Leonard J. Rose: From Keosauqua, Iowa to the Angel City, a Two-and-a-Half Year Journey Filled With Misfortune and Adventure, Part One

by John Marnell

John Marnell is a desert historian and author of The Letters of Alfred R. Calhoun, Mojave Desert, 1867-1868 and, with his wife Barbara, of Good Samaritans of Death Valley: Lou Wescott Beck and Rufus. We are happy to share this two-part post about Leonard J. Rose, who had a well-known ranch called Sunny Slope in the San Gabriel Valley and for whom the city of Rosemead is named and John starts by detailing the Rose family’s late 1850s migration from New Mexico to Los Angeles.

7 July 1858 is the date Leonard J. Rose, while crossing the continent, with well-defined hopes, etched his name for all ages at a place in New Mexico simply called Inscription Rock. An alternate title to this story might have been borrowed from George Koenig’s book about the Death Valley 49ers, “beyond this place there be dragons.”

As explained in Koenig’s epigraph, “Beyond This Place There Be Dragons can be found lettered by imaginative cartographers on ancient maps as a substitute for the more prosaic ‘Terra Incognita.’” While Koenig used the title to describe the uncertainties facing the gold seekers twenty years earlier, it could have been as dramatically applied to the first emigrants to attempt travel on what was known simply as the “Beale Route” to California. 

From Albuquerque, the tracks west to the Zuni Villages and Fort Defiance were known. To the west, the daily tasks of following the faint and indistinct trail, the search for water and feed, and other dangers were yet on the horizon for the Rose/Udell wagon train. The “dragons” that Rose and company were to encounter lingered ahead.

The name L. J. Rose is likely familiar to readers of Paul Spitzzeri’s Homestead Museum blog posts. Today’s narrative is different in that it tells of Rose’s time before reaching the Angel City in November 1860. To remind us of Rose’s accomplishments and life in southern California, I’m adding here a brief biography taken from the Huntington Library’s finding aid to their L. J. Rose Collection:

[The Rose family] made their way to Los Angeles, California, in 1860 and Rose bought an estate in the San Gabriel Valley. He named it Sunny Slope and it came to encompass approximately 2,000 acres. At Sunny Slope, Rose grew grapes, oranges, walnuts, and manufactured wine and brandy in the thousands of gallons a year. Rose used his economic success to pursue his interests in breeding trotter horses and racing them in harness races across the country. Rose also made a large profit from selling Sunny Slope to an English company in 1887, which he used to pay off debts, buy Rose-Meade ranch, which is now part of the city of Rosemead, and build a lavish home in downtown Los Angeles. Rose began a term as a California State Senator for Los Angeles in 1887. In the following decade, he made a series of bad investments in California and Nevada that ruined him financially. In 1899, mounting financial duress drove Rose to commit suicide in his Los Angeles home.

We will now take a look at how Rose and family got to California. In 1835, eight-year-old Leonard J. Rose arrived in New Orleans from his birthplace in Germany, accompanied by his mother, Wilhelmina, and his younger sister Anna. An older sister, Cresent, was left behind for reasons not clear (this is from Rose, Jr.’s book, though other sources, such as an 1889 Los Angeles County history, state that the Rose family came to America four years later).

His father, Ferdinand, had arrived in New Orleans about five years earlier to establish himself in business. Within a short time, the reunited Rose family relocated to Waterloo, Illinois. By 1848, Leonard moved to Keosauqua, Iowa, and operated what was to become a very profitable general merchandise store. Miss Amanda Markel Jones became his wife on 13 March 1851.

Within a half-dozen years, L. J. Rose saw the opportunity to accomplish a life-long dream to have a horse-race breeding ranch in California, though he was only thirty years of age at the time. Liquidating all of his hard-earned assets, Rose spent $27,500 preparing for the journey purchasing four new wagons including a smaller carriage for his family, sixteen horses, two hundred purebred Durham cattle, and forty-five work oxen to pull the wagons.  

The Rose family included Leonard, his wife Amanda, daughters Nina (3 years), and Annie (1 year), while also included were Amanda’s parents Ezra and Elizabeth, and Edward, her 18-year-old brother. Rose contracted with a group of young men to be drivers, herders, and outriders. By the middle of April 1858, all was in readiness.

Although planning to make the journey as a single company, it wasn’t long before Rose was joined by several other groups as they traveled further west through a southerly route. Shortly after leaving Las Vegas, New Mexico, the Rose train split off from the others and traveled to Santa Fé, staying several days where “the women fairly reveled in a shopping expedition.” Rose described it at the time as “a thoroughly up-to-date, wide-awake frontier town.” The Rose party then continued south, reaching Albuquerque to rendezvous with the rest of the outfits.

There were some passionate discussions among the family leaders, these being Rose, John Udell, Gillum Baley, Joel Hedgpeth, and John Daly, about which of three routes to take. The Old Spanish Trail north from Santa Fé—this route was used in 1841 by the Rowland-Workman party)—was troubling due to the ongoing “Mormon War” scare. The Southern Emigrant Route, following the Rio Grande south then west through Yuma and crossing the bleak desert of California was longer, but the 35^th Parallel route, located by two previous surveying expeditions, was more direct and so it was chosen. Amiel Weeks Whipple conducted a federal transcontinental railroad survey over it in 1853, and, four years later, Edward F. Beale surveyed and began the building of a wagon road as far as the Colorado River. Both of these surveys employed a guide, José Manuel Saavedra.

Rose and the others also realized that a guide was critically important for their survival on this route that was yet to be traveled by emigrants and was unknown to them. They became aware of Saavedra, who had promoted himself as quite capable in a lengthy article in the Santa Fe newspaper. He conveniently lived in Albuquerque and was available for a fee. Both Whipple and Beale, however, struggled with Saavedra at times and probably would have cautioned Rose about their choice.

Rose didn’t mention negotiations among the leaders, but John Udell’s journal does, and he wasn’t pleased as he thought he was paying too big of a share. Nonetheless, $500 was paid to employ Saavedra.

The official report from Beale as superintendent of the wagon road from Fort Defiance to the Colorado River was not published in time for any of the participants of this expedition to see how he characterized the job Saavedra had done. In the printed report, though, he had this to say fairly early in their exploration about the guide:

The various components of the wagon train began crossing the Rio Grande River at Albuquerque on about the 29^th of June. Over the next day or two they reunited, and the slow journey westward began. 

Rose, along with the other parties reached El Morro on 7 and 8 July. El Morro, also known as Inscription Rock, is steeped in history with the inscriptions of hundreds of past Spanish and American explorers and passers-by. Near the base of this sandstone monolith was a large pool of water, enough to satisfy the thirst of man and animal alike. Rose, along with as many as twenty-five others in this group carved their names and/or initials to become a part of the wonderful history recorded here. Rose, Baley, Hedgpeth, Udell, and many others have joined the earliest known inscription of Juan de Oñate’s dated 16 April 1605. Lawrence Clark Powell, the prominent librarian at UCLA, wrote about Inscription Rock “The wedding of human history and natural beauty moves me almost beyond words, and this consummation occurs supremely at El Morro.”

Leaving El Morro they soon passed the Zuñi villages, and their experiences of the trail ahead were described by Rose: “No work had been done on its roadbed, which was in reality no more than a devious trail, barely visible at times . . . The road had never been traveled by emigrants.”

The book L. J. Rose of Sunny Slope was taken from the memoirs of L. J. Rose Jr. who had combined his memories of his father’s life while growing up, supplemented by stories told and retold by his father of “the experiences of the trip across the plains.” On the other hand, Udell’s journal recorded many details of the regular struggles the entire party faced. The Journal of John Udell is a must-read for a more detailed understanding of this perilous journey. The daily crossing of an unknown terrain was more complicated by the scarcity of water and a guide who had trouble remembering the route and landscape. The emigrant train often found it necessary to divide up to give some of the water sources time to recover sufficiently between uses.

From Udell’s journal, “August 1, Sunday. I remained in camp; Mr. Rose concluded to start out with his train, to a weak spring, fifteen miles ahead. Mr. Bailey’s train, in which I am enrolled, agreed to remain until the next day. In the evening our other men came in and reported they had found plenty of water in different places for fifty miles ahead.”

The same source on August 23^rd: “While at this place we heard from Mr. Rose’s party; he had seven of his work oxen stolen by the Indians, and his brother-in-law was severely wounded by them. The Indians were frequently shooting their arrows among us, from their hiding places in the rocks and brush, as we passed along.” The entire wagon train was still a few days from reaching the Colorado River.

Finally, on 27 August 1858, the lead group, including the Rose and Baley contingent reached the crest of the Black Mountains from where they could see the Colorado River. In the Californian Illustrated Magazine of December 1892, Rose wrote:

We had long suffered from excessive heat and want of water, and our mouths were scorched by thirst as by a flame, when suddenly, as we surmounted a lofty peak, the glittering waters of the Colorado burst upon our vision. Its banks, fringed with cottonwoods and willows, promised shade and pasture for our suffering stock, our gratification being increased by beholding, far beyond, California, the goal of our hopes, which at a later date so bountifully repaid our sufferings. Our hopes and spirits revived, toils and sorrows were forgotten, and a shout of exultation arose as we beheld, apparently at our feet, this paradise of plenty. But soon all this bright anticipation, like the baseless fabric of a dream, vanished.

Over the next couple of days, all the stock were driven to the river, while some were returned to the camp in the mountains where Udell and others had remained to recover from the difficulties of the journey and to try to improve the rugged road down the mountain. The Bentner family, which included five children, made it part way to the river before camping alone along the route.

The Mohave Indians visited the emigrant camps, ran off a few cattle, but were generally peaceful. At about 2:00 p.m. on August 30^th, however, that all changed. A complete and detailed account of what happened next would take pages to convey and is beyond the scope of this paper. The distressing particulars as published in the 16 October 1858 Santa Fe Weekly Gazette are presented here. It offered the headline:

Very late and important News

This evening after we had gone to press an express arrived in this city with very late and important news from the emigrant route to California. Lieutenant Wilkins has kindly allowed us to peruse the letter containing it, and we stop the press to publish its contents, which we do in brief and without room or time for comment.

The letter is dated on the 22^nd ultimo, eighty miles west of the San Francisco mountains. The emigrant party, by the principal persons of whom the letter is signed, had arrived in safety at the crossing of the Rio Colorado near the Mojave villages. Shortly afterwards they were attacked by three-hundred Mojave Indians while most of the white men were engaged in constructing rafts to cross and in herding their stock, when a bloody fight ensued. In this engagement the emigrants lost three men, two women and four children killed, with sixteen wounded. The Indians took all the stock, except nineteen head of cattle and eleven horses. The emigrants then retreated on the return route in the night, taking with them but two wagons wherein to haul a small supply of provisions and bedding for the women and children – the whole party at the date of the letter consisting of 123 men, 33 women old and young, and 47 children from the two-week babe up. Soon after the retreat, starvation already starring the company in the face, they fortunately met another emigrant party, who generously shared with them their provisions and comfort [The trains encountered returned to Albuquerque as well.] The signers of the letter we allude to are the following twenty persons – who implore assistance, not for themselves, but for their wives and children, whose sufferings are described as the most intense…In response to this appeal Major E. Backus, in command at Albuquerque, has sent forward under escort, an ample supply of provisions to last them into the settlements.

The different parties of the returning emigrants reached the Indian villages at Zuñi at different times, some continuing east and others staying there much longer to begin their recovery from the exhausting journey from the Colorado River. The letter referred to above had reached the military quartermaster depot at Albuquerque causing the army to send three wagon loads of relief supplies to meet the broken-down emigrants at Zuñi, supplies arriving there on 30 October 1858.

Ed Akey, one of the men initially hired by Rose in Iowa, helped to narrate a story printed in the Annals of Iowa, 1915. Akey recalled:

Even the women and children had to walk much of the time. Mrs. Rose afterward related that she wore out her shoes and then walked with bare and bleeding feet.” Rose himself wrote “To add to our discomfort, the spears of the cactus would pierce our flesh, as each morning we had an hour’s diversion extracting those barbed needles. Provisions gave out, and we lived on the meat of cattle that died on the way, of which some were even diseased.

Prominent desert historian and Beale Road authority, Dennis G. Casebier, wrote of the retreat:

Very little has been written about these first emigrants to attempt to use the 35^th parallel route. Their dramatic experience did, in fact, result in one of the greatest tales of woe and suffering in the history of the American West.

We will return tomorrow with the second and final part of this post, so please join us then.