GENERAL JOHN BIDWELL.

 

            ON the scroll which holds the names of the west-coast Pioneers, the name of John Bidwell should be close to the top of the stalwart list. In many respects his career was most wonderful.

            When a boy he traveled three hundred miles on foot through the wilderness of Ohio and Indiana to obtain some rudiments of an education at a little old primitive academy. When nineteen years of age, he drifted down the Ohio from Cincinnati to the Mississippi, up the Mississippi to the Missouri, up the Missouri to Platte county, where he settled down and taught school for two winters.

            The call of the wild had always been in his ears. He one day met a man who had been to the west coast, who told Bidwell of the wonders beyond the plains and the mountains. The result was that a little company was fitted out and started west. This was in 1841. Bidwell had a yoke of oxen, a flintlock musket, a pair of old-time pistols and a little food.

            The company had no map or chart ; knew nothing of the route they were to travel except to go west. They wandered on, reached the Rockies, worked their way to about where Granger in Wyoming is, pushed through the pass to Soda Springs ; then continued west and south to the north end of Great Salt Lake, then zigzagged into the Humboldt valley; followed it to the sink, then bore across to the Carson river, and found their way through the hills to Walker river, then scaled the almost impassable heights which surround the source of the Walker. They had become divided and in searching one morning for his last ox, Bidwell came upon the big trees, the first white man to ever see them, and stumbled his way down the Stanislaus river to the San Joaquin.

            Of all the feats of all the pioneers this was the very greatest. There is nothing like it told in history. It could have been only through the mercy of God that it was accomplished.

10 AS I REMEMBER THEM.

            It was enough to break the heart of any man thrust out on that awful waste; no trail to follow; animals growing weaker and weaker as the difficulties of the journey increased; the grass giving way at last and nought in view save the desert, and finally the scaling of the Sierras, at a point which men

have ever since evaded, so terrible is it, that how that little company survived it without growing daft, is a marvel that grows in magnitude the more it is studied. The horror of the day, the terrible silence of the night, the awful fatigue, the impossibility of return, the hopelessness of trying to advance; all make of the journey one of the most striking achievements of the ages.

            Bidwell found General Sutter, who had reached California two years in advance of him. He was Sutter's lieutenant for two years, and especially had charge of the Hock farm. When Fremont came, in 1843, he was Fremont's guide, told him of the big trees and of Salt Lake, and when the

order came to Fremont that, in the event of war, he was to try to take and hold California, Bidwell became a soldier. After the war, Bidwell found what is now Bidwell's Bar, on Feather River. He made a fortune and then purchased Rancho Chico, twenty-two thousand acres of the richest body of land in the Sacramento valley.

            He carried east the block of gold quartz that was California's contribution to the Washington monument; set the machinery in motion that drew William H. Seward in the senate to advocate the admission of California, and, returning, began not only the cultivation of his farm, but established a

primitive experiment station and had at one time on this land four hundred food and flower varieties growing. This he pursued all his life. He gave me, in August, 1889, on his table on the Chico Rancho, a watermelon of his own "breeding" which was as yellow as a muskmelon, and sweeter than

a concert of nightingales.

            He was sent to Congress, and there all his work was for progress. In 1892 he was nominated by the Prohibitionists in National convention at Cincinnati for President, and received the highest vote ever given a prohibition candidate.

GENERAL JOHN BIDWELL.  11

            In the stirring years from 1860 to 1865 his was one of the loudest voices in California for the Union. His work was incessant during the sixty years he lived in California. He built seventy-five miles of the road over the Sierras from Chico toward Susanville ; put on a stage line to run between Chico and Boise City, and stocked the whole line with his own horses.

            When eighty years of age he went with an employee to the woods to select some timbers for a special use. He cut off a log that was in the way and was seized with heart failure. He was carried home, and on the same afternoon sank into a slumber which deepened into his last sleep an hour later.

            When I last saw him he was sixty-nine years of age, but he was as erect as a man of twenty. He was six feet high, and a stalwart a most impressive personage; a stalwart, but genial and generous. He had then toiled all his life, had suffered hardships almost unendurable, but had triumphed over all and had made for himself a high name, simply through his toil and his force of character, his high motives and his irrepressible energy.

            He was a Pioneer of Pioneers, a patriot, a statesman, a soldier, and lived a long life without fear and without reproach.