Tuolumne County Biographies

PRENTICE MULFORD

Submitted by: Nancy Pratt Melton

This file is part of the California Genealogy & History Archives
http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cagha/index.htm


Mr. Mulford writes as follows: �You ask me for my biography.  I could write you 
a much more interesting biography, were it not to be published until after I am 
dead.  I should not like to face my own truthful biography.  Very few really 
truthful biographies are ever written.  What men write of themselves, or have 
written for them, is generally a veneer over the hideous truth.  It is a 
re�spectable, conventional dummy, stuffed with skillful eva�sions, if not with 
downright lies, that is furnished for the edification of the public.  It is sad 
to think of such biogra�phies which cumber our histories, our village libraries, 
and even our Sunday schools.
Out of consideration, then, for the public weal, and out of deference to public 
opinion, I am compelled to suppress much that might be of absorbing interest in 
my truthful biography, and send you only these, the mutilated remains.
�I was born in Sag Harbor, on the east end of Long Island, State of New York, 
April 5th, A. D. 1834.  I was not born exactly as I would like to have been, and 
could I have been previously consulted might have suggested several alterations 
and improvements, especially as regards tastes temper, temperament and facial 
conformation.  However, I am thankful I was born a man, or at least a boy.
�At the age of 21 I shipped as a boy on the clipper Wizard, bound from New York 
for San Francisco, and thence to China.  Before that I had tried several 
callings and failed in all.  My father dying when I was 16, I, the only son, 
became substantially landlord of the hotel which he kept.  I ran this 
establishment into bankruptcy in four years.  Then I essayed an education as a 
teacher, at the State Normal School, and sickened of that after six months� 
experience.  I clerked in New York city for a year, and was discharged for 
general incapacity.  Then I went �Out West� into an Illinois land office, where 
a course of fever and ague discharged me.  Returning East, I concluded, that as 
the land would not hold me, I would try the sea.  Hence the Wizard.  The sea 
would not accept me.  On arriving in San Francisco, the captain called me into 
his cabin, informed me that I was not �cut out for a sailor, paid me my wages, 
and sent me ashore to cumber the ground of California.  I counted eggs a few 
months for a living in the warehouse of the Farallone Egg Company, and then 
shipped as cook on a whaling schooner bound for the lagoons of the coast of 
Southern California.  I could cook a very little, and I could not cook a great 
deal.  The result was, that the twenty men composing the officers and crew of 
the schooner fared hard for the first three months on very hard fare.  
Culinarily, I was not a Blot, but rather a blot on a noble profession.  At the 
expiration of three months, I had become so far versed in my calling that the 
usual profanity on account of 'spoiled grub� attendant on every meal was 
lessened one half, and before the voyage was up some entire meals were eaten 
without a curse in�voked on my head.  The voyage lasted a year.  My share of the 
proceeds amounted to $250, which I put in circulation, on landing, as quickly as 
possible.  Then I went to the mines.  I was landed in Tuolumne County with $18 
in my pocket and a sailor�s bag of clothing, which, among other things, 
contained seven vests.  It is a truth, that unless a man allows his clothes to 
wear out equally, his vests will always inconveniently accumulate.  A single 
vest will outlive five pans of pantaloons.  My first service to the community in 
Tuolumne was rendered at the Golden Ranch, a locality three miles from Don 
Pedro�s Bar and three from Hawkins�, where the life was knocked out of Mexican 
cows a year old, called calves, and other septua�genarian, long-horned cattle, 
whose flesh was termed beef.  For a few weeks I peddled this beef to the miners 
of Tuolumne.  One day the horse ran away and discharged the entire freight of 
beef in the panniers on the golden sands of California.  I picked the steaks up 
as they fell, stacked them in piles on the road, caught the horse, re�loaded 
him, led him to the muddy river, washed the beef, and left it, per custom, at 
the miners� cabins.  Next day I was discharged.  Then I served a short time at 
the grocery and boarding-house of my esteemed friend, Robert E. Gardi�ner, at 
Hawkins� Bar.  After allowing another horse, packed with provisions for a mining 
company, to get away from me and wreck the entire load I sought other fields of 
labor.  I worked a bank or surface mining claim for two years, at Swett�s Bar.  
It did not pay regularly, perhaps owing to my own irregularities.  In 1860 I 
left this claim and attempted the education of the turbulent youth of 
James�town.  I went to Jamestown full of good intentions, but was unable to 
carry them out; Jamestown at that time held too many �good fellows.� They were 
recreative, enter�taining, genial and congenial, abounding in character, 
in�dividuality, eccentricity, wit, humor, and a keen sense of the ludicrous.  
Ten of the Jamestown men of those days were equivalent to a hundred ordinary 
mortals.  I must mention among these J. Y. Dixon, the Postmaster and Ex�press 
Agent, a Louisianian, well educated, and who appreciated and enjoyed unwritten 
volumes attendant on the exhibition of the strange medley of character about 
him; Dr. Dodge, a gifted man, whose wit and humor inclined to the satanic order; 
the Sutton brothers�Virginians�who could fiddle or shoot with equal skill; 
Horace Jones, poor fellow, killed by a cave in Table Mountain Tunnel, who would 
come to camp and remain sometimes a fortnight lest he should �lose a point;� 
Charley Keefe, saloon�keeper and constable, who had a broad smile for 
every�body; Jacob Snyder, �The Count,� who was reputed to have spoken tolerable 
English when he first settled in Jamestown, but became more unintelligible every 
year; S.B. Minor, an expert in drollery and practical joking, who, as pure and 
simple good company, Dixon used to say, was worth one hundred dollars a month to 
any one able to afford him; William Lancaster, an original of the originals, and 
a standing contradiction to all the laws laid down by the advocates of cold 
water as a means of health; Charles Carroll Brown, a gifted son of Maryland, 
afterwards Dis�trict Attorney, a born orator, a brilliant writer, and always 
full of original and eccentric conception and humor; Bax�ter, a companionable 
man, afterwards stabbed to death in the old Sonora Placer Hotel; A B. Preston, 
Justice of the Peace, mine owner and speculator; James Lunt, Jailer under Jim 
Stuart, a whole-souled fellow; James Stuart, himself, former Sheriff of the 
county, who, coming to Jamestown to escape the pressure of political cares 
conse�quent on a residence in Sonora, built for himself a cottage where 
everybody went who could not get accommodated at the Jamestown hotels, and 
where three often slept in James Stuart�s wide French bed while the host took to 
the floor; Elton Baker, druggist, a gentleman and man of refined sensibility and 
taste.
Such was the �crowd,� or rather its nucleus, at James�town.  There were at times 
accessions from outlying camps, but the names I mention above were its pillars, 
its salt.  Combined, theirs was an intellectual menagerie.  Their acts, their 
sayings, and their history, would, if prop�erly chronicled, make a notable book. 
 It needs a Dickens or Thackaray to bestow them in the proper setting.
After teaching in the District School at Jamestown I resigned, probably just in 
time to avoid being discharged by the Trustees.  The trouble was not that I was 
too fond of conviviality, but I had then sufficient control over my�self in the 
use of the only element then extant in James�town to put things on a convivial 
footing.  However, all this was indirectly a good thing.  Living more correctly, 
I might have retained the favor of the Trustees, and so have lived and died 
teaching school.  I am sure that all things taken together work for our good.
Ceasing to be a pedagogue, I again became a miner, and again betook myself to 
the banks of the Tuolumne.  Bank diggings had then not quite given out.  I made 
from six bits to a dollar per day.  About this time, owing to the success of the 
copper mines at Copperopolis, a copper fever broke out in Tuolumne.  I took it.  
I became very quickly a copper �expert.� I discovered any number of copper 
mines, ranging from Don Pedro�s Bar to Sonora.  They were valuable mines�to 
sell.  This copper fever and my few discoveries, whose value was based far more 
on anticipation than reality, fired me with a grand scheme.  I organized a 
company to take up all the ground showing indications� of copper that we could 
hold.  �Indications� meant a green or blue stain on the outcropping ledge, or 
the presence of the sulphuret, carbonates or oxides of copper, no matter how 
minute in quantity.  �Holding ground� meant the pretense of a one day�s work per 
month per�formed on a claim.  I calculated that I could in this way �keep up� 
and hold sixty claims per month, and still have time left to prospect for more.  
The company was organized at Bob Love�s store, in Montezuma.  I wrote the 
con�stitution and by-laws.  I fitted the company out on paper with a president, 
a secretary, a treasurer and a board of directors, and also with a �prospector.� 
I was the prospector.  The prospector was really the company.  The prospector 
did all the work, discovered all the claims, kept them up, collected all the 
monthly assessments I could from some thirty members, living over an area of 
territory larger than the State of Connecticut, and officiated per proxy as 
president, treasurer, secretary and board of di�rectors.  I took up and kept up 
copper and silver mines all the way from Coultersville on one side, the Rock 
River Ranch on another, up to the Sierra summits, east of Sonora.
"The active working force of the company consisted of a very poor horse, a very 
poor dog and very inferior shot�gun, whose energies were largely expended at the 
breech in kicking me when I fired, a frying-pan, a coffee-pot, a small stock of 
provisions and a pair of blankets.  I obtained the loan of the horse for six 
months in exchange for company stock.  I believe the saddle was furnished for a 
similar consideration.  Tempted, indeed I may say almost forced by 
circumstances, I imitated greater corporations, and sometimes added a few drops 
of water to fertilize the com�pany�s stock.  Transient board for myself and 
animal I sometimes, with some difficulty, managed to settle in this way.  It was 
at times Hobson�s choice with the landlord, for it was all he could get.  After 
these operations I avoided those hotels.  These irregularities were the result 
of entrusting one man with too much power.  I was that man.  But it was hard and 
expensive to collect assessments when the members of the company were scattered 
all along from French Bar right and left to Eureka Valley, on the Summit.
�Among the more prominent members of my company, whose memories with me now 
rank among my greatest earthly treasures, were Dr. Lampson of Chinese Camp, a 
whole-souled man, full of generosity, good will, and, in his profession, good 
acts for his fellow man, as many a miner can testify; David Hayes, my companion 
while hibernating during the winter of 1865 in ten feet of snow in Eureka 
Valley, as good and brave a man as ever the East sent to the West; Dr. Clark, 
noted for driving mustang teams and absent-mindedness�another being of 
eccen�tric and generous nature, of whom it was told as one of the many evidences 
of his peculiarity that, once buying a pair of new boots of a Sonora shoemaker, 
he, drawing one of them on, took the other, and, pairing it off with the 
dis�carded old one, flung the wrongly mated pair into the street; Sol. Miller, 
express and news agent at Chinese Camp, who, as a mimic and quick catcher of 
character mannerisms, would have made a hit on the stage, though I imagine he 
never suspected his talent in this direction; George Evans, and John Bourland, 
once Sheriff. Had the company managed to wriggle through another year, I should 
probably have had half the county holding its stock.
�The company had an active career of about six months.  I discovered a great 
many mines, but none that would pay.  More than this, I took up land for the 
company, so
charmed was I with some of the picturesque valleys which I found in the remote 
fastnesses of the Sierras.  They were small Yosemites, surrounded by granite 
walls many hundreds of feet in height, abounding in beautiful lakes and rich 
meadows, apparently closed on all sides, no place of ingress or egress being 
visible, and studded with noble pines and oaks.  Influenced at one and the same 
time by the �love for the beautiful" and love for cash, I nailed the company�s 
notices to the trees, pre-empting these romantic spots, on which for seven 
months out of the twelve the snow laid ten or twelve feet deep.
There was no money in all this.  My soul was ever much on the heights of 
sentimentality, but cash lays deeper down.  The early fall of the high Sierras 
came on, and from them, the early snows obliged me to come out.  We all came out 
together.  By �we,� I mean the grizzlies, deer, cattle, Indians and myself.  The 
first light snowfall of winter abounded with our individual and tracks, all 
making our way to the warmer plains below.  Such was our yearly custom.
�I brought up that winter at Dave Hayes and John Welch�s Ranch, in Eureka 
Valley.  There I staid till March.  The company was bankrupt.  When the man who 
had given his very slow horse for six months in exchange for stock wanted his 
horse back, and so obliged the company to use its own legs for purposes of 
locomotion, the final crisis was reached and the company was obliged to 
sus�pend.  It had discovered much on which to base expecta�tion, but absolutely 
nothing on which to realize cash.
I left this mountain abode in March, and set out alone on snow shoes for Sonora, 
fifty-six miles distant I occu�pied three days and nights in getting to 
Strawberry Flat, twenty-six miles from Sonora, meanwhile freezing several toes 
and once taking an involuntary slide of six hundred feet down a smoothly frozen 
mountain side, where I re�mained all night at the spot where I was so fortunate 
as to bring up.  Had I proceeded a few hundred farther, a few pounds of animal 
organization, known to a few by the name at the end of this sketch, would have 
been resolved by pro�cess of decomposition into what we term its original 
ele�ments, for I should have slid off a precipice and been broken to pieces.
��Arrived in Sonora, profoundly �busted,� I set to work digging post-holes for 
my old and faithful friend Robert E. Gardiner, then County Clerk of Tuolumne.  I 
don�t think he was very anxious to have post-holes dug on his premises, but I do 
think he allowed me to imagine I was earning something in this way out to 
charity for my condition.  I alternately dug post-holes and composed a lecture.  
I hadn�t the remotest idea of  the subject of this lecture when I commenced 
writing it, and I had no very clear idea what the subject really was when I 
finished.  Dreading to face a real audience at first, I rehearsed it before a 
private one, of my own selection, in the Sonora Court House, one evening.  
Finding that I could have really stand fire, and that my tongue would not refuse 
duty in the presence of the multitude, as I feared it might, I hired my hall and 
advertise my lecture.  It was a partial success.  My critics said the matter was 
good, but the manner of delivery was not.  They were right, and would be to-day 
were they not to hear me again.  I starred with this lecture through the county, 
delivering it at Columbia, Jamestown, Summersville, Oak Flat, Don Pedro's, and 
pushing the campaign into Mariposa and Stanislaus, speaking at Coultersville, 
Mariposa and French Bar.  I was my own agent, traveled on foot, carried my own 
posters, tacked them up, and depended mainly for remuneration on voluntary 
contributions.  When in Coultersville, I suggested to the audience that if 
lacking coin they could substitute buttons. Some of them took me at my word.  
Often on arising to speak I felt an anxiety, hanging as a heavy weight on my 
mind, whether the receipts of the evening would suffice to pay a hotel bill 
which I knew could never be liquidated from any other source.  This also is an 
experience which tries a man�s soul.
�During this lecture season the State election came on.  A wild impulse seized 
me to run for the Legislature.  I had seen scalawags elected to the Legislature, 
and in this saw encouragement that I might be.  True, I had no money, and nor a 
first-class reputation in some respects; but, then, I had everything to gain and 
nothing to lose.  So I an�nounced myself and ran.  On the all-important day I 
ap�peared before the Democratic Convention in Sonora, made a speech which was a 
farrago of nonsense, and which did not even prove me a Democrat or endorse a 
single plank of the party platform, yet I was nominated by acclamation.  But not 
elected.  Perhaps the county did not wish to lose me.
��This attempt on the Legislature of California proved the indirect means of my 
riddance from the county.  Some�thing of my writings in the Union Democrat, and 
something more in connection with legislative canvass had appeared in the San 
Francisco papers.  This influenced Joseph E. Lawrence, editor and part 
proprietor at that time of the Golden Era, to make me an offer to serve on that 
paper.  I accepted, and in 1866 ended my connection with and baleful influence 
on Tuolumne.
 I count, however, my journalistic career as really com�mencing one Sunday under 
a big pine tree on the bank of an unnamed rivulet at Red Mountain Bar.  I had, 
with a number of other gentlemen resident in that locality, been on a spree, and 
while under the influence of that certain loss of self-esteem consequent on 
excess of any description, and which by some is termed repentance,� I put my 
thoughts on paper and sent them to the Union Democrat.  They were published over 
the signature of �Dogberry.� I followed this up with other articles, from time 
to time, and acquired a certain local reputation as a writer, and, I be�lieve, a 
very poor reputation as anything else.
Tuolumne County was for me a school.  The great variety of human nature with 
which I was brought in con�tact seemed as a lesson to be learned.  It was a mine 
of most valuable experience, one I have often worked since, and never yet 
bottomed.  Life in great cities does not afford such opportunities for studying 
individual characteristics as does the life of isolated localities of small 
population.  In the Californian �camp� it became a necessity that everybody 
became more or less acquainted with everybody else.  Put ten thousand men 
together, and the chances are that within a year�s time you won't know more than 
a dozen of them well.  Put fifty men together, and in a year's time you will 
know more or less of their individual characteristics and the lives of every one 
of them.  All this is valuable.  It serves as fifty separate lessons in hu�man 
nature.  I put knowledge of human nature above the education of the college.  
Show me your successful man in business or politics, and I will show you the man 
whose chief study has been that of his fellow man�or woman.
Among the distinguished men of Tuolumne with whom I have been brought in 
contact, were Tom Northrup and Gideon Thompson, perhaps the most prominent 
�old-timers, at  Red Mountain Bar.  Northrup was a bony giant, and counted, in 
the matter of work on a river claim, a regular horse.� Gid.  Thompson was as 
good a fellow as ever was, as all who knew him will testify.  He ran the Red 
Mountain Bar Store till its stock in trade dwindled down to a gallon of whisky, 
and then, packing up his fiddle, trudged up the hill, singing, �What can�t be 
cured must be endured.�
�At Hawkins� Bar, Munson Van Riper, of the New York Knickerbocker stock, was 
voted �our oldest and most re�spected citizen.  �  Munse, in the early days, was 
counted the best cook and housekeeper on the Bar.  He used to wash his own 
shirts and sheets.  He slept in sheets, which at that time was deemed 
ultra-luxurious.
"Morgan Davis was another prominent inhabitant of Hawkins�.  He was for years 
the custodian of the Hawkins' Bar Library, which had been purchased by the 
�Boys� in San Francisco--and a very creditable library it was.  Often have I, at 
the East, cited this as proof of the character of the early Californians.  The 
prevalent idea in the States is that the Californian of that time was a rough, 
uncouth, whiskey--guzzling semi--outlaw,  when in fact those who came from 1849 
to 1852 were the very pick of the energy, enterprise and intelligence, not only 
of the States but of other countries.  However, California writers and 
playwrights are responsible for this erroneous impression; and it's done, and it 
can't be helped.
"Peter Haldeman, Pennsylvania, once member of the Legislature, and afterwards my 
'mining pard,' was a noted citizen of Swett' s Bar.  He was once of the salt of 
the earth.  Poor fellow, he rests now, unmarked by a stone, somewhere in the 
Sonora graveyard.  Old Jo Gallone,  a former Key West wrecker, was also long one 
of the pillars of Swett' s.
"At Indian Bar, in its later years, John Sanborn represented its Vanderbilt.  
His big strike in the Indian Bar bank, after everyone supposed it had been 
worked out, was perhaps the most prominent event in the history of that bar so 
long as anybody was left to preserve its history.  Alas, how we are scattered, 
and what gnats we are; here today, and blow off by the winds of destiny 
to-morrow.  But the river, on hills in banks remain, though I am not even 
skeptical about calling them 'everylasting.'
��When Montezuma was a place, the store of Robert Love formed the Democratic 
headquarters, and that of William Brown the Republican rendezvous, from which, 
during the heated term of 'The War,� the political sympathizers made faces at 
each other.
"Ezekiel Brown, long landlord of the Crimea House, was in his time a bright and 
shining light, especially in promoting local mining enterprises.
With reference to the grade of character and intelligence among the early 
Californians, what a notable illustration was afforded of this in the flusher 
days of Sonora.  What a galaxy of cleverness, talent, quick intelligence, wit 
and humor was found in the following group or men, all residents there in 1859: 
H. P. Barber, the noted lawyer; Dr. John Walker, John Sedgwick, Charles Carroll 
Brown, Robert E. Gardiner, George Seckels, A. N. Francisco, editor of the Sonora 
Democrat; Charles Randall, Alan Mardis, Dr. Franklin, E. R. Galvin, David Hays 
Samuel Patterson, James Stuart, ex-Sheriff; Caleb Dorsey, -- Murphy, of the 
"Long Tom" saloon; Dr. Browne, Dr. Bruner, I.J. Potter Dr. Snell, Fred Brown, 
the handsome barkeeper; Ned Rogers, and many others whose names and now escape 
my memory. Why, such a convocation of men was a mass meeting all by themselves.  
Should I neglect also to mention ' Johnny Smith,' the prince of saloon keepers, 
and the insister, and promoter of Order Gentlemen, under peculiar circumstances 
and conditions ?
"God bless the old county! In fertility of soil, beauty of scenery, a genial 
climate, and a general capacity for in earthly Paradise, God has blessed it 
already.  It needs only that man�s common sense and industry should take up the 
work where Deity has left off and make it one.
"Prentices Mulford."

�A History of Tuolumne County, California� B.F. Alley, 1882.  Appendix pg.  
19-31.