A Family Gold Rush Compilation

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 A Gold Rush Family Compilation



A crude beachfront gold miners' "kitchen" - "Flapjacks, beans and bacon." Sketch appeared in the 1892 San Francisco Examiner.

    When I was a little girl and learned about the gold rush, I thought it was fascinating. But I thought, “Not my family.” In most families – at least judging by shows like “Finding Your Roots,” and conversations with friends, family stories are forgotten in a generation or two. Most people do not know the names of their great-grandparents by heart – or at all.

      So it was in my family. Five of my eight great-grandparents were immigrants. So I assumed my family as a whole had not been in America for long. Reading about the Puritans and the pioneers moving west, or events like the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, Indian wars, I always thought, “Not us. Not my people.” 

     I was completely wrong. Of Dad’s four grandparents, his grandfather Clyde’s family came to America in 1635. Mom’s grandmother, Mary Smathers, came from a family here since at least the early 1700s. U.S. History seems more personal to me now – and yes, the gold rush is part of my family saga. 

     

Gold Rush


     I’ve been able to identify nine argonauts in the family tree. They are:


  •  Myron F. Barbour (1811-1900) - My great-great-great-grandfather took the "gentleman's route" onboard the copper-bottomed ship the Rising Sun.

  • The brother and two children of my fifth great-grandmother, Laura Taylor Suttenfield. Her youngest brother, William H. Taylor (1817-1899) went to California with Myron.

  • Laura's son George Walker Suttenfield (1825-1910) and her daughter Mary Frances Suttenfield (1832-1898) moved to Texas together, and went to the gold fields separately, Frances with her husband Thomas Murphy.

  • Louis T. Bourie (1828-1908) - Laura Taylor Suttenfield’s niece, Ophelia Dubois Bourie, married Lou Bourie when he returned to Indiana. (Ophelia was the daughter of Laura’s sister Elvira Taylor and John B. Dubois.)

  • Three brothers, Frederick Blanchford “Fred” Barber (1828-1911), Winfield Scott “Scott” Barber (1827-1915) and Edwin Lusk Barber (1831-1916) -  They were the sons of Harlow Barber and Elsie Case. Harlow was Myron F. Barbour’s first cousin.


     All left for the gold diggings from Indiana or Texas. They took different routes. They ranged from age 38 to 18. Myron, William and Mary Frances were married and each had at least one child when they made the trip; the others were single young men. William, George and Mary Frances stayed out west; the rest returned to Indiana. 

     Unfortunately, their adventures were not recorded. A single line in an obituary is typically all the information I have, such as Scott Barber’s, which said, “In 1849, when the Gold Rush of California occurred, the news of it even reached Troy township, and Mr. Barber was caught by it. He spent four years in the west but returned to Troy township.” Mary Frances and her husband Thomas Murphy's experience was reduced to a line in his obituary: “[they] crossed the plains by the southern route through Arizona. It was a long, tedious trip of six months duration, and was attended with no little hardship and peril.”

     Bert Griswold’s amazing Pictorial History of Fort Wayne lists 25 Fort Wayne men who made the trek, an incomplete list. There I found one of a few references to Louis T. Bourie as an argonaut. The second was a letter he received in 1884 from an old compatriot in the gold fields, which he shared with the Fort Wayne Daily News. His obituary said that he “joined forces with a party of Fort Wayne gentlemen who were headed for the new eldorado and made the trip overland to the western coast.” However, instead of panning for gold he made the probably wise decision to accept a bookkeeping job in Sacramento. A short time later he left that job to found a grain milling business, the Phoenix Flour Mill. He returned home by ship in 1855, crossing the isthmus of Panama.  

      In 1911, a grieving Edwin Barber wrote a tribute to his deceased brother Fred. It gives hints of their California adventures and hardships.

     “Today, sitting alone and very lonesome in my office at Fort Wayne, I am trying to pay a deserved tribute to the memory of another grand American –”Hero of peace” – my lifelong friend and my California partner.” he wrote. 


     “A few days ago, at his pleasant home in Larwill, Ind., Fred B. Barber dropped out of the procession, gave up the unequal struggle, and crossed the great divide. I shall not utter one commendation that he does not deserve.

      Almost sixty years ago we crossed the great plains together, when there was not a white man’s cabin between Council Bluffs and Salt Lake, enduring hardships and risking perils by night and by day, which are entirely out of date today….

     I have known him at home in the wilderness, on the desert at midnight, in the gold diggings of California, in summer and winter, in sunshine and in storm; I have tramped and prospected with him in the hills, on river bars, in ravines and canyons; I have eaten with him our pancakes, beans and bacon, have “cabinned” with him in the winter, and rested with him in summer under great pines and cedars, and when night came we smoked our pipes and looked at the glowing coals of our campfire until sleepy, then wrapping our blankets around us we lay down on the matted pine leaves, looked at the stars through the branches of the great pines and cedars, and went to sleep to dream of home and the loved ones there. 

    I have known Fred Barber when men were dying around us of the dreaded cholera, hastily wrapped in blankets and buried in very shallow graves. I have cared for him when given up to die, and he has cared for me when I was weak and helpless…

 

     The Barber brother’s route from Council Bluff to Salt Lake would have been very familiar to the Mormon pioneers who were making their great exodus out of the United States into Utah at the same time. There are many accounts of this exodus for those interested in what that difficult experience was like. 

     Without knowing precise details, I can only speculate how some of these family members arrived in California. Please see the following articles for information on the ones in which I do have the information:


  • Farewell Dear Wife: The Argonaut - Myron Fitch Barbour’s California Adventure (published Feb. 3, 2023)

  • Dreams of Gold: George Walker Suttenfield’s Remarkable Life Out West (Dec. 21, 2023)

  • The Miracle of Connections, and Wendy’s Great-Great-Great Grandfather (Feb. 25, 2023)

  • Mary Frances Goes to California (coming soon)

     

     Maybe the three Barber brothers, the sons of Harlow Barber, traveled to California the way the Manlove brothers of Attica, Indiana did. Mark, John and Jonathan Manlove left Attica in the spring of 1849 and went by steamboat to St. Louis. They joined a company and took another steamboat to St. Joseph, Missouri. Then the easy part was over. They set off across the plains in a wagon train, stopping at the first settlement they came to two hundred miles up the Platte River, the Rubedeaux trading post. Here the wagons were abandoned and they made the rest of the journey on pack mules, following the established route from Fort Laramie to Salt Lake City. They went to the goldfields near Nevada City, but moved to Placerville where they built a cabin. These brothers were gone for two years and returned to Indiana when one developed “lung fever.”  

     

Riches


     Did anyone get rich?   Yes – if you count being rich in memories…rich in experiences…rich in seeing more of what gradually became the United States than most people saw in a lifetime. My third great-grandfather found at least a few sizable nuggets and sent the money from their sales home to his wife Jane. He had enough money to buy passage on a ship home, which was the “gentleman’s way” of traveling to and from California. 

     I wonder about the decisions of those who chose to return to Indiana rather than carving out new lives in the promising land of California. And I wonder about the decision of those like WIlliam Taylor, who sent for his wife and child. 

    All of the men and the few women realized they lived through something historic and never-to-be repeated. Most enjoyed talking about these youthful adventures. In 1903, shortly before his death, Lou Bourie was visited by an old companion from his California days, a Mr. Earl, whom he had not seen for 47 years. According to his obituary they enjoyed reminiscing, and believed they were the only men still alive of a group of fifty they’d known who searched for gold. 

     A few of the men in the family tree wanted, and even attempted, to process the experience in stories and reminiscences, like Edwin Barber. But unfortunately, very few of these memories were written down, so the details are now lost. I was fortunate even to be able to create this round-up of argonauts in the family tree. 


Sources:


     Barber, Edwin Lusk. “Another Old California Pioneer Has Dropped Out of the Procession and Crossed the Divide,” Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, 2 March 1911, p. 4.

     “Louis T. Bourie Dies Suddenly,” Fort Wayne Sentinel, 16 March 1903, p. 1.

     Griswold, Bert. A Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Chicago: Robert O. Law Co., 1917.

     Manlove, Mark D. “An overland trip to the California gold fields,” from Gold Rush Reminiscences, California State Library, https://oac.cdlib.org/search?style=oac4;Institution=California%20State%20Library::California%20History%20Room;idT=AFP-5523


   Copyright by Andrea Auclair  © 2024 

  

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