The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  Two months and three hundred miles into the trip, they reached Fort Kearney in Nebraska, low on provisions and in revolt against their captain, who had been skimping on food. The officer in charge of Fort Kearney listened to their grievances—and their threats to shoot the captain—and told the travelers all he could offer was return passage to St. Joseph. Eager to reach California, the emigrants made peace and pushed on along the well-worn trail.

  On May 13, they reached the Platte River, which August described as three times wider than the Weser, the river that bordered his Prussian hometown. He marveled at the herds of pronghorn antelope, which he thought at first were a type of deer. They saw occasional herds of buffalo. But the most common animals were wolves, which circled the camp at night and howled.

  A week later they crossed the Platte by ferry, taking two hours to get everyone across. Out of wood to cook by fire, they ate zwieback and ham. On May 26, they passed what August described as “a clot of earth straight up about 300 feet,” later known as Chimney Rock.

  Five days later, they reached Fort Laramie in the Wyoming Territory, a major trading post in the land of the Sioux. August was intrigued by their customs. “These Indians do not bury their dead,” he wrote. “They weave baskets and put their dead into them and stand them in the tops of trees.”

  The travelers forged ahead on the dusty, crowded trail and on June 8 reached the head of the Platte River in Casper, Wyoming. More than a hundred wagons waited to cross, a boon for ferry operators who charged $3 per wagon and $1 per animal. By noon the next day, August’s party had safely made it to the other side, swimming the animals to the far shore to save money.

  Within a week, the party confronted their captain again and threatened to leave him behind. They demanded he provide two and a half pounds of food per day, which would last forty days, and promise to buy any food needed after. He counteroffered: If they would stretch the food for six more days, he promised milk for coffee. Fourteen men accepted that deal, while the rest insisted on their original terms.

  On June 18, they saw snow-covered mountains of the Wind River Range in the distance as they approached a juncture known as “the parting of the ways.” They took the more difficult Sublette Cutoff, which shaved four days off the trip, and began a forty-one-mile trek across a desert described in guidebooks as “the dry Sandy.” They traveled mainly at night to avoid the extreme heat.

  On July 26, they reached “the big Sandy,” also known as the Forty-Mile Desert, a tough stretch in Nevada. They traveled again at night. “Here the measure of water cost 1 dollar,” August wrote. “Here we lost 7 oxen who died of thirst. We also had to leave a wagon here. Here thousands of cows, horses, mules were lying about dead … the discarded wagons by the hundreds were driven together and burned. Here we saw wagons standing that would never be taken out again, and more than 1,000 guns that had been broken up. Here on this 40 miles are treasures that can never be taken out again.”

  On September 1, they reached the eastern foothills of the Sierra Nevada and camped for several days before starting the ascent. “After 15 days of crossing these mountains, letting our wagons down by rope and tying trees behind the wagon, we came to a little mining town called Hangtown,” August wrote. “Very bad town. Close to where gold was discovered. Here I will go work for a while.”

  Six months after leaving St. Louis, the twenty-five-year-old immigrant had reached his new home in California—Hangtown, later renamed Placerville.

  Practical and frugal, August stayed away from the frenetic, speculative life of the mines. Instead, he found steady work making money off those who came to get rich quick. Hangtown, about eight miles south of Coloma, where gold had first been discovered, was a hub for the mining community. Within a few weeks, August had a job driving a freight wagon from Coloma to Sutter’s Fort, on the outskirts of Sacramento, about forty miles south.

  August became friendly with John Sutter and began to venture farther afield. He took supplies by boat from Sacramento up the Feather River to Marysville, a German settlement where Sutter owned a cattle and hog farm. By the spring of 1853, August was still driving a stagecoach and scouting options to settle down and farm. “I will go up in this fruitful valley and get myself a large tract of land,” he wrote. “I have gone up this river which has been named the Sacramento river to a little settlement named Colusa.”

  Colusa was a small town7 in a county of the same name, roughly sixty miles long and fifty miles wide, bordered on the east by the Sacramento River and on the west by the Coast Range. The name came from the local Indian tribe. The mines were on the other side of the river, so Colusa developed slowly; in 1850 there were only 115 residents. But as gold grew scarcer and pioneers became discouraged, they fanned out, settled land, and started businesses. At first the land was used mainly to graze livestock. Then Colusa farmers found they could make more money growing barley and wheat, which they sold as feed for horses that drew the wagons that resupplied the mining camps. By spring 1852, three steamboats—the Jenny Lind, Captain Sutter, and Orient—offered regular service up the river from Sacramento, a ninety-mile trip that took eighteen hours. The river traffic turned Colusa into a boomtown, with two hotels, a bakery, three blacksmith and wagon-making shops, a soda fountain, a vegetable depot, and a doctor. The 1852 census reported a population of 620—400 white men, 63 white women, 5 “negroes,” 3 “mulattoes,” 66 Indians, and 21 foreign residents. Soon hotels opened along the main routes, providing rest and food for travelers and their horses. There were hotels every few miles, their names reflecting the distance from Colusa: Five Mile House, Seven Mile House, Nine Mile House, Ten Mile House, Eleven Mile House, Sixteen Mile House, Seventeen Mile House, Nineteen Mile House, and Twenty Mile House.

  Wary of the river, which often overflowed and swept away livestock on low-lying ground, August chose his first ranch land carefully and staked his claim. “I have taken up land 15 miles west of Colusa, on high land and very fine land near to a large range of mountains called the Coast Range,” he wrote in 1854. “They are a great range which lies between the Pacific Ocean and the Sacramento Valley—that is what this valley is called now.”

  A remote county with cool winters, blazing hot summers, and lots of rattlesnakes, Colusa was not for everyone. But pioneers drawn to the sparsely settled farmland embraced the quiet, provincial lifestyle and put down roots that lasted generations. With little fanfare or effort to lure settlers, the low-key town grew to about forty-five hundred residents by 1862. “Those who came here came to stay,”8 wrote local historian Justus Rogers a few decades later. “They remained, and the generation that succeeded them, inspired with the same love for their environments, knew no other and sought no other region to be dedicated with that sweet, endearing, soul-satisfying word, ‘home.’ ”

  Home for August by 18609 was a house next door to two of Colusa’s leading citizens, fifth-generation American Will Green and his uncle Charles Semple. Charles’s brother Robert Semple had been an early pioneer, cofounded the first newspaper, the Monterey Californian, presided over the constitutional convention in 1849, and then founded the city of Benicia. Inspired by his success, Charles and Will left their Kentucky home and headed for California. Charles scouted land where he, too, might found a city, and settled on Colusa. His nephew became editor of the Colusa Sun and author of the first history of Colusa County, one of about 150 history books about California counties published in the nineteenth century.

  Like Green and Semple, most Colusa residents had come from the South. The county was politically conservative and known for its secessionist sentiment. During the Civil War, politicians gathered at the Copperhead Saloon, where they served “Habeas Corpus Juleps.” When President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, the flags at half-staff were mysteriously raised on the day of the funeral. Several citizens were arrested for unpatriotic celebrations, including the district attorney, the deputy assessor, and the justice of the peace.

  The settlers of Colusa had a reputation for respect
ing property rights and generally maintaining law and order without resorting to the lynch law that prevailed nearby. In 1854, they built a small, temporary courthouse. By 1860, the county had outgrown the makeshift structure and commissioned a white stone building in the Classical Revival style, its columns and portico familiar to the residents with Southern roots.

  August Schuckman had become a naturalized citizen on May 24, 1859, and registered to vote. But his focus was on business, not politics. As a citizen, he could obtain federal patents to land and register deeds. He purchased an eighty-acre parcel from the heirs of a Revolutionary War veteran who had been granted title under a government bounty program that offered free land as an incentive for soldiers to enlist. August paid the government rate, $1.25 per acre, and filed his claim on April 22, 1862. Having secured his farm, he temporarily stepped away. Knowing full well the travails of the trip, August set out to retrace his route—all the way back to Germany. Thirteen years after he had arrived in America, he was ready to start a family, and he went home to find a bride.

  Progress and August’s financial stability gave him more options on his trip back east. He chose the quickest route10—south from San Francisco by ship to Panama and then across the isthmus on the recently opened Panama Railroad. In the Panama port of Colón, he boarded the North Star, and on May 23, 1862, he arrived in New York Harbor. The same day, he applied for a United States passport.

  He sailed back to Germany and found his bride in the town of Soest, about sixty miles from his hometown. Augusta Sophie Fiedler was twenty-seven years old when she met August, who was thirty-five. She was the youngest of seven siblings, all but one of them girls. Her father, Max Mathias Fiedler, had been a captain and then a noncommissioned officer in the army and worked for the local tax authority. The Fiedlers were a well-educated middle-class family. If August and Augusta ever told their descendants the story of how they met, the tale was lost to subsequent generations. Whether motivated by love, adventure, or dim prospects at home, Augusta embarked on a journey to a radically different life.

  August and Augusta married in the Lutheran church in Wüsten on May 1, 1863, across the street from the Schuckman family tavern. They set off immediately, boarding the SS Hansa11 in Bremen. Most of the 546 passengers traveled in steerage; the Schuckmans were in first class, lower saloon, one step down from the best berths. They arrived in New York on May 26, then boarded another ship to travel around the Horn to San Francisco, and finally journeyed up the Sacramento River to Colusa. August had been gone from the farm for more than a year.

  Augusta had found the trip arduous and looked forward to reaching her new home. Yet Colusa proved small comfort. Augusta was educated, enjoyed playing the piano, and was accustomed to a refined life. She spoke no English and found herself lonely and isolated in a primitive farming community—not at all the life she had likely imagined. She had but a few possessions from Germany to remind her of home: clothes, a white china teapot. August bought her an elegant parlor organ from the Estey company in Vermont, the finest on the market.

  In 1863 August Schuckman brought his bride, Augusta, from a cultured German city to an isolated Colusa ranch. They posed for a charcoal portrait. (Courtesy of Brown family)

  On April 21, 1865, the day that Lincoln’s funeral cortege left Washington, D.C., the Schuckmans’ first son was born. They named him August, and he was known as Gus. He would live the rest of his life on Colusa farms. Gus was followed by Charles in the fall of 1866 and Frank in the spring of 1868.

  August continued to prosper,12 both as a farmer and as a land speculator. He raised cattle, hogs, and chickens and doubled the size of his farm, paying the federal government rate of $1.25 per acre. He profited handsomely from his $200 investment: On May 7, 1869, he sold his 160-acre ranch for $3,000. Ten days later, August bought the 800-acre Lett Ranch for $4,000 and settled in the northern end of the county, on rich soil nourished by Stoney Creek. By 1870, his farm produced 500 bushels of winter wheat, 100 bushels of barley, and 10 tons of hay. He owned livestock worth $1,200—three horses, three milk cows, nine other cattle, 290 sheep, and nine swine, some of which he slaughtered and sold for $450. The total estimated value of his farm’s produce was $1,050, and he estimated his personal wealth to be $3,950.

  The shrewd businessman took no chances. In a wild West where patent claims took months to travel back and forth to Washington, D.C., and ownership rights were often fuzzy, August filed a homestead claim in 1873 on the land he had been farming for four years. Once the paperwork came through, he was ready for his next deal. In the fall of 1874, he sold the ranch for $5,000, banked half the money, and spent the rest on the Twenty Mile House, a small inn and saloon.

  Augusta gave birth to two more sons, Louis and Will, then two girls, Minnie and Emma. The Schuckmans’ eighth and final child was born January 11, 1878. They named her Ida.

  Six months after Ida’s birth, August engineered a business coup. The Twenty Mile House included a parcel that one of the county’s largest landowners needed to cross in order to graze his herds. August agreed to trade the Twenty Mile House for a property just a few miles away but far more valuable—a well-known inn and tavern called the Mountain House.13 August wanted to be an innkeeper, like his father.

  August moved his family to the nearby city called Central, just as the town that was little more than a crossroads began to grow. The railroad had reached Colusa County.

  On a smaller scale, the railroad brought to Colusa the same dramatic change that the arrival of the first cross-country trains had brought to California a decade earlier. Once the first trains reached Oakland in 1869, a trip to New York took only a few days. Such easy access would enhance California, but also spur greater inequality, warned bestselling author Henry George in a well-read, prescient essay, “What the Railroad Will Bring Us.” As George predicted, land escalated in value, which was a boon for existing owners but a bar for newcomers. More people meant more competition for jobs, which lowered wages. The railroad centralized wealth and created a class of tycoons whose power would soon have profound implications for California.

  In Central, an enterprising builder named W. H. Williams had bought up land and laid out a grid in anticipation of the railroad terminus. Once trains began to run in 1876, goods could be shipped south to Sacramento by rail, and proximity to the terminal trumped access to the river. Williams resold land, Central boomed, and the city was renamed in his honor.

  While goods went south, people came north. The trains facilitated travel to several hot springs that were a day’s journey west of Williams by stagecoach. Renowned for their healing powers, Bartlett, Allen, and Wilbur Springs attracted hundreds of visitors a year from as far as San Francisco. Many were Germans, who compared the baths to those of Baden Baden. Advertisements and history books cited testimonials to the waters’ ability to cure rheumatism, liver and kidney ailments, fever, and asthma. Strategically located along the route from Williams to the springs sat August Schuckman’s inn.

  The Mountain House, built in 1855 at a fork in the road twelve miles west of Williams, became a popular stopping place to feed or change horses and to enjoy a drink, a meal, or an overnight rest. The inn had twelve bedrooms—one of them large enough to bunk ten single men—a long bar, a large sitting room, two dining rooms, a kitchen, and a pantry. Meals cost a quarter, and whiskey was ten cents a shot or a dollar a quart. To board a horse overnight cost fifty cents.

  Stagecoaches could carry more than a dozen passengers from Williams west to the Mountain House. There the coaches divided, some heading to the hot springs while others veered off to the mining community at Sulphur Creek. Mineral waters from the springs were bottled and sold as a tonic for ailments. Mule-drawn wagons hauled the bottled water from the springs to the Williams railroad station for shipping to San Francisco and points east. They, too, stopped at the Mountain House.

  Like many locals, the Schuckmans sometimes spent a day or a week at the springs to escape the brutal summer heat. Photographs show
August, his bearing erect, his sandy hair now gray, his face covered with a long beard, with his three daughters—Minnie and Ida rail-thin, Emma heavyset.

  The older Schuckman boys grew up and found work, two as telegraph operators for the railroad, one as an innkeeper in another county, one as a hired hand. William died in a farming accident at twenty-nine; Louis and his wife died of tuberculosis in their early thirties.

  A decade younger than their siblings and just two years apart in age, Ida and Emma were very close. German was their first language, and neither of their parents ever mastered English. When Ida was nine years old, her mother suddenly fell ill just before her fifty-second birthday. Augusta Schuckman, who had never embraced her life in California, died in the doctor’s office on May 22, 1887. She was buried in the Williams cemetery with a simple headstone that read OUR MOTHER, and a short verse, “A precious one from us has gone, a voice we loved is stilled. A place is vacant in our home which never can be filled.”

  A few years later, August and his daughters moved to the Mountain House. There they grew grains and vegetables and raised cattle, hogs, and chickens, selling whatever they didn’t eat or use at the hotel. They stored food in two large rooms under the house, covered with wet sacks to keep it fresh, until they acquired the luxury of an icebox. Gus, the eldest son, was an avid newspaper reader and self-taught animal expert, content to work on the farm. Frank had inherited his father’s financial acumen and helped run the business.