Freighters at Cisco on the South Yuba
Photograph by Alfred Hart
There is only so much a man, or woman, even on a horse or mule, can carry. Early in the gold rush most gold was found streamside on the Yuba, Feather and Bear Rivers but as the easy to find gold diminished the miners moved upslope, far from supply centers, to more remote upslope regions to find “the source.” Once in the mountains they realized that gold was most profitably pursued in small groups, or “companies”, and that establishing a nearby camp with provisions was essential.
Supplies reached the mining camps on the backs of mules in pack trains managed by mostly Mexicans called arrieros. Pack trains consisted of 40 to 50 mules each packing freight weighing 200 to 300 pounds a distance of 20 to 30 miles a day depending on terrain and climate. In 1853 there were 31 packing companies operating from Marysville, including 20 owned by Mexicans. At that time there were over 4,000 mules and 400 wagons based in Marysville.
Arrieros
Lithograph by Carl Carlos Nebel (1836)
An atajo was a caravan of pack mules and a jornado was a day’s march. In a conversation with Gus Poggi, who packed freight to the mines north of Downieville in the 1930s, he said they still used the aparajo, a straw or hair-stuffed mattress that sits between the cargo and the mule. Some packers preferred the wooden crossbuck.
Among the earliest packers was Jesus Maria Bustillos, a LaPorte-based freight train packer with 125 pack mules, who eventually partnered with John Rossiter, adding another 75 mules to the team. In 1860 Bustillos managed 140 mules and 40 drivers with an average pack train of 25 to 40 mules. Jesus Bustillos died and was buried in LaPorte in 1913 at the age of 76. There was a member of the Bustillos family consistently packing or freighting every year until 1918 when most freight hauling was motorized.
The Bustillos Family
Photographer and date unknown
In 1851 Frank Everts ran a pack train between Marysville and Gibsonville (the north-easternmost settlement in the Yuba River watershed). His pack train traveled the ridge between Slate Creek and Canyon Creek passing through Scales and Mt. Pleasant, then up the Port Wine Ridge to Port Wine and the several small towns on the way to Howland Flat. In the late 1850s Everts, Wilson and Company operated a daily Mountain Express between Marysville and all the mountain settlements of northern Sierra County and southern Plumas County.
The packing trade of Marysville was quite extensive serving Downieville, Eureka North, Morristown, St. Louis, Pine Grove, Poker Flat, Gibsonville, Nelson Point, American Valley, Indian Valley “and all intermediate and surrounding places in the counties of Sierra and Plumas", giving employment to about 2,500 mules, and between 300 and 400 men. Hutchings' California Magazine (1856) reported, “On a single day 1000 pack mules left Marysville while carrying 100 tons of freight, or two steamboat loads.” On April 19, 1862 a correspondent for the Sierra Democrat based in LaPorte, writes, “Considerable freight is now coming into this district on pack mules. The tariff is still five cents per pound from Marysville to LaPorte.”
Mule loads included flour, beans, alcohol, molasses, canned goods, dried apples and medicines. Bill Meek of Camptonville, who packed, freighted and drove a stage in eastern Yuba County and southern Sierra County, wrote in his memoirs: “Many a barrel of good whiskey have I loaded on a mule, many a car load of powder, many tons of iron pipe monitors, organs, pianos, billiard tables, wood stoves, in fact everything that was used in mining camps. Those were the good old days, 16 or 18 hours of labor, everybody happy and nobody idle.”
From Hutchings' California Magazine
Mexican mules were favored over American because they were tougher and stronger. They had been raised and trained in mountainous country, whereas most American mules had been used only for pulling wagons, farming and construction. In 1849 in Independence, Missouri a yoke of oxen cost $40 to $50 while mules cost $50 to $70 each. Mules in California were valued at $50 to $150 and capable of carrying 250 to 300 pounds. There are many stories that illustrate the toughness of Mexican mules, but it was still demanding and dangerous work. In the winter of 1852-53 a pack train was snowed in, north of LaPorte, between Little Grass Valley and Onion Valley, where only 3 of 45 animals survived.
Expressmen specialized in the safe delivery of mail, packages and gold dust. The earliest expressmen were on foot and carried freight in backpacks. Winter travel was far more difficult. Once reaching the snow many packers and expressmen switched to skis or “snowshoes” as they were called then. In the winter of 1857, J. B. Whiting initiated a Dog Express enterprise that worked pretty well for at least four winters. Prior to that he ran a winter “man pack train” called the Feather River Express. The Dog Express ran from the Buckeye Ranch in Yuba County to LaPorte then on to Quincy in Plumas County, a distance of about 30 miles. The team consisted of four dogs harnessed to a sled – the preferred species was a cross between the Alpine spaniel, or “Bernadine”, and the Newfoundland dog. It was a dependable service, carrying from 250 to 500 pounds of freight, “depending on the snow.” When the snow was compact, the trip took about 10 hours. Under ideal conditions they could even accommodate a passenger.
From Hutchings' California Magazine
In 1862 there was a Pioneer Freight line operating in Sierra and Plumas Counties and by 1865 there was an express and passenger train operating three times a week between Downieville and Howland Flat via the trail through Deadwood and Poker Flat. Even when snow made it impossible for pack trains the mail and a few light-weight items were delivered by men on snowshoes. One of them was Granville Zacharian who had a snowshoe express between Downieville and La Porte that ran twice a week. Also, during the mid 1860s, after much experimentation, horses were equipped with snowshoes.
Snowshoe for a horse
North Bloomfield Museum
From Hutchings' California Magazine
As well-used trails became roads teamsters used freight wagons to get supplies as far as possible into the mountains where pack trains would meet them. These places became supply centers and functioned as hubs for freight, mail, camaraderie and a connection to the outside world. The Empire Ranch, near present-day Smartsville, was such a place and so was Depot Hill high on a ridge above the North Yuba below Indian Valley. Another was Illinoistown located between the Bear River and the North Fork of the American River, renamed Colfax when the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869.
A wagon has obvious advantages over packing because there was no need for nightly unloading and a single freighter could carry 2,000 pounds. On the other hand, a wagon couldn’t follow a contour without tipping – roads had to be built to accommodate them. Early roads were seldom more than 6-8 wide. The California freight wagon was flat-floored, 16 to 20 feet long and 3 or 4 feet wide. Loads were stacked as high as 15 feet with rear wheels often 6 feet in diameter with 4-inch wide iron tires. A heavy-duty freighter with many mules could carry 6 to 8 tons. An example was Andrew Kneebone of Spenceville who started freighting in 1880 – he used a team of 16 mules and horses to haul three wagons. Roads eventually cross waterways so bridges, ferries or fords were also necessary and often collected tolls.
Freighters at Upper Cisco
Photograph by Alfred Hart
The Bridgeport covered bridge crosses the South Yuba on the Virginia Turnpike
The town of Cisco, on the South Yuba, was supplied by freight wagons using the Dutch Flat-Donner Pass Road and was totally dependent on the viability of the Meadow Lake Mining District, which boomed and busted between 1865 and 1867. Meadow Lake was situated in rugged terrain and accessible only by trail. Cisco had a population of about 1,000 including two hotels, the Cisco House and the Magnolia, three stores, two blacksmiths, a Post Office, a drug store and several saloons. Charles Wooster, who lived nearby on the North Branch of the South Yuba (Fordyce Creek) in 1865 kept a journal: “This town was devoted mainly to the maintenance of mule team drivers and their animals, as well as road builders. Saloon keepers were the most numerous class of businessmen.” “Fifty mules in a line under one management was not uncommon. A coffin containing a corpse would go by on a mule’s back, with the head of the corpse pounding audibly against the coffin in unison with the step of the mule. A stamp shaft attached to the pack-saddle of two mules in single file supplied an interesting manifestation of a mule in military step.”
Downieville Packers
Photographer and date unknown
It hard to appreciate how important the mail was to lonely miners working hard in what they perceived as a remote and dangerous world. Their original plans were to get rich and return home, very few, if any, planned to settle here so news from home was welcome and warming, sacred even. When deep snow and harsh weather prevented mail delivery to the South Yuba town of Washington for several weeks, frustrated townspeople put up a $25 prize for whoever could deliver the mail from Nevada City. Two young, but experienced, snowshoers were determined to get through and made it to within a half-mile of Washington when one of them, Malcom McLeod, succumbed to what was probably hypothermia. Apparently, they had become “bewildered” while snowshoeing in the dark and were traveling in a circle (The Daily Transcript, January 7,1890).
I’m not going into stagecoaches here, because they, along with their infrastructure of roads and way-stations, are another story. Most packers, expressmen, teamsters and drivers handled mixtures of freight and passengers. By 1854 almost all stagecoach lines were owned by the California Stage Company, capitalized at $1 million. The typical Concord Stage sat 9 to 12 people inside and up to 12 more on the flat roof. They carried passengers and some freight. Drivers, or “reignsmen” had more social graces and a much higher social standard than teamsters. They were often called “jehus” (a biblical chariot driver). “The speed of Jehu” was a popular 19th century idiom. You won’t have to look hard to find information on stagecoaches, both technical and romanticized.
In the late 1970s there was a roadblock near Goodyears Bar on the North Yuba River that had drivers stopped on Highway 49 for a few hours and during that time I met a local “old guy” as I waited. His stories were good. He grew up in Brandy City and Indian Valley and saw the end of mining by the small mine operator and the post-World War II boom in lumbering. The Cal-Ida mill employed nearly everybody. He asked me if I knew where the Mountain House Road was and immediately, in my mind, I saw the steep and curvy descent from the ridgetop to Woodruff Creek and Goodyears Bar, and I said yes. Then he told me that when he was a boy he often watched the stagecoach descend that road and thought that it was the most wonderful thing he had ever seen and he wanted to be a driver someday. He said, “Imagine that – I’m (??) years old and I loved stagecoaches, and in my lifetime a man has landed on the moon – imagine that!”
In May of 1903, Dr. Jones of Grass Valley, was the first to drive his car into downtown Washington in order to treat a patient and by 1914 the automobile replaced the stage and freighters on the line between LaPorte and Oroville. Within the next few years the freighting and passenger service business changed dramatically but packers continued to supply remote mines through the Depression years.
Photographer and date unknown
