California 1849-1913

ꬺCalifornia 1849-1913

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Title: California 1849-1913
Author: L.H. Wooley
Release Date: November, 2003 [Etext #4638] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on February 20, 2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
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California 1849-1913 or The Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four Years' Residence in that State

By L. H. Woolley Member of the Society of California Pioneers and of the Vigilance Committee of 1856

California

1849-1913

Trip Across the Plains.
The year 1849 has a peculiarly thrilling sensation to the California Pioneer, not realized by those who came at a later date. My purpose in recording some of my recollections of early days is not for publication nor aggrandizement, but that it may be deposited in the archives of my descendants, that I was one of those adventurers who left the Green Mountains of Vermont to cross the plains to California, the El Dorado - the Land of Gold.
In starting out I went to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, St. Louis and Independence, Missouri. Here I joined the first mule train of Turner, Allen & Co.'s Pioneer Line. It consisted of forty wagons, one hundred and fifty mules, and about one hundred and fifty passengers. We left the frontier on the fourteenth of May 1849, and here is where our hardships commenced. Many of us had never known what it was to "camp out" and do our own cooking. Some of the mules were wild and unbroken, sometimes inside the traces, sometimes outside; sometimes down, sometimes up; sometimes one end forward and sometimes the other; but after a week or two they got sobered down so as to do very well.
Our first campfire at night was on the Little Blue River, a few miles from Independence; it was after dark when we came to a halt, and it was my friend Gross' turn to cook, while the rest brought him wood and water and made a fire for him by the side of a large stump. I knew he was a fractious man, so I climbed into one of the wagons where I could see how he got along. The first thing that attracted my attention was the coffee pot upside down, next away went the bacon out of the pan into the fire. By this time he was getting warm inside as well as outside, and I could hear some small "cuss words"; next he looked into the Dutch oven, and saw that his dough had turned to charcoal. I got down into the wagon out of sight, and peeked through a crack; he grew furious, danced around the fire, and the air was full of big words. Finally we got a little coffee and some cakes and bacon, then I undertook to do a little sleeping but it was no go. Thus ended my first night on the Plains.
In the morning we started on our journey to travel over a level untimbered, uninhabited country for nearly four hundred miles, without anything of