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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.
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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. 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. |
AuthorWith 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. Archives
July 2017
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Sequoia Parks Conservancy, the official 501(c)(3) nonprofit partner of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (National Park Service) and Lake Kaweah (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), uses tax-deductible contributions to support these parks.
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