Henry Sammis is our earliest known relative to die in California. He was 44 years old at the time, and had 6 children with his wife.
Portuguese flat was an 'out there' place—far from a major settlement. It is also far to the north in California, perhaps three or four times farther from San Francisco than from the Oregon border. Today it is known as Pollard Flat—for those familiar with the area, it is 35 miles north of Redding along Interstate 5.2 Its name (to Europeans) through the early 1850s was Shenanigan's gulch and it began as a tent community for Portuguese immigrants. Around 1853 it began to be referred to as Portuguese Flat and began to grow due to an influx of gold miners. In 1855 there were three to four buildings including a boarding house, and the nearby Sacramento River Road was completed in early 1856.
Henry was the great uncle of our beloved Nellie of Remember When———. His sister Martha Sammis, Nellie's maternal grandmother, was the second wife of Jacob White, Nellene's grandfather and the source of that maternal surname which Nellie preserved in her memoirs' signature. Jacob came to the midwest from Massachusetts, settling first in Coolspring, Pennsylvania then moving to a Michigan town called Leonidas which sits in St Joseph County just over the border from Indiana. Leonidas is where Martha gave birth to Nellie's mother, Hortense—one of the 13 or 14 children Martha had with Jacob, and one of his 19 total.
Martha was much younger than Jacob and was only 17 when they first got together. Jacob may have been still married to his first wife, Louisa, at the time. Louisa likely went back to New York where she was from. Martha and Jacob were married some years after getting together. She also died in California (1902) and is buried at Red Bluff—the Treekeeper has visited her grave with the Llama.
Henry Sammis left his family in Ohio to go to California in search of gold. A short while before his death, he sent a letter home which said that he intended to return in about a month.
He had a partner, and the partner showed up back in Ohio after his death. He brought gold back for Henry's family, saying it was Henry's share. The family recorded some suspicion that they received less than what Henry (and they) were entitled to. It is a bit hard to understand, however, why they would expect the partner to show up at all. Perhaps, the Treekeeper speculates, their suspicions were fueled by outlandish imaginings of the scale of wealth easily available in California at the time of the gold rush.
Jacob's brother also lived in Leonidas but died in another Michigan town called Jackson, home of a very large prison. This same town is where Cousin Helen, on the DeFoe side of our family, currently resides. Jacob's brother Amos, with another man, was tried and convicted for the murder of a passing traveler whose body was never found. He died in prison while the case was being appealed.
It was two and a half years after Henry died in the Sacramento River before our family had another known relative in California. This was Moses Coleman Whitehouse, who came to California with one of his three daughters—the two being born in California. He came to San Francisco in 1860 from Canada, where he'd been married to his wife and where they had had their first daughter. We do not know the reason for their coming. It was not for gold mining but may have been to start up a small farm on the outskirts of San Francisco. Eventually he moved up by Calistoga—the site of a Boy Scout trip when I was a boy—and owned many properties including a farm there. It was not yet called Calistoga—a made up name which is a California version of 'Saratoga' the famous springs in New York (and namesake of the California town to which George Strehlke Jr and his wife Gloria would move from South Pasadena many years later)—but at that time called Hot Spring or Hot Springs, California, up at the top of Napa County. He had other property in the East Bay as well. He was perhaps not what one would call a rich man, but he had these assets. Our family had no trace of Moses until the Treekeeper investigated. Of his three daughters, the eventual husband of the eldest was the executor of Moses' estate upon his death.
Moses' wife became sick and died after 10 years in California, and Moses soon after remarried to the widow of the family that had lived at the next door property in San Francisco in 1860—the Robinson family. Mr. Robinson had likewise died, and Moses sought his wife out and married her in a place called Lone Tree Valley. This place is now called Brentwood, and is where my sister Shannon resides today.
Mrs. Robinson—Teresa or less often Theresa—was very difficult to locate in the record. The Treekeeper eventually found newspaper accounts of their wedding and their being married. Her full maiden name was Rebecca Terrisa Cooper. She and Moses did not seem to merge their respective families. Upon his death, she did not receive anything of his estate although she did go by the name Whitehouse for some years afterward before reverting to Robinson, the surname of her children. She was living in Antioch after his death, which took place only two or three years after their marriage—Antioch being where my sister's in-laws today live. Moses' three girls did not become wards of Teresa despite being young—one was almost ready to be married and the other two were sent back east to be with relatives. Both ended up in Canada with a maternal aunt. One later moved to New York where she married a surgeon or doctor, and the couple's son was also a doctor. The other has been challenging to locate with confidence because another woman by the same name was also from Eastern Canada, but the Treekeeper believes her son died in Michigan.
Within a year of Sammis dying, there was a nearby incident unrelated to our family in which two Americans—one of whom, Charles “Frances” Blair, had in fact come from Ohio—went to a camp of Chinese miners who were successfully carrying out their operations in the wilderness.2 The Americans came to rob them, and killed two to six of the Chinese in the camp. But there were one to two other Chinese who fought back and subdued the bandits, who had clearly underestimated the Chinese. The Chinese turned the bandits over to the authorities, reporting what they had done. The men were tried and Blair, at least, was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. The defense objected and the sentence was reduced by the California Governor, J. Neely Johnson, to life in San Quentin prison. Blair attempted escape, failed, and remained in prison until 1859. But a new governor, John B. Weller, came into office and pardoned him. Blair subsequently left California, perhaps returning to Ohio but never returning. It feels wrong that because of anti-Chinese sentiment the man was let go. On the other hand, it actually may be amazing that in California in the mid-nineteenth century, the American was sent to prison and served some time.