2023 Sacramento Archives Crawl Poster!

So, look what just dropped. From the ace graphic designer, the 2023 Sacramento Archives Crawl poster is live! Our 13th year and the beautiful posterage keeps coming...

The Farm to Fork Brewers Before There Was a Thing Called Farm to Fork

Before the very recent wave of Farm to Fork madness, Davis's Sudwerk - since 1989 - has been a Farm to Fork engine, producing some of the most exquisite German-style lagers in the world. They have also become a terrific supporter of the Sacramento Archives Crawl. Thanks to our friends in Davis, behold what you can win by simply crawling into Central Library on October 7, 2023, between 10 am and 4 pm and entering what has become one of the best stocked raffles going: A Sudwerk t-shirt, hat, $30 gift certificate, 2 sweet koozies, and a 4-pack of Sudwerk's 2023 California State Fair Silver medal-winning Overgrowth West Coast Double India Pale Ale (ID for proof of age required for all beer-related winners).

 

We're grateful for Sudwerk's (and all of our other sponsors') commitment to the promotion of archival research, education, history, and community in the Capital Region. No myth or folklore here. Just the genuine legend...Sudwerk:

 

The Legend of North Sacramento's Dueling Tree

The duel was a scourge in nineteenth-century California. Perhaps it had something to do with the number of disputed gold claims throughout the state and the passions attached; perhaps it was the paucity of, and competition for, the hand of a women as, according to the 1850 Census, 93 percent of California's population was male while the remaining 7 percent was female. There's also the factor of cultural importation. Historian William Secrest attributes the prevalence of dueling in California to the large number of Southerners who jumped into the Gold Rush. Whatever the factor, between 1850 and 1860, no other state could match the number of fatal duels to have taken place in California, in spite of the fact that the code duello had been expressly outlawed in the state's Constitution.

That brings us to the legend of the dueling tree, which was purported to be a preferred spot for dueling in Sacramento during the 1850s. Set in the small (now extinct) village of Oak Grove, near present-day North Sacramento, was the so-called dueling tree, a towering valley oak that oversaw one of California's most notorious duels.

It was August 2, 1852, and the parties were California State Senator James W. Denver and Alta newspaper editor Edward Gilbert. As the story goes, Gilbert wrote satirical marks about Denver in a column, Denver didn't like it and the result was a duel.

The two met at the oak and Denver being the challenged party chose rifles. Stepping through the morning dew, they walked 40 paces and fired. Nothing happened. Then the next shot came. Denver was untouched and Gilbert died almost instantly. In the short term, Gilbert was buried in San Francisco. In the long term, Denver went on to be the Governor of Kansas, the namesake for a city in Colorado, and live a pretty comfortable life. But what about the tree?

This 1961 aerial image from the UCSB Framefinder is marked to show 

the approximate area of the dueling tree at 2121 Canterbury Road.

Same view of the general location of the dueling tree, but in 1937.

According to an article in the August 30, 1964, Sacramento Bee, the tree endured and was purportedly located in the backyard of Mrs. Myrtle Johnson at 2121 Canterbury Road, in the Woodlake neighborhood of North Sacramento. But is/was that the actual tree? Was there even a tree or was it a grove of trees? While we can only be sure that we can't know for sure, the rest is lost to the fogs of time.

Learn of legends like this and so much more at the 2023 Sacramento Archives Crawl, set to take place on October 7, 2023, from 10 am to 4 pm at the Center for Sacramento History, the Sacramento Public Library, the California State Archives, and the California History Section of the California State Library.

The Count and the Rancher's Daughter

Like so much of Joan Didion's non-fiction, it reads like the juiciest of lore, but it's real and very accurate. In "Notes of a Native Daughter" (found in Slouching Toward Bethlehem), the Sacramento born and bred Didion, shares the storybook tale of a Sacramento rancher's daughter who meets a European prince on a Grand Tour of the European continent. As she writes on page 186: 

I want to tell you a Sacramento story. A few miles out of town is a place, six or seven thousand acres, which belonged in the beginning to a rancher with one daughter. That daughter went abroad and married a title, and when she brought the title home to live on the ranch, her father built them a vast house - music rooms, conservatories, a ballroom. They needed a ballroom because they entertained: people from abroad, people from San Franisco, house parties that lasted weeks and involved special trains. They are long dead, of course, but their only son, aging and unmarried, still lives on the place. He does not live in the house, for the house is no longer there. Over the years it burned, room by room, wing by wing. Only the chimneys of the great house are still standing, and its heir lives in their shadow, lives by himself on the charred site, in a house trailer.

That is a story my generation knows; I doubt that the next will know it, the children of the aerospace engineers...

So, what's the real-life basis for Didion's story? The Sacramento Bee, Thompson and West's 1880 History of Sacramento County, the U.S. Census (via the library's subscription to Ancestry), and various secondary sources tell us that our rancher's daughter is Alice McCauley, daughter of Virginia-born and Confederate sympathizer John F. McCauley. The "title" was Italian-born Count Julio (also referred to as Guilio) Valensin. Alice and Julio were married in Italy in the early 1870s, but eventually came back to the Sacramento Valley. The geographic location of where the ranch would have been, is more than "a few miles out of town," 21-miles southeast of Sacramento proper to be exact, just south of the Consumnes River and east of Galt near the extinct villages of Arno and Hicksville.

Alice and Julio did, indeed, live a lavish lifestyle, full of big houses and massive parties, attended by the Hearsts and various other wealthy families of Gilded Age California. It's also said (actually the Sacramento Bee said it) that Julio won a duel with another suitor for the affections of Alice. On the way less romantic side, the Bee also tells us that Alice was charged with treason for singing "Dixie" in 1861 in a San Francisco hotel, just after the start of the American Civil War. The charges were dropped after the family fled to Europe to stump for the southern cause.

Sacramento County Map, J.C. Boyd, 1903

Julio died young at the age of 46 from a burst appendix, but Alice lived to see two world wars, the Great Depression, the birth of the automobile and advent of human flight, dying in 1949 at the age of 101. A year later, her grand mansion was felled by fire. The lone son of Alice and Julio was Pio Valensin, who was born in Italy and the sole heir to Alice's ranch. When Didion wrote about the Valensins, Pio was still the owner of a roughly 4,500-acre spread of prime ranch land and hardly destitute to where he had to live in a house trailer.

Valensin Ranch, circa 1875. Thompson and West.

In the mid-1990s, the Nature Conservancy paid the descendants of the Valensins $12 million for the ranch, converting it into a massive nature preserve. 

Wicker Baskets at Cape Horn. Fact or Fiction? Or Both?

As we near the 2023 Sacramento Archives Crawl and our deep dive into the myth, folklore and legend of history, one tale to consider is the use of wicker baskets by Chinese laborers in the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad at a steep mountainside just east of Colfax, California, called Cape Horn. According to various popular histories - many dispensed in the late 1920s by PR and tourism offices of the Southern Pacific Railroad - workers were lowered in either wicker baskets or bosun's chairs to plant explosives along the massive promontory. The malleability of history and historiography leaves us in a spot where while it seems unlikely that such a practice ever took place at Cape Horn, there is indeed documentation, according to Stanford historian Gordon Chang, of something akin to it taking place in other portions of the Sierra Nevada during rail construction, as stated in his 2019 Ghosts of Gold Mountain (pages 86-92): 

The most thrilling scene that came under my observation was in the Sierra Nevada on the Central Pacific. Here the road in built on the side of a precipice 2,400 feet above the base, and the slope is so steep that the [Chinese workers] who did the work were let down in baskets, and in this position drilled holes and charged them in the side of the mountains. (Correspondent for the Pittsfield Eagle, 1868)

From the Sacramento Room's Appleton Family Papers, MC 7

The above photograph of Cape Horn, taken in 1900, and from the Sacramento Public Library's Appleton Family Papers (MC 7), shows us that regardless of whether or not baskets and/or chairs were employed, the Railroad Chinese created a master work of railroad construction. What's more, dangerous, unforgiving, and undervalued at the time, their toil and skill would go on to change the course of American history.  

Sacramento Archives Crawl 2023: Myth, Folklore, & Legend

It's nearly spring and generally the time when we reveal the theme of the 2023 Sacramento Archives Crawl. This year, the crawl will tackle myth, folklore, and legend and their lifespan within the context of the Sacramento Region's history. Whether or not you believe in a myth, folklore, or legend, it does exist in some form to someone and for a reason. Is there a single human heart buried in the Old City Cemetery next to the gravesite of its owner's lost love? Is there a lady in red that roams the stairwell and stacks of the 1918 main free public library at 8th and I? Were the elms that lined the Victory Highway, as it made its way through the village of Freeport, actually grown from seeds taken from the World War I battlefields of France and Belgium? While this obviously just scratches the surface, it might be helpful to ask yourself why myth, folklore, and legend even exist. Is it a primal drive to bring order to a disordered world? Perhaps the desired end to a story, told in such a way that lifts the human spirit? Join us on Saturday, October 7, 2023, from 10 am to 4 pm as a bevy of archival repositories, historical societies, and other cultural heritage groups present examples of myth, folklore, legend and tackle these compelling questions and so much more.

The Wrap-Up...

Dear Crawlers: A big thanks to all of you - the hundreds of you - who visited your archival and cultural heritage professionals throughout the day on October 1. Your passion, curiosity, and smiles were elevating and an ever reminder of how special the Capital Region history community is. 

So, is it too early to talk about next year? If you have any ideas on themes you'd like us to consider, feel free to write something in the comments section below. Next year's Sacramento Archives Crawl will be held on October 7, 2023, from 10 am to 4 pm. Until then, think happy thoughts of shuttlebuses, drawings, Mylar, and friendly archivists.

     From the Sacramento Public Library Photographic Slide Collection