Bancroftiana, Number 120 Spring 2002: Edward P. and Elliot Reed Letters: A Family Legacy

Edward P. and Elliot Reed Letters: A Family Legacy

My parents had the lovely habit of reading aloud in the evening, especially in the wintertime. I tell you this because it seems to me that it was perfect setting for my mother Ellen, to read her grandfather's letters aloud to her husband and myself, then an eight year old girl. Later in my life, when I was a college student, I reread the letters, to flesh out my understanding California history. Still later I read parts of them to my children when my eldest son was finding his fourth grade study of California's Gold Rush a less than exciting task. Last, I completed the cycle by reading some of the letters to my mother in her last years of life, to trigger her memories of meeting some of the people described in the letters, people she had met and known as a young child.

Edward and Clara Reed, Wedding Portrait, ca. 1859

Edward P. Reed, my great-grandfather, and the primary letter writer in the Edward P. And Elliot Reed Letters, 1849-1879 (BANC MSS 98/48 c) lived with his family in Homer, New York. Like many young men of not quite twenty, he did not know what to do with his life.

His father was an established lawyer and Edward was the oldest of the children. He and a friend, Frank Brown, who shared the same ambiguity of purpose, decided to go to Washington D.C. to see if they could find jobs, perhaps as clerks to Congressmen. This was early in 1848 and Edward's father, Edward C. Reed, had served in the House of Representatives for a term during Andrew Jackson's administration.

Shortly after this move, the news of a gold strike at Sutter's Mill, California reached New York. Edward and Frank immediately began discussions of travelling to California. They sailed out of New York on January 24, 1849, on the South Carolina. According to the records at the San Francisco Maritime Museum, this was the first ship from New York to reach "Gold Rush" California, by sailing around the Horn. Edward and Frank traveled steerage, with most of their money, and surely some of their families' limited funds, invested in merchandise to sell to the miners. Edward's first letter home, dated February 24, 1849, includes twenty-six dense pages of notes and observations written aboard ship. The second letter, sent from Rio De Janiero, totals twelve pages and his first letter from San Francisco is an eighteen-page commentary on the 156-day voyage.

After a very long, quite adventuresome voyage, including a smallpox outbreak, and two lengthy stops in South America, they arrived in San Francisco during the first week of July. Edward now possessed about five dollars cash in his pocket. He got a job unloading lumber from a barge at the foot of Washington Street for eight dollars a day. Within a few days, with their resources restored, the young men took passage up-river to Sacramento, where all the action was reputed to be.

Edward's descriptions of Sacramento are striking. He described it as a town of tents, made from the sails of the deserted ships that were moored in the river. After hawking their merchandise for a couple of months, Edward had a chance to travel with some acquaintances to the Trinity River to search for gold himself. Frank declined, so Edward sold his remaining share of supplies and became a goldminer. In an August 14, 1849 letter Edward wrote:

Imagine the village of Homer [New York] with two streets running parallel . . . with a line of schooners & ships tied up to the trees on the bank & then these streets nearly filled up with houses and stores, constructed of poles cut from the adjacent woods & covered with shirting . . . or old sails, with hundreds of tents pitched in every direction & you have a faint idea of the present city of Sacremento [sic] . . . The party of miners camped at a place on the Trinity, called to this day, Big Bar. There they panned for gold, with some success. Then fortune changed. The miners were relieved of most of their food by a stealthy Indian, and it began to rain. Now the trick was to cross the turbulent Trinity River with horses and diminished food supply intact. After quite a struggle the bedraggled group succeeded. As they traveled back from the Trinity River, Edward enjoyed his first view of Mount Shasta, and soon realized the difficult journey that lay ahead. The miners had a treacherous time navigating the sloughs, pulling and digging out their horses. They crossed the Sacramento River near its confluence with the American River in the company of a large party who had ox-teams and wagons, headed up by an exgovernor of Ohio. One met all types of people in the gold country.

Returning to Sacramento was no respite. At one point Edward rented a place to sleep and found it to be merely a table on which to lay his bedroll. He awoke in the morning with water a few inches below the tabletop. He moved to one of the boats on the river, which was being used as a hotel. Then he got sick, and nearly died. As he began to recover, a friend urged Edward to accompany him to Los Angeles. They took a steamer to San Francisco, where they waited for the coaster to Los Angeles. The sailing date was postponed, so greenhorns that they were, the two men bought a team of horses and a buggy to drive to Los Angeles. Needless to say, there were no roads to the south. Cow paths, yes, roads, no. They eventually got to the Salinas River, and realized the folly of this ill-advised trip. The weary travelers returned to San Jose, which looked even better than when they passed through the city the first time.

San Jose was a bustling place, serving as the territorial capital and therefore full of legislators and attendant hangers-on. Edward seized the opportunity to buy a small hotel or rooming house. This situation worked well for a short time, but the legislators decided that the state capital should be in Vallejo. Edward was fortunate to sell when he did. He then took a job in the city clerks' office, writing abstracts. Soon he became a city assessor. He also began to farm, first buying livestock to fatten and sell. Later he developed orchards near the area called Evergreen, located near Mount Hamilton. Edward also started a lumber mill, cutting redwood in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He worked at all of this for several years, until he felt securely established. In 1857 he returned home to New York arriving unannounced, and taking his family by complete surprise. He made this a very festive time, taking the family on a trip to Montreal and Quebec, and seeing that his parent's home was in good repair before he departed. He met and fell in love with Clara Winegar, his sister Ellen's best friend. He also arranged for his brother Elliot to come to California.

Edward traveled to California, and then in 1859 returned to New York in order to marry Clara. When the newlyweds returned to California, there were now two correspondents writing letters to Ellen. Clara's letters have a very different tone than her husband's. Clara was determined, opinionated, well educated young woman, brought up to hope for, if not expect a genteel life. California was rough, uncouth, dusty, muddy, and populated with a mixture of people who were nothing like those in Homer or Ithaca. She had a hard time adjusting to the varieties of racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds encountered in frontier California. Clara knew that she must deal with them as peers and it was difficult, and she expresses herself in letters to Ellen. At one point she writes Ellen about a city father extolling the repair of a road, which was badly rutted. He was very proud of the repair, which consisted of filling the ruts with dead chickens.

Edward's letters to New York are often filled with descriptions of the erratic economics of the state and efforts to get the railroad to California and into San Jose. He derides the risky plans to develop the Central Valley. Both write of their concerns about the Civil War. Edward and Clara were Unionists and Abolitionists, and commented on the amount of Confederate loyalty in California. Women's voices and opinions seemed to carry as much weight as men's within their family. Their niece, Lucy, was an ardent suffragette, and her efforts were applauded .

I wish I could say that Edward and Clara had "happily-ever-after lives," but they did not. Clara died not long after the birth of her daughter, my grandmother. Edward remarried, but his children and his second wife did not get along well together. His brother Elliot lost his wife and daughter to tuberculosis, apparently they drank milk from a tubercular cow. Edward's sister Mariana moved to San Jose with her three children, after her husband, a Union Army doctor, died in the Andersonville prison. Edward lived until almost the end of the century, but he went broke, caught in one of California's depressions with more lumber inventory than he could sell. What makes these people vivid and perhaps remarkable is that by their regular detailed letters they have made a record of who they were and what their times were like. It has been most interesting to live with this history in my hands. I hope it will be useful to others.

—Elise G. White