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"slug": "a-history-of-san-franciscos-wild-raw-farallon-islands",
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"content": "\u003cp>Whether or not the Farallon Islands are visible from shore is always a good measure of how clear a day we’re having in the San Francisco Bay Area. Situated 27 miles west of the Golden Gate, the cluster of 20 islets is often obscured by fog or marine layer — but on the clearest of days they emerge as a blurry silhouette on the horizon line.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The islands are closed to the public because they’re now a wildlife refuge where a dazzling array of birds and other wildlife thrive. But over the years, the islands have served many purposes, and been home to a few brave souls willing to weather the inhospitable conditions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriouspodcastinfo]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Oakland resident Ali Moghaddam was enjoying a day in Pacifica with his wife when he first learned about the islands from a placard overlooking the sea. It gave him just enough information to want to know more, so he sent this question to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/podcasts/baycurious\">Bay Curious\u003c/a> team: What is the history of the Farallon Islands?\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11920246\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11920246\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1298923486-small-800x424.jpg\" alt=\"The sun setting over the Pacific ocean. The Golden Gate Bridge is an silhouette, and on the horizon, the Farallon Islands stick out of the ocean. \" width=\"800\" height=\"424\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1298923486-small-800x424.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1298923486-small-1020x541.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1298923486-small-160x85.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1298923486-small-1536x814.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1298923486-small.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Farallon Islands are often obscured by fog or the marine layer, but on the clearest of days, you can see them from land. \u003ccite>(Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>The island’s early visitors\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The first people of the Bay Area were wary of the Farallons. Local tribes called them the Islands of the Dead, and it’s said they never stepped foot on them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>English explorer, pirate and trader of enslaved people Sir Francis Drake is the first person to leave a record of visiting the islands. He and his men made their way onshore in 1579, where they collected seal meat and eggs. They left after just one day. Drake named them the “Islands of St. James” — a name that didn’t stick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The name that did stick came about 25 years later, when Friar Antonio de la Asunción, sailing on a Spanish expedition, described the string of islands in his diary as “seven farallones close together.” Farallon is Spanish for steep rock or cliff. This time around, the name took.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11920259\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2047px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11920259\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/11105699446_a73ba6de9f_k.jpg\" alt=\"An illustration of the Farallons, with waves splashing up on the rocky shore in the foreground.\" width=\"2047\" height=\"1279\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/11105699446_a73ba6de9f_k.jpg 2047w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/11105699446_a73ba6de9f_k-800x500.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/11105699446_a73ba6de9f_k-1020x637.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/11105699446_a73ba6de9f_k-160x100.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/11105699446_a73ba6de9f_k-1536x960.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/11105699446_a73ba6de9f_k-1920x1200.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2047px) 100vw, 2047px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An illustration of the Farallons featured in the 1874 book “Western Wanderings: A Record of Travel in the Evening Land, etc. Illustrated” by J.W. Boddam-Whetham. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/11105699446/\">British Library/Flickr\u003c/a>)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>A land pillaged\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The first people known to live on the islands arrived in 1819. They were Russian fur hunters and members of the Aleut community, who likely were working as enslaved people. They lived on the Southeast Farallon, which is the only island large enough to support humans. They came to the islands to harvest fur seals — the warm pelts were in high demand in Russia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Zackhar Chichinoff was one of the Russians living on the island. His story has been\u003ca href=\"https://www.islapedia.com/images/0/05/Hoover%2C_M_The_Farallon_Islands_1932.pdf\"> recounted in several books\u003c/a> over the years:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>A schooner took us down to the islands but we had to cruise around for over a week before we could make a landing. We had a few planks with us and some canvas, and with that we built huts for shelter. The water was very bad also, being taken from hollow places in the rocks where it stood all the year round. We had no fire-arms, the sea lions were killed with clubs or spears. Scurvy broke out among us and in a short time all were sick except myself. All the next winter we passed there in great misery and when the spring came the men were too weak to kill sea-lions, and all we could do was to crawl around the cliffs and gather some sea birds’ eggs and suck them raw.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>Despite the difficult living conditions and basic weaponry, settlers managed to kill an estimated 200,000 fur seals on the Farallons over the course of a few years. Captain Benjamin Morrell Jr. visited the island in 1825 and offered this \u003ca href=\"https://www.islapedia.com/images/0/05/Hoover%2C_M_The_Farallon_Islands_1932.pdf\">update in his diary\u003c/a>:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>Many years ago this place was the resort of numerous fur seal but the Russians have made such a havoc among them that there is scarcely a breed left. On this barren rock we found a Russian family and twenty-three Codiaks, or northwest Indians, with their bark canoes. They were employed in taking sea-leopards, sea-horses, and sea-elephants for their skins, oil and flesh … at the time of our visit they had about fifty tons of this beef cured and were expecting the arrival of a Russian vessel to take off the beef and leave them a supply of fresh water, there being none on the island.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>By 1834 the fur seal population was decimated. The animals that survived abandoned the island. It would be 140 years before they were seen on the island again; in the 1970s, a few fur seals started to return to the island. The first pup was spotted in 1996, and since then the population has continued to grow. In 2019, Point Blue Conservation Science reported that about 2,000 pups are born on the island each year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11920258\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1024px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11920258\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/Farallon_Refuge_12294370586.jpeg\" alt=\"More than a dozen fur seals in the foreground, and countless more in the background. A few look directly at the camera. \" width=\"1024\" height=\"710\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/Farallon_Refuge_12294370586.jpeg 1024w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/Farallon_Refuge_12294370586-800x555.jpeg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/Farallon_Refuge_12294370586-1020x707.jpeg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/Farallon_Refuge_12294370586-160x111.jpeg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The fur seal population has rebounded, as seen in this 2011 photo. \u003ccite>(Jim Tietz/PRBO Conservation Science)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>The Egg War\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Things were quiet on the islands for a few years, but interest in them picked up again during the Gold Rush. Food scarcity prompted entrepreneurial men to venture out to the Farallons in search of supplies. Because the islands are the largest seabird nesting colony south of Alaska, what they found there were eggs. Lots and lots of eggs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11872731\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11872731\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2016/08/egger2_enl-6caea5207a48def8f2179382777a1e494376ff38.jpg\" alt=\"A group of men clean a week's haul of seabird eggs.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1616\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2016/08/egger2_enl-6caea5207a48def8f2179382777a1e494376ff38.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2016/08/egger2_enl-6caea5207a48def8f2179382777a1e494376ff38-800x646.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2016/08/egger2_enl-6caea5207a48def8f2179382777a1e494376ff38-1020x824.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2016/08/egger2_enl-6caea5207a48def8f2179382777a1e494376ff38-160x129.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2016/08/egger2_enl-6caea5207a48def8f2179382777a1e494376ff38-1536x1241.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2016/08/egger2_enl-6caea5207a48def8f2179382777a1e494376ff38-1920x1551.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A group of men clean a week’s haul of seabird eggs. \u003ccite>(Arthur Bolton/California Academy of Sciences )\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The eggs they collected turned out to be a hot commodity in protein-starved San Francisco, and the egg hunters quickly found themselves quite rich. An industry sprung up, which Mildred Hoover described in her \u003ca href=\"https://www.islapedia.com/images/0/05/Hoover%2C_M_The_Farallon_Islands_1932.pdf\">1932 book about the Farallons\u003c/a>:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>There was one essential item in the equipment of the workers – a loose fitting jacket with capacious pockets inside the front. At a given signal, the day’s operations began: every man started on the run for a favored spot among the nests. … When the loose-fronted jackets were full of eggs the men descended the slippery rocks with care to deposit their booty in hidden baskets – hidden because of the Gulls. Accidents were not unknown and to fall while wearing a coat full of eggs delayed the worker at least long enough to wash out the pockets with cold sea water.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>By the early 1850s, about a half-million eggs were gathered each year. Egg collecting became so lucrative that in 1863 two men were killed in “The Great Egg War.” (We actually did a whole \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11872730/the-gold-rush-delicacy-that-started-a-war-eggs\">Bay Curious episode about The Great Egg War\u003c/a> if you’d like to learn more.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But just as with the fur seals, overharvesting of eggs caused damage to the animal world. The wild murre population plummeted. Eventually, the federal government ruled all commercial eggers off the islands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11920247\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11920247\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/South_Farallon_Island_landing_1871-800x704.jpeg\" alt=\"A black and white photo taken on the Farallon Islands. A boat has been pulled onto the top of the rocks by a wooden, crane-like device. \" width=\"800\" height=\"704\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/South_Farallon_Island_landing_1871-800x704.jpeg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/South_Farallon_Island_landing_1871-1020x897.jpeg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/South_Farallon_Island_landing_1871-160x141.jpeg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/South_Farallon_Island_landing_1871-1536x1352.jpeg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/South_Farallon_Island_landing_1871-1920x1689.jpeg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/South_Farallon_Island_landing_1871.jpeg 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">In this 1871 image, you can see a crane-like device that was used to haul small boats safely onto the island. A similar technique is used today. \u003ccite>(Eadweard Muybridge photography, courtesy of USCG History)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>A lighthouse brings new residents\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Navigating the waters around the Farallon islands has always been extremely dangerous. Quick-moving currents can sweep boats onto the rocks, where the Pacific pounds them into oblivion, and during storms waves can get so big they swallow boats whole.[emailsignup newslettername=\"baycurious\" align=\"right\"]There are about 400 ship and airplane wrecks in the Greater Farallones sanctuary. (Airplanes flying low to get under the fog would run into the islands’ rocky peaks.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In hopes of warding off disaster, a lighthouse was built at the top of Southeast Farallon Island in 1855. It was one of the first lighthouses built on the West Coast. Four lighthouse keepers and their families lived simultaneously on the island to keep the light in operation. They lived in two Victorian duplexes that are still standing today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charles Nordhoff wrote about their lives in an \u003ca href=\"https://www.islapedia.com/images/8/88/Nordhoff_Farrallon_Islands_Harpers_1874.pdf\">1874 edition of Harper’s Magazine\u003c/a>:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>The life of the keepers on the Farallon Light is singularly lonely and monotonous … they live in what would seem to a landman like a perpetual storm. The ocean roars in their ears day and night; the boom of the surf is their constant and only music, the wild scream of the sea birds and the howl of the sea lions, the whistle and shriek of the gale, the dull threatening thunder of the vast breakers, are the dreary and desolate sounds which lull them to sleep at night, and assail their ears when they wake.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>Life seemed to have improved somewhat by 1932 when Mildred Hoover wrote about the lives of the island’s few residents. She wrote that radio reception on the islands was good, so keepers and their families spent their evenings dancing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11920249\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11920249\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/FarallonsFromSky.jpeg\" alt=\"A black and white 1929 photograph of the Southeast Farallon from the sky. You can see three dwellings, a lighthouse, and several auxiliary buildings. \" width=\"800\" height=\"653\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/FarallonsFromSky.jpeg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/FarallonsFromSky-160x131.jpeg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A 1929 photograph of Southeast Farallon Island from the sky. You can see three dwellings, a lighthouse, and several auxiliary buildings. \u003ccite>(Courtesy US Coast Guard)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>With the lighthouse keepers came another longtime resident: a \u003ca href=\"https://www.lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=100\">mule named Jack\u003c/a>. He was used to carry fuel and supplies to and from the lighthouse, which was perched at the top of a dangerous climb. Though most lighthouse keepers stayed on the island for \u003ca href=\"https://www.lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=100\">one or two years\u003c/a>, Jack called that rock in the middle of the Pacific home for 18 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the 1970s, the Coast Guard automated the lighthouse, and the keepers moved off the island.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Scientific and military presence on the island\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousbug]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the early 1900s, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=100\">Navy began operating a radio direction finder station\u003c/a> on Southeast Farallon Island, which could be used to locate enemy broadcasters. They constructed dormitories, a power house, two compass houses and several work sheds. Staffing of the station fluctuated, but one report says the total population on the island may have been as high as 70 at some points.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Weather Bureau also built a weather station on the island around 1902. Weather data collected on the Farallons was helpful in predicting what mainland residents could expect.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A sanctuary and laboratory\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Today, the Farallon Islands all are part of a \u003ca href=\"https://www.fws.gov/refuge/farallon-islands/about-us\">National Wildlife Refuge\u003c/a>, and the waters surrounding them make up the \u003ca href=\"https://farallones.noaa.gov/\">Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary\u003c/a>. The island is managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1971, they entered into an agreement with \u003ca href=\"https://www.pointblue.org/\">Point Blue Conservation Science\u003c/a> to jointly protect, monitor, conduct research, and manage the islands. The public isn’t allowed on them, but you can take a boat tour through the waters around them — like our colleague\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11916632/its-like-youre-on-a-different-planet-in-search-of-whales-and-other-creatures-at-the-mysterious-farallon-islands\"> Izzy Bloom did for a recent story\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11920251\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11920251\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1321230164-small.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1275\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1321230164-small.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1321230164-small-800x531.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1321230164-small-1020x677.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1321230164-small-160x106.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1321230164-small-1536x1020.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Oceanic Society naturalist Peter Winch (left) points as visitors aboard the Salty Lady view the Farallon Islands. \u003ccite>(Jane Tyska/Digital First Media/East Bay Times via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Biologists with Point Blue live in the two Victorian duplexes where lighthouse keepers once stayed. They’ve been conducting many long-term studies on the wild seabirds, seals, whales and sharks that thrive on the islands and in nearby waters. In 2009, KQED’s Quest produced this video about the islands and the research being done there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://youtu.be/WVL_2exHQrg\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "The rugged islands that sit 27 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge are extremely inhospitable, but a host of people have lived on them over the centuries.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Whether or not the Farallon Islands are visible from shore is always a good measure of how clear a day we’re having in the San Francisco Bay Area. Situated 27 miles west of the Golden Gate, the cluster of 20 islets is often obscured by fog or marine layer — but on the clearest of days they emerge as a blurry silhouette on the horizon line.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The islands are closed to the public because they’re now a wildlife refuge where a dazzling array of birds and other wildlife thrive. But over the years, the islands have served many purposes, and been home to a few brave souls willing to weather the inhospitable conditions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003caside class=\"alignleft utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__bayCuriousPodcastShortcode__bayCurious\">\u003cimg src=https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/bayCuriousLogo.png alt=\"Bay Curious Podcast\" loading=\"lazy\" />\n \u003ca href=\"/news/series/baycurious\">Bay Curious\u003c/a> is a podcast that answers your questions about the Bay Area.\n Subscribe on \u003ca href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/bay-curious/id1172473406\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Apple Podcasts\u003c/a>,\n \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/podcasts/500557090/bay-curious\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR One\u003c/a> or your favorite podcast platform.\u003c/aside>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Oakland resident Ali Moghaddam was enjoying a day in Pacifica with his wife when he first learned about the islands from a placard overlooking the sea. It gave him just enough information to want to know more, so he sent this question to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/podcasts/baycurious\">Bay Curious\u003c/a> team: What is the history of the Farallon Islands?\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11920246\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11920246\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1298923486-small-800x424.jpg\" alt=\"The sun setting over the Pacific ocean. The Golden Gate Bridge is an silhouette, and on the horizon, the Farallon Islands stick out of the ocean. \" width=\"800\" height=\"424\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1298923486-small-800x424.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1298923486-small-1020x541.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1298923486-small-160x85.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1298923486-small-1536x814.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1298923486-small.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Farallon Islands are often obscured by fog or the marine layer, but on the clearest of days, you can see them from land. \u003ccite>(Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>The island’s early visitors\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The first people of the Bay Area were wary of the Farallons. Local tribes called them the Islands of the Dead, and it’s said they never stepped foot on them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>English explorer, pirate and trader of enslaved people Sir Francis Drake is the first person to leave a record of visiting the islands. He and his men made their way onshore in 1579, where they collected seal meat and eggs. They left after just one day. Drake named them the “Islands of St. James” — a name that didn’t stick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The name that did stick came about 25 years later, when Friar Antonio de la Asunción, sailing on a Spanish expedition, described the string of islands in his diary as “seven farallones close together.” Farallon is Spanish for steep rock or cliff. This time around, the name took.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11920259\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2047px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11920259\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/11105699446_a73ba6de9f_k.jpg\" alt=\"An illustration of the Farallons, with waves splashing up on the rocky shore in the foreground.\" width=\"2047\" height=\"1279\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/11105699446_a73ba6de9f_k.jpg 2047w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/11105699446_a73ba6de9f_k-800x500.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/11105699446_a73ba6de9f_k-1020x637.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/11105699446_a73ba6de9f_k-160x100.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/11105699446_a73ba6de9f_k-1536x960.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/11105699446_a73ba6de9f_k-1920x1200.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2047px) 100vw, 2047px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An illustration of the Farallons featured in the 1874 book “Western Wanderings: A Record of Travel in the Evening Land, etc. Illustrated” by J.W. Boddam-Whetham. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishlibrary/11105699446/\">British Library/Flickr\u003c/a>)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>A land pillaged\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The first people known to live on the islands arrived in 1819. They were Russian fur hunters and members of the Aleut community, who likely were working as enslaved people. They lived on the Southeast Farallon, which is the only island large enough to support humans. They came to the islands to harvest fur seals — the warm pelts were in high demand in Russia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Zackhar Chichinoff was one of the Russians living on the island. His story has been\u003ca href=\"https://www.islapedia.com/images/0/05/Hoover%2C_M_The_Farallon_Islands_1932.pdf\"> recounted in several books\u003c/a> over the years:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>A schooner took us down to the islands but we had to cruise around for over a week before we could make a landing. We had a few planks with us and some canvas, and with that we built huts for shelter. The water was very bad also, being taken from hollow places in the rocks where it stood all the year round. We had no fire-arms, the sea lions were killed with clubs or spears. Scurvy broke out among us and in a short time all were sick except myself. All the next winter we passed there in great misery and when the spring came the men were too weak to kill sea-lions, and all we could do was to crawl around the cliffs and gather some sea birds’ eggs and suck them raw.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>Despite the difficult living conditions and basic weaponry, settlers managed to kill an estimated 200,000 fur seals on the Farallons over the course of a few years. Captain Benjamin Morrell Jr. visited the island in 1825 and offered this \u003ca href=\"https://www.islapedia.com/images/0/05/Hoover%2C_M_The_Farallon_Islands_1932.pdf\">update in his diary\u003c/a>:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>Many years ago this place was the resort of numerous fur seal but the Russians have made such a havoc among them that there is scarcely a breed left. On this barren rock we found a Russian family and twenty-three Codiaks, or northwest Indians, with their bark canoes. They were employed in taking sea-leopards, sea-horses, and sea-elephants for their skins, oil and flesh … at the time of our visit they had about fifty tons of this beef cured and were expecting the arrival of a Russian vessel to take off the beef and leave them a supply of fresh water, there being none on the island.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>By 1834 the fur seal population was decimated. The animals that survived abandoned the island. It would be 140 years before they were seen on the island again; in the 1970s, a few fur seals started to return to the island. The first pup was spotted in 1996, and since then the population has continued to grow. In 2019, Point Blue Conservation Science reported that about 2,000 pups are born on the island each year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11920258\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1024px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11920258\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/Farallon_Refuge_12294370586.jpeg\" alt=\"More than a dozen fur seals in the foreground, and countless more in the background. A few look directly at the camera. \" width=\"1024\" height=\"710\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/Farallon_Refuge_12294370586.jpeg 1024w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/Farallon_Refuge_12294370586-800x555.jpeg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/Farallon_Refuge_12294370586-1020x707.jpeg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/Farallon_Refuge_12294370586-160x111.jpeg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The fur seal population has rebounded, as seen in this 2011 photo. \u003ccite>(Jim Tietz/PRBO Conservation Science)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>The Egg War\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Things were quiet on the islands for a few years, but interest in them picked up again during the Gold Rush. Food scarcity prompted entrepreneurial men to venture out to the Farallons in search of supplies. Because the islands are the largest seabird nesting colony south of Alaska, what they found there were eggs. Lots and lots of eggs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11872731\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11872731\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2016/08/egger2_enl-6caea5207a48def8f2179382777a1e494376ff38.jpg\" alt=\"A group of men clean a week's haul of seabird eggs.\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1616\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2016/08/egger2_enl-6caea5207a48def8f2179382777a1e494376ff38.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2016/08/egger2_enl-6caea5207a48def8f2179382777a1e494376ff38-800x646.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2016/08/egger2_enl-6caea5207a48def8f2179382777a1e494376ff38-1020x824.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2016/08/egger2_enl-6caea5207a48def8f2179382777a1e494376ff38-160x129.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2016/08/egger2_enl-6caea5207a48def8f2179382777a1e494376ff38-1536x1241.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2016/08/egger2_enl-6caea5207a48def8f2179382777a1e494376ff38-1920x1551.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A group of men clean a week’s haul of seabird eggs. \u003ccite>(Arthur Bolton/California Academy of Sciences )\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The eggs they collected turned out to be a hot commodity in protein-starved San Francisco, and the egg hunters quickly found themselves quite rich. An industry sprung up, which Mildred Hoover described in her \u003ca href=\"https://www.islapedia.com/images/0/05/Hoover%2C_M_The_Farallon_Islands_1932.pdf\">1932 book about the Farallons\u003c/a>:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>There was one essential item in the equipment of the workers – a loose fitting jacket with capacious pockets inside the front. At a given signal, the day’s operations began: every man started on the run for a favored spot among the nests. … When the loose-fronted jackets were full of eggs the men descended the slippery rocks with care to deposit their booty in hidden baskets – hidden because of the Gulls. Accidents were not unknown and to fall while wearing a coat full of eggs delayed the worker at least long enough to wash out the pockets with cold sea water.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>By the early 1850s, about a half-million eggs were gathered each year. Egg collecting became so lucrative that in 1863 two men were killed in “The Great Egg War.” (We actually did a whole \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11872730/the-gold-rush-delicacy-that-started-a-war-eggs\">Bay Curious episode about The Great Egg War\u003c/a> if you’d like to learn more.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But just as with the fur seals, overharvesting of eggs caused damage to the animal world. The wild murre population plummeted. Eventually, the federal government ruled all commercial eggers off the islands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11920247\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11920247\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/South_Farallon_Island_landing_1871-800x704.jpeg\" alt=\"A black and white photo taken on the Farallon Islands. A boat has been pulled onto the top of the rocks by a wooden, crane-like device. \" width=\"800\" height=\"704\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/South_Farallon_Island_landing_1871-800x704.jpeg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/South_Farallon_Island_landing_1871-1020x897.jpeg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/South_Farallon_Island_landing_1871-160x141.jpeg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/South_Farallon_Island_landing_1871-1536x1352.jpeg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/South_Farallon_Island_landing_1871-1920x1689.jpeg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/South_Farallon_Island_landing_1871.jpeg 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">In this 1871 image, you can see a crane-like device that was used to haul small boats safely onto the island. A similar technique is used today. \u003ccite>(Eadweard Muybridge photography, courtesy of USCG History)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>A lighthouse brings new residents\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Navigating the waters around the Farallon islands has always been extremely dangerous. Quick-moving currents can sweep boats onto the rocks, where the Pacific pounds them into oblivion, and during storms waves can get so big they swallow boats whole.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>There are about 400 ship and airplane wrecks in the Greater Farallones sanctuary. (Airplanes flying low to get under the fog would run into the islands’ rocky peaks.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In hopes of warding off disaster, a lighthouse was built at the top of Southeast Farallon Island in 1855. It was one of the first lighthouses built on the West Coast. Four lighthouse keepers and their families lived simultaneously on the island to keep the light in operation. They lived in two Victorian duplexes that are still standing today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charles Nordhoff wrote about their lives in an \u003ca href=\"https://www.islapedia.com/images/8/88/Nordhoff_Farrallon_Islands_Harpers_1874.pdf\">1874 edition of Harper’s Magazine\u003c/a>:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>The life of the keepers on the Farallon Light is singularly lonely and monotonous … they live in what would seem to a landman like a perpetual storm. The ocean roars in their ears day and night; the boom of the surf is their constant and only music, the wild scream of the sea birds and the howl of the sea lions, the whistle and shriek of the gale, the dull threatening thunder of the vast breakers, are the dreary and desolate sounds which lull them to sleep at night, and assail their ears when they wake.\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>Life seemed to have improved somewhat by 1932 when Mildred Hoover wrote about the lives of the island’s few residents. She wrote that radio reception on the islands was good, so keepers and their families spent their evenings dancing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11920249\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11920249\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/FarallonsFromSky.jpeg\" alt=\"A black and white 1929 photograph of the Southeast Farallon from the sky. You can see three dwellings, a lighthouse, and several auxiliary buildings. \" width=\"800\" height=\"653\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/FarallonsFromSky.jpeg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/FarallonsFromSky-160x131.jpeg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A 1929 photograph of Southeast Farallon Island from the sky. You can see three dwellings, a lighthouse, and several auxiliary buildings. \u003ccite>(Courtesy US Coast Guard)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>With the lighthouse keepers came another longtime resident: a \u003ca href=\"https://www.lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=100\">mule named Jack\u003c/a>. He was used to carry fuel and supplies to and from the lighthouse, which was perched at the top of a dangerous climb. Though most lighthouse keepers stayed on the island for \u003ca href=\"https://www.lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=100\">one or two years\u003c/a>, Jack called that rock in the middle of the Pacific home for 18 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the 1970s, the Coast Guard automated the lighthouse, and the keepers moved off the island.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Scientific and military presence on the island\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003caside class=\"alignleft utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__bayCuriousPodcastShortcode__bayCurious\">\u003cimg src=https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/bayCuriousLogo.png alt=\"Bay Curious Podcast\" loading=\"lazy\" />\n What do you wonder about the Bay Area, its culture or people that you want KQED to investigate?\n \u003ca href=\"/news/series/baycurious\">Ask Bay Curious.\u003c/a>\u003c/aside>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the early 1900s, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=100\">Navy began operating a radio direction finder station\u003c/a> on Southeast Farallon Island, which could be used to locate enemy broadcasters. They constructed dormitories, a power house, two compass houses and several work sheds. Staffing of the station fluctuated, but one report says the total population on the island may have been as high as 70 at some points.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Weather Bureau also built a weather station on the island around 1902. Weather data collected on the Farallons was helpful in predicting what mainland residents could expect.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>A sanctuary and laboratory\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Today, the Farallon Islands all are part of a \u003ca href=\"https://www.fws.gov/refuge/farallon-islands/about-us\">National Wildlife Refuge\u003c/a>, and the waters surrounding them make up the \u003ca href=\"https://farallones.noaa.gov/\">Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary\u003c/a>. The island is managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1971, they entered into an agreement with \u003ca href=\"https://www.pointblue.org/\">Point Blue Conservation Science\u003c/a> to jointly protect, monitor, conduct research, and manage the islands. The public isn’t allowed on them, but you can take a boat tour through the waters around them — like our colleague\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11916632/its-like-youre-on-a-different-planet-in-search-of-whales-and-other-creatures-at-the-mysterious-farallon-islands\"> Izzy Bloom did for a recent story\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11920251\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11920251\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1321230164-small.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1275\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1321230164-small.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1321230164-small-800x531.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1321230164-small-1020x677.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1321230164-small-160x106.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2022/07/GettyImages-1321230164-small-1536x1020.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Oceanic Society naturalist Peter Winch (left) points as visitors aboard the Salty Lady view the Farallon Islands. \u003ccite>(Jane Tyska/Digital First Media/East Bay Times via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Biologists with Point Blue live in the two Victorian duplexes where lighthouse keepers once stayed. They’ve been conducting many long-term studies on the wild seabirds, seals, whales and sharks that thrive on the islands and in nearby waters. In 2009, KQED’s Quest produced this video about the islands and the research being done there.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/WVL_2exHQrg'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/WVL_2exHQrg'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"disqusTitle": "The Inventor and Artist Who Tried Starting the First Airline Service to SF ... in 1849",
"title": "The Inventor and Artist Who Tried Starting the First Airline Service to SF ... in 1849",
"headTitle": "Mark Fiore: Drawn to the Bay | KQED News",
"content": "\u003cp>If you lived on the East Coast and had gold fever in 1849, getting to California's gold country was not easy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You had to either travel overland by foot, horse or wagon, or hop on a ship that would take you around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America. Or you could catch a ship to Panama, where you would have to trudge through the jungle and catch another ship up to San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Your trip would likely be measured in months rather than weeks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Enter Rufus Porter, a serial inventor and artist, who promised \u003ca href=\"https://collection.sfomuseum.org/objects/1511919121\">his soon-to-be-built steam-powered \"aerial locomotive\"\u003c/a> could get you to California comfortably in three days at speeds of around 100 miles per hour.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/05/airship_050622_final.png\">\u003cimg class=\"aligncenter wp-image-11913446 size-large\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/05/airship_050622_final-1020x1020.png\" alt='Cartoon: a dirigible floats through the sky as a happy gold mining sourdough character jumps into the sky holding a pick ax and gold pan. Text reads, \"air travel from N.Y. to S.F. ... in 1849? Rufus Porter promised a quick, 3-day trip westward on his 800-foot \"aerial locomotive.\" Tickets were $50, but the airship was never built.\"' width=\"640\" height=\"640\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/05/airship_050622_final-1020x1020.png 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/05/airship_050622_final-800x800.png 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/05/airship_050622_final-160x160.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/05/airship_050622_final-1536x1536.png 1536w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/05/airship_050622_final.png 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Porter might sound like a nut — but he also founded \u003ca href=\"https://www.scientificamerican.com/\">Scientific American\u003c/a>, which remains a respected publication today, and has a \u003ca href=\"https://www.rufusportermuseum.org/\">museum dedicated to his artwork in Maine\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His publication did much better than \u003ca href=\"https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/transcontinental-airline-1849-1\">his transcontinental airline service, which never got off the ground\u003c/a>, literally or figuratively.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Porter never sold enough tickets to fund the huge dirigible he promised.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(Perhaps someone also pointed out to him which way prevailing winds blow across the West.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eighty years later, though, the monstrous German dirigible \u003ca href=\"https://opensfhistory.org/news/2019/08/31/zeppelin-comes-to-san-francisco-a-closer-look/\">the Graf Zeppelin floated over San Francisco\u003c/a> after leaving Japan on its 22-day journey around the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Knowing what happened to \u003ca href=\"https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/disaster/\">the Hindenburg\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/27/brazil-zeppelin-hangar-nazis\">the future that awaited the zeppelins\u003c/a>, riding a horse across the country seems like a walk in the park.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>If you lived on the East Coast and had gold fever in 1849, getting to California's gold country was not easy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You had to either travel overland by foot, horse or wagon, or hop on a ship that would take you around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America. Or you could catch a ship to Panama, where you would have to trudge through the jungle and catch another ship up to San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Your trip would likely be measured in months rather than weeks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Enter Rufus Porter, a serial inventor and artist, who promised \u003ca href=\"https://collection.sfomuseum.org/objects/1511919121\">his soon-to-be-built steam-powered \"aerial locomotive\"\u003c/a> could get you to California comfortably in three days at speeds of around 100 miles per hour.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/05/airship_050622_final.png\">\u003cimg class=\"aligncenter wp-image-11913446 size-large\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/05/airship_050622_final-1020x1020.png\" alt='Cartoon: a dirigible floats through the sky as a happy gold mining sourdough character jumps into the sky holding a pick ax and gold pan. Text reads, \"air travel from N.Y. to S.F. ... in 1849? Rufus Porter promised a quick, 3-day trip westward on his 800-foot \"aerial locomotive.\" Tickets were $50, but the airship was never built.\"' width=\"640\" height=\"640\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/05/airship_050622_final-1020x1020.png 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/05/airship_050622_final-800x800.png 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/05/airship_050622_final-160x160.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/05/airship_050622_final-1536x1536.png 1536w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/05/airship_050622_final.png 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Porter might sound like a nut — but he also founded \u003ca href=\"https://www.scientificamerican.com/\">Scientific American\u003c/a>, which remains a respected publication today, and has a \u003ca href=\"https://www.rufusportermuseum.org/\">museum dedicated to his artwork in Maine\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His publication did much better than \u003ca href=\"https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/transcontinental-airline-1849-1\">his transcontinental airline service, which never got off the ground\u003c/a>, literally or figuratively.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Porter never sold enough tickets to fund the huge dirigible he promised.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(Perhaps someone also pointed out to him which way prevailing winds blow across the West.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eighty years later, though, the monstrous German dirigible \u003ca href=\"https://opensfhistory.org/news/2019/08/31/zeppelin-comes-to-san-francisco-a-closer-look/\">the Graf Zeppelin floated over San Francisco\u003c/a> after leaving Japan on its 22-day journey around the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Knowing what happened to \u003ca href=\"https://www.airships.net/hindenburg/disaster/\">the Hindenburg\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/27/brazil-zeppelin-hangar-nazis\">the future that awaited the zeppelins\u003c/a>, riding a horse across the country seems like a walk in the park.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>These days, if I want to get to Santa Cruz from my San Francisco apartment, I hop in my hatchback, head south on Interstate 280, then cut over to Highway 17. Ninety minutes later (pandemic aside), I’m watching the Giant Dipper roller coaster dive into free fall, fish tacos in hand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11869428\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11869428\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Trains-Route.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"1115\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Trains-Route.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Trains-Route-160x223.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The South Pacific Coast Railroad Route, which debuted in 1880, could take passengers from Alameda to Santa Cruz in just under four hours. \u003ccite>(Wikimedia Commons)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But, 150 years ago, that same trip would have meant rattling around in a horse-drawn carriage for four days. The long, expensive journey meant only upper-class people could afford to go. All that changed when a guy named \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Graham_Fair\">James Graham Fair\u003c/a> got the audacious idea to build a railroad through the Santa Cruz Mountains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fair, or “Slippery Jim” as he was known in business circles, made his fortune mining silver in Nevada. But he saw railroad barons like Leland Stanford getting rich in the railroad business and he wanted a piece of the action.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If there’s only one person you need to know, it’s probably him,” says local historian Derek Whaley, who grew up in Santa Cruz County and \u003ca href=\"https://www.santacruztrains.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">wrote two books\u003c/a> about the railroad. “He had a lot of money, a lot of influence and just a huge vision.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Railroads were big business in the late 19th century. Everything from shipping to logging, mining, farming and tourism depended on them. Fair’s “vision” was to compete with the big train lines — namely the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads — that had staked claim across the western United States.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rich with redwood timber and strategically located between San Francisco Bay and the port of Santa Cruz, Fair identified the Santa Cruz Mountains as the ideal place for his railroad. The problem was, he didn’t know much about trains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriouspodcastinfo]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But he also had a bit of a henchman who was the on-the-ground person that was overseeing daily operations,” Whaley says. The henchman’s name was \u003ca href=\"http://www.spcrr.org/HistorySPCRR.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Alfred Davis\u003c/a>, but everyone called him “Hog.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He was an interesting guy, apparently quite friendly most of the time,” Whaley says. “But he also had a bit of an attitude when he wanted to.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Davis also had a ton of railroad savvy. What came to be known as the “Mountain Route” never would have gotten built without the combination of Fair’s deep pockets and Davis’ know-how, says Whaley.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11869422\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11869422\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Train-Wrights-800x469.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"469\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Train-Wrights-800x469.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Train-Wrights-1020x598.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Train-Wrights-160x94.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Train-Wrights.jpg 1338w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A group visits the town of Wrights, a major stop on the South Pacific Coast Railroad, on a push car, circa 1880. \u003ccite>(Rodolph Brandt/The Bancroft Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.abandonedrails.com/south-pacific-coast-railroad\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">South Pacific Coast Railroad\u003c/a> was an engineering marvel for its day. Laying tracks through 25 miles of rugged mountain terrain was a massive undertaking. While standard train tracks measure about 5-feet wide, the “narrow gauge” tracks of the Mountain Route measured just 3-feet wide, making it easier to curve around the rolling hills. To make it through the steepest grades, laborers dug eight tunnels through the mountains. To cross the region’s winding creek beds, they built just as many trestles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel described the construction in 1879:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“With its great bores … its powerful bridges … its heavy rails, its easy curves … its expensive right of way, its smell of money from one end of the line to the other, we say .. . nobody else would build this road. Few can do it.”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Tragedy in the Tunnels\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The South Pacific Coast Railroad featured two tunnels that spanned over a mile. Carved along the San Andreas Fault, the Summit Tunnel near the town of Wrights Station, measured over 6,000 feet and once held the record for the longest railroad tunnel in all of California. But digging it came at considerable human cost: the lives of dozens of Chinese migrant workers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Inseparable from the story of California’s railroads is the exploitation of Chinese migrants, who often did the most dangerous jobs for a fraction of what white laborers were paid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In his book “Chinese Gold: The Chinese in the Monterey Bay Region,” \u003ca href=\"http://www.sandylydon.com/new-page-18\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">local historian Sandy Lydon\u003c/a> wrote that, “Between 1875 and 1880, the Chinese built three separate railroads, laid 42 miles of track, drilled 2.6 miles of tunnels to stitch Santa Cruz County together. For every mile of railroad, one Chinese died.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11869537\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11869537\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Tunnel-800x442.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"442\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Tunnel-800x442.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Tunnel-1020x563.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Tunnel-160x88.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Tunnel-1536x848.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Tunnel-672x372.jpg 672w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Tunnel.jpg 1600w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Crews haul mud from the Summit Tunnel, circa 1880. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Derek Whaley)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Construction of the Summit Tunnel began in 1878 and was plagued from the start. Underground, crews complained of suffocating fumes and oil oozing from the earth. The air got so bad that workers began to pass out. Eventually, methane gas that had been building up inside the cavern ignited into a fireball.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A \u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/clip/6988949/wrights-tunnel-22-nov-1879/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel article\u003c/a> dated Nov. 18, 1879 described its devastation:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“The explosion was followed by a sheet of lurid flame, which the great mountain belched forth, consuming everything before it.”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>The blast killed 32 Chinese workers. “Most of their bodies were returned to China,” Whaley says. “But there were several years where there was a Chinese cemetery up in the mountains where some of the workers had been buried.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After the explosion, the gas leak was fixed. But for years the tunnel was said to be haunted by the ghosts of those who died digging it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Railroad Opens for Business\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In May of 1880, the South Pacific Coast Railroad opened for business. Despite the ghastly death toll leading up to its debut, the train was an overnight success. Riders lined up to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11549263/the-island-ghost-town-in-the-middle-of-san-francisco-bay\">escape city life\u003c/a> for an afternoon taking in Santa Cruz’s sandy beaches and Boardwalk amusements. San Franciscans took a ferry across the bay to Alameda, before hopping on a train that took them south. In the 1920s, the line earned the nickname “The \u003ca href=\"https://www.santacruztrains.com/2019/09/curiosities-sun-tan-special.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Sun Tan Special\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Especially during the summer,” Whaley says, “it would bring tourists from all over the Bay Area, thousands of people on busy days.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For others, the pristine wilderness and fresh air of the Santa Cruz Mountains was the main draw. Mountain retreats and picnic areas, like Sunset Park, drew crowds on the weekends.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11869412\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 714px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11869412\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Trains-Hiln-Mill.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"714\" height=\"558\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Trains-Hiln-Mill.png 714w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Trains-Hiln-Mill-160x125.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 714px) 100vw, 714px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The main yard at the Frederick A. Hihn sawmill at Laurel in 1902. The South Pacific Coast Railroad’s biggest exported was redwood timber processed at mills along the route. \u003ccite>(Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“The ride is one which rivals anything up the Shasta division or over the Sierras, for tho’ the mountain groups are not so massive, the effects are equally fine,” wrote H.S. Kneedler in his 1895 book “Through Storyland to Sunset Seas.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Along with tourism, industry flourished. Owners of sand quarries, quicksilver mines and a gunpowder factory used the train to ship their goods. Farmers shipped apples and sugar beets. There was even a brief oil boom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the railroad’s biggest export was the sturdy lumber harvested from redwood trees. Builders used the timber to construct San Francisco houses, and lumber companies shipped their boards all over the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They had lumber sent over to Hawaii,” Whaley says. “They had it sent down to Mexico.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11869415\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1600px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11869415 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Hiln-Mill-2.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1600\" height=\"1245\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Hiln-Mill-2.png 1600w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Hiln-Mill-2-800x623.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Hiln-Mill-2-1020x794.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Hiln-Mill-2-160x125.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Hiln-Mill-2-1536x1195.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The first band saw in California operating at the Hihn sawmill at Laurel in 1902. \u003ccite>(Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Logging, tourism and other industries gave life to towns like Alma, Wrights and Laurel, which was known for its sawmill. Stops along the route become destinations in themselves, including one named Call of the Wild. Its log cabin station invoked a scene from Jack London’s Gold Rush-era novel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1887, with business booming, Fair sold his upstart railroad to the Southern Pacific Transportation Company, one of the industry giants he’d set out to challenge. The sale earned Fair a reported $6 million, which is roughly the equivalent of $160 million today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fair’s legacy in the Bay Area outlasted his stake in the railroad. His daughter built the \u003ca href=\"https://www.fairmont.com/our-story/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Fairmont Hotel\u003c/a> atop San Francisco’s Nob Hill and named it in his honor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The End of the Mountain Route\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1940, California built Highway 17, a paved road that ran parallel to much of the train line. As car ownership soared, the railroad’s profits plummeted. To make matters worse, loggers had stripped the mountains of redwood trees, the railroad’s major export. Whaley says the redwoods we see in the mountains today are primarily second growth trees, unlike the 1,000-year-old trees found in places like Muir Woods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11869545\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11869545\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Trains-Fair.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"856\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Trains-Fair.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Trains-Fair-160x171.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A portrait of James Graham Fair, one of the founders of the South Pacific Coast Railroad. \u003ccite>(Library of Congress)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In February of 1940, with the railroad barely scraping by, a storm hit the Santa Cruz Mountains. Without trees to hold the hillside in place, the earth collapsed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It caused huge chunks of the line to sink,” Whaley says. “There’s a couple of spots where you can actually see the tracks hanging off the ledge.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After the storm, Southern Pacific decided the repairs weren’t worth the cost. Most of the tunnels were sealed with dynamite or left to decay. And the once-booming mountain towns faded off the map. The town of Alma, arguably the most bustling stop on the line, was eventually flooded to create what’s now the Lexington Reservoir south of downtown Los Gatos.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The final stretch of the track between Felton and the Santa Cruz Boardwalk survived the storm. These days, \u003ca href=\"https://www.roaringcamp.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Roaring Camp Railroads\u003c/a> runs trains on the weekends for tourists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Railroad Revival?\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As traffic on Highway 17 has picked up over the years, some locals have discussed reviving the old railroad. The Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors \u003ca href=\"https://goodtimes.sc/santa-cruz-news/isnt-train-san-jose/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">debated the idea\u003c/a> in the 1990s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Almost every feasibility study has said that, yes, the route through the mountains is a good idea,” Whaley says. “And the current existing route is probably the most logical one.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But these efforts have been opposed by groups arguing that a commuter train would spoil Santa Cruz’ identity as a locals-only beach town. Whaley believes Santa Cruz has already become a satellite community of Silicon Valley, and that an alternative to Highway 17 would make everyone’s life better. He dreams of one day riding a train that traces the same sharp curves as the old Mountain Route.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>These days, if I want to get to Santa Cruz from my San Francisco apartment, I hop in my hatchback, head south on Interstate 280, then cut over to Highway 17. Ninety minutes later (pandemic aside), I’m watching the Giant Dipper roller coaster dive into free fall, fish tacos in hand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11869428\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11869428\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Trains-Route.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"1115\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Trains-Route.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Trains-Route-160x223.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The South Pacific Coast Railroad Route, which debuted in 1880, could take passengers from Alameda to Santa Cruz in just under four hours. \u003ccite>(Wikimedia Commons)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But, 150 years ago, that same trip would have meant rattling around in a horse-drawn carriage for four days. The long, expensive journey meant only upper-class people could afford to go. All that changed when a guy named \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Graham_Fair\">James Graham Fair\u003c/a> got the audacious idea to build a railroad through the Santa Cruz Mountains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fair, or “Slippery Jim” as he was known in business circles, made his fortune mining silver in Nevada. But he saw railroad barons like Leland Stanford getting rich in the railroad business and he wanted a piece of the action.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If there’s only one person you need to know, it’s probably him,” says local historian Derek Whaley, who grew up in Santa Cruz County and \u003ca href=\"https://www.santacruztrains.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">wrote two books\u003c/a> about the railroad. “He had a lot of money, a lot of influence and just a huge vision.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Railroads were big business in the late 19th century. Everything from shipping to logging, mining, farming and tourism depended on them. Fair’s “vision” was to compete with the big train lines — namely the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads — that had staked claim across the western United States.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rich with redwood timber and strategically located between San Francisco Bay and the port of Santa Cruz, Fair identified the Santa Cruz Mountains as the ideal place for his railroad. The problem was, he didn’t know much about trains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003caside class=\"alignleft utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__bayCuriousPodcastShortcode__bayCurious\">\u003cimg src=https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/bayCuriousLogo.png alt=\"Bay Curious Podcast\" loading=\"lazy\" />\n \u003ca href=\"/news/series/baycurious\">Bay Curious\u003c/a> is a podcast that answers your questions about the Bay Area.\n Subscribe on \u003ca href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/bay-curious/id1172473406\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Apple Podcasts\u003c/a>,\n \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/podcasts/500557090/bay-curious\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR One\u003c/a> or your favorite podcast platform.\u003c/aside>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But he also had a bit of a henchman who was the on-the-ground person that was overseeing daily operations,” Whaley says. The henchman’s name was \u003ca href=\"http://www.spcrr.org/HistorySPCRR.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Alfred Davis\u003c/a>, but everyone called him “Hog.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“He was an interesting guy, apparently quite friendly most of the time,” Whaley says. “But he also had a bit of an attitude when he wanted to.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Davis also had a ton of railroad savvy. What came to be known as the “Mountain Route” never would have gotten built without the combination of Fair’s deep pockets and Davis’ know-how, says Whaley.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11869422\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11869422\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Train-Wrights-800x469.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"469\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Train-Wrights-800x469.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Train-Wrights-1020x598.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Train-Wrights-160x94.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Train-Wrights.jpg 1338w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A group visits the town of Wrights, a major stop on the South Pacific Coast Railroad, on a push car, circa 1880. \u003ccite>(Rodolph Brandt/The Bancroft Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.abandonedrails.com/south-pacific-coast-railroad\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">South Pacific Coast Railroad\u003c/a> was an engineering marvel for its day. Laying tracks through 25 miles of rugged mountain terrain was a massive undertaking. While standard train tracks measure about 5-feet wide, the “narrow gauge” tracks of the Mountain Route measured just 3-feet wide, making it easier to curve around the rolling hills. To make it through the steepest grades, laborers dug eight tunnels through the mountains. To cross the region’s winding creek beds, they built just as many trestles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel described the construction in 1879:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“With its great bores … its powerful bridges … its heavy rails, its easy curves … its expensive right of way, its smell of money from one end of the line to the other, we say .. . nobody else would build this road. Few can do it.”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Tragedy in the Tunnels\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The South Pacific Coast Railroad featured two tunnels that spanned over a mile. Carved along the San Andreas Fault, the Summit Tunnel near the town of Wrights Station, measured over 6,000 feet and once held the record for the longest railroad tunnel in all of California. But digging it came at considerable human cost: the lives of dozens of Chinese migrant workers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Inseparable from the story of California’s railroads is the exploitation of Chinese migrants, who often did the most dangerous jobs for a fraction of what white laborers were paid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In his book “Chinese Gold: The Chinese in the Monterey Bay Region,” \u003ca href=\"http://www.sandylydon.com/new-page-18\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">local historian Sandy Lydon\u003c/a> wrote that, “Between 1875 and 1880, the Chinese built three separate railroads, laid 42 miles of track, drilled 2.6 miles of tunnels to stitch Santa Cruz County together. For every mile of railroad, one Chinese died.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11869537\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11869537\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Tunnel-800x442.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"442\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Tunnel-800x442.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Tunnel-1020x563.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Tunnel-160x88.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Tunnel-1536x848.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Tunnel-672x372.jpg 672w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Tunnel.jpg 1600w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Crews haul mud from the Summit Tunnel, circa 1880. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Derek Whaley)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Construction of the Summit Tunnel began in 1878 and was plagued from the start. Underground, crews complained of suffocating fumes and oil oozing from the earth. The air got so bad that workers began to pass out. Eventually, methane gas that had been building up inside the cavern ignited into a fireball.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A \u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/clip/6988949/wrights-tunnel-22-nov-1879/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Santa Cruz Weekly Sentinel article\u003c/a> dated Nov. 18, 1879 described its devastation:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“The explosion was followed by a sheet of lurid flame, which the great mountain belched forth, consuming everything before it.”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>The blast killed 32 Chinese workers. “Most of their bodies were returned to China,” Whaley says. “But there were several years where there was a Chinese cemetery up in the mountains where some of the workers had been buried.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After the explosion, the gas leak was fixed. But for years the tunnel was said to be haunted by the ghosts of those who died digging it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Railroad Opens for Business\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In May of 1880, the South Pacific Coast Railroad opened for business. Despite the ghastly death toll leading up to its debut, the train was an overnight success. Riders lined up to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11549263/the-island-ghost-town-in-the-middle-of-san-francisco-bay\">escape city life\u003c/a> for an afternoon taking in Santa Cruz’s sandy beaches and Boardwalk amusements. San Franciscans took a ferry across the bay to Alameda, before hopping on a train that took them south. In the 1920s, the line earned the nickname “The \u003ca href=\"https://www.santacruztrains.com/2019/09/curiosities-sun-tan-special.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Sun Tan Special\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Especially during the summer,” Whaley says, “it would bring tourists from all over the Bay Area, thousands of people on busy days.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For others, the pristine wilderness and fresh air of the Santa Cruz Mountains was the main draw. Mountain retreats and picnic areas, like Sunset Park, drew crowds on the weekends.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11869412\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 714px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11869412\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Trains-Hiln-Mill.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"714\" height=\"558\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Trains-Hiln-Mill.png 714w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Trains-Hiln-Mill-160x125.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 714px) 100vw, 714px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The main yard at the Frederick A. Hihn sawmill at Laurel in 1902. The South Pacific Coast Railroad’s biggest exported was redwood timber processed at mills along the route. \u003ccite>(Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“The ride is one which rivals anything up the Shasta division or over the Sierras, for tho’ the mountain groups are not so massive, the effects are equally fine,” wrote H.S. Kneedler in his 1895 book “Through Storyland to Sunset Seas.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Along with tourism, industry flourished. Owners of sand quarries, quicksilver mines and a gunpowder factory used the train to ship their goods. Farmers shipped apples and sugar beets. There was even a brief oil boom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the railroad’s biggest export was the sturdy lumber harvested from redwood trees. Builders used the timber to construct San Francisco houses, and lumber companies shipped their boards all over the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They had lumber sent over to Hawaii,” Whaley says. “They had it sent down to Mexico.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11869415\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1600px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11869415 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Hiln-Mill-2.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1600\" height=\"1245\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Hiln-Mill-2.png 1600w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Hiln-Mill-2-800x623.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Hiln-Mill-2-1020x794.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Hiln-Mill-2-160x125.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Railroad-Hiln-Mill-2-1536x1195.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1600px) 100vw, 1600px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The first band saw in California operating at the Hihn sawmill at Laurel in 1902. \u003ccite>(Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Logging, tourism and other industries gave life to towns like Alma, Wrights and Laurel, which was known for its sawmill. Stops along the route become destinations in themselves, including one named Call of the Wild. Its log cabin station invoked a scene from Jack London’s Gold Rush-era novel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1887, with business booming, Fair sold his upstart railroad to the Southern Pacific Transportation Company, one of the industry giants he’d set out to challenge. The sale earned Fair a reported $6 million, which is roughly the equivalent of $160 million today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fair’s legacy in the Bay Area outlasted his stake in the railroad. His daughter built the \u003ca href=\"https://www.fairmont.com/our-story/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Fairmont Hotel\u003c/a> atop San Francisco’s Nob Hill and named it in his honor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The End of the Mountain Route\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1940, California built Highway 17, a paved road that ran parallel to much of the train line. As car ownership soared, the railroad’s profits plummeted. To make matters worse, loggers had stripped the mountains of redwood trees, the railroad’s major export. Whaley says the redwoods we see in the mountains today are primarily second growth trees, unlike the 1,000-year-old trees found in places like Muir Woods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11869545\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11869545\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Trains-Fair.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"856\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Trains-Fair.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/04/Santa-Cruz-Trains-Fair-160x171.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A portrait of James Graham Fair, one of the founders of the South Pacific Coast Railroad. \u003ccite>(Library of Congress)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In February of 1940, with the railroad barely scraping by, a storm hit the Santa Cruz Mountains. Without trees to hold the hillside in place, the earth collapsed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It caused huge chunks of the line to sink,” Whaley says. “There’s a couple of spots where you can actually see the tracks hanging off the ledge.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After the storm, Southern Pacific decided the repairs weren’t worth the cost. Most of the tunnels were sealed with dynamite or left to decay. And the once-booming mountain towns faded off the map. The town of Alma, arguably the most bustling stop on the line, was eventually flooded to create what’s now the Lexington Reservoir south of downtown Los Gatos.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The final stretch of the track between Felton and the Santa Cruz Boardwalk survived the storm. These days, \u003ca href=\"https://www.roaringcamp.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Roaring Camp Railroads\u003c/a> runs trains on the weekends for tourists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Railroad Revival?\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As traffic on Highway 17 has picked up over the years, some locals have discussed reviving the old railroad. The Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors \u003ca href=\"https://goodtimes.sc/santa-cruz-news/isnt-train-san-jose/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">debated the idea\u003c/a> in the 1990s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Almost every feasibility study has said that, yes, the route through the mountains is a good idea,” Whaley says. “And the current existing route is probably the most logical one.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But these efforts have been opposed by groups arguing that a commuter train would spoil Santa Cruz’ identity as a locals-only beach town. Whaley believes Santa Cruz has already become a satellite community of Silicon Valley, and that an alternative to Highway 17 would make everyone’s life better. He dreams of one day riding a train that traces the same sharp curves as the old Mountain Route.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Surviving the Donner Party: California, Gold and Lifelong Secrets",
"headTitle": "Surviving the Donner Party: California, Gold and Lifelong Secrets | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is Part Two of the Bay Curious series on the Donner Party. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11844011/donner-party-pt-1\">Read Part One of this story here.\u003c/a>\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen the snow finally melted in spring of 1847, the grisly evidence of the Donner Party’s ordeal — the things that had been buried under feet of snow at Donner Lake — were revealed in full.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Word of the Donner Party disaster had spread across the country and was already creating “lousy PR” for California, says Donner Party historian Greg Palmer. The story spooked would-be emigrants to the state, making officials wish “they could just wipe the slate clean.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The solution was a California military detachment, led by Gen. Stephen Kearny. On their way over the mountains to Kansas in summer 1847, these men were given new orders to go to Donner Lake and clean up the mess.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Writer Edwin Bryant was with them — himself a recent emigrant who’d been on the Oregon Trail just ahead of the Donner Party. What he later wrote about that day was stomach-churning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Near the principal lake cabin I saw two bodies entire, except the abdomens had been cut open and entrails extracted,” Bryant wrote. “Their flesh had been either wasted by famine or evaporated by exposure to dry atmosphere, and presented the appearance of mummies.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11844056\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11844056\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Creek.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Creek.png 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Creek-800x533.png 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Creek-1020x680.png 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Creek-160x107.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Creek-1536x1024.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Donner Memorial State Park in summer \u003ccite>(Carly Severn/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Bryant and the other soldiers were looking at what remained of the Donner Party: evidence of sheer desperation, and what it looks like when human bodies are stripped for food. “Human skeletons, in short, in every variety of mutilation,” Bryant wrote. “A more appalling spectacle I never witnessed.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bryant reported how that military party scraped all the remains they could find up from the forest floor, dug a hole in the floor of one of the cabins, and set fire to the whole thing: “With everything surrounding them connected with the horrible and melancholy tragedy, consumed.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These soldiers weren’t just performing a physical clean-up job. They were taking a truly shameful part of the state’s history and erasing it from human sight. This new California demanded it.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Survivors in the Spotlight\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>As soldiers were burning the Donner Party’s dead up at Donner Lake, their family members who’d made it out alive were safe and warm miles away in the west.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A lot of the survivors spent the immediate aftermath recovering in present-day Sacramento at Sutter’s Fort. Presided over by colonizer John Sutter, this was the same place that had acted as a kind of Donner Party rescue command center during those long winter months.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once the first survivors had escaped and brought the terrible news to California, public interest in the Donner Party saga soared. “The fact that it wasn’t just a bunch of mountain men … but these were women and children,” made it even more compelling, Palmer says. And of course, there was the cannibalism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like many people who find themselves at the center of disaster, the Donner Party survivors quickly found that other people were already writing their story for them. The same month that the last survivor, Lewis Keseberg, was rescued from Donner Lake, the California Star newspaper published an account it claimed was based on eyewitness accounts from the rescuers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A more shocking scene cannot be imagined than was witnessed by the party of men who went to the relief of the unfortunate emigrants in the California Mountains … A woman sat by the side of the body of her dead husband cutting out his tongue ; the heart she had already taken out, broiled, and eaten.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The California Star cast the Donner Party as terrifying ghouls, so hooked on the taste of humans that they’d been somehow transformed by it into cannibalistic monsters:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So changed had the emigrants become that when the rescuing party arrived with food, some of them cast it aside, and seemed to prefer the putrid human flesh that still remained.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11844051\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11844051\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-6.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-6.png 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-6-800x533.png 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-6-1020x680.png 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-6-160x107.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-6-1536x1024.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A man poses by stumps of trees cut above the snow line by the Donner Party in Summit Valley, Placer County, photographed in1866 by Lawrence & Houseworth, \u003ccite>(Library of Congress)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>This account drips with revulsion at what cannibalism might have done to the Donner Party’s very humanity:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Calculations were coldly made, as they sat around their gloomy camp fires, for the next succeeding meals… Language can not describe the awful change that a few weeks of dire suffering had wrought in the minds of the wretched and pitiable beings.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A lot of what was published in the California Star is undoubtedly sensationalized, or just flat-out wrong. But this story, published hot on the heels of the disaster, set the tone for how California looked at the Donner Party, and it haunted the survivors for years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eliza Donner was just three years old when the Sierras orphaned her. It wasn’t until 1911 that she felt able to write her memoir, and to talk publicly about what she remembered of the disaster, but also about her life as a Donner Party survivor. In her book “The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate” she detailed how for years afterward, people came up to her and quoted that newspaper story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Evidently, it was written without malice, but in ignorance, and by some warmly clad, well nourished person, who did not know the humanizing effect of suffering and sorrow,” she wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Two Survivors, Two Stories\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>A lot of the public outcry was directed at the final man to leave Donner Lake: Lewis Keseberg. Much of this was owing to another bit of lurid reportage, this time courtesy of one of the men who’d rescued Keseberg, Capt. William Fallon. He wrote how he “discovered Keseberg lying down amid the human bones, and beside him a large pan full of fresh liver and lights [lungs]”, and heavily insinuated that Keseberg had murdered Eliza Donner’s mother, Tamsen Donner, to consume her flesh and keep himself alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From almost the moment he came down from the mountain, Keseberg was a marked man. “Some declared him crazy, others called him a monster,” wrote Eliza Donner, who knew all too well how fast — and how effectively — the written word could be used against someone. She described “blood-curdling editorials” that were written about Keseberg, “stamping him with the mark of Cain, and closing the door of every home against him.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11844052\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11844052\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Lakeside.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Lakeside.png 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Lakeside-800x533.png 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Lakeside-1020x680.png 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Lakeside-160x107.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Lakeside-1536x1024.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Donner Lake, pictured in summer \u003ccite>(Carly Severn/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Yet all the while, another man — the only actual, confirmed murderer of the Donner Party — received quite different treatment. It was no secret that William Foster had murdered the two Miwok men Luis and Salvador so that the first “Folorn Hope” group to escape Donner Lake could eat their flesh. But because of who he’d killed — two Native Americans, rather than a white woman like Tamsen Donner — Foster never faced a reckoning for his crime.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Greg Palmer says, it wasn’t even seen as a crime. “‘They’re only Indian’: That was the mentality of the day,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What’s more, Foster had chosen to join the third rescue party, to voluntarily return to Donner Lake to bring more people to safety. To the white world in California, Foster was a hero, not a murderer —and condemning him would have meant condemning a mindset and a way of life that had greatly benefited many people who came to California to claim it for their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the many more were about to make the journey.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The Gold Rush Takes Over\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>As brutal as the Donner Party’s life and death story is, the immediate aftermath actually marks a calm before the storm in California’s history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the short-term, the Donner Party horror scared people in California, but also would-be emigrants contemplating the same trip. The overland traffic of settlers in 1847 and 1848 dropped sharply, says Greg Palmer “because of what happened.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In January, 1848, just nine months after final survivor Lewis Keseberg was dragged off the mountain, gold was discovered in California. As if to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the players in this period of time, that gold was found on land claimed by none other than John Sutter, on a site he was developing as an expansion of his Sutter’s Fort empire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11844049\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11844049\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-9.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-9.png 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-9-800x533.png 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-9-1020x680.png 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-9-160x107.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-9-1536x1024.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Gold miners in El Dorado, California, between ca. 1848 and ca. 1853 \u003ccite>(Library of Congress)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Those small flakes of gold in a river on Sutter’s land changed California forever — and most of all, for those Indigenous communities that had lived here for centuries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dahlton Brown is Executive Director for the \u003ca href=\"http://wiltonrancheria-nsn.gov/\">Wilton Rancheria\u003c/a> tribe in Elk Grove, outside Sacramento. And says he still finds it “just incredible” how the Miwok and Nisenan people of this region “could go from being the ancestral stewards of a place since time immemorial to just being a resource to be used, for the kind of capitalistic growth and entrenchment of an American society that hadn’t even been on this continent, established as a nation for 100 years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Earlier colonizers had already hugely disrupted the lives of California’s Indigenous residents. Settlers like the Donner Party had then wanted their land — and now with gold, everybody else did, too. White migration into California had been a trickle, but now it became a flood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s estimated that in the first 20 years after gold was discovered, 80% of California’s Indigenous population was wiped out — not just by disease, but by destruction and murder. Those that survived found themselves displaced, and their customs, cultures and lives irrevocably altered — by design.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There were “insane restrictions put on our tribal communities that were meant to suffocate our life ways,” Brown says. These limitations were meant to “rob our communities and land, to make way for these miners and for these folks looking to make their riches.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11844048\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11844048\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-8.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-8.png 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-8-800x533.png 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-8-1020x680.png 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-8-160x107.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-8-1536x1024.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Gold prospectors amid log cabins in El Dorado, California, between ca. 1848 and ca. 1853 \u003ccite>(Library of Congress)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>California had a new image, a new way of being. And everything that came before that didn’t fit was treated like dirt in the gold pan: discarded in the name of “progress.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Hidden From Sight\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>As California bloomed under the Gold Rush, virtually all of the survivors of the Donner Party quietly, deliberately retreated from view, and scattered throughout the Bay Area and Northern California. For almost all of them, what happened up by Donner Lake was something they never wanted to talk about publicly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you’re imagining the remaining members of the Donner Party might have wanted to stick together, think again, says Greg Palmer. After what happened, there seems to have been very little desire to even speak to any of the others ever again. “There were animosities that weren’t forgotten,” Palmer says. “Which is totally natural.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of the families that entered the mountains, only two survived intact: The Reed and Breen families. Of all of the survivors, the Reed clan probably made the best of it — something you could attribute to the fact that patriarch James Reed hadn’t actually been trapped in the Sierras with his family. His earlier banishment from the trail ensured his safe arrival into California, where he’d been able to find time to do some land deals in San Jose while he was raising money to go rescue his wife and children. These included the purchase of the land where San Jose State University now lies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the Reed family escaped the mountains, they relocated down to the new home waiting for them in South Bay, where they settled into civic life with relative ease. After striking it rich in the Gold Rush, James Reed even became the Chief of Police in the San Jose Police Department. The family also welcomed two of the Donner family orphans into their home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After recuperating at Sutter’s Fort, the Breens quietly moved south to San Juan Bautista, outside Gilroy. The other survivors, who had all watched at least one family member die in the Sierras, scattered more quietly around Northern California — from Petaluma and Sonoma to Sebastopol and Tomales Bay. Marysville, just outside Yuba City, is named after one of the Donner Party survivors, Mary Murphy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And what about Lewis Keseberg, the man who had ‘cannibal’ yelled at him in the street? He sued a bunch of people for calling him a murderer — but the judge sneeringly awarded him damages of just one dollar in each case. He lived for almost fifty more miserable years after being dragged off the mountain, beset by misfortune and bereavement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11844053\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11844053\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Rock.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Rock.png 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Rock-800x533.png 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Rock-1020x680.png 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Rock-160x107.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Rock-1536x1024.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The large rock in Donner Memorial State Park that formed the back wall of the Murphy cabin, which now holds a plaque bearing the Donner Party’s names \u003ccite>(Carly Severn/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Lansford Hastings, the entrepreneur whose wrong-headed guidebook was the blueprint for the Donner Party’s demise, became a lawyer in San Francisco, and then abandoned it to go into the Gold Rush business with none other than John Sutter. Even Sutter — the enslaving colonizer — described Hastings as “a bad man.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hastings then became a Civil War major, on the Confederate side. Having been at least the semi-architect of one disastrous journey, his last voyage was to Brazil, where he was attempting to start a colony for Confederates. He died on the ship on the way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11844059\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11844059\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Plaque2.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Plaque2.png 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Plaque2-800x533.png 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Plaque2-1020x680.png 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Plaque2-160x107.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Plaque2-1536x1024.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A plaque at Donner Memorial State Park bears the names of the Donner Party. The large boulder that holds the plaque was used as the back wall of the Murphy family cabin \u003ccite>(Carly Severn/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Many of the survivors never even spoke about that winter with their own families, says Greg Palmer. “I guess you could call it the code of silence, remembering that this is the Victorian era … speaking of anything that’s very personal, particularly something as taboo as eating the flesh of people was just not done. And so the shameful stigma of it pervaded most of the members.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When you remember that first newspaper story in the California Star, who could blame them? The public seized on what they’d read and if anything, remembered it as even worse. Eliza Donner recalled being taunted by a stranger years after the disaster, who “insisted that the Donner Party was responsible for its own misfortune” and who proclaimed “that he himself felt that the miserable wretches brought from starvation were not worth the price it had cost to save them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Perhaps this new California — swollen with people, gold and self-regard — didn’t want any reminder of early failures. Desperation and degradation, after all, hardly makes for a satisfying origin myth.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>A Legend Resurrected\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>For three decades after the disaster, little more was heard from or about the Donner Party survivors. But in 1878, a historian and newspaper editor in Truckee named Charles McGlashan had a chance encounter with a Donner Party survivor. This was James Breen — who, like Eliza Donner, had only been a tiny child when his family lived through the disaster. But the meeting was enough to get Charles McGlashan instantly obsessed with this local, infamous history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McGlashan’s exhaustive research resulted in him writing the first comprehensive book on the Donner disaster: “The History of the Donner Party.” It reignited interest in this horrible part of California history, and those who had survived it. McGlashan even took a role in those survivors’ lives, urging Eliza Donner — then in her thirties —to meet with Lewis Keseberg and give him the chance to confess if he really had killed her mother up at Donner Lake. She agreed, and later wrote how Keseberg sank to the ground and cried out “On my knees before you, and in the sight of God, I want to assert my innocence.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She chose to believe him — and if Keseberg was lying, then he held on to his secrets for another 16 years until his death, age 81, penniless in Sacramento.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eliza Donner lived many years more. She was born before the railroads, but lived to see the First World War, and died in 1922 just before her 80th birthday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And thirteen years after that, a woman named Isabel Breen died in the South Bay, in 1935. She’d been just one year old when her family fought for their lives up at Donner Lake. With her death, the very last of the Donner Party survivors quietly left the earth.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The Secret Tomb\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>At Donner Memorial State Park, you can wander the site of the camps where the Breens, the Reeds and all those other families lived, and died. You can explore the museum, and pose for photos by the huge Pioneer Monument that stretches over 20 feet into the blue Truckee sky.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11844044\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11844044\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Monument.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Monument.png 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Monument-800x533.png 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Monument-1020x680.png 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Monument-160x107.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Monument-1536x1024.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Pioneer Monument in Donner Memorial State Park \u003ccite>(Carly Severn/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>This massive statue was erected in the warm sun of summer in 1918. The crowd that watched included 80-year-old Patty Reed, who’d been just eight when her family survived the Sierras, and who’d returned to this place that had brought her family such unimaginable pain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In summer, Donner Lake hums with the sound of campers and holidaymakers. In winter, when the snow shrouds everything, it’s much more silent. And that’s when your mind might turn to wondering: Where did all those bodies find their resting place?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That military party that first swept this place when the snows thawed in 1847 had buried all the corpses they could find in a pit they’d dug in one the cabins, and then burned it all. But for a long time, nobody was able to work out which cabin that was.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Greg Palmer says they’ve excavated various parts of the park looking for the burial site: “They found rifle balls, jewelry, coins, buttons, various fragments of broken china and whatnot,” he says. “But they did not find evidence of a mass grave.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When they built Interstate 80 in the 1960s, they excavated another cabin site too. Nothing. That left one more place, hiding in plain sight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The only conclusion that we can reach is that the cabin that had the mass grave was the Breen family cabin, located where the monument is standing right now,” says Palmer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11844045\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 474px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11844045\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-1918.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"474\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-1918.jpg 474w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-1918-160x135.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 474px) 100vw, 474px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A group of people including then-California Gov. William D. Stephens at the 1918 unveiling of the Pioneer Monument \u003ccite>(Shades of San Francisco, San Francisco Public Library )\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Meaning that buried under this landmark — the one that every visitor to this place poses for photographs in front of — is very probably a mass grave. Palmer says that cadaver dogs trained to detect the presence of human bodies have reacted to it in a way that leaves almost no doubt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That makes the monument “more than just a testament,” Palmer says. “It’s a tomb, and should be respected as such.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>A Lasting Legacy\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>We humans like to make meaning from things. We’re compelled toward the idea that there are lessons to be found within history, even the bad parts, like quartz concealed in Sierra granite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Looking back at the Donner Party in 2020 — yes, it’s sometimes still treated like a pop culture punchline: the cannibalism, the grand plans gone spectacularly awry. Yet it’s also seen by many as kind of an American tragedy. A group of questing “pioneers” in search of the California dream, cruelly denied — but fate couldn’t stop some of them from prevailing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Dahlton Brown, of the Wilton Rancheria tribe, the Donner Party saga tells a very different story about California, and the United States as a whole. In this story, he sees “kind of this glorification of the American spirit, and having to do what needed to be done in order to survive — that has become pretty synonymous with the way that America treats itself. There’s this idea that ‘if I gotta step on a few necks to survive, then I’ll do it.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Donner Party wanted what many people have wanted throughout history: something better for them and their families. All the while, they knew that came at a cost for others — for the people whose land they were claiming for their own — and they did it anyway. For Brown, their drive to acquire and extract — that zeal to stretch out to grab more — doesn’t just prefigure the Gold Rush: it’s America in a nutshell. He says many Americans still often act like manifest destiny is their creed: “that there is this God-given and inherently given right that American citizens have to colonize a place because, in their view, it is making it better,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11844064\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11844064\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Flickr-1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Flickr-1.png 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Flickr-1-800x533.png 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Flickr-1-1020x680.png 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Flickr-1-160x107.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Flickr-1-1536x1024.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A snowy peak on the route from Reno to Donner \u003ccite>(Alisha Vargas/Flickr)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The Donner disaster might even show us what happens when such an impulse isn’t accompanied by knowledge of the land you’re coming to claim. Knowledge that the Indigenous people who already lived here absolutely prized.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As 81 people learned in the winter of 1846, if you misjudge this landscape it can consume you whole.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Where did those who survived the Sierras and cannibalism end up? And how did this notorious disaster come to represent everything California wanted to forget?",
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"description": "Where did those who survived the Sierras and cannibalism end up? And how did this notorious disaster come to represent everything California wanted to forget?",
"title": "Surviving the Donner Party: California, Gold and Lifelong Secrets | KQED",
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"headline": "Surviving the Donner Party: California, Gold and Lifelong Secrets",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is Part Two of the Bay Curious series on the Donner Party. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11844011/donner-party-pt-1\">Read Part One of this story here.\u003c/a>\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__dropcapShortcode__dropcap\">W\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>hen the snow finally melted in spring of 1847, the grisly evidence of the Donner Party’s ordeal — the things that had been buried under feet of snow at Donner Lake — were revealed in full.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Word of the Donner Party disaster had spread across the country and was already creating “lousy PR” for California, says Donner Party historian Greg Palmer. The story spooked would-be emigrants to the state, making officials wish “they could just wipe the slate clean.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The solution was a California military detachment, led by Gen. Stephen Kearny. On their way over the mountains to Kansas in summer 1847, these men were given new orders to go to Donner Lake and clean up the mess.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Writer Edwin Bryant was with them — himself a recent emigrant who’d been on the Oregon Trail just ahead of the Donner Party. What he later wrote about that day was stomach-churning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Near the principal lake cabin I saw two bodies entire, except the abdomens had been cut open and entrails extracted,” Bryant wrote. “Their flesh had been either wasted by famine or evaporated by exposure to dry atmosphere, and presented the appearance of mummies.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11844056\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11844056\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Creek.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Creek.png 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Creek-800x533.png 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Creek-1020x680.png 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Creek-160x107.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Creek-1536x1024.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Donner Memorial State Park in summer \u003ccite>(Carly Severn/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Bryant and the other soldiers were looking at what remained of the Donner Party: evidence of sheer desperation, and what it looks like when human bodies are stripped for food. “Human skeletons, in short, in every variety of mutilation,” Bryant wrote. “A more appalling spectacle I never witnessed.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bryant reported how that military party scraped all the remains they could find up from the forest floor, dug a hole in the floor of one of the cabins, and set fire to the whole thing: “With everything surrounding them connected with the horrible and melancholy tragedy, consumed.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These soldiers weren’t just performing a physical clean-up job. They were taking a truly shameful part of the state’s history and erasing it from human sight. This new California demanded it.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Survivors in the Spotlight\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>As soldiers were burning the Donner Party’s dead up at Donner Lake, their family members who’d made it out alive were safe and warm miles away in the west.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A lot of the survivors spent the immediate aftermath recovering in present-day Sacramento at Sutter’s Fort. Presided over by colonizer John Sutter, this was the same place that had acted as a kind of Donner Party rescue command center during those long winter months.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once the first survivors had escaped and brought the terrible news to California, public interest in the Donner Party saga soared. “The fact that it wasn’t just a bunch of mountain men … but these were women and children,” made it even more compelling, Palmer says. And of course, there was the cannibalism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like many people who find themselves at the center of disaster, the Donner Party survivors quickly found that other people were already writing their story for them. The same month that the last survivor, Lewis Keseberg, was rescued from Donner Lake, the California Star newspaper published an account it claimed was based on eyewitness accounts from the rescuers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A more shocking scene cannot be imagined than was witnessed by the party of men who went to the relief of the unfortunate emigrants in the California Mountains … A woman sat by the side of the body of her dead husband cutting out his tongue ; the heart she had already taken out, broiled, and eaten.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The California Star cast the Donner Party as terrifying ghouls, so hooked on the taste of humans that they’d been somehow transformed by it into cannibalistic monsters:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So changed had the emigrants become that when the rescuing party arrived with food, some of them cast it aside, and seemed to prefer the putrid human flesh that still remained.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11844051\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11844051\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-6.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-6.png 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-6-800x533.png 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-6-1020x680.png 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-6-160x107.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-6-1536x1024.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A man poses by stumps of trees cut above the snow line by the Donner Party in Summit Valley, Placer County, photographed in1866 by Lawrence & Houseworth, \u003ccite>(Library of Congress)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>This account drips with revulsion at what cannibalism might have done to the Donner Party’s very humanity:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Calculations were coldly made, as they sat around their gloomy camp fires, for the next succeeding meals… Language can not describe the awful change that a few weeks of dire suffering had wrought in the minds of the wretched and pitiable beings.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A lot of what was published in the California Star is undoubtedly sensationalized, or just flat-out wrong. But this story, published hot on the heels of the disaster, set the tone for how California looked at the Donner Party, and it haunted the survivors for years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eliza Donner was just three years old when the Sierras orphaned her. It wasn’t until 1911 that she felt able to write her memoir, and to talk publicly about what she remembered of the disaster, but also about her life as a Donner Party survivor. In her book “The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate” she detailed how for years afterward, people came up to her and quoted that newspaper story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Evidently, it was written without malice, but in ignorance, and by some warmly clad, well nourished person, who did not know the humanizing effect of suffering and sorrow,” she wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Two Survivors, Two Stories\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>A lot of the public outcry was directed at the final man to leave Donner Lake: Lewis Keseberg. Much of this was owing to another bit of lurid reportage, this time courtesy of one of the men who’d rescued Keseberg, Capt. William Fallon. He wrote how he “discovered Keseberg lying down amid the human bones, and beside him a large pan full of fresh liver and lights [lungs]”, and heavily insinuated that Keseberg had murdered Eliza Donner’s mother, Tamsen Donner, to consume her flesh and keep himself alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From almost the moment he came down from the mountain, Keseberg was a marked man. “Some declared him crazy, others called him a monster,” wrote Eliza Donner, who knew all too well how fast — and how effectively — the written word could be used against someone. She described “blood-curdling editorials” that were written about Keseberg, “stamping him with the mark of Cain, and closing the door of every home against him.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11844052\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11844052\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Lakeside.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Lakeside.png 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Lakeside-800x533.png 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Lakeside-1020x680.png 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Lakeside-160x107.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Lakeside-1536x1024.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Donner Lake, pictured in summer \u003ccite>(Carly Severn/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Yet all the while, another man — the only actual, confirmed murderer of the Donner Party — received quite different treatment. It was no secret that William Foster had murdered the two Miwok men Luis and Salvador so that the first “Folorn Hope” group to escape Donner Lake could eat their flesh. But because of who he’d killed — two Native Americans, rather than a white woman like Tamsen Donner — Foster never faced a reckoning for his crime.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Greg Palmer says, it wasn’t even seen as a crime. “‘They’re only Indian’: That was the mentality of the day,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What’s more, Foster had chosen to join the third rescue party, to voluntarily return to Donner Lake to bring more people to safety. To the white world in California, Foster was a hero, not a murderer —and condemning him would have meant condemning a mindset and a way of life that had greatly benefited many people who came to California to claim it for their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the many more were about to make the journey.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The Gold Rush Takes Over\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>As brutal as the Donner Party’s life and death story is, the immediate aftermath actually marks a calm before the storm in California’s history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the short-term, the Donner Party horror scared people in California, but also would-be emigrants contemplating the same trip. The overland traffic of settlers in 1847 and 1848 dropped sharply, says Greg Palmer “because of what happened.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In January, 1848, just nine months after final survivor Lewis Keseberg was dragged off the mountain, gold was discovered in California. As if to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the players in this period of time, that gold was found on land claimed by none other than John Sutter, on a site he was developing as an expansion of his Sutter’s Fort empire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11844049\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11844049\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-9.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-9.png 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-9-800x533.png 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-9-1020x680.png 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-9-160x107.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-9-1536x1024.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Gold miners in El Dorado, California, between ca. 1848 and ca. 1853 \u003ccite>(Library of Congress)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Those small flakes of gold in a river on Sutter’s land changed California forever — and most of all, for those Indigenous communities that had lived here for centuries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dahlton Brown is Executive Director for the \u003ca href=\"http://wiltonrancheria-nsn.gov/\">Wilton Rancheria\u003c/a> tribe in Elk Grove, outside Sacramento. And says he still finds it “just incredible” how the Miwok and Nisenan people of this region “could go from being the ancestral stewards of a place since time immemorial to just being a resource to be used, for the kind of capitalistic growth and entrenchment of an American society that hadn’t even been on this continent, established as a nation for 100 years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Earlier colonizers had already hugely disrupted the lives of California’s Indigenous residents. Settlers like the Donner Party had then wanted their land — and now with gold, everybody else did, too. White migration into California had been a trickle, but now it became a flood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s estimated that in the first 20 years after gold was discovered, 80% of California’s Indigenous population was wiped out — not just by disease, but by destruction and murder. Those that survived found themselves displaced, and their customs, cultures and lives irrevocably altered — by design.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There were “insane restrictions put on our tribal communities that were meant to suffocate our life ways,” Brown says. These limitations were meant to “rob our communities and land, to make way for these miners and for these folks looking to make their riches.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11844048\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11844048\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-8.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-8.png 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-8-800x533.png 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-8-1020x680.png 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-8-160x107.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-8-1536x1024.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Gold prospectors amid log cabins in El Dorado, California, between ca. 1848 and ca. 1853 \u003ccite>(Library of Congress)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>California had a new image, a new way of being. And everything that came before that didn’t fit was treated like dirt in the gold pan: discarded in the name of “progress.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Hidden From Sight\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>As California bloomed under the Gold Rush, virtually all of the survivors of the Donner Party quietly, deliberately retreated from view, and scattered throughout the Bay Area and Northern California. For almost all of them, what happened up by Donner Lake was something they never wanted to talk about publicly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you’re imagining the remaining members of the Donner Party might have wanted to stick together, think again, says Greg Palmer. After what happened, there seems to have been very little desire to even speak to any of the others ever again. “There were animosities that weren’t forgotten,” Palmer says. “Which is totally natural.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of the families that entered the mountains, only two survived intact: The Reed and Breen families. Of all of the survivors, the Reed clan probably made the best of it — something you could attribute to the fact that patriarch James Reed hadn’t actually been trapped in the Sierras with his family. His earlier banishment from the trail ensured his safe arrival into California, where he’d been able to find time to do some land deals in San Jose while he was raising money to go rescue his wife and children. These included the purchase of the land where San Jose State University now lies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the Reed family escaped the mountains, they relocated down to the new home waiting for them in South Bay, where they settled into civic life with relative ease. After striking it rich in the Gold Rush, James Reed even became the Chief of Police in the San Jose Police Department. The family also welcomed two of the Donner family orphans into their home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After recuperating at Sutter’s Fort, the Breens quietly moved south to San Juan Bautista, outside Gilroy. The other survivors, who had all watched at least one family member die in the Sierras, scattered more quietly around Northern California — from Petaluma and Sonoma to Sebastopol and Tomales Bay. Marysville, just outside Yuba City, is named after one of the Donner Party survivors, Mary Murphy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And what about Lewis Keseberg, the man who had ‘cannibal’ yelled at him in the street? He sued a bunch of people for calling him a murderer — but the judge sneeringly awarded him damages of just one dollar in each case. He lived for almost fifty more miserable years after being dragged off the mountain, beset by misfortune and bereavement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11844053\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11844053\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Rock.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Rock.png 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Rock-800x533.png 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Rock-1020x680.png 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Rock-160x107.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Rock-1536x1024.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The large rock in Donner Memorial State Park that formed the back wall of the Murphy cabin, which now holds a plaque bearing the Donner Party’s names \u003ccite>(Carly Severn/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Lansford Hastings, the entrepreneur whose wrong-headed guidebook was the blueprint for the Donner Party’s demise, became a lawyer in San Francisco, and then abandoned it to go into the Gold Rush business with none other than John Sutter. Even Sutter — the enslaving colonizer — described Hastings as “a bad man.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hastings then became a Civil War major, on the Confederate side. Having been at least the semi-architect of one disastrous journey, his last voyage was to Brazil, where he was attempting to start a colony for Confederates. He died on the ship on the way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11844059\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11844059\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Plaque2.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Plaque2.png 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Plaque2-800x533.png 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Plaque2-1020x680.png 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Plaque2-160x107.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Plaque2-1536x1024.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A plaque at Donner Memorial State Park bears the names of the Donner Party. The large boulder that holds the plaque was used as the back wall of the Murphy family cabin \u003ccite>(Carly Severn/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Many of the survivors never even spoke about that winter with their own families, says Greg Palmer. “I guess you could call it the code of silence, remembering that this is the Victorian era … speaking of anything that’s very personal, particularly something as taboo as eating the flesh of people was just not done. And so the shameful stigma of it pervaded most of the members.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When you remember that first newspaper story in the California Star, who could blame them? The public seized on what they’d read and if anything, remembered it as even worse. Eliza Donner recalled being taunted by a stranger years after the disaster, who “insisted that the Donner Party was responsible for its own misfortune” and who proclaimed “that he himself felt that the miserable wretches brought from starvation were not worth the price it had cost to save them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Perhaps this new California — swollen with people, gold and self-regard — didn’t want any reminder of early failures. Desperation and degradation, after all, hardly makes for a satisfying origin myth.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>A Legend Resurrected\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>For three decades after the disaster, little more was heard from or about the Donner Party survivors. But in 1878, a historian and newspaper editor in Truckee named Charles McGlashan had a chance encounter with a Donner Party survivor. This was James Breen — who, like Eliza Donner, had only been a tiny child when his family lived through the disaster. But the meeting was enough to get Charles McGlashan instantly obsessed with this local, infamous history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McGlashan’s exhaustive research resulted in him writing the first comprehensive book on the Donner disaster: “The History of the Donner Party.” It reignited interest in this horrible part of California history, and those who had survived it. McGlashan even took a role in those survivors’ lives, urging Eliza Donner — then in her thirties —to meet with Lewis Keseberg and give him the chance to confess if he really had killed her mother up at Donner Lake. She agreed, and later wrote how Keseberg sank to the ground and cried out “On my knees before you, and in the sight of God, I want to assert my innocence.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She chose to believe him — and if Keseberg was lying, then he held on to his secrets for another 16 years until his death, age 81, penniless in Sacramento.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eliza Donner lived many years more. She was born before the railroads, but lived to see the First World War, and died in 1922 just before her 80th birthday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And thirteen years after that, a woman named Isabel Breen died in the South Bay, in 1935. She’d been just one year old when her family fought for their lives up at Donner Lake. With her death, the very last of the Donner Party survivors quietly left the earth.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The Secret Tomb\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>At Donner Memorial State Park, you can wander the site of the camps where the Breens, the Reeds and all those other families lived, and died. You can explore the museum, and pose for photos by the huge Pioneer Monument that stretches over 20 feet into the blue Truckee sky.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11844044\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11844044\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Monument.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Monument.png 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Monument-800x533.png 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Monument-1020x680.png 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Monument-160x107.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Monument-1536x1024.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Pioneer Monument in Donner Memorial State Park \u003ccite>(Carly Severn/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>This massive statue was erected in the warm sun of summer in 1918. The crowd that watched included 80-year-old Patty Reed, who’d been just eight when her family survived the Sierras, and who’d returned to this place that had brought her family such unimaginable pain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In summer, Donner Lake hums with the sound of campers and holidaymakers. In winter, when the snow shrouds everything, it’s much more silent. And that’s when your mind might turn to wondering: Where did all those bodies find their resting place?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That military party that first swept this place when the snows thawed in 1847 had buried all the corpses they could find in a pit they’d dug in one the cabins, and then burned it all. But for a long time, nobody was able to work out which cabin that was.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Greg Palmer says they’ve excavated various parts of the park looking for the burial site: “They found rifle balls, jewelry, coins, buttons, various fragments of broken china and whatnot,” he says. “But they did not find evidence of a mass grave.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When they built Interstate 80 in the 1960s, they excavated another cabin site too. Nothing. That left one more place, hiding in plain sight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The only conclusion that we can reach is that the cabin that had the mass grave was the Breen family cabin, located where the monument is standing right now,” says Palmer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11844045\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 474px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11844045\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-1918.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"474\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-1918.jpg 474w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-1918-160x135.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 474px) 100vw, 474px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A group of people including then-California Gov. William D. Stephens at the 1918 unveiling of the Pioneer Monument \u003ccite>(Shades of San Francisco, San Francisco Public Library )\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Meaning that buried under this landmark — the one that every visitor to this place poses for photographs in front of — is very probably a mass grave. Palmer says that cadaver dogs trained to detect the presence of human bodies have reacted to it in a way that leaves almost no doubt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That makes the monument “more than just a testament,” Palmer says. “It’s a tomb, and should be respected as such.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>A Lasting Legacy\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>We humans like to make meaning from things. We’re compelled toward the idea that there are lessons to be found within history, even the bad parts, like quartz concealed in Sierra granite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Looking back at the Donner Party in 2020 — yes, it’s sometimes still treated like a pop culture punchline: the cannibalism, the grand plans gone spectacularly awry. Yet it’s also seen by many as kind of an American tragedy. A group of questing “pioneers” in search of the California dream, cruelly denied — but fate couldn’t stop some of them from prevailing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Dahlton Brown, of the Wilton Rancheria tribe, the Donner Party saga tells a very different story about California, and the United States as a whole. In this story, he sees “kind of this glorification of the American spirit, and having to do what needed to be done in order to survive — that has become pretty synonymous with the way that America treats itself. There’s this idea that ‘if I gotta step on a few necks to survive, then I’ll do it.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Donner Party wanted what many people have wanted throughout history: something better for them and their families. All the while, they knew that came at a cost for others — for the people whose land they were claiming for their own — and they did it anyway. For Brown, their drive to acquire and extract — that zeal to stretch out to grab more — doesn’t just prefigure the Gold Rush: it’s America in a nutshell. He says many Americans still often act like manifest destiny is their creed: “that there is this God-given and inherently given right that American citizens have to colonize a place because, in their view, it is making it better,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11844064\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11844064\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Flickr-1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Flickr-1.png 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Flickr-1-800x533.png 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Flickr-1-1020x680.png 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Flickr-1-160x107.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/10/2-Flickr-1-1536x1024.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A snowy peak on the route from Reno to Donner \u003ccite>(Alisha Vargas/Flickr)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The Donner disaster might even show us what happens when such an impulse isn’t accompanied by knowledge of the land you’re coming to claim. Knowledge that the Indigenous people who already lived here absolutely prized.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As 81 people learned in the winter of 1846, if you misjudge this landscape it can consume you whole.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Statue of John Sutter, Pioneer Who Enslaved Native Americans, Removed in Sacramento",
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"content": "\u003cp>A statue honoring a colonizer who laid claim to the land where the discovery of shiny flakes of gold sparked the California Gold Rush was removed Monday outside a hospital bearing his name in Sacramento.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Several dozen people cheered as a work crew lifted the statue of John Sutter — a 19th century European colonizer of California who enslaved Native Americans — off its pedestal outside Sutter Medical Center in the latest reckoning of historical figures being removed from public display.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Across the U.S. and Europe, statues of Confederate officers and colonial figures are being toppled, sometimes forcibly by protesters, as the uproar over racism spreads after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“OK, he’s Sutter, but he’s a real son of a b——,” said Frank Condon, a playwright who was walking to a doctor’s appointment. He had marveled hours earlier that it was still standing and wondered why it hadn’t been taken down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sutter, a European immigrant who had built a fort in Sacramento in the mid-1800s, had laid claim to land on the American River in Coloma about 35 miles away in the Sierra foothills. James Marshall, a carpenter, was building a mill there for Sutter when he discovered gold in 1848.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/Captain_Hooks/status/1272690216306798592?s=20\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The two tried to keep it a secret, but word got out and men flocked to the foothills in search of their fortune.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to the replica fort in downtown Sacramento that still bears his name across from the hospital, there is a county and several schools and streets named for Sutter across California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Out of respect for some community members’ viewpoints, and in the interest of public safety for our patients and staff, we are removing the John Sutter statue that was originally donated to Sutter General Hospital,” a Sutter Health spokesman said in a statement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sutter Health did not say whether it was considering removing Sutter’s name from the nonprofit hospital system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ashwut Rodriguez, a California Indian from Sacramento, spit on the statue of Sutter after it was loaded onto a flatbed and tied down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/SammyCaiola/status/1272641287326322688?s=20\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is only a Band-Aid on a broken arm, but we can’t celebrate or consider anything until you stop celebrating these evil people,” said Rodriguez, 42, who came out with his family and young children to watch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The statue will be kept in storage until a decision is made where it will go, Sutter Health spokesman Gary Zavoral said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sutter himself did not benefit from the gold rush and his empire crumbled after the discovery was made.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"title": "Statue of John Sutter, Pioneer Who Enslaved Native Americans, Removed in Sacramento | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“OK, he’s Sutter, but he’s a real son of a b——,” said Frank Condon, a playwright who was walking to a doctor’s appointment. He had marveled hours earlier that it was still standing and wondered why it hadn’t been taken down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sutter, a European immigrant who had built a fort in Sacramento in the mid-1800s, had laid claim to land on the American River in Coloma about 35 miles away in the Sierra foothills. James Marshall, a carpenter, was building a mill there for Sutter when he discovered gold in 1848.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"disqusTitle": "In Murphys, an Iconic Gold Rush Hotel Lies Silent For the First Time in 164 Years",
"title": "In Murphys, an Iconic Gold Rush Hotel Lies Silent For the First Time in 164 Years",
"headTitle": "The California Report Magazine | KQED News",
"content": "\u003cp>Californians may recognize Calaveras County for its almost century-old \u003ca href=\"https://www.frogtown.org/frog-jump\">frog jump competition\u003c/a>, which was canceled this month due to the coronavirus pandemic. But shelter-in-place restrictions have shuttered an even older Calaveras gem — \u003ca href=\"http://murphyshotel.com/\">The Murphys Historic Hotel.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“To my knowledge, it has never been completely shut down and not operated in 164 years,” said owner Brian Goss. That is, until now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The hotel, which sits on a street corner in the heart of California’s gold country, is a two-story stone building with moss green shuttered windows and a wrought iron balcony. Town residents say it’s the heart of Murphys.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Brian Goss, owner of The Murphys Historic Hotel\"]'PG&E shutdowns in California, we didn’t close — we had the bar open by candlelight and we were cooking food out on the barbecue.'[/pullquote]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Goss said owning the hotel feels like owning a museum. It’s a gold rush relic, a piece of history that has seen generations of Californians pass through since 1856. Now, for the first time in it’s storied existence, the building sits empty.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve had a couple of big fires come through here, we didn’t close,” Goss said. “PG&E shutdowns in California, we didn’t close — we had the bar open by candlelight and we were cooking food out on the barbecue.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Wild West Resiliency\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>The Murphys Hotel has weathered many storms, both the economic and the literal ones. But the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis defy even this Wild West resiliency — something that’s characterized this old mining town for a century and a half.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11816886\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 618px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-11816886\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-07-at-12.40.06-PM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"618\" height=\"464\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-07-at-12.40.06-PM.png 618w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-07-at-12.40.06-PM-160x120.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-07-at-12.40.06-PM-536x402.png 536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 618px) 100vw, 618px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An archival image of Murphys in the 1860s. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Brian Goss)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The gold rush brought thousands of miners to the region, and by 1852, Murphys had a larger population than it does now, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.foothill-resources.com/bios\">local historian Judith Marvin.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There was a three-story hotel, eight taverns, two restaurants, one express and banking house, nine carpenter shops,” Marvin said. “So it was booming by then.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The area generated $20 million in gold, and a lot of it was taken from the creek right behind the historic hotel. Throughout the years, the hotel \u003ca href=\"http://murphyshotel.com/historicrooms/\">hosted figures\u003c/a> like Mark Twain, Susan B. Anthony and J.P. Morgan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But then came Murphys’ first big bust.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All the easy gold was found and the whole county went into a big depression,” Marvin said. “But Murphys just kind of staggered along. Slumbered, you could say.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Tourism Boom and Bust\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>The town itself just scraped by until the most recent boom came along: tourism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The old one-horse-town kind of Main Street is now lined with 25 wine tasting rooms, an artisan ice cream shop and a pet store selling elaborate dog vests. But, at least for now, they’re all shuttered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote size=\"medium\" align=\"right\" citation=\"Bob Russell, Murphys resident\"]'I’m born and raised Californian and I've always been a big believer that California always overcomes things.'[/pullquote]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California's shelter-in-place order hit right as businesses in Murphys were coming out of the slowest part of the year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The next five months or six months is when everybody makes their money,” said local resident Bob Russell, who manages \u003ca href=\"http://www.sequoiawoods.com/\">a nearby golf club\u003c/a>. “You try to make it and break even or not lose too much, then try to make it around next year to this time again.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The town’s rebound will likely start with the 164-year-old Murphys Hotel. But other businesses, like Doke Sushi, might not bounce back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over the past six years, Josh Steck built the small Japanese restaurant into a local favorite. Now, Steck said he’s lost 90% of his business. Locals are trying to support the restaurants, but without visitors, it’s hard to make do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11816885\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 327px\">\u003cimg class=\" wp-image-11816885\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/05/Irish-Murphys-Sign-800x1072.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"327\" height=\"438\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/05/Irish-Murphys-Sign-800x1072.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/05/Irish-Murphys-Sign-160x214.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/05/Irish-Murphys-Sign-1020x1367.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/05/Irish-Murphys-Sign.jpg 1504w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 327px) 100vw, 327px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The rainbow appears behind the Murphys Hotel sign. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Brian Goss)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“I’m not quite sure we could make it through the summer,” Steck said. “We don’t have the money and resources to weather it through this stuff and we’re the last ones to ever get aid.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If businesses lose tourist traffic the entire summer, it could have a long-term impact. Steck believes that with so many small businesses struggling, the personal touch — the exact thing that attracts visitors to Murphys — could be lost for good.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Historian Judith Marvin thinks it’s going to be a while before Murphys can rebound. Her study of the town’s history leads her to believe the busts usually last much longer than the booms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think we have to reinvent ourselves. As does everyone,” Marvin said. “And it’s not going to be mining.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Russell still has a pioneer mindset about the situation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m born and raised Californian and I've always been a big believer that California always overcomes things,” Russell said. “I think it will survive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Californians may recognize Calaveras County for its almost century-old \u003ca href=\"https://www.frogtown.org/frog-jump\">frog jump competition\u003c/a>, which was canceled this month due to the coronavirus pandemic. But shelter-in-place restrictions have shuttered an even older Calaveras gem — \u003ca href=\"http://murphyshotel.com/\">The Murphys Historic Hotel.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“To my knowledge, it has never been completely shut down and not operated in 164 years,” said owner Brian Goss. That is, until now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The hotel, which sits on a street corner in the heart of California’s gold country, is a two-story stone building with moss green shuttered windows and a wrought iron balcony. Town residents say it’s the heart of Murphys.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "'PG&E shutdowns in California, we didn’t close — we had the bar open by candlelight and we were cooking food out on the barbecue.'",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Goss said owning the hotel feels like owning a museum. It’s a gold rush relic, a piece of history that has seen generations of Californians pass through since 1856. Now, for the first time in it’s storied existence, the building sits empty.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve had a couple of big fires come through here, we didn’t close,” Goss said. “PG&E shutdowns in California, we didn’t close — we had the bar open by candlelight and we were cooking food out on the barbecue.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Wild West Resiliency\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>The Murphys Hotel has weathered many storms, both the economic and the literal ones. But the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis defy even this Wild West resiliency — something that’s characterized this old mining town for a century and a half.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11816886\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 618px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-full wp-image-11816886\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-07-at-12.40.06-PM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"618\" height=\"464\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-07-at-12.40.06-PM.png 618w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-07-at-12.40.06-PM-160x120.png 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/05/Screen-Shot-2020-05-07-at-12.40.06-PM-536x402.png 536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 618px) 100vw, 618px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An archival image of Murphys in the 1860s. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Brian Goss)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The gold rush brought thousands of miners to the region, and by 1852, Murphys had a larger population than it does now, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.foothill-resources.com/bios\">local historian Judith Marvin.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There was a three-story hotel, eight taverns, two restaurants, one express and banking house, nine carpenter shops,” Marvin said. “So it was booming by then.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The area generated $20 million in gold, and a lot of it was taken from the creek right behind the historic hotel. Throughout the years, the hotel \u003ca href=\"http://murphyshotel.com/historicrooms/\">hosted figures\u003c/a> like Mark Twain, Susan B. Anthony and J.P. Morgan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But then came Murphys’ first big bust.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All the easy gold was found and the whole county went into a big depression,” Marvin said. “But Murphys just kind of staggered along. Slumbered, you could say.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Tourism Boom and Bust\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>The town itself just scraped by until the most recent boom came along: tourism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The old one-horse-town kind of Main Street is now lined with 25 wine tasting rooms, an artisan ice cream shop and a pet store selling elaborate dog vests. But, at least for now, they’re all shuttered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California's shelter-in-place order hit right as businesses in Murphys were coming out of the slowest part of the year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The next five months or six months is when everybody makes their money,” said local resident Bob Russell, who manages \u003ca href=\"http://www.sequoiawoods.com/\">a nearby golf club\u003c/a>. “You try to make it and break even or not lose too much, then try to make it around next year to this time again.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The town’s rebound will likely start with the 164-year-old Murphys Hotel. But other businesses, like Doke Sushi, might not bounce back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over the past six years, Josh Steck built the small Japanese restaurant into a local favorite. Now, Steck said he’s lost 90% of his business. Locals are trying to support the restaurants, but without visitors, it’s hard to make do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11816885\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 327px\">\u003cimg class=\" wp-image-11816885\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/05/Irish-Murphys-Sign-800x1072.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"327\" height=\"438\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/05/Irish-Murphys-Sign-800x1072.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/05/Irish-Murphys-Sign-160x214.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/05/Irish-Murphys-Sign-1020x1367.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2020/05/Irish-Murphys-Sign.jpg 1504w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 327px) 100vw, 327px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The rainbow appears behind the Murphys Hotel sign. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Brian Goss)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“I’m not quite sure we could make it through the summer,” Steck said. “We don’t have the money and resources to weather it through this stuff and we’re the last ones to ever get aid.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If businesses lose tourist traffic the entire summer, it could have a long-term impact. Steck believes that with so many small businesses struggling, the personal touch — the exact thing that attracts visitors to Murphys — could be lost for good.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Historian Judith Marvin thinks it’s going to be a while before Murphys can rebound. Her study of the town’s history leads her to believe the busts usually last much longer than the booms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think we have to reinvent ourselves. As does everyone,” Marvin said. “And it’s not going to be mining.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Russell still has a pioneer mindset about the situation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m born and raised Californian and I've always been a big believer that California always overcomes things,” Russell said. “I think it will survive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "The Rich History of San Francisco's First Plaza",
"headTitle": "The Rich History of San Francisco’s First Plaza | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Plazas are one of the few public spaces where people from all walks of life cross paths. In San Francisco alone there are dozens of them across the city: some small, some big, some old, some new. That’s what got one Bay Curious listener wondering which plaza was the first.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To find out we spoke to San Francisco Recreation and Park historian Christopher Pollock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriouspodcastinfo]He told us the city’s oldest plaza is Portsmouth Square, located in the heart of Chinatown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To understand why this spot is considered the first, Pollock said we have to go back to the days when San Francisco was occupied by Spanish and Mexican settlers. They called their settlement “Yerba Buena” and the plaza — what we now call Portsmouth Square — was the center of government affairs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So how did Portsmouth Square get its name?\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11787759\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 3252px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-11787759 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/Portsmouth-Square.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"3252\" height=\"1581\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/Portsmouth-Square.jpg 3252w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/Portsmouth-Square-160x78.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/Portsmouth-Square-800x389.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/Portsmouth-Square-1020x496.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/Portsmouth-Square-1200x583.jpg 1200w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/Portsmouth-Square-1920x933.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 3252px) 100vw, 3252px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Portsmouth Square, 1851 \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Library of Congress)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When the Mexican-American War broke out in 1846 many Americans believed it was their Manifest Destiny to expand West, and Yerba Buena was one of those desired territories.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Capt. John Montgomery lands near Portsmouth Square and symbolically raised a flag to signal this was an American occupation,” said Pollock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shortly after, Montgomery renamed the square after his ship, the USS Portsmouth.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>A Very Distinguished Square\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Beyond being the first city square, a historic park and a hub for the local Chinese community, Portsmouth Square has a few other claims to fame.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11787747\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 760px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2019/11/21/the-rich-history-of-san-franciscos-first-plaza/nypl-digitalcollections-510d47e0-43ef-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99-001-w/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-11787747\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-11787747 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/nypl.digitalcollections.510d47e0-43ef-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.001.w.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"760\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/nypl.digitalcollections.510d47e0-43ef-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.001.w.jpg 760w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/nypl.digitalcollections.510d47e0-43ef-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.001.w-160x84.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 760px) 100vw, 760px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Portsmouth Square \u003ccite>(Courtesy of New York Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>A year after the Americans claimed the territory, the first public school in California was built at the square’s southwest corner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Some anecdotal stories say not many attended in the beginning. Trying to rope people into education was far from their thoughts at the time, and they didn’t have any truancy offers to chase down people who didn’t attend,” said Pollock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The square also has ties to the Gold Rush. According to local lore, Portsmouth Square was where the discovery of gold was first announced. As news spread, thousands of prospective miners migrated to the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fast forward to 1873 and the city gets its first cable cars. The inventor, Andrew Smith Hallidie, piloted the cars by driving past Portsmouth Square.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11787811\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-11787811 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/earthquake.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"333\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/earthquake.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/earthquake-160x83.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Soldiers being served supper at Portsmouth Square after the 1906 earthquake. \u003ccite>(Library of Congress)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Then the 1906 earthquake and fire devastated the city. In the open space at Portsmouth Square, camps were set up for people who were displaced or burnt out of their homes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[Eventually] the military established their own camp and ended up building some 150 two-room earthquake cottages that were in neat little rows within the square,” said Pollock. That camp housed people for up to a year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A lot has happened here — more of which we explore on the Bay Curious podcast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Or you can see it for yourself. Take a walk through the park and you’ll find a number of commemorative plaques highlighting all of this history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "A lot of firsts happened here ... gold, school, flag raising and more! \r\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Plazas are one of the few public spaces where people from all walks of life cross paths. In San Francisco alone there are dozens of them across the city: some small, some big, some old, some new. That’s what got one Bay Curious listener wondering which plaza was the first.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To find out we spoke to San Francisco Recreation and Park historian Christopher Pollock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003caside class=\"alignleft utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__bayCuriousPodcastShortcode__bayCurious\">\u003cimg src=https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/bayCuriousLogo.png alt=\"Bay Curious Podcast\" loading=\"lazy\" />\n \u003ca href=\"/news/series/baycurious\">Bay Curious\u003c/a> is a podcast that answers your questions about the Bay Area.\n Subscribe on \u003ca href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/bay-curious/id1172473406\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Apple Podcasts\u003c/a>,\n \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/podcasts/500557090/bay-curious\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR One\u003c/a> or your favorite podcast platform.\u003c/aside>\u003c/p>\u003cp>He told us the city’s oldest plaza is Portsmouth Square, located in the heart of Chinatown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To understand why this spot is considered the first, Pollock said we have to go back to the days when San Francisco was occupied by Spanish and Mexican settlers. They called their settlement “Yerba Buena” and the plaza — what we now call Portsmouth Square — was the center of government affairs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So how did Portsmouth Square get its name?\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11787759\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 3252px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-11787759 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/Portsmouth-Square.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"3252\" height=\"1581\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/Portsmouth-Square.jpg 3252w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/Portsmouth-Square-160x78.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/Portsmouth-Square-800x389.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/Portsmouth-Square-1020x496.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/Portsmouth-Square-1200x583.jpg 1200w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/Portsmouth-Square-1920x933.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 3252px) 100vw, 3252px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Portsmouth Square, 1851 \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Library of Congress)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When the Mexican-American War broke out in 1846 many Americans believed it was their Manifest Destiny to expand West, and Yerba Buena was one of those desired territories.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Capt. John Montgomery lands near Portsmouth Square and symbolically raised a flag to signal this was an American occupation,” said Pollock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shortly after, Montgomery renamed the square after his ship, the USS Portsmouth.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>A Very Distinguished Square\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Beyond being the first city square, a historic park and a hub for the local Chinese community, Portsmouth Square has a few other claims to fame.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11787747\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 760px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2019/11/21/the-rich-history-of-san-franciscos-first-plaza/nypl-digitalcollections-510d47e0-43ef-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99-001-w/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-11787747\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-11787747 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/nypl.digitalcollections.510d47e0-43ef-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.001.w.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"760\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/nypl.digitalcollections.510d47e0-43ef-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.001.w.jpg 760w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/nypl.digitalcollections.510d47e0-43ef-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.001.w-160x84.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 760px) 100vw, 760px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Portsmouth Square \u003ccite>(Courtesy of New York Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>A year after the Americans claimed the territory, the first public school in California was built at the square’s southwest corner.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Some anecdotal stories say not many attended in the beginning. Trying to rope people into education was far from their thoughts at the time, and they didn’t have any truancy offers to chase down people who didn’t attend,” said Pollock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The square also has ties to the Gold Rush. According to local lore, Portsmouth Square was where the discovery of gold was first announced. As news spread, thousands of prospective miners migrated to the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fast forward to 1873 and the city gets its first cable cars. The inventor, Andrew Smith Hallidie, piloted the cars by driving past Portsmouth Square.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11787811\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-image-11787811 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/earthquake.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"333\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/earthquake.jpg 640w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2019/11/earthquake-160x83.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Soldiers being served supper at Portsmouth Square after the 1906 earthquake. \u003ccite>(Library of Congress)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Then the 1906 earthquake and fire devastated the city. In the open space at Portsmouth Square, camps were set up for people who were displaced or burnt out of their homes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[Eventually] the military established their own camp and ended up building some 150 two-room earthquake cottages that were in neat little rows within the square,” said Pollock. That camp housed people for up to a year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A lot has happened here — more of which we explore on the Bay Curious podcast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Or you can see it for yourself. Take a walk through the park and you’ll find a number of commemorative plaques highlighting all of this history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "the-not-so-crystal-clean-history-of-san-franciscos-drinking-water-2",
"title": "The Not-So-Crystal Clean History of San Francisco's Drinking Water",
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"content": "\u003cp>To the west of Interstate 280 along the Peninsula south of San Francisco, there’s a long stretch of beautiful greenery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The hills are carpeted with trees, a thick bank of coastal fog hugs the ridge line, and nestled in the middle sit two crystal clear lakes. It all looks so pristine, untouched even.[baycuriouspodcastinfo]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it’s entirely man made.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Jackie Nuñez moved to San Mateo from Santa Barbara, she couldn’t help but notice the Crystal Springs reservoirs. Jackie studied environmental science in college, and she asked \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/series/baycurious\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Bay Curious\u003c/a>: “What’s the story behind Crystal Springs? There’s not that much information about it online, other than that it’s a man-made reservoir.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s actually two reservoirs: The Upper and Lower Crystal Springs Reservoirs are two of four reservoirs in the Crystal Springs watershed that once belonged to a private monopoly built to serve San Francisco after the Gold Rush.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You may recall from history class that, after gold was found at Sutter’s Mill in early 1848, it took only a couple of years for San Francisco to \u003ca href=\"http://www.sfgenealogy.org/sf/history/hgpop.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">transform\u003c/a> from a sleepy dock town of a few hundred people into a city with more than 20,000 residents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But this unlikely boomtown sat on a tiny spit of land surrounded by salt water on three sides, and the new denizens of San Francisco couldn’t survive on whiskey alone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There were quite a few freshwater creeks amid the sand dunes of early San Francisco, but nowhere near enough to satisfy the needs of 21,000 people. Clever businessmen made personal fortunes bringing water in from Marin County by barge and then sending horses and donkeys around the city dragging water barrels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11747170\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11747170\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37099_Screen-Shot-2019-05-14-at-2.54.09-PM-qut-800x447.jpg\" alt=\"The San Francisquito Creek on the Stanford campus. Creeks like this were tempting to San Franciscans thirsty for San Mateo County's fresh water in the years after the Gold Rush.\" width=\"800\" height=\"447\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37099_Screen-Shot-2019-05-14-at-2.54.09-PM-qut-800x447.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37099_Screen-Shot-2019-05-14-at-2.54.09-PM-qut-160x89.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37099_Screen-Shot-2019-05-14-at-2.54.09-PM-qut-1020x570.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37099_Screen-Shot-2019-05-14-at-2.54.09-PM-qut-1200x671.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37099_Screen-Shot-2019-05-14-at-2.54.09-PM-qut.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The San Francisquito Creek on the Stanford campus. Creeks like this were tempting to San Franciscans thirsty for San Mateo County’s fresh water in the years after the Gold Rush. \u003ccite>(Rachael Myrow/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>That Marin water was expensive. During dry times, a mere bucket could cost you a gold dollar, which would be worth about $300 today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This was a big entrepreneurial opportunity,” said Mitch Postel, president of the \u003ca href=\"https://historysmc.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">San Mateo County Historical Association\u003c/a>. He said it wasn’t long before a handful of speculators started looking to make money by bringing water in from south of the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the time, the Peninsula was sparsely populated with a series of farms and a stagecoach road running through the middle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Really, the only outstanding thing that you would have found was the stagecoach stop, which became a pretty elaborate hotel for its day: the Crystal Springs Hotel,” Postel said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11747158\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11747158\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37105_1971-156B-001_2019mar03_010_P-qut-800x647.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"647\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37105_1971-156B-001_2019mar03_010_P-qut-800x647.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37105_1971-156B-001_2019mar03_010_P-qut-160x129.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37105_1971-156B-001_2019mar03_010_P-qut-1020x825.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37105_1971-156B-001_2019mar03_010_P-qut-1200x971.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37105_1971-156B-001_2019mar03_010_P-qut.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The only known drawing of the Crystal Springs Hotel, from which historians believe the area around it was named. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the San Mateo County Historical Association)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>A man by the name of George Ensign took in this picture postcard of a scene and realized it could become a vast watershed for San Francisco. Thus began a masterful plan to divert the region’s freshwater creeks and put much of this acreage under water.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1858, Ensign joined a group of like-minded investors who pushed for a change in state law that allowed for the formation of corporations to supply cities, counties and towns with water. These \u003cem>water\u003c/em> companies were empowered to acquire lands and waters by eminent domain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two years later, Ensign incorporated the Spring Valley Water Works (later changed to Company), which proceeded to buy up those farms and the hotel in San Mateo County.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11747167\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11747167\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/The_Wasp_1881-06-25_The_modern_alchemists-_turning_water_into_gold-800x1125.jpg\" alt='From the June 25, 1881 edition of \"The Wasp,\" a political cartoon with the caption \"The modern alchemists turning water into gold.\"' width=\"800\" height=\"1125\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/The_Wasp_1881-06-25_The_modern_alchemists-_turning_water_into_gold-800x1125.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/The_Wasp_1881-06-25_The_modern_alchemists-_turning_water_into_gold-160x225.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/The_Wasp_1881-06-25_The_modern_alchemists-_turning_water_into_gold-1020x1434.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/The_Wasp_1881-06-25_The_modern_alchemists-_turning_water_into_gold-853x1200.jpg 853w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/The_Wasp_1881-06-25_The_modern_alchemists-_turning_water_into_gold-1920x2700.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/The_Wasp_1881-06-25_The_modern_alchemists-_turning_water_into_gold.jpg 1456w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">From the June 25, 1881, edition of ‘The Wasp,’ a political cartoon skewering the fortunes being made by a select few in selling water to San Francisco.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“A lot of the times they would enlist the aid of the courts when people got wise to what they were doing, and might have the land condemned at 10 cents on a dollar,” Postel said. “They weren’t above any method in order to get the land that they needed.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, the watershed has grown to 23,000 acres, a massive protected natural space in an age when much of the San Francisco Bay Area has been paved over for housing, office spaces and freeways.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite the enormity of the service provided to San Francisco, the company was hated by its customers. For one thing, there was the ever-present, fetid stench of political corruption and dubious land deals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was a monopoly. It probably had even more latitude in what it could do than PG&E,” Postel said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also, the water quality and service in San Francisco were said to be \u003ca href=\"http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=WATER!_WATER!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">awful, and expensive\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As time went on, the greater Bay Area’s appetite for water continued to grow with the population, and the reservoirs of the Crystal Springs watershed were not enough. So the Spring Valley Water Company expanded into the Alameda Creek watershed on the other side of the bay, making farmers there angry, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Politicians in San Francisco schemed for decades to take the company out of private hands, and they finally succeeded in 1930. That’s when the city started bringing \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11674188/hetch-hetchy-waters-epic-journey-from-mountains-to-tap\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">water from Yosemite\u003c/a> to the Bay Area, through what is known today as the \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfwater.org/index.aspx?page=554\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Hetch Hetchy Regional Water System.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, the Crystal Springs reservoirs are part of this water system, but only a small percentage of the drinking water consumed by the Bay Area today comes from San Mateo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11747163\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11747163\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37102_springvalley-lg2-800x577.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"577\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37102_springvalley-lg2-800x577.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37102_springvalley-lg2-160x115.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37102_springvalley-lg2-1020x736.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37102_springvalley-lg2.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A map from “San Francisco Water” Vol. II No. 1 published in January, 1923. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the San Mateo County Historical Association)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>More Crystal Springs Questions Answered\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Jackie Nuñez isn’t the only person who’s asked Bay Curious about Crystal Springs:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>“There is a group of private homes on Upper Crystal Springs Reservoir. How was that allowed?”\u003c/strong> — Rupi Singh\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These homes could easily be considered the greatest municipal perk in the Bay Area: residences for the families of \u003ca href=\"https://baynature.org/article/the-keeper-of-the-waters/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">watershed keepers and supervisors\u003c/a>. The rent is reportedly not market rate, but they’ll tell you somebody’s got to live on the land to watch and protect it from trespassers and the like.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11747688\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11747688\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/CrystalSprings2-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/CrystalSprings2-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/CrystalSprings2-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/CrystalSprings2-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/CrystalSprings2-1200x800.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/CrystalSprings2.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Lower Crystal Springs Reservoir Dam keeps the water from flowing to the city of San Mateo. \u003ccite>(Sruti Mamidanna/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>“With all the beautiful open space and hills around the west side of Crystal Springs Reservoir, why isn’t the area open to hiking and biking?”\u003c/strong> — Raoul Wertz\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The public can enjoy the \u003ca href=\"https://parks.smcgov.org/crystal-springs-regional-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Crystal Springs Regional Trail\u003c/a>, a 15.3-mile trail, which will eventually run 17.5 miles from San Bruno to Woodside when it’s finished. Currently, the trail serves more than 325,000 visitors annually.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That said, most of the watershed is not open to the public, especially that stretch on the western side of the water. A local group called \u003ca href=\"https://openthewatershed.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Open the SF Watershed\u003c/a> has been lobbying for years to expand public access, but they haven’t been able to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/10472738/hikers-bikers-press-for-more-public-trails-in-peninsula-watershed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">crack the resistance\u003c/a>, which includes not just the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which runs the watershed, but also a number of local environmental groups who would rather keep human interference on the land to a bare minimum.\u003cbr>\n[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"title": "The Not-So-Crystal Clean History of San Francisco's Drinking Water | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>To the west of Interstate 280 along the Peninsula south of San Francisco, there’s a long stretch of beautiful greenery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The hills are carpeted with trees, a thick bank of coastal fog hugs the ridge line, and nestled in the middle sit two crystal clear lakes. It all looks so pristine, untouched even.\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003caside class=\"alignleft utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__bayCuriousPodcastShortcode__bayCurious\">\u003cimg src=https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/bayCuriousLogo.png alt=\"Bay Curious Podcast\" loading=\"lazy\" />\n \u003ca href=\"/news/series/baycurious\">Bay Curious\u003c/a> is a podcast that answers your questions about the Bay Area.\n Subscribe on \u003ca href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/bay-curious/id1172473406\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Apple Podcasts\u003c/a>,\n \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/podcasts/500557090/bay-curious\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR One\u003c/a> or your favorite podcast platform.\u003c/aside>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it’s entirely man made.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Jackie Nuñez moved to San Mateo from Santa Barbara, she couldn’t help but notice the Crystal Springs reservoirs. Jackie studied environmental science in college, and she asked \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/series/baycurious\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Bay Curious\u003c/a>: “What’s the story behind Crystal Springs? There’s not that much information about it online, other than that it’s a man-made reservoir.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s actually two reservoirs: The Upper and Lower Crystal Springs Reservoirs are two of four reservoirs in the Crystal Springs watershed that once belonged to a private monopoly built to serve San Francisco after the Gold Rush.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You may recall from history class that, after gold was found at Sutter’s Mill in early 1848, it took only a couple of years for San Francisco to \u003ca href=\"http://www.sfgenealogy.org/sf/history/hgpop.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">transform\u003c/a> from a sleepy dock town of a few hundred people into a city with more than 20,000 residents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But this unlikely boomtown sat on a tiny spit of land surrounded by salt water on three sides, and the new denizens of San Francisco couldn’t survive on whiskey alone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There were quite a few freshwater creeks amid the sand dunes of early San Francisco, but nowhere near enough to satisfy the needs of 21,000 people. Clever businessmen made personal fortunes bringing water in from Marin County by barge and then sending horses and donkeys around the city dragging water barrels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11747170\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11747170\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37099_Screen-Shot-2019-05-14-at-2.54.09-PM-qut-800x447.jpg\" alt=\"The San Francisquito Creek on the Stanford campus. Creeks like this were tempting to San Franciscans thirsty for San Mateo County's fresh water in the years after the Gold Rush.\" width=\"800\" height=\"447\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37099_Screen-Shot-2019-05-14-at-2.54.09-PM-qut-800x447.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37099_Screen-Shot-2019-05-14-at-2.54.09-PM-qut-160x89.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37099_Screen-Shot-2019-05-14-at-2.54.09-PM-qut-1020x570.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37099_Screen-Shot-2019-05-14-at-2.54.09-PM-qut-1200x671.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37099_Screen-Shot-2019-05-14-at-2.54.09-PM-qut.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The San Francisquito Creek on the Stanford campus. Creeks like this were tempting to San Franciscans thirsty for San Mateo County’s fresh water in the years after the Gold Rush. \u003ccite>(Rachael Myrow/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>That Marin water was expensive. During dry times, a mere bucket could cost you a gold dollar, which would be worth about $300 today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This was a big entrepreneurial opportunity,” said Mitch Postel, president of the \u003ca href=\"https://historysmc.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">San Mateo County Historical Association\u003c/a>. He said it wasn’t long before a handful of speculators started looking to make money by bringing water in from south of the city.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the time, the Peninsula was sparsely populated with a series of farms and a stagecoach road running through the middle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Really, the only outstanding thing that you would have found was the stagecoach stop, which became a pretty elaborate hotel for its day: the Crystal Springs Hotel,” Postel said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11747158\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11747158\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37105_1971-156B-001_2019mar03_010_P-qut-800x647.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"647\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37105_1971-156B-001_2019mar03_010_P-qut-800x647.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37105_1971-156B-001_2019mar03_010_P-qut-160x129.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37105_1971-156B-001_2019mar03_010_P-qut-1020x825.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37105_1971-156B-001_2019mar03_010_P-qut-1200x971.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37105_1971-156B-001_2019mar03_010_P-qut.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The only known drawing of the Crystal Springs Hotel, from which historians believe the area around it was named. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the San Mateo County Historical Association)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>A man by the name of George Ensign took in this picture postcard of a scene and realized it could become a vast watershed for San Francisco. Thus began a masterful plan to divert the region’s freshwater creeks and put much of this acreage under water.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1858, Ensign joined a group of like-minded investors who pushed for a change in state law that allowed for the formation of corporations to supply cities, counties and towns with water. These \u003cem>water\u003c/em> companies were empowered to acquire lands and waters by eminent domain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two years later, Ensign incorporated the Spring Valley Water Works (later changed to Company), which proceeded to buy up those farms and the hotel in San Mateo County.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11747167\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11747167\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/The_Wasp_1881-06-25_The_modern_alchemists-_turning_water_into_gold-800x1125.jpg\" alt='From the June 25, 1881 edition of \"The Wasp,\" a political cartoon with the caption \"The modern alchemists turning water into gold.\"' width=\"800\" height=\"1125\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/The_Wasp_1881-06-25_The_modern_alchemists-_turning_water_into_gold-800x1125.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/The_Wasp_1881-06-25_The_modern_alchemists-_turning_water_into_gold-160x225.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/The_Wasp_1881-06-25_The_modern_alchemists-_turning_water_into_gold-1020x1434.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/The_Wasp_1881-06-25_The_modern_alchemists-_turning_water_into_gold-853x1200.jpg 853w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/The_Wasp_1881-06-25_The_modern_alchemists-_turning_water_into_gold-1920x2700.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/The_Wasp_1881-06-25_The_modern_alchemists-_turning_water_into_gold.jpg 1456w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">From the June 25, 1881, edition of ‘The Wasp,’ a political cartoon skewering the fortunes being made by a select few in selling water to San Francisco.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“A lot of the times they would enlist the aid of the courts when people got wise to what they were doing, and might have the land condemned at 10 cents on a dollar,” Postel said. “They weren’t above any method in order to get the land that they needed.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, the watershed has grown to 23,000 acres, a massive protected natural space in an age when much of the San Francisco Bay Area has been paved over for housing, office spaces and freeways.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite the enormity of the service provided to San Francisco, the company was hated by its customers. For one thing, there was the ever-present, fetid stench of political corruption and dubious land deals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was a monopoly. It probably had even more latitude in what it could do than PG&E,” Postel said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also, the water quality and service in San Francisco were said to be \u003ca href=\"http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=WATER!_WATER!\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">awful, and expensive\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As time went on, the greater Bay Area’s appetite for water continued to grow with the population, and the reservoirs of the Crystal Springs watershed were not enough. So the Spring Valley Water Company expanded into the Alameda Creek watershed on the other side of the bay, making farmers there angry, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Politicians in San Francisco schemed for decades to take the company out of private hands, and they finally succeeded in 1930. That’s when the city started bringing \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11674188/hetch-hetchy-waters-epic-journey-from-mountains-to-tap\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">water from Yosemite\u003c/a> to the Bay Area, through what is known today as the \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfwater.org/index.aspx?page=554\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Hetch Hetchy Regional Water System.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, the Crystal Springs reservoirs are part of this water system, but only a small percentage of the drinking water consumed by the Bay Area today comes from San Mateo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11747163\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11747163\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37102_springvalley-lg2-800x577.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"577\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37102_springvalley-lg2-800x577.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37102_springvalley-lg2-160x115.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37102_springvalley-lg2-1020x736.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/RS37102_springvalley-lg2.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A map from “San Francisco Water” Vol. II No. 1 published in January, 1923. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of the San Mateo County Historical Association)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>More Crystal Springs Questions Answered\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Jackie Nuñez isn’t the only person who’s asked Bay Curious about Crystal Springs:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>“There is a group of private homes on Upper Crystal Springs Reservoir. How was that allowed?”\u003c/strong> — Rupi Singh\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These homes could easily be considered the greatest municipal perk in the Bay Area: residences for the families of \u003ca href=\"https://baynature.org/article/the-keeper-of-the-waters/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">watershed keepers and supervisors\u003c/a>. The rent is reportedly not market rate, but they’ll tell you somebody’s got to live on the land to watch and protect it from trespassers and the like.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11747688\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11747688\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/CrystalSprings2-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/CrystalSprings2-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/CrystalSprings2-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/CrystalSprings2-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/CrystalSprings2-1200x800.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/05/CrystalSprings2.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Lower Crystal Springs Reservoir Dam keeps the water from flowing to the city of San Mateo. \u003ccite>(Sruti Mamidanna/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>“With all the beautiful open space and hills around the west side of Crystal Springs Reservoir, why isn’t the area open to hiking and biking?”\u003c/strong> — Raoul Wertz\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The public can enjoy the \u003ca href=\"https://parks.smcgov.org/crystal-springs-regional-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Crystal Springs Regional Trail\u003c/a>, a 15.3-mile trail, which will eventually run 17.5 miles from San Bruno to Woodside when it’s finished. Currently, the trail serves more than 325,000 visitors annually.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That said, most of the watershed is not open to the public, especially that stretch on the western side of the water. A local group called \u003ca href=\"https://openthewatershed.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Open the SF Watershed\u003c/a> has been lobbying for years to expand public access, but they haven’t been able to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/10472738/hikers-bikers-press-for-more-public-trails-in-peninsula-watershed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">crack the resistance\u003c/a>, which includes not just the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which runs the watershed, but also a number of local environmental groups who would rather keep human interference on the land to a bare minimum.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "meet-charley-parkhurst-the-gold-rushs-fearless-gender-nonconforming-stagecoach-driver",
"title": "Meet Charley Parkhurst: the Gold Rush's Fearless, Gender Nonconforming Stagecoach Driver",
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"content": "\u003cp>During the Gold Rush, there were few in the West as notorious and formidable as the stagecoach driver.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriouspodcastinfo]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These men would drive gold and other valuables from the far-flung mining outposts in the Sierra to the big-city banks of San Francisco. It was a treacherous journey that required expert navigation across rough terrain — but the biggest challenge became thieves. They lay in wait, eager to rob drivers and passengers of their valuable cargo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stage drivers had to be good with a gun to keep their cargo safe and their passengers alive. For their skill and fearlessness, stage drivers were paid very well, and the best ones were known by name across California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among the best drivers in the entire state was Charley Parkhurst. In a profession where hypermasculinity was rewarded, Parkhurst stands out, because he was gender nonconforming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Charley Parkhurst: The Famous California Driver\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Parkhurst was described as a man of slight build, who chewed tobacco, drank whiskey and swore often. He wore beaded riding gloves and used a whip on his horses — and to stay out of brawls.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He was tough, and he looked even tougher after he was half-blinded when a horse kicked him in the face (it was probably scared by a snake), which earned him the nickname “One-Eyed Charley.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some knew the story of his crossing a crumbling bridge during a storm. Others cared only about his ability to keep the bandits away from their goods. None of his peers knew that Charley was \u003ca href=\"https://www.glaad.org/reference/covering-trans-community\">assigned female at birth\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Early Years\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>The accounts of Parkhurst’s early years sometimes contradict one another. As far as we know, Parkhurst was born around 1812 in \u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/image/50297431/?terms=Charley%2BParkhurst\">New Hampshire\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some say Parkhurst spent his early years in an orphanage, then ran away to find work in stables. Others say Parkhurst worked on an \u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/image/35077156/\">uncle’s farm\u003c/a> until they had a falling out, after which Parkhurst ran away to Rhode Island. Either way, around this time, young Parkhurst started wearing boys clothes, living as a male and learning how to ride horses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11742538\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11742538\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/Tallyho-Coaching-Sioux-City-party-Coaching-at-the-Great-Hot-Springs-of-Dakota.jpg\" alt=\"Tallyho Coaching, Sioux City party Coaching at the Great Hot Springs of Dakota\" width=\"640\" height=\"531\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/Tallyho-Coaching-Sioux-City-party-Coaching-at-the-Great-Hot-Springs-of-Dakota.jpg 640w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/Tallyho-Coaching-Sioux-City-party-Coaching-at-the-Great-Hot-Springs-of-Dakota-160x133.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A stagecoach back in the 1800s. \u003ccite>(Library of Congress)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Eventually, Parkhurst started working as a stage driver on the East Coast, until the Gold Rush brought him out West around 1850.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Gender Terms in History\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>One could use him or they as a pronoun for Parkhurst.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Because ‘they’ is a wonderful nonbinary pronoun that can be used today to mark people who are sort of refusing or renouncing the gender binary,” says Don Romesburg, a historian and chair of women’s and gender studies at Sonoma State University. “But I think they can also be used for people in the past as a kind of marker of undecidability. I think that if you’re going to pick one wrong gender pronoun for Charley, it would be she. Because for as much of Charley’s life that Charley was an active agent in asserting a gendered self … he was he.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s hard to say if Parkhurst was trans because we don’t know why Parkhurst decided to live as a man. There could have been many motivations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Women were given very few economic opportunities in the mid-19th century California. They could be seamstresses or laundresses or teachers or sex workers essentially,” says Romesburg.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Plus, people who had romantic ties to someone of the same sex would have been marginalized at the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s all sorts of reasons beyond perhaps a true expression of one’s gendered self that someone like Parkhurst might choose to live as a man for many years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Romesburg says, Parkhurst’s life is clearly part of trans history.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The Gold Rush\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Parkhurst ran stretches of road all around California — between Mariposa and Stockton, Oakland and San Jose, and San Juan and Santa Cruz. Parkhurst was highly sought after, working for many wealthy families, and even drove a large cargo of gold for Wells Fargo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11742554\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-11742554\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/el-dorado-04487v-1020x638.jpg\" alt=\"Gold miners, El Dorado, California. Photo, between circa 1848 and 1853.\" width=\"640\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/el-dorado-04487v-1020x638.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/el-dorado-04487v-160x100.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/el-dorado-04487v-800x500.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/el-dorado-04487v.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Gold miners, El Dorado, California. Photo, between 1848 and 1853. \u003ccite>(Library of Congress)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>With a money box full of gold and a coach full of passengers, Parkhurst would drive six horses across rough terrain where bandits lay in wait.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once Parkhurst was stopped by a gang of highway robbers whose faces were disguised with masks made out of long underwear. They brought a gun to Parkhurst’s head and threatened the passengers. Parkhurst’s gun was out of reach, and he was forced to give the bandits the money box. However Parkhurst defiantly told the bandits that if it happened again, it would be unpleasant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After that, Parkhurst was always prepared. The next time he was stopped by a famous desperado called “Sugarfoot,” Parkhurst shot him dead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It wasn’t long before Parkhurst developed a reputation as one of the safest California “whips,” and became known as “\u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/image/283388836/?terms=Charley%2BParkhurst\">the ‘boss’ driver of the road.”\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11742544\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-11742544\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/Wells-Fargo-Co.s-Express-Office-1020x911.jpg\" alt=\"Wells, Fargo & Co.'s Express Office\" width=\"640\" height=\"572\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/Wells-Fargo-Co.s-Express-Office-1020x911.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/Wells-Fargo-Co.s-Express-Office-160x143.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/Wells-Fargo-Co.s-Express-Office-800x715.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/Wells-Fargo-Co.s-Express-Office.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Wells, Fargo & Co.’s Express Office \u003ccite>(Library of Congress/Lawrence & Houseworth)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But was living out on the road lonely?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While there were passengers floating in and out of Parkhurst’s life, it was said he often worked alone, serving as both driver and lookout.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for love, it’s hard to say. There is a story about a poor widow who was about to lose her house. Parkhurst bought the house to give back to her. Some speculated Parkhurst did it for the widow’s daughter, who was pretty, but Parkhurst left that town soon after.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Parkhurst retired from stagecoach driving after trains started crisscrossing the Golden State. He worked as a farmer and lumberman, where he “\u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/image/20424854/?terms=Charley%2BParkhurst\">always commanded the highest wages\u003c/a>” and had saved “\u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/image/20424854/?terms=Charley%2BParkhurst\">several thousands of dollars\u003c/a>” by that point. Parkhurst was also considered generous and social.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Parkhurst was also registered to vote in 1867, about 50 years before women got suffrage. Some say Parkhurst could have been the first person assigned female at birth to cast a ballot in California for a presidential election.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charley continued to work until he developed severe rheumatism in his 60s, which eventually shriveled his limbs. Then in 1879, Parkhurst developed cancer of the tongue and died at the age of 67 near Watsonville, California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That was when the public found out that Parkhurst was assigned female at birth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What followed was a national sensation.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"alignleft\">Often when talking about trans people, publications disclose birth names, usually with the implication that it is the person’s “real name.” \u003ca href=\"https://www.glaad.org/reference/covering-trans-community\">Guidelines for covering the trans community\u003c/a> instruct media outlets to treat chosen names as real names.\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Across the country, papers printed stories that might be seen as insensitive today. A number of headlines erase Parkhurst’s experience living as a man: \u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/image/20424854/?terms=Charley%2BParkhurst\">Thirty Years in Disguise\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/image/457374668/?terms=charley%2Bparkhurst\">The Female Stage Driver\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/image/194684511/?terms=charley%2Bparkhurst\">A Queer Woman\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most national coverage of Parkhurst still conveyed a sense of awe in everything he accomplished. In Emily Skidmore’s book, \u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/True-Sex-Lives-Twentieth-Century-ebook/dp/B0757458G3\">“True Sex: the Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Century,”\u003c/a> she found that when gender histories of trans men are revealed, local communities tend to be quite sympathetic to that person. When national newspapers picked those stories up, the narratives shift to degeneracy, masquerading, fooling, disguising and pathology.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Parkhurst Today\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Since his death, Charley’s story has been told in more obscure historical texts, but now it seems Charley will take a more permanent place in California history books.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The FAIR Education Act passed in 2011 ensures the roles and contributions of LGBT Americans and people with disabilities be included in K–12 history education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Romesburg fought to include Charley in lesson plans and says, “It’s important that we see LGBT lives in the past so that we understand that queerness and transness is not something that simply appears after Stonewall, for example. But it’s something that’s been around in some form everywhere for always.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Great Stories From Trans History\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Charley highlights just one of many trans stories. To learn a little more, we’ve compiled a list of a few people in trans history to read about: \u003ca href=\"https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-incredible-chevalier-deon-who-left-france-as-a-male-spy-and-returned-as-a-christian-woman\">Chevalier D’Eon\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/obituaries/overlooked-marsha-p-johnson.html\">Marsha P. Johnson\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.masstpc.org/wewha/\">We’wha\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/22/donald-trump-transgender-military-ban-albert-cashier\">Albert D. J. Cashier\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HObtUIElQZY\">Sir Lady Java\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/its-easier-to-change-a-body-than-to-change-a-mind-the-extraordinary-life-and-lonely-death-of-roberta-8899823.html\">Roberta Cowell\u003c/a>,\u003ca href=\"http://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/tgi-bios/alan-l-hart\"> Dr. Alan L. Hart\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/aug/19/2\">Nong Toom\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://srlp.org/about/who-was-sylvia-rivera/\">Sylvia Rivera\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.historyisgaypodcast.com/notes/2019/1/20/episode-21-the-real-housewife-of-rome\">Emperor Elagabalus\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.queerportraits.com/bio/anderson\">Lucy Hicks Anderson,\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/18/style/paris-has-burned.html\">Angie Xtravaganza\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tennis/2018/03/30/tennissrenee-richards-first-transgender-woman-play-professional/\">Renee Richards\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[baycuriousquestion]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Stagecoach drivers were seen as the masculine ideal in the Old West. It was a profession demanding lots of skill, physicality, endurance and courage. Charley Parkhurst was one of the best, and unbeknown to his peers, he was assigned female at birth.",
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"title": "Meet Charley Parkhurst: the Gold Rush's Fearless, Gender Nonconforming Stagecoach Driver | KQED",
"description": "Stagecoach drivers were seen as the masculine ideal in the Old West. It was a profession demanding lots of skill, physicality, endurance and courage. Charley Parkhurst was one of the best, and unbeknown to his peers, he was assigned female at birth.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>During the Gold Rush, there were few in the West as notorious and formidable as the stagecoach driver.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003caside class=\"alignleft utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__bayCuriousPodcastShortcode__bayCurious\">\u003cimg src=https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/bayCuriousLogo.png alt=\"Bay Curious Podcast\" loading=\"lazy\" />\n \u003ca href=\"/news/series/baycurious\">Bay Curious\u003c/a> is a podcast that answers your questions about the Bay Area.\n Subscribe on \u003ca href=\"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/bay-curious/id1172473406\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Apple Podcasts\u003c/a>,\n \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/podcasts/500557090/bay-curious\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">NPR One\u003c/a> or your favorite podcast platform.\u003c/aside>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These men would drive gold and other valuables from the far-flung mining outposts in the Sierra to the big-city banks of San Francisco. It was a treacherous journey that required expert navigation across rough terrain — but the biggest challenge became thieves. They lay in wait, eager to rob drivers and passengers of their valuable cargo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stage drivers had to be good with a gun to keep their cargo safe and their passengers alive. For their skill and fearlessness, stage drivers were paid very well, and the best ones were known by name across California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among the best drivers in the entire state was Charley Parkhurst. In a profession where hypermasculinity was rewarded, Parkhurst stands out, because he was gender nonconforming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Charley Parkhurst: The Famous California Driver\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Parkhurst was described as a man of slight build, who chewed tobacco, drank whiskey and swore often. He wore beaded riding gloves and used a whip on his horses — and to stay out of brawls.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He was tough, and he looked even tougher after he was half-blinded when a horse kicked him in the face (it was probably scared by a snake), which earned him the nickname “One-Eyed Charley.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some knew the story of his crossing a crumbling bridge during a storm. Others cared only about his ability to keep the bandits away from their goods. None of his peers knew that Charley was \u003ca href=\"https://www.glaad.org/reference/covering-trans-community\">assigned female at birth\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Early Years\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>The accounts of Parkhurst’s early years sometimes contradict one another. As far as we know, Parkhurst was born around 1812 in \u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/image/50297431/?terms=Charley%2BParkhurst\">New Hampshire\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some say Parkhurst spent his early years in an orphanage, then ran away to find work in stables. Others say Parkhurst worked on an \u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/image/35077156/\">uncle’s farm\u003c/a> until they had a falling out, after which Parkhurst ran away to Rhode Island. Either way, around this time, young Parkhurst started wearing boys clothes, living as a male and learning how to ride horses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11742538\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11742538\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/Tallyho-Coaching-Sioux-City-party-Coaching-at-the-Great-Hot-Springs-of-Dakota.jpg\" alt=\"Tallyho Coaching, Sioux City party Coaching at the Great Hot Springs of Dakota\" width=\"640\" height=\"531\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/Tallyho-Coaching-Sioux-City-party-Coaching-at-the-Great-Hot-Springs-of-Dakota.jpg 640w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/Tallyho-Coaching-Sioux-City-party-Coaching-at-the-Great-Hot-Springs-of-Dakota-160x133.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A stagecoach back in the 1800s. \u003ccite>(Library of Congress)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Eventually, Parkhurst started working as a stage driver on the East Coast, until the Gold Rush brought him out West around 1850.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Gender Terms in History\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>One could use him or they as a pronoun for Parkhurst.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Because ‘they’ is a wonderful nonbinary pronoun that can be used today to mark people who are sort of refusing or renouncing the gender binary,” says Don Romesburg, a historian and chair of women’s and gender studies at Sonoma State University. “But I think they can also be used for people in the past as a kind of marker of undecidability. I think that if you’re going to pick one wrong gender pronoun for Charley, it would be she. Because for as much of Charley’s life that Charley was an active agent in asserting a gendered self … he was he.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s hard to say if Parkhurst was trans because we don’t know why Parkhurst decided to live as a man. There could have been many motivations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Women were given very few economic opportunities in the mid-19th century California. They could be seamstresses or laundresses or teachers or sex workers essentially,” says Romesburg.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Plus, people who had romantic ties to someone of the same sex would have been marginalized at the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s all sorts of reasons beyond perhaps a true expression of one’s gendered self that someone like Parkhurst might choose to live as a man for many years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Romesburg says, Parkhurst’s life is clearly part of trans history.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The Gold Rush\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Parkhurst ran stretches of road all around California — between Mariposa and Stockton, Oakland and San Jose, and San Juan and Santa Cruz. Parkhurst was highly sought after, working for many wealthy families, and even drove a large cargo of gold for Wells Fargo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11742554\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-11742554\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/el-dorado-04487v-1020x638.jpg\" alt=\"Gold miners, El Dorado, California. Photo, between circa 1848 and 1853.\" width=\"640\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/el-dorado-04487v-1020x638.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/el-dorado-04487v-160x100.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/el-dorado-04487v-800x500.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/el-dorado-04487v.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Gold miners, El Dorado, California. Photo, between 1848 and 1853. \u003ccite>(Library of Congress)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>With a money box full of gold and a coach full of passengers, Parkhurst would drive six horses across rough terrain where bandits lay in wait.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once Parkhurst was stopped by a gang of highway robbers whose faces were disguised with masks made out of long underwear. They brought a gun to Parkhurst’s head and threatened the passengers. Parkhurst’s gun was out of reach, and he was forced to give the bandits the money box. However Parkhurst defiantly told the bandits that if it happened again, it would be unpleasant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After that, Parkhurst was always prepared. The next time he was stopped by a famous desperado called “Sugarfoot,” Parkhurst shot him dead.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It wasn’t long before Parkhurst developed a reputation as one of the safest California “whips,” and became known as “\u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/image/283388836/?terms=Charley%2BParkhurst\">the ‘boss’ driver of the road.”\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11742544\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-11742544\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/Wells-Fargo-Co.s-Express-Office-1020x911.jpg\" alt=\"Wells, Fargo & Co.'s Express Office\" width=\"640\" height=\"572\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/Wells-Fargo-Co.s-Express-Office-1020x911.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/Wells-Fargo-Co.s-Express-Office-160x143.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/Wells-Fargo-Co.s-Express-Office-800x715.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/04/Wells-Fargo-Co.s-Express-Office.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Wells, Fargo & Co.’s Express Office \u003ccite>(Library of Congress/Lawrence & Houseworth)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But was living out on the road lonely?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While there were passengers floating in and out of Parkhurst’s life, it was said he often worked alone, serving as both driver and lookout.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for love, it’s hard to say. There is a story about a poor widow who was about to lose her house. Parkhurst bought the house to give back to her. Some speculated Parkhurst did it for the widow’s daughter, who was pretty, but Parkhurst left that town soon after.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Parkhurst retired from stagecoach driving after trains started crisscrossing the Golden State. He worked as a farmer and lumberman, where he “\u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/image/20424854/?terms=Charley%2BParkhurst\">always commanded the highest wages\u003c/a>” and had saved “\u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/image/20424854/?terms=Charley%2BParkhurst\">several thousands of dollars\u003c/a>” by that point. Parkhurst was also considered generous and social.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Parkhurst was also registered to vote in 1867, about 50 years before women got suffrage. Some say Parkhurst could have been the first person assigned female at birth to cast a ballot in California for a presidential election.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charley continued to work until he developed severe rheumatism in his 60s, which eventually shriveled his limbs. Then in 1879, Parkhurst developed cancer of the tongue and died at the age of 67 near Watsonville, California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That was when the public found out that Parkhurst was assigned female at birth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What followed was a national sensation.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"alignleft\">Often when talking about trans people, publications disclose birth names, usually with the implication that it is the person’s “real name.” \u003ca href=\"https://www.glaad.org/reference/covering-trans-community\">Guidelines for covering the trans community\u003c/a> instruct media outlets to treat chosen names as real names.\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>Across the country, papers printed stories that might be seen as insensitive today. A number of headlines erase Parkhurst’s experience living as a man: \u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/image/20424854/?terms=Charley%2BParkhurst\">Thirty Years in Disguise\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/image/457374668/?terms=charley%2Bparkhurst\">The Female Stage Driver\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.newspapers.com/image/194684511/?terms=charley%2Bparkhurst\">A Queer Woman\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most national coverage of Parkhurst still conveyed a sense of awe in everything he accomplished. In Emily Skidmore’s book, \u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/True-Sex-Lives-Twentieth-Century-ebook/dp/B0757458G3\">“True Sex: the Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Century,”\u003c/a> she found that when gender histories of trans men are revealed, local communities tend to be quite sympathetic to that person. When national newspapers picked those stories up, the narratives shift to degeneracy, masquerading, fooling, disguising and pathology.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Parkhurst Today\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Since his death, Charley’s story has been told in more obscure historical texts, but now it seems Charley will take a more permanent place in California history books.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The FAIR Education Act passed in 2011 ensures the roles and contributions of LGBT Americans and people with disabilities be included in K–12 history education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Romesburg fought to include Charley in lesson plans and says, “It’s important that we see LGBT lives in the past so that we understand that queerness and transness is not something that simply appears after Stonewall, for example. But it’s something that’s been around in some form everywhere for always.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Great Stories From Trans History\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Charley highlights just one of many trans stories. To learn a little more, we’ve compiled a list of a few people in trans history to read about: \u003ca href=\"https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-incredible-chevalier-deon-who-left-france-as-a-male-spy-and-returned-as-a-christian-woman\">Chevalier D’Eon\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/obituaries/overlooked-marsha-p-johnson.html\">Marsha P. Johnson\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.masstpc.org/wewha/\">We’wha\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/22/donald-trump-transgender-military-ban-albert-cashier\">Albert D. J. Cashier\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HObtUIElQZY\">Sir Lady Java\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/its-easier-to-change-a-body-than-to-change-a-mind-the-extraordinary-life-and-lonely-death-of-roberta-8899823.html\">Roberta Cowell\u003c/a>,\u003ca href=\"http://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/tgi-bios/alan-l-hart\"> Dr. Alan L. Hart\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/aug/19/2\">Nong Toom\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://srlp.org/about/who-was-sylvia-rivera/\">Sylvia Rivera\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.historyisgaypodcast.com/notes/2019/1/20/episode-21-the-real-housewife-of-rome\">Emperor Elagabalus\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.queerportraits.com/bio/anderson\">Lucy Hicks Anderson,\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/18/style/paris-has-burned.html\">Angie Xtravaganza\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tennis/2018/03/30/tennissrenee-richards-first-transgender-woman-play-professional/\">Renee Richards\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Pisco Punch: The Pricey San Francisco Cocktail That Was a Gold Rush Knockout",
"headTitle": "Pisco Punch: The Pricey San Francisco Cocktail That Was a Gold Rush Knockout | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-california-report-magazine/id1314750545?mt=2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Listen to this and more in-depth storytelling by subscribing to The California Report Magazine podcast.\u003c/a> Find the full Golden State Plate series \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/series/golden-state-plate/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f you’re a cocktail drinker, you’ve no doubt tasted a few Pisco Sours in your time. It’s that pale, frothy drink made with pisco — a highly potent Peruvian brandy. The Pisco Sour was invented in Peru, with the first printed recipe appearing in the 1940s. But many, many years before that, 19th century San Francisco was gripped by a craze for another pisco concoction. They called it the “Pisco Punch” — and by all accounts, this singular beverage should have come with a health warning.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Era of Excess\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>You won’t \u003cem>see\u003c/em> Pisco Punches on many menus in 2019. Only a handful of places in San Francisco — like North Beach’s \u003ca href=\"https://comstocksaloon.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Comstock Saloon\u003c/a> — serve these gold-colored, citrusy concoctions anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11720631\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11720631\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34806_DSC_1217-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34806_DSC_1217-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34806_DSC_1217-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34806_DSC_1217-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34806_DSC_1217-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34806_DSC_1217-qut-1200x800.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bar manager Anthony Cozeck prepares a Pisco Punch at San Francisco’s Comstock Saloon. \u003ccite>(Carly Severn / KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Yet in the late 1800s, Pisco Punch wasn’t \u003cem>just\u003c/em> a drink. Ordering a glass was a status symbol — and it said everything about the newfound wealth and ambition of Gold Rush San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Prospectors streamed into the city with money to burn and tastes to be satisfied. In prodigiously prosperous early San Francisco, those buyers found a mixology culture that wouldn’t be out of place today, says cocktail historian Duggan McDonnell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was a port city, and it had access to so many amazing, wonderful ingredients,” McDonnell points out. “And when you have wealth, what do you spend it on, but amazing things to put on your body and in your mouth?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11720626\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11720626\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34798_DSC_1171-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34798_DSC_1171-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34798_DSC_1171-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34798_DSC_1171-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34798_DSC_1171-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34798_DSC_1171-qut-1200x800.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">San Francisco cocktail historian Duggan McDonnell \u003ccite>(Carly Severn/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Every scene needs its headquarters, and in 1880s San Francisco, that place was a bar called the Bank Exchange and Billiard Saloon — just steps from where the Comstock Saloon does business today. Here, on the site where the Transamerica Pyramid now stretches into the San Francisco sky, the Pisco Punch was born.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Bank Exchange may have been a saloon — but with its marble bar and ornate chandeliers, it was no dive. “It opened up in 1853 frankly as a testament to the West — that the West was going to make it,” says McDonnell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11720625\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11720625\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/800px-G._R._Fardon_British_-_Montgomery_Block_Montgomery_Street_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/800px-G._R._Fardon_British_-_Montgomery_Block_Montgomery_Street_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/800px-G._R._Fardon_British_-_Montgomery_Block_Montgomery_Street_-_Google_Art_Project-160x120.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Montgomery Block building that housed the Bank Exchange and Billiard Saloon, photographed in 1856 by G. R. Fardon (1807-1886) \u003ccite>(Wikimedia Commons)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The huge building that housed the Bank Exchange was called the Montgomery Block — \u003ca href=\"https://sf.curbed.com/2017/1/3/14156812/transamerica-pyramid-montgomery-block-sf-artists\">a sprawling hub of movers and shakers\u003c/a>. Artists and writers, including Jack London and Ambrose Bierce, lived and worked above the saloon. Even Mark Twain was a regular, and was said to have drunk Pisco Punches there with the local man who inspired the character of Tom Sawyer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Behind that marble bar was the Bank’s very own celebrity bartender: a Scotsman named Duncan Nichol (also spelled elsewhere as “Nicol.”) He was the tastemaker serving Pisco Punch to San Francisco’s well-to-do — for an eye-watering price. In today’s money, estimates McDonnell, a single order of Pisco Punch would set you back a cool $25.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11721024\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 637px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11721024\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/AAB-1782.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"637\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/AAB-1782.jpg 637w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/AAB-1782-160x100.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 637px) 100vw, 637px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Duncan Nichol (on the left) inside the Bank Exchange \u003ccite>(San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Today, CEOs battle over technology patents. In 1887, Duncan Nichol’s big triumph — the move that secured his fame, and his legacy — was acquiring the intellectual property rights to the Bank’s Pisco Punch recipe when he bought the bar, promoting himself from bartender to owner. This drink was simply \u003cem>that\u003c/em> big of a deal in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you’re wondering what on earth could be so special about a single cocktail, take a look at what was actually in it.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Anatomy of an ‘It’ Drink\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>There was, of course, the pisco itself. Pisco is a distilled, fermented grape juice from Peru with extreme potency. So potent, says Peru-born \u003ca href=\"https://www.piscotrail.com/\">pisco expert Nico Vera\u003c/a>, that “one bottle of pisco is the equivalent of about 10 bottles of wine.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11720630\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11720630\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34807_DSC_1219-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34807_DSC_1219-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34807_DSC_1219-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34807_DSC_1219-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34807_DSC_1219-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34807_DSC_1219-qut-1200x800.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A Pisco Punch is strained into its antique glass at San Francisco’s Comstock Saloon. \u003ccite>(Carly Severn / KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Pisco was born, says Vera, when Peruvian vintners working with the grapes brought over by the Spanish 400 years earlier found their wine banned by the King of Spain — for competing a little too much with their European equivalents. Peru’s winemakers, he says, “had to embrace distillation as an alternative.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Peruvian traders had long been bringing pisco up to the San Francisco Bay (then part of Mexico). With the discovery of gold in this region, more and more Peruvians made the journey to leverage their expertise in mining, and brought even more of their national brandy with them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11720633\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11720633\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34812_DSC_1239-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34812_DSC_1239-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34812_DSC_1239-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34812_DSC_1239-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34812_DSC_1239-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34812_DSC_1239-qut-1200x800.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Looking out toward the former site of the Bank Exchange and Billard Saloon — now where the Transamerica Pyramid stands — from San Francisco’s Comstock Saloon. \u003ccite>(Carly Severn / KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Once San Francisco got a taste for pisco, the city was wild for it, says Vera, comparing the vogue for pisco to the gin craze that swept 18th century London. “It’s 38 to 48 percent alcohol by volume, and is very clean when it is single distillation and nothing gets added. So in theory, you don’t get a hangover,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Or as historian McDonnell puts it, “That kind of pisco is more concentrated than anything else on this planet. I mean, it gets into your \u003cem>bones\u003c/em>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another key ingredient? Pineapple. These fruits arrived into San Francisco on many of the same ships that brought the pisco, becoming another luxury item for a luxury-obsessed town.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11720635\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11720635\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34811_DSC_1236-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34811_DSC_1236-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34811_DSC_1236-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34811_DSC_1236-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34811_DSC_1236-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34811_DSC_1236-qut-1200x800.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bar manager Anthony Cozeck speaks to customers at San Francisco’s Comstock Saloon.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>As McDonnell puts it knowingly: “Only in the richest city in the world would you then take that sweet magical fruit and put it in a cocktail, for God’s sake.” He also says that San Francisco store owners would take whole pineapples straight from the docks and place them in their windows — the tradition that turned the pineapple into “the international symbol of hospitality and luxury.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The Mixologist’s Mystery\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Along with some lime and syrup, the Bank’s Pisco Punch also boasted a mystery ingredient that Duncan Nichol would never divulge. Along with the pisco, this secret made the cocktail so mythically strong that the Saloon apparently only allowed two per customer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“No man but one knows what is in it,” wrote author \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudyard_Kipling\">Rudyard Kipling\u003c/a> in \u003ca href=\"http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32977\">“From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel”\u003c/a> — just one of Pisco Punch’s literary fans. “I have a theory it is compounded of the shavings of cherubs’ wings, the glory of a tropical dawn, the red clouds of sunset, and fragments of lost epics by dead masters.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11720638\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11720638\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34808_DSC_1223-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34808_DSC_1223-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34808_DSC_1223-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34808_DSC_1223-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34808_DSC_1223-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34808_DSC_1223-qut-1200x800.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A lemon twist is added to a Pisco Punch at the Comstock Saloon. \u003ccite>(Carly Severn / KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Another (anonymous) contemporary wrote, with a shot more brevity, that “it makes a gnat fight an elephant.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That mystery ingredient itself, says Duggan McDonnell, might explain why writers were so effusive in their love for it. That special something, he believes, might have been \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin_Mariani\">Vin Marani\u003c/a>: a fortified wine from Bordeaux. The principal ingredient in that, until it got banned, was coca leaves from Peru. In essence: cocaine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In “19th century California, specifically San Francisco writing,” says McDonnell, “you look at Twain and Kipling and all these guys and there’s a lot… of \u003cem>energy\u003c/em> in their prose? A lot of \u003cem>hyperbole,\u003c/em> shall we say? So I’m not surprised that these guys had a few Pisco Punches with their coca leaves in them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>One Era Ends, Another Begins\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>But as with all crazes, things come to an end. In the case of Pisco Punch, that end was Prohibition, with the \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States\">passing of the Volstead Act in 1919. \u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like so many bar owners, Duncan Nichol was forced to closed his Bank Exchange Saloon — and not long after, he took his mystery Pisco Punch recipe to the grave.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11721040\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 613px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11721040\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/CHS-screenshot.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"613\" height=\"934\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/CHS-screenshot.png 613w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/CHS-screenshot-160x244.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 613px) 100vw, 613px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The 1973 California Historical Society Quarterly (Vol. 52) that revealed the Pisco Punch recipe allegedly used by Duncan Nichol himself. \u003ccite>(California Historical Society)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>San Francisco’s hottest cocktail became a forgotten legend until decades later, when in 1973 a version of the Bank’s original recipe was \u003ca href=\"https://www.jstor.org/stable/25157448?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents\">unearthed by the California Historical Society and published\u003c/a>. Places like the Comstock Saloon began bringing it back — with a spot of guesswork around that secret ingredient.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here, just down the street from where the Bank once stood, the Comstock is still serving up several Pisco Punches a night. Yet like Duncan Nichol over a century ago, they still can’t resist a little mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11720628\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11720628\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34803_DSC_1209-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34803_DSC_1209-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34803_DSC_1209-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34803_DSC_1209-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34803_DSC_1209-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34803_DSC_1209-qut-1200x800.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Anthony Cozeck holds the Comstock Saloon’s secret Pisco Punch ingredient. \u003ccite>(Carly Severn / KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Shaking up his Pisco Punch, Comstock bartender Anthony Cozeck says their version also features a “a secret proprietary ingredient” — that they keep in a bottle labeled “Nichol.” “You can tell me which you think it is,” Cozeck says. “But I won’t tell you if you got it right.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you hear a challenge here, you’re right. Just … go easy.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-california-report-magazine/id1314750545?mt=2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Listen to this and more in-depth storytelling by subscribing to The California Report Magazine podcast.\u003c/a> Find the full Golden State Plate series \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/series/golden-state-plate/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__dropcapShortcode__dropcap\">I\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>f you’re a cocktail drinker, you’ve no doubt tasted a few Pisco Sours in your time. It’s that pale, frothy drink made with pisco — a highly potent Peruvian brandy. The Pisco Sour was invented in Peru, with the first printed recipe appearing in the 1940s. But many, many years before that, 19th century San Francisco was gripped by a craze for another pisco concoction. They called it the “Pisco Punch” — and by all accounts, this singular beverage should have come with a health warning.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Era of Excess\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>You won’t \u003cem>see\u003c/em> Pisco Punches on many menus in 2019. Only a handful of places in San Francisco — like North Beach’s \u003ca href=\"https://comstocksaloon.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Comstock Saloon\u003c/a> — serve these gold-colored, citrusy concoctions anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11720631\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11720631\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34806_DSC_1217-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34806_DSC_1217-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34806_DSC_1217-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34806_DSC_1217-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34806_DSC_1217-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34806_DSC_1217-qut-1200x800.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bar manager Anthony Cozeck prepares a Pisco Punch at San Francisco’s Comstock Saloon. \u003ccite>(Carly Severn / KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Yet in the late 1800s, Pisco Punch wasn’t \u003cem>just\u003c/em> a drink. Ordering a glass was a status symbol — and it said everything about the newfound wealth and ambition of Gold Rush San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Prospectors streamed into the city with money to burn and tastes to be satisfied. In prodigiously prosperous early San Francisco, those buyers found a mixology culture that wouldn’t be out of place today, says cocktail historian Duggan McDonnell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was a port city, and it had access to so many amazing, wonderful ingredients,” McDonnell points out. “And when you have wealth, what do you spend it on, but amazing things to put on your body and in your mouth?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11720626\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11720626\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34798_DSC_1171-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34798_DSC_1171-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34798_DSC_1171-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34798_DSC_1171-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34798_DSC_1171-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34798_DSC_1171-qut-1200x800.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">San Francisco cocktail historian Duggan McDonnell \u003ccite>(Carly Severn/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Every scene needs its headquarters, and in 1880s San Francisco, that place was a bar called the Bank Exchange and Billiard Saloon — just steps from where the Comstock Saloon does business today. Here, on the site where the Transamerica Pyramid now stretches into the San Francisco sky, the Pisco Punch was born.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Bank Exchange may have been a saloon — but with its marble bar and ornate chandeliers, it was no dive. “It opened up in 1853 frankly as a testament to the West — that the West was going to make it,” says McDonnell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11720625\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11720625\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/800px-G._R._Fardon_British_-_Montgomery_Block_Montgomery_Street_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/800px-G._R._Fardon_British_-_Montgomery_Block_Montgomery_Street_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/800px-G._R._Fardon_British_-_Montgomery_Block_Montgomery_Street_-_Google_Art_Project-160x120.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Montgomery Block building that housed the Bank Exchange and Billiard Saloon, photographed in 1856 by G. R. Fardon (1807-1886) \u003ccite>(Wikimedia Commons)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The huge building that housed the Bank Exchange was called the Montgomery Block — \u003ca href=\"https://sf.curbed.com/2017/1/3/14156812/transamerica-pyramid-montgomery-block-sf-artists\">a sprawling hub of movers and shakers\u003c/a>. Artists and writers, including Jack London and Ambrose Bierce, lived and worked above the saloon. Even Mark Twain was a regular, and was said to have drunk Pisco Punches there with the local man who inspired the character of Tom Sawyer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Behind that marble bar was the Bank’s very own celebrity bartender: a Scotsman named Duncan Nichol (also spelled elsewhere as “Nicol.”) He was the tastemaker serving Pisco Punch to San Francisco’s well-to-do — for an eye-watering price. In today’s money, estimates McDonnell, a single order of Pisco Punch would set you back a cool $25.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11721024\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 637px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11721024\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/AAB-1782.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"637\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/AAB-1782.jpg 637w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/AAB-1782-160x100.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 637px) 100vw, 637px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Duncan Nichol (on the left) inside the Bank Exchange \u003ccite>(San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Today, CEOs battle over technology patents. In 1887, Duncan Nichol’s big triumph — the move that secured his fame, and his legacy — was acquiring the intellectual property rights to the Bank’s Pisco Punch recipe when he bought the bar, promoting himself from bartender to owner. This drink was simply \u003cem>that\u003c/em> big of a deal in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you’re wondering what on earth could be so special about a single cocktail, take a look at what was actually in it.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>Anatomy of an ‘It’ Drink\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>There was, of course, the pisco itself. Pisco is a distilled, fermented grape juice from Peru with extreme potency. So potent, says Peru-born \u003ca href=\"https://www.piscotrail.com/\">pisco expert Nico Vera\u003c/a>, that “one bottle of pisco is the equivalent of about 10 bottles of wine.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11720630\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11720630\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34807_DSC_1219-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34807_DSC_1219-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34807_DSC_1219-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34807_DSC_1219-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34807_DSC_1219-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34807_DSC_1219-qut-1200x800.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A Pisco Punch is strained into its antique glass at San Francisco’s Comstock Saloon. \u003ccite>(Carly Severn / KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Pisco was born, says Vera, when Peruvian vintners working with the grapes brought over by the Spanish 400 years earlier found their wine banned by the King of Spain — for competing a little too much with their European equivalents. Peru’s winemakers, he says, “had to embrace distillation as an alternative.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Peruvian traders had long been bringing pisco up to the San Francisco Bay (then part of Mexico). With the discovery of gold in this region, more and more Peruvians made the journey to leverage their expertise in mining, and brought even more of their national brandy with them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11720633\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11720633\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34812_DSC_1239-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34812_DSC_1239-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34812_DSC_1239-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34812_DSC_1239-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34812_DSC_1239-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34812_DSC_1239-qut-1200x800.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Looking out toward the former site of the Bank Exchange and Billard Saloon — now where the Transamerica Pyramid stands — from San Francisco’s Comstock Saloon. \u003ccite>(Carly Severn / KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Once San Francisco got a taste for pisco, the city was wild for it, says Vera, comparing the vogue for pisco to the gin craze that swept 18th century London. “It’s 38 to 48 percent alcohol by volume, and is very clean when it is single distillation and nothing gets added. So in theory, you don’t get a hangover,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Or as historian McDonnell puts it, “That kind of pisco is more concentrated than anything else on this planet. I mean, it gets into your \u003cem>bones\u003c/em>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another key ingredient? Pineapple. These fruits arrived into San Francisco on many of the same ships that brought the pisco, becoming another luxury item for a luxury-obsessed town.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11720635\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11720635\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34811_DSC_1236-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34811_DSC_1236-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34811_DSC_1236-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34811_DSC_1236-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34811_DSC_1236-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34811_DSC_1236-qut-1200x800.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bar manager Anthony Cozeck speaks to customers at San Francisco’s Comstock Saloon.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>As McDonnell puts it knowingly: “Only in the richest city in the world would you then take that sweet magical fruit and put it in a cocktail, for God’s sake.” He also says that San Francisco store owners would take whole pineapples straight from the docks and place them in their windows — the tradition that turned the pineapple into “the international symbol of hospitality and luxury.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>The Mixologist’s Mystery\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Along with some lime and syrup, the Bank’s Pisco Punch also boasted a mystery ingredient that Duncan Nichol would never divulge. Along with the pisco, this secret made the cocktail so mythically strong that the Saloon apparently only allowed two per customer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“No man but one knows what is in it,” wrote author \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudyard_Kipling\">Rudyard Kipling\u003c/a> in \u003ca href=\"http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32977\">“From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel”\u003c/a> — just one of Pisco Punch’s literary fans. “I have a theory it is compounded of the shavings of cherubs’ wings, the glory of a tropical dawn, the red clouds of sunset, and fragments of lost epics by dead masters.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11720638\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11720638\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34808_DSC_1223-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34808_DSC_1223-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34808_DSC_1223-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34808_DSC_1223-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34808_DSC_1223-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34808_DSC_1223-qut-1200x800.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A lemon twist is added to a Pisco Punch at the Comstock Saloon. \u003ccite>(Carly Severn / KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Another (anonymous) contemporary wrote, with a shot more brevity, that “it makes a gnat fight an elephant.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That mystery ingredient itself, says Duggan McDonnell, might explain why writers were so effusive in their love for it. That special something, he believes, might have been \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin_Mariani\">Vin Marani\u003c/a>: a fortified wine from Bordeaux. The principal ingredient in that, until it got banned, was coca leaves from Peru. In essence: cocaine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In “19th century California, specifically San Francisco writing,” says McDonnell, “you look at Twain and Kipling and all these guys and there’s a lot… of \u003cem>energy\u003c/em> in their prose? A lot of \u003cem>hyperbole,\u003c/em> shall we say? So I’m not surprised that these guys had a few Pisco Punches with their coca leaves in them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>One Era Ends, Another Begins\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>But as with all crazes, things come to an end. In the case of Pisco Punch, that end was Prohibition, with the \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States\">passing of the Volstead Act in 1919. \u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like so many bar owners, Duncan Nichol was forced to closed his Bank Exchange Saloon — and not long after, he took his mystery Pisco Punch recipe to the grave.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11721040\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 613px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11721040\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/CHS-screenshot.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"613\" height=\"934\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/CHS-screenshot.png 613w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/CHS-screenshot-160x244.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 613px) 100vw, 613px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The 1973 California Historical Society Quarterly (Vol. 52) that revealed the Pisco Punch recipe allegedly used by Duncan Nichol himself. \u003ccite>(California Historical Society)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>San Francisco’s hottest cocktail became a forgotten legend until decades later, when in 1973 a version of the Bank’s original recipe was \u003ca href=\"https://www.jstor.org/stable/25157448?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents\">unearthed by the California Historical Society and published\u003c/a>. Places like the Comstock Saloon began bringing it back — with a spot of guesswork around that secret ingredient.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here, just down the street from where the Bank once stood, the Comstock is still serving up several Pisco Punches a night. Yet like Duncan Nichol over a century ago, they still can’t resist a little mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11720628\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11720628\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34803_DSC_1209-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34803_DSC_1209-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34803_DSC_1209-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34803_DSC_1209-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34803_DSC_1209-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/01/RS34803_DSC_1209-qut-1200x800.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Anthony Cozeck holds the Comstock Saloon’s secret Pisco Punch ingredient. \u003ccite>(Carly Severn / KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Shaking up his Pisco Punch, Comstock bartender Anthony Cozeck says their version also features a “a secret proprietary ingredient” — that they keep in a bottle labeled “Nichol.” “You can tell me which you think it is,” Cozeck says. “But I won’t tell you if you got it right.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "golden-state-plate-the-story-of-the-martini-straight-up-with-a-twist",
"title": "Golden State Plate: The Story of the Martini, Straight Up, With a Twist",
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"headTitle": "Golden State Plate: The Story of the Martini, Straight Up, With a Twist | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>The martini is iconic. Not just because of James Bond, but the glass it’s served in, those neon signs in front of old school bars … it even has its own emoji.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUUq5mRCimo\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The martini is also the first cocktail Tamir Ben-Shalom learned how to make.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ben-Shalom is bar manager at the \u003ca href=\"http://www.bullvalleyroadhouse.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bull Valley Roadhouse\u003c/a> in the tiny East Bay town of Port Costa. He makes a mean martini: two parts of Old Tom Gin, one part Turino vermouth blend, and orange bitters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11703176\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11703176\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut-1200x900.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut-1180x885.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut-960x720.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut-520x390.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Tamir Ben-Shalom is the Bar Manager at Bull Valley Road House in Port Costa, a tiny town in the East Bay. \u003ccite>(Bianca Taylor/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11703175\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11703175\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut-1200x900.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut-1180x885.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut-960x720.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut-520x390.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Lemon, gin and vermouth go into the martini at the Bull Valley Roadhouse. \u003ccite>(Bianca Taylor/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But he tells me that if I want to get to the bottom of the martini mystery, I really need to drive 20 minutes to Martinez. So, I get in my car until I hit the intersection of Masonic and Alhambra Streets. It’s an unassuming parking lot, except for a plaque on a giant boulder that claims \u003cem>this\u003c/em> is the site of the martini’s invention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11703173\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11703173 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-800x1067.jpg\" alt=\"In the middle of a parking lot in Martinez, there is a plaque that claims it is the site of the invention of the martini.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1067\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-800x1067.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-160x213.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-1020x1360.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-900x1200.jpg 900w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-1920x2560.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-1180x1573.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-960x1280.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-240x320.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-375x500.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-520x693.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">In the middle of a parking lot in Martinez, there is a plaque that claims it is the site of the invention of the martini. \u003ccite>(Bianca Taylor/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The plaque reads: “On this site in 1874, Julio Richelieu, bartender, served up the first martini when a miner came into his saloon with a fistful of nuggets and asked for something special. He was served a Martinez Special. After three or four drinks, however, the Z would get very much in the way. The drink consisted of two thirds gin, one third vermouth, a dash of orange bitters, poured over crushed ice and served with an olive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not only does Martinez lay claim to the drink with a plaque, it throws an \u003ca href=\"http://www.martinezchamber.com/martinis-on-the-plaza-gala\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">annual Martini’s on the Plaza Gaza\u003c/a>, and the drink’s origin story is on the \u003ca href=\"http://www.cityofmartinez.org/our_city/martini.asp\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">city’s official website.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Gabriel Clothes, a San Francisco bartender who collects and studies old cocktail recipes, says there’s actually a lot of controversy about where — and who — invented the martini.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These origins are so murky. Especially a drink, it’s not entered into the public record,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11703179\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 347px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11703179 \" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33514_JerryThomas01-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"347\" height=\"310\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33514_JerryThomas01-qut.jpg 294w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33514_JerryThomas01-qut-160x143.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33514_JerryThomas01-qut-240x215.jpg 240w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 347px) 100vw, 347px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An 1862 engraving of Jerry Thomas. His ‘Bartenders Guide’ is a seminal cocktail recipe book. \u003ccite>(Wikimedia Commons: Museum of the American Cocktail)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But Clothes tells me a really similar origin story — it also takes place during the 1870s, but this time it happens in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It starts with a miner with a sack of gold who went into the bar at the \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occidental_Hotel\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Occidental Hotel\u003c/a> hoping to trade it for a bottle of whiskey.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bartender \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Thomas_(bartender)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Jerry Thomas\u003c/a> gave him the whiskey AND a special drink he invented off the cuff — the Martinez.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1887, the recipe for the Martinez was documented for the first time, in Jerry Thomas’ Bartender’s Guide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And his recipe looks a lot like the classic martini : one part Old Tom gin, and two parts vermouth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11703178\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 292px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-11703178\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33515_bartenders-guide-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"292\" height=\"440\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33515_bartenders-guide-qut.jpg 199w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33515_bartenders-guide-qut-160x241.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 292px) 100vw, 292px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jerry Thomas’ Bartenders Guide (first published in 1862) was reprinted in 1887 with a recipe for the Martinez. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Jennifer Colliau)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>To try to clarify the Martinez-Martini confusion, I consult with Jennifer Colliau, an an award-winning bartender and self-proclaimed cocktail nerd.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I love that there’s this air of mystery to it,” she says of the cocktail. “[American writer] H.L. Mencken called the martini ‘the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet.'”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She loves the martini so much, she’s created a spreadsheet of all the different variations she’s found over the years. It has whopping 469 entries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some of the drinks she’s documented are made with exact same recipe but different names: the Chris Racquet Club, the Duey, the Dry Martini, the Marguerite and the Nutting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11703180\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11703180 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33516_JENNIFER-colliau-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"415\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33516_JENNIFER-colliau-qut.jpg 640w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33516_JENNIFER-colliau-qut-160x104.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33516_JENNIFER-colliau-qut-240x156.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33516_JENNIFER-colliau-qut-375x243.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33516_JENNIFER-colliau-qut-520x337.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jennifer Colliau is founder of Small Hand Foods, and an award-winning bartender. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Jennifer Colliau)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>All of those drinks are made with the same ingredients: 1 to 1 gin and dry vermouth with orange bitters. So which one is one?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Colliau says I’m asking the wrong question: “There is nothing empirical here. There are people writing other people’s recipes. There are people naming drinks after themselves or after the bars they work in.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This explains why it’s \u003cem>so\u003c/em> hard to nail down the difference between a Martinez and a martini, let alone where it was invented. But regardless of what it was called…it’s obvious that a martini-type gin drink was very popular at the turn of the century.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People always drank whatever they had around and you know when America was being settled, there was a lot of gin here,” says Colliau.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And that wasn’t an accident. Gin’s popularity can really be traced back to \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Prohibition\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the manufacturing and selling of alcohol became illegal in 1920, people got…creative. Ever heard of bathtub gin? That was literally gin made in a bathtub. It was cheap and easy, and there was a lot of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11703181\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 472px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11703181\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33553_prohibition-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"472\" height=\"372\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33553_prohibition-qut.jpg 472w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33553_prohibition-qut-160x126.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33553_prohibition-qut-240x189.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33553_prohibition-qut-375x296.jpg 375w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 472px) 100vw, 472px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Prohibition agents destroying barrels of alcohol. \u003ccite>(Wikimedia Commons: Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago Historical Society.)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>And the martini profile got a boost when President Roosevelt repealed Prohibition thirteen years later. According to Gabriel Clothes, Roosevelt even toasted the end of Prohibition with — a martini.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Colliau considers the martini the “granddaddy of cocktails”.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And this granddaddy came from here — the San Francisco Bay Area. Well it PROBABLY came from here…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/11/27/move-over-san-francisco-the-martini-has-a-home-in-contra-costa-county-seat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">San Jose Mercury News\u003c/a>, in 1983, the San Francisco Court of Historical Review — a group with no actual legal authority — held a mock trial over the origin of the martini, determining that their city was the cocktail’s rightful birthplace.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11703182\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 287px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11703182\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1-800x1067.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"287\" height=\"383\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1-800x1067.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1-160x213.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1-1020x1360.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1-900x1200.jpg 900w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1-1180x1573.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1-960x1280.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1-240x320.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1-375x500.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1-520x693.jpg 520w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1.jpg 1512w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 287px) 100vw, 287px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A martini with a twist. \u003ccite>(Bianca Taylor/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But not to be outdone, a mock court in Martinez overturned the ruling shortly after.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When I press Jennifer Colliau, Tamir Ben-Shalom, and Gabriel Clothes on the martini was invented, no one is willing to say anything definitively.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finally, when I ask Colliau if she thinks it’s important that people know where the martini comes from, she gives it to me straight:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Oh god no no no. No one needs to know any of this,” she says laughing. Then she adds, “I mean if you’re enjoying yourself at my bar that’s really all that I care about.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cheers to that!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "The drink was originally concocted in the Bay Area. But where exactly the cocktail was invented, how it got its name, and what it's made of — that's where it gets muddled.",
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"title": "Golden State Plate: The Story of the Martini, Straight Up, With a Twist | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The martini is iconic. Not just because of James Bond, but the glass it’s served in, those neon signs in front of old school bars … it even has its own emoji.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/OUUq5mRCimo'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/OUUq5mRCimo'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>The martini is also the first cocktail Tamir Ben-Shalom learned how to make.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ben-Shalom is bar manager at the \u003ca href=\"http://www.bullvalleyroadhouse.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bull Valley Roadhouse\u003c/a> in the tiny East Bay town of Port Costa. He makes a mean martini: two parts of Old Tom Gin, one part Turino vermouth blend, and orange bitters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11703176\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11703176\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut-1200x900.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut-1180x885.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut-960x720.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33552_IMG_4072-qut-520x390.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Tamir Ben-Shalom is the Bar Manager at Bull Valley Road House in Port Costa, a tiny town in the East Bay. \u003ccite>(Bianca Taylor/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11703175\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11703175\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut-1200x900.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut-1180x885.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut-960x720.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut-240x180.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut-375x281.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33512_IMG_4071-qut-520x390.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Lemon, gin and vermouth go into the martini at the Bull Valley Roadhouse. \u003ccite>(Bianca Taylor/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But he tells me that if I want to get to the bottom of the martini mystery, I really need to drive 20 minutes to Martinez. So, I get in my car until I hit the intersection of Masonic and Alhambra Streets. It’s an unassuming parking lot, except for a plaque on a giant boulder that claims \u003cem>this\u003c/em> is the site of the martini’s invention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11703173\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11703173 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-800x1067.jpg\" alt=\"In the middle of a parking lot in Martinez, there is a plaque that claims it is the site of the invention of the martini.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1067\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-800x1067.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-160x213.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-1020x1360.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-900x1200.jpg 900w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-1920x2560.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-1180x1573.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-960x1280.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-240x320.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-375x500.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33511_alt_797-520x693.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">In the middle of a parking lot in Martinez, there is a plaque that claims it is the site of the invention of the martini. \u003ccite>(Bianca Taylor/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The plaque reads: “On this site in 1874, Julio Richelieu, bartender, served up the first martini when a miner came into his saloon with a fistful of nuggets and asked for something special. He was served a Martinez Special. After three or four drinks, however, the Z would get very much in the way. The drink consisted of two thirds gin, one third vermouth, a dash of orange bitters, poured over crushed ice and served with an olive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not only does Martinez lay claim to the drink with a plaque, it throws an \u003ca href=\"http://www.martinezchamber.com/martinis-on-the-plaza-gala\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">annual Martini’s on the Plaza Gaza\u003c/a>, and the drink’s origin story is on the \u003ca href=\"http://www.cityofmartinez.org/our_city/martini.asp\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">city’s official website.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Gabriel Clothes, a San Francisco bartender who collects and studies old cocktail recipes, says there’s actually a lot of controversy about where — and who — invented the martini.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These origins are so murky. Especially a drink, it’s not entered into the public record,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11703179\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 347px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11703179 \" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33514_JerryThomas01-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"347\" height=\"310\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33514_JerryThomas01-qut.jpg 294w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33514_JerryThomas01-qut-160x143.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33514_JerryThomas01-qut-240x215.jpg 240w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 347px) 100vw, 347px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An 1862 engraving of Jerry Thomas. His ‘Bartenders Guide’ is a seminal cocktail recipe book. \u003ccite>(Wikimedia Commons: Museum of the American Cocktail)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But Clothes tells me a really similar origin story — it also takes place during the 1870s, but this time it happens in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It starts with a miner with a sack of gold who went into the bar at the \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occidental_Hotel\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Occidental Hotel\u003c/a> hoping to trade it for a bottle of whiskey.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bartender \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Thomas_(bartender)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Jerry Thomas\u003c/a> gave him the whiskey AND a special drink he invented off the cuff — the Martinez.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1887, the recipe for the Martinez was documented for the first time, in Jerry Thomas’ Bartender’s Guide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And his recipe looks a lot like the classic martini : one part Old Tom gin, and two parts vermouth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11703178\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 292px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-11703178\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33515_bartenders-guide-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"292\" height=\"440\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33515_bartenders-guide-qut.jpg 199w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33515_bartenders-guide-qut-160x241.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 292px) 100vw, 292px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jerry Thomas’ Bartenders Guide (first published in 1862) was reprinted in 1887 with a recipe for the Martinez. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Jennifer Colliau)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>To try to clarify the Martinez-Martini confusion, I consult with Jennifer Colliau, an an award-winning bartender and self-proclaimed cocktail nerd.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I love that there’s this air of mystery to it,” she says of the cocktail. “[American writer] H.L. Mencken called the martini ‘the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet.'”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She loves the martini so much, she’s created a spreadsheet of all the different variations she’s found over the years. It has whopping 469 entries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some of the drinks she’s documented are made with exact same recipe but different names: the Chris Racquet Club, the Duey, the Dry Martini, the Marguerite and the Nutting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11703180\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11703180 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33516_JENNIFER-colliau-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"415\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33516_JENNIFER-colliau-qut.jpg 640w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33516_JENNIFER-colliau-qut-160x104.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33516_JENNIFER-colliau-qut-240x156.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33516_JENNIFER-colliau-qut-375x243.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33516_JENNIFER-colliau-qut-520x337.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jennifer Colliau is founder of Small Hand Foods, and an award-winning bartender. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Jennifer Colliau)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>All of those drinks are made with the same ingredients: 1 to 1 gin and dry vermouth with orange bitters. So which one is one?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Colliau says I’m asking the wrong question: “There is nothing empirical here. There are people writing other people’s recipes. There are people naming drinks after themselves or after the bars they work in.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This explains why it’s \u003cem>so\u003c/em> hard to nail down the difference between a Martinez and a martini, let alone where it was invented. But regardless of what it was called…it’s obvious that a martini-type gin drink was very popular at the turn of the century.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People always drank whatever they had around and you know when America was being settled, there was a lot of gin here,” says Colliau.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And that wasn’t an accident. Gin’s popularity can really be traced back to \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Prohibition\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the manufacturing and selling of alcohol became illegal in 1920, people got…creative. Ever heard of bathtub gin? That was literally gin made in a bathtub. It was cheap and easy, and there was a lot of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11703181\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 472px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-11703181\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33553_prohibition-qut.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"472\" height=\"372\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33553_prohibition-qut.jpg 472w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33553_prohibition-qut-160x126.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33553_prohibition-qut-240x189.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33553_prohibition-qut-375x296.jpg 375w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 472px) 100vw, 472px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Prohibition agents destroying barrels of alcohol. \u003ccite>(Wikimedia Commons: Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago Historical Society.)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>And the martini profile got a boost when President Roosevelt repealed Prohibition thirteen years later. According to Gabriel Clothes, Roosevelt even toasted the end of Prohibition with — a martini.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Colliau considers the martini the “granddaddy of cocktails”.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And this granddaddy came from here — the San Francisco Bay Area. Well it PROBABLY came from here…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/11/27/move-over-san-francisco-the-martini-has-a-home-in-contra-costa-county-seat/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">San Jose Mercury News\u003c/a>, in 1983, the San Francisco Court of Historical Review — a group with no actual legal authority — held a mock trial over the origin of the martini, determining that their city was the cocktail’s rightful birthplace.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11703182\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 287px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-11703182\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1-800x1067.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"287\" height=\"383\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1-800x1067.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1-160x213.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1-1020x1360.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1-900x1200.jpg 900w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1-1180x1573.jpg 1180w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1-960x1280.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1-240x320.jpg 240w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1-375x500.jpg 375w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1-520x693.jpg 520w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/11/RS33508_alt_798-1.jpg 1512w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 287px) 100vw, 287px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A martini with a twist. \u003ccite>(Bianca Taylor/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But not to be outdone, a mock court in Martinez overturned the ruling shortly after.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When I press Jennifer Colliau, Tamir Ben-Shalom, and Gabriel Clothes on the martini was invented, no one is willing to say anything definitively.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finally, when I ask Colliau if she thinks it’s important that people know where the martini comes from, she gives it to me straight:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Oh god no no no. No one needs to know any of this,” she says laughing. Then she adds, “I mean if you’re enjoying yourself at my bar that’s really all that I care about.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cheers to that!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"disqusTitle": "A Besotted Mining Town is Laid to Rest...Underwater",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>A lot of us Californians like to hit the open road, explore miles of highway and venture off onto some back roads. Sometimes, we come across towns with some pretty bizarre and surprising names. For this installment in our series “A Place Called What?!” we head to Whiskeytown, in Shasta County.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Know a California spot with an unusual name? Send a note to: calreport@kqed.org.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The small mining settlement of Whiskeytown got its name from an incident involving a mule and, unsurprisingly, some booze.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"There was no road there yet or anything,\" says Jay Thompson. Thompson grew up near Whiskeytown, in the small city of Shasta. Now he works at the \u003ca href=\"https://shastahistorical.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Shasta Historical Society\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thompson says that during the Gold Rush, all supplies were brought in by mules. One fateful day, a pack mule was carrying a barrel of whiskey to town.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11659882\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-11659882\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/04/RS30237_1989.15.10C-qut-1-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2018/04/RS30237_1989.15.10C-qut-1-800x533.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2018/04/RS30237_1989.15.10C-qut-1-160x107.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2018/04/RS30237_1989.15.10C-qut-1-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2018/04/RS30237_1989.15.10C-qut-1.jpg 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2018/04/RS30237_1989.15.10C-qut-1-1180x787.jpg 1180w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2018/04/RS30237_1989.15.10C-qut-1-960x640.jpg 960w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2018/04/RS30237_1989.15.10C-qut-1-240x160.jpg 240w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2018/04/RS30237_1989.15.10C-qut-1-375x250.jpg 375w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2018/04/RS30237_1989.15.10C-qut-1-520x347.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Whiskeytown. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Shasta Historical Society)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\"They were crossing a creek, and it fell off and broke open,\" he explains. \"They named the creek Whiskey Creek, and then from there they just went ahead and called the [town] Whiskeytown.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The town is virtually non-existent now. All you can see above ground are remnants of mines in the hillsides. But below ground, it's a different story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's under a lake, a beautiful lake called \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/whis/index.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Whiskeytown Lake\u003c/a>,\" says Thompson.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What remained of the old town - a defunct hotel, a couple of other crumbling brick buildings - became flooded with water when the \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskeytown_Dam\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Whiskeytown Dam\u003c/a> was built in 1960.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thompson says, if you go snorkeling there, you're likely to see a few ruins underwater.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RXS-d6m2L8\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "There's not much left of Whiskeytown left above ground. Underwater, though, it's a different story.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>A lot of us Californians like to hit the open road, explore miles of highway and venture off onto some back roads. Sometimes, we come across towns with some pretty bizarre and surprising names. For this installment in our series “A Place Called What?!” we head to Whiskeytown, in Shasta County.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Know a California spot with an unusual name? Send a note to: calreport@kqed.org.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The small mining settlement of Whiskeytown got its name from an incident involving a mule and, unsurprisingly, some booze.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"There was no road there yet or anything,\" says Jay Thompson. Thompson grew up near Whiskeytown, in the small city of Shasta. Now he works at the \u003ca href=\"https://shastahistorical.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Shasta Historical Society\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thompson says that during the Gold Rush, all supplies were brought in by mules. One fateful day, a pack mule was carrying a barrel of whiskey to town.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_11659882\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg class=\"size-medium wp-image-11659882\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/04/RS30237_1989.15.10C-qut-1-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2018/04/RS30237_1989.15.10C-qut-1-800x533.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2018/04/RS30237_1989.15.10C-qut-1-160x107.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2018/04/RS30237_1989.15.10C-qut-1-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2018/04/RS30237_1989.15.10C-qut-1.jpg 1920w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2018/04/RS30237_1989.15.10C-qut-1-1180x787.jpg 1180w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2018/04/RS30237_1989.15.10C-qut-1-960x640.jpg 960w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2018/04/RS30237_1989.15.10C-qut-1-240x160.jpg 240w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2018/04/RS30237_1989.15.10C-qut-1-375x250.jpg 375w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2018/04/RS30237_1989.15.10C-qut-1-520x347.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Whiskeytown. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Shasta Historical Society)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\"They were crossing a creek, and it fell off and broke open,\" he explains. \"They named the creek Whiskey Creek, and then from there they just went ahead and called the [town] Whiskeytown.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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}
},
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"id": "californiareportmagazine",
"title": "The California Report Magazine",
"tagline": "Your state, your stories",
"info": "Every week, The California Report Magazine takes you on a road trip for the ears: to visit the places and meet the people who make California unique. The in-depth storytelling podcast from the California Report.",
"airtime": "FRI 4:30pm-5pm, 6:30pm-7pm, 11pm-11:30pm",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/californiareportmagazine",
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"order": 10
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM3NjkwNjk1OTAz",
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},
"city-arts": {
"id": "city-arts",
"title": "City Arts & Lectures",
"info": "A one-hour radio program to hear celebrated writers, artists and thinkers address contemporary ideas and values, often discussing the creative process. Please note: tapes or transcripts are not available",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/05/cityartsandlecture-300x300.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.cityarts.net/",
"airtime": "SUN 1pm-2pm, TUE 10pm, WED 1am",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "City Arts & Lectures"
},
"link": "https://www.cityarts.net",
"subscribe": {
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/City-Arts-and-Lectures-p692/",
"rss": "https://www.cityarts.net/feed/"
}
},
"closealltabs": {
"id": "closealltabs",
"title": "Close All Tabs",
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"info": "Close All Tabs breaks down how digital culture shapes our world through thoughtful insights and irreverent humor.",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/closealltabs",
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"order": 1
},
"link": "/podcasts/closealltabs",
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"id": "code-switch-life-kit",
"title": "Code Switch / Life Kit",
"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"meta": {
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubnByLm9yZy9yc3MvcG9kY2FzdC5waHA_aWQ9NTEwMzEy",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
"airtime": "THU 10pm, FRI 1am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Commonwealth-Club-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"meta": {
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"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
"link": "/radio/program/commonwealth-club",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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}
},
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"id": "forum",
"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 9am-11am, 10pm-11pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Forum with Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal",
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"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 9
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5NTU3MzgxNjMz",
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"id": "freakonomics-radio",
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"info": "Freakonomics Radio is a one-hour award-winning podcast and public-radio project hosted by Stephen Dubner, with co-author Steve Levitt as a regular guest. It is produced in partnership with WNYC.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/freakonomicsRadio.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
"airtime": "SUN 1am-2am, SAT 3pm-4pm",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
"subscribe": {
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
"rss": "https://feeds.feedburner.com/freakonomicsradio"
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},
"fresh-air": {
"id": "fresh-air",
"title": "Fresh Air",
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"link": "/radio/program/fresh-air",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/381444908/podcast.xml"
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510051/podcast.xml"
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},
"hidden-brain": {
"id": "hidden-brain",
"title": "Hidden Brain",
"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "NPR"
},
"link": "/radio/program/hidden-brain",
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},
"how-i-built-this": {
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"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/howIBuiltThis.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this",
"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
"subscribe": {
"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/3zxy",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?mt=2",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510313/podcast.xml"
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},
"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
"title": "Hyphenación",
"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
"meta": {
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"order": 15
},
"link": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/2p3Fifq96nw9BPcmFdIq0o?si=39209f7b25774f38",
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"rss": "https://feeds.megaphone.fm/KQINC2275451163"
}
},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 18
},
"link": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1492194549",
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}
},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
"subscribe": {
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace-pm/rss/rss"
}
},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
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"source": "WaitWhat"
},
"link": "/radio/program/masters-of-scale",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "http://mastersofscale.app.link/",
"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
"subscribe": {
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
"npr": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/464615685/mind-shift-podcast",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "On Our Watch from NPR and KQED",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1567098962",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510360/podcast.xml"
}
},
"on-the-media": {
"id": "on-the-media",
"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm-3pm, MON 12am-1am",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/onTheMedia.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/otm",
"meta": {
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"source": "wnyc"
},
"link": "/radio/program/on-the-media",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/on-the-media/id73330715?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/On-the-Media-p69/",
"rss": "http://feeds.wnyc.org/onthemedia"
}
},
"pbs-newshour": {
"id": "pbs-newshour",
"title": "PBS NewsHour",
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