Merced County CA Archives History - Books .....American Explorers 1925
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Book Title: History Of Merced County California

CHAPTER II

AMERICAN EXPLORERS

   The first American arrival which we have a certain record of was that of
Jedediah Strong Smith in 1827. He was born in the Mohawk Valley in New York
State, in 1798, moved to New Hampshire, came in touch with fur traders in
Canada, and was a clerk on a freight boat on the Great Lakes while yet a boy. At
the age of twenty he turns up in St. Louis, then the center of Western
enterprise, and begins a career as a fur trader and explorer.

   After expeditions with David E. Jackson, William Ashley, Andrew Henry, Thomas
Fitzpatrick, and others to the upper Missouri and the Yellowstone, and even to
Great Salt Lake and the headwaters of the Columbia, he set out in the summer of
1826 to explore the unknown country between Great Salt Lake and the California
coast. The expeditions of Lewis and Clark to the Northwest and of Pike to the
Southwest had left this vast unknown region between. It is only within the last
few years that his work has come to be recognized, or even known.

   David E. Jackson and William L. Sublette, at Salt Lake in the summer of 1826,
were joined by Ashley and Smith, coming from St. Louis with a supply of goods
for the Indian trade. Ashley sold out to the three others, and it was under the
direction of the new firm that Smith's expedition was undertaken. New fur fields
were the primary object, which necessarily involved exploration, and; probably
also exploration for its own sake and also, it is believed, the establishment of
a station on the Pacific Coast for carrying on the fur trade with China.

   They left Salt Lake on August 22, and proceeded southwest to Utah Lake,
thence up the Sevier River, across a range of mountains, and down a river which
Smith named Adams "in compliment to our President," but which was afterwards
called the Virgin after one of Smith's men. Traveling down this stream twelve
days, they reached the Colorado, down which he traveled four days more, when he
rested and recruited his horses among the Mojaves. Then, he writes: "I traveled
a west course fifteen days over a country of complete barrens. . . ." Cleland
conjectures that his route followed approximately that of the Santa Fe Railroad;
at any rate he crossed the Sierra Madre Mountains through Cajon Pass and on
November 27 camped a few miles from San Gabriel Mission.

   There was trouble ahead, for the presence of his party in the province was
contrary to Mexican law. Leaving his party, Smith went to San Diego to see
Governor Encheandia and attempt to obtain passports. These the Governor was not
willing to issue on his own responsibility. After nearly a month, with the aid
of a present of beaver skins and with the assistance of Captain Cunningham of
the hide-and-tallow ship "Courier," he secured papers of a sort; but the best
that the Governor would permit him was to return unmolested the way he had come,
though he had wished to go north through the settled portions of California.

   He returned to San Gabriel, purchased horses from the ranchos around Los
Angeles, put his equipment in order, and on January 18, 1827, set out,
ostensibly to follow out the letter of Encheandia's permits. But he had no
intention of quitting California so directly, and when he reached the eastern
mouth of the Cajon, turned northward and entered the southern end of the San
Joaquin Valley, either through the Tejon or the Tehachapi Pass.

   "Traveling leisurely down the valley," says Cleland, "which he found
inhabited by large numbers of Indians, very backward in civilization, living
only on acorns, roots, grass, and fish, armed only with bows and arrows, but in
no way hostile or dangerous, Smith and his men came at length to one of the
numerous rivers which flow into the valley from the Sierras. This was probably
the Stanislaus or the Merced, but here again the record is too incomplete to fix
the matter definitely.

   "Smith called this stream the Wimmulche (Wimilche), after an Indian tribe
which lived beside it. Here he trapped a short time, finding 'a few beaver, and
elk, deer, and antelope in abundance.' He then endeavored to cross the Sierras
and return to the Great Salt Lake. Nothing definite is known of the pass through
which Smith sought to lead his men on this occasion. He speaks of the attempt
having been made across Mount Joseph." The route, Cleland tells us, can only be
conjectured, and he cites Harrison C. Dale as the best authority on the
expedition and says that his conjecture is that Mount Joseph is Mt. Stanislaus,
and that Smith's course lay up the middle fork of the Stanislaus River.

   At any rate, they were forced back by deep snow. Leaving the greater part of
his party on the Wimilche, Smith with .two companions, seven horses, and two
mules set out on May 20 for a second trial, and succeeded in crossing in eight
days. They lost two horses and a mule in the crossing, and twenty days later,
with only one horse and one mule of the original nine alive, and more dead than
alive themselves, the three men reached Great Salt Lake.

   He met his partners here, tarried a month, then set out, July 13, 1827, with
a second expedition of nineteen men to rejoin his companions on the Wimilche. He
followed his old route to the lower Colorado, and here the Mojaves, apparently
friendly at first, set upon them when they were separated while crossing the
river and killed ten of their number. The survivors, abandoning most of their
belongings, arrived after nine days and a half of hardship at San Gabriel again,
where Smith left two of his men, obtained such provisions as he could, and set
out for the San Joaquin.

   The men he had left behind were about out of food; a new stock was necessary
for the return journey, and as there was no other way for it, Smith with Indian
guides set out for San Jose, which he reached in three days, probably crossing
over the Pacheco Pass.

   He found Father Duran at the mission there far less obliging than Father
Sanchez at San Gabriel, and was imprisoned on a charge of enticing away
neophytes. He obtained his release and went to Monterey, and the Governor, whom
he sought there, proved to be the same Encheandia whom he had met the previous
year in San Diego. For a long time Encheandia threatened to send Smith a
prisoner to Mexico, but he was at length prevailed upon by several American ship
captains, whose ships were at Monterey, to permit the Americans to secure
necessary supplies and leave the country in peace. Smith gave a bond of $30,000
to insure his departure from the province and was allowed to go. His men
meanwhile, being in want, had journeyed north to San Francisco. They obtained
food and clothing there, and Smith attempted to secure American and English
recruits, but was prevented by the Mexicans. The party then proceeded northward
up the "Bonadventure"—the Sacramento—and about the middle of April, 1828, left
the river and traveled northwesterly through the Coast Range of what is now
Trinity and Humboldt Counties, to the sea.

   The route was extremely rough and difficult, and they lost a considerable
number of their horses in falls, in fording streams, and in other accidents.
From near the mouth of the Klamath to that of the Umpqua they traveled along the
coast. Here, before they could reach the headwaters of the Willamette, Indians
suddenly set upon their camp, on July 14, 1828, and killed all except Smith
himself, Arthur Black, and John Turner. Ignorant of Black's escape, Smith and
Turner together proceeded to the Hudson's Bay Company post at Vancouver, where
Black had arrived the day before.

   Smith did not touch California again. He continued the fur trade and
exploration in the Rocky Mountain region until the spring of 1831, when he was
killed in an Indian ambush.

   James Ohio Pattie and his father Sylvester Pattie, who came into southern
California between Smith's first and his second expedition, do not appear to
have touched the San Joaquin Valley. After almost incredible hardships and the
loss of a number of their men in a battle with the Indians, the Patties reached
civilization in southern California, and found it not too civilized. Governor
Encheandia, who had been disturbed by the advent of Smith across the desert, was
still more disturbed by this arrival so soon afterwards of a second party of
Americans, and threw them into prison, where the elder Pattie, already reduced
in strength by the hardships of the trip, died.

   The son finally obtained his liberty by the possession of some rough medical
skill and a small supply of vaccine on his part and the coming of an epidemic of
smallpox. It is related that he vaccinated Mexicans and Indians by thousands all
the way up the coast as far as Sonoma. But it does not appear that he extended
his medical ministrations to the interior.

   These expeditions of Smith and Pattie, small in size as they were, ushered in
an important era. They were followed by other trapping and trading expeditions,
and they made certain the great overland advance of settlers in the forties both
before and after the discovery of gold, and equally certain that California
would pass from Mexican to American control.

   Ewing Young, a Tennesseean, who had been for some years a trader and trapper
in New Mexico, in 1829 led the first party to follow Smith and the Patties into
California. He turned north without the formality of entering the settled
portion of southern California, and trapped the streams of the San Joaquin.
Somewhere in this valley or the lower part of the Sacramento he encountered
Peter Skeen Ogden's party of Hudson's Bay Company trappers.

   Young later crossed over to San Jose and proceeded to southern California. He
reached Taos on his return from California in the summer of 1830, and here
formed a partnership with William Wolf-skill, a Kentucky trapper with several
years experience in the Missouri-Santa Fe-Chihuahua trade. Little came of it;
but in the fall of 1831 a partnership consisting of Young, Jackson, the former
partner of Smith, and a man named Waldo, sent a combined trading and trapping
expedition from Santa Fe to California. Jackson, with eleven men, was to proceed
directly to California and purchase a large number of mules to be driven back to
Missouri and Louisiana, and he brought five pack animal loads of silver pesos
with him for the purpose. Young was to trap on the Gila and the Colorado until
the end of the season and then join Jackson in Los Angeles.

   They met there about April 1, 1832. Neither had met with the expected
success. They returned to the Colorado, whence Jackson was to go on east with
his mules while Young returned to trap through central and northern California
the following autumn. Jackson lost most of the mules within two days by an
Indian attack. Young spent the summer hunting sea otter off the California
coast, and in October left southern California with fourteen men by way of the
Tejon for the San Joaquin.

   They trapped the Kings, Fresno, and San Joaquin until they discovered that a
party of Hudson's Bay men had been before them, and then pushing on to the
Sacramento found the rival trappers camped. They crossed to the coast about
seventy-five miles north of the Russian settlement at Ross, went up the coast to
the Umpqua, and by way of Klamath Lake and the Klamath, Rogue, and Pitt Rivers,
circled back to the upper Sacramento, traversed the length of the two great
valleys and passed out over the Tejon.

   He returned from the Colorado to Los Angeles in 1834, and passed northward up
the settled coast portion buying horses, which he drove to market at the
settlements on the Columbia. Young settled in Oregon, and continued for many
years to make trips into California as a trader in mules and cattle.

   We have mentioned the Hudson's Bay Company. They sent a number of trapping
expeditions into California, some of which worked the San Joaquin, doubtless
including what is now Merced County. The earliest, in 1828, was led by McLeod
and guided by Turner, one of the two men who escaped with Smith when the rest of
his party was massacred by the Indians. Another expedition, already refered to,
under Peter Skeen Ogden, crossed over from the Snake River and spent eight
months on the Sacramento and San Joaquin, returning to Vancouver, Cleland tells
us, laden down with furs. He mentions a number of others which found the
Sacramento and its tributaries, such as the Feather and American, rich in
beaver. It does not appear that they came to the San Joaquin.

   It is interesting to digress here to remark that a few specimens of the
beaver and the antelope, which these early comers found so plentiful, still
survive in the county. Over along the Merced River in the vicinity of Snelling
and Hopeton, the writer has seen where beavers have been at work. Only three or
four years ago two young men there, with the willing consent of the owners of
certain small irrigation ditches taking out of the Merced in that vicinity,
which were being damaged, and under a special permit from the State Fish and
Game Commission, trapped some thirty-five of these animals—perhaps the last
instance of beaver trapping that has occurred or will ever occur in the State.

   In the southwesterly part of the county in the vicinity of Mercey Hot
Springs, a few antelope still linger and are occasionally seen. The writer heard
a sheep man there state early in August, 1921, that he had within a few days
seen their tracks at the pools where his sheep drank, and within the last six or
seven years has talked with at least two men who have personally seen a few of
the animals in that region. Within the memory of men not yet middle-aged a small
band of antelope ranged the hills within ten miles to the north and northeast of
Merced, and another small band stayed in the southeasterly corner of the county
in the vicinity of Raynor's Ranch. Isaac Bird, for many years manager of the
Chowchilla Ranch and later president of the Farmers & Merchants Bank in Merced,
told the writer that he had seen antelope between the business section of Merced
and where the county hospital now stands; and there is no lack of men still
living who remember when they used to be hunted in the Deane Colony and Robla
sections.

   Elk also used to abound, though they have been all gone for many years. It is
said that they used to migrate into and out of the Stevinson Colony section
yearly. G. L. Russell, of Lingard, relates that his father told him of seeing a
large pile of cast antlers in that vicinity.

   In addition to these animals which are wild by nature, these early trappers
and explorers found in the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys wild cattle and
especially wild horses, escapes or descendants of escapes from the Spanish
ranchos west of the Diablo Range.

   "Multiplication of ranchos and increase of horses," Richman tells us, "led to
the expedient of killing the surplus animals. As early as 1784 it had been found
necessary to reduce by slaughter surplus cattle at the San Francisco presidio.
But horses (mares more especially) were less valuable than cattle, and having
increased to vast herds which consumed the mission pasture, and in the San
Joaquin Valley roamed hither and yon in squadrons devastating though
picturesque, it was ordered in 1805, at the instance of President Tapis, that
their number be reduced; and between 1805 and 1810 they were slaughtered by tens
of thousands."

   Richman refers in a note to a communication dated 1805, preserved in the
Bancroft collection, from Mascario de Castro to Arrillaga, San Jose, on the
necessity of killing mares, and to a petition of the Russian-American Company
stating that immense herds of wild cattle and horses range as far north as the
Columbia River, and that an annual slaughter of 10,000 to 30,000 head had been
ordered.

   Lieutenant Joseph Warren Revere of the United States Navy, an expert
horseman, author of "A Tour of Duty in California," 1849, who tells us that he
has mounted the noblest of the race in the stables of Mohammed Ali, Viceroy of
Egypt, as well as those belonging to other potentates in Syria, Egypt, and
Barbary, besides choice specimens of the Persian stock in British India,
describes the horse of the Spanish Californian ranchero for us. He tells us it
was of Andalusian descent, "beautiful and strong. White, dapple-gray, or
chestnut in color, he was full-chested, thin-flanked, round in the barrel,
clean-limbed, with unusually small head, feet, and ears, large, full eyes,
expanded nostrils, and full flowing mane and tail."

   It is interesting to note that this animal, which we thus find so abundant
and figuring so considerably in the history of California at the beginning of
the nineteenth century, and which in its wild state was of course entirely gone
before the beginning of the twentieth, appears not to have been introduced into
the present California at the beginning of the eighteenth. Kino, who commanded
an exploring expedition to the Gila-Colorado junction in 1701, relates that the
Indians there were amazed at the speed of his horses, an animal never before
seen by them.

   That wild horses were abundant in Merced County in its infancy is well
established. Samuel L. Givens, a pioneer of 1852 to Mariposa and Merced
Counties, now living at the age of eighty-two on his ranch on Bear Creek about
thirteen miles northeast of Merced, relates that there was within his
recollection a corral for their capture somewhat further down the creek,
probably on the Wolfsen Ranch, with a low fence or wing extending far out away
from the creek to guide the animals into the enclosure. And in the minutes of
the county for the first year of its existence (1855) it stands of record that
certain citizens petitioned the board of supervisors, and the board granted the
petition, to impose a license of $25 a month on each person engaging in the
business of catching mustang horses within the county. The board imposed the
license and gave the sheriff half of it for collecting it. Evidently there was
no great rush to the county seat to pay the license; we may fairly presume that
the sheriff earned his money at the job.

   But we have wandered beyond the age of the explorers into that of the earlier
settlers. It is necessary to go back some twenty years to notice one more early
American exploring expedition from across the Sierra Nevadas. This is the one of
Joseph Reddeford Walker, who, like Young, was a Tennesseean. Walker was one of
the lieutenants of that Captain Bonneville whose expedition to the Great West
has been chronicled by Washington Irving.

   On July 24, 1833, Walker left Bonneville's main command on the Green River,
and with thirty-five or forty men started westward to explore the territory
beyond the Great Salt Lake. The party passed the lake, struck the headwaters of
the Humboldt or Mary's River, followed it to its sink, and crossed the Sierra
Nevada. Washington Irving is vague as to their exact course, and Cleland tells
us that it is still a matter of conjecture—that some place it by way of the
Truckee and others further south, following up the river which now bears
Walker's name and so crossing the crest of the divide. This would bring them in
by way of the Sonora Pass to the head of the South Fork of the Stanislaus, by
the same route by which Smith had crossed to the eastward. Cleland, however,
quotes George Nidever, a member of the expedition, to the effect that the route
down the western slope of the Sierras lay "through a valley between the Merced
and the Tuolomi Rivers." Walker's tombstone, Cleland notes, bears the
inscription, "Camped at Yosemite, Nov. 13, 1833."

   A map accompanying Richman's history shows Walker's route cutting
approximately through the middle—from north to south— of the present Yosemite
National Park, coming in a little north of Mono Lake, where the nearest pass
would be the Tioga.

   The party reached the San Joaquin Valley, at any rate, traveled southward a
short distance, then turned westward to the coast and spent Christmas at
Monterey, where the inhabitants proved courteous and diverting hosts. The.
trappers here got beyond Walker's control and wasted much of Bonneville's
substance, so that after some months Walker led them, except some who elected to
remain, back into the San Joaquin again. He continued up the Valley to near its
southern end and passed out by way of the South Fork of the Kern through the
opening since known as Walker's Pass. Possibly exploring the Owens River Valley,
Walker proceeded in a general northeasterly course and rejoined Bonneville on
the Bear River in Utah.

   These early American expeditions established a regular trade route with
southern California; they increased the foreign population, so that the number
of Americans coming by land rivaled those coming by sea; and they familiarized
the settlers of the western American States- with the resources and the easy
conditions of life in the country west of the Sierra. We have just seen how some
of Walker's men chose to remain in California. Some of the free trappers of some
of these early expeditions likewise chose to remain behind, it would seem, in
the San Joaquin region. W. L. Means, who lives on a ranch in the Merced River
bottom a short distance below Snelling, states that when his father, likewise W.
L. Means, left the Mariposa mines in 1851 or 1852 to come down into the Robla
region some ten or twelve miles southwest of Merced to hunt meat for the market
which the mines supplied, he hired amongst others to help him in curing the
flesh of elk and antelope a man named McPherson, who had lived for some years
among the Mariposa County Indians.

   Doubtless among those wild and adventurous spirits there was every now and
then one who preferred to stay in this new and pleasing wilderness. It is a
reasonable conjecture, though with no very great chance of verification, for the
circumstances of their lives would be greatly against any record except word of
mouth surviving them. The day of the fur hunter who was also an explorer drew to
a close, and the day of the earliest settler approached. From among the first,
guides for the last were sometimes recruited—such men as Walker, Kit Carson, and
Jim Bridger.

   More and more the situation was shaping up for the ultimate taking over of
the territory by Americans. Well-grounded indeed was the increasing dread of the
Mexican officials regarding the growing numbers within their borders of the
citizens of the vigorous young republic to the east. Before we proceed in the
next chapter to follow the fortunes of the earliest Americans who came as
settlers, it is worth while to remind ourselves here that already these
forerunners of the settlers had done as much to occupy the region east of the
Coast Range as Spain and Mexico in all their years had done.


Additional Comments:
HISTORY OF
MERCED COUNTY
CALIFORNIA
WITH A
Biographical Review
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

HISTORY BY
JOHN OUTCALT

ILLUSTRATED COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME
HISTORIC RECORD COMPANY
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
1925


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