Mendocino County Biographies

John Pendleton Simpson

Transcribed by: Pat Howard

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

 
	This pioneer of Mendocino county, whose portrait will be 
found in these pages, was born in Chautauqua county, New York, September 20, 
1822. He remained at his birthplace until he was about thirteen years of age, 
when with his parents he moved to Ashtabula county, Ohio, where he remained 
until he was seventeen years of age. He then went to New Orleans and there 
remained until 1849, when he set out for California, coming the southern route 
through Texas and Mexico. He and Robert White were chums at home, and were 
partners through their mining days, and came to Mendocino county together as 
early as 1852, before there had hardly been a white man within its boundaries, 
and have since remained together as business partners. Nearly sixty years have 
left their snow upon their heads, which are now white with it. They have passed 
through the entire process of frontiering, and know it all by heart. The native 
Indians are mostly all gone now who were their only neighbors in those pioneer 
days, and their places are filled by men of their own race and tongue, and the 
rude �wick-e-up� is supplanted with neatly-painted cottages, and the wild 
jungles are now smiling fields of grain. All honor, say we, to these brave men, 
who took their lives in their hands and led the way into the outer circles of 
our country, that we might enjoy the land as an abiding place a quarter of a 
century later.
 
SOURCE: History of Mendocino County, California - San Francisco, Cal. Alley, 
Bowen & Co., Publishers. 1880 Pp.  585, 586