I transcribed this for the Californio content, but the story of the C. & N. Railroad, (and the chief engineer's trip to Japan) Mayor Rossi's "Greater San Francisco," the guy in Chico with the log of the U. S. S. Constitution, life on Alcatraz before the prison, and the Bear Creek killings in Redding are worth reading about. As usual, I've left off the current events from the beginning of this edition of The Knave, focusing on the old-timey stuff. Much more Knave editions are here.- MF
Here and There
"WHENEVER HE was well he played and talked - when he was ill he worked and wrote. And so it was with him when he was in California. He was confined to his bed or at least indoors, yet he worked and wrote stories here that will live forever." With Flodden Heron speaking, the Hawthorne Club of San Francisco observed the birthday of Robert Louis Stevenson this week by placing a wreath on the statue in Portsmouth Square. There were only a few present and the ceremonies were purposely simple. Stevenson, who knew San Francisco, Monterey and St. Helena, has intimate and enduring place in the California memories and appreciation. ... The week saw a birthday come to Mrs. Naomi Schenck, of The Dalles, Oregon. Reputed to be the last survivor of the Donner party, she is now ninety. It was as Naomi Pike, a baby, she went through the horrors with that emigrant train which faced hunger and cold in the winter of 1846. One of the men of the party carried her from the scene when the rescue was effected. ... An intimation that she is at work on a book about the Roosevelts, present and past, was given by Gertrude Atherton, within the week, when in an NRA talk she admitted having made a deep study of the subject and outlined material, seriously and sprightly, which might well be used in a novel. At any rate, hearers gained the impression the work is on her mind and are looking for the formal announcement.
The C. & N. Start
MORE REMINISCENCES of the California and Nevada Railroad, together with a correction, come from Frank H. Seely, “one who worked there" in the other days. Mr. Seely calls attention to the fact that while the late F. M. Smith was later interested in the road it was another Smith, Captain John, sometimes called “Denver Smith” who was in at the start. Writes Seely: "This California and Nevada Narrow Gauge R. R. was the result of the owners' desire to make a short line connection from Oakland and Luning, Nevada, and was started in April, 1884, by the following parties: Capt. John Smith, President of the Company, a former contractor for construction on the Denver and South R. R., also the Denver, Rio Grande R. R.; Vice-President J. S. Emery, founder of the town of Emeryville, the land terminal of the road, and the principal owner of the San Pablo Avenue Horse Car line: Chas. F. Burrell was Secretary and Treasurer, and Calvin G. Pratt as Chief Engineer on location and construction. The first line camp was on San Pablo Avenue at Sugarloaf Mountain [the "little hill" in El Cerrito? - MF] and location surveys were started in both directions, the first party in the direction of San Pablo to establish the right of way, the second on the water line at the point near the Key System Right of Way to obtain the sea level for a gradient. This is where the small wharf juts out into the bay near the site of the old Judson works. The railroad survey went out in a northerly direction to what at that time was called Cat Creek road and the survey followed the line of San Pablo - or Cat Creek Road to its intersection with the Fish Ranch Road which is now Tunnel Road. This survey passed the Thodes Grove where picnics were held, thence crossed the creek and entered the Harry L. Thornton place then passed through the Orinda Park homesite of Surveyor General Wagner and then into the Mayor Bryant place where Bryant's Station was located. [A modern view - MF] From this point the location was held up pending negotiations as to the most direct route over the hill to Lafayette. When the route was determined it was discovered that the Chief Engineer had absconded with about $20,000.00 but was later located in Yokohama, Japan, and was brought back, but the funds had been used in wild living and so could not be had for further work. When the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe R. R. finally obtained the right of way from the California and Nevada Narrow Gauge R. R. for a fair valuation it was transferred and the original holders dissolved its organization."
When Mayors Speak
THERE ARE THOSE in the San Francisco City Hall who suggest that it might be a good plan to prevent mayors from taking trips to the East. They recall the furore occasioned when Mayor Rossi, in Chicago, told of his vision and plan of a San Francisco which would take in all neighbors, only to bring protests from points surrounding and discovery there is nothing in the city's charter to permit the undertaking. [Part 2, here. This idea is so crazy, I've pasted it below, in its entirety. - MF] In Chicago again Mayor Rossi, while on his way to Washington to confer on the newer plans for civil works employment, made a little speech to the interviewers. He called attention to the climate of California - something which always seems to be a good idea - and coupled with it that subject which was on his mind, unemployment. The ones without jobs in the state of sunshine and warm weather, he said, do not fear cold and in fact “enjoy a feeling of confidence and optimism.” That, say those who are burdened with the local problems, is an invitation to the unemployed of the land to come out here and add to the difficulties of the situation.
Davis' Captor Dead
FROM CHICO COMES the word of the death a few days ago of James McCord Stilson, one of the most colorful characters of the Sacramento Valley and known far and wide as the possessor of one of the best collections of pioneer and Indian relics. Since the death of his wife several years ago Stilson, who was 87 years old, lived alone in his Chico cottage, surrounded by his treasures. He had served a number of terms as chairman of the Butte Republican County Central Committee and was active last year in the Hoover campaign. But although deeply interested in politics, it was as a Civil War veteran and as a collector of early day souvenirs that Stilson was known. A native of Connecticut, he joined the Union Army and was among those present at the capture of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, and was the first to carry the report of the capture to General Wilson in Macon, Ga. He came to California at the close of the war, locating in Chico in 1868. He became identified with the activities of the G. A. R. and for many years had attended every national encampment of that organization, holding a number of high offices in it. Periodically Stilson would journey into the mountains on a treasure hunt, being gone for weeks and returning with valuable specimens of Indian arrow heads and pottery. He was an expert on the subject and a few years ago loaned part of his collection to the State exhibit at Sutter's Fort in Sacramento. Stilson was an Oakland visitor last year at the time the U. S. S. Constitution was moored here. He flew from Chico with the original log of “Old Ironsides," which he presented to the historic ship's commander. The log covered the period from March 2, 1835, to July 31, 1838. It had been in Stilson's possession since 1868.
When Alcatraz Was Gay
ALCATRAZ - island of pleasant memories. How incongruous this seems to the thousands of us who have traveled the Bay for years and gazed at the bleak, forbidding upthrust of rock crowned with its military prison. How many persons have stood at the rail of the Sausalito ferry and glimpsed a bit of the life thereon. Lines of grey khaki-clad figures moving about under the watchful eyes of armed military guards. Then we have sighed and with a shake of the head have either expressed aloud, or to ourselves, a thankfulness that we have not had to live there. Now comes the new talk of Alcatraz as the “Devil's Island" of the United States, a prison for the toughest of the tough and the hardest of the hard. Its future seems even blacker than its past, of which most of us know. But to Mrs. Mary R. Hunkin, of Pacific Grove the name brings memories of a happy childhood. This was the time when Alcatraz was an army post. No prison marred its outline. Instead there was a comparatively small fortress built of red brick perching precariously on the top of the hill. It was called "The Bastille.” The garrison was under command of Col. A. M. Randol and the entire twelve acres of its surface provided a playground for the Colonel's daughter. There were tennis courts, too, close by the old fortress, and the officers of the military post lived in little houses that flanked the picturesque road winding to the hill top. Perhaps that road is still there but there is no "chariot” to carry passengers from the small dock to the bluff above. The "chariot," a peculiar two-seated rig drawn by a not too ambitious horse, is perhaps typical of Alcatraz in the early '80's. Colonel Randol had it built expressly for the purpose of carrying residents and visitors up that short winding road, and with its passing went the regime of intimate homeliness on the island. Today the walls of the cell blocks in which there are 600 individual cells present only an aspect of frowning austerity. It would make a pretty story if one could say that in the early days Alcatraz was sort of a Paradise. That would contrast with the "Devil's Island” idea. But alas! that would not be true. The island, after all, is very much of a huge rock, it never had densely wooded slopes nor was covered with a profusion of wild flowers that men destroyed to create their prison.
Newspaper's Birthday
WHEN A NEWSPAPER reaches its seventy-fifth year it is entitled to celebrate, and that is what the Contra Costa Gazette, of Martinez, did with a big special edition telling the story of its county's past and present. The Gazette was established as a weekly on September 18, 1858, by W. B. Soule & Co., and at Martinez. A number of names of old-time newspapermen come in with the changes which followed. R. K. Bonnard, B. E. Hillman, W. Bradford, R. R. Bunker and W. W. Theobald owning all or part interest during the first few years. In 1868, when C. B. Porter owned the Theobald interest, an earthquake wrecked the building and in 1871 the plant was destroyed by fire. New machinery and type was secured and an edition appeared within 48 hours of the blaze. It was in 1865 that the publishers moved the paper to Pacheco which was looming up as a leading center and there the paper stayed until 1873 when it came back to Martinez. Bunker and Porter then being the proprietors. For over a score of years W. A. Rugg was the presiding genius, building up the paper, establishing it as a daily and wielding a wide influence. In 1930 it was purchased from short-time owners who bought it from Rugg, by Senator Will R. Sharkey, present owner. Under a number of names, as weekly, semi-weekly, and daily and printed in two cities, the paper has gone through fire and quake to make its regular appearance for seventy-five years. Its annual edition extolls the glories of a county rich in industry and agriculture and is one which may well be prized for reference.
The Spanish Settlers
NOT THE LEAST interesting columns in the Gazette's annual are those telling the old Spanish story as gleaned from the letters of Dr. John Marsh, county's first American settler, from military reports, and other sources. The account has it that in 1823 when the first applications for grants of land in this county were made, Contra Costa was without a white resident. The initial applications were those of Francisco Castro for the San Pablo Rancho and of Ignacio Martinez for the Pinole rancho. As approved each was granted an area four leagues in extent. In the following year members of these two families, the county's first permanent white settlers, built adobe residences. Their nearest neighbors were the Peraltas at San Antonio and the Castros at San Lorenzo. In 1826 Jose Maria Amador acquired the San Ramon Rancho and in 1828 Valencia obtained the Acalanes Rancho at Lafayette and Felipe Briones the rancho of his name and Moraga the Redwood rancho or the Lagunas Palos Colorados. At that time also, Salvio Pacheco obtained the grant on the Rancho Monte del Diablo and Dona Juana Pacheco obtained the Rancho San Miguel and her nephew, Ygnacio Sibrian, assumed direction of the property. [See also this article by Andrew Alden. - MF] Mariano Castro and Bartolo Pacheco settled upon the San Ramon Rancho in 1832. In the same year William Welsh secured the Welch grant, which includes the townsite of Martinez and in 1837 Dr. John Marsh, the county's first American settler, established himself upon his grant, Los Mejanos or Pulpunes and gave to the county its first production of cereals. The Castros are credited with having the first "fruit garden.” Other Spanish families settling in the county included Alvarado, Sepulveda, Miranda, Soto, Alviso, Naviaga, Berryessa, Higuero, Boca, Estudillo, and Sunol.
“Caribou Bill”
MEN WHO KNOW their Alaska of the old days are telling stories now of "Caribou Bill.” He was in the Yukon before the gold rush and for a long time after, a picturesque figure of showman's training, a carrier of the mails, and a champion "musher.” Caribou Bill was named William F. Cooper when he was born in Rochester, N. Y., 61 years ago.' It is said he was a friend of Jack London's and there are many hereabouts who knew him in Alaska or made his acquaintance during his not infrequent journeys down to the States. He was the one who "mushed" from Skagway to New York in 1909 during the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle., In 1908 his friends boasted that he was the world's champion dog “musher” and, to prove it, Bill started from Nome on a four-years' globe-trotting jaunt. One of the conditions was that he leave without a cent in order to win a purse of $100,000 offered by the Nome Sweepstakes Association. Not far from Nome, the sled broke through the ice and Cooper narrowly escaped with his life. A month later he bedded down for the night in a log cabin where the body of a man who had been frozen reposed uneasily in one corner. On another occasion he was lost in a blizzard and once he fell into a crevasse, each time being rescued, according to the legends, by his dogs. Caribou Bill's world tour carried him to New York in the Spring of 1910. His advance agents circulated the story that he had been exiled from Russia by the Czar; another that he was a member of a rescue party that dug for seventy-eight entombed men buried by an avalanche in White Horse Pass, Alaska, in 1904. On his dog-sled trips he always carried a moosehide whip, thirty feet long. It became, in his hands, a deadly weapon, and with it he could kill a cat or rabbit at ten paces. Whether he ever finished his around-the-world-trip is not in the records. Bill died within the week at Tacoma.
Story of a Rifle
THE BEAR CREEK Indian uprising of 1866 was recalled the other day when John Schuler contributed to a display which the Native Sons sponsored at Redding, a brass-mounted rifle nearly seventy years old. It was presented to one of the pioneers, Fred Schuler, father of John, shortly after the Indian trouble and because Schuler was one of the posse of six who went out after the Indians. The story of that uprising and swift retribution came with the massacre by the Indians of Mrs. Marie Dersch of Millville, Shasta County, back in 1866. Schuler and five others took the trail, found the Indians, engaged them in battle and slew them all. There were days of trailing before the Redskins were found in the rough Mill Creek country, east of Red Bluff, and it is said that every member of the band, except one squaw, was slain. The posse, returning to Red Bluff, was royally welcomed and each member was given a new "sixteen shot” repeating rifle, valued at seventy-five dollars. Each used a short rim fire 44 calibre cartridge and was made by the New Haven Arms Company.
[Flipping this story around, it seems as if the man we knew as Ishi may have lost family or tribal members as a part of this retribution. Read some of the links above. - MF]
Piety Hill Puzzle
PERHAPS READERS of the Knave can help Edmund Kinyon of Grass Valley who is seeking information concerning the names of the streets in Nevada City's "Piety Hill” section. There has been argument, some holding that the Biblical names came out of a careless attitude or rough sense of humor, on the part of the settlers and others maintaining that the ones who located there were genuinely religious. Zion, Gethsemane, Jordon, Cross, and Tribulation Trail are some of the designations still used and known to have been accepted prior to 1867. It is Kinyon's idea that a studied plan must have been followed and that something like a religious colony must have existed either in actuality or vision. Four square blocks, carrying street names out of old mining days, offer a question which reference to old files does not answer. Perhaps some of the old-timers who know will come forward with the story.
GREATER S. F. ROSSI DREAM, BRINGS SMILE
Mayor's Speech at Chicago Convention Stirs Both Amusement, Amazement
Practical and Legal Barriers to 50-Mile Metropolitan Area Revealed
BY ANTHONY F. MOITORET
Mingled amazement and amusement today greeted the flight of fancy indulged in by Mayor Angelo J. Rossi ot San Francisco at the National Conference of Mayors in Chicago when he released to an unsuspecting world what had been, up to now, a deep secret - his city's ambition to annex Oakland, Berkeley. Alameda, Richmond and other communities within a radius of 50 miles from the San Francisco city hall.
With a single sweeping stroke of oratory, the San Francisco mayor wiped nearly a score of thriving communities off the map and made them mere civic chattels of his own city under the borough system.
Speaking on “Combined City and County Government. Rossi thrilled he hearers at the mayors' convention with an account of how the San Francisco charter had been fixed up to launch an annexation campaign that would make Los Angeles jealous.
MAYOR McCRACKEN'S REPLY AWAITED
What Mayor W. J. McCracken of Oakland, voted $275 by the city council to make the trip to Chicago to hear how his city is to be gobbled up by San Francisco, had to say about Mayor Rossi's speech is not recorded in the news dispatches from the convention. Councilmen who voted to send Oakland's mayor to Chicago were inclined to the belief that he must have spoken up militantly for Oakland's continued existence and put Mayor Rossi definitely in his place.
Even in San Francisco there was professed surprise at Rossi's remarks. If the expansion program has been secretly cooked up by an exclusive cabal of politicians, it was apparent that Rossi had committed a faux pas. As one observer put it, he "pulled a Los Angeles"
Mayor Rossi's Greater San Francisco, as described in his Chicago speech. would include all the communities within a circle extending 50 miles out in the Pacific Ocean and running north to take in Petaluma, Sonoma. Napa, Suisun and Fairfield. To the East the enlarged city would have Mount Diablo as a rival of Twin Peaks. Pleasanton, Milpitas, Santa Clara and Pescadero would be other communities inside the fringe of the enlarged metropolis.
PROTEST EXPECTED FROM LOS ANGELES
Protests were expected from Los Angeles to the scheme, inasmuch as the combined population of all the San Francisco boroughs would make the Southern California city a mere hamlet by comparison.
"The charter of San Francisco," explained Mayor Rossi in his lecture to other mayors on how cities take on girth, "contains certain permissive sections providing all the necessary machinery for the borough system of government. Each of these 15 communities has a mavor and supports both city and county officers, with tax rates that vary, but are all much higher than the tax rate of San Francisco."
The monkey wrench in the machinery described by Mayor Rossi is the specific limitation in the charter of the City and County of San Francisco for the annexation of San Mateo County, when and if the people of that county vote to become San Franciscans. Charter experts at the San Francisco City Hall today admitted that there is no provision in their charter for absorbing any other territory.
ROSSI PROGRAM A "PIPE DREAM"
The San Mateo annexation provision was the result of an enabling act which San Francisco succeeded in having the 1929 Legislature approve. Until similar legislation could be enacted covering all the other counties included in the Rossi vision of a Greater San Francisco, his program would be a pipe dream.
Rossi told the mayors gathered at Chicago that having all these separate cities with their own mayors was "wasteful duplication." The San Francisco charter, he let it be known, had been drafted in anticipation of taking in these other cities to give them the benefit of the San Francisco brand of government.
In the Eastbay the Rossi announcement came as something of a shock, inasmuch as no intimation had been given of the San Francisco plans when the cities on both sides of the bay had joined hands to obtain $62,000,000 from the Federal government to build the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge. That it was planned to make the bridge merely an extension of a San Francisco Street was not even whispered during the course of the negotiations.
Likewise, the Golden Gate Bridge, physically uniting San Francisco with Marin County, had not up to now been considered as a welding governmental link. And speaking of bridges, the map of Rossi's enlarged city would show the Carquinez Bridge in San Francisco!
Now that the world has been told of the San Francisco program, Mayor Rossi will be expected to take into his confidence on his return those cities which he invites to drop their separate identities and join the "city that knows how."
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