Colusa-Statewide County CA Archives History - Books .....Colusa County 1891
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Book Title: Memorial And Biographical History Of Northern California

COLUSA COUNTY

Is sixty miles north and south and averages about forty-five miles east and
west, and consequently contains about 2,800 square miles. Of this about 1,500
square miles lie in the Sacramento Valley. As the summit of the Coast Range
forms the western boundary, the remainder of the area is composed of mountains,
low hills and smaller valleys. There are probably about 200 square miles of this
valley portion, 700 square miles of low hills and 400 of mountains. The
Sacramento River, running almost due south, forms the eastern boundary. The
river makes twelve miles of easting and sixty miles of southing. This part of
the Sacramento River has not been filled up by hydraulic mining, and its water
is clear except after rains. To the town of Colusa, twenty-two miles above the
southern line of the county, steamers tow barges carrying as much as 700 tons.
Above that point 300 tons is considered a fair load. The fall of the river from
the upper end of the county to the town of Colusa is eighteen inches to the mile
and from that place down it is only six inches. Compared with the lower portion,
the upper river has more rapids and bars, and it also washes its banks and
changes its position more. The average width of the river is something more than
300 feet, and the height of the banks at low water is twenty-three feet. The
other principal streams of the county, besides the Sacramento, are Butte Slough,
eighteen miles north of the southern boundary of the county; Sycamore Slough,
four miles below Butte Slough; and Stony Creek, rising on the Coast Mountains
about forty miles north of the south line of the county and running north and
then east. Although this carries off a great deal of water during the rainy
season, in the dry portion of the year it loses itself in the gravel before
reaching the river. It is from an eighth to a quarter of a mile wide, and its
banks twelve to fifteen feet high. The current is so rapid that its deposits
have been principally boulders and sand.

  The river is skirted on either side with oak, sycamore, cottonwood and ash.
Much of this, however, has been cut off. Along the coast range is much valuable
pine timber. Away from the river, where the people have to depend upon wells for
water, the average distance to good water is about twenty feet. In many portions
of the plains it is only ten feet. At one place in the southwestern portion,
water is not reached short of seventy-five to 100 feet. At this depth hones and
timber are often found, which have been covered by some cataclysm. One man took
up most of the skeleton of a deer. In the alkali districts very good water is
obtained by boring down sixty to seventy-five feet and tubing out the surface
water.

  The valley land is very high. The original alkali spots, never exceeding fifty
square miles, perhaps, is fast disappearing.

  The average summer heat, taking the hottest part of the day, is about ninety
degrees; average in winter, sixty degrees; extreme heat, 115°, and extreme cold
29° above zero. Very seldom is ice formed, and never over half an inch in
thickness, and the heat is never oppressive. The average rainfall is about
twenty inches per annum, which is the same as the Sacramento Valley generally.

  Colusa is one of the original counties named February 18, 1850; but at first
it was attached to Butte County for its official purposes. In the early part of
1851, Colusa was an aspiring city of one house and half a dozen inhabitants; and
Monroeville, a rival, was equally aspiring and contained-exactly the same number
of buildings and perhaps the same number of inhabitants. Each was afraid that
the other would get ahead in the organization of the county. The influence of
the founders of Colusa had the county created and named, which then was spelled
Colusi. To be ahead with the matter, the Monroeville people petitioned Moses
Bean, Judge of Butte County, to have the county organized. Although he had no
authority in the matter, he issued a proclamation ordering an election of
officers for the proposed new county of Colusa, January 10, 1851. The election
was held, but all the men chosen failed to qualify except J. S. Holland, county
judge, and Uriah P. Monroe, county clerk. Holland died April 12, and some one,
not now known, called an election to fill the vacancy. At this election
thirty-eight votes were polled in the county and John T. Hughes was elected. He
held one court and left the county. There was no county judge then until
September 3, when William B. Ide, of Bear-Flag Rebellion notoriety, was elected
and at once entered upon the duties of the office without waiting for the term
to expire. At this election forty-seven votes elected an Assemblyman, namely, H.
L. Ford; E. D. Wheatly, clerk; J. F. Willis, sheriff; W. H. Shepard, assessor;
Ben Knight, treasurer; Uriah P. Monroe, public administrator; and John T.
Hughes, district attorney. The last two probably did not accept their offices.
Five elections were held in 1851.

  The organizers had not thought a word about the location of a county-seat, but
the officers first elected, being of the Monroe faction, commenced business at
Monroeville, without any forms of law. At the session of the Legislature of 1851
Colonel C. D. Semple managed to get a bill through defining the boundaries of
the county of Colusi, and fixing the seat at Colusa. The acting officers paid no
attention whatever to this law: they went right on at Monroeville. In 1853 a
vote was taken resulting in establishing the seat at Colusa by 310 votes against
sixty, and accordingly a courthouse and jail were ordered built there, at a cost
of $3,000, the contract being dated January 6, 1854.

  William B. Ide, an intelligent but singular man, died of small-pox at
Monroeville, December 20, 1852, when he was county judge.

  Colusa is an Indian word, and was the original name of a numerous tribe of
Indians who lived on the western side of the Sacramento River. Its meaning is
not known.

  The town was laid out at the rancheria of the Colus Indians, and the
termination a given to the name. In the legislature General M. G. Vallejo
insisted that i was the proper termination, and so it went into statutes. While
the county-seat was held at Monroeville the partisans of the place were very
particular in marking the distance, while the partisans of the town of Colusa
insisted that the town and the county ought to be spelled alike. After 1854 the
statutes concerning the county had the termination a and the officials seals
were changed accordingly.

   In 1846 or '47 Dr. Robert Semple went up to the head of the Sacramento Valley
to see some old pioneers who had settled in what is now Tehama County. Returning
by way of the river, he tied two cotton wood logs together for a boat. He found
great difficulty in navigation until he came to the rancheria of the Colus
Indians: from there down it was easy. Looking over the vast territory of fertile
lands around this spot, he made a memorandum of it as the future city of the
upper Sacramento Valley, and found that it was owned by John Bidwell under a
Mexican grant. When in 1849 his brother, Colonel Charles D. Semple, came out to
California, he favorably received his notions, hunted up Bidwell and purchased
his grant. In the spring of 1850 he set out with a little steamboat for the
future city. The Colus rancheria, to which the Doctor had directed him, was
entirely hidden from the river, and the first, rancheria in sight from the river
was a temporary encampment of a portion of the Colus Indians seven miles above
the present site of the town. The Indians being asked about the name of the
tribe, very promptly answered Colus; and, thinking he was on the right spot, and
the water being so high as to render navigation alike everywhere, the boat's
cargo of merchandise and men were landed and a town laid out and christened Colusa.

  In the spring of 1850 Dr. Semple commenced to build a steamboat at Benicia to
run up to the new town, and on the first of July that year she made her first
trip, and she too was named Colusa. She was a side-wheel boat, had a very trim
hull and cabin, and was of fair size. But no engine could be found large enough
to run her, and no two small engines could be found that were alike so as to
constitute a pair; so the novel experiment was tried of running one wheel with
an engine made for the style of the Mississippi steamboats, and the other with a
smaller engine, with an entirely different stroke and power. They ran the boat,
and on the morning of the third of July the proprietor started out from Benicia
for Colusa. On the sixth they arrived at the present site of Colusa, then called
Salmon Point, and then troubles commenced; for it required nearly a week to get
up to where the town was laid out. About three miles up the river the little
engine broke down, and the boat had to be warped from there up. An Indian guide
was employed to point out the exact site of the place, leading the boatmen
through a thicket of wild rose-bushes to a point opposite the place; for this
was on the east bank of the river. The Indian took the men's clothes across tied
in a boat upon the top of his head, and then they could wade or swim across. In
a day or two the boat readied the landing, was discharged, and started back with
one wheel. Although it cost over $60,000, this was the last trip she ever made.

  Colonel Semple found that he had made a mistake in the location of the city,
and that the Colas rancheria was really some seven miles lower down the river.
About a month afterward the goods were hauled down there, and thus the city was
founded. In this locality it was favorably situated for the trade between Shasta
and the northern mines. Colonel Semple bought a little steamer called the Martha
Jane and ran her regularly a few trips, but it was too early in the development
of the country to obtain remunerative patronage, and he had to sell her. In the
autumn of 1851 Captain George V. Right undertook the navigation of this portion
of Sacramento with an iron-hulled boat, but it struck a snag on the first trip
and sank, just above Knight's Landing. Next Captain Bartlett, with the Orient, a
fast little stern-wheel boat of about 100 tons' burden, succeeded in making
several profitable trips. The town was then growing rapidly.

  One of the greatest drawbacks to the town has been the imperfect title to the
land, made so by conflicting boundaries of grants and imperfect description
given in deeds. This matter, however, was nearly all settled about fifteen years
ago.

  Colusa is unusually well favored as being in one of the best agricultural
districts in the United States.

  In 1850 there were perhaps a thousand Indians in Colusa County of the Colus
tribe, 200 or 800 of the Willies, who inhabited Grand Island, 200 of the
Cortinas, who had their headquarters near the head of Cortinas Creek, about
twenty miles southwest of Colusa. There was also a large tribe in the vicinity
of Newville and some scattering villages near the upper end of the county. Those
about Newville were considered the most dangerous. The Grand Island Indians
survived the white civilization the longest and for many years made good harvest
hands. The Colus tribe were under the immediate control of Sioc, a chief of more
than ordinary intelligence, who held a sort of provincial control over all the
other tribes of the valley. His word was law, and he had the power of life or
death over his subjects. They never had any clothing, except that the squaws,
for the sake of ornamentation, wore a fringe of small cords extending from their
waist to near the knees. When the first settler visited these Indians, all the
clothes which the male portion of the tribe had was one stove-pipe hat and one
vest. The latter was turned up-side down, the legs thrust through the armholes
and buttoned up behind. A person who has never tried it has no idea how a vest
worn in that way will fit.

  The Mexican, land grants for Colusa County have been: Colus, 8,876 acres, to
C. D. Semple in 1869; Jacinto, 35,487 acres, to William M. McKee in 1859;
Larkin's children's ranch, 44,364 acres, to F. Larkin and others in 1857. In
Colusa and Tehama counties: Capay, 44,388 acres, to J. Soto in 1859. In Colusa
and Yolo counties, Jimeno 48,854 acres, to Larkin and Missroon in 1862.

IN MORE MODERN TIMES

Colusa County enjoyed the reputation of being the banner wheat county of the
State, half of its area of some 3,000 square miles being the rich, dark, deep
alluvium of the Sacramento River basin, of an almost incredible fertility. The
balance of its acreage seems almost as rich, being made up of the low rolling
hills and rounded valleys of the Coast Range.

  The history of the county has proceeded in three leaps or bounds, so to speak.
It was first a great cattle and sheep country, this stage of affairs holding
until about 1870, although there was some grain-raising along the river as early
as 1852. As late as 1868 some of the best lands in the county were subject to
private entry at $1.25 an acre. About that time they learned to plow deep and
raise the small grains, and then land began to rise rapidly in value. The second
stage was as a grain-raiser, and this is only now beginning to give way to
manifest destiny in the way of fruit, grape and similar growths.

  It is as a great grain country that we must first consider Colusa County.
Statistics places this wonderful county thirteenth in the entire United States,
and first in California, in the value of agricultural products. It is the county
of immense grain farms and wheat fields. The fame of the great Glenn farm has
gone over the world, and has only been surpassed in the new northwestern States
of late years. This farm is only one of many such. On these farms the fields
cover square miles; plowmen, sowers and reapers move by battalions. Every thing
proceeds on a gigantic scale, and here at harvest time are seen a score of
horses shoving before them the great machines that reap, thresh and sack the
wheat all at one process. The third stage is slowly coming in. The building of
the Northern California Railroad in the seventies from Woodland straight as a
line across these level plains to Red Bluff in the north, gave too high a value
to these lands for any but the very rich to continue on at wheat-growing, and
now, under the energetic promptings of Will S. Green, the pioneer editor of
Colusa and almost the father of the county, the owner of the Colusa Sun, a great
ditch has been surveyed from the Sacramento to irrigate the bulk of the level
lands. This is now being dug, and when water runs through it, as it will ere
1891, the days of grain-growing as a chief industry will be numbered, and the
still richer future of fruit-raising will be begun.

  Before leaving this matter of grain-growing, however, let us see what it has
done for Colusa. The county has produced as high as 10,000,000 bushels of wheat
in a year, the plump, pale hard California berry that commands the highest
prices in the markets of the world. It has made enormous fortunes for many men,
who usually drift off to the centres of population, there to employ their
capital; but it has also made every one in the county wealthy. The assessment
roll shows an assessed valuation of over $1,400 apiece, for man, woman and child
of population. This is almost wholly an assessment, too, of farming lands, for
Colusa County has no cities yet, although she probably will have soon.

  The subdivision of lands is proceeding slowly yet surely along the Sacramento
River, especially near the town of Colusa, and along the line of the railway,
where smart towns are springing up. The planting of fruit trees follows hard en
the subdivision and the fame of Colusa County peaches and pears and prunes, as
well as other fruits, such as figs, citrus growths, vines, etc., is already
being heard, and the fruit cannery lately established in Colusa has a rushing
business.

  In the matter of transportation this county enjoys unusual facilities, being
most fortunately situated as regards both rail and water communication. The
Sacramento River passes through the entire length of the county and furnishes
the means of low freights to San Francisco, a constant cheek upon overcharges by
rail. She is traversed from end to end also by the Northern Railroad, about
midway between the river and foot-hills, connecting with the Oregon lines, and
thus throwing the whole of the northern travel through the county. The Colusa &
Lake Railroad, chartered in 1882 and built in 1885, E. A. Harrington being the
moneyed man, is projected from Colusa westward toward Lake County, through the
Coast Range. It is now in operation a distance of twenty-five miles well into
the foot-hills in the western part of the county. When fully completed -it will
open up a vast and virgin field. The West Coast & Mendocino road is projected
from Willows northwestward through the Coast Range toward Mendocino and Humboldt
counties. It is now built to Fruto, twenty-two miles, to a rich fruit and grain
region.

  Some attention has been paid to mining in the western part of the county, and
one or two wild huzzas for a little time, over copper and quicksilver, but
nothing to speak of is now being done.

  Colusa, the county-seat, has known many fluctuations. It is at the head of
deep-water navigation on the Sacramento River and possesses a large shipping
trade. The town has known periods of depression and want of confidence that
seriously hindered the march of progress. As a consequence it is ten miles from,
when by a reasonable bonus it might have been upon, the trunk line of railroad,
and until the past few years was united to it only by stage. The dawn of better
things has risen now, however, and the town is fighting for her own with
pronounced success. In the way of manufactures she has a flour mill of large
capacity, a large and busy fruit cannery, a foundry, is well lighted and
drained, and has a good system of water-works. The school system is excellent,
the buildings new and handsome, and a three-story college, St. Aloysius, under
Catholic auspices, that promises great efficiency. The court-house and hall of
records are handsome buildings standing in spacious and well-kept grounds. The
Colusa Bank is one of the strong financial institutions of the county, with a
paid up capital of $500,000. Churches are strong arid numerous, and the town
supports a Normal and Commercial Institute that has good reputation.

  Willows ranks next to Colusa in size, and is growing, being the product of the
railroad. It has large grain warehouses and is an important shipping point. It
has good schools and churches, a well-established bank, a foundry and live
business men. During the last couple of years it has enjoyed quite a "boom."

  Orland, the most northerly town in the county, also a product of the railroad,
has an energetic and thriving population. It has a bank, good public schools,
churches, and possesses a Normal College that is a successful enterprise.

  Germantown is in the northern portion of the county, also on the line of the
Northern Railway, in a fine farming district; has excellent warehouse and
shipping facilities, good business houses, and a new public school building.

  Maxwell is a thriving railroad town and an important shipping point for grain,
having fine storage capacity. It has a $10,000 brick school-house and good
churches. The town is centrally located, and in the midst of a rich farming
territory.

  Williams is also a flourishing young railroad town, with a tine, large, brick
public school building; churches; substantial and well conducted stores, good
hotels, and large warehouse capacity.

  Arbuckle is an important railroad point in the southern part of the county,
with rich tributary farming land. It has a good school-house and church.

  College City lies three miles east of Arbuckle, and is a flourishing little
town. It is the seat of Pierce Christian College, founded in 1874 and handsomely
endowed by the will of Andrew Pierce, a prominent educational institution of the
State. The inhabitants constitute a strictly temperance community, the selling
of intoxicating drinks being prohibited within a radius of one mile.

  Butte City and Princeton are important river villages, prominent shipping
points, and in a very rich section of the county.

  St. John, Jacinto, Syracuse, Grand Island, and Grimes' Landing are also river
villages and shipping points.

  Leesville, in Bear Valley; Smithville, Elk Creek, and Newville, in Stony Creek
Valley; Sites, in Antelope Valley; Sulphur Creek, in the mining district, in the
southwestern part of the county; and Fruto, in the foot-hill region northwest of
Willows, are trading points of importance.

  The newspapers of the county are live and fearless exponents of their section,
comparing well with the journals of other parts. The list is as follows: In
Colusa, the Sun, daily and weekly, founded in 1862, and oldest paper in county;
Gazette, daily and weekly, established in 1889; and Herald, in 1886. At Willows
are published the Journal, issued first in 1877;, daily and weekly, the
Republican and Review, weeklies, established in 1889 and 1890. At Orland is the
News, date, 1885; at Arbuckle, the Autocrat, date, 1890; at Maxwell, the
Mercury, date, 1888, and at Williams the Farmer, founded in 1887.

  In the earliest day the county was Whig in politics, but after the formation
of the Republican party it became Democratic; and during the war was almost what
some people denomnated "secession."

  The Assemblymen from Colusa County have been: Robert Barnett, 1885; G. W.
Bowie, 1854; T. J. Butler, 1863; George Carhart, 1853; Reuben Clark, 1883; H. W.
Dunlap, 1859; D. P. Durst, 1861; Henry L. Ford, 1852; W. S. Green, 1867-'68;
Thomas J. Hart, 1875-'78, 1887; S. Jennison, 1863-'64; E. J. Lewis, 1856, 1858;
William S. Long, 1865-'66; W. P. Mathews, 1880-'81, 1887; J. L. McCutcheon,
1855; L. Searce, 1869-'70; John Simpson, 1873-'74; D. M, Steele, 1857; F. A.
Stephenson, 1860; Joseph W. Thompson, 1862; Loomis Ward, 1871-'72.


Additional Comments:
Extracted from

Memorial and Biographical History of Northern California.

Illustrated, Containing a History of this Important Section of the Pacific Coast
from the Earliest Period of its Occupancy to the Present Time, together with
Glimpses of its Prospective Future; Full-Page Steel Portraits of its most
Eminent Men, and Biographical Mention of many of its Pioneers and also of
Prominent Citizens of To-day.

"A people that takes no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will
never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote
descendents." – Macauley.

CHICAGO
THE LEWIS PUBLISHING COMPANY
1891.

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