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

CHAPTER XVIII

TRANSPORTATION

   There is perhaps no one factor which enters into the history, especially the
early history, of the county which sheds more light upon that history than the
story of the transportation connected with it. The story of that most necessary
handmaiden of the early production and consumption of the region is extremely
picturesque; but more important than that, the story of where people were coming
from and going to, and what they were bringing with them and taking back, is
very illuminative of what manner of life they were living, very illuminative of
the sum total of their history.

   In no particular is it more necessary than in that of transportation, that we
should resolutely put from us the history of the present if we are to understand
that of the past. There are now half a dozen railroads coming into the county,
paved highways and automobiles, telegraph and telephone lines, airplanes
overhead—in short, all the complex fabric of modern transportation and
communication. To understand the early transportation we must reconstruct in our
minds a Merced County in which these things did not exist; indeed, a world in
which most of them did not exist. We have seen how Harvey J. Ostrander and a
companion walked here from San Luis Obispo; how J. L. Ivett walked here from San
Francisco; how pioneers, men and women, came here across the plains in wagons
drawn by ox teams, and took half a year in the journey. In this speed-crazed
age, one of the hardest things for us to realize about the transportation of
those earlier days, is the extremely slow speed at which they traveled. Only
recently there was exhibited in Merced the moving picture based on Zane Grey's
novel, "The Thundering Herd." It was about as false to realities as most movies
are; and one of the respects in which it was most essentially false was, that
the pioneers were represented as driving their teams and wagons at a furious
gallop. Also, the villians robbed a four-horse team of its load of buffalo hides
and carried them off, dragging them with a saddle horse, partly on the front
wheels and axle of the wrecked wagon and partly on the ground. We shall not
understand the transportation of those days unless we realize that they hauled
heavy loads, that they went not only at a walk, but at a slow walk, making
something like twelve or fifteen miles a day, and that they did not indulge in
any gallops over the plains, for the excellent reason that one such piece of
foolishness was pretty likely to damage stock and wagon both, and all the
repairing of such damage the travelers had to make with such scant means as they
had at hand.

   We have seen that the first comers to the county came, some of them, from the
north, from Stockton or Sacramento or San Francisco, and some of them from the
south by way of Los Angeles and Tejon, Visalia and Fort Miller. Also that their
first objective was not this valley country at all, but the mining country of
the hills— the Southern Mines. But though the immigrants came from both north
and south, supplies came practically all from the north. Stockton was the point
from which nearly all the freight was shipped; it came that far from San
Francisco by water, and from Stockton it was hauled by wagon to the mines. The
main artery of travel was not down in the valley where the railroad and the
State highway now parallel each other, but along the edge of the foothills. This
was so for two reasons: first, because it was to the hills that the freight was
going; and second, because of the difficulty of crossing the tributary rivers
which flow into the San Joaquin from the east, which difficulty would have been
much greater down in the plains than it was at the edge of the foothills.

   Very early there were ferries established across these tributaries along the
edge of the foothills; we read in the biographical sketch of Judge James W.
Robertson, for example, that he arrived on the Merced River near where Snelling
was afterwards established in January, 1850, at the old California Ferry, where
Young's Ferry afterwards was. Phillips' Upper Ferry was the point mentioned in
the description of the line dividing Merced from Mariposa County when Merced was
created in April, 1855. During the first year of the county's history we find in
the minutes of the board of supervisors that there was quite a fight on between
Phillips and Young with their ferries and Murray with his bridge, and that the
board licensed them all three, charging them each $250 or $300 license a year,
and putting each under bond at something like $20,000. That indicates a good
deal of traffic by that time. Going to indicate that a large portion of this
traffic stopped between these points and Millerton, is the fact that the yearly
license on Converse's Ferry across the San Joaquin at the latter point was but
$75, and the bond somewhere in proportion; the mines did not extend much south
of Fort Miller.

   These ferries and this bridge, like practically all the others which existed
in those early days, were toll-ferries and toll-bridges. They were established
by private individuals, under permission granted by the county or counties
concerned; the county, as we have seen, put them under bonds and collected a
license from them, and also the county prescribed the rates which they might
charge. There were also toll-roads, established in like manner by private
individuals or companies for their own profit but under some county regulation.
In the first year or two of Merced County's history we find numerous references
in the minutes of the board of supervisors to A. Firebaugh and his toll-road
across Pacheco Pass. Firebaugh and several associates, under permission from
this county and Santa Clara, built the road across the range between the San
Joaquin Valley and Gilroy, and there was a proviso in the franchise granted them
that after a period of years the road should become public. Proprietary
toll-roads were built in many places in the hills; places where the expenditure
of more money than the county could afford to spend on some hill would produce a
road enough better than the public one so that teamsters would pay the toll. One
of the most interesting toll-roads locally was that which Washburn built from
this side of Cold Springs into Yosemite, which was opened to travel in 1875, and
which remained a toll-road until just a few years ago; many people since the
coming of the automobile will remember paying toll on it. "Toll House" is a
geographical name which occurs repeatedly in the foothills and commemorates the
day of the toll-roads.

   In Merced County, in the valley country, a road was created in the early days
by the simple process of dedicating a more or less indefinite strip of country
to the purposes of travel. The line was made definite upon the ground by
traveling over it, but in case of washouts and ruts the travelers pioneered out
a new route alongside the old one. There was plenty of land, and for the most
part it was public land, and was used only for cattle range, except the
comparatively small areas along the river and creek bottoms. As we have seen in
the chapter on the No-Fence Law, the law prior to 1870 required the farmer to
fence stock out instead of requiring the stockmen to fence their animals in, and
accordingly the roads were for the most part not fenced. Roads were worked by
the system of road overseers; and in the early minutes of the supervisors we
find repeatedly where they appointed overseers, a dozen or more for the diffrent
districts into which roughly they divided the county, with each overseer given
the men who lived in his district, each man being required to work out his road
tax.

   The great artery of travel was the road from Stockton out to the edge of the
foothills about Knight's Ferry and thence along the edge of the hills by way of
La Grange, Merced Falls, the Union Post Office, Newton's Ferry across the
Chowchilla, Converse's Ferry across the San Joaquin, Fort Miller, and so on to
Visalia and Tejon and Los Angeles. But the bulk of travel stopped with the limit
of the Southern Mines, for the most part north of the San Joaquin. The greater
number of early roads in Merced County were for the purpose of connecting the
settlements which were creeping out into the flat country with this Stockton and
Fort Miller road; the chief exception to this was the road running down the
north side of the Merced from Merced Falls clear to Hill's Ferry at the mouth of
the Merced. Somewhat later other roads connected Hill's Ferry with the country
on west to the Coast Range. From San Jose across Pacheco Pass a stage road led
to Visalia; the San Luis Ranch was a station on this road, and from the San Luis
Ranch also we find pretty early a road to Stockton. A principal fact which we
must never forget is that along the line of the Central Pacific and the main
valley highway, where now the principal towns and the thickest settlements are
located, there was in the early days no route of travel—for the two reasons
already indicated, that it was to the hills and not to the valley that travel
was bound, and that crossing, and travel between crossings too, was easiest up
next to the hills. Along that line there may have been up and downs, but there
was at least solid bottom, and freighting across the valley country would in the
winter have made one continuous mire hole of the road clear from Stockton to
Visalia. It was not until almost the end of the sixties, when grain-farming had
come as far south as Stanislaus County, that travel began to leave the edge of
the foothills for further out in the valley; in 1868 we read of the
establishment by Congress of a new mail route from Stockton to Millerton by way
of French Camp, Tuolumne City, Paradise, Empire City, "Hopetown," P. Y. Welch's
store on Mariposa Creek, Appling's store on the Chowchilla, and so on to Millerton.

   Along about 1870 the newspapers carry notices of intention to petition for
three new roads which may be said to have constituted a road system for the East
side: one from Montgomery's Ranch, the present Wolfsen place, down the north
side of Bear Creek to Dover; a second from Sandy Mush northeastward, joining the
road from Snelling to Mariposa Creek near Montgomery's Ranch; and the third from
the vicinity of Fergus or the Franklin schoolhouse to McSwain's Ferry, leading
from the first road to the country north of the Merced River. As indicating the
unfixed locations of the roads up to this time, we cite the complaint which
Steele makes about the people of Plainsburg, of how the farmers, who have
recently settled on the grain lands, are changing the routes of the roads to
suit their own convenience or whim, so that in many cases the bridges which the
county had been at pains to build across some of the creeks were left without
roads connecting with them.

   The quantity of freight hauled between Stockton and the Southern Mines, and
the country tributary to the mines, was immense. Large freighting businesses
were built up. Among the men who were notable in this business were Alvin
Fisher, C. H. Huffman, and Hughes & Keyes. W. H. Hartley was also in this
business before he settled on Bear Creek and went to wheat-raising. Fisher
afterwards was one of the notable figures in the stage business to Yosemite, at
first from Stockton, and then as the railroad was built southward, from Modesto,
and then from Merced. A few miles out of Stockton on the Sacramento road, Fisher
had his own stock ranch, where he raised the horses he used in his teaming
business. C. H. Huffman, the old-timers will tell you, had the finest teams and
hauled the largest loads on the road. These were only a few of the notable
figures in the business. They were not only teamsters, but also commission
merchants; they bought supplies for regular and occasional customers in the
mining country and along the route from Stockton south, and delivered the
purchases. E. M. Stoddard, before he came to Merced about the time that town was
started, was in the teaming business out of Stockton, with a partner named Ladd.
They had a warehouse on Hunter Street. After the railroad reached Bear Creek and
Merced was built, Stoddard & Hubbard were commission merchants and teamsters for
a number of years. Stoddard later absorbed the business.

   This freighting and staging business employed hundreds of men and thousands
of horses. Merced County farmers raised a lot of hay, for which the teaming
business furnished a market; and Merced County stockmen raised a good many of
the horses and mules, and there were a lot of both used. There were also, as we
have seen in the case of Peter Fee, some oxen used. J. M. Montgomery and a lot
of others raised oxen. The oxen, however, went pretty early, except in the
logging in the lumber camps, where they were used up into the present century.
Everything, as we have seen, came out of Stockton. The best teams would haul
about a ton to an animal. It was a pretty level haul from Stockton to
Snelling's. The freight rate in the fifties was about $30 a ton. They made, as
we have said, about twelve or fifteen miles a day, and this made frequent
stopping-places necessary. And they were there, every two or three or four
miles, ranch houses usually, with the ranch sometimes the main thing, and
sometimes the accomodation of travelers being the chief occupation of the owner,
as the fates and his gifts willed it. Peter Fee kept travelers, as he tells us
in his dairy; and he also tells us of a number of others, where he sometimes
stayed when he was on one of his frequent teaming trips—Young at the ferry,
Dingley up towards Knight's Ferry, with whom Fee 'swopt oxen," the Dutch Ranch,
and so on. John Loftus Ivett, on his ranch above Snelling, kept a house of
entertainment for travelers and teamsters and a trading post also, where little
local teamsters would haul in wool and other local produce in small loads and
Ivett would make up big loads to send out to Stockton.

   Necessary adjuncts of these stopping-places were of course large stables and
corrals; and they were in many cases adjuncts of hotels in the towns too, as we
learn from the early hotel advertisements in the Snelling papers. Many men who
had products to sell had also teams and wagons to deliver them with, as had
Greeley with his sawmill and William Nelson & Son with their flour mill. Henry
Nelson tells of hauling flour to pretty much all of the foothill towns from
Sonora to Grub Gulch with their own team; and in the summer of 1872, after their
mill had burned up and they had the team on their hands with nothing in their
regular line to do, he came over to the new town of Merced and hauled wheat from
the region about Planada and Tuttle to the new warehouse at Merced, with a
Chinaman to help him load the sacks. He also went out and bought wheat along
down the Merced, and some of the first wheat that was raised on the site of the
town of Merced, and hauled some of it to the mill himself.

   The railroad, the Central Pacific, the first one, came in 1872; and this did
away with the freighting by team from Stockton. But there was a great deal of
teaming for many years later, of course; the coming of the railroad simply moved
the starting-point further south, first to Modesto, then to Merced, and so on
down the line. Out of each of these towns went the traffic to the hills, and by
and large it went by wagons. Even today the hills are but partially served by
railroads. and the regions between the railroads were served by teams until
these gave way to automobiles and trucks. The last of the freighters by team out
of Merced was "Vic" Trabucco, who for twenty years or more has hauled the
merchandise for the Trabucco store in Mariposa from Merced, and who only three
or four years ago replaced his four-horse team with a truck. For purely local
hauling, of grain and hay from the ranches to the railroad, the trucks have not
yet wholly replaced the horse and mule teams, and the same is true of the
harvesting; only five years ago a thirty-two-animal harvester was used on the
land where the California Packing Corporation's four-thousand-acre orchard is
now flourishing.

   The Central Pacific, as we have seen, was completed in 1872. The West Side
Railroad and the Oakdale Branch were built in 1890; the Valley Road, or
Spreckels' Road, now the Santa Fe, was built in 1896; and the Yosemite Valley
Railroad, in 1907; while the Tidewater Southern came into the Hilmar country in
1917. We have told the story of the Central Pacific in considerable detail, for
it was significant of the change from cattle to grain, and that change marked a
fundamental change in the character of the county, since it was a determining
factor as to the direction its growth should take. Of none of the later
railroads can anything like this be said; they all added to the convenience and
completeness of transportation, but no one or all of them could turn the
county's course aside essentially from the lines in which it had been cast when
the wheat men had once replaced the cattle men.

   The freighting from Merced into Mariposa County continued then to be a big
industry after the Central Pacific came. It was mostly freighting to the hills.
The product there was chiefly gold; and neither it nor any of the lesser
products had much bulk, except lumber and wood. Lumber shipped up the San
Joaquin began pretty early to compete with lumber from the Sierra Nevadas, and
after 1872 the outside lumber came in by rail. Hauling lumber from the mountains
was difficult and expensive. This fact led to the construction of the Madera
Flume in the early seventies, shortly after the railroad was completed; and in
Steele's paper of that time we may read of the plan to build this means of
conveying lumber from the mountains, and how it was to reach the railroad "at a
point between Berenda and Borden"—from which we may infer that both these
stations are older than Madera itself, which derives its very name from the
timber for which it was the terminus on the railroad. Merced men were largely
instrumental in the founding of Madera, prominent among those who took part in
the flume enterprise being J. M. Montgomery and J. B. Cocanour —and they lost a
lot of money in it, too, which is no criticism of the soundness of the project
itself.

   Into the hills, so long as the mines were active, there was much freight to
go, all that fed and clothed and furnished the houses of the population there;
and we have seen that that population was large enough so that Mariposa had an
Assemblyman to herself, while Merced and Stanislaus shared one between them. And
there was mining machinery, exceedingly heavy hauling—stamp mills, engines,
boilers—you may find some of it up there today, rusting away in places where you
marvel how they ever hauled it. Just for a sample, there was the famous old Hite
Mine at Hite's Cove on the South Fork. John Hite had fifty stamps there in the
seventies, and they say took out a million dollars. He built a road, a grade
twisting down the side of a point for three miles, to get to it; the grade was
so crooked and steep that old-timers will tell you of a valley teamster who took
a contract to haul some stuff in there, and who went to the top of the hill and
took one look and then departed and returned no more. There were mines around
Mariposa, Hornitos, and Coulterville and along the river, and the sum total of
heavy machinery that went in to them was appalling—and all by teams.

   Just as Alvin Fisher, C. H. Huffman, and Hughes & Keyes had done out of
Stockton, there were men who freighted out of Merced and acted as commission
merchants and purchasing agents for numerous companies, associations, and
individuals up in the hills. Ladd & Stoddard had been in the business out of
Stockton, and Stoddard & Hubbard were in it out of Merced. The business was
later absorbed by E. M. Stoddard. Stoddard was purchasing agent for a number of
years for John R. Hite, buying and hauling up to Hite's mine the flour,
potatoes, and supplies in general that the mine needed. And he had a very
valuable contract to do the hauling for the Chinese Six Companies, to many
places in the mountains. At Mormon Bar there were thousands of Chinese to whom
he hauled supplies. Every once in a while they would send out a load of human
bones, being snipped some to China for burial.

   For the first few years of Merced's existence the mountain freighting was the
big thing. Then along about 1880 the mines began to be worked out, and the
Chinese Exclusion Act put an end to the Chinese business. Meanwhile the
passenger business was growing. The stages from Stockton to Mariposa had been
operated from the beginning by the Alvin Fisher lines, and this continued until
Fisher died and his business was sold out in 1874 in Merced. Fisher was a factor
in the Yosemite business up to his death, and that was growing. Upon the sale in
Merced in 1874, the interests of the Fisher estate were bought by a group of men
headed by M. McClenathan, who had followed the livery and teaming business south
with the railroad; A. J. Meany and C. S. Peck were among the group who were with
McClenathan. They ran a stage by Coulterville for three or four years in
Yosemite. Meanwhile, in 1875, Washburn Brothers (A. H. and John), had built a
road into Yosemite from Clark's Station, now Wawona; and along about the end of
the seventies they induced the railroad company to build the branch to Raymond
and make that the jumping-off place for the Yosemite travel. McClenathan entered
into an arrangement with the Washburns to haul to Wawona such traffic as got off
at Merced, and the route by Coulterville was abandoned for a number of years.
The passenger business continued to increase, and the freight business to
decrease as the population of Mariposa County decreased.

   McClenathan died in 1886, and E. M. and D. K. Stoddard bought his business in
July of that year. McClenathan's stables were where the Hotel El Capitan stands
today. Within a few weeks after the Stoddards had bought the property the
stables burned down. They were rebuilt. E. M. and D. K. Stoddard continued the
arrangement with the Washburns which McClenathan had made to carry passengers
from Merced to Wawona. In 1896, when the Valley Railroad, the Santa Fe, was
completed, they established a rival passenger business to the Central Pacific's,
and Stoddard & Son made an arrangement with the new railroad to carry their
passengers into Yosemite by way of Coulterville.  They did about forty per cent
of the business, against about sixty per cent by the Central Pacific and the
Washburns, by Wawona. The business by way of Coulterville and also that by way
of Big Oak Flat had languished during the intervening years; the Southern
Pacific routed the bulk of the travel by Berenda and Raymond and Wawona.

   Then years after the Santa Fe came, the construction of the Yosemite Valley
Railroad was begun. E. M. Stoddard then turned the business over to his son, and
D. K. Stoddard moved his headquarters for a brief time to Merced Falls, and in
the spring of 1907 on to the terminus of the new railroad at El Portal. Under a
five-year contract he carried on the stage business from there into Yosemite
until 1911, when the stage line was sold to the Yosemite Valley Railroad Company
and they began in the spring of 1912 the use of automobiles, using part machines
that year.

   The best year in the history of horse-drawn stages into Yosemite was 1910,
when about 16,000 passengers were carried into the Valley. The greatest day,
however, occurred in the previous year, when, on June 6, 1909, they took 601
passengers from El Portal into the Valley in 68 stages, with 272 horses. It was
a Knights of Columbus Excursion, a one-day run, worked up by J. B. Duffy, now
general passenger agent of the Santa Fe west of Albuquerque; he was then an
excursion agent for the Santa Fe. The 68 stages consisted of 48 regular ones
belonging to this run, 4 with teams and drivers borrowed from the government, 12
borrowed from Wawona, and 4 borrowed from Coffman & Kenney. They had them all
lined up. each with a big number on, and the passengers were assigned to their
stages by number before the train arrived at El Portal. The saloons at El Portal
were closed for the occasion, so that no driver might be late or befuddled; and
the whole party was loaded in about twenty minutes and everybody was landed in
Yosemite without mishap. On October 7 of this same year they took in President
Taft and party, seven stages in all, including amongst other the President,
Governor Gillette, United States Senator Flint, Congressmen Inglebright,
Need-ham, and McKinley, Shaw, the President's secretary, and Butts, his body
guard. Henry Hedges drove the stage uLoya," with a team of four browns, which
carried the President and his immediate party. Following were six other stages
with the rest of the party, including a lot of railroad and telephone men.

   Among the stage drivers were Dowst, Grant, Snediger, George Powell, Jimmie
Leonard, and Frank Tryer. They knew their business, and maintained schedules
like a railroad. Mr. Stoddard relates that one summer, from April 1 to November
1, they carried the mail from Coulterville to Merced with such regularity that
they nearly jarred the government of the United States.   They left Coulterville
at 5 A. M. and were due at the post office at Merced at 11:45. They proceed to
arrive at 11: 45 with such exactness that the post office authorities back at
Washington concluded that Postmaster Charles Harris was drawing on his
imaginaion a little when he recorded the time of their arrival. He received
instructions to report the exact time of arrival. Still the reports continued to
go in "11: 45." The honor of the stage drivers was touched. They made sure of
arriving a little before that objectionable 11: 45 and then waited just long
enough so that their arrival was always just at that time. The Post Office
Department sent an inspector out from Washington, and presently a second one.
The record stands that for seven months the mail from Coulterville arrived each
day at 11: 45 a. m.

   It must be realized that the coming of the railroads, even after there were
four or five of them, still left a lot of hauling and that the roads were bad.
They were bad until the day of the automobile had been a reality for several
years. It is scarcely a dozen years ago now since the main Valley Highway of the
State system was paved through the county alongside of the Central Pacific
tracks." Since that time there has been another paved highway built across the
county from north to south on the West Side, part of which was built under the
million-and-a-quarter-dollar county-highway bond issue voted in November, 1918,
and part of which is State-aid road. The State-aid road runs from the Pacheco
Pass through Los Banos and by way of Santa Rita out to the Chowchilla Ranch, and
thence into Madera County and out to the Valley Highway at Califa. Other
portions of the county highway extend from the Chowchilla Ranch to within three
miles of Merced, from Atwater to Winton, from Livingston to the American
Vineyard, and after a two mile gap, from the new Milliken Bridge north through
Irwin and Hilmar to connect with the Stanislaus County highway to Turlock, from
Hopeton to above Snelling, and from the State-aid highway between Los Banos and
Santa Rita to Dos Palos and Dos Palos Colony. About nine years ago the portion
of the State Highway lateral in Mariposa County from Merced to Mariposa was
constructed—an excellent mountain road, ultimately to be paved. Three or four
years later the part of this lateral in Merced County, about fourteen miles, was
built and paved. Within the last three years this road has been extended by the
State Highway Commission from Mariposa on about fourteen miles to Briceburg on
the Merced River, and for more than a year now has been extended on up the south
side of the river by convict labor to connect with the federal road which
already leads from El Portal into Yosemite. This will be completed for use in
the summer of 1926, and there is a fund already in existence for paving it. The
road beyond Mariposa is twenty-one feet wide in the cuts and twenty-four feet in
the fills, and is well banked on the curves; its highest point in crossing the
divide between Mariposa and the Merced River is only 2900 feet above the sea,
and it will provide a year-around highway into Yosemite, open to automobile
travel fifty-one years after the Washburn Brothers opened their road by way of
Wawona. Meanwhile the State has graded the highway across the Pacheco Pass, and
there is a paved road from San Juan to the ocean.

   All of this marks the approaching fulfillment of a vision of a
Yosemite-to-the-Sea Highway which such road boosters as John R. Graham, Richard
Shaffer, Jr., H. B. Stoddard, Frank Barcroft, J. W. Haley, and a number of
others have for a number of years been working for, and the fulfillment of a
desire which we see cropping up in the columns of the papers of the county every
now and then ever since the beginning of the wheat-farming days in the late
sixties—a road across the river, connecting the East and the West Sides of the
county, extended to a road connecting Yosemite with the Coast Highway and the
towns on Monterey Bay.

   Only the day before this is written, the county papers carried a story of how
Los Banos has joined the newly formed County Chamber of Commerce, the last of
the various towns of the county to do so, thus completing the roster. You can
drive from the county seat to Los Banos now in an hour and a quarter and keep
within the speed limit. It is quite a long time since Henry Miller kept a team
ready for his service in each town, and J. W. Mitchell spent the greater part of
his time driving about with a span of horses and a buckboard over his
110,000-acre ranch. The county reaches from the summit of the eastern Coast
Range to the Sierra foothills, but there are probably not two per cent of the
people in it who cannot drive from where they live to any other part of the
county in less than three hours; and for the movement of freight, either
supplies coming in or produce going out, while the roads are not perfect, they
are so vastly better than they were twenty years ago, when there used to be from
500 to 1000 horses stabled every night in Merced, that the men who drove those
horses would hardly recognize it as the same county.

   One form of transportation which in one sense of the word did not affect the
course of the county's growth materially, may be said in another sense to have
affected it profoundly. This was the river steamer transportation, and the sense
in which it affected the county's history was what may be called a negative
sense. It affected the course the county's growth should take because it was
such a failure as transportation. We have seen how Steele in the late sixties,
when the new grain-raisers had begun to pour into the country south of the
Merced and into the West Side country, indulged in a good deal of erroneous
prophecy about the  continued growth of Snelling, and especially about the
assured future and permanence and growth of Dover. The essential reason why his
prophecy was erroneous was that the San Joaquin and the Merced ran too low for
navigation, by about midsummer, particularly as it was not until about this low
water stage that the grain began to be ready for shipment. It is said that
steamers, some of the small free-lance freighters, a few times came up the
Merced as far as Cox's Ferry, and we have assurance that the pictures of
steamers in the pictures of the Stevinson and Turner ranches in the old 1881
history are founded on fact. On the San Joaquin the head of navigation seems to
have been Sycamore Point, only a short distance below where the Central Pacific
crosses the stream. The San Joaquin is still officially considered by the United
States Government as a navigable stream, and the bridges are turn bridges below
that point. Oldtimers in Merced tell of seeing the smoke of steamers from the
county seat as they puffed up against the current. They frequently took cargoes
of wool from Firebaugh and points lower down. It is interesting to speculate how
different the history of Merced County and the whole San Joaquin Valley would
have been if river navigation with heavy cargoes had been possible the year
around. The two lines of railroad first built across the county from north to
south may be regarded as admissions that river navigation had been tried and
found wanting. If the river had been navigable, it would have proved a bond of
union instead of a barrier between the West and the East Sides, the railroads
would not probably have been built where they were, the towns would not have
been built where they were- and other "ifs" could be added indefinitely; but
enough of them have been suggested.


Additional Comments:
Extracted from:

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


File at: http://ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/ca/merced/history/1925/historyo/transpor334ms.txt

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