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  • Home
  • Shop
  • Sequoia Conservation Fund
  • Crystal Cave 2021
  • Support SPC
    • Give Monthly
    • Become a Friend
    • Support a Program
    • Tribute Gift
    • Planned Giving
    • Other Ways to Give
    • Corporate Sponsorship
    • Supporters
  • Adventures
    • Dark Sky Festival
    • Pear Lake Winter Hut-Closed
  • WebCam
  • Employment
  • Virtual Backgrounds
  • Running Wild
  • Mineral King Video Premiere
  • Connect

Saga of Molly Byrd

4/15/2016

0 Comments

 
She was the daughter of a drunkard, a successful actress, a rancher, a
prisoner’s rights activist, a woman who came to own a portion of
Redwood Canyon, the wife of a man who was destined to gain
international fame - Molly Byrd came into this world in the year of
1859 and, if infants could contemplate the possibilities that life
might serve up to them as the decades unfolded, she would still never
have been able to even wildly imagine what Fate had in store for her
during what were to be her eighty-five years here on this Earth.

Molly grew up at a home called Rattlesnake Ranch, about twenty-five
miles northeast of Visalia in the San Joaquin Valley, the daughter of
a rancher who had built a struggling yet successful business from the
ground up but who later developed a reputation for his frequent hard
drinking and abusive behavior, eventually driving his wife and
children away from him. She was also the daughter of a loving mother
who stood by her during a large portion of those interesting and
eventful eighty-five years, years which would lead Molly to all parts
of the west coast of the United States, including to what is now Kings
Canyon National Park in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

When Molly was fifteen years old she fell in love with a man who
worked as a teamster hauling lumber down to the valley from a mill
high up in the Sierra. The teamster’s name was Chris, and although he
was twelve years her senior the attraction was instantly mutual and
the chemistry between them was said to be palpable. Both felt that it
was Love at First Sight, and both knew that it would last forever.
After a brief courtship Molly’s parents gave their blessing to the
union and they were married at Rattlesnake Ranch in November of 1874.

Chris owned a piece of property near Dry Creek, but instead of moving
there he worked out a trade for land higher up in the mountains; one
hundred and sixty acres in what is now known as Redwood Canyon in
Kings Canyon National Park. He and Molly named the place the Redwood
Ranch. They moved up there to what they felt was their own personal
Garden of Eden to make it their home, and Molly became pregnant with
the first of what would eventually be nine children. But after a
riding accident the baby was born prematurely and died within a day.
Baby Eugene was buried there at Redwood Ranch, beneath a giant Cedar
tree next to a small spring of running water, and rests in that grove
of Sequoias to this day next to a cousin who also died as an infant.

The search for work led Chris to cross the Sierra on foot to Inyo
County, while Molly returned to Rattlesnake Ranch and gave birth to
their second child several months later. Then it was back to the
valley, then to San Francisco, Seattle, and back again to California
to farm near a place called Mussel Slough. Then they moved west to
Adelaide, and the children kept coming, eight more in all after Eugene
– Eva, Carl, Elmer, John, Joseph, Louis, Winifred, and Ynez. While
Chris and Molly started a ranch at Adelaide trouble erupted at their
former home of Mussel Slough between the farmers and the Southern
Pacific Railroad, and although they weren’t involved in that fighting
the Southern Pacific branded Chris and Molly as troublemakers because
they had friends at Mussel Slough who had taken up arms against the
railroad. Never mind that the farmers had lost that battle – once you
were an enemy of the railroad, the railroad never forgave or forgot.

When Molly, Chris and the children moved back near Visalia to start a
farm, Chris was still on the railroad’s Hit List. So when train
robberies started happening in the San Joaquin Valley in the late
1880’s, the Southern Pacific decided that they would point the finger
of blame at Chris and his friend John, even though they didn’t have a
shred of evidence that either of them had ever been involved; even
though they knew for a fact that the Dalton Gang had committed at
least some of those train robberies. They began watching Chris as well
as Molly, and they weren’t subtle about it. The family was being
harassed, but the Southern Pacific was the most powerful thing in
California – a law unto themselves – so they could get away with it.
One day when Molly wasn’t home a railroad detective, accompanied by a
sheriff, rode up and walked into their living room with their guns
drawn. Their oldest daughter, Eva, ran out the back door to tell her
father that two men were in the house threatening to either arrest him
or shoot him. Unable to tolerate this threat to his family in his own
home Chris picked up his own gun and went in to confront the two men.
Shots were exchanged and the railroad detective and sheriff took off
back to town at full speed. Chris and John knew the trouble wasn’t
over and they in turn took off for the mountains, back to the security
of Redwood Ranch, but leaving Molly and the children behind for their
own safety.

Molly Byrd was now thirty years old and deeply in love with her
husband, the mother of eight more children after little Eugene had
died, and she was no fool. She knew that the railroad would never give
up on trying to destroy her family and kill her husband. She was
right. The railroad posted a team of spies on Molly’s farm and posted
a reward of ten thousand dollars on her husband’s head – dead or
alive. The railroad had basically issued a Death Warrant on a man who
had never been convicted of a crime.

Thus began a saga which ran on for the next two years. Chris and John
hid out in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, alternating between the
Redwood Ranch and a mining claim they had several miles north of the
ranch. The area was familiar to them as Chris had worked as a logger
and as a teamster in the area, and both men had numerous friends who
helped them out. Molly, meanwhile, took on the tasks of running the
family farm and raising eight children, while at the same time fending
off frequent visits from the sheriff and suffering constant threats
and intrusions from the railroad. One of those railroad detectives, a
man by the name of Will Smith, took to watching the family so closely
that he decided that he was in love with Molly’s eldest daughter, Eva,
and wanted to marry her. But Eva told him off in no uncertain terms,
and in language which was quite explicit, explaining in detail how she
would never have anything to do with a man who had sunk so low in life
as to take a job as a railroad detective. She was most definitely as
strong willed as Molly, and just as opinionated. Molly was proud of
her. Chris would sometimes sneak down to the farm and pay a visit to
Molly at night and then leave before morning light. The railroad
detectives also suspected Molly of sneaking food up to her husband in
the mountains, and although they were very vocal in their accusations
they could never prove anything. During these years Molly had the
continuous support of her mother – Grannie Byrd to the children – who
lived nearby in Visalia.

Chris and John were finally captured after a year and a half in the
mountains and after a fiery shootout with a possee. John died from
wounds shortly after the gunfight, and Chris was charged with the
murder of two deputies who had died. Chris stood trial and was
convicted of murder while Molly attended court every day, watching the
legal process of her husband being railroaded into jail. Chris pled
self-defense, saying that the men he had shot had been illegally
hunting him to collect an illegal bounty put on his head by the
Southern Pacific, yet he was convicted of murder nonetheless. But
Chris escaped from the county jail before he could be sent to Folsom
Prison and was free in the mountains again for several months after
someone smuggled a gun into his cell. Again Molly was implicated, and
again nothing could be proven. But she was a woman who stood by her
husband and no one doubted her resolve to do what she felt needed to
be done.

But since Molly was being watched so closely by the railroad, it was
also thought that she used her oldest daughter, Eva, to communicate
with her husband. On one occasion Eva was seen to saddle up and follow
a possee out of town at a discreet distance. Later she admitted to
sneaking up to their campfire to listen to what was being said. When
she heard that railroad detective and would-be lothario, Will Smith,
say that they thought they had her father trapped in a box canyon, she
went back to her horse and rode around the possee and up the box
canyon to find her father and warn him. She did find him, and they
managed to climb out the steep end of the canyon and escape while it
was still dark. It became clear to both the sheriff and to the
railroad that Chris’s repeated escapes and continued freedom would not
have been nearly so successful without the help of Molly and Eva.

After Chris was captured, Molly was refused entrance to the jail to
visit him for an entire week. During that time Chris’s left arm was
amputated by the doctor, supposedly because of an infection. Yet there
were some who felt that it was, in reality, a not-so-subtle message
from the Southern pacific - 'Stop Pissing Us Off, Or We’ll Cut Off
Even More Pieces'. Molly took this with her usual courage, and then
she and Eva came up with an ingenious idea as to how to raise money
for his appeal. They wrote a stage play about the supposed escapades
of Chris, starred in it themselves, and it opened in San Francisco to
a packed house and standing ovations. Of course it didn’t do so well
when it toured Central California – Southern Pacific Country – and
soon had to close down.

But that didn’t stop Molly. Even with her husband shipped off to
Folsom Prison in leg irons to serve a life sentence, Molly refused to
give up. Chris said that he was innocent, and that was enough for her.
So for the next seventeen years Molly worked tirelessly for his
release. She wrote letters to politicians, raised money, gave
speeches, and filed for appeals. Finally, after Chris had been in
prison for seventeen years, Molly convinced the governor of California
to grant him a pardon due to his continually declining health, and her
husband was released from jail in 1911. But this was immediately
followed by a demand that Chris and Molly leave California immediately
and never return. That, of course, was the railroad talking – still
giving orders through the mouths of politicians. The railroad never
forgave and never forgot. So Molly and her husband moved on up to
Oregon where she and Eva took care of Chris until he died six years
later in 1917.

Molly lived on until 1944 when she passed away at the age of
eighty-five. She had lived through what most people would consider to
have been a hard life, with both the Southern Pacific Railroad and the
State of California setting their combined wills against her and
determined to destroy her family. Looking back Molly sometimes
couldn’t help but wonder just where the trouble had all begun – Mussel
Slough? Perhaps, but Molly and Chris hadn’t even been present for that
battle. The Train Robberies? Again, perhaps – although Chris swore to
his dying day that he had never robbed a train in his life, and Molly
echoed that conviction. Molly always felt that at least the state
could have given him a fair trial on that charge, but they didn’t.
They couldn’t, because there was just no evidence that he had ever
robbed a train. But Molly Byrd stood by her husband for their entire
lives. She had married the man who was destined to become known as the
notorious Chris Evans – the leader of the Evans and Sontag Gang of
train robbers; a train robber who was never charged or tried for train
robbery. But the Southern Pacific Railroad never forgave or forgot
anyone they considered an enemy.

Having begun her marriage with the premature birth and death of her
first child, Molly was destined to repeat that sad experience with
another son, Louis. In February of 1925 Louis, now living in Oregon,
borrowed a car from a friend. He planned on taking his mother out to
dinner and wanted to make the evening special by giving her a ride in
an automobile, an event which was still a novelty for Molly, who was
always more comfortable on a horse. After dinner Louis suggested a
ride in the country because it was such a beautiful evening, and Molly
agreed. But unused to driving a car, especially at night on unlit
country roads, Louis lost control of the vehicle and it skidded and
then overturned. The top was torn off the car as it continued to
tumble.  Molly was thrown out of the vehicle but suffered only mild
abrasions. The force of the accident also threw Louis out of the car,
but he had the misfortune to land on his head. He died three days
later of brain injuries. Molly walked away from that crash relatively
uninjured but she had lost another son, this one at the young age of
only thirty-eight.

The Redwood Ranch, the beloved home of Molly and Chris at which they
had begun their marriage so many years before, passed out of their
care during the time of Chris’s imprisonment in order to raise much
needed funds for the family. In a complicated transaction which began
with Molly deeding the property to her mother, and Granny Byrd then
deeding it to a friend who in turn deeded it to another friend, the
Redwood Ranch was eventually deeded to the United States Government
and became attached to the Sequoia National Forest. The whole process
was a complicated title laundering scheme more typically conceived in
the mind of a railroad lawyer, but apparently Molly felt that the
elaborate subterfuge was necessary in order to disguise the fact that
the money was eventually coming to her, perhaps fearing that if the
government knew they might balk at providing income for the wife of a
train robber. So, as an intelligent woman with a calculating mind, she
planned carefully to avoid that possibility.

Yet the fact that the land should go to the federal government was
important to Molly and Chris because they both still loved the ranch
and wanted to see it protected from logging and development. In return
for the gift the government deeded a piece of land of equal size to
the man who had donated the ranch to them, and he in turn sold it and
passed the money on to Molly who used it to move out of Visalia and up
to Oregon, taking the children with her. Had Molly lived longer she
would have been happy to see Redwood Canyon, including the land which
had once been her beloved ranch, become a part of Kings Canyon
National Park, where it achieved a more complete and lasting
protection.

Molly lived life with no excuses, few regrets, and without ever
backing down. And even though Molly couldn’t personally continue to
stay in the mountains she was comforted by the memory that a part of
her nevertheless did manage to linger there; a small part, buried
there at Redwood Ranch, just beneath a giant Cedar tree next to a
small spring of running water; her first child, still resting in that
grove of Giant Sequoias to this day.
0 Comments

The Saga of Molly Byrd

4/15/2016

0 Comments

 
She was the daughter of a drunkard, a successful actress, a rancher, a
prisoner’s rights activist, a woman who came to own a portion of
Redwood Canyon, the wife of a man who was destined to gain
international fame - Molly Byrd came into this world in the year of
1859 and, if infants could contemplate the possibilities that life
might serve up to them as the decades unfolded, she would still never
have been able to even wildly imagine what Fate had in store for her
during what were to be her eighty-five years here on this Earth.

Molly grew up at a home called Rattlesnake Ranch, about twenty-five
miles northeast of Visalia in the San Joaquin Valley, the daughter of
a rancher who had built a struggling yet successful business from the
ground up but who later developed a reputation for his frequent hard
drinking and abusive behavior, eventually driving his wife and
children away from him. She was also the daughter of a loving mother
who stood by her during a large portion of those interesting and
eventful eighty-five years, years which would lead Molly to all parts
of the west coast of the United States, including to what is now Kings
Canyon National Park in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

When Molly was fifteen years old she fell in love with a man who
worked as a teamster hauling lumber down to the valley from a mill
high up in the Sierra. The teamster’s name was Chris, and although he
was twelve years her senior the attraction was instantly mutual and
the chemistry between them was said to be palpable. Both felt that it
was Love at First Sight, and both knew that it would last forever.
After a brief courtship Molly’s parents gave their blessing to the
union and they were married at Rattlesnake Ranch in November of 1874.

Chris owned a piece of property near Dry Creek, but instead of moving
there he worked out a trade for land higher up in the mountains; one
hundred and sixty acres in what is now known as Redwood Canyon in
Kings Canyon National Park. He and Molly named the place the Redwood
Ranch. They moved up there to what they felt was their own personal
Garden of Eden to make it their home, and Molly became pregnant with
the first of what would eventually be nine children. But after a
riding accident the baby was born prematurely and died within a day.
Baby Eugene was buried there at Redwood Ranch, beneath a giant Cedar
tree next to a small spring of running water, and rests in that grove
of Sequoias to this day next to a cousin who also died as an infant.

The search for work led Chris to cross the Sierra on foot to Inyo
County, while Molly returned to Rattlesnake Ranch and gave birth to
their second child several months later. Then it was back to the
valley, then to San Francisco, Seattle, and back again to California
to farm near a place called Mussel Slough. Then they moved west to
Adelaide, and the children kept coming, eight more in all after Eugene
– Eva, Carl, Elmer, John, Joseph, Louis, Winifred, and Ynez. While
Chris and Molly started a ranch at Adelaide trouble erupted at their
former home of Mussel Slough between the farmers and the Southern
Pacific Railroad, and although they weren’t involved in that fighting
the Southern Pacific branded Chris and Molly as troublemakers because
they had friends at Mussel Slough who had taken up arms against the
railroad. Never mind that the farmers had lost that battle – once you
were an enemy of the railroad, the railroad never forgave or forgot.

When Molly, Chris and the children moved back near Visalia to start a
farm, Chris was still on the railroad’s Hit List. So when train
robberies started happening in the San Joaquin Valley in the late
1880’s, the Southern Pacific decided that they would point the finger
of blame at Chris and his friend John, even though they didn’t have a
shred of evidence that either of them had ever been involved; even
though they knew for a fact that the Dalton Gang had committed at
least some of those train robberies. They began watching Chris as well
as Molly, and they weren’t subtle about it. The family was being
harassed, but the Southern Pacific was the most powerful thing in
California – a law unto themselves – so they could get away with it.
One day when Molly wasn’t home a railroad detective, accompanied by a
sheriff, rode up and walked into their living room with their guns
drawn. Their oldest daughter, Eva, ran out the back door to tell her
father that two men were in the house threatening to either arrest him
or shoot him. Unable to tolerate this threat to his family in his own
home Chris picked up his own gun and went in to confront the two men.
Shots were exchanged and the railroad detective and sheriff took off
back to town at full speed. Chris and John knew the trouble wasn’t
over and they in turn took off for the mountains, back to the security
of Redwood Ranch, but leaving Molly and the children behind for their
own safety.

Molly Byrd was now thirty years old and deeply in love with her
husband, the mother of eight more children after little Eugene had
died, and she was no fool. She knew that the railroad would never give
up on trying to destroy her family and kill her husband. She was
right. The railroad posted a team of spies on Molly’s farm and posted
a reward of ten thousand dollars on her husband’s head – dead or
alive. The railroad had basically issued a Death Warrant on a man who
had never been convicted of a crime.

Thus began a saga which ran on for the next two years. Chris and John
hid out in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, alternating between the
Redwood Ranch and a mining claim they had several miles north of the
ranch. The area was familiar to them as Chris had worked as a logger
and as a teamster in the area, and both men had numerous friends who
helped them out. Molly, meanwhile, took on the tasks of running the
family farm and raising eight children, while at the same time fending
off frequent visits from the sheriff and suffering constant threats
and intrusions from the railroad. One of those railroad detectives, a
man by the name of Will Smith, took to watching the family so closely
that he decided that he was in love with Molly’s eldest daughter, Eva,
and wanted to marry her. But Eva told him off in no uncertain terms,
and in language which was quite explicit, explaining in detail how she
would never have anything to do with a man who had sunk so low in life
as to take a job as a railroad detective. She was most definitely as
strong willed as Molly, and just as opinionated. Molly was proud of
her. Chris would sometimes sneak down to the farm and pay a visit to
Molly at night and then leave before morning light. The railroad
detectives also suspected Molly of sneaking food up to her husband in
the mountains, and although they were very vocal in their accusations
they could never prove anything. During these years Molly had the
continuous support of her mother – Grannie Byrd to the children – who
lived nearby in Visalia.

Chris and John were finally captured after a year and a half in the
mountains and after a fiery shootout with a possee. John died from
wounds shortly after the gunfight, and Chris was charged with the
murder of two deputies who had died. Chris stood trial and was
convicted of murder while Molly attended court every day, watching the
legal process of her husband being railroaded into jail. Chris pled
self-defense, saying that the men he had shot had been illegally
hunting him to collect an illegal bounty put on his head by the
Southern Pacific, yet he was convicted of murder nonetheless. But
Chris escaped from the county jail before he could be sent to Folsom
Prison and was free in the mountains again for several months after
someone smuggled a gun into his cell. Again Molly was implicated, and
again nothing could be proven. But she was a woman who stood by her
husband and no one doubted her resolve to do what she felt needed to
be done.

But since Molly was being watched so closely by the railroad, it was
also thought that she used her oldest daughter, Eva, to communicate
with her husband. On one occasion Eva was seen to saddle up and follow
a possee out of town at a discreet distance. Later she admitted to
sneaking up to their campfire to listen to what was being said. When
she heard that railroad detective and would-be lothario, Will Smith,
say that they thought they had her father trapped in a box canyon, she
went back to her horse and rode around the possee and up the box
canyon to find her father and warn him. She did find him, and they
managed to climb out the steep end of the canyon and escape while it
was still dark. It became clear to both the sheriff and to the
railroad that Chris’s repeated escapes and continued freedom would not
have been nearly so successful without the help of Molly and Eva.

After Chris was captured, Molly was refused entrance to the jail to
visit him for an entire week. During that time Chris’s left arm was
amputated by the doctor, supposedly because of an infection. Yet there
were some who felt that it was, in reality, a not-so-subtle message
from the Southern pacific - 'Stop Pissing Us Off, Or We’ll Cut Off
Even More Pieces'. Molly took this with her usual courage, and then
she and Eva came up with an ingenious idea as to how to raise money
for his appeal. They wrote a stage play about the supposed escapades
of Chris, starred in it themselves, and it opened in San Francisco to
a packed house and standing ovations. Of course it didn’t do so well
when it toured Central California – Southern Pacific Country – and
soon had to close down.

But that didn’t stop Molly. Even with her husband shipped off to
Folsom Prison in leg irons to serve a life sentence, Molly refused to
give up. Chris said that he was innocent, and that was enough for her.
So for the next seventeen years Molly worked tirelessly for his
release. She wrote letters to politicians, raised money, gave
speeches, and filed for appeals. Finally, after Chris had been in
prison for seventeen years, Molly convinced the governor of California
to grant him a pardon due to his continually declining health, and her
husband was released from jail in 1911. But this was immediately
followed by a demand that Chris and Molly leave California immediately
and never return. That, of course, was the railroad talking – still
giving orders through the mouths of politicians. The railroad never
forgave and never forgot. So Molly and her husband moved on up to
Oregon where she and Eva took care of Chris until he died six years
later in 1917.

Molly lived on until 1944 when she passed away at the age of
eighty-five. She had lived through what most people would consider to
have been a hard life, with both the Southern Pacific Railroad and the
State of California setting their combined wills against her and
determined to destroy her family. Looking back Molly sometimes
couldn’t help but wonder just where the trouble had all begun – Mussel
Slough? Perhaps, but Molly and Chris hadn’t even been present for that
battle. The Train Robberies? Again, perhaps – although Chris swore to
his dying day that he had never robbed a train in his life, and Molly
echoed that conviction. Molly always felt that at least the state
could have given him a fair trial on that charge, but they didn’t.
They couldn’t, because there was just no evidence that he had ever
robbed a train. But Molly Byrd stood by her husband for their entire
lives. She had married the man who was destined to become known as the
notorious Chris Evans – the leader of the Evans and Sontag Gang of
train robbers; a train robber who was never charged or tried for train
robbery. But the Southern Pacific Railroad never forgave or forgot
anyone they considered an enemy.

Having begun her marriage with the premature birth and death of her
first child, Molly was destined to repeat that sad experience with
another son, Louis. In February of 1925 Louis, now living in Oregon,
borrowed a car from a friend. He planned on taking his mother out to
dinner and wanted to make the evening special by giving her a ride in
an automobile, an event which was still a novelty for Molly, who was
always more comfortable on a horse. After dinner Louis suggested a
ride in the country because it was such a beautiful evening, and Molly
agreed. But unused to driving a car, especially at night on unlit
country roads, Louis lost control of the vehicle and it skidded and
then overturned. The top was torn off the car as it continued to
tumble.  Molly was thrown out of the vehicle but suffered only mild
abrasions. The force of the accident also threw Louis out of the car,
but he had the misfortune to land on his head. He died three days
later of brain injuries. Molly walked away from that crash relatively
uninjured but she had lost another son, this one at the young age of
only thirty-eight.

The Redwood Ranch, the beloved home of Molly and Chris at which they
had begun their marriage so many years before, passed out of their
care during the time of Chris’s imprisonment in order to raise much
needed funds for the family. In a complicated transaction which began
with Molly deeding the property to her mother, and Granny Byrd then
deeding it to a friend who in turn deeded it to another friend, the
Redwood Ranch was eventually deeded to the United States Government
and became attached to the Sequoia National Forest. The whole process
was a complicated title laundering scheme more typically conceived in
the mind of a railroad lawyer, but apparently Molly felt that the
elaborate subterfuge was necessary in order to disguise the fact that
the money was eventually coming to her, perhaps fearing that if the
government knew they might balk at providing income for the wife of a
train robber. So, as an intelligent woman with a calculating mind, she
planned carefully to avoid that possibility.

Yet the fact that the land should go to the federal government was
important to Molly and Chris because they both still loved the ranch
and wanted to see it protected from logging and development. In return
for the gift the government deeded a piece of land of equal size to
the man who had donated the ranch to them, and he in turn sold it and
passed the money on to Molly who used it to move out of Visalia and up
to Oregon, taking the children with her. Had Molly lived longer she
would have been happy to see Redwood Canyon, including the land which
had once been her beloved ranch, become a part of Kings Canyon
National Park, where it achieved a more complete and lasting
protection.

Molly lived life with no excuses, few regrets, and without ever
backing down. And even though Molly couldn’t personally continue to
stay in the mountains she was comforted by the memory that a part of
her nevertheless did manage to linger there; a small part, buried
there at Redwood Ranch, just beneath a giant Cedar tree next to a
small spring of running water; her first child, still resting in that
grove of Giant Sequoias to this day.
0 Comments

Mad Prophet of the Mountains

4/1/2016

0 Comments

 
The voices whispered to him, telling him what he should do. The
spirits materialized out of nothingness and floated before him,
indicating the path he should take. Premonitions formed within his
mind, and his life – as well as the lives of countless others - was
altered because of them. A strongly spiritual man, these tenuous
otherworldly threads wove a tapestry in his life which was often more
real than the crusts of bread which kept him alive or the hard bed in
which he slept. By trade he was a carpenter, at most times in his life
appearing merely human. But by the dictates of Fate he was destined to
forge a new course of history and change the lives of millions of men.
Though the biblical similarities were striking, he was not a man whose
sandaled feet trod the deserts of the Middle East thousands of years
ago seeking to save men’s souls for the Next World; instead he was a
boot-shod carpenter who walked the Sierra Nevada Mountains of
California in the mid-nineteenth century and who inadvertently lured
millions of men from every corner of the world to his very doorstep
seeking the golden wealth of This World, the Here and Now. His name
was James Marshall, and like an occasional carpenter from history
before him, much of his life was ripped from his control by a fame he
did not seek; with an ending to his life of less notoriety but no less
sad. For James Marshall was the man who discovered gold in the Sierra
Nevada Mountains of  California, and who inadvertently announced that
discovery to the entire world.

Marshall was born into a family of farmers in New Jersey in 1810.
After an unremarkable childhood and an extended adolescence unmarred
in the least by any type of excitement, he finally left home at the
age of twenty-four to try life on his own, making his way slowly
through Illinois and Indiana to settle in Missouri where he contracted
an extended bout of malaria. After recovering from the disease he left
that state on the advice of his doctor to seek a healthier climate,
and by 1844 he had settled in Oregon. But the endlessly wet climate
there soon made him unhappy and restless, and less than a year later
he was heading south to California, which he had heard had a wealth of
sunshine and more variety of opportunity for making his fortune than
that of just farming. By 1845 his wanderings took him to Sutter’s Fort
in the Sacramento area where he found work using his carpentry skills.
Marshall became friends with his employer and Sutter loaned him the
money to buy some land and stock it with cattle. Things were finally
looking up for him, but apparently he didn’t realize it. Instead of
sticking with his carpentry job at the fort and tending to the cattle
on his ranch, Marshall thought he’d finally chase after that tenuous
excitement which had so far eluded his life and in 1846 he joined the
California Battalion under Colonel John Fremont to fight for
California independence in the Bear Flag Revolt. The revolt was
successful, California became independent of Mexico, and Marshall
returned to his ranch, naively surprised to find that all of his
cattle had been stolen, slaughtered, and eaten. Without any stock his
ranch had no income, and without income he lost the land and had to
return to doing carpentry work for Sutter. Marshall had sadly
demonstrated a distinct inability to think through to the end result
of his actions; a dilemma that would show up again and again to plague
him throughout his life.

In 1847 Sutter decided that he needed to produce his own lumber –
there just wasn’t enough building material to be had for all of the
projects he had in mind. So he sent Marshall to scout for a good
location on which to build a saw mill. Marshall quickly found an ideal
location on the American River about forty miles northeast of Sutter’s
Fort near Coloma, and Sutter offered him a quasi-partnership in which
Marshall would construct and manage the sawmill and receive a portion
of the proceeds in return. By August of that year the mill was under
construction, but it was soon found that the downstream channel wasn’t
going to be deep enough. So Marshall began a weeks-long project to
deepen the riverbed, having his men dig during the day and then
diverting the force of the river water at night to wash away the rock,
dirt, and debris they had excavated. Each morning he would inspect the
site before the men began their work. On January 24th of 1848, as he
walked along the muddy channel, a sharp glint in the morning sunlight
caught his eye. He stopped, bent over, and picked up a small rock that
shone with a bright golden hue. He looked down again and picked up a
few more. Marshall knew what he had found, and he knew that he had to
tell his boss, John Sutter. But he waited for four fateful days before
he did so, and in those four days he instead told the men working for
him about his discovery; another hasty and perhaps inappropriate
decision. James Marshall had found gold, and neither his life nor the
new Republic of California would ever be the same again.

Four days later Marshall finally made the forty mile trip to Sutter’s
Fort and told Sutter that he had to speak with him, immediately and in
private. Sutter managed to keep his curiosity under control and led
Marshall into his private office.

“Lock the door,” Marshall ordered him in a tense whisper, having
finally realized the need for secrecy although it was already too
late.

“Why?”

“Just lock it!”

Sutter turned and fiddled with the latch, curious as to why his
employee should be ordering him around like this. But Marshall had a
reputation for sometimes acting strangely, and the men at the fort
sometimes spoke of things only Marshall could see or hear.

“Are we alone?”

Sutter looked around, as if the answer was self-evident. Then he added
that his clerk was the only other person in the building.

Marshall beckoned him over eagerly, and when Sutter was at his side
Marshall pulled a ragged cloth from his coat pocket and slowly
unfolded it, revealing several glittering stones to Sutter.

“It’s gold!” he whispered.

Just at that moment the door opened and in walked Sutter’s clerk. The
office door, apparently, did not have a very secure lock. Perhaps it
had never been tested before this. As the clerk walked right up to
them and saw the gold in their hands, Marshall almost lost control.

“I told you to lock the door!”

Sutter quickly ushered his clerk out of the office, ignoring the man’s
effusive apologies, and slammed the door behind him. Then he and
Marshall pushed a large piece of furniture up against it to forestall
further entry. Over the next several hours the men ran several tests
on the nuggets and determined that they were indeed pure gold, the
Twenty-Four Carat Real Thing. Marshall immediately headed back to the
mill, and Sutter followed the next day. Halfway there Sutter was
surprised to see Marshall on the road, coming back to meet him,
impatient for Sutter’s arrival and wondering what was taking him so
long.

Unlike Marshall – and unlike almost everyone else in the world –
Sutter was not excited by the discovery of gold on his property. Quite
the opposite – it upset him. Instead of seeing the prospect of
immediate wealth flowing from the earth into his pockets he instead
saw the possible disruption of his many treasured projects for the
future. Upon examining the site after he arrived Sutter then assembled
his entire crew and asked them that they keep the discovery secret, at
least until the sawmill was finished, as well as a flour mill he was
building a few miles away at Brighton. To a man they all swore they
would keep the secret safe for the one to two months it would take to
finish those projects.

‘To a man’, was the key phrase, because it wasn’t a man who let the
secret out. That was done by Elizabeth Wimmer, the camp cook and wife
of Peter Wimmer, one of Marshall’s assistants. She told a man who
brought some horses up to the mill all about the discovery and proudly
added that it was her son John who had actually made the first find
while playing in the ditch one morning before the men started work,
and that Marshall had just taken the credit. She gave the teamster a
few flakes of gold as a souvenir, saying there was plenty more just
lying around. He in turn told a shopkeeper named Smith about it as he
paid for a bottle of whiskey with those same flakes of gold. Smith in
turn told Sam Brannan, a merchant from Yuerba Buena. Brannan
immediately rode up to Sutter’s Fort to confront Sutter for either a
confirmation or a denial. Upon receiving a reluctant confirmation that
the story was true, Sam Brannan was soon riding through the streets of
Yueba Buena (the future San Francisco) shouting at the top of his
lungs that gold had been discovered on the American River. Men flocked
northward, and Yuerba Buena became almost a ghost town overnight.

John Sutter had been right in his misgivings. Once word got out about
the gold his and Marshall’s employees no longer felt bound by their
promise of secrecy and, with the mill almost finished, they all quit
their jobs to hunt for gold. Sutter managed to get the mill
operational but he couldn’t find enough men to work for him – they all
had Gold Fever – so before the year was out he had to sell his
interest in the mill for what little he could get. Marshall stuck it
out and tried to keep the mill running, but the land owned by him and
Sutter was soon overrun with prospectors who showed no respect for
either property rights or first claims on the gold. Then Marshall
tried to levy entry fees from the miners on his land and also tried to
collect royalties from them for the gold they found, for which he
instead received only laughter or threats of violence. The ‘48ers, as
they came to be called, considered themselves to be first on the scene
and to have a right to whatever they could find and take. Finally
Marshall, too, was forced off his own land, and by 1849 had to leave
Coloma, a victim of his own unrestrained and ill-considered urge to
talk too much.

It was at this point that James Marshall truly became the Mad Prophet
of the Mountains. If before he had only occasionally seen visions and
heard voices, now they came to the forefront and he was not shy about
sharing them. The miners flooding into the mountains all knew of
Marshall and credited him with the initial discovery. They had also
heard of his supernatural experiences and quickly associated those
with the discovery of gold. They came to believe that Marshall had
actually been told where to find the gold by unseen spirits and
Marshall fed that view, saying that he had the power to find even more
gold. Men began to follow him around, demanding that he tell them
where more gold was to be found. Marshall implied that he knew, but
took things a step further by claiming that all of the gold in the
mountains was his, and his alone. He had become a prophet, and a
jealous one. He set off to find the gold and men followed him by the
hundreds; by the thousands. If he was seen to set his shovel to the
ground in a particular spot then the next day there would be scores of
shovels digging that same earth. He became the Prophet of the
Mountains, supposedly channeling messages from the spirits who told
him where the gold was, just as they had supposedly done on that day
in January of 1848 when he’d first found it. If nothing was found at
the sites he indicated the would-be miners would get angry, saying he
was intentionally misleading them and threatening Marshall with
violence if he refused to reveal what the spirits had really told him;
where the large deposits gold were really to be found.

For his own safety Marshall realized that he would have to escape from
his followers, and that’s exactly what he did. One night in 1853
Marshall shouldered a pack onto his back and disappeared into the
mountains. For the next four years he remained intentionally lost in
the wilderness and was rumored to be making a living as a prospector
in the central or southern Sierra, but the stories of sightings of him
remained unsubstantiated and his whereabouts remained unknown to those
who sought his divine guidance in their lives. In 1857 he quietly
reappeared in Coloma where he purchased a plot of land with the small
amount of gold he had found, then planted an orchard and vineyard to
make his living as a farmer. His return to the former gold fields went
largely unnoticed, as all of the gold deposits around Coloma had by
then played out and the miners had moved on.

By the 1860’s his small farm had failed, unable to compete with the
much larger farms springing up in the Sacramento Valley, and Marshall
had to give up his land and take a job as a blacksmith – not a
profession for which he was eminently qualified, for by now he was
well into his fifties and lacked the physical strength and stamina
needed for that profession. The thought came to him that he might make
a living by going on the lecture circuit and giving talks about his
role in the discovery of gold, but he was, quite frankly, a poor
public speaker and was unable to hold the attention of an audience no
matter how interesting his story may have been. For the next several
years he did odd carpentry jobs around Coloma and sold his autograph
to anyone who was interested, usually not getting more than fifty
cents for it, and a creeping dependence on alcohol quickly took what
little money he earned.

In 1872 the California legislature provided him with a brief financial
respite. In recognition for his service in both the Bear Flag Revolt
and his role in turning the fledgling Republic of California into one
of the most prosperous places on earth they awarded him a monthly
stipend of two hundred dollars, but only for a period of two years. In
1874 the legislature reluctantly renewed the pension for another two
years, but only at half the previous monthly rate. In 1876, when that
expired, they refused to renew it at all. Marshall made the trip to
Sacramento to plea his case in person, asking that the pension be
renewed. But while he was speaking to the legislators a bottle of
alcohol slipped from beneath his coat and crashed to the floor,
transforming him instantly in the eyes of the legislators from a
respected California pioneer to a rather pathetic alcoholic;
effectively bringing an end to any chance he might have had for
further income from the state; instantly changing his place in history
from that of a unique man to instead – in the eyes of the legislators
– to that of an embarrassing footnote whom they hoped would once again
disappear into the Sierra.

Marshall struggled on for a few more years and passed away in August
of 1885. His reputed spiritual powers had been in decline for many
years; no one from Beyond whispered to him where to find gold; the
voices had fallen silent; and Marshall quietly slipped from life to
join his unseen friends on the Other Side of the Great Veil. He was a
man who literally marched to the beat of a different yet unseen
drummer; a man who once held the wealth of the entire Sierra in his
hand and let it slide through his fingers; a man who traveled the
length of the Sierra from Tahoe to the Sequoias alone and on foot,
trying to elude his devoted and fanatical followers; a man who lived
and died just a poor carpenter.
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    Author

    With a degree in Anthropology and an avid interest in history, Tim Christensen has lived in the Sierra Nevada Mountains for many years. He has no cell phone or television, but manages, when not chopping firewood or shoveling snow, to keep himself entertained with a library of several thousand books. 

    Tim has worked for Sequoia Parks Conservancy since 2010 in the Kings Canyon Visitor Center and also as a naturalist for the Sequoia Field Institute.  COPYRIGHT 2016 T.E. CHRISTENSEN

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