Tales Behind the Tombstones Page 8

  Nancy’s recollections of some of the other members of the Bidwell-Bartleson Party and the apprehension she felt about the trip were recorded in the San Francisco Examiner in 1893. She described what it was like when the wagon train first set out on May 12, 1841: “A man by the name of Fitzpatrick was our pilot, and we had a priest with us who was bound for the northwest coast to teach the Flathead Indians. We numbered thirty-three all told and I was the only woman. I had a baby to take care of too.”

  By July the emigrant party had made it to Fort Laramie, Wyoming. The party experienced little trouble on the first twelve hundred miles of the trip, but the difficulties they faced on their travels from Wyoming into California more than made up for that. While resting near the Platte River, one of the members of their wagon train was taken captive by Indians. He was later released, but the Indians never strayed far from the group.

  The Indians’ constant presence made the livestock nervous and frightened Nancy and her baby. Benjamin recognized that his wife was fearful and stayed close by her side. Whenever she wanted to turn back, he would urge her on by quoting the notices about California that he had read in the Western Emigration Society paper. They called California “a land of perennial spring and boundless fertility.” Nancy’s daydreams about the life they would have there sustained her for a time, but eventually her worst fears were realized.

  By August the Bidwell-Bartleson Party was completely lost. They knew they were supposed to be near the Humboldt River, but it was nowhere in sight. Food was scarce, and the animals became too exhausted to pull the wagons. Still, the party pushed west, abandoning their wagons one by one and slaughtering their oxen for food.

  On September 7, 1841, the weary group located the Humboldt River, but then they could not find the road that would lead from there to the Truckee River. Nancy held her daughter tightly in her arms and desperately tried to shade her from the sun. Her baby was hungry and cried to be fed, but food was again running short. In October the party killed the last of their oxen. The weather turned cold, and Nancy longed to go back home, but the party continued on until they came face-to-face with several high peaks.

  Later, Nancy recalled the struggle through the jagged mountains that appeared to be “capped with snow, perhaps of a thousand years. We had a difficult time finding a way down the mountains. At one time I was left alone for nearly half a day, and I was afraid of Indians, I sat all the while with my baby on my lap. It seemed to me while I was there alone that the moaning of the winds through the pines was the loneliest sound I had ever heard.”

  Nancy was an inspiration to her fellow travelers. Many of them kept journals in which they wrote about her bravery and made mention of the fact that her baby was never sick a day of the trip. In 1842 Joseph Chiles, one of the members of the party, wrote about Nancy’s courage and strength: “She bore the fatigues of the journey with so much heroism, patience, and kindness that there still exists a warmth in every heart for the mother and her child.”

  Nancy Kelsey’s pioneering days did not end once she made it over the Sierra Nevadas. She had hoped Benjamin would settle down and build a life for her and their daughter, Ann, but after five months of being in California, he decided to move the family to Oregon. Nancy didn’t want to go, but she was dedicated to her husband.

  In 1847 Benjamin and Nancy traveled from Oregon to the Napa Valley, the San Joaquin plains, and Mendocino. Benjamin left Nancy alone in 1848 to see if there was any truth to the gold rumors. He was gone ten days and brought back one thousand dollars. The next time he went to the mines he took a flock of sheep up for mutton and brought back sixteen thousand dollars. He used the money to buy Nancy and, by this time, their two daughters, a lake ranch in a town the couple had helped build called Kelseyville.

  Nancy was finally living the good life her husband had promised her, but it was short-lived. Benjamin sold the lake ranch after a few months and took his family down the Humboldt River to be among the first settlers of Eureka and Arcata. Just when Nancy thought they would finally stay put, Benjamin came down with tuberculosis, and they were compelled to travel to a drier location for his health.

  In 1874 Nancy followed Benjamin back to California. He built her a cabin high up in the Cuyama Mountains in San Diego. He died in Los Angeles in 1888. Nancy died of cancer in 1896. Her grave in Santa Barbara is marked by a rock. The simple inscription on it reads KELSEY.

  The Lone Angel 1897

  A demur marble angel sits among the faded wooded crosses and weather-ravaged rock grave memorials at the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Bodie, California. The three-foot cherub holds a flower wreath in her left hand and rests her hand on her right elbow. The lone angel watches over the burial site of a three-year-old little girl named Evelyn Meyers.

  Evelyn was the joyful, precocious daughter of Fannie and Albert Meyers. Born in Bodie on May 1, 1894, the child had a ready smile for everyone she saw and a particular fondness for an elderly miner who was a dear friend of the family.

  Fannie would take Evelyn with her when she went to do the weekly shopping. The little girl played outside with the other children in town and sat with the old miner friend and listened to the stories he would tell. Evelyn would follow the man everywhere he went, from the blacksmith shop to the church. The miner was taken with the little girl’s devotion.

  In the spring of 1897, Evelyn spotted the miner on Main Street and took out after him. Unaware that the child was following him, the man made his way to his claim just outside the town. Evelyn crept quietly behind. Whistling and preoccupied with the job of searching for gold, the miner raised a pickax up and back to begin chipping away at a rock wall. He still did not know Evelyn was behind him as he began to work. The top of the pickax caught the girl in the head, killing her instantly. The miner was devastated. The girl was laid to rest on April 6, 1897.

  Thousands of Bodie visitors have passed by the angel tomb-stone in the one-hundred-plus years it has been standing in the cemetery. Vandals have broken the top of the wings on the statue as well as the left foot. The inscription at the base of the marble is still clearly visible and reads BELOVED DAUGHTER.

  The Odd Fellows Cemetery is located east of Bodie.

  John Bidwell d. 1900

  “The party whose fortunes I have followed across the plains was not only the first that went direct to California from the East; we were probably the first white people, except Bonneville’s party of 1833, that ever crossed the Sierras.”

  —JOHN BIDWELL, DECEMBER 1890

  Among the many brave men who ventured into the remote lands of America’s Western territories to establish a trail to the Pacific Coast was politician and military leader John Bidwell. At the age of twenty-one, Bidwell joined the first wagon-train expedition to California. The intrepid former schoolteacher, along with a handful of other men on the journey, crossed the Sierra Mountain range into the Sacramento Valley in November 1841.

  Shortly after the pioneer’s arrival, he took a job at Sutter’s Fort working for the founder of the outpost, John A. Sutter. Bidwell was Sutter’s chief clerk and was given the monumental duty of stocking the facility with supplies ranging from fruits and vegetables to cannons and ammunition.

  Bidwell was born on August 5, 1819, in Chautauqua County, New York. His formative years were spent in Pennsylvania and Ohio. He was educated at various country schools and later attended the Kingville Academy in Ohio, where he decided to become a teacher. After hearing about the wonders of California, Bidwell decided to leave teaching behind and go west. He helped form the Western Emigration Society and recruited settlers to accompany him overland.

  Not only was Bidwell a stalwart trailblazer and capable business manager, but he was a successful prospector as well. He discovered gold along the Feather River and used the funds made from the Bidwell Bar find to purchase a twenty-thousand-acre plantation he named Rancho Chico.

  After serving two years in the army, fighting in the Mexican-American war and rising in rank to general, Bidwell left the mi
litary and returned to his home in Northern California. When he wasn’t managing the growing of crops and caring for the livestock on his property, he was involved in political pursuits. In 1849 he was elected to the California Senate. In 1850 and 1860 he was the state supervisor for the United States census. He served as a delegate for the Democratic Party’s national convention held in 1860, was a delegate for the Republican Party convention in 1864 and 1865, and served a two-year term in Congress.

  On April 16, 1868, he married Annie Ellicott Kennedy, whom he met during one of his visits to Washington, D.C. Present at their wedding were Presidents Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant. The couple lived the bulk of their married life at Rancho Chico, working their prize-winning orchards and providing financial assistance to the community at large.

  John Bidwell ran for the office of governor on two different occasions, but failed both times to get elected. In 1890 he was the Prohibition candidate for president of the United States.

  The respected statesman died on April 4, 1900. He had been clearing brush along Chico Creek when he suffered a heart attack. The last words he is known to have said were to his wife the morning he left to begin the chore. He told her, “I feel like a young boy.”

  John Bidwell was laid to rest at the Chico Cemetery in Chico, California. Hundreds throughout the state attended his funeral. Children from the Mechoopda Indian Reservation, located on Bidwell’s land, tossed wildflowers and garden blossoms over his grave. The service ended with a chorus of mourners singing traditional religious hymns.

  John’s wife, Annie, honored her husband’s last request, which was to donate more than two thousand acres of their ranch to the city of Chico to be used exclusively as a public park. Bidwell Park is now one of the largest city parks in the West.

  Old Joe d. 1901

  “The wagon rests in winter; the sleigh in summer; the horse never.”

  —YIDDISH PROVERB

  On a hot July day at the turn of the century, an old teamster stood over the grave of his best friend and offered up a prayer. The inscription scrawled across the crude tombstone simply read OLD JOE. DIED JULY 3, 1901. It stood alone next to the well-traveled road leading to the mining town of Foresthill, California, and it is still standing today.

  In the early 1850s prospectors and stage drivers traveled the well-worn route known as Foresthill Road from the mining town of Auburn into the into the gold rush camp in and around Foresthill. Many pioneers and miners lost their lives in the area that yielded millions of dollars in gold. Old Joe was one of them. The teamster who buried his friend no doubt wept at his loss. Most assume the plot belongs to an Indian or early settler, but it actually belongs to an animal.

  Old Joe was a stagecoach horse who sacrificed his life in an attempt to carry through to safety passengers and supplies entrusted to him. He was fatally wounded by a shot from a holdup man’s gun when the stage driver refused to halt. He died with his harness on. His body was dragged to the side of the road he had trekked day after day and buried.

  The stage robbery was the last one on the line. A young man who was a resident of Foresthill was arrested and charged with the crime sometime afterward. Years later the Wells Fargo box that was carried away from the scene of the crime was found in the American River Canyon.

  A large black oak, behind which the holdup man stood while awaiting the approach of the stage, still stands as a sentinel over Old Joe’s grave. When the bandit shot Old Joe, driver Henry Crockett, in spite of the shotgun leveled at him by the bandit, did not mince words in expressing his rage. “You’ve killed the best horse in this country and you’ll pay for it, by God,” he shouted.

  Death came close to Crockett that day, but it had to wait for a railroad train at a depot near Sacramento. Crockett was struck by a fast passenger engine several years later and died shortly thereafter. Unlike his traveling companion Old Joe, Crockett’s burial site is not known.

  Old Joe’s grave is located along U.S. Highway 101 North, seven miles south of Auburn, California.

  Calamity Jane d. 1902

  “Though she did not do a man’s share of the heavy work, she has gone in places where old frontiersmen were unwilling to trust themselves, and her courage and good-fellowship made her popular with every man in the command.”

  — ONE OF MANY COMMENTS BUFFALO BILL CODY

  HAD ABOUT THE AMAZING LIFE OF CALAMITY JANE, GIVEN

  TO A ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWSPAPER REPORTER IN 1906

  Among the many mourners who attended the legendary Wild Bill Hickok’s funeral on August 3, 1876, was a sorrowful, rough-looking woman clad in buckskins and a weathered cowboy hat. Her name was Martha Jane Canary-Burke, better known as Calamity Jane. She was as famous as the lawmen-gunfighter whose grave she was sobbing over. The nontraditional lifestyle she lived earned her the reputation as a woman who always did as she pleased. She was an army scout, a railroad worker, stagecoach driver, wagon freighter, Indian fighter, nurse, and sometimes a prostitute. Jane could drink the average man under the table and cuss with the best of them. For most of her adult life, she was devoted to one man, Bill Hickok.

  Calamity Jane was born in Princeton, Missouri, in 1852. From an early age she fought the idea that little girls should always dress like proper ladies and excel at domestic chores like cooking and sewing. Jane liked to run with the boys and roam the countryside on her horse. She was twelve years old when her family headed west, and she was excited about the promising adventure that laid ahead. She fell in love with the wild country, and when she wasn’t riding the range she was holed up in a cow town watching the gamblers, miners, ranch hands, and ladies of the night come and go from the saloons and dance halls. Little did she know at the time how important those establishments would be in her future.

  She was thirteen years old when both her parents passed away. Her mother, Charlotte, died en route to the gold diggings in Montana. Her father, Robert, died a year later. As the oldest of six siblings, Calamity was left to care for the family. In 1867 she moved the Canary offspring to Fort Bridger, Wyoming. She kept her brothers and sister fed by working as a laundress and by working as a prostitute at a local brothel.

  In 1870 Jane left the hard life she’d been living and drifted across the Wyoming territory. According to her autobiography she ended up in Fort Russell, Wyoming, and signed on as a scout for General George Custer. Her skills as a tracker and hunter made her a natural for the position. It was the first of many frontier jobs the independent woman would sign on to do.

  Calamity Jane’s employment aspirations were as unconventional as her manner of dress. She wore men’s clothing, complete with long underwear and boots, and sported a pair of six-shooters on her hips. Her unusual style and ability to master jobs traditionally done by men, made her a popular western character and earned her the handle that became legend. Tales of her adventures found their way into dime novels published in the East and helped make her a household name across the country.

  Over her fifty-plus years, she traveled from the Dakotas to Arizona and back again. In spite of her hard drinking and bawdy ways, she was a compassionate soul who on more than one occasion helped care for ailing miners dying of smallpox.

  Jane kept company with various men from time to time and was even married once, but her heart belonged to James Butler Hickok. They arrived in Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876 and were frequently seen together. Hickok maintained the pair were only friends, but Jane insisted they were more. Whatever their relationship might have been, it’s clear that Jane was dedicated to Wild Bill. She grieved for months after he was killed.

  On August 1, 1902, seventeen years after Hickok died, Calamity Jane passed away from pneumonia while staying at the Callaway Hotel in Terry, South Dakota. She was fifty-one. Her body was returned to Deadwood, where the town undertaker outfitted her in a white cotton dress before placing her in a cloth-lined coffin.

  According to the Black Hills Daily Times, Jane’s funeral was “one of the largest Deadwood had ever seen.” Mourners
paraded past her casket, remembering with fondness Calamity’s character. One resident who felt the once-feisty woman did not look natural placed a pair of six-shooters in each of her hands. The undertaker removed the weapons and chastised viewers about disturbing the body. His pleas went ignored, and many in attendance cut locks of her hair off to keep as souvenirs. The man was finally forced to build a wire cage over the corpse in order to prevent further such action.

  Calamity Jane’s last request to be buried next to Wild Bill was honored. Before she was laid to rest beside the man she loved at the Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood, Seth Bullock—lawman, politician, and Jane’s friend—delivered her eulogy.

  Two names are inscribed on the tombstone standing over Jane’s grave. One reads CALAMITY JANE and the other MARTHA JANE BURKE.

  Nellie Pooler Chapman d. 1906

  “My chair is a barrel cut in this wise, with a stick with headrest attached. The lower half of the barrel stuffed firmly with pine needles and covered with a strong potato sack over which I had an elegant cover of striped calico.”

  —J. FOSTER FLAG, FORTY-NINER DENTIST