Chapter 2
Note! This article and its content is solely owned and copyrighted by Bill Baccus, as sole agent for Sadie Culbert's descendants and the Culbert family, and may not be reproduced or distributed in any form, may not be quoted or paraphrased, may not be sold or published by anyone without the written permission & authorization of Bill Baccus.
Grandma was a wonderful cook, and a regular New England manager and housekeeper, so it did not take her long to get things on a good business basis after she got on the job. They had not been there very long when one day there was quite a commotion in the room where the men stayed. My mother, a girl then, opened the door and looked in and there was an Indian who had been to Amador City and was on his way back to the Indian camp. He had been imbibing quite freely of the "fire water," and was on the rampage. So mother went in and took him by the shoulder and said, "Now you go home and don’t come back until you are sober." He looked at her a moment and the said, "Alright, me go." He went out, got on his horse and left.
There were several men sitting around in the room and one of the said, "Well, I don’t really know whether to compliment you on your bravery or criticize you for your foolishness." Mother said, "I don’t know why, he was only a drunken Indian." The man replied, "Yes, but we know drunken Indians, You don’t." The Indian came back in a few days and brought mother a string of beads and said that he was very sorry. So everything turned out all right.
My father, Matthew McElwain Culbert was born in Callaway County, Missouri, son of Matthew and Prudence Lilly Culbert. He had one sister, who married John Van Horn, and one brother, Thomas, who married Eliza Jane Myers. He left Missouri at the age of seventeen to join a covered wagon train to California. They met with the usual adventures that were the inevitable attendants of those terrible trips, but all arrived safely in Sacramento in February, 1850. At that time there was an epidemic of cholera in Sacramento, so most of the people went directly to the mining districts.
Father cast his first vote for the admission of California into the Union during that summer of 1850. I asked him one day how he managed to vote when he was only eighteen years old. He said, "Nobody asked me how old I was. They wanted votes, not birth certificates, at the time." Probably voting was not such a complicated affair then as it is now. The thought that if a man was old enough to do a man’s work and intelligent enough to understand what ought to be done, that a few years shortage in his entrance into the world was his own business.
Well, they came from all parts of the world wherever the news had gone forth of the discovery of gold in California. People from all walks of life, both educated and illiterate, like the Argonauts of old in search of the Golden Fleece. Some were good and some were bad, but most of them were just average men doing the best they could with the "materials at hand," and ready to take their parts in whatever work that lay before them, as it happened to be. Nearly all of them were young men looking for adventure and excitement even if they had to make it themselves, which I guess they often did.
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