Myron F. Part IV: The Argonaut

This is the fourth installment in the life of my third great-grandfather, Myron Fitch Barbour, from my life sketch. 

Farewell Dear Wife: The Argonaut

 

  Three men left Fort Wayne in February or March of 1849, headed for New York City. Once there, they made their way to the office of Isaac T. Smith at 101 Wall Street. This sailing merchant made arrangements for them to sail on a “very fast-sailing” clipper, the Rising Sun. How promising she seemed! 

  The Rising Sun was a new, 300-ton vessel, only four months old, built of southern oak and longleaf pine, with a copper bottom and copper fastenings. She was  equipped with a complete naval armament for security, according to an ad in The (New York) Evening Post. She had taken only one voyage, and that carrying ballast only, so -- the ad boasted --  she was “free from all impurities arising from objectionable cargoes or steerage passengers.”

Part of an ad in the (New York) Evening Post for the sailing ship the Rising Sun.

  As a clipper ship, she was faster than other types of ships, and had a shallow draft, which meant, as another ad promised, that she could be sailed up the Sacramento River “to the mines, which will give the party a safe and comfortable home till other arrangements can be made.”

  The Rising Sun also promised to have on board a physician who’d served in the U.S. Navy, and “competent geologists and mineralogists, under the instructions and advice of Prof. Silliman and Prof. J. Dana of the United States Exploring Expedition, are connected to the company and will precede it overland.” [1]

  She was owned by the sixty members of the Rising Sun Company. Her cargo included a steam engine, smelting furnace, smith’s forge and “all essential utensils for mining operation.” She was under the command of Captain E.B. Hooper, a man with much experience navigating the waters around treacherous Cape Horn.

  This route around Cape Horn was the “white collar route” to California, more often undertaken by merchants, doctors and lawyers. [2] It had its disadvantages: those who’d journeyed on the overland trail arrived in better shape to walk and camp in the gold diggings than those who’d spent months onboard a ship.

 

  The Rising Sun sailed out of New York on March 29th with 82 passengers on board, including the Rising Sun Mining and Trading Association, of which the captain was a member, and the Archimedes Mining Company.[3] Onlookers and family members to be left behind gathered at the wharf to cheer and wave good-bye as the Rising Sun was towed out to sea by steam-powered towboats.

  Maybe the excited Argonauts sang a song that was sung on other ships at departure, to the tune of “Yankee Doodle:"

   

Ho for California,

  That’s the land for me,

  I’m bound for Sacramento

  With my washbowl on my knee.

 

  The passengers included the three Fort Wayne citizens: Myron, his friend Rufus Morgan French, who went by “Morgan,” and Myron's wife’s young uncle William H. C. Taylor.[4] The three had caught gold fever, but unlike most Midwesterners who went the overland route, they decided to take the “trip around the Horn.”[5] Somehow, Myron, Morgan and William had the money to travel to New York and book passage on the Rising Sun. The going rate for a New York to California trip ranged from about $100 to $300. This was roughly equivalent to about $5,600 to $16,800 today. This was at a time when the average American’s annual income was between $200 to $300.

   Morgan was single, but of course, Myron was leaving Jane and their children behind, the oldest, Lucius, only seven. Jane was five months pregnant. William also left a wife and baby behind, but dropped them off at her parents' home in western New York. Though the Forty-niners were largely single men, a handful of women left for the gold fields – not all of whom were accompanied by husbands. Married men like Myron and William left wives behind, with promises of a payoff down the road. A song, “The Gold Hunter’s Farewell to His Wife,” also set to the tune of “Oh, Susannah,” captured their situation:

 

Farewell, dear wife, keep up good cheer,

There’s glittering scenes before me –

You soon with me the wealth shall share

That lays in California.

 

I’ll hunt the mountains, search the sand,

Through weather clear and stormy.

With shovel, spade and sieve in hand,

Dig gold in California.

 

The Sacramento’s banks are lined,

“They” credibly inform me,

With metals of the richest kind –

I must see California.

 

What makes you think I won’t return,

With lots of gold to adorn you?

Dry up your tears and do not mourn,

There’s wealth in California.

 

  This was the grand adventure of Myron’s life. This topped even his pioneering move to the “west,” - Indiana - before California became the west. Most of the Forty-niners had never been on a boat journey even down a river. If Myron’s passage was typical, it went somewhat as follows:

 

·  First leg – passengers were in high spirits, albeit with some homesickness, and seasickness.

·  Once the landlubbers acclimated, the monotony of each day set in. Boredom was broken by reading and writing, playing cards, chess, checkers, backgammon, dominoes and pitching pennies. Passengers fished and shot at birds. In the evenings those who had instruments made music and there was dancing. Some ships had Lyceums of sorts, with talks on subjects such as mathematics, Spanish and Bible study. Drinking parties were mentioned in diaries and letters, too. Sighting other ships, especially when they were close enough to exchange information and letters, was a highlight. Some ships were able to lower boats and sent parties to visit each other. This happened at least once on their journey.

·  A rite of passage then as now was crossing the equator, with a “crossing the line” ceremony including a visit from King Neptune and his court.

·  Next there was a stop, usually at least a week long, in Rio de Janeiro. Passengers became tourists and indulged in sightseeing.  Fresh food was welcomed after weeks at sea. Bananas were hung from the rigging, and oranges loaded on board. It may have been the first time Myron saw such fruits.

·  Then there was trip around the Horn itself. After roasting in tropical heat, the gold seekers pulled out their flannels and found themselves back in a winter to rival New England’s.

 

      Maybe the Rising Sun made stops along the eastern seaboard, as was described by Bayard Taylor, a reporter for the New York Tribune who recounted his travels to the "diggings" in a series of letters that were later published in a book. He sailed on the Falcon, a U.S. Mail steamship, whose purpose mandated stops. If the Rising Sun stopped at Charleston or in Cuba, Myron would have seen his first glimpse of slavery, as Bayard did. The Falcon's route took it close enough to shore for her passengers to see the lighthouse at St. Augustine, banks of coral, white beach sand, and dense thickets of live oak, mangrove and cypress.

"I found it delightful to sit all day leaning over the rails, watching the play of the flying-fish, the floating of purple nautili on the water, or looking off to the level line of the shore," he wrote.

Little more than three months after sailing out of New York, The Rising Sun cleared treacherous Cape Horn. It was July 4th, and passengers and crew boisterously celebrated by blowing bugles, playing martial music and reciting the Declaration of Independence. After speeches, a special dinner was served, with roast goose, plum pudding, mince pies, figs and assorted nuts. [6] Except for the menu, this was largely how the Fourth of July would be celebrated were these Americans back home.

  Typical stopping points on the way up the west coast of South America were Valparaiso or Talcahuano, or sometimes Juan Fernandez Island, then a stop in Panama.

  The Rising Sun completed her journey on September 13th, sailing into the San Francisco Bay. It was an adventure getting to California; now Myron, Morgan and William faced another adventure of getting to the diggings and attempting to make their fortunes. For Myron and Morgan, there would be the reverse adventure of making it back to Indiana. William would stay, and his father-in-law would make the trip to California, bringing William's wife and son around 1853. 

 

  Enos Christmas, a Pennsylvania printer’s apprentice, arrived in the Mariposa diggings in the foothills of the Sierras in mid-March 1850.[7] In describing his journey to the diggings Christmas wrote, “Soon after dinner we fell in with four or five broken-down-looking fellows on foot who were returning from the mines, and they gave us some rather discouraging accounts. They told us that they had been there some five or six months without being able to make anything, and that hundreds were there working for their board alone. This did not in the least abate our bright anticipations and we are determined to go and see for ourselves.”

 Myron was one of the men who had been in the Mariposa diggings for six months. While there isn’t a record of how much gold he found, he did find some.

  That there is any record at all of Myron’s days in the gold fields is thanks to George W.B. Evans. Evans was an Ohio lawyer whose gold rush diary was published nearly a hundred years later. Like Myron, Evans was a Midwesterner who left a wife and son to try to strike it rich in California. Unlike Myron, he would never return to them. Plagued with health problems, he died in the golden state. During his mining days in the Mariposa diggings, however, he struck up a friendship with Myron, mentioning him six times between December 1849 and April 1850. By that time, he’d left the diggings for a job in San Francisco as an inspector of incoming vessels.

  The two lived in the Agua Fria camp along the Mariposa River, which is actually a creek and now known as Mariposa Creek. Evans described it thus -- “as wild a spot as it had yet been our fortune to stumble upon. The mountains rose high above us on every side, and in the bottoms of a few very narrow ravines men were searching in holes for the glittering metal.” In his first night there, in October, which must have been about the time Myron arrived, Evans reported he passed an almost sleepless night due to the constant noise kept up by gamblers and drunken men.

  On November 4th he reported, “This is the first Sabbath for us in the mines, and I am happy to say that nearly all the miners have suspended labor, and there is order and decorum in camp. All my companions have gone to attend divine service at Fremont’s Diggings, four miles east of this.” The rest of the month, he repeatedly complains of the noise of gambling, fights and drunkenness.

  The miners started out in tents, then some, like Evans and his two roommates, built log cabins. On Nov. 30th, he slept on a bedstead he’d made himself – his first time sleeping off of the ground in months, a luxury he deeply appreciated. December 4th they awoke to snow on the ground, and the men turned their attention to making a wood frame and rawhide door for their cabin.

  On December 30th, he mentions Myron for the first time:

 

The day has been beautiful and calm, and several sales and the election have passed into the things that were. William L. Scott, an elderly gentleman and a man of much experience of the pioneer kind, was elected alcade, or chief magistrate, and M.F. Barbour, of Fort Wayne, Indiana, sheriff of these diggings. Mr. Scott had a majority of thirty-eight votes over Dr. E. Stone, and Barbour beat the old sheriff, or old guinea fowl, just ten votes. This result is very satisfactory to the people…”

 

January 5, 1850, he described the “courthouse” where the magistrate and sheriff held forth.

 

  The sitting of this court was held in a small trading shanty, for this day’s term, which was constructed of upright forks, crossed with poles, filled in with stone and mud, and the roof was of slate and sloped but one way. One corner of this was occupied by Dr. Stone as a grocery, and a rawhide table served as a bench for the jury and a smaller one covered with slabs of slates was used as a writing table for the judge, sheriff, and members of the bar…..The sheriff acted both in the capacity of executory officer and clerk of this court, and, when ordered, called the jury and counted the number at the same time.

    

  Evans had opportunity to serve as attorney for some of the accused; other times he served on the jury. One thing he complained about was a lack of reading material as both books and newspapers were in short supply. He spent an enjoyable time reading the new California Constitution. On January 11th, a day in which rains suspended all gold mining, he wrote, “…now it is that the mind wants food and hungers because books cannot be found. I have just finished an hour’s reading of a work styled The Pirates of Cape Ann,[8] which task I found a pleasant one. With this opportunity I was kindly furnished by Sheriff Barbour, and to him I owe the pleasure of passing a few hours whilst the descending rain was patterning upon our canvas roof. “

  January 17th he reported “Sheriff Barbour received two letters from home by this express [from San Francisco], and bearing news of such a character as are alarming to me. The cholera seems to have visited all the towns on the Wabash and Erie Canal, and who knows but my little family has had this terrible disease to contend against.” Of course this had to be concerning to Myron, too.

     What Myron and his friend probably did not know was that cholera struck Fort Wayne the August Myron was en route to California, killed 45, and vanished in October. It was undoubtedly worrisome for Jane, home with the children, and she likely joined in a day of fasting and prayer declared in the town on August 2nd.

 

   January 21st 1850 Evans described how, the previous day, a dead miner’s things had been sold, and how the estate’s administrator, another man, and “Sheriff Barber” set out to find the place where the miner was buried. There were two reasons for this. The unfortunate miner, A.G. Yotter, was killed by a bear and buried right where he was felled by two other miners using only jack knives to dig his grave. The three ‘officials’ wanted to rebury him in a grave secure from prowling animals, and they wanted to search his body for over $100 cash that had mysteriously disappeared right after Yotter’s death. The next day, Evans wrote that the men found the grave disturbed, but the remains themselves were little disturbed. Myron and the other two men dug a new grave, re-examined the body, buried it, and secured the grave from bears and wolves. The lost money and a silver-cased gold pen was indeed found in the man’s pockets, and were taken charge of by the administrator of his estate. “…the party returned to camp this evening, fully satisfied that everything that could be done, had now been effected, and that all cause for suspicion touching the money was now forever removed.”

  By February, Evans reported that he was soon ready to move on from the Mariposa Diggings for more promising options, and that most of the men felt the same way. February 16th he wrote, “This evening after dark, friend Barber came to the door and announced the arrival of the express. This glad news brought us all on our feet and we rushed into the open air…” This mail delivery brought Evans dreadful news, as he learned his father, uncle and two cousins died of cholera.

  On March 19th Evans left the camp and settled in San Francisco, where he boarded at a house kept by several Chinese and began his new job as a customhouse officer. He mentions Myron on April 26, 1850, when he describes doing him a favor.

 

  I then wandered into the office of Adams and Company and left in their care, for transmission to New York, eighteen ounces and eleven pennyweights of dust – proceedes to be sent home by draft – and also one pound for my friend M.F. Barber. This done, I felt a relief from a great measure of responsibility.

    

  Myron's pound of gold was worth about $330, so about a year's income. The next day was Evans’ last mention of Myron by name.

 

  I was placed in charge of the British bark “Change” of Panama. Judge of my very agreeable surprise on meeting with Dr. John M. Fletcher and Dr. Lewis of Fort Wayne, Indiana. This meeting gave me sincere pleasure and I felt as if once more among men with whom I had met before. M.F. Barber, our old acquaintance at the mines, also called, and after a short conversation with these old friends, I proceeded to the discharge of the baggage of 129 passengers.

 

  The following day, Evans mentioned that all his visitors were gone except “Dr. F.” A precise date for when Myron left California, or when he returned to Indiana, has not been located. The next part of his story is told in his 1900 obituary, the source of which is almost certainly his daughter Sylvia. The obituary noted his gold rush past, saying, “in later years he frequently spoke of his experiences there.” Myron booked passage on a ship big enough to hold 300 passengers, according to the obituary, for a second trip around the Horn.

 

  It was on this trip that an accident occurred which gives insight into Mr. Barbour’s character and sense of right. The captain of the vessel was addicted to drunkenness and several times the ship was in danger of being lost as a result of the commander’s condition. There were 300 passengers and there was almost a panic on board. Still, no one dared to brave the captain’s fiery temper insofar as to enter into a formal objection to his habits.

  But that quiet schoolteacher determined that the drunkenness of the captain should no longer imperil so many lives, and in defiance of the chief officer’s rage he called a meeting of the passengers, and his words gave them courage so that they compelled the captain to put in at a port in Central America.

  There, Mr. Barbour went ashore and sought out the marine authorities, secured the captain’s discharge and the appointment of a second mate, a sober, reliable man to assume the command.

 

  This account certainly paints Myron as the hero. After all these amazing adventures, Myron returned to Fort Wayne, to Jane, to Lucius and Sylvia and little Myron Cassius, to Ella and to Eliza Jane. It was time to get back to home life, and along with the comforts of home, the everyday work-a-day. On the 1850 census, enumerated on August 11th, Myron is listed as a clerk in Fort Wayne. Included in his household is a 17-year old named Fanny Bishop, a live-in servant. Although servants were something the middle class could then afford, it would seem they were doing well.

 

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[1] Benjamin Silliman, Sr. was a noted Yale professor of chemistry and geology. Dana was a geologist and also a Yale professor. Their names were well-known.

[2] California: A History, p. 110.

[3]  It was common for groups of men to form mining companies before departure for the “land of promise.” The advantage of joining one was similar to booking all travel and excursions with a cruise ship company verses making the arrangements on one’s own. Provisions, mining equipment and housing would all be taken care of. It was more expensive than being an independent gold seeker, though, as memberships had to be purchased.

 

[4] Laura Taylor Suttenfield was 21 and married five years when her little brother William Taylor was born. He was only one year older than Jane. William would stay out west, becoming a justice of the peace in Nevada. R. Morgan French, a Connecticut native born in 1822, came to Fort Wayne in 1844. Like Myron he returned to Fort Wayne in 1851 where he entered in business, first in hardware, then in the manufacture of wool goods, and as an insurance company executive. He lived there till his death in 1891.

[5] Myron’s cousins – Harlow Barber’s sons --  and Jane’s brother, George Walker Suttenfield, known as “Walker,” went the overland route. Jane’s cousin’s husband, Louis Bourie, also went that route. The Barbers and Louis Bourie would return, but Walker, after a period of wandering in Nevada and Montana, lived out his life in California, still chasing gold in the 1880s. Jane’s 17-year old sister Mary Frances also joined the gold rush with her husband, traveling an arduous desert route from Texas through Arizona in 1850.

[6] California: A History, p. 110.

[7] Christman’s letters home and a journal were published in 1930.

[8] The Pirates of Cape Ann, or: The Freebooter’s Foe, A Tale of Land and Water, by Charles E. Averill, was a dime novel. Averill wrote several books about California gold mining in addition to fiction.

Copyright Andrea Auclair © 2023