California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown

1. Go-getters

PAT BROWN STOPPED AS HE walked down the aisle of his official gubernatorial plane, the Grizzly, and peered out the window. Calling out to make himself heard over the drone of the propellers, he exclaimed with wonder, “Gee, will you look at that!” People sitting nearby, seeing nothing spectacular, asked Brown what he was referring to. “California,” he replied, unabashed. “Did you ever see anything like it?”1 Like many Americans, Brown was a man of joyful geographic bias. He lived his entire life in California and never doubted he was lucky for the privilege. As his career brought him prestige and opportunities, he traveled the world and enjoyed its wonders, but he always loved Yosemite most of all. Perhaps family history was at work. Perhaps Brown cherished California so deeply because his ancestors, like so many others, had endured hardships to make a life there. California was no accidental homeland, but a hardearned goal, an accomplishment to savor. In that, Brown was tied to an essential story of his nation’s experience. For among his forefathers were people who had possessed the courage or desire or desperation to abandon their old lives and strike out for something new, hunting for the future in the West. ——— 7 1 GO-GETTERS 8 RISING Both of Brown’s grandfathers sought new lives twice, first by leaving the old country for America and then by heading west to California. The first to arrive in the state was Brown’s maternal grandfather, a tough German immigrant named Augustus Schuckman. Schuckman came to America in about 1850, worked for a time in the Midwest, then beat the winter snows over the Sierra Nevada in a wagon train in 1852. For Americans, California was then a new and enticing place. Less than a decade before, it had been a Mexican province—and not one of particular lore or fame.The preferred destination for western pioneers had been Oregon. The Gold Rush had changed that, and by the time Schuckman and his comrades arrived California had burst into the consciousness of both the United States and the world. Coming down the western slope of the mountains, Schuckman stopped in the mining boomtown of Placerville, where, he later claimed, he struck up a drinking friendship with John Marshall, the discoverer of the first nugget. Schuckman had once worked as a boatman on rivers around the Great Lakes, and as a way to see the countryside he soon took up the same work in California. On a trip up the Sacramento River, he found Colusa County, a stretch of rolling hills and grasslands, and decided to make it his home. He bought a small ranch and ran cattle, but his real goal had always been life as a country innkeeper. As he prospered, he bought first one stagecoach stop, then another, transforming himself into a hotelier. As would his grandson, he liked the company of people: Even after a bout of self-reform made him a teetotaler, he tended the bar at his inn.2 Schuckman married while on a trip back to Germany, and although his wife disliked her rustic new home in America, the couple eventually produced nine children. The last was a girl, named Ida, born in 1878. Mrs. Schuckman died when Ida was still young, and perhaps because of the loss, or simply because of her nature, the girl did not much like country life. She found a little relief from the boredom when, still in her teens and the postmistress in a nearby town, she steamed open all the letters and read them, but she soon resolved to leave. When she was a young woman, friends moved to San Francisco, and she seized her chance to follow them, determined to make her way in the great city.3 ——— Brown’s other grandfather, Joseph Brown, came to America at almost the same time as Schuckman, fleeing his native Ireland amid the miseries of the GO-GETTERS 9 potato famine. A few weeks after his twenty-first birthday, in 1850, he sailed into Boston harbor in the cold of a New England November. He headed straight for the little town of Framingham, Massachusetts, where a large and established Irish community allowed him to hear the comforting accents of home. Brown made a life for himself in his new country, finding work as a laborer, then becoming a citizen, and finally marrying and starting a...