Farewell to California! The Bonniwell party returns (part 2)

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 3 Comments

The Bonniwell party’s prospectors had gone to the California gold fields via two very different routes. The 1849 party went west using a combination of land and water transportation to get from Milwaukee to El Dorado via steamship from New Orleans, then across the Isthmus of Panama by foot, mule and canoe, and then another steamer to San Francisco. Compared to the overland route, it was quicker, more reliable, and safer, but more expensive.

The larger Bonniwell party of 1850, led by “Captain” William T. Bonniwell, took the shorter but more strenuous—and risky—overland route. After fitting out their wagon train at Independence, Missouri, they headed west, across the vast plains and the great western desert, and then struggled up and across the Sierra Nevada. This route was much less expensive, and much less secure. They faced constant dangers, including lack of adequate food and water, unpredictable weather, equipment failure, the threat of bandits, and the possibility of Indian attack.

Both Bonniwell parties survived their journeys and made it to the gold region. They appear to have had some success, mixed with much tedium and many futile efforts. Eventually, our Wisconsin prospectors—like many, if not most, California gold seekers—decided to return home. And then the question became: how to get home safely, economically, and reasonably quickly? For most adventurers, especially those with even a modest amount of gold dust or specie in their baggage, it was clear that the overland route was too long, impractical and dangerous. So some kind of (mostly) ocean voyage seemed like the best bet, and the San Francisco newspapers were full of enticing deals for homeward travelers.

San Francisco to Panama, and beyond

San Francisco newspapers regularly featured advertisements for competing steamship lines. Here’s one from the Daily Pacific News of January 21, 1850, for the Empire City line, promoting the trip from San Francisco to Panama [City] on their newest ship, the Sarah Sands.

This 1850 lithograph, like the ad above, suggests the iron ship Sarah Sands was new, modern and cut a sleek line through the sea. Just the thing for a returning miner’s comfortable trip homeward:

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Farewell to California! The Bonniwell party returns (part 1)

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 5 Comments

I’ve never been to California’s gold rush country, so I don’t know how accurate this unknown artist’s View of Sutter’s Mill & Culloma Valley. On the South Fork of the American Line, Alta, California might have been.1 It’s drawn in the Romantic style of the time, although it’s clear the unspoiled, natural, “sublime,” view of El Dorado county’s hills and mountains are quickly giving way to the shelters and “diggings” of the immigrant gold miners and the nearby rough-and-tumble mining town of Culoma.

I wonder, did the Bonniwell party’s miners have the time, or inclination, to savor such exalted vistas? Perhaps. During the Bonniwell’s overland trek in the summer of 1850, George Bonniwell mentioned in his diary a number of “beautiful ” views of rivers, bluffs and other natural wonders. But after a year or two of toil in the harsh conditions of gold-rush era California, I expect the day-to-day existence of our Mequon men had become much less awe-inspiring. The typical experience of gold rush miners—whether successful or not—tended to be much more…mundane:

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The Cooper

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

In the 1800s there were no corrugated cardboard boxes or padded shipping envelopes. If you needed to store or ship any liquid—and most dry goods—the barrel (and its larger and smaller cousins) was almost always your container of choice.

Anderson, Alexander, engraver. Five Men on a Flatboat With Barrels and Sacks; One Man Operates the Keel from Above the Boathouse, the Others Are Resting on the Freight, circa 1830-1860, Library of Congress.

And when you needed a barrel, hogshead, keg, cask or firkin, or just an oaken bucket for your well, you would get it from a cooper.

Unknown photographer. Occupational Portrait of a Cooper, Three-Quarter Length, With Barrel and Tools, circa 1840-1860, Library of Congress.

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Have you voted?

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

It’s not too late to cast your ballot in the reader’s poll from our previous post, asking how I should archive the contents of my April 22 Cedarburg History Museum talk here at Clark House Historian. Should I publish the words and images as a series of usual-format CHH blog posts, or as one or more YouTube videos, featuring all the original PowerPoint slides, accompanied by my re-recorded narration?

The polls are still open, and the lines are short. Just scroll down to the Leave a Reply box, below, and where it says “Enter your comment here…” leave your vote for “Blog posts” or “YouTube videos.”  Questions? For the full story, just click this link and read the second part of Monday’s post, beginning at “That was fun!”

In the words of the late, great, Mayor Richard J. Daley, “vote early and vote often!”

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Time flies!

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 6 Comments

[Editor], daguerreotype with added color highlights c.1855 (slightly cropped, and color adjusted), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Charles Isaacs, (link), Creative Commons CC0 license. Click to open larger image in new window.

Hey! It’s almost been a month since my last post. Sorry about that. I haven’t gone this long between posts in several years, I think, and now I’ve got (the digital equivalent of) a towering pile of half-written posts to finish and topics to discuss. That said, I have been busy…

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1850 census: more neighbors “in Wisconsin”– while prospecting in California

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 4 Comments

Recently, we took a closer look at the 1850 census for old Washington county1 and noticed that six men from the neighboring Bonniwell families—men that we know from other records were actually half a continent away, prospecting for gold in California—were officially enumerated as members of their Wisconsin families in census schedules for Mequon and Grafton. In addition, we now know that those six Bonniwell men were not the only members of their expedition to be enumerated with the families they left behind in old Washington county.

Persons “whose usual place of abode…”

In the months since my original attempt to identify and list all the members of the Bonniwell 1849 and 1850 expeditions in Gold! – The Bonniwells go west…but when? and who?, I have been able to identify—with varying degrees of confidence—several other members of their California expeditions. I have more details to share about the lives of these men later, when time permits. For today, I’d like to briefly introduce each of them and make note of their presence on the 1850 census schedules for old Washington Co., Wisconsin, even though all were still seeking fortunes in California at the time they were enumerated.

Phineas Miller “P.M.” Johnson (1808-1876)

P. M. Johnson was, with William T. Bonniwell, one of the co-organizers of the Bonniwell 1849 and 1850 expeditions to the California gold region. We know that he was still in California in 1849-1850, but he was enumerated on lines 37-42, page 229a of the 1850 census for Grafton, Washington Co., Wisconsin with his wife, Orra Ann (Collins) Johnson and his four eldest children: Ransom W., Samuel C., William H., and George.2

The P.M Johnson family’s 1850 enumeration concludes on the reverse of this schedule, lines 1-4, page 229b, with the information for their youngest four offspring, Anna, Edwin, Julia, and four-month-old Harriet.

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JMC & the neighbors petition Congress, 1849

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 1 Comment

Today we have a surprise addition to our survey of Alfred T. Bonniwell documents. It’s a recent discovery, a very cool 1849 petition to Congress asking for a new postal road from Grafton to Waukesha, via Mequon. It’s signed by many of old Washington county’s most civic-minded men, including Grafton postmaster P.M. Johnson, Jonathan M. Clark, Peter Turck, and almost all of the Bonniwell men. It’s of interest to us, in part as an example of the citizen petition process in the early days of Wisconsin statehood, and more specifically as a record of “who was here?” in Washington county in a non-census year.

A growing county needs a new mail route

Petition of Phineas M. Johnson and others to U.S. Congress. [1849-02-06]. /documents/D275080, page 1, detail, salutation, The Papers of Abraham Lincoln Digital Library. Public domain.1, 5

Citizen petitions have been a part of American governance since early days. Check out our 2021 RBOH: Wisconsin Citizen Petitions for more information on a newly digitized collection of early Wisconsin territorial and state petitions, including a searchable database of petition images. Citizens could also petition the federal government for assistance; our petition is addressed To the Honorable the Senate and House of Representatives in Congress Assembled, and looks like this:

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Peter Turck and Irish Relief

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins.

It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and to celebrate, here’s an update of my CHH post from March 17, 2021. Slàinte!

Today is St. Patrick’s Day, originally the religious observance of the feast day of the principal patron saint of Eire.1 In honor of the day, let’s take a look at a few aspects of Irish life in early southeast Wisconsin and the involvement of Mary (Turck) Clark’s father Peter Turck in a civic effort to relieve Irish suffering during the Great Famine.

Irish immigrants in early Wisconsin

The first white visitors to Wisconsin were seventeenth-century French-Canadian explorers, priests and fur trappers, at home along Wisconsin’s lakes and rivers. They were followed by a smattering of British and French settlers in the mid- and later-eighteenth century. Cornish lead miners arrived in the southwest corner of the territory around the turn of the nineteenth-century. And in the mid-1830s, when the federal government officially “opened” the southeast corner of Wisconsin for settlement, there was a large influx of New Englanders and New Yorkers.

There were also a substantial number immigrants from across the sea among the Wisconsin pioneers of the 1830s and ’40s, including settlers from Upper and Lower Canada, Nova Scotia, Great Britain, the Netherlands, the German-speaking lands, and Ireland. By the time of the 1850 federal decennial census, Irish men, women, and children comprised the second-largest group of foreign-born immigrants in the state, surpassed in number only by immigrants from the German-speaking lands.

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The Bonniwells & Co. and the 1850 census–part 4: “in” Wisconsin!

/ Clark House Historian Reed Perkins. / 2 Comments

In our last post, we discovered that none of our Bonniwell gold rush expedition members could be found on the surviving population schedules for the 1850 federal census in California.1 Does that mean they were not to be found anywhere on the national 1850 enumeration? Well, no. It turns out that while the Bonniwell men and their companions were physically present in California, they managed to be enumerated in…Wisconsin?

Currier & Ives. Home Sweet Home, c. 1874. New York: Published by Currier & Ives. Library of Congress.

There’s no place like home

You might think that once every ten years, when the census enumerator came to call, he or she would simply speak to a responsible adult at each address and write down the information for all of the “inhabitants” of each household. And that is pretty much how it was done.2

Naturally, there could be complications. What if some members of the household were away, perhaps working the fields, or at the mill? Maybe someone had to go to town, or farther away, on business. What about a child that is out of town at school or college? Or… what if the head of household had gone prospecting in the wilds of California’s gold district?

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