California letters of Lucius Fairchild PUBLICATIONS OF THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN EDITED BY JOSEPH SCHAFER SUPERINTENDENT OF THE SOCIETY CALIFORNIA LETTERS OF LUCIUS FAIRCHILD WISCONSIN HISTORICAL PUBLICATIONS COLLECTIONS VOLUME XXXI SARGENT's PORTRAIT OF GENERAL LUCIUS FAIRCHILD (Original in the State Historical Museum, Madison) CONSIN HISTORICAL PUBLICATIONS COLLECTIONS VOLUME XXXI CALIFORNIA LETTERS OF LUCIUS FAIRCHILD EDITED WITH NOTES AND INTRODUCTION BY JOSEPH SCHAFER SUPERINTENDENT OF THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN PUBLISHED BY THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN MADISON, 1931 COPYRIGHT, 1931, BY THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN California letters of Lucius Fairchild http://www.loc.gov/resource/calbk.004 THE ANTES PRESS EVANSVILLE, WISCONSIN v INTRODUCTION The letters herewith presented have a two-fold significance. On the one hand, as readers will be quick to discern, they constitute a new and vivid commentary upon the perennially interesting history of the gold rush and life in the California mines. To be sure their author, like nearly all of those upon whose narratives our knowledge of conditions in the gulches and on the river bars of the Golden State depends, wrote as an eager gold seeker busily panning, rocking, or sluicing the sands of some hundred foot mining claim. His picture of California, at any given moment, had to be generalized, so to speak, from the “color” at the bottom of his testing pan. His particular camp, company, or environmental coup symbolized for him the prevailing conditions social, economic, and moral. While this was inevitable, it was by no means a misfortune, for a certain uniformity prevailed throughout the mining field and the witness who by intensive living gained a true insight into a given unit had qualifications for interpreting the entire gold digging society. Besides, Fairchild, while less mobile than the proverbial prospector, who was never happy except when searching for “better diggings,” shifted about considerably in the course of his six years' residence in California as his itinerary shows. The interval between Calaveras County mouth of the Sacramento, where he began digging, and Scott Valley, near the Oregon boundary, where his California vi career was closed, is not merely a pretty stretch of miles and diversified landscapes, but it includes the greater part of the early gold mining area. Over that scope of country young Fairchild ranged in a way to become reasonably familiar with the leading communities scattered through it. In addition, he visited San Francisco, and received from friends occasional reports about the region south, as far as San Diego. It can be said, therefore, that taken all together, the letters throw much light on gold mining from the early prospecting days to those of the fluming and quartz-crushing era. California letters of Lucius Fairchild http://www.loc.gov/resource/calbk.004 The story Fairchild tells of the trip to California in 1849 is naturally less detailed than that related by some of the well known diarists among the Argonauts. Yet the long and intimate descriptive letters he wrote from St. Joseph, Missouri, and from the river steamboats between Dubuque and that place, give a charming picture of the preliminaries and preparations for the journey across the plains. It would be hard to find other groups of letters or extant diaries which make so palpable conditions at Missouri River concentration points as do the letters herewith published under dates of April 23, and 24, May 2.5, 11, and 13, 1849. Fairchild kept a kind of current record of experiences as his letters show, and in some instances he summarizes the movements of his party in accordance with the entries contained therein. This diary, kept up in some fashion though not always day by day, for several years, has not been found among the Fairchild papers; but the letters have the double advantage of being contemporaneous with the events narrated and at the same THE FAIRCHILD HOME, MADISON vii time free from the tedium of the diarist's schedule of routine facts. History is served by them quite as effectually, in most respects, as it could be by the unvaryingly regular daily journal. The larger interest of this volume, however, to the people of Wisconsin, whose generosity makes possible its publication, is in the relation of the experiences disclosed to the career of one of their cherished leaders of the past generation. From the beginning of the Civil War to the day of his death, the genial spirit of Lucius Fairchild captivated the imagination of the people of his state. They applauded his gallantry on the field of battle, which won him promotion to the rank of brigadier general, trusted him in politics as three successive elections to the governorship testify, and followed with justifiable pride his distinguished service to the nation m the diplomatic field. This was not merely because Fairchild always threw himself whole-heartedly into the performance of every assigned task, doing his work well and capably, but because there was about him a subtle personal quality that irradiated his activities, rendering him under all circumstances interesting to his fellow citizens and on occasion dramatically gripping. These letters, the spontaneous outpouring California letters of Lucius Fairchild http://www.loc.gov/resource/calbk.004 of a boy who was now separated for the first time irrevocably from home and loved ones, will hereafter form an ideal introduction to the study of Lucius Fairchild. With this thought in mind, the editor has been doubly careful to reproduce the letters verbatim et literatim. Whereas, in the case of letters or diaries designed solely to throw light on historical situations, it viii is allowable for the reader's comfort to modernize the punctuation if not the spelling, no such liberties could be taken with the present series of documents. Accordingly, they reflect their author's progress in epistolary self-expression during these formative years. Lucius Fairchild was born December 27,1831, and was, therefore, seventeen years and three months old when, on the thirty-first of March, 1849, his ox-drawn covered wagon rolled ponderously out of the village of Madison, headed for the alluring land of gold. His father, Jairus C. Fairchild, a native of the state of New York, had married Sarah (Sally) Blair of Massachusetts and settled as a merchant in Kent, Ohio, where this son was born. Later they removed to Cleveland and in 1846 came to Madison. The family included a daughter named Sarah (like her mother), and three sons, Cassius, Lucius, and Charles, in that order. The daughter was soon married to Eliab B. Dean, a native of Massachusetts, and later, as Madame Conover, became a very distinguished leader of Madison society. Cassius and Lucius who had received educational advantages in Cleveland and at an Ohio boarding school, were placed for several terms in Carroll Academy at Waukesha. But at the time the news of the gold discovery reached Madison, it found both boys helping to conduct their fathers mercantile establishment and associated business ventures, the elder Fairchild having been elected state treasurer of Wisconsin in 1848, and being reelected the next year. Cassius stuck to the business until the Civil War broke, when both he and Lucius received commissions, each of them being quickly promoted ix to the rank of colonel. At Shiloh, Cassius received a serious wound from the effects of which he finally died in 1868. Charles, the younger brother, profited from the college education Lucius in these letters continually urged him to strive for, served in the navy during the war, and afterwards became prominent in business and brokerage circles both at Boston and at New York. California letters of Lucius Fairchild http://www.loc.gov/resource/calbk.004 In 1848 and 1849 the Fairchilds erected the fine brick residence overlooking Lake Monona, a few rods from the state capitol, which figures so prominently in the social annals of Madison, first as the Jairus Fairchild home from the summer of 1849, then as the home of Lucius Fairchild until his death in 1896, and lastly, as the home of his widow until her death in 1925. Thereafter the house was dismantled, the heirs turning over the Fairchild papers, accumulations of three generations, to the State Historical Society which received also, as a bequest from Mrs. Lucius Fairchild, the John Singer Sargent portrait of her husband which is reproduced in this volume. The new brick house was practically completed before Lucius left Madison, though the family had not yet occupied it, and the picture of “home” which he carried to the gold mines was of his father, mother, sister, brother-in-law (and their small daughter), and two brothers assembled at the fire-place in the spacious drawing room. The Fairchilds were a prosperous, intelligent, high minded, affectionate group, and the boy realized that he had more to keep him at home, or, having broken away, to bring him back with the least possible x delay, than was at all common among the Argonauts. “Only thinking of you,” wrote Lucius to his home folks on his second Christmas in California, “is happiness enough for one common mortal, and if I could think that I am as dear to you as you are to me I believe I should burst with a sound like a pop gun.” Fredrika Bremer's account of these good people in the brick house who entertained her in October, 1850 is the classic picture of the Fairchild home which this boy had temporarily exchanged for a “brush house,” or at best a log cabin in the mines.* Fredrika Bremer, Homes of the New World, translated by Mary Howitt (New York, Harpers, 1853), i, 630-631.