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Gold Rush Gambler - Yuba County's John Rose (July-August 1990) (8 pages)
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Page: of 8
PAGE 18 THECALIFORNIANS JULY/AUGUST1990
Gold Rush Gambler:
Yuba County’s John Rose
If it doesn’t work, try something else; tomorrow is another day;
the sky is the limit; rags to riches
— not the past but the future has counted in the United States.
— Bernard De Voto, The Easy Chair
By Diane
Spencer-Pritchard
hen customers play a Reno crap
Wik they hope to win — but are
not surprised to lose. In the great
crapshoot of life, the results are more or less
similar. And humanity being what it is,
winners in the game of life are generally admired and courted, while losers get short
shrift. But the world often sees something
endearing in the less fortunate — witness
the timelessness of Chaplin’s Little Tramp,
or the enduring popularity of Lola Montez.
Additionally, there is frequently much to
be learned from the lives of these people.
The study of one such unfortunate, John
Rose, incisively illustrates the upheaval
Californios often faced during California’s
difficult transition from quiet Mexican territory to state of the union.
Rose’s name appears frequently in the
records of Hispanic Califomia and early
Yuba County history, including John Sutter’s diary, land and court records of Yuba
County, and Marysville newspapers of the
time. Although he was clearly a prominent
county citizen during the early years of the
gold rush, the fact that references to him
are intriguingly nil after 1855 raises the
question of what happened. Luckily, unlike
many historical figurés, Rose left a substantial trail in repositories across the state;
indeed, material relating to his life even
popped up in several esoteric locations, including a garage sale in Yuba City. When
at last the extensive materials were studied,
they revealed not only the excitement of
Rose’s early years in California, but the
thoroughly splendid denouement of his
greatest venture as well.
John Rose was born in Leith, Scotland,
on 19 March 1817, the oldest of several
children. In 1827 Rose’s father died and
John was forced to abandon his formal education to help care for his younger brothers and sisters. At the age of 12, however,
Rose abandoned his position as family babysitter and was apprenticed toa ship’s carpenter in the shipyards of Clyde, Scotland.
He served for 7!/2 years, learning the trade
that was to be his bread and butter throughout much of his life. During these years, too,
he apparently acquired something more in
the way of education, informal though it
may have been, for his later letters show
him to be both intelligent and articulate.
In July 1837 Rose signed on as ship’s carpenter aboard a hide and tallow vessel
bound from Liverpool to the Pacific Coast,
and in October arrived in the Alta California port of Yerba Buena. He obviously liked
what he saw, for he never returned to England.
This began a period of time in which Rose
lived a nomadic bachelor existence. In
1838 he shipped out on a year-long voyage
to Peru and Chile, and did not resurface in
the records again until 1843, when he left