Читать книгу History of Fresno County, Vol. 1 - Paul E. Vandor - Страница 18

About Millerton and its protecting appendage, Fort Miller, the first of these for a decade and a half after county organization, the social, political, governmental and population center, cluster most of the memories of the long ago. No more alluring natural spot than the fort site could have been selected. It was on the shelving, grass-grown, south bank of the river at one of the widest reaches, so that it was never in danger of flood such as twice visited Millerton, the last on a Christmas eve washing away nearly half the village and causing a property loss from which it never recovered. In that flood the water in the river rose a full twenty-four feet, maintained with little appreciable fall for as many hours. Fort site was a garden spot in spring and autumn, but in summer because in a pocket of sheltering, surrounding low hills, a perfect bake-oven.

Fort Miller was located at the highest practical point on the river, all things considered. Above it and Fine Gold Creek, the stream is impassable, rushing out of a mountainous precipitous gorge. It was to place it with.in easy reach of the hill country beyond, and especially to afford protection to the miners at Cassady's Bar, across the range and due east and south of the fort on the river bend, that the ancient trail, traversable to this day, was laid out across the hills back of the fort. At Millerton the river runs due east and west, the fort facing the stream to the north. Its northern edge was built up to and partly hung over the river bank in early days. It is not to say either that the river at the fort was always confined to the present bed. The fort is at the mouth of a long and serpentine ravine running far above and back into the foothills and mountains beyond.

The site was originally thickly covered with oak trees. These were felled for the logs in construction, as well as to leave a clearing as a military prerequisite. The fort enclosure was a quadrangle, surrounded by a stone and adobe wall, five or six feet high, and faced the river. From Millerton, the fort is not visible, the western view being shut of? by a rocky promontory which projects to the river bank about halfway between fort and village, which are a mile or more apart. The nearest courthouse cave-corner is barely discernible from the fort. The latter was not unlike many another.

The guardhouse was long ago razed, leaving only the rock-walled, iron-barred, ventilation-holed excavated dungeon. It stood at the northwest corner of the quadrangle and near it was presumably the main fort entrance from town. Facing the parade ground and at the upper edge, with the flag staff in the center, was the roomy, one-story headquarters and commandant's residence with veranda, and on the line to its left two smaller adobe officer's quarters. The parade ground was enclosed on the right by the long, low, wooden barracks shed and on the side backing the river were the stables and the quartermaster's department sheds in continuation of the barracks. In rear of headquarters, the sloping hillside was dotted by the post garden, the smithy, the bake-oven, powder magazine, the two-story, sunny hospital, and nearly on top of the hill spur the little post cemetery.

The ancient blockhouse, the oldest standing building in the county today, in the construction of which not a nail entered as the logs were dovetailed and mortised, stands outside of the quadrangle. A group of military and farm structures clustered on the blockhouse side at one time, so that the fort surroundings had the appearance of being quite a pretentious settlement. Blockhouse, standing now in solitude, is often overlooked by sightseeing visitors. Indeed many labor under the delusion that Millerton and fort site are one and the same thing, and that the courthouse was a jail instead of a general county government building, jail included in the basement.

The post had accommodations for a garrison of two cavalry troops or two batteries of artillery serving as infantry, with detachments in charge of light field pieces. Its military history is brief and comparatively speaking uneventful.

The kitchen addition to headquarters, and connected with, the dining room at the eastern angle, is a blockhouse of hewn timber, held in place by uprights and the interstices filled with mud to make solid walls. Under roof protection, the soundness and preservation of these oaken logs showing the marks of the hewer's ax are worthy of note. In the garden in the rear of headquarters are umbrageous and prolific orange trees, which in earlier days were a seven day's wonder, to see which people travelled miles. They were, so it is said, the first orange trees set out anywhere in the valley, this side of Stockton.

The blockhouse was erected in 1851 as a temporary defense in advance of the actual construction of the fort. At about the height that a man within would hold a rifle in the act of aiming the weapon on a rest, runs around the building a thick plank pierced with loopholes, each about a foot square.

All the habitable reservation structures have, in their day, been used as private dwellings, even to the barracks and hospital, for Millerton never had a building boom and accommodations for the visitor or newcomer were often at a premium. After abandonment of the fort it became the home of Judge C. A. Hart, was so occupied for years, and there he died. Having all been in almost continuous occupancy, fort buildings are fairly well preserved, though the boards protecting the adobe outside walls have been punctured by generations of wood-peckers for the storing of acorns. The blockhouse, sad to tell, is relegated to the base use of a cowshed.

The enclosing wall has long ago disappeared, so have the stables and quartermaster's sheds. The cemetery graves, with a few exceptions where no one came forward to make claim, were emptied long ago also, and the military dead removed to the national cemetery at the San Francisco Presidio on final evacuation of the fort. The disinterments were principally among the later graves in the newer portions of the cemetery nearest the fort buildings. The last exhumation was that of the remains of the old-time sheriff, J. S. Ashman. The grave of the little Stiddam girl is the only marked sepulch.er left in the burial ground — the rust eaten, iron fenced sunken grave of an infant. Frances E. Stiddam, who died October 21, 1861, and concerning whose kin all trace or knowledge has been lost.

The fort is used now as the farmhouse of the 14,000-acre cattle ranch, including townsite, of the W. H. McKenzie estate, taking in land on both sides of the river and in two counties as the San Joaquin is the boundary with Madera on the north.

THE PICTURESQUE WAS NOT LACKING

The picturesque was not lacking at Millerton in the mining days. Indians were a common-place sight in times of idling peace, to fill out the picture, what with one rancheria below the village and another on the bare bluffs on the other side of the river, facing the town. They begged for food, pilfered small things, did chores for money or a meal, or came to sell salmon speared in the stream, or small game snared or shot in the hillsides, while the squaw with papoose strapped on back in chokoni (canopied basket) came to barter her handiwork in beaded belts or moccasins, or woven reed baskets.

The rough and sun-blistered miner was of course very much in evidence in flaming red shirt, whatever the thermometer, heavy water-proof top-boots with pantaloons tucked in them, and ostentatiously displaying pistol and bowie knife in belt, whether arriving new comer with pack on burro looking for a prospect, or whether one already located and at the village with pack animals to stock up provisions, and never forgetting a goodly supply of aqua fortis for snakebites, or as a sovereign preventive against chills and colds as the result of working in the wet slush about rocker or cradle on river or creek bank.

The swarthy Sonoran was there in his wide sombrero, gaudy colored neckcloth and often in serape covering his shoulders, gliding about furtively because he was not always looked upon with favor. The meekest, most docile and unobtrusive was the blue-bloused, cow-hide booted, bowl-shaped, bamboo-hatted Chinaman, working over the tailings that others had abandoned after winnowing the surface "color." A few Chinese women there were also, and never did one amble down the village street from Chinatown at the upper end of it beyond the later courthouse but she attracted general notice, even admiration, for woman was yet a curiosity. And last but not least during the days of the fort occupation, there were the off-duty soldiers killing dull time and not looking the trim and natty men at arms as of the days long after the war. The Indians regarded them as veritable demi gods though, sober or not.

The arrival in dust cloud of freight team, mounted express or passenger stage was always an event that assembled the villagers. Steamers later landed at the head of Fresno Slough on the West Side and teams hauled freight to Visalia and other southern points, or eastward to Millerton or into the mines. The mounted express for the conveyance of gold dust, mail and small packages was the rapid transit means to the mines, for post offices there were at first none, and express companies handled the mail.

Adams & Company succeeded by Wells, Fargo & Company were in their day the carriers and did an immense and profitable mail and passenger business that was practically a monopoly for years. For the conveyance of dust or bullion, they were the only safe and responsible agencies, every coach carrying shotgun messengers to guard and protect the treasure. In 1857 Thomas M. Heston ran a stage (called the Rabbit Skin Express) from Hornitas to Visalia via Millerton, and the Silman lines made regular stage trips from Stockton to Millerton via Tuolumne City, Paradise City, Empire City, Snelling and Plainsburg. Later Silman & Carter also ran a stage from the Slough City to Visalia via Millerton.

Thomas M. Heston was represented to be "a whole-souled fellow and a good citizen." He was elected an assemblyman, and attended the eleventh legislative session in 1860, and in those days to be a successful stage-man one had to be a popular idol — a very lacquered tin-god on wheels. Heston was believed to have been murdered afterwards near Esmeralda Mining District, his remains having been identified by the gold filling in his teeth.. But the California State Blue Book records that he was drowned in the Kern River in 1863.

The isolation of Millerton is not sufficiently appreciated in these days of hourly trains and of rapid transportation by Owl, Limited, Angel and all the other lightning express trains, in these hurry-scurry days of telegraph, telephone, long distance phones, special delivery mail, parcels post, wireless telegraphy and flying machines. This isolation was an inconvenience as late as February, 1871, in that it took then three days to go from Millerton to the near cities as follows: One day to Hornitas in Mariposa, sixty miles; one day from Hornitas to Modesto, forty miles, and then on the third day by the cars to San Francisco or Stockton. It was declared in all sobriety that under the existing schedule and if one were in a hurry to go to San Francisco one could do so more quickly by stage riding to Visalia, sixty-five miles south, and then staging it to destination, gaining nearly two hours in time. The railroad had then built as far only as Modesto, with finishing work on the railroad bridge across the Tuolumne. Snelling was then the county seat. It was changed to Modesto with the advent of the railroad.

In May, 1870, a mail route from the New Idria quicksilver mines (now located in San Benito County just beyond the Fresno County line) via Panoche Valley, Firebaugh Ferry, Areola (now Borden in Madera County) and Millerton, with an office at Areola, was urged because as represented then the mine residents must come twenty miles to Millerton for their mail, while mail from Millerton to the New Idrians and Panoche Valleyites went to Stockton, thence to Gilroy in Santa Clara County, thence to the place of destination, journeying nearly 500 miles in a circle to cover about sixty or seventy in a direct line.

The people of Buchanan (a deserted copper mining camp now in Madera County) were as urgently in need of a post-office. They were forced to come to Millerton, fifteen miles distant, for their mail and th.is too in the face of the fact that it passed through the camp to go to Millerton for distribution.

A RED LETTER WEEK FOR EXCITEMENT

A red letter week for unwonted excitement must have been the closing one in July, 1853, when the railroad route topographical survey party and its train of baggage wagons raised the dust of town towards a camp at the fort, followed in a day or so by Harry S. Love's dust-powdered cavalcade of twenty rangers, in red-hot from the killing of Bandit Joaquin Murieta, whose head was brought in pickle, also the hand of Manuel Garcia, "Three Fingered Jack." Garcia was also decapitated but the skull was so shattered with Love's shots that it could not be preserved and was cast to the coyotes.

The survey party was protected by a detachment of dragoons, commanded by Lieut. George Stoneman. Little dreamed he then of the honors in store for him as a cavalry and corps commander ten years later in the war, or that in 1879 under the new constitution he would be elected one of the state's first railroad commissioners and on his masterly negative record as the minority member of three he would pave the easy way for the 1883-87 governorship of the state.

Certain, however, that a vermilion hued dash of color was given to the picture when there came into the village the sun-browned gun fighters of Love, deputy sheriff of Los Angeles, a Texan, who had served as scout and express rider in the Mexican War and inured himself to border dangers and hardships. Bancroft describes him as "a law abiding desperado who delighted to kill wild men and wild beasts," a leader "with bright, burning and glossy ringlets falling over his shoulders," one who "wore a sword given by a Spanish count whom he had rescued from the savages." a personage the "way and walk of whom were knightly as of ancient cavalier," while "savages he had butchered until the business afforded him no further pleasure." That in the rude frontier settlement of rough men as at Millerton, Love was lionized goes without saying. Among his gun men were Harvey, who murdered Savage, and Philemon T. Herbert, the California congressman (1855-56), who distinguished himself by shooting an inoffensive negro hotel waiter in Washington.

Truth to tell, the end of Murieta, with his pickled head as evidence of the fact, and the extermination of his band of cutthroats were events of state wide moment, the importance of which cannot be measured in these staid days of governmental regulation. The end of Murieta, described by Bancroft as the "King of California Cutthroats." and the "Fra Diavolo of El Dorado," merits more than passing reference, because a state verily rejoiced in h.is death.

One unquestioned result of the enforcement of the foreign miner's tax law was the prejudice which it fomented, depriving many of employment and driving them to theft and even murder. This prejudice was evidenced in the passage, by the first legislature in April, 1850, of this tax law. It forbade anyone mining in the state, unless holding a thirty-days' twenty-dollar license, the sheriff empowered to assemble a posse of Americans to drive him off on nonpayment, and the governor's appointed tax gatherers receiving three dollars out of every license collected, to make them active and persistent. In March, 1851, this trouble-making law was repealed, but subsequently another was enacted fixing the license at four dollars per month and making the sheriffs the collectors. Except for harassing the inoffensive Chinese, it was not always strictly enforced. Persecution in 1850 growing out of this tax, in being driven from the Stanislaus River, followed by binding to a tree and public flogging in Calaveras, on an unfounded charge of horse stealing is said to have prompted Murieta to take an oath of vengeance that was relentlessly kept, sparing not even the innocent, such an implacable foe of every Gringo American came he to be.

Besides the tax, there were laws prohibiting mining by any save such as could or intended to become citizens, and regulations of this character were not unusual in the Southern Mines until the four-dollar tax law was passed. But it was when the Chinese began to flock into the mining regions that the most violent hatred of the foreign element was aroused by their thrift and industry and the withdrawal of gold for which, as claimed, they left no compensating return. Driven from the mines, the Chinese accommodated themselves to the situation and became house servants, work hands and railroad builders, working more injury to white labor than if they had been left undisturbed in the mines among only a restricted class as to number.

For some years in connection with the tax collections, the waste upper San Joaquin Valley region, and especially that west of Tulare Lake was roamed over by bands of Spanish speaking vagabonds, whose nominal vocation was running mustangs, but whose real activities were robbery and the protection of robbers. In October, 1855, the evil had so grown that on the Merced a company of rangers was formed and a bloody fight was had on the Chowchilla River with a band of horse and mule thieves. Sheriff's posses after these bands were not infrequent, nor sanguinary encounters either.

It is an interesting coincidence that in his career Murieta came in early contact with Ira McCray, who was such a notable and conspicuous personage in the history of Millerton. It was about 1853 in Tuolumne County, at Sawmill Flat that McCray was a store keeper and obnoxious, to Murieta and his band, and that attempt was made to poison the spring furnishing drinking water. Fortunately the poison was so liberally applied that the project failed. McCray and others, it was said, had been marked for death and report had it that the store was to be robbed on a certain night. A messenger was sent to Columbia for aid, and in response came, with a little field piece that was discharged at frequent intervals to announce its approach, a military company under Thos. N. Cazneau, who was state adjutant general under Governor Haight in 1870-71, but removed from office. There was no robbery attack on the store, but there was such a cleanup of eatables and drinkables at the Flat by the soldiers after the day's march that it was a debatable question whether a raid by the robbers would not have been preferable to the protection of the soldiery.

THE NAPOLEON OF THE CANYONS

To quote Bancroft, "Murieta stood head and shoulders over all knights of the road in California, if not indeed superior to the most famous highwaymen recorded in the annals of other countries." He was only a few months more than twenty-one when he died, after "a brilliant career of crime" of less than three years. Bancroft asserts that "the terms brave, daring and able faintly express his qualities," drawing then the far-fetched comparison that "in the canyons of California he was what Napoleon was in the cities of Europe." It is needless to recite details of his many crimes. Educated in the school of revolution in Mexico, it was an easy gradation for him to consider himself the champion of his countrymen rather than an outlaw.

The terror of the Stanislaus, his history "though crimson with murder, abounds in dramatic interest." In a few months he headed an organized band that ravaged in every direction, and he "gave proof every day of possessing a peculiar genius for controlling the most accomplished scoundrels that had ever congregated in Christendom." They operated principally in Calaveras, Tuolumne and Mariposa Counties, but covered the state at large in their impartial distribution of murderous attentions. For nearly three years, Murieta flitted between town and country, snapping fingers in the face of authorities and the populace, while throughout the length and breadth of the interior valley from Shasta to Tulare, and along the coast line of missions, the country lamented its dead and rang with demands for his capture, dead or alive. Joaquin lived mostly about the towns but kept his henchmen informed of what was going on and of the opportunities for plunder.

One of the secluded rendezvous places of the band was in the Arroyo de Cantua foothills on the West Side of Fresno County, where to this day are pointed out caves and watch peaks that served the band. The fraternity was sent out for operations in five subdivisions under as many secondary chiefs, acting simultaneously in widely scattered sections, and this with the membership of Joaquin Valenzuela, with similarity in name and appearance, earned for Murieta a reputation with some for ubiquity almost supernatural. Indeed upon his death, it was long insisted with dogged pertinacity that he was still alive. In disguise one day at Stockton, he halted his horse to read a tacked up handbill offering $1,000 for his capture, and he nonchalantly added in pencil, "I will give $5,000 — Joaquin."

The monster of the band was Manuel Garcia. "Three Fingered Jack," from the loss of a finger in the war with Mexico. This most sanguinary wretch was no less conspicuous for savage cruelty as for courage. To gratify his lust for human butchery, he adopted as his specialty the throat-slitting of Chinamen. Sometimes he pistoled them, but this was too tame work. He would seize them by the queue and with, a twist peculiar to his practiced hand threw up the chin, presenting an unobstructed mark. His boast was that out of every ten not more than five escaped his aim.

At last the people of the state were aroused against this saturnalia of crime and butcheries as a reflection on their manhood in permitting it to go unchecked so long, and in March, 1853, the legislature passed an act empowering Love to bring out a ranger company of twenty mountaineers of experience, bravery and tested nerve to hunt down the marauders. Love followed on the trail, spying by night and keeping close cover by day. On Sunday, July 25, 1853, he and eight rangers came upon a party of seven camping west of Tulare Lake, six seated around a fire at breakfast. Murieta gave the alarm and threw himself on the back of his saddleless and bridleless horse, speeded down the mountain side, leaped the animal over a precipice but falling with him was on his feet again, remounted and dashed on. The rangers close at his heels fired and the bay steed was shot in the side and fell. Joaquin ran afoot and received three balls in the body. He turned on his pursuers, saving. "It is enough; the work is done," reeled, fell on right arm and died without groan. Garcia being cornered, fought but was overcome, after riding five miles and being shot nine times.

Love afterward received the $1,000 reward offered by the governor, and the legislature of 1854 generously added $5,000, the rangers having been engaged for $150 a month. The head of Murieta and the mutilated hand of Garcia were on August 18, 1853, advertised in San Francisco on exhibition at King's saloon at Halleck and Sansome streets — admission one dollar. Certificates of identity were attached of persons who had known Joaquin. These gruesome relics fell, in later years, into the hands of an anatomical museum, and were presumably destroyed in the big" fire of April, 1906. The superstitious made much of the growth after death of Joaquin's hair and of the nails on Garcia's hand, but pshaw! there have been more lurid and incredible tales told about Murieta and his band of a half hundred than were ever circulated concerning Robin Hood, Rob Roy, Fra Diavolo, Capt. John Kidd, Jonathan Wild, Jack Sheppard, Robert Macaire, and all the other unmentioned famous outlaws of history.