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October, 1879
Four men rode into the woods east of Mendocino. They unsaddled their horses then set up camp in an old hay shed. There they waited for their leader to bring supplies and to tell them when all was ready. The task he had set for them: to rob the county sheriff as the lawman toured the coastal region collecting taxes.
That ringleader was a well-regarded professional, yet no stranger to the extraction of funds from the citizenry. He sent one-eyed A.B. Courtwright to them, carrying tobacco, cartridges, and copies of the San Francisco Chronicle. The same four had spent much of September at Courtwright's cabin, fourteen miles southeast of Westport, near Ten Mile River. The ringleader from Mendocino had mailed Courtwright twenty dollars to provision the four conspirators with bacon, sugar, tea, and other simple necessities.
Courtwright knew three of these men, Harrison Brown, John Billings, and Samuel Carr. All served time together with him at San Quentin Prison. Billings and Carr had both killed men in their past. The former had several scars under his shirttail, testament to a number of gun battles he'd engaged in throughout the West. All three were in their late thirties or early forties, though Carr, with sunken cheeks and a graying goatee appeared significantly older.
The fourth man, George Gaunce, was a comparative youth in his mid-twenties. By the time the four horsemen camped in the woods several miles east of Mendocino and less than a mile north of Big River, Gaunce sported two to three weeks worth of beard.
On Monday, October 13th, Mendocino town constable Bill Host started his day at the home he shared with his invalid wife. They called their spread Ash Grove. Though he still owned property in town, Host now preferred their Ash Grove farm about seven miles along the road toward the hamlet of Comptche; the same road wended farther east past Orr's Hot Springs and over the coast range to the county seat in Ukiah. Host rode north that morning of the 13th, crossed Big River while the autumn air still held a chill, then turned west. Near the north fork of Big River, the sight of recently turned earth the size of a grave caught Constable Host's eye. Stopping to inspect, he kicked away enough dirt to discover the hide, bones, and other remains of a freshly buried heifer.
He followed the tracks of horses to a location where the redwood forest petered out into prairie land dominated by huckleberry brush. There, the constable spotted four strangers camped beside a trickling brook. Host did not stop, though he noted a makeshift rack where strips of meat hung drying over an open fire.
Instead, he continued into town to report the incident to Chester Ford, superintendent at the Mendocino Lumber Company office. Twenty-three-year-old Jerome Chester Ford shared the same first name with his father, Jerome Bursley Ford, one of the founders of the lumber company. Bill Host expressed his suspicion that the heifer being jerked might belong to the company's herd. Chester Ford agreed that it proved a matter worthy of further investigation.
Host asked for and received a warrant from the local justice of the peace, then he and seven other Mendocino men rode back to the camp. They found it abandoned and no sign of the beef either. Host located stray items such as a label from iron ware, a pair of rubber slippers next to a log, as well as pieces of drawers and a rag. One of the men brought his dog who led them back to the buried heifer remains. On closer inspection, Host could not find a brand, but he discovered the ears had been cut off and were nowhere to be found, proving to him that the lumber company had tagged the bovine's ears. Eventually, the constable and his men found hoof prints leading away from the jerking camp, but dusk soon prevented pursuit.
Back in town, the constable procured promises from Tom Dollard and William Wright to ride along with him the next day. Dollard worked occasionally for the lumber company, but his main source of income derived from his co-ownership of the mercantile store known as “Jarvis and Dollard” at the northeast corner of Main and Kasten Streets. He was a divorced man, apparently much sought after as a partner at local Saturday night dance parties. Forty-year-old William Wright's employment stemmed more directly from the Mendocino Lumber Company as a wagoneer.
On the 14th, Host, Dollard, and Wright rode about four miles out the Little Lake Road then turned into the woods when they spied smoke rising. They soon found the four men encamped, with their beef hanging and ready to be cured or jerked. A couple of them wore holsters with revolvers while four rifles stood stacked against a tree within easy reach. Constable Host noticed the lack of sun on the strangers' hands and forearms and the high heels of their boots. No cowboys, he concluded before greeting the men.
William Wright said, “That is pretty good venison.”
Harrison Brown, a slim fellow with heavy eyebrows, and a scar at the center of his forehead, replied from the campfire, “Yes, pretty good for the woods.” Then he asked Host what he was looking for.
The constable said, “A tie claim. My old claim's about worked out.”
“What else do you make,” Brown asked.
“Posts, shakes, and shingles.” With only two men to back him, Host reckoned it poor odds to tangle with four well-armed outsiders. He, Dollard, and Wright made their excuses and headed back to Mendocino.
That evening eight men were sworn in to accompany Host the following day. The posse dwindled to seven when Chester Ford's father, who happened to be in town visiting from Oakland, objected in the strongest terms. Hardware store owner Eber W. Potter volunteered for Host's posse. On the street that night he encountered John F. Wheeler, the town dentist, known to townspeople as “Doc.” Wheeler's prowess with both rifle and revolver was a given in Mendocino. He had killed many a buck and rumor had it he'd scouted with Buffalo Bill and Custer after having spent three years as a captive of the Sioux in his boyhood. Potter liked him because Doc had purchased several boxes of cartridges and a butcher knife at the hardware store.
Potter asked if the dentist would join the posse. Wheeler responded that if the men who owned the butchered heifer put up $500 or $600 reward he would. He also cautioned Potter about the possibility of gunplay, saying, “Someone might get shot.... Who would care for mother now.”
The next morning at 7 a.m., with an autumn cold snap in the air, Potter sat the saddle alongside Constable Host. Dr. Wheeler was nowhere to be found. Acceding to his father's wishes, Chester Ford sheepishly bowed out and watched his townsmen, armed with rifles and revolvers, head out on horseback. Laughter and nervous joviality marked the ride into the woods as if a lark of some kind, if not adventure, awaited. Dollard and Wright accompanied Constable Host again. Along with them rode attorneys Archibald Yell and J.J. Morrow as well as former mill hand turned saloon keeper Cy Galbraith. The one among them most familiar with the outdoors and hunting rifles was thirty-one-year-old woods superintendent James Nichols. Though both were more than a decade older, Dollard and Nichols were rumored to be suitors of Kate Carlson. She was one of nineteen-year-old twin daughters of a Main Street hotelier.

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John Fleming Wheeler served the town of Mendocino as dentist for less than a year and a half in 1878-1879. His name lives on because of his central role in the most notorious crime in Mendocino County's 19th Century history. See the previous AVA for more on Wheeler's childhood and his early endeavors in Mendocino.
A closer examination of Wheeler reveals a life rich in adventure before he arrived in Mendocino County. A decade before his arrival on the north coast, he was employed as a U.S. Deputy Marshal to help quell a shooting war that had broken out between mining companies in Silver City, Idaho. He gained that position due to his remarkable skills with guns and his horsemanship.
With that behind him, Wheeler turned his attention to horse trading in and around Silver City. However, in late June and early July, 1868, some of his finest steeds were stolen from a corral. Through intuition or straightforward information, Wheeler believed the horse thief to be none other than Bigfoot.
The presence of the figure known as Bigfoot was first noted at the scene of an Indian raid in 1862. In the following year, when gold fever brought thousands to southwestern Idaho, any number of raids and late night stock thefts held a common clue, one of the perpetrators left enormous footprints behind.
John Hailey, early Idaho historian, quotes T.J. Sutton, an Indian fighter [and scout for an Idaho force that in many ways mirrored Jarboe's Rangers of northern Mendocino County in the late 1850s] attached to an expedition in 1863, describing the footprints he witnessed first hand: “We also discovered and measured Bigfoot’s track, which was 17 and one-half inches long by six inches wide.” Sutton also wrote. “At that time we had no knowledge of the man, but the enormous size of his track attracted our attention and so roused our curiosity that careful measurements of its dimensions were made, and no little discussion indulged in as to whether it was a human track.”
Sutton described Bigfoot as “the boss horse thief of the plains.” The mythic description of Bigfoot caused boys in the area to create gigantic moccasins in order to leave seventeen inch footprints at the sites of many pranks over the next few years. The man, myth, or legend purportedly stood six feet, eight inches tall, on a two hundred eighty pound frame. Most who proffered such descriptions probably never saw the real Bigfoot.
The account of what happened after John Wheeler's horses disappeared remains supposition, though it has been recounted in several serious works of history. Apparently, the legend of Bigfoot, which had grown throughout the 1860s from Montana on across Idaho, did not dissuade Wheeler. He garnered information that Bigfoot and two Bannock confederates planned to rob a stagecoach that traveled the rutted Silver City to Boise run. Wheeler lay in wait amid sagebrush south of the Snake River. Before the stage appeared, he spotted the potential hold-up trio and commenced firing. One Indian fell dead, another headed for the hills, but Bigfoot stood in the open shooting and hollering for his opponent to show himself. Wheeler obliged. Bigfoot emptied his gun to no effect, but was hit with at least one round then turned to run. Wheeler strode toward him, Henry rifle in one hand and revolver in the other. Bigfoot drew his large hunting knife and lunged forward. Wheeler holstered the revolver and emptied his Henry, with round after round striking Bigfoot's barrel chest and other parts of his body. He fell in the dirt on his back. With both legs broken and one arm shattered by the bullets, Wheeler considered him still so dangerous that when the big man asked for a drink of water, Wheeler supposedly said, “Hold on til I break the other arm, old rooster, then I'll give you a drink.”
“Well, do it quick,” Bigfoot responded, “and give me a drink and let me die.”
With his revolver, Wheeler shot him through the second arm then strolled down to the stream, filled his canteen, returned and held it to Bigfoot's lips. In a matter of less than a minute it lay as empty as his gun.
Bigfoot allowed as how he could do with some whiskey. Wheeler said he always carried a flask in case of snakebite. “Give it to me quick, I'm getting blind,” the fallen man said.
Wheeler pulled the flask from his breast pocket, knelt, and tipped it to Bigfoot's mouth, into which every drop sank in a series of swallows until the Indian's head slumped to one side. At first the pistoleer and rifleman assumed Bigfoot to be dead, but in a matter of a few minutes the mythic figure raised his head, saying that he felt much better.
At this point logic compels interjection to offer that a man shot through with so many rifle and revolver rounds could scarcely hold the water let alone the liquor. However, the encounter of Bigfoot and Wheeler has been told thus so many times, and no alternative offered, what transpired next must be related as well.
Bigfoot claimed his real name was Starr Wilkinson, with a white father, Archer Wilkinson. His mother was a half Cherokee, half Negro woman. Starr said his father had been hanged for murder, but his mother was a good, religious woman. Because of his size he had been called “Bigfoot” as long as he could remember.
He came westward driving a wagon as a member of a emigrant train in 1856. He fell in love with a young woman on the journey. She seemed similarly inclined until an artist from New York City joined up with the group. Suspecting the artist had insulted him, an argument commenced while the two rounded up the stock one morning along Goose Creek, near the Crazy Mountains, between Bozeman and Livingston, Montana. The artist admitted to derogatory statements about Wilkinson’s parentage.
“This made me mad,” Bigfoot told Wheeler. “I told him if he called me that again I would kill him. So he drew his gun on me and repeated it. I was unarmed, but started at him. He shot me in the side but did not hurt me much, so I grabbed him and threw him down, and choked him to death, then threw him into the river. I took his gun, pistol and knife and ran off into the hills.”
According to the tale, Wheeler told Bigfoot/Wilkinson that he was part Cherokee. At this juncture Bigfoot asked two favors of Wheeler: that none be told of his death and that his body be buried where it could never be found. Wheeler agreed, and Chief Bigfoot died content.
Apparently, a sizable reward existed for the capture or killing of Bigfoot. No records document Wheeler seeking that monetary reward.

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John Fleming Wheeler arrived in Mendocino City in the summer of 1878. He set up a dentist office within the Norton Hotel on Main Street. For a short while previously he had practiced dentistry in San Rafael. In 1877, he could be found for a time in the mining boom town of Bodie where he was involved in two shooting affrays.
In Mendocino, he soon gained renown as a crack shot with a rifle. The local newspaper took note of him bagging multiple bucks in one day during deer hunting season. Elite members of coastal society went to him for toothache care and to have their rifles sighted precisely. Late in 1878, Wheeler traveled back to Marin County and returned with his wife. Eventually, they would reside in their own home in Mendocino while his practice expanded from dentistry to occasional forays into full on medical practice after Dr. McCornack took a sabbatical back east to expand his training.
Rumor had it that Wheeler was born in the Cherokee Nation around 1842. Census documents place part of his childhood within McDonald County, at the southwestern corner of Missouri. The county's western edge bounded the Indian Territory. McDonald County's western border bore west several miles as it traversed from north to south. This crooked line, with a governmental stamp of approval, may have foreshadowed John Wheeler's own fate.
When he reached the age of ten, the Wheeler family also bore west, for California. A year later, young John and at least one sister appear to have traveled eastward again along with their father. According to John Wheeler's own telling, somewhere along the way he was taken captive by Indians. What became of his father and sister remains a mystery.
John Wheeler claimed that his riding and shooting skills were nurtured in this early experience of living with Native Americans. He told acquaintances in Mendocino that after a few years as a captive, he escaped from the Indians. Not long after, he apparently served as a scout for the U.S. Army on the Great Plains and on into the Rocky Mountain region. In this line of service, he supposedly crossed paths with both Buffalo Bill Cody and George Armstrong Custer. No documentary evidence seems to have survived to verify the matter; however, the locale and timeline of Wheeler's whereabouts do fit together enough to make this a reality.
During 1879 and 1880, Wheeler would be at the center of the action in the most notorious acts of violent crime in Mendocino County's 19th Century history, but he had already experienced more than a lifetime's worth of adventure a decade earlier. The late 1860s found John F. Wheeler in Idaho Territory where he sought fortune in gambling halls, served on the side of the law, and encountered Bigfoot.
Wheeler's skill on horseback allowed him to make his way on roads, trails, and cross country in places few others would attempt and in practically all weathers. At some point he wended his way along the rocky roads to Silver City, at 6,200 feet elevation. Accounts from the winter of 1868 show that he spent a good deal of his time at the gambling tables of this boom town about seventy miles south of Boise. On the outskirts of Silver City, competition between two mining companies, the Ida Elmore and Golden Chariot, at a spot known as War Eagle Mountain, reached a combative pitch in March, 1868. The two competitors for ore dug furiously right next to one another until they broke through each other's shafts, resulting in full scale confrontation. A Boise newspaper reported on March 25, 1868, “A large number of well armed men are in both mines, well fortified and closely watching each other. Occasional shots are fired.”
Truth be told, in a single night one hundred fifty rounds were discharged. By mid-month, random shots had turned into underground battle. Gunfire killed the owner of the Golden Chariot and several others on either side lay mortally wounded.
On March 29th, U.S. Marshal Orlando “Rube” Robbins took control of the disputed grounds at the behest of the territorial governor. Due to his skill with guns, his horsemanship, and apparently his favorable reputation as an Army scout, one of those deputized to monitor the combatants John F. Wheeler.
By late May the troubles at Silver City had subsided enough that deputies like Wheeler were no longer needed for deployment. At this juncture he moved across the territory and crossed over the line to ride the other side of the law. A Boise paper told much of the tale. “When a hundred miles beyond Port Neuf canyon [southeast of Pocatello near the Port Neuf River, a tributary of the Snake], three masked highwaymen stopped the stage, ordered the driver to throw out the Express box [there were actually two strongboxes, one containing about $1,800, the other holding $10,000], and the passengers to alight, at the same time covering them with with their Henry rifles. The driver threw out the way box [ with $1,800 in it]...”
The use of a Henry rifle proved just one of a pile of circumstantial details that point to Wheeler being one of the leaders of this little band of highwaymen. One of the passengers handed over $300 in greenbacks, but a man named Mullaney “protested his innocence of anything valuable so stoutly, and offered himself for search with so earnest an air that the robbers believed him and let him slide unsearched. After getting this booty they ordered the driver to go on. By his cleverness the Express box with $10,000 was saved... Mullaney thinks they are the same who robbed Ramey and Welch... and killed the latter after having robbed him.”
The similarities between the Port Neuf canyon robbery and the robbery and killing of Mr. Welch were undeniable. One of Wheeler's compatriots, John Billings, shot down Mr. Welch in cold blood. According to the survivor, Ramey, the whim displayed in the murder and the corresponding whim of allowing Ramey to escape, relieved of money, but physically unscathed, remained a shock he never got over. Such was the character of the companions Wheeler oft times chose.
Wheeler also engaged in horse trading in and around Silver City. Some of his finest steeds were stolen from a corral in late June or early July. Through intuition or straightforward information, Wheeler believed the horse thief to be none other than Bigfoot.
The presence of the man known as Bigfoot was first noted at the scene of an Indian raid in 1862. In the following year, when gold fever brought thousands to southwestern Idaho, any number of raids and late night stock thefts held a common clue, one of the perpetrators left enormous footprints behind.
John Hailey, early Idaho historian, quotes T.J. Sutton, an Indian fighter [and scout for an Idaho force that in many ways mirrored Jarboe's Rangers of northern Mendocino County in the late 1850s] attached to an expedition in 1863, describing the footprints he witnessed first hand: “We also discovered and measured Bigfoot’s track, which was 17 and one-half inches long by six inches wide.” Sutton also wrote. “At that time we had no knowledge of the man, but the enormous size of his track attracted our attention and so roused our curiosity that careful measurements of its dimensions were made, and no little discussion indulged in as to whether it was a human track.”

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Last time we explored the details of the May 1856 beating of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. The attacker was South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks who used a walking cane to repeatedly strike Sumner. Brooks was abetted by fellow Congressmen Laurence Keitt and Henry Edmundson who prevented others from assisting Sumner while Brooks carried on the thrashing even after the cane broke into pieces.
See last week's AVA for the pro- and anti-slavery sentiments that led to the attack within the Senate chamber. In the aftermath, southerners supported Brooks' actions. While up north, the view proved a polar opposite.
In the House of Representatives, Massachusetts Congressman Anson Burlingame rose from his desk on June 21st to speak. “On May 22nd... a member from the House, who had taken an oath to sustain the Constitution, stole into the Senate, that place that hitherto been held sacred against violence, and smote him [Sumner] as Cain smote his brother.”
At that point Representative Keitt shouted from his seat, “That is false.”
Burlingame continued. “I will not bandy epithets with the gentleman. I am responsible for my own language. Doubtless he is responsible for his.”
Keitt interjected, “I am.”
Burlingame returned to his original intent. “One blow was enough, but it did not satiate the wrath of that spirit which had pursued him through two days. Again and again and again, quicker and faster, fell the leaden blows, until he was torn away from his victim, when the senator from Massachusetts fell into the arms of his friends, and his blood ran down the senate floor.”
Within days, Brooks responded by challenging Burlingame to a duel. The South Carolinian said he would face the Massachusetts lawmaker “in any Yankee mudsill of his choosing.”
A mudsill is a support, as on a bridge or building, literally resting at the base of the structure. In Brooks' terminology, the base aspect meant a place where people of the lowest social level congregated.
Burlingame accepted the opportunity to duel soon as he heard it. As the challenged party he was afforded the right to choose the weaponry and the location of the duel. He opted for rifles and the Navy Yard on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. The latter to avoid U.S. laws forbidding the practice of dueling.
At some point Brooks learned of Burlingame's reputation as a crack shot, particularly with a rifle. The South Carolina Congressman failed to appear on the north side of Niagara on the appointed date. He claimed it would be unsafe for him to ride through what he called “hostile country” to reach the dueling ground, meaning he would not pass through northern states.
Brooks tried to engage Massachusetts' other senator, Henry Wilson, in a duel, but that never came off either.
Many prominent Southerners insisted that Sumner was faking injury, that Brooks had not hit him all that hard or often. Sumner suffered from what now might be called traumatic brain injury. He convalesced for three years. He did return to his Senate seat, which the Massachusetts legislature held open for him, in 1859. He suffered from something akin to postraumatic stress disorder for the remainder of his life.
Northern representatives moved to have Brooks expelled from the House, but the measure failed. An attempt to censure Edmundson also failed. Rep. Keitt, however, was censured for his role in the attack, including brandishing a pistol in the Senate chamber. Both Brooks and Keitt resigned their seats in the summer of 1856. The voters of South Carolina refused these indignities and returned both to Congress in special elections less than a month after their respective resignations.
The slogans, “bleeding Kansas” and “bleeding Sumner” galvanized the new Republican Party. Though the Republicans lost the presidential election of 1856, the party took control of many state legislatures. This, in turn, proved a long term success since state legislatures picked U.S. Senators until the ratification of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913. For decades, staunch anti-slavery Republicans would dominate the U.S. Senate from the Civil War into the 20th Century. As that century wore on, Republicans more and more resembled the political party of big business. After the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act in the mid-1960s, Republicans looked more like the Democrats of the 1850s than the party of Lincoln or Sumner.
Brooks was tried in a Washington D.C. Court for the assault on Sumner. He was convicted. The penalty: a fine of $300, but no jail term.
After the Presidential election in November 1856, in which he was re-elected, Brooks spoke on the floor of the House, calling for the admission of Kansas to statehood “even with a constitution rejecting slavery.” The sentiment assuaged many in the north and shocked several of his southern brethren.
In January 1857, Preston Brooks came down with a serious case of croup in his D.C. quarters. The respiratory infection first manifested as a cough that turned into a swelling inside his trachea. The Congressman's pain grew so intense that he reportedly tore at his own throat in an effort to alleviate his suffering. He died on January 27th, not yet reaching his thirty-eighth birthday.
Despite extreme winter weather, thousands of dignitaries and citizens alike attended the memorial service in the Capitol. Brooks' coffin traveled south by train into Virginia. It lay in state in the capitol building of Richmond while other cities and towns along the route planned for ceremonial stops.
It was well into February before Brooks made his final journey into South Carolina for burial in the family plot in Edgefield. In that era presidential inaugurations took place on March 4th. This was not changed to January 20th until the 1930s.
In Preston Brooks' hometown newspaper, alongside the detailed story of the ceremony and service of Sumner's attacker being laid to his final rest, part of a column noted, “The Congress Convention has counted the votes for President and Vice President, and have declared [Democrats] Buchanan and Breckinridge elected. A question was raised concerning the vote of Wisconsin, but it was finally admitted.”
This referenced the fact that due to a blizzard the Wisconsin vote was not tabulated in the state capital until one day after the official deadline. Congress convened on February 11, 1857, to count the electoral votes, with Senate President Pro Tempore James Mason presiding. He was the grandson of one of the “founding Fathers,” George Mason, and assumed the lead role at the procedure due to the death of Vice President William King, who perished just six weeks after taking office in 1853. No replacement had been named in the intervening four years.
Senator Mason proceeded with the traditional announcements of the vote counts by state. When Wisconsin's five electoral votes for Republican Presidential candidate John C. Fremont were about to be shared aloud, Virginia Representative John Letcher rose to object.
Mason stood a bit flummoxed for a short while before ruling Letcher out of order and concluded the electoral count. Though Wisconsin's tally would not ultimately matter in a count that Democrat James Buchanan won by sixty electoral votes, members of Congress can be sticklers of the finer points. Thus, Kentucky Senator John Crittendon (member of the Know Nothing Party that received more than twenty-one percent of the popular vote in November 1856) asked if Mason was taking upon himself “the privilege of determining a presidential election and saying who shall be President? I protest against any such power.”
South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler (Preston Brooks' relative) claimed that any such availing of “arbitrary power could make a President of the United States without an election.”
Other senators and representatives acknowledged that Wisconsin's votes would not sway that particular election, but warned against setting a dangerous precedent. South Carolina's other senator, Democrat James Orr, noted the obvious. “Suppose the result of the election would depend on the vote of that state.”
At one point Butler stated, “It is a power which in the time of temptation — and God knows when the time of temptation may arrive for someone to desire to be President to rule in this country — I would not like to trust too many people.”
The lawmakers adjourned into the Senate chamber. Deliberations continued into the next day. They returned to the House floor decreeing that the Wisconsin votes would count, not because the presiding officer said so, but because “an Act of God” had prevented the electors from reaching Madison, Wisconsin at the appointed time.

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Preston Brooks entered the United States Senate chamber, clutching a gutta percha walking cane topped with a gold knob. The cane stood approximately waist high next to the thirty-six-year-old South Carolinian.
Alongside Brooks stood Laurence Keitt, a fellow South Carolinian, and Henry Edmundson. Keitt possessed a pistol. They waited for the gallery to clear that afternoon. The three had decided beforehand that no ladies be present. The Senate was not in session, but some of the senators worked at their desks.
When the gallery emptied, the three men strode down the aisle to a spot slightly behind the desk of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. The forty-five-year-old solon sat silent, absorbed in his writing. Brooks stepped alongside him. “I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine."
Sumner made an attempt to rise; however, Brooks drew the cane back and swung it down across the side of the Massachusetts senator's head. Sumner slumped into his seat. Whipping the cane down, again and again, Brooks swung so fast and ferociously that he clipped the side of his own face once with the recoil.
Senator Sumner lay trapped, his legs pinned beneath a desk bolted to the floor. The first or second blow hit his brain so hard that he lost his sense of vision. Blood poured over his face. Finally, like a caged animal, he instinctively unleashed all his reserved strength and blindly tore the desk from its moorings.
He staggered up the aisle, arms outstretched in a defensive, seeking posture. Brooks continued caning him on top of the head, across the face and shoulders. The cane snapped in two, but Brooks grabbed a broken end and bashed Sumner with the gold knob. Sumner stumbled to a knee, and to some appeared to be in a state of convulsion. “Oh Lord,” he muttered. “Oh, oh.”
Brooks later claimed that his victim bellowed like a calf. The South Carolinian caught hold of Sumner's lapel, lifted him onto both feet and continued hitting him with the gold knob.
By then, other senators and some members of the House of Representatives attempted to intervene. The heavy set Edmundson blocked their way and admonished them to leave Brooks and Sumner to themselves. Keitt brandished a walking stick of his own as well as a pistol. “Let them be! Let them alone, God damn you, let them alone!”
The cane continued to break off into barely more than a golden nub as Brooks struck Sumner over and over. Representatives Ambrose Murray and Edwin Morgan finally pushed through and pulled Brooks away. Murray, a Senate page, and the Sergeant at Arms lifted Sumner to his feet. Somehow, he had regained consciousness. They escorted the Massachusetts lawmaker to a cloakroom for preliminary first aid, including stitches. With the Speaker of the House, Nathaniel Banks, and Senator Henry Wilson lending assistance, Sumner made his way to a carriage then to his lodgings where a doctor soon followed.
Brooks wiped the sweat from his brow and walked out of the Senate chamber as if he had just been for a vigorous hike, otherwise unperturbed. He did require medical attention later for the cut his own cane had inflicted above his right eye. Edmundson gathered all the pieces of the shattered cane.
The year was 1856. Brooks, Keitt, and Edmundson were members of the House of Representatives. The United States remained torn over the issue of slavery, particularly whether or not to allow the practice in new states as the nation's boundaries expanded westward across the continent. The issue had been forestalled in 1820 under a law called the Missouri Compromise. That legislation prohibited the admission of any further slave states north of the thirty-six degree, thirty minute parallel of latitude, with Missouri being the exception.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, authored by Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas among others, ripped the Missouri Compromise asunder. Douglas hoped that creating the separate territories of Kansas and Nebraska from the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase would further westward expansion and help in the development of a transcontinental railroad connecting the new (1850) state of California with the rest of the country. The primary result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was a rush of pro- and anti-slavery “settlers” into Kansas. Many armed conflicts, with grievous injury and deaths, ensued. Douglas had hoped that his concept of “popular sovereignty,” meaning a vote by the new residents, would permanently solve the slavery question in these fledgling territories. By 1856, one of those territories was commonly called “bleeding Kansas.”
Three days before Preston Brooks' attack on May 22, 1856, Charles Sumner took to the Senate floor, speaking at length against the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The speech ran over from May 19th into May 20th. In his remarks, Sumner singled out Senator Douglas and Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, authors of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Butler and Congressman Brooks were relatives. Sumner stated, “The senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, slavery. For her his tongue is always profuse in words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator.”
Butler had recently suffered a stroke, which slurred his speech. Sumner went there in his oration. “[He] touches nothing which he does not disfigure with error, sometimes of principle, sometimes of fact. He cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder.”
Sumner's reference to slavery as a mistress was no flippancy. At the time slaveholders made statements to the effect that abolitionists only wanted an end to slavery so they could take a black woman as a wife or mistress. Abolitionists, aware of slave masters taking advantage of their slaves sexually, referenced those actions in public statements.
Thus, the issue of slavery in the western territories and states took on an intensely personal tone. For Preston Brooks it was too much to forebear. Hence, the whispered comment to Sumner immediately before the caning. “I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine."
Reaction to Preston Brooks' caning of Charles Sumner depended on where one resided. A U.S. Senator from the South said that he approved of Brooks' act. Henry Wilson, of Massachusetts, stated on the floor of the Senate that the assault was base, brutal, and cowardly. To which Sen. Butler responded, “You are a liar.”
At the end of May 1856, the Charleston Daily Courier editorialized about Sumner's speech, “We venture the assertion that no parallel to these vituperative outbursts of Sumner can be found in the annals of Congress.”
The Liberator of Boston printed the entirety of Sumner's speech, calling it a majestic oration “on the invasion and subjugation of Kansas by Executive perfidy and Missouri border ruffians.” That newspaper labeled Preston Brooks' attack as a “brutal and dastardly outrage.”
The editor of the Richmond Enquirer extolled Brooks' deed as “good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequences.”
Two results stemmed from the cane splintering into many pieces. From all over the south, Brooks received hundreds of new canes, at least one of which bore the inscription, “Hit him again.”
The original cane's gold head, retrieved by Edmundson, eventually ended up displayed in the Old State House Museum in Boston. More immediately, the other pieces Edmundson gathered up were mostly fashioned into chains that Southern lawmakers wore around their necks in solidarity with Brooks.

                                                                                            Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com


The Mendocino Coast Hospitality Center in Fort Bragg, CA, receives hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in government funding. That's tax dollars from the public. Yet, in these Covid times the Hospitality Center Board of Directors has not included the public in a single monthly meeting. If you go online and seek out the smaller special districts on the Mendocino Coast, you will find Zoom and/or teleconference links for all the meetings this writer is aware of. Some of those had glitches in their early attempts at such gatherings, but at the very least the effort was made to hold Rec & Park, Harbor District, or Healthcare District meetings with public input included. The Hospitality Center has seemingly gone out of its way to avoid the public. In effect, Covid-19 has given its board a smokescreen to operate undercover for ten months now.
Using the most recent tax records available, the Hospitality Center (HC) receives at least $400,000 in government funding annually. With that in mind, one might reasonably presume that the public would be apprised of HC board of directors meetings if not invited to them. A check of the HC website provides no clue as to when the HC board meets. As of January 4th, their web pages hadn't advanced beyond a December, 2020 activities calendar. That calendar uses the word “community” all over the place, but never to welcome the community as a whole, and certainly not to welcome the outside community to a board of directors meeting.
A look at the HC Facebook page doesn't give any hints about board of directors meetings either. When last the AVA broached the topic of the Hospitality Center in November, 2020, it was to focus on the correspondences of the last two full time executive directors of HC. The “Hospitality” organization has been without an executive director since Carla Harris was let go on July 1, 2020. As noted in the November piece, Ms. Harris had some choice words regarding the HC board of directors. “They [the MCHC board] are out of touch with reality. They enable folks, they thing [think] they are above the law and don't event [even] reside in Fort Bragg. They have no clue how to help people out of homelessness and have no idea what it takes to run an efficient and effective nonprofit organization. They are a bunch of narcissistic arses with their heads burried [sic] so deep in the sand that they can't even see beyond their own bullshit.”
Her predecessor, Anna Shaw, echoed those comments. “I agree 100% with Carla Harris’s experience of the MCHC Board of Directors, specifically that 'they are out of touch with reality, they don’t care about the community, and they are out of control. They enable folks, they think they are above the law and they don’t even reside in Fort Bragg. They have no clue how to help people out of homelessness and have no idea what it takes to run an efficient and effective nonprofit organization.'
“I was Executive Director for almost 8 years, I believe Carla’s tenure in that position was about 20 months. That’s nearly ten years total that the MCHC Board of Directors has mis-run this organization, as reported by the most senior staff.”
Well, lo and behold, word on the street is that Hospitality Center is replacing some of the current directors. The key phrase being, “word on the street.” You won't find any notice of it on their web page or Facebook page. Unlike the radio notices I have heard quite frequently advertising for applicants to fill a vacant Fort Bragg City Council seat, there appears to be no public media outreach to encourage coastal citizens to apply for the HC board.
If one digs down deep on the Hospitality Center web site, an application for a seat on the board can be found. Of course, by the time this is read by the general public HC Board President Carole White may have hand picked her own favorites. It is worthy of note that since taking over the Old Coast Hotel site at 101 North Franklin Street in Fort Bragg not a single central business district owner has been added to the HC Board of Directors.
Fort Bragg business owner Jim Britt has voiced an idea for change at HC. He would like to see the organization move from a non profit closed board of directors to a membership organization. In that scenario, HC could sell memberships. Britt has offered up an example in which coastal citizens could pay a $25 annual membership fee and businesses $100, with both membership classes allowed to vote as board members. Britt maintains such a change would only require a board resolution filed with the California Secretary of State's office, and that the corporate 501(c)3 status would otherwise go unaltered. According to Britt, this new structure would allow residents of the coast and particularly Fort Bragg to feel more involved and invested in the operations of the Mendocino Coast Hospitality Center. Britt feels that this style of board should include a city employee and a member of the police force. Britt states that the advantages of public ownership of HC would not only include the infusion of public money, but also that public ownership would bring quicker and more effective resolution to problems that HC leadership has ignored for too long.

                                                                                            Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com


From Fort Bragg: “The [pandemic] has taken a second start at this place as it has in similar other sections and some forty-five or fifty cases are reported. The Board of Health held a session [this week] and decided it would not be advisable to open the schools at the present time so they will remain closed indefinitely. All households where the disease exists have been quarantined and occupants of those who have not contracted the disease are allowed egress and ingress but are required to wear masks. A special watchman has been appointed to see that these regulations are enforced. If the disease is not checked with these restrictions, probably the order will go into effect requiring the closing of places of amusement, saloons, etc., and the general wearing of masks.”
The time was the first week of January, 1919. The pandemic then was influenza, the first wave of which hit northern California in October, 1918. It remained deadly throughout November then dissipated as the December holidays neared. As with the Covid-19 pandemic, further waves or surges followed.
In the second week of 1919 the Fort Bragg Board of Health deemed more drastic measures necessary in an attempt to slow the spread of influenza. On January 10th, twenty-one families in the coastal town were under quarantine with seventy-two active influenza cases detected. The government banned the showing of motion pictures within city limits then soon thereafter all public gatherings. Saloon businesses stayed open, but had to close by 10 pm. The Board of Health also required bars to remove all seating, so if you wanted to drink in a saloon, you did it in a unique form of standing room only.
Talk of opening schools at mid-month led the health board to demand that if this occurred both teachers and students would have to be wearing masks.
Several new cases of influenza among the younger set forced the closure of the high school in Ukiah in the first week of 1919. The Victory Theatre was closed as well, on an indefinite basis. City officials discussed the possible need for a return to mandatory mask wearing.
In Willits, the flu grew so prevalent in the early days of January, 1919, that all the employees of the First National Bank were temporarily laid low. Reinforcements were brought in from the institution's Ukiah branch to keep the doors open.
A coastal family named Lima, recently moved to Oakland, suffered one of the most thorough blows of the influenza epidemic. Two boys and their mother succumbed to the malady within weeks of each other.
Also in Oakland, a former Mendocino County family nurtured a son born at only four pounds in September, 1917, to a robust sixteen-month-old of normal size. However, during the first days of January, influenza swept in and snuffed out the lad's life in short order.
In Mendocino City, a thirty-five-year-old mother of three died as a result of the influenza epidemic. Tragedies such as this brought out the volunteer spirit. A membership drive added one hundred fifty-two names to the local branch of the Red Cross.
After a number of deaths in the town of Fort Bragg during the first days of 1919, on January 12th the city council passed an ordinance requiring the wearing of masks until 'the disease shall have abated.” One day later, Louis Ghens, of that town, died from pneumonia complications after being afflicted by the influenza bug. Another day later, the same pattern felled Charles Mattila. The following morning, fifteen-year-old Isabelle Neal, a student at Fort Bragg High School also perished.
In Ukiah, the flu killed twenty-year-old Josie Laviletta. Still, the more mundane aspects of life continued. In the county seat, many complaints reached law enforcement regarding recent incidents of reckless automobile driving. The local police increased their efforts to enforce the speed law in the town and its environs at the legal limit of 15 MPH.

                                                                                            Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com

Christmas fell on a Wednesday in 1918. Letters were still arriving in Mendocino from men who had fought the War to End All Wars. Though the armistice had been signed a month and a half earlier, the yuletide mail brought news from young men like Clarence Jarvis who'd been in the thick of it. “I have been on the move ever since I arrived here. We didn't get time for our meals, when the big drive was on and when we stopped, 'we flopped.'

“You know it was hard to keep up with 'Jerry.' What he lacked in fighting, he made up in running, and we ran them ragged, believe me. We were operating with the 1st Army on the Verdun front when we first came over. After our regiment was wiped out, we were sent to the Somme sector, where we were attached to the 27th and 30th divisions, which were shock troops for the 4th British Army operating on the Somme front. The 27th and 30th were the first to bust the Hindenburg, and they kept on busting till the thing was over. They were filled up four different times so you can see the price they paid.
“The old 'whiz bangs' have stopped and I guess they will be shipping us home soon... [W]hen I see the Statue of Liberty I'll be the happiest guy on earth. When we get started across the pond, I believe I can stand at attention all the way across.”
That letter was written and posted days as the armistice was signed in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. Other families and friends received cheery correspondences at Christmastime, written mere hours before that peace was signed, letters from boys and men who were then shot down in the last hours and minutes of warfare.
Life and death went on here at home as well. During the evening of the day following Christmas, the wireless in Fort Bragg relayed a message from the steamer Klamath, out of San Francisco, bound for Portland. The vessel lay offshore with a sailor on board, suffering from a mangled arm. The wireless message asked for a boat to be sent out to get him ashore to a hospital for serious medical attention.
Max Isner and three other men put out in a dory toward the Klamath. They made there way to the vessel without incident. Shipmates lowered the injured sailor carefully aboard the small craft. Only when nearing the harbor entrance did the rescue mission encountered a moment of indecision. Whether a minor fog bank encircled them or rogue waves pushed them off course is uncertain, but they veered too far north until a reef caught hold of the craft. Waves tossed boat and men, capsizing the dory, tossing fully clothed men into the rock strewn fringes of the Pacific.
Two of the Fort Bragg men swam back to the overturned craft, clinging there for all they were worth. The tiny boat drifted with the waves and tide, farther and farther, but, fortunately eastward, into the harbor. Finally men on the wharf, waiting to assist with the rescue, spotted the stranded fellows. A second boat put out and pulled them safely aboard. A third man had managed to crawl his way onto the edge of the guilty reef. The second boat heard his frantic cries for help, and he, too, was saved. Max Isner and the injured sailor drowned.
The influenza epidemic had subsided to such a degree that in Mendocino County there were those who slapped a knee with glee to find that the county tax collector had come down with the bug. Perhaps they joked about the matter because news spread quickly that the man was reported to be rapidly recovering.
On another front the turn toward 1919 may well have been foreshadowed in the tale of twenty-seven-year-old Susie May Everson, a native of the town of Mendocino. In 1910 her parents moved with her to Palo Alto, when she was accepted into the freshman class at Stanford University. She graduated with honors in 1915, taking up a teaching position at the high school in Modesto soon thereafter. In that locale did the influenza epidemic sweep her up into its vast numbers of victims.

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As I write, rain is predicted to arrive in a day or two, with re-occurring precipitation of measurable amounts forecast throughout the coming week. Here, along the Albion, we can certainly use a downpour or two or three. The river is extraordinarily low for December, easily forded in many places between this ranch and South Fork a couple of miles eastward. I have written recently about our cattle walking along the dry creek bed to escape beyond fencing in that easterly direction. Humans need only employ a hop and skip, never mind the jump, to avoid the trickling stream, and cross from side to side in most locations.
About a mile and a half northeast of the forks of the Albion its main branch snakes so precipitously, first north to south then south to north, that on maps of a century or so ago this bend in the stream was known as Cape Horn. In the 1950s our family enjoyed brief camping forays amid the then lightly wooded headlands of “Cape Horn.” Another quarter mile north along the main branch of the Albion lie the remains of a place my father always referred to as “the old Heaton place.”
It is one of the locales my father used his local geography teaching skills at. When I was a small boy, whenever we drove or walked there my father would point and say simply, “The old Heaton place.”
This was repeated until I beat him to the punch, offhandedly pointing and remarking, “The old Heaton place.” His job was done, and occasionally in this newer century I have utilized the same method for places of local historic note.
I never knew the Heatons. They must have given up their farm many years before I came along. I believe they preceded by decades my mother's arrival, by marriage, into the Macdonald clan in 1941. Nevertheless, until recent years apple trees remained for the picking on that old property. Up and down the Albion, long abandoned apple trees of many varieties still survive, evidence of the logging camps moving eastward throughout the latter years of the nineteenth century up until the mills shut down at the end of the 1920s, in essence leaving the timber lands to regenerate for a full human generation. Even now the occasional walk west down the Albion River from here can provide evidence of ripe apples from a tree near Slaughterhouse Gulch or just this side of Deadman’s Gulch.
The Albion Lumber Company operated not only a slaughterhouse from the 1880s through the 1920s, but also grazed a substantial herd of beef cattle in the field on the opposite side of the river. One can’t truly describe it as south or east of the river since here, too, the tidewater of the Albion bends dramatically at the mouths of Duck Pond Gulch, Slaughterhouse Gulch, Pleasant Valley/Railroad Gulch, and Deadman’s Gulch and a couple of more times between the boom and the Pacific Ocean. The Pomo word for what we call the Albion meant something akin to “crooked river.”
The streams running out of Railroad Gulch, so called because it was the first gulch that the Albion Lumber Company extended a branch of its rails into, and Pleasant Valley Gulch join in a tiny rivulet before meeting the Albion itself. That tiny trickle of summer and fall can turn into a tumbling torrent when sufficient rains fill and overflow the streams of Pleasant Valley and Railroad Gulch in winter.
Some members of the Macdonald family's Hereford cattle were descended from survivors of the Albion Lumber Co. herd. Others descended from Macdonald cattle who grazed right alongside them, a practice not uncommon in those days, especially when one of the Macdonald brothers, Charles (born at home in 1890), worked as chief assistant to Matt Piper at the slaughterhouse in the 1910s. Until well into the second half of the twentieth century, vehicles could travel from the Littleriver prairie down the Slaughterhouse Road, cross the stream at low tide at the mouth of Duck Pond Gulch then snake their way uphill through a series of turns known as the “Devil's Gate” to Albion Ridge. Before automobiles, residents of that prairie or the Albion cutoff road wended their way down to the mouth of the next gulch west of Duck Pond on horseback or in wagons to pick out choice cuts of beef from the Albion Lumber Co. slaughterhouse.
The elongated meadow across the river from the mouth of Slaughterhouse Gulch, extending to the mouths of Pleasant Valley and Railroad Gulch, was known for much more than a century as simply “the field.” In the last couple of decades a few misguided individuals have attempted to refer to it as “the enchanted meadow.” Historically speaking, I doubt that those steers taken directly from it to the slaughterhouse felt enchanted.

                                                                                             Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser: www.theava.com


The November Zoom meeting of the Mendocino Coast Recreation & Park District (MCRPD) Board of Directors lasted nineteen minutes. The most newsworthy item from the proceeding was the announcement that California State Parks had acknowledged receipt of a $76,267 payback on a planning grant from the Off Highway Motor Vehicle Division.
In July, 2018, California State Parks had placed all grants to MCRPD on hold due to audits that claimed conflicts of interest in the grant writing and procurement process. In June of 2020 state parks made it clear to MCRPD that grants would continue to be disallowed unless three “tainted” members of the MCRPD board left office or were removed. One of the “tainted” three, John Huff, resigned, but later decided to run for an open seat in the November election. Another one of the “tainted” three, Kirk Marshall, finished out his term of office in November without running for re-election. The third board member deemed “tainted” by State Parks, Bob Bushansky, has offered up excuses why he considers the label unwarranted. He seems intent on staying on the board at least until his term is up in two years.
Sarah Bradley Huff, principal grant writer for MCRPD and spouse of John Huff, left her position in September. Mr. Huff won his election bid, so MCRPD will still have two members on its five person board who may still be considered “tainted” by California State Parks.
This leads us to the November meeting of the Noyo Harbor Commission. Newly appointed Commission Chair Jim Hurst held the gathering in a socially distant, yet in person, format at Silver's at the Wharf. Hurst, Commissioner Michelle Norvell, and brand new commissioner Doug Albin made up a quorum. To fill out the five member commission, two new members will be appointed by the county and hopefully seated before January, 2021 comes to a close.
Among the items considered by the harbor commission were letters of resignation from the harbor master and commissioner Steve Bradley. Here's where the past connections with MCRPD get sticky. Also in the Noyo Harbor Commissioners agenda packet was a letter from their chief grant writer, the same Sarah Bradley Huff. Her correspondence: “This letter is written to inform you that effective immediately, I am terminating my Grant Writing and Grant Management agreement with Noyo Harbor District.
“For the last several years, I have worked very hard with Harbor staff and Commissioners to try to bring funding to the harbor in an effort to create a better and more functional facility. I have strived [sic] to always do my best and provide professional and quality service to your District. However, it has become apparent that my services are no longer desired by some members of the Commission. Several of the more recent meetings have evolved [sic] into a personal attack. While most commissioners arrive at meetings well primed, it is clear that others are ill prepared to discuss the issues at hand. In an effort to cover up their poor planning, they in turn make inuendoes [sic] insinuating wrongdoing on the part of others. In addition, the condescending way of behaving toward staff and council [sic] and other commissioners has become intolerable.
“This decision was not an easy one to reach and in closing I hope the Commission can find the balance it needs to meet the needs of the entire District it serves and not just a select few. The Noyo Harbor has always been an important part of Fort Bragg and the surrounding communities. I hope it is not lost due to the egos of a few.”
Under #3 of the Harbor Commission's agenda, “Conduct of Business,” fell this item: “Discussion and possible approval for Jim Jackson to retain Sarah Huff at the District's expense.” Jackson is the legal counsel for the commission. When questioned, Chairman Hurst made it clear this was not his idea, but Mr. Jackson's. Hurst also made it known that the idea would not fly under the newly constituted set of commissioners. One of the issues Ms. Huff apparently alluded to in her resignation letter was the objection that Hurst and Commissioner Norvell seemed to have with Ms. Huff essentially retaining almost sole control over the grants she wrote for the harbor district. In the meeting prior to this one, questioning from Hurst and Norvell appeared to indicate that Huff's grant writing control s to questioning only lasted a few short weeks, followed by the vitriolic resignation letter.
At one point in that prior harbor commission meeting, after Hurst's and Norvell's questions, Ms. Huff indicated that she didn't view the situation as an attack on her and would be happy to answer any further questions. Apparently, that openness extended so far as to her denying commissioners access to the grants until after the grants were accepted. This, of course, begs the question how did the previous commissions vote to approve seeking grants they had not even read?
Documents obtained through a public records act request indicate that Ms. Huff was paid 5% of the total amount of every grant obtained through the harbor district.