Of Course It’s True [Except for a Couple of Lies]

By Jonathan Brown

This book is a collection of stories on family, life and values. It begins with a story of the author’s namesake, who came to California in 1849, in pursuit of happiness. The middle section is about a range of events in life. The final section is about beliefs – which helped guide the author’s actions. The chapters tell individual stories but when read as a whole you will recognize a life full of experiences - some important, some not so much; but all comfortably wrapped in humor. Eclectic? You bet. Boring, no. The author recognizes that some people who participated in the events described in the book will remember things differently. That’s OK with him. Memoirs are perceptions and not necessarily precise. The author asks readers who want 100% accuracy to write their own book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: May 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781665738576

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Copyright © 2023 Jonathan Brown.

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Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-3859-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-3858-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-3857-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023902661

Archway Publishing rev. date: 4/25/2023

Foreword

A memoir is a personal account of certain events or people. This one is divided into three parts—stories about family; stories about life, from health to technology; and finally stories about values. The family stories are what got this project started. Family stories have always been a part of me. The person I was named after journeyed from New York to California in 1849. As I grew up I heard a lot of family stories that seemed to be contradictory on basic details. Unsurprisingly, as I discussed the stories with other family members, I found that they interpreted or told many of the stories I treasured quite differently from the way I saw them. We each watch the world through different lenses. Sure, it may be certain that something did happen on a particular date, but its effects might be seen quite differently by the various people who were actually involved in the event. As stories are retold over generations, they are also elaborated on based on a series of factors that are mostly unseen. Am I saying there is no objective history? Absolutely not. But we should accept family stories, often mediated by family members over generations, more as allegories than histories. Those stories help to define your family and yourself.

As I began to plan this book, I accumulated stories from my own memory and did some work on Ancestry.com to establish how parts of my family fit together. The bold venture of my namesake, Jonathan Archer, intrigued me. He boarded a ship in New York and traveled around the Horn in 1849 on the South Carolina to California to seek his fortune. As you read his story, you’ll see that even his motives for coming to California are in doubt. I had the benefit of having a set of letters he sent to his mother and some other documents relating to his time in California. Jonathan Archer’s story has affected me in many ways. I also discovered a contemporaneous journal from a shipmate which is in the California Historical Society archives. I discovered several other journals. The journals have at least one thing in common: they all seem to end when the argonaut gets to San Francisco or soon after. Jonathan’s journal has very little detail about life on the ship or weather conditions. But he seems great at color commentary.

As I researched Jonathan Archer, I also encountered his younger brother, Oliver Hazard Perry Archer, who stayed in New York and built up a substantial fortune. I wondered why Jonathan had felt compelled to take an arduous journey and why his brother chose a very different path. Both, in their own ways, were following Thomas Jefferson’s notion of pursuing happiness.

While I thought about this project for a long time, progress initially was intermittent. The readership for this kind of writing is limited, and getting dates and stories correct would take a lot of research. Then my daughter, Emily, intervened. For Christmas 2019 she gave me a gift of Storyworth, a web-based program that creates a book from weekly prompts offered on the site. The prompts are about life events. In some cases Emily supplied some questions. It is a far from perfect platform, but it offers the weekly discipline of a writing prompt.

I have to admit that Storyworth offered some questions that I chose not to answer. Some were issues about which I had nothing to say. For example, one question asked, What was your bedroom like when you were a child? I started to write messy but did not think that would make much of a chapter. For others, I could not think of any response that made sense. For example, Why did you get married? Duh? I was in love. After more than fifty years, that love is more true now than in 1969, when we were married over Woodstock weekend (in Pasadena, not in New York). But some of the questions worked to inspire my writing, and I have used them for some of my chapter titles.

The entire manuscript has been divided into three staves. The first is about family and my academic formation. The second covers reflections on a variety of topics, including work, fitness, and technology. The third is divided between chapters on our life in Mexico and some reflections on ideas that motivate me. Finally, I offer a conclusion that ties the parts together.

I believe America’s history is fundamentally positive. We formed this government to pursue happiness. One of the things that makes this country exceptional is the assumption that people can actually surmount tremendous odds through hard work and luck—that is what the pursuit of happiness is all about. James Buchanan, the Nobel-winning economist discussed throughout the book, rephrased Jefferson to the freedom to become the person you want to be.

After reading the stories about my family, you may come away with different impressions from mine. That’s fine; that is one of the points of this book: we all come to stories from our own perspectives, and that shapes how we interpret those stories. Friedrich Hayek called that the knowledge of time and place.

For a memoir, the third stave may seem out of place. As a sometime academic, I needed to spend some time thinking about principles important to my own life. When my wife read these chapters she commented that they looked a bit like my dissertation. The principles can be summarized in five broad ideas:

1. Crowds are better than experts at many things.

2. Markets are consistently better than governments at allocating resources, on most things.

3. The history of America is exceptional—we should celebrate it.

4. If you are asked to choose between James Madison and Woodrow Wilson (as the inspiration for our system)—choose Madison.

5. Values do count—but do not be so tied to your own that you are not able to recognize the values of others. Surprises are good.

In the third stave I added a chapter that mirrors an essay by Friedrich Hayek,except mine is titled Why I Am Not a Progressive. One theme you may see, which underlies much of the book, is a description of how my political thinking devolved. I found that while most of my ideas would put me in the political spectrum as a libertarian, I don’t rabidly follow those notions. Groucho Marx was right when he resigned from the Friars Club with the following quip: I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.

In the movie Sunset, there is a continuing response to the question Is it true? After the question is asked, the response is Of course it’s true, with a couple of lies. That is the way family stories are told. We should appreciate the wisdom of that logic. It is not that we are trying to fool ourselves or others, but rather that our perceptions of events can be very different from others’.

While working on this project was solitary in one sense, in many ways it was a joint project. Two credits need to be expressed here; more formal acknowledgments are presented at the end. In 2019, I was diagnosed with lymphoma. I repurposed my blog, called Five Cent Thinking, as a way to describe the process of going through treatment. Over about a year, I wrote a series of reflections: on how to go through chemo, on why the economics of medicine is absurd, and on a host of other topics. I had a list of almost 100 readers who offered responses to those posts. They helped me work on style but also substance. When I got to actually writing chapters, I had two initial editors, Carole Eudey, who worked with me at AICCU, and Patricia Heinicke, whom I found from a friend’s recommendation. Both were able to help organize, reorganize, and reconceptualize the project.

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Finally, this book has a lot of pictures. Since I was very young I have been interested in photography. Most of the pictures in this book were taken by me or a close member of the family. The only place without pictures is in the third stave, where I substituted footnotes for photos. An image of me that I have used in many places was taken when I was about 3 and living on Spruce Street in Berkeley; I am sitting on a pony. Somehow that seemed like a good representation of who I have become as an adult. At one point, I had helped endow a center for the University of Southern California in Sacramento and was asked to supply a donor picture. This is the one I chose. They decided to use a different one.

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When my son was about the age I was in the picture, I had a picture of him taken on a horse, and when his oldest son was about the same age, we had a similar picture taken of him. I have all three pictures hanging in my office. (That grandson is now over six feet tall!) Other photos come from family archives, including the one at the right, which my mom sent to Quinlan when we started dating. She called it The Senator with Cherries.

In his biographical reflections, A Personal Odyssey, Thomas Sowell quotes Benjamin Disraeli’s description of the need to offer reflections late in life, which Disraeli called anecdotage.

I stand by my anecdotes in this book as true—except for a couple of lies.

Jonathan Brown

Fair Oaks, California, and

San Miguel de Allende

June, 2023

Notes

1 A term I first encountered in Dickens but which originally meant a stanza in a poem.

2 In Hayek’s massive opus The Constitution of Liberty

3 The Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities where I worked for more than 30 years.

Contents

Foreword

STAVE 1

Stories About Family

STAVE 2

Stories About Life

STAVE 3

Stories About Beliefs

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS:

The Glass Is Refillable

Acknowledgments

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STAVE 1

Stories About Family

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So Who Was Jonathan Archer and

Why Is He Important to Me?

I was named after an ancestor who came to California in 1849. He lived there and died less than a year after he arrived in Sacramento. Part of the story of Jonathan Archer (1824–1850) is his journey and part is of the family that stayed behind.

There are all sorts of problems in trying to understand a namesake who came to California when conditions were primitive and who stayed in the state for only a short time. But I do have some artifacts of his trip, including a series of letters that he wrote home to his mother. I first came in contact with those letters when my aunt Mary (my mother’s sister) transcribed them.That was not an easy task. In order to save money, letters of the time were written on onionskin paper and used every available space. With the passing of more than 170 years, the ink had faded and bled. In addition, penmanship styles of the 1850s were different from today; they look a lot like German Script. My aunt Mary spent several months trying to decipher the letters and I truly appreciated her effort. Mary was never one for sentimentality, but she knew the importance of the legacy for me. The first picture in the chapter is of the receipt that Jonathan got for booking aboard the South Carolina. The fare was $250, which was not an insubstantial sum.There were two classes of passage—a cabin, with about four argonauts per room, and second class, which relegated passengers to a dorm below deck, two to a bunk. A dollar in 1850 would be worth about $35 in 2021, so his fare would be something more than $8,700 in today’s terms. But that estimate is misleading. Many jobs were not compensated in money at the time. So the relative value was perhaps even larger.

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Passage receipt to California

Jonathan’s commitment to the journey was even greater. Without any reliable communications mechanism, getting messages back home was by no means assured. At the same time, the risk of death on the trip and in the new location was large. So making the decision to move involved the very real possibility that you would never see your family again.

One of the themes you will hear often in this book is what Thomas Jefferson called the pursuit of happiness. Jonathan Archer’s pursuit was, as you will read, only partially successful.The pursuit of his younger brother, who stayed home in New York, was more successful in material terms. But neither thought that the system was stacked against them, or that government needed to assist them to achieve what they wanted to in life.

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OHP and his family in Allendale

My Family Has a Lot of Jonathans

The person I was named after had a father named Jonathan (1782–1832), who, according to the 1830 New York City Directory, was a grocer and lived on Broome Street. He was married to Hannah in 1818. That Jonathan’s father was Caleb Archer (1741–1778), who married Aeltje Ecker Archer (1738–?). As I was researching the book I found a life insurance policy for Jonathan the dad which he took out the year he was married. He had a partner in the purchase of a sloop named Harriot, for which I have the original purchase agreement. Finally, though he died in 1832, I have a court summons from 1840 to all the heirs of the estate. Beyond those fragments I could find no more about Jonathan’s dad. As you look along the Archer line, there also seem to be a lot of others named Jonathan. The sloop and other data like census records indicate that the original Jonathan dealt in dry goods.

My namesake was the oldest brother of Oliver Hazard Perry Archer (1825–1899), known in the family as OHP. According to his obituary, OHP traveled in pretty rare company, including the magnate Commodore Vanderbilt. My namesake’s father may have known the hero of the War of 1812, or was simply caught up in the excitement of Perry’s military record in the War of 1812. OHP was an entrepreneur. He seems to have started out as an employee of a delivery drayage business but soon expanded to investments in firms like Wells Fargo. He was an original investor in the Erie Railroad with Jay Gould. In 1871, he joined a group of Erie stock-holders and directors to oust Gould from the railroad. ¹

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Marriage certificate for OHP and Mary.

OHP married Mary Dean (1827–1910). Their marriage lasted forty-five years. According to one obituary, when he died he was reputed to have left many millions of propertyin his estate. It was divided among his wife and his three sons; he even offered a $500 bequest to his loyal coachman, Dennis O’Brien.

OHP had an estate in Allendale, New Jersey, as well as his house in New York City. The Methodist Church in Allendale was founded by OHP and Mary (https://www.archerchurch.org/history). He was an important member of his community. When my mother’s parents met, it was in New Jersey (near the summer homes of one of my two great-grandfathers (Daniel Mason Garber or OHP). OHP thought young Mason (my grandfather covered in Stave 1, Chapter 2) was not suitable for Grace.

I had some odd residuals from OHP when I was growing up. One was his habit of obtaining a type set of mint American coins at the beginning of each year. When I started collecting coins, those sets were given to me. Another residual was his propensity to invest in diamonds and other jewelry. When each of my siblings and I were about to get married, we received stones or jewelry from his purchases. My share was three one-carat diamonds that were made into an engagement ring for my future bride.

OHP had two daughters, Nellie (Aunt Noanie), who later owned a summer home in Vermont called Quiturcare, and Delia (Aunt Dee), who seemed to have been pretty stern. The sisters traveled extensively around the turn of the century and to exotic places. Dee married twice and seemed to have added to her wealth with each of those unions. One of her husbands was a minister. Both husbands died relatively young. William Abbott, her second husband, at the time of his death had at least three insurance policies. The family lore is that William, because of husband Abbott’s early demise, is not a good name to have in our family.

Aunt Dee had a pretty horrible reputation within the family. She was described by one family member as a Disney villain. When she took over management of OHP’s house after his wife Mary died, she was said to have locked the kitchen cabinets and the pantry. Noanie seems to have bought the house in Vermont as a respite from Allendale. My mother and my two aunts spoke fondly of Quiturcare.

One of OHP’s sons, Harry M. Archer (1868–1954), was a physician who, after a short career as a medical examiner for a New York life insurance company, became the chief medical officer for the Fire Department of New York. Gampy Harry, as he was called by my mother and her sisters, was my grandmother’s dad. When I first became interested in finding out about my family, I wrote to Ed Koch, then mayor of New York City, whom I had known slightly in Congress, and he sent me back a copy of a magazine that contained an article about Harry Archer. It detailed his career with the NYFD and was published about two years after his death. H. M. Archer was awarded the Bennett Medal for his service and valor to the NYFD. My grandmother’s mother (Helen Louise) died relatively young after having suffered an embolism in a department store. Harry subsequently married a woman named Emily June whom most of the family did not like. She had been a secretary to Harry. Evidently, she treated Nana, my grandmother, poorly. She was reported to have had the habit of donning her fur coat, jumping into her red sports car, and going to collect rents from the tenants living in the tenements that she and Harry owned. She evidently reveled in evicting people who could not pay.

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Gampy Harry

Grace (Nana), my grandmother, grew up in luxury. When Harry died, his home in Manhattan was donated to the NYFD. It is still used as a fire station today. Technically, that house would revert to our family if the NYFD ever decided to decommission the fire station.

Those scattered stories make up the bulk of my memories of relatives I never met. But they are important nonetheless. I was fortunate that some more tangible legacies came directly from the person I was named after, and that is where we will turn next.

Jonathan Archer’s Pursuit of Happiness

Piecing together a picture of my namesake then has some holes. Many of California’s civic records were destroyed either by floods in Sacramento or by the earthquake and fire in San Francisco. His letters seem to have been sent back to New York after he arrived in California.

The story of the California Gold Rush needs to be put into perspective; the news cycle in the mid-nineteenth century was slow, very slow.

One wag at the time described the Post Office as a shadow of an apology for transmission of letters or news. In 1846, California had about 10,000 Spanish-speaking residents and perhaps another 2,000 immigrants of European heritage. That changed quickly when James Marshall discovered the gold flecks in Coloma on January 24, 1848. News of the discovery did not reach the San Francisco papers for another two months. By the end of that year, about 6,000 Forty-eighters (the early gold seekers) were in the state, and they were mostly from nearby states. Newspapers in New York did not have a story about the discovery until August 19, 1848, with the breathless announcement that gold was for the taking.

Two other events may have precipitated Jonathan’s desire to venture west. During the fall of 1848, mentions of gold in newspapers began to grow in frequency and excitement. In August the Commandant of Monterey, who is a distant relative on my mother’s side (Colonel Richard Barnes Mason, grandson of George Mason), wrote a lengthy report to President Polk about his trip to the gold fields. Two snippets from the report give you an idea of his excitement:

We started on the 12th of June last to make a tour through the northern part of California. We reached San Francisco on the 20th, and found that all, or nearly all, its male inhabitants had gone to the mines. The town, which a few months before was so busy and thriving, was then almost deserted.

Mr. Marshall was living near the mill, and informed me that many persons were employed above and below him; that they used the same machines as at the lower washings, and that their success was about the same—ranging from one to three ounces of gold per man daily.

Polk also received a report of gold diggings from Kit Carson, the legendary scout. In his 1848 State of the Union (delivered in December of that year), he used the gold discovery as a justification for the recently concluded war by arguing that

Recent discoveries render it probable that these mines are more extensive and valuable than was anticipated. The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service who have visited the mineral district and derived the facts which they detail from personal observation.

and

The effects produced by the discovery of these rich mineral deposits and the success that has attended the labors of those who have resorted to them, have produced a surprising change in the state of affairs in California. Labor commands a most exorbitant price, and all other pursuits, but that of searching for the precious metals, are abandoned. Nearly the whole of the male population of the country has gone to the gold districts. Ships arriving on the coast are deserted by their crews and voyages were suspended for want of sailors. Our commanding officer entertains apprehensions that soldiers can not be kept in the public service without a large increase of pay. Desertions in his command have become frequent, and he recommends that those who shall withstand the strong temptation and remain faithful should be rewarded. This abundance of gold and the all-engrossing pursuit of it have already caused in California an unprecedented rise in the price of all the necessaries of life.

There may have been one more motivator for Jonathan to undertake the journey. In mid-December of 1848, a packet ship named the New York arrived with seventeen passengers who, according to one news account at the time, were infected with Asiatic Cholera. So his choice of either staying home or risking a four-to five-month sea voyage may well have appared as filled with equal perils.

About a month after the outbreak, Jonathan began his trip, following several months of gold fever discussion in the media. The papers for the last few months of 1848 were filled with ads about ways to get to California. So, in 1849, Jonathan joined an estimated 90,000 forty-niners looking for gold. About half of the miners came to the state by sea.

Sailing to California in 1849

The trip to California began when Jonathan’s ship left New York Harbor on January 24, 1849. The South Carolina had first-class cabins for sixty and a total passenger list of 163. A trip around the Horn could take between six and seven months, depending on how favorable the winds were. Jonathan’s trip was faster—he arrived in San Francisco in spring of 1849. The other contemporaneous account of the ship South Carolina has one major discrepancy compared to Jonathan’s commentary. The author of that journal, Albert W. Bee, who ended up staying in San Francisco, had come from the DC area and even mentions in his journal seeing President Polk before departing for New York. ² As was common at the time, Bee was part of a mining company, which was a way to pool capital for prospecting. Very often these companies were formed with the equivalent of a venture capitalist who fronted expenses in return for some portion of the profits.

One impression comes clear from Bee’s journal: there were two classes of service on the ship. The below-decks passengers ate a lot of salt pork and duff (an unattractive combination of flour and dried fruit), while the cabin passengers had some fresh meat and fruits. The other difference was that the second-class passengers were assembled below deck two to a bunk. Bee commented that he was lucky to be able to be near the hatch, so he had some light and air in his bunk. Bee’s journal also mentions that before they arrived in Rio, two passengers developed smallpox and the doctor on board inoculated other passengers.

Jonathan’s letters take a bit of decoding. They look like they were composed over a period of time in what looks sort of like diary entries, but with the cost of mail I am sure it was thought prudent to accumulate material before sending it off. What follows is a mostly chronological summary of his trip.

He is very sparse on details of the journey to Rio de Janeiro. Several of the journals I read suggest a route from New York that went very close to the African coast and then to Rio, and that may have been necessitated by the inability of clippers to sail much off the wind. Jonathan spent several days in Rio, ultimately leaving on March 10 (thus, it took about a month to get from New York to Rio, roughly 4,100 miles). Presumably, the layover had several purposes, including resupplying the ship for the next leg.

Jonathan’s letters were good at what we would call color commentary today. It is a pity that he was thirty-nine years ahead of the first Kodak; I suspect he would have been attracted to the device.

He told a story of a Navy midshipman who took up an offer from the Brazilian government to plant a flag on top of Sugarloaf (4,237 feet), which Jonathan described as dominating the harbor as you enter. An earlier attempt had failed when a French sailor fell and broke his neck. The American was successful, but the Brazilian government reneged on the deal. Jonathan described the Brazilian officials as not having souls above buttons, which was to pay the successful person $2,000. The government again promised to offer the reward. The midshipman successfully rescaled Sugarloaf and on the second attempt the government paid off.

Rio, he estimated at the time, was about half the size of New York, with about 200,000 people, but had a much longer history. Jonathan made some telling comments about the current state of the slave trade in the city. He described the treatment of slaves as brutal. Many were naked and showed signs of extreme lacerations on their backs. They lived on the streets and, when they died, were transported to a common grave to await the requisition of our Divine Master. At least one of my ancestors fought for the Confederate Army in the U.S. Civil War—it is clear Jonathan would not have joined him.

When visiting a Catholic Church, Jonathan was amazed at the statuary—which he said was mostly from Italy. He also visited the theater. He and his friends (Captain Chandler, Doc Rogers, a Navy Captain named Bartlett, and four others) attended a theater performance of something by Ravel (not Maurice Ravel, who was born in 1875) and then got a tour of the theater, including the Emperor’s box. Jonathan thought the theater performance was full of gibberish. At the end of the evening the group was able to get some slaves to row them the three miles back to the ship. However, they were stopped by a military party intending to extort the tourists. Fortunately, the incident ended well because one of the tourists could speak Spanish (Portuguese?) and convinced the military party that they were not leading a slave rebellion. Jonathan was also impressed with Rio Grande (Rio Grande do Sul), located across the bay from Sugarloaf. He described the beauty of the beaches and the mansions that ran along two miles of shoreline. While on their stroll, a Frenchman invited them to visit his gardens and orange grove. They were offered fine hospitality by the Frenchman and his two daughters. It was such a pleasant experience that the group visited them once more before they left.

When they did leave Rio, they made very good progress for the first couple of days, arriving at the Falkland Islands ³ on April 1. They were then becalmed and alternatively caught in gales for two weeks. Finally, the winds refreshed and they made a good run toward Cape Horn. As they got to the cape they were again beset by quirky winds for thirty-four days. They reached latitude 60 south and the storms again were intense—leaving the sails looking like glass. When they finally rounded the cape, they were blown back by about 100 miles. They finally got clear of the cape again and headed for the Archipelago Juan Fernandez, to refresh their water and supplies. The island chain is about 300 miles off Chile’s coast. The chain was famous because it was the location of the story of Robinson Crusoe. One of the islands in the chain is named after the marooned sailor, Alexander Selkirk, who inspired Stevenson’s story. Selkirk was shipwrecked there for four years in 1704. The islands were also mentioned in Two Years Before the Mast,

Richard Henry Dana’s account of life at sea.

As the crew set about toward the island to find a place to anchor, their launch came next to a whale that ultimately came up underneath the rowboat. It breached but did not capsize the small craft. The watering island had fifteen inhabitants and their major commerce was supplying ships with water and dried fish. When they got to the island they had a picnic and did some hunting of goats and ducks.

The island’s cook caused Jonathan Archer great amusement. She used an old stocking to clean out the frying pan that was used to prepare their salted fish and fried goat. As he described it, when the meal was about half-cooked, she brought it to the table with a couple of forks and spoons. Jonathan protested that the spoon was dirty, so she spat on it and wiped it off with the bottom of her dress. Bee mentions the same hygienic procedure for spoons. Jonathan chose to not partake of the feast, so he, and his friend Palmer, decided to go outside the hut and cogitate on the matter. When they asked about overnight accommodations—they found them to be equally sumptuous. They consisted of a hut and a couple of goat skins. The proprietor/cook finally agreed to throw an old sail over the two of them and Jonathan said he was soon fast asleep. The proprietor and his wife, the cook, slept in the same room. Jonathan and his buddy got up early in order to return to the ship so they could have breakfast under better sanitary conditions.

Fishing as a youth: When I was in high school I frequently fished on one of three fishing barges that were off the Redondo Pier. While one could catch bonita and barracudas, the more frequently caught fish was a Pacific mackerel that was small, cross-boned, very greasy, and not very tasty. My friend and I always brought a gunnysack with us, and when we had accumulated twenty-five of the buggers, we would spend the rest of the day clipping off their back fins and throwing them back in the water. Often that would attract blue sharks—which quite agitated the barge captain, whom we affectionately called Grumpy. After returning to the dock, we would sell the fish (to unsuspecting tourists) as a cousin of the bonita for 25¢ apiece. If you sold twenty, you would have paid for the fare on the barges. (I know that all sounds horrible too! And it was—but I was in high school.) But karma eventually gets you back. As an adult I started to fish again and, for about five years, was totally skunked on every fishing trip. It even happened when our son, Peter, was young and we went to a stocked lake. We sat there for two hours without even a nibble, then I suggested that I go get us some hamburgers. While I was gone, my friend, his son, and Peter caught four fish in about ten minutes. The curse on my fishing was not cured until I started going to a friend’s cabin in Wyoming with guides and somehow I was relieved of my earlier sins.

As they continued north they went through periods with no wind and on those days would catch fish. One day they caught seven sharks, including one that was fourteen feet long. They rigged a mast on its head and another at mid-body and then threw him back in and watched him struggle. They also caught two barrels of blackfish.

Jonathan’s Time in California

About 900 miles west of San Francisco the South Carolina caught a westerly and was able to get into San Francisco Bay. Jonathan’s description of the bay coincides with other contemporary ones I have read—it was filled with ships. At the entrance to the harbor they sighted a barque named the Ocean Bird; it had sailed one month before the South Carolina left New York. He described the total trip as about five months long—thus, I have him arriving in California in May of 1849. Bee’s journal lists the arrival as June of 1849—but that would not jibe with Jonathan’s letters. Also, Bee’s journal seems to have skipped a month moving from March to May.

San Francisco had grown twenty-five-fold in about a year. When Jonathan arrived, there were then about 25,000 residents. Before they disembarked, the captain went ashore to get provisions for the passengers. Costs were inflated: he found beef for $1 per pound, and onions for $2 per pound.

Jonathan was amazed at the relative values in the city. He passed several small gambling establishments and saw one miner lose several thousand dollars’ worth of gold dust, saying only that he had more where that came from. Jonathan commented, They think no more of $100 here than you would 50¢ in New York. Flour was the only commodity that was in a reasonable range—at $6 per barrel.

When Jonathan went to Burgone and Co., a gold broker, he was surprised to find that gold would net $16 per ounce for commodities or $15.25 for cash. When a miner asked for cash he was paid $1,452 for his stash. Miners could make between $16 and $100 per day, but it was very hard work.

The inflated values he encountered surprised Jonathan. While he was in San Francisco he met a man from Panama who wanted a house built and had to pay a carpenter $16 per day. If you were living on a ship, it cost $2 to leave the ship during the day and $10 to return to the ship at night. He described a corner-lot house in the city that was worth $200,000.

When he arrived in Sacramento in August of 1849, on August 12 he wrote a letter to his brother, who was contemplating joining him. OHP and even younger brother James at least thought about making the journey, though in the end neither did. Jonathan cautions him about coming to the new El Dorado. He and some friends, after spending some time in San Francisco, chartered a schooner to get to Sacramento. He thought the Sacramento River was the most beautiful he had ever seen. He waxed sentimentally about going up the Sacramento with a washbowl on his knee. At one point on the trip the captain halted the progress and got drunk. A couple of the passengers disembarked to hunt—they got chased back to the ship by a wild bullocks. When they got to Sacramento the river was twenty-five feet below the level it had been during the winter rains. In the years after Jonathan died, the older parts of Sacramento were eventually raised to compensate for the periodic flooding. The trip to Sacramento took several days, including the unplanned stop. He described the pleasure of sleeping on the ship for at least three nights.

Jonathan and Entrepreneurship

I’m left with thoughts about what might have been Jonathan’s true purpose in coming to the Gold Rush—or did it change as he progressed? He evidently brought provisions from New York for resale and added to his stash in San Francisco. Jonathan sold pickles at $100 per barrel, mackerel at $36 per barrel, and pork at $40. His uncle Leonard had given him some pork that he sold to a merchant who declared it was the best pork he had ever seen. One interesting comment was that there were no coopers—so evidently part of the price of a commodity was based on the barrel. Coopers at the time made $30 per day. Unlike Bee, he seems not to have participated in a joint venture.

He recognized that, in the economy of the gold fields, costs and prices were inflated. So a bowl of mush with milk was two schillings, milk $1 per quart, and board could be between $21 and $30 per week. But through enterprise, Jonathan was able to accumulate $300 in gold dust and a horse, saddle, and bridle, worth $200. That was a lot of money in those times. But costs could be out of sight. Doctor visits were $16.

He derided the lazy fellows and bragged that he had earned some money painting signs. One of the artifacts I worked from was an inventory of his stash as he came to California and then added to it before embarking to Sacramento. Family lore held that he went to California to prospect for gold, but there is at least some evidence that he was really