Collection: Books and Periodicals > Nevada County Historical Society Bulletins

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Title: Volume 062-1 - January 2008 Collection Type: Books and Periodicals Collection Name: Nevada County Historical Society Bulletins # of Pages: 4 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

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Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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NCHS Bulletin January 2008 A son, Rufus, was born in Mississippi in 1830, graduated from Oakland College, and was the editor of the Grass Valley National for many years. Over the next decade, Rufus became a Justice of the Peace, County Clerk, president of the Nevada and Grass Valley Turnpike Company, a captain in the local militia of the Nevada Rifles, secretary of the Alta Mining Company, and a Trustee of the Episcopal Church of Grass Valley. He joined the Confederate Army in early 1861, and returned to Grass Valley in 1868, where he edited the Union and National newspapers. In 1889 he owned the Grass Valley Evening Telegraph with William Prisk.)® The other Southerner mentioned by Morse was Col. William English, a Georgia planter who brought an estimated 60 to 100 slaves to work in the Kentucky Ridge mine above Rough and Ready in 1851. (English had a contract to build a quartz mill in which to process the ore, but the mill proved unsuccessful and litigation resulted.) Col. English was killed accidentally on August 27, 1852, when a gun in his hand discharged into his body after he was thrown from his horse. English’s wife “reportedly set the slaves free and most of them drifted to Grass Valley and Nevada City.”® Edmund Kinyon, in his book, The Northern Mines, reported that the Colonel’s heirs threatened them with return to slavery if they did not buy their freedom. Kinyon also states that the slaves “gradually scattered, here and there, the majority, it would appear, to Grass Valley and its suburb, Boston Ravine.”"” In those early decades, Boston Ravine was a typical gold rush mining community peopled with hundreds of Peruvians, Sonorans, Californios, native-born Anglos, Irishmen, Frenchmen, Australians and a few Blacks. (The 1850 census for Grass Valley lists six Blacks; and 62 in the 1860 census!! who congregated in Boston Ravine and at Hayti Hill.) We surmise the name was applied to this area because Isidor, ostensibly the first Black there and a former slave from Haiti, as well as other freed slaves from the Shoemaker family and Col. English colony soon settled there because of their common ethnicity. As in all gold rush camps, Boston Ravine had its quota of Spanish seforitas, gambling dens and saloons, where general mayhem prevailed. Morse remembered the Washington Hotel, then “the largest ever built in Boson Ravine,” which was kept by one named Cassin and Pat Mooney. The latter was living with a Spanish woman nominally considered his wife and who spoke no English. Mooney was “one of the most desperate men that was ever in Grass Valley. He was covered with scars received in former fights.” It was also said that he had been a bandit in Mexico before coming to California. “He and his partner, after keeping the hotel together for some years, finally quarreled,” and he set fire to the building, burning it to the ground, and with it his partner’s wife, Mary Cassin, a beautiful woman, and her baby. Cassin himself escaped. There was no positive proof of Mooney’s guilt, although suspicion pointed strongly to him. He had been seen by men working at the Empire Mill to emerge from the house in the moonlight, before the fire started. He was arrested and tried for arson, but was acquitted and soon after he left town.’ Considering the lawless times and the rough characters that the discovery of gold had attracted to California from all parts of the world, “there was very little serious trouble in Grass Valley. Desperadoes were almost unknown,” Morse related, but there were frequent fistfights, especially between the men of Boston Ravine and the Irish colony that settled down around Allison Ranch, “but shooting scrapes were rare and no one ever attempted to ‘shoot up the place.’ There were, of course, the usual number of saloons, gambling dens, and dance halls full of Spanish women, in full blast. Among those who came here in the early days were a good many ex-convicts, ticket-of-leave men from Australia; ‘Sidney Ducks,’ as they were called.'® The majority of these were hardened characters, but some who had probably been transported for the lesser offenses turned out to be very decent fellows.”"* Historian Ralph Mann, who analyzed the structure of society in Grass Valley and Nevada City from 1849 to 1870, blamed “greed, boredom, and anticipated license which gave rise to a society outside accepted mores.”'* Morse reported that some of the Sidney Ducks lived decent lives, “but more frequented certain ‘lewd dens’ in Grass Valley, looking for criminal opportunities. If they had the reputation of being ‘very hardened’ characters, the Spanish were believed worse. ... Chileans, Sonorans and Californios, indiscriminately lan called Spanish, were more directly identified with the per-™\ ceived foreign threat to the American-ness of the camps than any other group. . . . According to the American-born, vice as’ ' well as violence was the near-exclusive province of the ‘Span-~. . ish.”” When Morse reported that upon his arrival only one English-speaking woman lived in Grass Valley, he meant only one respectable woman, “‘Spanish woman’ or ‘sefiorita’ almost invariably denoted a prostitute, and ‘Spanish house,’ regardless of the nationality of owner or inmates, referred to the lowest dives or dance halls. ... Most Hispanic men mined or teamed, but in the popular image they pimped and rolled drunks in the bordellos.”"® Commenting upon the numbers of Blacks living in Boston Ravine and that “classic suburb” of Grass Valley known as Hayti Hill, William H. Sears, editor of the Nevada Daily Gazette, described the area in 1865 as “a small edition of New York’s Five Points—a sort of moral sink-hole, where brutal blacks and degraded whites mingle together in one common mass of reeking corruption.”"” It was a sight the Reverend Cummings would have been aghast to behold. We have also found another area in Grass Valley where some Blacks resided, called Nigger Hill, which is located at the top of Washington Street. The Nevada Daily Gazette of December 28, 1865, reported that “a house occupied by a colored woman on Washington Street... caught fire [due to a] stove pipe coming apart at one of the joints and firing the ceiling.”'® Also, the 1871 Grass Valley Assessment roll lists a(™ “Crants, Charles, miner, residence Nigger Hill.”'® The prop-