USA > California > Napa County > History of Napa and Lake Counties, California : comprising their geography, geology, topography, climatography, springs and timber, together with a full and particular record of the Mexican Grants, also separate histories of all the townships and biographical sketches > Part 73
USA > California > Lake County > History of Napa and Lake Counties, California : comprising their geography, geology, topography, climatography, springs and timber, together with a full and particular record of the Mexican Grants, also separate histories of all the townships and biographical sketches > Part 73
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we would call it rightous and praiseworthy. If so in us, why not in the poor untutored savage of the far away western wilds ?
But Stone and Andy Kelsey, who remained at the Lake ranch all the time when they found out the truth, instead of going rightly about it to pacify the Indians, only continued to add insult to injury. It is stated by white men that it was no uncommon thing for them to shoot an Indian just for the fun of seeing him jump, and that they lashed them as a sort of a recreation when friends from the outside world chanced to pay them a visit. For the sake of the Indians, it was fortunate that these visits were few and far between. By all it is stated that they took Augustine's wife and forced her to live with one of them as his concubine, and compelled her to cease all relations with her legal spouse. And so we might go on adding to the lists of aggressions, all of which, be it distinctly understood and remembered, is the testimony of the white people who knew them in their day, or who have it from first hands.
The following is the statement made by the early settlers, concerning the massacre: As stated above, Stone and Kelsey had taken Augustine's squaw away from him and had her in the house with them, and this naturally made him more vengeful than the other Indians. He was now a sort of boss vaquero, being a chief, and hence had a double leverage as it were, having the confidence of the white men and an extra degree of influence over the Indians. It is stated that while Stone and Kelsey were away with the vaqueros one day, attending to their cattle, the squaw filled the guns full of water, thus wetting the charges thoroughly. The next morning, while Stone and Kelsey were at breakfast, the Indians made a charge upon them, and Kelsey was killed outright with an arrow. Stone escaped up stairs, and the Indians rushed in after him, and he jumped out of the upper window and ran down to the creek and hid in a clump of willows. By this time the whole rancheria was aroused, and when they smelled blood as it were, or sniffed the battle from afar, they all became ravenous. They all turned out to search for Stone, and finally an old Indian found him and struck him on the head with a rock, killing him. The two men were buried in the sand of the creek bank. This was in the fall of 1849.
The Indians were foolish enough to think that because they had killed these men they would be thenceforward free from further trouble, and in this idea they became doubly reassured, as weeks and months went by and there was manifested by the whites no intention of revenge, and in fact none were seen in the country during the winter. In the spring of 1850, however, the scene changed, and their dream of uninterrupted security was demolished by the roar of artillery and the sharp rattle of musketry. A detachment of soldiers under Lieutenant Lyons (afterwards the brave Gen- eral who fell at Wilsons Creek, near Springfield, Missouri, during the War
.
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of the Rebellion) was sent up there to punish them ; and, if we are to judge by the work they are reported to have done, they did their work with a vengeance.
When the soldiers arrived at the lower end of the lake, coming over Howell Mountain, through Pope and Coyote Valleys, they found that the Indians had all taken to an island in the lake and it was impossible to get at them. They then sent back to San Francisco or Benicia and got two whale-boats and two small brass field-pieces. These boats were brought up on wagons, and those wagons were the first ever seen in Lake County, and what that trip must have been is easily imagined by any one familiar with California mountains. By this time quite a party of volunteers from among the settlers had arrived, and the expedition was organized about as follows: Part of the soldiers with the cannon embarked in the whale- boats, and the main body of the soldiers and the volunteers, being mounted, proceeded around the lake on the west side, this party being in command of Lieutenant George Stoneman (afterwards General Stoneman, who made his name famous during the War of the Rebellion). The Indians were located on an island which was situated near the head of the lake, being surrounded by deep water in the winter season, but shallow in the summer when the water is low, having gone there in the interim between the arrival of the first and last detachment of troops.
The point of rendezvous of the soldiers and volunteers was at what is now known as Robinsons Point, a short distance south of the island. Dur- ing the night the volunteers and artillery went around the head of the lake, and got as near to them as possible. In the morning a few shots were fired with rifles to attract their attention ; but as the balls fell far short of the range, the Indians only laughed at them. The entire body of Indians con- gregated on that side of the island, to watch the men and to jeer at them. In the meantime, the soldiers in the boats had come up on the opposite side of the island, and, at a signal, the artillery was turned loose upon them. Had a thunderbolt from heaven fallen out of a clear sky among them, it would not have created greater consternation than did those canister shots which went plowing madly through their numbers, strewing the ground with dead and dying.
To say that a panic seized them but mildly expresses the state of affairs among them at that supreme moment of their dismay and discomfiture. Pell-mell they rushed over the island to shelter themselves from the terrible ravages of the " boom-booms," as they called them. To their utter surprise as they descended the opposite side of the island, a line of soldiers rose up from the tule and received them with a deadly volley of musketry. Words fail to describe the wonderful state of confusion that followed. They rushed madly into the water, and swam off to the main land and escaped to
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the mountains, but many of them were left upon the field and in the water, as it is said that the soldiers killed women and children indiscriminately, following them in the water and shooting them and clubbing them with their guns and oars. It is said that the settlers took no part in this general slaughter, and a story is told of one who happened to run across a comely squaw hidden in the brush, and taking a fancy to her thought to capture her. She did not intend to have it that way, and when he approached her to compel her to arise, she arose in the might of her insulted and outraged sympathy for her people, and the man stated that he would never be more glad to escape with his life from the clutch of a she bear, than he was to get away from her. He had to use very severe measures to save his own life, though nothing was farther from his intentions than to wantonly injure the woman.
The soldiers proceeded from the scene of this one-sided combat over the mountains to Potter and Ukiah Valleys. In the former they found no Indians, though the rancherias were numerous. The Indians had been warned and had taken to the brush. In the latter place the Indians, although warned, had never seen a soldier, and did not know how hard they could shoot, and hence remained at home to receive them in a hos- pitable manner. The result was that the soldiers made an onslaught upon their rancheria and killed about thirty of them. They then proceeded down the Russian River Valley to Santa Rosa and Sonoma, and thence to Benicia, being gone something over a month. Their wagons and boats, and the cannon, were left at the lake, and parts of them were found here and there years afterwards. One of the cannon was found near the foot of Uncle Sam Mountain by a lot of hunters, among whom was Dr. Downes, now of Lakeport, and as it was the Fourth of July, they started in to celebrate the day with it. They put too much powder in one of the charges and the cannon was wrecked. The other is supposed to be lying at the bottom of the lake somewhere. One of the boats was found in the sand on the south bank of the lake several years ago, and what became of the other is un- known. These were the first wagons, boats and cannons ever in Lake County. The wagons and the wheels of the cannon came into good play with the earlier settlers, who used them as long as they lasted.
CHIEF AUGUSTINE'S VERSION OF THE MASSACRE,-We will now give the story as related by Augustine verbatim, taken down stenographically at the time of its recital. There were two interpreters present, and the story was told in a straightforward manner, and with but few questions being asked. The people of Lakeport have great confidence in his veracity as far as he thinks that he is right. In the main his story agrees with that already recited and which was gleaned from the white settlers. Wherein it
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does not we cannot, and presume no one else can reconcile the two. Here is the narration :
"Salvador Vallejo had a claim on sixteen leagues of land, around the west side of Clear Lake. Stone and Kelsey came and built an adobe house at where Kelseyville now stands. They had nothing but one horse apiece when they came into the valley. They got all the Indians from Sanel, Yokia, Potter Valley and the head of the lake to come to the ranch, and of all those there he chose twenty-six young Indians, all stout and strong young men, and took them to the mines on Feather River, and among them was Augustine. This was in the summer time. In one month the Indians had got for them a bag of gold as large as a man's arm. They gave the Indians each a pair of overalls, a hickory shirt and a red handkerchief for their summer's work. They all got home safely.
"They then made up another party of one hundred young men, picked from the tribes as the others had been, and went again to the mines. This was late in the fall of the year or early winter. They did not feed the In- dians, and the water was so bad that they could not drink it, and they got sick, and two of them died there. The Indians got dissatisfied and wanted to go home. Finally, they told the Indians to go home. On the road they all died from exposure and starvation, except three men, who eventually got home. Two of these men are still living, and their names are Miguel and Jim. Stone and Kelsey got back before the three Indians did, but could give no satisfactory answer to the inquiries concerning the whereabouts of the Indians who had gone off with them. They were afraid of the Indians and did not go among them very much. At length the three arrived and told their story, but the Indians kept hoping that some more of them would come in the next spring, having spent the winter in the rancherias of some of the Sacramento Valley Indians, but in this they were doomed to disappointment.
" Stone and Kelsey took the gold they had got on their first trip and went to Sonoma Valley and bought one thousand head of cattle with it. It took six trips to get them all into Big Valley. There were twelve Indian va- queros, of whom Augustine was the chief, on each trip. They did not give these vaqueros very much to eat, and nothing for their wages. Stone and Kelsey also bought all the cattle that Vallejo had in the valley at this time. The whole valley was full of them, and they would number about two thousand head, any way, if not more.
" Stone and Kelsey used to tie up the Indians and whip them if they found them out hunting on the ranch anywhere, and made a habit of abus- ing them generally. They got a lot of strong withes, which came from the mountain sides and were very tough, and kept them about the house for the purpose of whipping the Indians with all the time. When a friend of any
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of the vaqueros came on a visit to the ranch, if they caught them, they would whip them (the visitors). The Indians all the time worked well, and did not complain. If the Indians questioned them about the Indians who had died in the mountains, they would whip them.
" Stone and Kelsey then tried to get the Indians to go to the Sacramento River, near Sutters Fort, and make there a big rancheria. They would thus get rid of all except the young men, used about the ranch as vaqueros, etc. The Indians worked for two weeks, making ropes with which to bind the young men and the refractory ones, so as to be able to make the move into the Sacramento Valley. The old and feeble ones they could drive, but they were afraid the young men would fight them and kill them. They told the Indians that, if they killed them, they would come back again in four days, and the Indians believed this, and thus they were held in subjection. The Indian women made flour for the ranch, with mortars, and it took them all day to pound up a sufficient quantitity for the use of the place. The In- dians were mad on account of the fact that the others had died in the mountains, and then, when they wanted to move them off to the Sacramento Valley, they became still more enraged, and the plan was then set on foot to kill them.
" The Indians did all the work in building the adobe house, there being some four or five hundred of them engaged at it all the time for two months. They had to carry the water with which the adobes were mixed a distance of about five hundred yards, in their own grass buckets. Men and women all worked together. For all this number of people they only killed one beef a day, and they had no bread, nor anything else to eat except the meat. The more work the Indians did, the more they wanted them to do, and they got crosser and crosser with them every day.
" Augustine was sent to work for Ben. Kelsey in Sonoma Valley, and after about a month he came home to visit his friends, and as soon as Andy Kelsey saw him there he tied him up in a sweat-house on his feet and kept him standing there for a week. At the same time he tied up six others for the same period. When he had punished them he sent all but Augustine to Napa County, taking a lot of the other Indians with them, and just be- fore starting off with them whipped four of the number. They were sent down there to build an adobe house for Salvador Vallejo, and they were gone for a long time. He also took Indians down to the lower valleys and sold them like cattle or other stock.
" Finally the Indians made up their minds to kill Stone and Kelsey, for, from day to day they got worse and worse in their treatment of them, and the Indians thought that they might as well die one way as another, so they decided to take the final and fatal step. The night before the attack the Indians stole the guns of Stone and Kelsey and hid them. Early in
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the morning the Indians made the attack on them. Kelsey was shot in the back with an arrow, which was shot at him through a window. He then ran out of the house, across the creek to where there was a rancheria, and an old Indian caught him there and struck him on the head with a stone and killed him dead. Stone, when Kelsey was shot, ran into a small house near the adobe and shut the door. The Indians then cut the fastenings of the door and he then tried to make his way through the crowd to the big house, having in his hand a large knife. He did not attack the Indians with it, but used it as a protection for himself. He had on a long-tailed coat, and as he passed along the crowd was crushed in upon him by the outer circles, and he was caught by the tail of the coat and jerked down, and trampled upon, and his throat cut with his own knife, and left for dead. He jumped up and ran into the house, and the Indians supposed up stairs where the bows and arrows, which they had taken from the Indians, were stored. The Indians heard a rattling noise and thought he was up stairs, but he was not. It was only his death struggles which they heard. They feared to follow and see where he was, for if he had access to the bows and arrows he could use them as well as an Indian, and would thus probably kill some of them. The Indians buried both men, Kelsey near the ranch- eria where he fell, and Stone near the house. When the soldiers came up these bodies were taken up and they were both buried together.
" The Indians then all went to Scotts Valley and Upper Lake, or wherever else they pleased, as they all now felt that they had their liberty once more and were free men. The killing of Stone and Kelsey occurred in the win- ter. In the spring following the soldiers came to Kelsey's ranch and found that the Indians were on an island in a rancheria. They then sent and got their boats and cannon and went to Lower Lake, where they got some Indian guides to show them the way to the rancheria, at Upper Lake. When the soldiers came up they went over into Scotts Valley, and on the road found one Indian, whom they killed. The rest ran into the brush, and afterwards went to the rancheria at Upper Lake. They killed two Indians in Scotts Valley. A part of the soldiers went from Lower Lake to Upper Lake in four boats, and the balance of them went on horseback around the Lake. They took the cannon by land, and passed through Scotts Valley on the road. They found a rancheria there and the Indians ran into the brush. They fired the cannon twice into the brush, but did not kill any Indians.
" The two parties met at the point near Robinson's place, below Upper Lake. In Scotts Valley the Indians had a rifle, the one taken from Kelsey at the time of the killing. This they discharged at the soldiers, which was the cause of their shooting the cannon at them. The entire party camped where the boats landed that night. In the morning early the party with
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the cannon went around the head of the lake and got on the north side of the island, and those in the boats went into the slough on the south side of the island. Before leaving, however, they killed their two Indian guides, one being shot and the other hung. They then began firing at the Indians with their small arms. Five Indians went out to give them battle ; one with a sling and the other four with bows and arrows. The cannon were not fired at all. The Indians took to the tule and water and swam around and kept out of the way of the soldiers as much as possible, and there were only sixteen of them killed there that day. The soldiers then went over to Potter and Yokia Valleys. They did not find the Potter Valley Indians, but they had a fight with the Yokias. The Indians fought well considering their arms, and many of them were killed-over one hundred, at least. The soldiers returned to San Francisco by way of Sonoma. Afterwards about twenty men came up and sent word to the Indians in Scotts Valley to come to Kelsey's ranch and make a treaty. The Indians went down and the treaty was made. Ben. Moore drove the cattle of the Kelsey estate out of the valley. He had ten men with him."
TREATY OF PEACE .- Sometime during 1850 H. F. Teschmaker and a party came up to Lake County to make a treaty with the Indians. He sent out emissaries in all directions, and killed a lot of cattle and venison, and had a grand powwow. We do not know whether or not there are any papers on record in relation to this treaty ; still, the Indians seemed to understand it, as will appear from Augustine's statement above, and were probably glad enough so adhere to its provisions. For this service and in payment for provisions said by Teschmaker to have been furnished by him to the Indians at this time, a bill was passed by the Legislature of the State allowing him several thousand dollars. The settlers generally, and all who know of the particulars of the affair assert that he was more than well paid for his time and trouble.
GAME AND HUNTERS .- In an early day game was very abundant in this section of the country, and as a consequence, many hunters came in and spent a short season. This game consisted of bear, elk and deer as quadru- peds, and quail, pigeons, geese and ducks were the chief representatives of the feathered tribes, while the fish consisted of trout, bass, white fish, suckers and salmon trout. Truly, it was a sportsman's paradise. To. Dr. J. S. Downes certainly belongs the honor of being the chief hunter of that section in those early days. He relates that on one occasion he succeeded in killing eleven elk in one drove, on the banks and near the head of Cache Slough. It was the day the steamer " New World " made her first trip to Sacramento, and the pilot got so exuberant on the occasion, that when he came to the Brazos del Rio, at the mouth of Cache Slough, he took the wrong course, finding
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himself at the end of an hour almost aground on the shoals of the slough, instead of the channel of the Sacramento (old) River. Seeing the Doctor, the steamer was stopped and he was called and their whereabouts inquired of. The slain elks were taken on board, the doctor acting as guide; they backed down to the river and steamed for Sacramento.
SETTLEMENT PROPER .- We will now proceed to the regular settle- ment of the county, following along with the general history up to the present time. It is no easy matter to get the names and location of the early settlers, but in the main they will be found to be correct. To Walter Anderson belongs the honor of being the next settler after Stone and Kelsey, being there certainly as early as 1848. He seemed to be one of those sturdy old pioneers, who believed thoroughly in pushing away from the environ- ments of civilization, into the depths of the densest forests and over the ruggedest mountains, pitching his tent where the foot of man had never yet pressed the virgin soil. He had his wife with him, who was doubtless the first white woman to ever reside in that county. There was a young man by the name of Beson with him here also, but nothing further is known of him. In 1851 Anderson moved on and finally located in a valley in Mendocino County, south-west of Ukiah some twenty miles, which still bears his name.
Walter Anderson was at one time a very wealthy man, owning broad acres of land, large herds of cattle, and having ready cash to a considerable amount. He was the pioneer of Anderson Valley and entered it " from the plains across," with a large number of cattle. But before he died, and while in the sere and yellow leaf of life, and bowed down with the weight of four- score years he became landless and moneyless. Such was too often the case in the early days of California. Those into whose hands a fortune seemed to be dropped could not grasp the gift.
We will give the statements made to us by three pioneers, Messrs. Woods Crawford, Benjamin Dewell and W. C. Goldsmith, in relation to the settle- ment of the county up to 1854. Mr. Crawford's statement is as follows :
"The first house in the county (outside of that built by Stone and Kelsey), was built by Robert Gaddy, now living near the mouth of Kelsey Creek, by Charles Ferguson, and C. N. Copsey, in 1853, and was a log cabin. It was located about one and one-half miles west of the present site of Lower Lake, and the land is now owned by the Clear Lake Water Com- pany. These men had no families. During the same year, the second house was erected by J. Broome Smith and William Graves, one of the famous Donner party, being then a boy, and was taken out on a man's back. This house was made of split lumber, and was located near the foot of Uncle Sam Mountain, near where Konockti Landing now is. The water company
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now owns the land. They had no family. The next house was built in Scotts Valley by Jefferson Warden, in the fall of 1853, on what is known as the Theo. Deming place. He had no family.
" In the spring of 1854, a party consisting of Martin Hammack, his wife, a grown son, two daughters, and two younger sons; Brice Hammack, a son of Martin Hammack's, and wife; Woods Crawford and wife, who was a daughter of Martin Hammack ; John T. Shin, J. J. Hendricks, J. W. Butts, J. B. Cook and W. S. Cook, the later being father and son, in company with several others-making a party of about twenty-five all told-came into Lake County and settled in Big Valley. Three days later they were followed by Elijah Reeves and family. Those named above were all, how- ever, who became permanent settlers, as the others drifted back to the older settlements or pushed on into the mountains. This party came up by way of Napa City, Yountville, over Howell Mountain into Pope Valley, over Pope Mountain into Coyote Valley, thence to Lower Lake, and thence over Siegler Mountain to Big Valley. The Hammack party were under the lead- ership of a guide. They had ox-teams, four yoke to a wagon, and their wagons were the first that were brought into the county with families, or by any one except soldiers. In coming down Howell Mountain they had to tie trees to the hind end of the wagon, to keep them from upsetting on the teams, and to act as a break.
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