An illustrated history of the state of Idaho, containing a history of the state of Idaho from the earliest period of its discovery to the present time, together with glimpses of its auspicious future; illustrations and biographical mention of many pioneers and prominent citizens of to-day, Part 128

Author: Lewis Publishing Company. cn
Publication date: 1899
Publisher: Chicago, The Lewis publishing company
Number of Pages: 1014

USA > Idaho > An illustrated history of the state of Idaho, containing a history of the state of Idaho from the earliest period of its discovery to the present time, together with glimpses of its auspicious future; illustrations and biographical mention of many pioneers and prominent citizens of to-day > Part 128

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craft. Masonry upholds all that is honorable, pure and good in life, and thus a good Mason is a good citizen.

CHARLES G. MARTIN.

Charles G. Martin is one of the pioneers of what is now Bingham county, Idaho, and has seen this entire section of the state develop from a wild region, whereon civilization had not set its stamp, into one of the finest and richest farm- ing and stock-raising districts of the state. In the work of development and progress he has ever borne his part, and he takes a just pride in the county's improvement, and deserves great credit for what he has done in its behalf.

Mr. Martin was born in Clark county, Ken- tucky, November 16, 1847, and is a son of Samuel P. and Eliza (Jones) Martin. His father was born in and is now a resident of Missouri, and has reached the ripe old age of eighty years. His wife was a native of Virginia, and died in Mis- souri, in 1864. The Martin family removed from Kentucky to Missouri about the year 1850, and the father carried on farming, which has been his life work.

Charles G. Martin spent the greater part of his childhood and youth in Missouri and is indebted to its public-school system for the educational privileges afforded him. He was early trained to habits of industry and enterprise on the home farm and assisted in the duties and labors of the fields upon the old homestead throughout his minority. Until 1870 he was identified with the agricultural interests of that state, and then came to Idaho, settling on the bank of the Snake river. For some time he was employed by Matt. Taylor and then began stock-raising on his own account. He resides three and one-half miles east of Idaho Falls, where he owns three hundred and twenty acres of good land. He is extensively engaged in raising horses and cattle and in his business pursuits is meeting with very desirable success. He makes a specialty of beef cattle, for which he finds a ready sale on the market.

Mr. Martin was united in marriage to Mrs. Johanna Wright, a native of West Virginia, who came to Idaho in 1872. They now have two children, Jo and Mary. In politics Mr. Martin is a strong Democrat, believing most firmly in the principles of the party, but his attention is

not given to office-seeking, his energies being de- voted to his business interests, in which he is meeting with deserved success. Throughout this section of the state he is well known, and he de- serves mention among Idaho's pioneers.

ALEXANDER E. MAYHEW.

The rewards of purity in public life are many, but one of the most important and apparent is continuance in public life. This is true every- where, and of course it is true in Idaho, where the fact is emphasized and illustrated by the career of Judge Mayhew of Wallace, Shoshone county, Idaho. At least he lives at Wallace, but he is a man of the west and for the west, and his influence is active and far-reaching.

Alexander E. Mayhew, son of Samuel and Elizabeth (Conklin) Mayhew, was born in Phila- delphia, Pennsylvania, March 31, 1830. His father, a native of Philadelphia, was for many years a merchant of that city, but died in New Jersey in 1871, and his mother, born in Phila- delphia, died in New Jersey, in 1887.

The boyhood days of Judge Mayhew were passed in Philadelphia, where he attended the public schools and was graduated from the Uni- versity of Pennsylvania, with the class of 1852. He read law under the preceptorship of Willian D. Baker, one of the leading Philadelphia law- yers of his time and one of the most successful in the country, and in 1855 he located at Atchi- son, Kansas, where he continued his legal studies in the office of Abel & Stringfellow, being ad- mitted to the bar in 1856. He entered upon the practice of his profession in Atchison and served one year as city attorney. In 1859 he went to Pike's Peak, Colorado, where he practiced law and was connected with mining interests, and there he remained until 1864, when he re- moved to Helena, Montana, whence he went later to Deer Lodge, that state. Here he was successful professionally. For twelve years he was prosecuting attorney for his county, with office at Deer Lodge, and he was a member of the Montana legislature in nine successive ses- sions, in eight of which he was speaker of the house.

Judge Mayhew came to the Coeur d'Alene country in 1884, and has lived at Wallace since 1890. He was a member of the Idaho legisla-

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ture of 1887-9 and a member of the state consti- tutional convention in 1890. In 1891 he was the Democratic candidate for congress in his dis- trict, but was defeated at the polls by Willis Sweet. In 1894 he was elected to the Idaho state senate and was president of the senate in the session which followed. In 1895 he was elected judge of the first judicial district of Idaho, and in 1898 was re-elected to succeed himself.

The professional success of Judge Mayhew is a part of the recorded legal and judicial history of the west. A lawyer of fine attainments, with an intimate knowledge of law and its application to the affairs of life, with magnetic qualities as a forensic speaker, with industry, carefulness, and great zeal in caring for the interests of clients, actuated always by a high sense of honor, which long since won him the complimentary sobriquet of "Honest Alex," and with a genuine love for the law and the highest respect for its established tribunals,-he has achieved a reputation of which any lawyer in the country might be proud. Long years of political service have not corrupted him, and upon every legislative body of which he has been a member, upon every court in which he has appeared, he has left the influence of pure motives, fair fighting, honest methods and un- swerving devotion to the right as it has been re- vealed to him. As a judge he considers the poor and the rich alike and renders decisions which stand and win for him the praise of good and honest citizens.

Of a genial, whole-souled disposition, Judge Mayhew has made many friends wherever he has lived, and has come to be one of the best known men in the west. He is an Elk and an Odd Fel- low, and is connected with the various profes- sional organizations. Among those men of Idaho who have at heart everything affecting her prog- ress and development he is a leader, and so act- ive has he been in good works for the public benefit that his public spirit has come to be pro- verbial.

LOUIS E. EILERT.

The new west is eminently the home of the self-made man. Indeed, it may be said that in making himself the self-made man of the new west has built the new west up about him. Of course this means the self-made man in a col- lective sense. Individually self-made men like

Louis E. Eilert, of Rathdrum, Kootenai county, Idaho, are units in the scheme of moral and ma- terial development and progress. Louis E. Eil- ert is a native of Hanover, Germany, and was born April 5, 1851, a son of Ernest and Mary Eilert, descendants from a long line of German ancestors. In 1852 Ernest Eilert started for America with his wife and his son (then about a year old), with such plans in his mind as a man will make for those whose lives he wants to make better, without regard to the sacrifices he may be called upon to make in his efforts to the end. But he was doomed to bitter disappointment at the very outset. His wife died on the voyage and was buried in the Atlantic ocean. But still duty lay plainly enough before him. Emigrants and pioneers may not have time for mourning their dead, for they have a fight to wage for the living. One may scarcely imagine how lonely the journey was of Mr. Eilert to the new land, after that dark day in his history, and across a land to him unknown to Wisconsin, where he settled on Wood river, in Waukesha county. There the boy Louis was reared and taught a good deal about work and not much about books. The schools there were crude and inadequate, but they were schools of a kind, and the boy learned enough to serve as seed in the field of knowledge,-seed which he has cultivated since as well as he might, until he is regarded as a well informed man, alive to every important public question and zealous for education and all mate- rial progress. He came to the site of Rathdrum, Idaho, in 1880, and was one of the men who erected the first building where the town has since grown up. He is to some extent interested in mining, and is the operator of the Rathdrum brewery and carries on a retail trade in wines and liquors. He has been successful as a business man and owes his success entirely to his own ex- ertions, for he is in every sense of the word a self-made man.

A steadfast Democrat, he has always taken an active interest in the work of his party, but he has no desire for official position and has discour- aged the use of his name whenever his candidacy for office has been suggested. He is a member of the Knights of Pythias, and has made an en- viable reputation as a public-spirited citizen.

Mr. Eilert married Mrs. Abbie (Bradbury)

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Tucker, in 1883, and her one son by her former marriage has been given the name of his step- father, Louis Eilert.

JOHN A. O'FARRELL.

John Andrew O'Farrell was born in the county of Tyrone, province of Ulster, Ireland, on the 13th day of February, 1823. He pursued his education in the common schools until his thir- teenth year, and was then placed in a naval school where he remained for two years. He went to sea in the Oriental Steamship line when fifteen years of age, sailing from the East India dock on the Thames, London, England, to the city of Cal- cutta, Hindustan, East Indies. The return trip occupied seven months' time and the vessel deliv- ered and received mails and passengers at the isle of St. Helena, off the west coast of Africa, and at all the ports of entry on the African coast and the isles of Madagascar and Ceylon in the Indian ocean, thence to Madras and Calcutta. At the age of sixteen, on his return from India to Lon- don, Mr. O'Farrell was transferred to the Aus- tralian liner, Nebob, of the East India Company, sailing from Birkenhead, opposite Liverpool, England, to Sydney, New South Wales, Austra- lia. On the return trip they stopped at Chinese and Japanese ports for mails and passengers, and sailed the Pacific route through the straits of Magellan, crossing the southern Atlantic to the Cape of Good Hope and taking on mail and pas- sengers at St. Helena and other stations on the way to England. This trip occupied thirteen inonths' time.

The father of our subject was Andrew O'Far- rell, a military engineer, who served in that ca- pacity on the battlefield of Waterloo under the Duke of Wellington. He was for thirty-one years an engineer in the British service. His eldest son, Patrick Gregory O'Farrell, entered the British navy as a cadet and served continu- ously in the navy for twenty-eight years, being on the Arctic expedition with Captain McClure in the early '40s, on a three-years trip in the froz- en polar region.

After his return from Australia in the ship Ne- bob, John A. O'Farrell remained at home for eighteen months, working at the trade of ship- smith in Captain Coppin's ship-building works on the river Foyle, at Londonderry, in the north

of Ireland. He was then between nineteen and twenty years of age. The White Star liner, City of New York, was undergoing repairs, and he worked on her and shipped as one of her crew, as an able seaman, bound for New York. He landed in New York city on the 5th of January, 1843, being nineteen years and eleven months of age. The following day he left for Philadelphia, and through his uncle secured a position in the Philadelphia navy yards as shipsmith. He was employed in that capacity until the Mexican war broke out, when he sailed on the United States store-ship, the Lexington, which was ordered to the Mexican frontier on the Pacific waters, bound for Monterey, the Mexican capital of Alta, or Northern, California. There was no such place as San Francisco then on the Pacific coast, and on the site of the present city was an old Spanishı settlement of two hundred people, the place be- ing known as Yerba Buena. The ship was loaded with arms and ammunition and a force of marines under command of Captain C. Q. Tomp- kins, of Company F, Third Artillery, and Lieu- tenant W. T. Sherman. The Lexington sailed around Cape Horn, making the trip from the Delaware to the bay of Monterey in one hundred and ninety-eight days. They arrived at their des- tination January 29, 1847, and found the United States frigate, Independence, commanded by Commodore William Branford Shubrick, lying at anchor in the bay. When the Lexington ar- rived Commodore Shubrick boarded her and finding Captain C. Q. Tompkins with Company F, of the Third Artillery, placed him in command of the land forces, while Lieutenant Sherman, afterward the celebrated general of the civil war, was made quartermaster and adjutant. Two days later the sloop of war Cyane, under command of Captain Dupont, entered the harbor, having on board General S. W. Kearny with his staff and troops. He established headquarters at Mon- terey and Commodore Shubrick took command of the sea on the frigate Independence. General Kearny's staff was composed of the following: Colonel R. B. Mason, of the First Dragoons; Captain Folsom and Lieutenant Ord, afterward General Ord, with Lewis Dent as private secre- tary. Dent was the brother of Mrs. General Grant. He was appointed probate judge and magistrate, before whom all difficulties were

John & Oferries

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tried. In May, 1847, General Kearny returned to the United States in the sloop of war Cyane, to report to the government his opinion and to give an account of the new territory of Alta Cali- fornia. Colonel R. B. Mason was left in com- mand of the land forces, with Lieutenant Sher- man as adjutant and Captain Folsom quarter- master. There were no mail routes then on the Pacific coast in California, not even a wagon road. All travel was over the trails or by canoes on the rivers. A tri-monthly mail was estab- lished by Colonel Mason and Commodore Shu- brick, being carried three times a month from Monterey to Point Danas, thence to Los Angeles and on to San Diego, and returning by the same ports to Monterey, thence north to Yerba Buena, Captain Folsom's station. The store-ship Lex- ington was detailed for the mail service from De- cember, 1847, until the Ist of May, 1848.

Mr. O'Farrell was a seaman on the mail ship and on the first Sunday in May, 1848, at the trading post in Yerba Buena, he met Captain John Sutter, Jim Marshall and others who had arrived from Sutter's sawmill at Coloma, forty miles from San Francisco. They had the first gold-dust Mr. O'Farrell had ever seen. It was as coarse as grains of wheat and corn. Marshall gave him three grains of gold, worth about two dollars, and he engaged with Sutter to work in the gold mines. He was to receive a per cent of what he washed out of the ground at the mill, and his daily wages averaged from thirty to fifty dollars. Being fond of excitement he visited all the newly discovered gold-producing localities in the territory of California. On the 9th of Sep- tember, 1850, California was admitted into the Union with the provision that all men over twen- ty-one years of age in the state on that date were made by act of congress lawful citizens of the United States. Mr. O'Farrell had been seven years in America, either on land or in American waters, and was twenty-seven years of age, so he cast his first vote in California, in the fall of 1850. That winter the snow was very deep in the mining districts of California, and the bay of San Francisco was crowded with ships from all quarters of the globe. Seamen's services con- manded high wages and Mr. O'Farrell engaged on the Red Jacket, a Baltimore clipper, for the round trip from San Francisco to Auckland, New

Zealand, thence to Melbourne and Sydney, Aus- tralia, stopping at Honolulu both going and on the return trip. The vessel at length arrived again in San Francisco, laden with coal, which was then a valuable cargo in San Francisco. Nine months had been consumed in making the voyage. In 1851 William H. Aspinwall & Company, of New York, secured the United States mail contract, to carry the mail by the istlimus route, and placed three large steamships on the Pacific side to run between San Francisco and Panama. These ves- sels were called the California, the Oregon and the Panama. Commodore Vanderbilt was an unsuccessful candidate for the mail contract, which paid several millions of dollars during the four years of its term. Vanderbilt, however, re- solved not to be defeated in his plans. He went to Liverpool, England, and connected himself with all the Atlantic ocean lines of every nation of Europe, and they placed four large steamers on the Pacific between San Francisco and the Central American port of San Juan del Sur. From that port passengers were taken across the isthmus to Graytown, whence the English lines of steamers carried the mail and passengers to Kingstown, Jamaica, where they could be trans- ferred to American and English vessels. In the winter of 1852, when the snow in the mountains was too deep to admit of profitable gold-washing, Mr. O'Farrell worked on the Vanderbilt line be- tween San Francisco and San Juan del Sur, and in 1853 he was engaged on the ships of the same company on the Caribbean sea, on the Atlantic side, sailing between Graytown and Southamp- ton, England.

In the fall of 1853 England and France de- clared war against Russia and Patrick Gregory O'Farrell, the eldest brother of our subject, was one of the naval officers under Admiral Dundas. being stationed on the Black sea and the sea of Azov. As seamen were in great demand for that naval service, John A. O'Farrell shipped at Spit- head, Portsmouth, England, on the Agamemnon, the flagship of Admiral Lyons, for service on the Black sea and along the Crimean coast. That vessel reached the bay of Odessa about the 15th of February, 1854. The British fleet, under the command of Admirals Dundas and Lyons, num- bered twenty-one ships, including war ships, fri- gates and curvets or sloops of war, while the

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French fleet, under command of Admirals Ham- lin and Brunnette, numbered twenty-three ships. The orders to demand the surrender of Odessa arrived on the night of the 21st of April, 1854, by the naval mail packet Credock from Constan- tinople to the fleet. Of course the order was not complied with, and the first guns of the Crimean war were turned upon Odessa about five o'clock on the morning of Saturday, April 22, 1854, the cannonading continuing thirteen hours. - The city was on fire, but Prince Mencicoff, the Rus- sian general, did not surrender. The British

war ship Terrible was destroyed by the Russian fire from the guns of the forts of Odessa, and several ships of the French and British fleets were crippled, and the fleets were unable to effect a landing. The British army of over thirty thou- sand men under Lord Raglan, and the French army of forty thousand men under Marechal St. Arnod, with ten thousand Turks under Omar Pasha, were ordered to the front under the pro- tection of the combined fleets of France and Eng- land. On the 14th of September, 1854, at Kil- matta bay, where the river Alma connects with the Black sea, the French, British and Turkish troops were landed. The Heights of Alma, a rocky cliff, are situated from one to three miles

. from the shores of the Black sea, and along the apex of the cliff was the Warnsoff stage road from Sebastopol to Odessa. A telegraph station and mercantile houses were located there, and Gen- eral Mencicoff, commander-in-chief of the Rus- sian army, concentrated seventy thousand men there on the night of September 19, 1854. On the following morning the French, British and Turks, under the command of Field-Marshal Arnod, of France, formed a battle line three miles in length at right angles on the north bank of the Alma and the shore of the sea. The Rus- sian army of seventy thousand opened fire on the French army, who had their position along the sea shore, hoping to drive the French into the sea, but the heavy guns of the fleet kept the Rus- sians at bay until Lord Raglan with his command arrived, bringing the cannon up the Alma river and onto the heights in the third hour of the bat- tle, and attacked the Russians on the level plain of the heights. This move drew the strong force of the Russians from the French, who almost as if by magic scaled the heights. The roar of ar-

tillery and the thunderous sounds of the battle lasted for three hours, at the end of which time the Russians retreated toward the valley of Bal- aklava. So intense had been the battle that it required six days to bury the dead and get the wounded on board the hospital ships. On the seventh day after the battle of Alma the com- bined force of French, English, the Piedmontese, under General Forey, and the Turks, under Gen- eral Omar Pasha, marched toward the Balaklava valley, a thriving agricultural district farmed principally by Scotch farmers who immigrated

there to raise wheat on a large scale. At the head of this valley the Warnsoff stage road from Odessa to Simferopol and Sebastopol crosses the Takernea river on a long stone bridge of many arches. A Russian fort stood in this locality. The two famous brothers, the Generals Luder, held this position, fifteen miles from Sebastopol, with a strong army, and General and Prince Mancicoff with his men who fought in the Alma, were fortified on the heights on the south side of the valley, whilst the sons of Emperor Nicholas, Michael and Nicholas, held their artillery and cavalry forces for any emergency on a com- manding position. The Russians held position where the guns of the fleet could not reach them, and where they could deliver a deadly fire on the French, British and Turks. The French and British marines and the marine artillery were ordered ashore together with the artillery of the navy, and the troops forced a position on the nearest heights, known then as the marine heights. While getting their guns in place under cover of darkness, on the morning of October 17, 1854, the Russian pickets opened fire, and the battle of Balaklava commenced. Captain Nolan, of the Seventeenth Irish Hussars, was field dis- patcher for Lord Reglan, who gave him a written dispatch to the Earl of Cardigan, who com- manded the cavalry, to charge up the valley in order to know better the Russian position. Cardigan ordered Captain Nolan to lead the charge. He and his six hundred men then dis-

mounted, tightened their saddles and then re- mounted for the fatal charge. They rode over a rolling ridge about one thousand yards only to find themselves within the range of sixty field- pieces, planted on each side of the valley. To re- treat was certain death. Captain Nolan charged

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for the battery, heand his men cutting the Russian gunners from their guns, and then turning at the command to right about face, cut through a second time and charged down the valley to their own line, where Captain Nolan, who had lead in what was one of the most daring and brilliant military movements in history, was killed by a cannon shot.

On the 5th of November, 1854, the allied ar- mies of France and England, in connection with the fleets, had arranged for the final assault on Sebastopol. Marechal McMahon, of France, with his men, stormed the Malakof, capturing the principal defense of Sebastopol, Forts Nicholas and Alexander, with several hundred guns, which commanded the naval entrance to Sebastopol. Here the Agamemnon, the flagship of Admiral Lyons, was crippled. Many of the men were killed, and Mr. O'Farrell was among the wounded. For his meritorious services in that engagement, however, he received a Crimean prize medal, which he still has in his possession. In 1856 the Crimean war was ended, and he re- turned to California, where he resumed mining in the gold districts.

In the fall of 1857 Mr. O'Farrell was one of a party who organized a company at Downie- ville, California, to prospect for gold on the Pike's Peak mountain range, at the head waters of the Platte river, then in western Kansas, but now in the state of Colorado. He was one of the first to find gold, making his discovery April 6, 1860, in what is known as California Gulch, where the Leadville Mining Camp is now lo- cated. Attracted by the gold discoveries throughout the northwest he has visited and worked in the mining regions of Oregon, Wash- ington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Ne- vada and the territories of New Mexico and Ari- zona, but has made his home in Boise, Idaho, since June, 1863.

WILLIAM C. DUNBAR, JR.

A popular citizen of Caldwell, the county-seat of Canyon county, is the gentleman whose name appears above. In 1895 he was elected to the position which he now holds, that of county clerk of the district court, and has made a thorough, capable and reliable official. In his political views he is a Populist. Formerly he served as

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An illustrated history of the state of Idaho, containing a history of the state of Idaho from the earliest period of its discovery to the present time, together with glimpses of its auspicious future; illustrations and biographical mention of many pioneers and prominent citizens of to-day, Part 128

Author: Lewis Publishing Company. cn Publication date: 1899 Publisher: Chicago, The Lewis publishing company Number of Pages: 1014

Author: Lewis Publishing Company. cn
Publication date: 1899
Publisher: Chicago, The Lewis publishing company
Number of Pages: 1014