Dreams of Gold: Walker Suttenfield's Remarkable Life Out West
Note: The A to Z Family History Challenge was created by other family history/genealogy bloggers a few years ago to inspire people to write one post a week. I’ve also seen one that called for writing a post a day, except Sundays, for the month of April. These aren’t designed to be deep in-depth time-consuming research endeavors (but they can be – and I love doing research). The original idea was doing something quick, maybe posting a photo of a broach inherited from a grandmother and writing about it. Some bloggers came up with themes, one being places of importance in family history. I liked that idea. So most of my A to Z challenge will be places, and of course why they matter in my family tree.
A to Z Challenge: M- Mountain Spring Station, Mohave County, Arizona
I wish I had a photo of George Walker Suttenfield, but I do have this picture of his remarkable second wife Sarah Foxall.
“Over and over the same story was repeated – of men who spent their money, their time, their hope, for claims that paid but little or not at all…..The story of mining as a whole is a romantic one. It meant the opening up of the Territory. But the story of the individual miner was not always so glamorous.” (1)
Walker Suttenfield knew more than a little about the lack of glamor in mining. Yet, to the end of his long life he never completely gave up the hope of someday striking it rich, and owned a mine at his death in 1910. Today’s “A to Z Challenge” features a place he spent a few years in: Mountain Spring Station in Mohave County, Arizona. It’s not that it is a terribly important place, but it is a symbol of the adventurous life he led, and the lifestyle he was willing to have in pursuit of the strike-it-rich dream.
Walker was born George Walker Suttenfield in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1825, the son of William Suttenfield and Laura Taylor. He was my third great-grandmother’s brother.(2) As a young man he went out to California for the Gold Rush, starting his daring life with travel around the raw, often remote edges of the great West.
His adventures started in Preston Bend, Texas. Walker’s father died in 1836 when he was 11. His mother struggled to support the children who were still at home. The youngest, Mary Frances, was only four when William Suttenfield died. But the oldest daughter, Sophia, married and left home in 1833. Through marriage she had done well in Texas, and owned a plantation in Preston Bend called Glen Eden. When Mary Frances was 14 or 15 she moved in with Sophia, marrying at age 16 in Grayson County, Texas.
Although I can't absolutely prove it, I believe Walker is the one who brought his little sister Mary Frances to their oldest sister’s home in Grayson County, Texas, the first of his many moves. (3) For her to travel alone was out of the question and there was no railroad running between Fort Wayne and Grayson County. In fact, Texas was still a new state. It’s most likely that they traveled by canal as far south in Indiana as possible, and in New Albany caught a steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi. They would still have to travel by wagon to Glen Eden, which would be no easy journey.
Mary Frances married in Grayson County in February 1849. She had a baby in October and a few months later she and her husband traveled to California to the gold fields.
In Walker’s obituary, it says in April 1849 he started overland for the gold fields from Fort Smith, Arkansas in a cattle train. The first argonauts to leave from Fort Smith departed just a month earlier. Things did not go well in Walker’s party; cattle died, and according to his obituary, “He was one of the train who were forced to cross the Colorado desert on foot. Their provisions ran low and they suffered great hardships.” They arrived in San Diego, the obituary said, in October, “practically destitute.”
Most likely, his experiences were like those recorded by a group - maybe even his group - after crossing the Colorado River, facing a 90-mile stretch of desert on the trail. The carcasses of mules, horses and oxen littered the roadside, and a stifling smell filled the air. Intense summer heat, from 100 to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, “provoked the most intolerable thirst. An extremely hot wind swept over the desert with great violence and “even the strongest staggered under its withering influence.” Among the weary emigrants there was, “many a quivering and sinking heart.” After they reached San Diego, a correspondent for the New Orleans Daily Picayune probably spoke for many when he wrote, “A man who has traveled the Gila route may throw himself upon his knees when he has reached this point [San Diego], and thank God for preserving him through it.”(4) From San Diego Walker took a ship to San Francisco where he had to work in various jobs until he had the money to go off to the diggings.
Official records show his perambulations from there. On the 1850 census he and eight other men lived together in First Garrote, Tuolumne County, California. Now the town of Groveland, it was a gold mining camp. In 1851 in Fine Gold Gulch, Mariposa County, he married his first wife, Sarah Boardman. She was a recent widow with a little girl. Theirs was said to be the first wedding in the county. He gave up on gold mining, for a time, and raised cattle from 1856 to 1861. The 1860 non-population census recorded him in Mariposa County with 600 acres of land and stock valued at $3,000.(5) His obituary said he moved to Stockton in 1862. He and Sarah had five children, the last born in 1861, William T. Suttenfield. William was the last of their children because Walker left the family. Sarah spent the rest of her life in Stockton.
Walker’s trail resumed in Montana Territory in June 1868, where the Virginia City newspaper reported on happenings in a place called Jefferson Gulch. One claim yielded 47 and a half ounces of gold in one week. The correspondent reported, “The gulch now contains about fifty men, and is provided with one store, one hotel and a ranch office, the latter kept by Suttenfield & Co., the friends of the cayuse.”
He was enumerated on the 1870 census in Missoula, raising stock, with a personal estate he reported as $800 in value. He was living in a small hotel or boarding house that had a Chinese cook, Ah You.
In 1875 he was back to mining in desolate Nye County, Nevada Territory. He was recorded on the state census living with other miners. Nye County today is the location of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository and the Nevada National Security Site where nuclear testing was started in 1951. More than ninety percent of the land is under the management of the federal government. It has no incorporated cities, and 86 percent of the population lives in the unincorporated county seat Tonopah. Its current status gives clues as to how remote and desolate it must have been in the 1870s.
From there he went to Arizona Territory, where a territorial census placed him in Mohave County in 1876.
This brings us to the Mountain Spring Station. There is a very interesting 1880 census page for this location because it consists of only one page with only 16 residents - the total population. I have not seen any other census page like it in years and years of peering at census documents. Of the 16 residents, ten were Indians, all but two of whom (Joe Piute and Pompei Patterson) had native names: Maon, Wacuma, Spanula, Cherawarama, Ouasamaugita, Hackaookama, Norcha, and Zuli-ka. Walker was listed as head of the station, with his second wife, Sarah Foxall. Sixteen-year old Pompei Patterson lived with them as a servant. Three white men, only one of whom had a wife, are listed as miners; the Indian men are identified as laborers. Three of the Indians were children living with their parents.
Maybe I should say “wife,” when referring to Sarah, however. Later, on the 1900 and 1910 census, Americans were asked how many years they had been married. Walker and Sarah gave 1882 as the date they were wed. Were they in error? Or from the safety of time and distance, when no one would know they “lived in sin” in Arizona, did they then feel free to tell the truth?
By sheer coincidence, Walker’s first and second wives were both named Sarah and both immigrated to the U.S. from England as young children. His first wife’s family settled in Poughkeepsie, New York. But Sarah Foxall had a very interesting story. Her parents were converts to the Mormon Church - correctly known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. They were baptized in England in 1840 by Wilford Woodruff, who was serving a mission there but would later be the fourth president of the church. In October 1841 Sarah’s family arrived in Nauvoo, the church headquarters on the banks of the Mississippi River in Illinois. They experienced life in busy Nauvoo during the last four years of prophet Joseph Smith’s life, and chose to remain faithful to the main branch of the church after his murder, when there was much confusion about succession and several schismatic groups.
The Foxalls made the trek across the plains to the great Salt Lake Valley, and in 1851 at age 16 Sarah married David Wilkin as a plural wife. She was “sealed” to him, in the parlance of the Church, along with another woman, Jane Easton, making them his third and fourth wives. (He would take a fifth three years later.)(6) At some point Sarah left David and, it seems, the church.
There is a gap in her whereabouts but her only child James Foxall Wilkin, married a church member in Pioche, Nevada, in 1875. It was a remote silver mining boom town known as one of the roughest towns in the west, where shoot-outs in the streets were common. It held the unsavory statistic of having the highest homicide rate in Nevada Territory. If Sarah was with him, a place like the mining station in Mohave County, Arizona wasn’t likely to be daunting to her.
At any rate, now Sarah found herself in the remote Mountain Spring Station with Walker. The nearest town was Mineral Park. It was founded in 1871 and located in the Cerbat Mountains. Getting there was no casual undertaking. Prospectors had to take a riverboat 300 miles upstream from Yuma to Hardyville (now underwater near Bullhead City), then cross 38 miles of unforgiving desert.(7)
The mines in the area produced gold, silver, copper, lead and zinc, and Indians had mined for turquoise since around the year 600. Mineral Park was the Mohave County seat and grew quickly, with a population of 700. It became a regional center for even more isolated outposts, such as Mountain Spring Station. It had two stagecoach stations, a post office that opened in 1872, assay offices, five smelters, a courthouse, stores, hotels, saloons, a doctor and lawyers, and in November 1882, a newspaper.
In the first edition of the newspaper, editor James Hyde wrote that the last time mail was received in town was July, blaming “rascally, thieving mail contractors” and Granville Henderson Ouray, the congressional delegate who had not done anything to remedy the situation. In the second edition, November 12th, a small item noted that because Mr. Blakely was unavoidably delayed in California, the town’s children would have a month-long vacation from school. We can infer that Mr. Blakely was the town’s only public school teacher.
Mineral Park’s heyday was brief, however. In 1883 the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad was completed 20 miles south of town. At first, this seemed like a good thing. It brought more of the outside world closer and cut transportation costs dramatically, causing prosperity for the town. But the settlement of Kingman was built to service the railroad, and it began to grow rapidly. It became the regional supply center, and in 1887 the county seat was moved to Kingman.
By January 1884, Mrs. Sarah Suttenfield had a letter sitting unclaimed in the post office at Mineral Park, a probable sign that she and Walker had moved on. An era was over and Mineral Park dwindled to a ghost town.
Walker and Sarah moved to San Bernardino, California, back in “civilization,” where they would remain for the rest of their lives. In April 1886 Walker registered to vote. His occupation was given as a stableman. Two years later he co-founded the San Bernardino branch of the Society of California Pioneers, an important social outlet for him and his wife. It operated in the era when fraternal organizations were of such importance to Americans. The leaders were given the titles Mother and Father, and the other members were referred to as Sister and Brother. They had their own meeting place known as Native Hall.
On the 1900 census, at age 75, they lived in a rental home and his occupation was “miner.” He never had struck it rich - nor had he given up that dream. By 1910 at age 85, he was no longer working, and owned his home. Sarah’s only child James, age 57, lived with them and was listed as a farmer, “working out.” His last name was listed as his mother’s maiden name, Foxall, either a mistake, or a possible repudiation of his polygamous father.
In 1910 Walker used six lines to feebly sign his name from his bedside in a centennial roster of the Pioneer Society. It was just weeks before his death of throat cancer. Fittingly, he was buried in the Pioneer Memorial Cemetery, with rituals performed by the Pioneers.(8)
Notes:
Housman.
My great-great-great grandmother was Jane Suttenfield, born in Fort Wayne in 1817. She married Myron Fitch Barbour.
Landrum, p. 5.
Bieber.
His farm, according to this census report, was valued at $800 and his farm implements and machinery at $200.
David Wilkin was an Irishman who lived one of those fascinating and amazing lives of the nineteenth century. He converted to the Mormon Church in 1840 in Ireland and came to Nauvoo the next year. He served in the Mormon Battalion in 1846, led a wagon train to the Salt Lake Valley and became a member of the Quorum of Seventy, a high leadership position in the Church. In 1857 he also served a mission in which 71 missionaries went east from Salt Lake on their way to missions in Europe pulling 28 handcarts.
Alexander.
The society continues to operate today. Membership is open to direct descendants of Californians who arrived prior to January 1, 1850. Its headquarters is in the Presidio in San Francisco and it operates a museum that is open to the public once a month.
I don’t know if Walker maintained contact with any of his children after he left them and his first wife, but I suspect that he did not. In 1929 his son William wrote the Pioneer Society and asked them for any information they had about his father. Except for a brief time in Tacoma, Washington, his little sister Mary Frances spent the rest of her life in Oakdale, California, which today is a six-hour drive from San Bernardino. I don’t know if they maintained contact. Sarah Foxall Suttenfield died in 1915. After her death, her son James returned to Utah where Mary, the daughter he’d left as a baby, took him in. She remained a faithful member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints all her life.
Sources:
Alexander, Kathy. “Ghosts of the Cerbat Mountains,” Legends of America, March 2023, https://www.legendsofamerica.com/az-cerbat/
Bieber, Ralph P. “The Southwestern Trails to California in 1849,” The Mississippi Valley Historical review, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Dec. 1925), pp. 342-375.
Brown, John Jr. and James Boyd. History of San Bernadino and Riverside Counties, Western Historical Association, Chicago, Illinois: Lewis Publishing Co., 1922.
Griggs, Karen Ann. “Handcarts Going East,” Journal of Mormon History, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Spring 2009), pp. 191-237.
Griswold, Bert. A Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Chicago: Lewis Publishing, 1917.
Housman, Robert L. “Frontier Society - Cedar Creek Montana 1870-1874,” The Washington Historical Quarterly, Vol. 26 No. 4 (Oct 1935), pp. 264-273.
Landrum, Graham. Grayson County - An Illustrated History of Grayson County, Texas, Fort Worth, Texas: University Supply & Equipment Company, 1960.
Peterson, Paul R. Quantrill in Texas: The Forgotten Campaign, Nashville, Tennessee: Cumberland House Publishing: 2007.
Newspapers:
“From Jefferson Gulch,” The Montana Post (Virginia City, Montana), 26 June 1868, p. 8.
“Letter List,” Mohave County Miner (Mineral Park, Arizona), 13 Jan 1884, p. 3.
Copyright Andrea Auclair © 2023
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