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Collection: Directories and Documents > Historical Clippings
Historical Clippings Book (HC-22) (197 pages)
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Page: of 197
@ FORDS AND FERRIES OF EARLY CALIFORNIA
THEODORE S, SOLOMONS
With the great steel and concrete bridges over San Francisco Bay,
with modern structures spanning nearly every stream in the state, people today can scarcely realize the travel difficulties of early Californians
in a country of swift and suddenly swelling rivers and creeks.
To the Spaniard, usually in the saddle, the ford was sufficient. It
mattered little that the trail or road came down upon the river at an
impassable place. Whether he rode or drove an ox team he could skirt
the bank for a mile, or ten miles if necessary, to a broad and shallow
fording place. Time was of little importance. It was a land of
mafiana.
But when, in 1848 and early 1849, the oxen changed to draft horses
and the slow carts changed to swift stages and heavily laden freight
wagons, the ford became a nuisance, uncertain, often hazardous.
Frank Marryat, celebrated English author of Mountains and
Molehills, gives us an example of perilous fording in his thrilling
deseription of driving oxen across the swollen Russian River. William Kelly, in his Stroll Through the Diggings of California, tells of
his mounted party of gold seekers with their three loaded ox teams
struggling successfully through the fords of Yuba only to be attacked
by Indians at a very difficult crossing of the Feather River. The ford
was a dangerous point in the journeys of the early Californian.
The government engineers, in their efforts to map the country and
pick sites for army posts, had many trying experiences with river fords.
General Percifer F. Smith, commanding the armed forces of California,
in company with a distinguished geologist, was halted at the Mokelumne River. The expedition was obliged to countermarch four miles
to high lands; then around about over broken country twenty miles
to the river again—‘‘at no great distance from where we left it,’’ as
General Smith remarks disgustedly.
His chief topographer, Lieutenant Derby, had many misadventures at fords, including ‘‘miring down’’ frequently. In his 1850
explorations, during the season of high water in the Kings-Kern plains,
Derby found himself unable to cross the valley. Kings River ordinarily found its way to Tulare Lake. But now the flood waters as far
down as Buena Vista Lake below Bakersfield were flowing northward
into the San Joaquin River through a slough which Derby refers to as
the Sanjon de San Jose.
104.