After the Gold Rush: Tarnished Dreams in the Sacramento Valley

Essay on Sources

e s s a y o n s o u r c e s After the Gold Rush is grounded in a wide range of primary sources and an expansive, if uneven , body of secondary literature. This short essay highlights the evidence and interpretations that were most crucial to the making of this narrative. For additional bibliographical information and complete citations, readers should consult the chapter notes. More than three decades ago, W. N. Davis Jr., of the California State Archives, published a lengthy, two-part article in the California Historical Quarterly with the rather unassuming title “Research Uses of County Court Records, 1850–1879, and Incidental Intimate Glimpses of California Life and Society,” vol. 52 (Fall/Winter 1973): 241–66, 338–65. “County Court records,” he began, “are a rich and virtually untapped resource for historical research.” They are “valuable sources for social, economic, biographical, genealogical, and legal history” that often “reveal the people candidly and factually in their vernacular, colloquial, and earthy dress” (241, 244). While genealogists have flocked to county archives in subsequent years to exploit these records, historians have by and large steered clear of them. These small and often isolated facilities are not nearly as glamorous as the Bancroft or the Huntington libraries and are often much more diªcult to access, but they hold materials every bit as rich—not only civil, criminal, and probate court case files but also land records (deeds, mortgages, leases), assessment rolls, church, school, and marriage records, obituaries, directories, board of supervisors minutes, newspapers, photographs, and a whole host of other documents that o¤er researchers much more than “incidental intimate glimpses of life and society,” Davis’s modest subtitle notwithstanding. Indeed, county records (primarily Yolo, but also Sacramento, Solano, and Placer) are the foundation of this book. State and federal court records proved invaluable as well. Researchers will find themselves rooting for county cases to be appealed to the California Supreme Court, where the documents—full transcripts of testimony, in particular—are often even richer (and more legible). Pierce v. Robinson (1859), Beatty v. Clark (1861), Dresbach v. His Creditors (1881), and Brown v. Greene (1884), for example, yield an almost inexhaustible amount of material on the economic and social development of Putah Creek/Davisville, much of which exists nowhere else. The case files of the California Land Commission, located at the Bancroft Library , University of California, Berkeley, not only document the specific legal issues concerning the 813 Mexican and Spanish land grants but also provide insights into each grant’s complicated history, the particular region’s environment, and the personalities of the liti- gants and their lawyers. The land case “dockets” kept by the U.S. General Land Oªce, also at the Bancroft Library on microfilm, contain appeals, aªdavits, correspondence, and other materials pertaining to controversies that arose after the federal government had issued patents. The Rancho Los Putos docket, for example, proved just as valuable for this study as the land case itself. Other archival sources supplement the case files and dockets. At the National Archives, the Records of the Department of the Interior (RG 48) and the Department of Justice (RG 60) contain extensive correspondence between federal and state oªcials on California land grants, while the Records of the General Land Oªce (RG 49) have township tract books, land-entry files, maps, and more correspondence. Federal, state, and county surveyor records (field notes, maps, and still more correspondence) can be found, respectively, at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, California State Oªce, and the California State Archives, both in Sacramento, and the Yolo County Surveyor’s Oªce, Woodland. Indispensable for the study of Rancho Laguna de Santos Callé is the thick folder of documents in box 816, U.S. Land Oªce, Sacramento, Records, California State Library, Sacramento. Attorney John Curry’s recollections, “History of the Spanish Grants of Solano County” (1907), Law Library, University of California, Berkeley, are illuminating as well. Individual experiences such as Curry’s are the driving force of this narrative. In this regard , no one source proved more revealing than the Pierce Family Papers, Department of Special Collections, University of California Library, Davis. Account books, employee time logs, promissory and bank notes, receipts, correspondence, photographs, and especially the daily journals of George and George Jr. constitute, in my judgment, the single most valuable archival collection for California rural history. A close second might be the Jerome C. Davis Papers, California State...