* Roughly $7 billion worth of gold was extracted from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada during the Gold Rush, in 2009 dollars.
* If they followed the custom of the closely related Maidu, they also would not touch the meat of the grizzly bear, because the bear might have eaten human flesh and to eat of it would be akin to cannibalism, widely taboo among the Indians of Northern California.
* Tucker had not brought Mary Ann Graves’s letters to her mother for fear that any news of what had happened to the snowshoe party would demoralize those whom he hoped to lead out of the mountains.
* Eddy later attempted to make good on his threat in San Francisco but was stopped by James Reed.
* Just how astonishingly lucky we are to live in the twenty-first century is underscored by a quick look at historical longevity rates worldwide. The average citizen of the Roman Empire could expect to live to about twenty-five. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the average global life span was still only about thirty-six years. But by 1995 it had reached sixty-five, and by 2008 in the United States it was seventy-eight.
* The wheel was later replaced with an even larger, thirty-six-foot wheel. The Old Bale Mill remains a popular visitors’ attraction today.
* While we generally think of the Gold Rush as having occurred in 1849, for those few who were fortunate enough to already be in California, it began in the spring of 1848. My great-uncle, George Tucker, was among those who were first on the scene, and by the summer of 1848 he had gathered enough gold to buy his own spread on the floor of the Napa Valley, at the age of eighteen.
* Not everyone thought Ritchie a good catch. Georgia Donner later recalled that some who knew Ritchie thought him to be “unworthy of her.” Georgia was only six at the time of the marriage, however, and her sources might have formed that opinion later, and perhaps in light of subsequent events.
* Tarwater was likely Martin Tarwater, a crotchety Sonoma County farmer whom Jack London met many years later. London lampooned Tarwater in a short story called “Like Argus of the Ancient Times.” London’s fictional “John Tarwater” was hotheaded, oafish, and particularly averse to legal proceedings. “The application of lawyers to John Tarwater was like the application of a mustard plaster,” London wrote.
* The monument is, among other things, a grave marker. On June 22, 1847, General Stephen Kearny, leading an expedition eastward, paused at the lake camp. He ordered his men to gather the human remains and bits of shredded clothing that were scattered about the site and to lay them in a pit they had dug in the floor of the Breen cabin. Then they set the cabin afire and departed. Seventy-one years later, in June of 1918, three elderly ladies—Martha “Patty” Reed Lewis, Eliza Donner Houghton, and Frances Donner Wilder—looked on as the monument, standing on the site of the Breen cabin and the cremated remains, was formally dedicated.
Daniel James Brown, The Indifferent Stars Above
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