mountains to the very summits to graze in the natural meadows on the succulent wild herbage and brush.

Before the American occupation, little or no attention was paid to milk and butter. With irrigation and alfalfa growing, dairying became an indus- try which has grown wonderfully. Notwithstanding the genial climate, the open range and splendid pasturage, one-third of the butter used in California in the 70's was imported from the eastern states. The state produced about six million pounds of butter annually and one-third of this came from Marin County, with 24,000 neat cattle out of about one million in the state. The largest dairy farm was the 75,000-acre ranch of the Shafter brothers in that county. Merced was credited with 60,000 neat cattle and only produced about 9,000 pounds of butter. Kern, Tulare, Colusa and San Diego were the next largest cattle counties.

The state produced then annually 5,000,000 pounds of cheese, of which 3,000,000 were credited to Santa Clara and Monterey Counties. Santa Clara with 22,000 cattle, 7,000 of them cows, made as much cheese as the entire state, the two counties excepted. It was solemnly asseverated in "The Gold- en West"-a book on California-that in a part of the southern counties, where cattle were so numerous that they swarmed about telegraph poles to scratch themselves and rubbed down the eight-inch square masts for miles, one could not taste butter, nor cheese, nor milk in a journey of 200 miles!

Fresno was one of the interior "cow counties." As late as 1890, when it was out of that classification, there were about 70,000 head of cattle in the county, and fully 1,000,000 sheep, wool being an important export item. This section is also favorable for the raising of horses and mules. The ranges became more limited, however, with the spread of farming from year to year, yet even today cattle raising is no small industry. Alfalfa cultiva- tion has made it more profitable, though on a reduced scale in scope, while giving dairying a great stimulus. The cattle, sheep and wool business repre- sented a million-dollar asset in 1890. Today it is a combined asset of more than $3,923,000 in value. In 1861, Spanish stock cattle were assessed at ten dollars per head, American stock at twelve dollars and twenty-five dollars

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HISTORY OF FRESNO COUNTY

was the valuation placed on the better above three-year-old.

The "cattle barons" of Fresno had bands ranging in number from 200 to 3,000 and 4,000 and over. They contributed to their own undoing when farming and irrigation came on. Cattle were not herded as sheep are, but roamed at will over boundless areas. Every man marked his by a particular brand burned into the left hip, and these "irons" were as title deeds recorded and it was a felony to obliterate or alter them.

NO-FENCE LAW OBLIGATIONS

In the San Joaquin Valley generally in connection with the spread of orchards, vineyards and farms, and locally due to the agitation of the Ala- bama Settlement of grain growing colonists at Arcola (Borden), the adop- tion of the "No Fence" law was the turning point in agricultural advance- ment and prosperity. Before, the stockmen lorded it over all, and regarded it as an encroachment on their rights to sow a field of grain, and to that extent abridge their open pasture, or restrict their horizon between the foot- hills of the eastern and western ranges. The question at issue in the law was : which was the most desirable industry for the permanent settlement and development of the virgin land, the farmer or the stockman?

The pastoral period brought the "sandlapper" to the fore. The deriva- tion of this term is obscure, but the appellation was one given in contempt and derision by the stock owners to a class that loaded all worldly goods on a wagon and with family drove out on the plains to take up a quarter section of government land out of the stockman's self-appropriated range. It was then yet a question whether the soil of the plains, away from water. could be successfully farmed without irrigation, but the "sandlapper," whose coming was almost contemporaneous with that of the railroad, was quite willing to assume the risk, with transportation to a seaboard market as an incentive.

It cost, so it is said, $2,240 to fence a quarter section against the inroads of roaming herds. The "sandlapper" was in a large measure responsible for the "no fence" or "herding law," the agitation over which started about 1870 and continued with much bitterness and personal animosities until the enactment in 1874. The stockmen came to a full realization of the new order of things, when a heroic remedy was employed in ranging up marauding cattle and shooting them. This enforced compliance with a law that at first was generally ignored by those whom it most directly affected.

The "no fence" law obligated the stock owner to herd his cattle and sheep, whereas before the stock roamed at will and was not assembled ex- cept for the annual rodeo. He was also made responsible for damage done by his beasts. The farmer was not required to fence his holding, though as a custom, "more honored in the breach than in the observance," he occa- sionally did so. In particular localities hedges served more as sheltering wind breaks than farm dividing lines. Senator Thomas Fowler, then a cattle king and for whom the village ten miles from Fresno was named, cham- pioned the opposition against the law in the legislature, and paid the penalty in defeat at the next election. The law requiring the stockman to herd on his own land tolled the requiem of the pastoral period in Fresno, and passed the land over to the husbandman, though the tillable area was so vast that years elapsed before the small farmer ceased to be the exception and be- came the rule. The stockman gradually retired from the field. Sheep re- placed cattle in thinly settled localities, but agriculture in time encroached even there upon them.

In springtime the rodeo was held. The word is from the Spanish verb meaning to gather, to surround. It was a rounding up of the cattle to en- able the owners to select their own, count them and drive them off to their own pastures with the calves following the mother cows, and to brand the

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HISTORY OF FRESNO COUNTY

calves and mavericks. Rodeos were held at stated places and at pre-arranged times, succeeding one another until all cattle had been counted in a district, and the calves marked. At times 20,000 head of stock would be gathered on a plain for singling out. Clever feats of horsemanship and of lasso throw- ing marked the rodeo and with the trained character of the horses put to blush the exhibitions at Wild West shows.

STOCK INDUSTRY ON THE WANE

Cattle and sheepmen had other troubles. There were early losses by reason of floods in destruction of pasture. The drought of 1856 was too early to affect the infant local industry. That of 1864 was disastrous, cattle and sheep starving by the thousands in the state. The one of 1870-71 was not productive of such general rnin. But in 1876-77 followed another as disas- trons as the one of 1864, with perishing herds and bands. An industry of the drought year of 1877 was the stripping of the carcasses of cattle for the hides and of sheep for the pelts. Since that year the stock business has never regained the importance that it once held as a general industry. Oak and other trees were felled for the animals to browse on the foliage and tender twigs. Bands of sheep numbering thousands were abandoned to die of starvation. Animals were killed for their pelts and in districts the air was polluted with the stench of thousands of corrupting carcasses and the sky blackened with attracted carrion birds. Bands of sheep were sold for a bit (twelve and one-half cents) a head, when ordinarily worth two dollars and three dollars, and thousands were killed and tried for the fat. The stockman's losses were very heavy, and in certain sections the industry never recovered, many abandoning it. With the continued encroachment of agriculture, the consequent cutting of the pastures and the advanced value of tillable land, the larger surviving stockmen took themselves off to Nevada and Arizona. As ineffectual was their opposition to the introduction of irrigation in the valley.

Raising sheep for the wool was commenced in California in 1853 and the 1855 first exportation was 360,000 pounds. As showing the development of wool growing, the following figures are illustrative:

Year.

Pounds.

1857

1,100,000

Value. $ 173,500

1862

5,900,000

1,062,000

1868

13,225,000

2,428,000

1870

19,010,000

3,506,000

1871

22,323,000

6,697,000

Original stock was of poor quality, the remnants of old mission flocks and bands of inferior sheep brought into the state overland from New Mexico. As wool growing attracted attention, blooded stock was introduced. Still flocks of the old Mexican stock roamed the sandy plains of southern Califor- nia, described "as much like wolves as regards wool as like sheep." This class averaged a fleece of wool, sand and dirt as sheared of only two pounds, the inferior American sheep of four and improved breeds and Merino from six to eight, often as high as ten to fifteen pounds. In 1875 there were about 2,500,000 sheep in the state, flocks of 3,000, 8,000, 10,000 and 20,000 being not uncommon. California was highest on the list of wool growing states. The first shipment of freight from Fresno City was wool that Frank Dusy loaded on the cars on the track before a freight depot had been built.

Sheepmen underwent the same trials and tribulations as did the cattle- men. The great flocks have fallen off since 1870, when they numbered 4,152,- 349, reduced in 1910 to 2,417,477, a decrease from the year preceding of 1.734,872. 1880 was a banner year with 5,727.349. After the "no fence" law, sheep were herded where there was no farming, and at this day they are

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HISTORY OF FRESNO COUNTY

pastured principally on the uninhabited West Side plains to feed on the wild alfilaria, or driven by the shepherds to rented stubble land and vineyards in season to clean them off.

Sheep had once, as the cattle have, the unlimited range of the mountains until the organization of the National Forest under the act of March, 1907. Then followed a practical exclusion, except in restricted number and under regulations, the claim being that their cloven hoofs and their presence de- stroy and spoil pasturage for cattle, the latter never feeding in pasture that has been ranged over by sheep. Before the above act, the areas were called Forest Reserves. Of course there is no restriction on land patented or deeded before the act, but the passage to and from these lands is under guard of the rangers. Sheep first began to go into the mountains for pasturage in 1877, a "dry year." In March, 1899, the supervisors through the legislature at the behest of the sheepmen memorialized Congress to open the forest for the grazing of stock to avert financial disaster to the industry that year because of the lack of rain and consequent lack of natural feed.

Firebaugh, which is near the great Miller & Lux cattle ranch domain, was the shearing center for years, the aggregation of Basques, Portuguese, Mexicans, Italians and Indians giving it riotous life in season, but the sheep business does not longer measure up with its picturesque past. In its day shearing stations were at Millerton, Centerville, Dry Creek and at Laton on the Laguna de Tache grant.

The readily accessible western slopes of the Sierras have been pretty well gone over for the trees in the timber belt varying from twenty to forty miles in width. The sawmills surely left their impress, but as seriously main- tained and as stoutly disputed the sheepmen destroyed as much as ever did the mills in a year. The sheep were not corraled in the mountains, but to protect them at night from prowling wild beasts encircling bonfires were lit to keep them off. These fires being negligently left burning were spread by the wind and at times covered wide areas. It has been asserted that the evidences of fires can be traced seventy-five miles into the mountains at the base of great sugar and yellow pines.

The roll of Assessor Thomas W. Simpson for 1870, the year when the stock business was at its height, is interesting as showing the county's wealth during the pastoral period. Total acreage was 1,344,078. Total valuations were $3,219,503-land and improvements $1,575,761, personal property $1,- 545,034; taxes on same $68,673-$27,832.49 state, $40,219.07 county and $532 on dogs. Common sheep were assessed at $1.50 a head and this was the general character of the stock in 1870. M. J. Church, "the Father of Irrigation," is assessed $1,950 for 1,300, Supervisor D. C. Dunagan $2,700 for 1,800, William Helm $9,000 for 6,000, while Sheepman Gus Herminghaus is assessed $10,000 for 8,997 sheep and $9,100 for 5,800.

Incidental showings are these: Judge Hart total assessment $2,825- Fort Miller improvements $800, Millerton Chinatown $500, 600 goats one dollar each. Ira McCray assessed for a total of only $740. The New Idria quicksilver mine with 1,920 acres $102,130, Peters & Ferguson in the Exposi- tor plant $700, William C. Ralston, Bank of California president, $53,000 on dollar-an-acre land, W. S. Chapman, Edmund Jansen, Frederic Roeding et al $77,000 for like valued land. Besides his vast land holdings, Chapman with J. M. Montgomery was associated with William Deakin in 7,572 head of cattle. Darwin & Ferguson with three stock establishments, had 7,429 acres assessed at $9,300, besides 2,200 at $3,000. In the early 80's along the Kings River and near Traver in Tulare lay large tracts owned by them. Their brand known in all the region about was "76", and the land was called "the 76 country." Isaac Friedlander, "the wheat king," had in Fresno County 57,360 acres assessed at $57,400. Senators Fowler and Kerman had 300 steers at $7,500 and 5,000 head of stock besides at fourteen dollars each. John Heinlen 1,000 at $14,000, Jeff G. James and Selig & Company (whole-

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HISTORY OF FRESNO COUNTY

sale butchers of San Francisco) assessed for 16,877 acres at seventeen an acre, 200 beeves $5,000, 2,600 head of stock at $36,400, total $60,900, Miller & Lux assessed $102,600 for land, $61,250 for personal property and 4,000 head of stock $56,000, L. Perez and E. Alttube 3,000 at $49,000. John Suther- land 600 stock horses $6,000, 500 beef cattle $12,500 and 5,000 stock cattle $70,000.

AMONG THE BIG SHEEPMEN

Among the big sheepmen in 1870 may be recalled W. T. Cole with a band of 5,000, William Helm 6,000, E. J. Hildreth 4,000, James R. Jones 5,000, J. A. Patterson 4,500, Frank Dusy who counted 13,300 in his band in 1882, Alexander Gordon and W. C. Miller 10,000 in one year, John Suther- land who drove 12,000 to Texas one dry year. B. S. and J. T. Birkhead who counted 4,600 in their possession and J. N. Walker 6,000. Charles J. Hobler, who was an extensive raiser, was the first after 1872 to introduce the French Merino. William Helm, who came to Fresno in 1865 from Placer County with sheep, was probably at one time the largest individual sheep raiser in this section. He bought 2.640 acres of land on Dry Creek at one dollar an acre and established winter camp on the site of the present county courthouse, having at one time 22,000 sheep that browsed in the mountains in the summer. In conveying his wool to market at Stockton, he employed three wagons, each drawn by ten mules, spending twelve days on the round trip.

The following from a newspaper publication of forty years ago is of passing interest as marking the scope of the sheep industry at the close early in May, 1878, of the shearing season :

"In the two shearing establishments here over 80,000 sheep have been sheared up to date and dipped and not more than 10,000 have been engaged for the next week. Frank Dusy has sheared a little over 42,000 and has not more than 4.000 more engaged. He has employed white men, has superin- tended the work himself and has paid from six to seven cents a head for shcaring, the men boarding themselves. His dip has been lime and sulphur and he charges two cents each for sheep and one cent for lambs. Mr. Foster has sheared over 40,000 sheep and has between 6,000 and 8,000 yet to shear. William Helm and Jesse Morrow have had over 20,000 sheared at his corrals. He has employed white men, paid the same wages, and has charged one and one-half cents for dipping sheep and three-quarters of a cent for dipping lambs."

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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 23

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