How Much of this Book is Real?

Because this novel is a blend of fact and fiction, some readers may like to know which events depicted within its pages really happened and which didn’t. Some of you also may be interested to know which characters are based on real people and which are fictitious.

To begin with, Will Barlow is a fictional character. Thousands of boys his age made the cross-country trip to California. Consider him a composite character who symbolizes that youthful energy, faith, hope and courage that allowed men and women of all ages to make similar journeys into unknown territory all to pursue their dreams and the promise of love and happiness.

Rebecca Baldwin, as well as her mother and father, are also fictional characters. But they, too, represent numerous wealthy families that journeyed to California for reasons such as the judgeship that Thaddeus Baldwin is traveling to fill.

The Wades – Henry, Mary and their three children – were real people, although we don’t know a great deal about them and can guess only what they were like based on comments by William Lewis Manly. Manly, who was also a real character, commented in his 1894 book, “Death Valley in ’49,” that the family was standoffish and didn’t associate much with the other parties on the trail. Using Manly’s skeletal descriptions of the Wades, I have bestowed on them a number of characteristics – some flattering, others not – for which there is no basis in fact other than those few comments by Manly. For little more than reasons of sheer convenience, I also eliminated a fourth child that history says they had. And for each and every one of these literary decisions, I apologize to Mary and Henry – wherever they may be.

Returning for a moment to William Lewis Manly, not only was he a real character but he really did travel all around the country with John Rogers, a big mountain man from Tennessee. Together they tried to find their old friends, the Bennetts, who were also a real family with two children – George, Melissa and the baby, Martha. Lewis Manly and John Rogers did indeed finally locate Asabel and Sally in the little camp at Hobble Springs, and it was entirely by accident as portrayed in this book. The sheer coincidence of this event makes one wonder what might have been the fate of the Death Valley pioneers if Manly hadn’t been there to rescue them. The members of the Arcane family also were real and they were good friends of the Bennetts in real life.

Most of the description of these parties’ travels along the Platte River and through the Nevada desert into Death Valley is based upon actual recorded incidents, with the exception of major scenes and actions involving fictionalized characters, or those that offer conjecture about real characters. When the real Lewis Manly and John Rogers went for help, for example, we can only surmise a great deal of what happened to those who stayed and waited for their return. This is because the only reliable record we have of the Death Valley episode is Manly’s own. Of the other characters in the novel who remain behind in the valley, all are based on real people. The Earharts were real, as was Capt. Culverwell, who died on the floor of Death Valley trying to follow the Wades’ trail on foot. The two Germans, Nusbaumer and Hadapp, and the Alsatian named Anton Slogal also were real people, as were the four teamsters who worked for the Bennett and Arcane families. And Mr. Gould, the man who for a time traveled with Fish and Culverwell, also was a real person.

The Jayhawkers were a real group of single men traveling together for purposes of expediency, but they probably weren’t as nasty a bunch as portrayed here. Fact is, the whole group of them kept in contact with each other for many years following their exploits, and they even got together and swapped memories with Lewis Manly one year.

There was a real Benjamin Isham from New York and a real Mr. Fish, and they did play music together at campfire gatherings in the desert. They also both perished in the desert, just west of Death Valley. That is about all we know of these two men.

There was a real Capt. Hunt and he really did take a huge company of wagons south from Hobble Creek until more than half of the parties decided to take a trail west, following a map that was shown to them by a man called Smith and supposedly drawn by a mountaineer named Williams. We don’t know much more about Hunt after this, so his involvement with Will, Lewis and John Rogers after the trip south is entirely fictional.

A number of parties took the Smith detour, including the Bennett and Arcane families, the Jayhawkers, Earharts and others. There was a real Rev. Brier, and he has been described by Manly as a self-serving preacher whose wife did most of the work in camp. He actually was seen by Manly lecturing his two sons on education in the middle of Furnace Creek Canyon, just east of Death Valley. The Brier family did follow the Jayhawkers out of Death Valley, and the reverend actually did go on to Los Angeles and ran a boarding house and vineyard for a while, doing quite well for himself.

An odd postscript to the experiences of the Bennett-Arcane parties involves model family man Asabel Bennett, who, after their ordeal, moved to the San Francisco area with his wife Sally and children. There they had a fourth child, and his wife died shortly after. We may never know if his experiences in Death Valley had left a mark on Bennett, but after his wife’s death, he gave away the baby girl and left his three other children, now teenagers, to fend for themselves while he went to Cedar City, Utah, to run a general store. When that failed, he returned to southern California and, in 1861, journeyed with a man named Charles Alvord back to Death Valley, where rumors of a gold find were fueling interest by prospectors. On a brief hike by himself, Alvord collected some rocks and had them assayed back in Los Angeles. To his surprise, they were found to have a high content of gold.

Bennett and Alvord returned to Death Valley a second time, but Alvord was unable to locate the place where he had found the rocks. Certain that Alvord was lying, Bennett and three or four other men left him to perish on the saline flats of the Amargosa Sink.

Meanwhile, Lewis Manly ran into Bennett in Los Angeles. When he heard what had happened, he convinced Bennett to return with him to Death Valley and rescue the abandoned man. Along with a man named Caesar Twitchell, Manly and Bennett returned to Death Valley and found Alvord very much alive, though growing short of supplies. Bennett and Twitchell agreed to return to Los Angeles for food and gear, leaving Manly and Alvord in Death Valley. Once again, Bennett never returned, leaving the two to struggle back to Los Angeles again, as Manly had done a dozen years before. Manly and Bennett never met again.

As an interesting side note, Manly wrote in his book that the Wades had perished in Death Valley, but he was wrong, a fact he discovered only when a relative of the Wades wrote a letter to the San Jose Pioneer after publication of the Manly text in 1894. In that letter, Mrs. Edward Burrell not only corrected Manly’s statement, but went on to say that 36 members of the Wade family – sons, daughters, grandsons and grand-daughters – were all alive and well and, coincidentally, living within 20 miles of Manly’s own home near San Jose.

Francisco Ramirez really was the young Mexican editor of the Los Angeles Star, a bi-lingual newspaper, but the accounts of his character and his actions in this book are purely fictional. His brother in law, Sam Morgan is entirely fictitious.

Lorenzo Sawyer was a real attorney in Nevada City. He arrived in California in 1850 at the age of 30, started a law practice that year and became an avid proponent of civil rights for Chinese laborers in California’s mining towns. Sawyer later became a judge on the California Supreme Court, and finally a circuit judge for the Ninth Circuit.

Soon Hing and some of the other Chinese miners mentioned in this book were actual people, many of them clients of Lorenzo Sawyer at one time or another. The timing of this novel, however, places them all together at one time, which is purely fictional.

Last, there was no “Safe House” outside Nevada City, at least not so far as I am aware. But places like this fictional asylum were, unfortunately, fairly common. Real problems and abuses involving asylums in this country lasted well into the late 1800s, when stricter controls and oversight by state agencies at last began to address the prevalence of false commitment of patients who were not really mentally ill.

Bibliography

Although the majority of the events in this book are fictional, a great deal of what goes on was based on fact. Therefore, I made use of numerous historical resources in an attempt to help readers get a better “feel” for the late 1840s and early 1850s in the American West. Aside from the books and other sources listed below, much of the information I used in writing this book has been resting in my head for close to 30 years. This corresponds closely to the first time I visited Death Valley, Calif., and fell in love with the stark scenery, the extreme weather and the many mysteries – solved and unsolved – that surround its colorful history.

Following are the texts I used most extensively for my research.

Bakken, Gordon Morris
“American Mining Law and the Environment: The Western Experience”
Western Legal History ; Journal of the Ninth Judicial Circuit Historical Society
Vol 1, No. 2, Summer/Fall 1988, pp. 211-236

Bancroft, Hubert Howe
“The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft”
The History Company, Publishers
San Francisco, Calif., 1888, Volume 23

Berkebile, Don H.
“Horse-Drawn Commercial Vehicles”
Dover Publications, Inc.
Toronto, Canada, 1989

Henry Bigler, Journal of
Journal History of 1849, Nov. 18
Utah State Historical Society

Blakeslee, Mrs. E.C., Leslie, Miss Emma, and Hughes, Dr. S.H.
“The Compendium of Cookery and Reliable Recipes”
The Merchants’ Specialty Co., Publishers
Chicago, Ill., 1890

Brier, Rev. John Wells
“The Argonauts of Death Valley”
Grizzly Bear Magazine, Vol IX, No. 2 (June 1911)

Burrell, Mrs. Edward
Letter in San Jose Pioneer
December 15, 1894

Cronkhite, Daniel
“Death Valley’s Victims”
Sagebrush Press, 1977

Dain, Norman
“Concepts of Insanity in the U.S., 1789-1865”
Rutgers University Press
New Brunswick, N.J.

Dane, G. Ezra, in collaboration with Beatrice J. Dane
“Ghost Town”
Alfred A. Knopf, Publishers
New York, N.Y., 1941

Deutsch, Albert
“The Mentally Ill in America –
A History of Their Care and Treatment From Colonial Times”
Doubleday, Doran & Company
Garden City, N.Y., 1937

Florin, Lambert
“A Guide to Western Ghost Towns”
Superior Publishing Company
Seattle, Wash., 1967

Fogelson, Robert M.
“The Fragmented Metropolis – Los Angeles, 1850-1930”
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Mass., 1967

Goetzman, William H.
“Army Exploration in the American West, 1803-1863”
Yale University Press
New Haven, Conn., 1959

Grob, Gerald N.
“Mental Institutions in America – Social Policy to 1875”
The Free Press,
New York, N.Y.

Hunt, Rockwell D.
“California Ghost Towns Live Again”
California History Foundation
Stockton, Calif., 1948

Levy, JoAnn
“They Saw the Elephant; Women in the California Gold Rush”
Archon Books,
Hamden, Conn., 1990

Long, Margaret
“Shadow of the Arrow”
Caxton Printers,
Caldwell, Idaho 1950

Manly, William Lewis
“Death Valley in ’49” (first edition)
Pacific Tree and Vine Co.
San Jose, Calif., 1894

Addison Pratt, Journal of
Journal History of 1849, October 9
Utah State Historical Society

Przbyszewski, Linda C.A.
“Judge Lorenzo Sawyer and the Chinese: Civil Rights Decisions in the Ninth Circuit”
Western Legal History; Journal of the Ninth Judicial Circuit Historical Society
Vol 1, No. 1, Winter/Spring 1988, pp. 23-56

Putnam, George
“Death Valley and its Country” (first edition)
Duell, Sloan and Pierce, Publishers
New York, N.Y.,1946

Quaife, Milo Milton (Editor)
“Pictures of Gold Rush California” (Historical Reprint)
R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co.
Chicago, Ill., 1949

Reid, John Phillip
“Some Lessons of Western Legal History”
Western Legal History; Journal of the Ninth Judicial Circuit Historical Society
Vol 1, No. 1, Winter/Spring 1988, pp. 3-21

Rios-Bustamante and Castillo, Pedro
“An Illustrated History of Mexican Los Angeles, 1781-1985”
Chicano Studies Research Center
University of California, 1985

Robinson, Fayette
“California and Its Gold Regions” (Historical Reprint)
Arno Press,
New York, N.Y., 1973

Spears, John R.
“Illustrated Sketches of Death Valley “ (first edition)
Rand, McNally & Company
New York, N.Y., 1892

Street, Franklin
“California in 1850” (Historical Reprint)
Arno Press,
New York, N.Y., 1973

Wells, Evelyn and Peterson, Harry C.
“The '49ers”
Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Garden City, N.Y., 1949

Woods, Daniel B.
“Sixteen Months at the Gold Diggings” (reprint)
Arno Press
New York, N.Y., 1973