Anvil Firing

I have learned a lot about old times in California as I have worked on editing this book on Pres Longley, the miner poet. Yesterday John Rudderow, the instigator of this project, told me about the old custom of “firing the anvil” on the 4th of July.

Want to make a lot of noise and don’t have a cannon? Not to worry, you can have the same level of excitement and racket with a couple of anvils and some black powder. Every town had at least one blacksmith who had the necessary equipment, so it wasn’t hard to arrange.

(I don’t recommend trying this at home, even if you do happen to have an anvil. Could be dangerous.)

Take one anvil and turn it upside down. On the underside is a hollow about the size of a brick. Pour in some gunpowder and place a fuse or a trail of gunpowder. Then place the other anvil right side up on top. When you light off the gunpowder, you will get a terrific explosion and the top anvil will fly at least a hundred feet in the air. It will come down too, so clear the deck.

To see some anvil firing, go to YouTube or take a look at this one. Or go up to Weaverville on the 4th of July. It looks like they are still firing anvils at their celebration.

Pres Longley, the Bard of Butte

I have a new project that I’ve been working on for the past month or so, and I am hoping it will be a book soon. I am helping to edit a book of poems by Pres Longley, the poet of Helltown, the Bard of Butte, friend of John Bidwell, resident of Butte Creek Canyon, a miner poet.

Alexander Preston Longley came to California with his brother in 1852 after spending two years fighting Comanches with the Texas Rangers. He prospected here and there in Northern California, finally settling in 1866 at Boneyard Flat near Butte Creek. For sixty years he wrote poems about life in California: verse about his miner friends, tributes to pretty girls, eulogies of dearly departed pets, patriotic poems, humorous pieces, comments on the passing scene.

I think you will like getting to know Pres Longley and reading his verse. Here is a small sample:

You may wrangle and rave of your Marysville girls,

     Of the girls of the Capital City,

Of the ‘Frisco girls, with their fads and their curls,

     But the Butte Creek girls are most pretty;

Their smiles are far dearer to me than the gold

     That the millionaire hides in his coffers,

And I hope, ‘ere the days of this leap year are told,

     Some dear one will make me an offer.

I’m Back!

Sorry I dropped the ball here at the Bidwell blog. I’m ready to get back to blogging, although I’m not making any big promises. But I should be showing up occasionally with some tidbits about John Bidwell and his world.

An announcement! Next Sunday, January 27th, is the date for the annual meeting of the Bidwell Mansion Society at the Visitor’s Center at Bidwell Mansion SHP. You don’t have to be a member to attend, although we welcome new members.

There will be a reception for members at 5:30 p.m. followed by a meeting at 6:00. New board members will be introduced, departing ones will be extolled, and the revised by-laws will be presented for a vote of approval. Then on to the speaker–

The guest speaker is Valerie Sherer Mathes, professor of history at City College of San Francisco. A specialist in American women’s history and Native American history, she is the author of Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy, coauthor (with Richard Lowitt) of The Standing Bear Controversy: Prelude to Indian Reform, and editor of The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson.

Her newest book is Divinely Guided: The California Work of the Women’s National Indian Association, published in 2012 by Texas Tech University Press.  The WNIA was a favorite cause of Annie Bidwell, and the book contains chapters on Annie’s work with the Mechoopda Indians and the WNIA’s famous Indian boarding school in Greenville, Plumas County.

See you there!

“By a Little Exertion”

After his experience at the disastrous 1860 Democratic National Convention—the one that split the party in two—John Bidwell came home to California and attended the state convention that would nominate a candidate for governor. He wanted the job. In 1867, writing to Annie about his life and political career, he said:

I was so sustained by the people of California that I could have been elected to almost any office, as I believe — In 1861 I could by a little exertion have been nominated for governor — came very near it without making any exertion.

So why did he not exert himself?

Bidwell lived in the day when, ideally, the political  job sought the man, rather than the man seeking the job.  He expected the party to seek him out as the best candidate, and support him. He didn’t consider it proper that he should put himself forward. Bt not exerting himself, he eventually (after fourteen ballots) lost the nomination to John C. Conness.

Note that this is the version that he told Annie. Annie, with her high ideals, wanted him to be the man that others would seek, rather than the politician who went looking for a public office to fill. So he is telling Annie what he thinks she wants to hear.

He also doesn’t mention that he wouldn’t have won the governorship anyway. This was after the Democratic Party tore itself in two. He was at the Union Democrat convention–the convention of Democrats loyal to the Union. What the pro-South Democrats were doing I’m not sure, but they didn’t support Conness or the Republican candidate. With the Democratic vote divided, Republican Leland Standford, became governor of California. And the next time around, Bidwell would be a Republican too.

Bidwell on the 1860 Democratic Convention

In 1891, John Bidwell dictated a memoir in which, among many other things, he recalled his career in politics. Here is what he had to say about his role at the 1860 National Democratic Convention:

When I was sent as a delegate to the Charleston convention in ’60 . . . and saw that the south meant disunion, I could not agree with them. I differed with all the other delegates from California and Oregon, Senator Gwin was one of them, and Senator M.S. Latham was another, and while he was from Ohio, he was under the influence of the southern democracy. . . . I returned to Washington, and the convention made no nomination.

Afterward one wing held its convention and nominated Breckenridge, and the other wing nominated Douglas. Of course, I was with Douglas. After I got back to Washington, on my way home to California, Stephen A. Douglas, before he was nominated for president, sent for me. He wanted to see the man that had dared to differ with Gwin and the rest of them from California. They called me the black sheep and everything else, but that did not hurt me.

When I got home to California, Gwin and Frank Washington called upon me. The latter was the finest political writer on the coast. He was the leader of the southern democracy here. They stayed with me and talked almost until midnight, to try and induce me to vote for Breckenridge. I treated them very politely, took them in my carriage to the county seat, and bid them goodbye. I never could be persuaded to yield to the disunion element that was growing up at the time.

Bidwell Goes for the Governorship, Part I

John Bidwell would have told anyone who asked him that all he ever wanted to be was a farmer, and a farmer he was, albeit on a grand scale. But he had political ambitions too. Not like William C. Gwin, who came to California specifically to become a U.S. senator and succeeded in his ambition, but in the sense that he wanted to help California progress and he wanted to rise to the top. He was intelligent, energetic, and fair-minded–he would have made a great governor.  Unfortunately he never made it to the pinnacle of state government.

His first try came in 1861. He had been, throughout the 1850′s, a Democrat. He helped organize the Democratic Party in California. The Democrats dominated politics for most of the decade.  In 1860 Bidwell went to the national Democratic Convention in Charleston, South Carolina as one of eight delegates from California.

It was at this point that the Democrats went from being the predominate force in American politics to a party riven by sectionalism. Bidwell was a “Douglas” Democrat, backing Senator Stephen A. Douglas for the nomination. But the other seven California delegates, led by Senator William Gwin, were part of the pro-Southern and pro-slavery faction of the party. Although Douglas had been the front-runner leading up to the convention, the Southern wing of the party blocked his nomination.  Ballot after ballot was taken, no candidate was nominated, and the convention and the party fell to pieces.

Bidwell gave his proxy for Douglas to a friend and went back to California. The warring Democrats held two separate conventions nominating rival candidates, Douglas and Breckinridge, and thus insured the election of the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln.

Back in California Bidwell’s name was put forward for governor at the 1861 convention of Union Democrats. Four other men vied for the nomination and in the end it went to John C. Conness.  Just as the Democrats were divided on the national level, so were they split in the state, and they could not win. Leland Stanford became California’s first Republican governor.

It was Bidwell’s last hurrah as a Democrat. A staunch Union man, he was disgusted with the Democrats who supported secession. He and other Democrats who stood for the Union merged with the Republicans to form what was then called the Union Party, but would eventually simply be the Republican Party.

The Governor’s Mansion

Yesterday Jim and I visited Governor’s Mansion State Historic Park in Sacramento, another one of the state parks that was slated for closure last year.  Thankfully, that unfortunate chapter in state parks history is behind us, for the time being at least, and we can go on enjoying the marvelous variety of natural and cultural sites that belong to the people of California. 

The Governor’s Mansion is a wonderful example of Victorian Gothic architecture. Our guide called it second-generation Italianate. Bidwell Mansion is good example of first-generation California Italianate architecture (built 10 years before the Governor’s Mansion), and it is interesting to note the similarities and differences. Both are three story buildings with a basement and a tower. Both have the same kind of decorative wooden brackets around the eaves. Both of them have a similar layout: public rooms on the first floor, bedrooms and servants quarters on the second floor, ballroom on the third floor.  (We didn’t get to see the ballroom–it’s under renovation.)

Both were up-to-date buildings in their day, with running water and flush toilets and all the latest in innovative interior design.

Bidwell Mansion is a broader, more expansive building, with a stucco exterior; the Governor’s Mansion is narrower and seems taller, and is all built of wood, with lots more “gingerbread” decoration. My guess is that, back in the day, Bidwell Mansion was cooler in the summertime, and if you had the choice of which one to live in, Bidwell Mansion would be more comfortable overall.

The Governor’s Mansion was built in 1877 by wealthy merchant Albert Gallatin. In 1903 it was sold by its second owners, the Steffens family, to the state to be used as an executive residence. Twelve governors from George Pardee to Ronald Reagan lived here, but the Reagans moved out after only four months. Here’s how an article in the Sacramento Bee described their reaction:

Here is how political journalist Lou Cannon described the story about the house in his 2003 book, “Governor Reagan, his rise to power:”
“Trading Pacific Palisades was bad enough. Living in a relic that was more suitable as a museum (which it is today) was unthinkable. Nancy Reagan rebelled. She realized that the mansion, which had ropes in the bedrooms instead of fire escapes, was a ‘firetrap.’ A rusted screen that wouldn’t budge covered the window of her son’s second-story bedroom. In case of fire, her son was supposed to smash the screen by running at it with a bureau drawer and then climb onto the roof. Nancy Reagan had no difficulty in persuading her husband to move out of the mansion.
“The Reagans, at their own expense, leased a two-story twelve-bedroom Tudor house in  an exclusive section of eastern Sacramento.”

“Firetrap” was a good excuse, but no doubt Nancy Reagan had other reasons. Antiquated bathroom fixtures, small bedrooms, inadequate space for entertaining, a location right on a busy street—it’s a great place to visit but she didn’t want to live there.