by Paul R. Spitzzeri
According to Homestead founder William Workman, he, his wife Nicolasa Urioste and their children Margarita and José arrived in this region on 5 November 1841 after a two-month, 1,200-mile long trek over the Old Spanish Trail from New Mexico—this date being particularly meaningful for the native of England as it is Guy Fawkes Day, a national holiday there. Assuming this is the accepted date of landfall, today marks the 183rd anniversary of the arrival, while the Bidwell-Bartleson Party, the first overland wagon train, reached Marsh’s Ranch in northern California on the 4th.
The timing was also notable this year as the Old Spanish Trail Association held its annual conference in Santa Fé, the picturesque northern New Mexican city where the Anglo-American contingent of the expedition, numbering twenty-five men and the families of two of them (the Workmans and that of William Gordon and his wife María Lucero), gathered in early September to launch their migration to Alta California.
Once the group reached Abiquiú, the northern most Spanish settlement in New Mexico and which was a community of genízaros (detribalized and Christianized natives), a large contingent of perhaps forty or so persons, including more families, joined the expedition, with some of the men experienced trail travelers and whose services were undoubtedly vital for the success of the group in making their way through the challenging terrain.
The conference featured many interesting presentations on modern sheep ranching and its continuation of tradition; the mechanics of packing mules on trail trips; the reexamination of commonly held beliefs and myths related to the trail; a notable mapping project related to native trails in and near the Old Spanish route; and a National Park Service session that discussed initiatives tied to the national historic trail.
This latter included mention of the Homestead as a certified trail-related site and the creation of an asset page on the NPS website, while it was noted that signage is also being explored, something that we hope will, in part, take place next year. Lastly, one of the presentations was a shared one with Tom Paine, a descendant of Rowland and Workman Expedition member, Dr. Jonathan Huntington Lyman, with Tom discussing unpublished reminiscences of his ancestor and which have not been made public since their 1860 compilation, while I briefly discussed recollections Lyman gave to Thomas Jefferson Farnham for his posthumous history of California and Oregon, issued in 1849.
Contact was made earlier with Tom when he came upon a post on this blog about the Lyman contributions to Farnham’s work and then he wrote me about the manuscript that the doctor penned and which had been passed down over more than a century and a half until it was left to Tom, who has been pondering what to do with the work. The idea for a combined talk was suggested largely as way to give Tom a forum for this remarkable document, as well as an opportunity to meet trail historians and enthusiasts and help him decide what to do with the manuscript.
Because of time constraints, my portion was necessarily truncated, so this post serves to fill in the gaps as we further look at what Farnham recorded from Lyman’s observations of travel on the Old Spanish Trail in fall 1841 and include content not discussed in the prior post. Farnham (1804-1848) was born in Vermont, though apparently in a portion that became, in 1820, the state of Maine, created as a free state in a compromise that allowed for Missouri, where Workman’s brother, David, then resided, to become a slave state.
After being educated in New England, Farmham, as did many migrants, settled in Illinois, formerly part of the old “Northwest,” specifically in Peoria, where he was admitted to the bar. In 1836, he married Eliza Burhans (1815-1864), a remarkable figure in her own right, and the couple had a son, who died after just under a year. Whether this tragedy was part of the reason, Farnham was stirred by a missionary’s talk in 1839 about converting indigenous people in the Willamette Valley of what became Oregon.
Farnham was chosen to be captain of a party that referred to themselves as the “Oregon Dragoons” and which carried a flag, made by Eliza, which was inscribed with the group’s motto “Oregon or the Grave.” As most of the dragoons deserted, only five, including Farnham, made it to Fort Vancouver, across from what became Portland. He soon wrote a petition requesting the government in Washington, D.C., to take over the area to protect Americans in the region.
After a short sojourn in Oregon, Farnham sailed to Hawaii, stayed there briefly, and then, in early 1840, traveled to Monterey, the capital of the Mexican department of Alta California. There, he became involved in the Graham Affair, concerning Americans and Europeans arrested by officials on suspicion of attempting to foment a revolt similar to that undertaken in Texas, which, in 1836, became an independent nation prior to its annexation in 1845. Farnham’s efforts evidently were critical in obtaining the release of the prisoners.
It should be noted that, in 1840, Workman and John Rowland were named agents of the Texan republic, though it is not clear whether this was with their approval or wishes—the expedition the following year was directly tied to the imminent attempted invasion by an armed force to seize territory to the Río Grande, the self-declared western border of Texas but on the eastern banks of which were the principal New Mexican pueblos of Albuquerque, Santa Fé and Taos, where the Workmans long resided.
In May, Farnham took a ship to the western Mexican port city of San Blas and then crossed that country and made his way to New Orleans before reuniting with Eliza upon which she gave birth to twins in spring 1841. The family resided in New York City, Wisconsin and Illinois in the next several years, during which period, between 1842 and 1846, Farnham wrote five books pertaining to his peregrinations through the west, Hawaii and México.
There was, however, a separation between the Farnhams, with Eliza, in 1844, taking a position as matron of the woman’s section of Sing Sing Prison in New York City and remaining in that role for four years. She briefly worked at an institute for the sight impaired in Boston , while Thomas returned to California in 1846 and then died in San Francisco in September 1848, just as the Gold Rush was starting to emerge. The following year, Eliza took her two sons, Charles and Edward, to California to claim a property at Santa Cruz left them by Thomas.
After seven years of struggle and a difficult second marriage that ended in divorce as well as the death of Edward and a daughter from the latter relationship, however, Eliza and Charles returned to New York, where she studied medicine for two years and worked on a book that proclaimed the natural superiority of women. In 1858, she spoke on this topic at a Woman’s Rights Convention in the Big Apple, though, notably, she was against woman suffrage, and, the following year, came back to the Golden State, where she lectured and then was hired at the state insane asylum at Stockton.
Near the end of 1862, Eliza was back in New York and promoted the abolishment of slavery before volunteering as a nurse treating Union soldiers after the Battle of Gettysburg, one of the most famous engagements in the Civil War. She may well have contracted tuberculosis there and died of the disease in 1864, at age 49. The Farnhams were a formidable couple, to be sure, and it may well be that Eliza helped in the compilation of the book, issued after Thomas’s death, in which Lyman’s accounts of his travels were included.
To this observer, it seems that Farnham utilized the recollections of the doctor to flesh out his avowed subject concerning the history of California, which was more broadly defined before its seizure by Americans in 1846-1847 with many maps showing the territory as embracing much of the west far beyond the boundaries that were established when statehood was granted in September 1850. Farnham’s travels in California were limited to the regions around the Bay Area, Santa Cruz and more northern sections, but Lyman, by virtue of his use of the Old Spanish Trail, traversed the southern portion including greater Los Angeles.
Moreover, Farnham, a keen observer of those regions he’d visited on his many travels, was obviously highly impressed by the like-minded attributes of Lyman, who he referred to as a friend, though he, strangely, recorded the doctor as being from Buffalo, when there is no documentation of Lyman ever residing in that New York metropolis. In any case, the inclusion of the Lyman remembrances allowed Farnham to fulfill the promise of the book’s official title of Life, Adventures and Travels in California, though, common to the extraordinarily lengthy titles of the period, it bore a subheading of To Which Are Added the Conquest of California, Travels in Oregon, and History of the Gold Regions—these, no doubt, added to enlarge the audience.
These remarkable circumstances, in fact, lead to another important component of the Farnham/Lyman collaboration—namely, the idea of what a published narrative constituted. A reader in most of America, if not abroad, was likely to accept the content penned by the two men as the result of authoritative description and analysis. Beyond this, it was not likely that a reader would be able, if they so wished, to corroborate the text with other works given the paucity of such travelogues for this part of the continent at the time—though, in 1849, when the Life, Adventures and Travels was published by Nafis and Cornish of New York, as well as Van Dien and Macdonald of St. Louis, more such works were being composed and issued.
This was especially true of Lyman’s observations, as the number of those who’d plied the Trail did not include anyone to date who’d recorded their impressions in such detail. While there would be plenty of travelers and migrants who flocked west with the bursting forth of the Gold Rush and many accounts penned and published, the minute examinations and recollections of the physician were almost certainly novel to readers and not comparable to other accounts—yet.
With the 2022 Lyman post mainly covering his Farnham remembrances as to the Old Spanish Trail route, landscape, plant material and his encounter with ruins of what Farnham wondered were from the fabled Cíbola, purportedly a large metropolis of untold riches, though it is almost certain that what was found were the remains of an indigenous community, what we’ll do tomorrow with part two is focus on those aspects of the Lyman recollection dealing with his description of indigenous communities as well as a particularly interesting account of interactions in the Rowland and Workman Expedition between New Mexican genízaros, native peoples and the Anglo members.
Be sure to join us then as we commemorate the anniversary of the expedition with the Lyman account as published by Farnham, as well as share a bit of a remarkable conference-concluding field trip to Abiquiú, which is where the trek really began in early September 1841.