David Wharff’s Gold Rush Odyssey
In August 1849, shortly after arriving in Sacramento from a six-month voyage around Cape Horn, David Wharff watched as a man in a gambling hall walked up to a faro table and casually placed $10,000 in gold nuggets ($315,000 in today’s currency) on the queen of spades. A game of chance, faro was more popular than poker in gold country because the odds were better.
As a crowd of awed onlookers gathered around the table, the faro dealer made nine consecutive draws from a deck of cards, with each draw turning one card over for himself and another for the gambler. On the tenth draw, as a matching queen card fell to the gambler’s side of the table, the crowd erupted with a roar. The gambler, a local merchant named Sam Brannan, pocketed his winnings, bought drinks for the house, and strolled out into the night.
For Brannan, the wager may have seemed like small change, but to Wharff and the other Forty-niners in the hall it captured the high stakes gamble they had undertaken, deserting their families, jobs, and farms to sail around the world or trek across the country to California with hopes of hitting the jackpot. Brannan was among those who made a fortune enabling their California dream.
In 1848, while working in his dry goods store in Sacramento, then called Sutter’s Fort, Brannan sold some goods to a group of men who paid in gold nuggets. They had discovered the nuggets while constructing a sawmill for John Sutter along the South Fork of the American River.
With foresight, Brannan quickly converted his store into a mining supply center, the only one between San Francisco and the Sierra foothills. By 1849, 50,000 gold seekers had descended upon the area, and Brannan’s store was generating $150,000 a month in sales (almost $4.7 million in today’s currency), making him California’s first millionaire.
But while Brannan and others made fortunes selling goods and services—one prostitute claimed to have made $50,000 ($1.5 million in today’s currency) after a year’s work—the majority of the Forty-niners came away from the gold fields empty handed, left to retreat back to the lives they discarded or, like David Wharff, redirect their California dream to a new wager with better odds, like farming.
Born into a colonial family in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Wharff inherited the stern demeanor of his Protestant ancestors, as well as a close attention to the value of a dollar. After finishing grammar school, he moved to Boston at age 14 to apprentice as a carpenter. By the time he turned 20, he was earning a journeyman’s wage of $1.25 a day ($40 in today’s currency), not enough to marry and settle down with the girl of his dreams, Olive Densmore from Nova Scotia. When word reached Boston of a gold strike in California, it resounded like a shot across the bow for frustrated men like Wharff.
Unable to afford a ticket on a first class clipper ship, Wharff and six of his friends pooled their money to book passage on a small, battered brig, the Christiana, departing Boston on February 15, 1849, among a flotilla of more than 500 vessels leaving eastern ports, packed with “Argonauts”—named for the band of heroes in Greek mythology who accompanied Jason on a sea quest for the golden fleece—undertaking the 15,000-mile voyage around Cape Horn to San Francisco and the golden state.
Wharff and the other nine passengers on the Christiana passed their time gambling, playing checkers, smoking, drinking, telling stories, and daydreaming of how to spend their gold. After subsiding for two months on salted meat that went bad, butter and lard that turned rancid, hard bread that became laced with bugs, and cheese nibbled on by rats, they put in for ten days just south of Rio de Janeiro for fresh water, provisions, and new sails.
“We could buy oranges, $1 a thousand; wine, 10 cents a gallon,” Wharff wrote.
Then came the most perilous leg of the journey, rounding Cape Horn. After 55 days braving monstrous waves, terrifying winds, and frigid temperatures, the ship docked at Valparaiso, Chile, where Wharff and his friends spent five days ashore watching Spaniards bet stacks of gold doubloons on horse races, further fueling their desire to reach California.
Finally, on the morning of August 16, 1849, six months after leaving Boston, the Christiana sailed through the Golden Gate alongside twenty other windjammers. The crew deserted the moment the ship docked. During the two days it took the captain to find replacements, Wharff and his friends took in the night life of the mushrooming metropolis, more than 500 bars and 1,000 gambling dens.
At establishments like the Parker House or the El Dorado, women dealt the cards, brass bands or banjo musicians performed, and gold nuggets sat piled high on the gambling tables. They could eat at places like the Fly Trap or Monkey Warner’s Cobweb Palace, which was decorated with whales’ teeth. After six months of boredom cooped up in close quarters at sea, it was like entering a carnival.
From San Francisco, a pilot boat guided the Christiana up the river to their final destination, Sacramento. By the time Wharff stepped off the boat, he was down to his last 25 cents. Spotting a house under construction near the wharf, he approached the foreman, who, after learning he was a carpenter, hired him on the spot for $20 a day.
Wharff and his Boston friends formed a company to share in the collective spoils of their gold diggings, purchasing an empty lot in Sacramento for $10 upon which to erect a small, prefabricated house they had brought with them on the Christina, to serve as company headquarters. However, within a couple of weeks of watching Forty-niners return to town with $3,000-$4,000 in gold dust ($95,000 to $125,000 in today’s currency), the collective fell apart, as each man set off on his own for the foothills.
After Wharff earned $300 ($9,500 in today’s currency) working 15 days as a carpenter, he paid a driver with an ox team $80 ($2,500 in today’s currency) to haul him, his equipment and provisions up to Weaver Creek in El Dorado County, where he quickly learned squeezing gold out of rocks was harder work than he imagined. Not only were living conditions primitive and costs high, the work itself—digging, pickaxing, shoveling, clawing, scraping, shifting, and panning—was tedious, with little success. The first piece of gold he found was the size of a pin head.
Teaming up with three other men, Wharff moved on to the South Fork of the American River, where they built a cofferdam of sandbags to divert the water around a small stretch of river bottom. For two days they risked their lives in ice cold water from the snow pack, blocked by a sandbag wall teetering on the verge of collapse, to extract $800 of gold nuggets ($25,000 in today’s currency), which they divided up and then went their separate ways. Wharff traveled to Marysville to pan for gold, and then to Shasta County, where he joined 16 other men on a mining crew.
Finally, after more than two years working the riverbeds and mines, Wharff decided to call it quits. He had witnessed his fair share of casualties, men broken by exhaustion and fatigue, as well as those whose lives were taken by disease, murders, fights, and mining accidents. He returned to San Francisco with a full belt of gold dust strapped to his waist, not enough to make him a wealthy man, but enough to stake a claim in starting a new life. For Wharff, that meant returning to Boston to claim the hand of his sweetheart.
On December 15, 1851, he purchased a $200 ticket ($6,200 in today’s currency) aboard a steamer of 650 passengers departing San Francisco for New York via Nicaragua. The overland route across Nicaragua, similar to the route across the Isthmus of Panama, trimmed 8,000 miles and five months of travel time off the voyage around Cape Horn. The tradeoff was a risk of contracting a deadly tropical disease, such as malaria, yellow fever, or cholera.
After sailing to the port of San Juan del Sur on Nicaragua’s west coast, Wharff and the other passengers were greeted by a long line of mules waiting to take them on an 11-mile trail to Lake Nicaragua. At night they slept on elevated wooden benches to protect them from poisonous centipedes on the ground.
In the morning, they rode a ferry across the lake, disembarking to walk around a set of rapids down to the San Juan River, where they boarded steamers on a 100-mile river journey through dense forests of mangrove trees, dazzling tropical flowers, and exotic animals such as crocodiles, parrots, and jaguars. At the port of Greytown on the Caribbean coast, they transferred to a steamer bound for New York, arriving on January 15, 1852, only one month after leaving San Francisco.
Wharff, bewhiskered and in rough miner’s garb, was unrecognizable to his family when he showed up in Boston. Only his voice was familiar. After shaving and donning a new suit of clothes, he called on the girl he’d left behind.
But after two and half years in California, Boston felt tired and slow. Carpenters were still working for $1.25 a day compared to the $20 he was able to earn in Sacramento. Within a few days, he was ready to return to the gold fields. His older sister Mary Jane stepped in, agreeing to go with him, but only on the condition he marry Olive and bring her with them.
The couple wed on February 19, 1852 and, along with Mary Jane, departed for California on March 1st. The steamers using the Nicaragua and Isthmus of Panama routes were booked through mid-summer, so Wharff paid $900 ($28,500 in today’s currency) for three tickets aboard the Sam Appleton, a large windjammer sailing around the Horn.
The ship made only one stop in Valparaiso and arrived in San Francisco on July 22nd. Sailing on to Sacramento, Wharff took the two women to the company house he and his Boston friends built. Only one of the of men was there, the rest were working in the mines.
“My wife and sister,” wrote Wharff, “thought it was a hard-looking place. I had never seen a broom in the house since we put it up in ’49, so you can judge how clean it was.”
Sacramento was experiencing a heat wave so hot the women refused to accompany Wharff to the diggings. Instead, he had to content himself with carpentry work around town, even though the day rate had dropped to $12. That may have been for the best.
By 1852, an estimated 250,000 people had flooded into California, making for the largest migration in U.S. history. With most surface deposits exhausted, the days of the miner with a pick, shovel, and wash pan were ending, replaced by well-capitalized mining companies operating with deep power drills and hydraulic water jets that blasted away mountainsides.
Mary Jane and Olive prevailed on Wharff to move them out of the company house into a nearby rental, while he built a new house on the same lot. No sooner had he finished than a fire (later known as the Great Conflagration) swept through Sacramento on November 2, 1852, burning down more than 80 percent of the city’s structures.
A wind-blown ember set fire to the floor joists of the new house, but two men passing by— Sacramento merchants Leland Stanford and Collis P. Huntington, who a decade later would team up with Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker to form the Central Pacific Railroad as “the Big Four”—extinguished the blaze, saving the house.
The following morning, a merchant approached Wharff with an offer to buy his house and move it down the street. Having spent $300 to construct it, he sold the house and some furniture in it for $2,200 ($70,000 in today’s currency). He and Olive, who was four months pregnant with their first child, promptly boarded a steamer for San Francisco, where they rented a small house on Washington Street. Mary Jane, who was making a good living as a dressmaker, stayed behind in Sacramento, where she soon married Frank Green, a Forty-niner from Boston.
After four months in San Francisco, Wharff ran into a Boston man who had returned from the east coast with three large bundles of fruit trees. Having earlier purchased land in Sonoma County, he asked Wharff to accompany him there to help construct the floor and doors of a wall tent he was planning to install as temporary living quarters. Ever adventurous, Wharff boarded a small schooner with the man and sailed up a winding creek to Petaluma.
Established as a trading post two years earlier by meat hunters shipping game down to San Francisco, by early 1853 Petaluma consisted of two hotels, roughly 50 houses, a dry goods store, and a potato warehouse. As Sonoma County’s main shipping port, it found itself at the center of the area’s first agricultural boom—potatoes.
First introduced by an Irish immigrant named John Keyes out at Bodega Head in 1850, potato farming was well-suited to the area’s coastal climate. Quick to grow, easy to transport and store without refrigeration, potatoes became a staple for the burgeoning population of San Francisco.
Farmers hauled wagonloads of their spuds into Petaluma via Potato Street (renamed Prospect Street in the 1860s), storing them at the warehouse until they could be loaded onto “potato boats” bound for the city. Each planted acre of potatoes generated $1,200 annually ($37,000 in today’s currency). For disappointed Argonauts like Wharff, those seemed like better odds than panning for gold.
After disembarking in Petaluma, Wharff and his friend stayed overnight at the American Hotel on Main Street (site of today’s Putnam Plaza). The hotel’s proprietor, George Williams, a Forty-Niner from Maine and the father-in-law of future Petaluma grain merchant John McNear, also operated a freight service with a wagon and three oxen. In the morning, for $10 ($300 in today’s currency), he hauled the wall tent and lumber out to the new farm six miles north of town.
At the time, there were only two other settlers on the 16-mile stretch between Petaluma and Santa Rosa, Tom Hopper and Almer Clark. Hopper would go on to become one of the wealthiest landowners in the county, and Clark would soon open a popular stagecoach stop, the Valley House along Petaluma Hill Road. Along the way, Williams pointed out to Wharff 160 acres of land for sale in what is today downtown Penngrove.
“I thought I had hit a gold mine,” Wharff wrote.
After helping his friend construct the wall tent, Wharff hurried back to Petaluma to purchase his new farm before sailing back to San Francisco to share the news with Olive, who, during his absence, had given birth on March 31st to a baby daughter, Mary.
Anxious to get his potato crop in, Wharff sailed back to Petaluma with lumber and a wall tent, as well as six dozen laying hens he purchased from a Frenchman in the Presidio for $225 ($7,100 in today’s currency).
George Williams hauled everything out to the new farm, where Wharff built a chicken coop directly onto the tent, to protect his valuable hens from preying coyotes. Returning to San Francisco for Olive and Mary, he once again hired Williams to transport them and their worldly possessions to the farm. As the made their way through the deserted valley, Olive nervously asked where exactly they were going.
“Home,” Wharff said.
After setting up Olive and the baby in the tent, Wharff traveled to Tomales, then a booming shipping port, where he purchased two tons of seed potatoes from Henry McCleave for $400 ($12,000 in today’s currency). That summer, while waiting for the potato crop to come in, the Wharffs made money by selling their eggs in town for $1.50 a dozen ($47 in today’s currency), becoming the first poultry producers in the area.
What Olive made of life on the farm, her husband didn’t say, except to note there were only three other women living in Petaluma at the time, and that Olive went for six months without seeing the face of another white woman.
In September 1853, a month before the fall potato harvest, one of Wharff’s neighbors, upset his potato patch was being trampled by grazing cattle from the nearby ranch of Tom Hopper, set fire to the dry grasses on his property. As the wind came up, the fire quickly extended across the valley, and by evening had burned over to the top of Sonoma Mountain. Having earlier cleared the grasses and wild oats from around his tent home and potato patch, Wharff was spared any damage.
The following month, he harvested his potatoes, bagging them in sacks he purchased for $16 per 100, and hauled them to Petaluma’s potato warehouse, to eventually be loaded aboard “potato boats” bound for San Francisco. Unfortunately, the potato buyer at the warehouse had bad news—the market had crashed due to an overabundance of spuds that fall. He advised him to store his 20 tons of potatoes at the warehouse for $200 ($6,300 in today’s currency) until early spring, when prices would hopefully rebound.
By February, as it became clear that the boom was over, a victim of overplanting, soil erosion, and increased competition, the manager of the warehouse asked Wharff to remove his potatoes which were beginning to sprout. Wharff told him to move them himself, which he did, dumping them in the Petaluma Creek.
Disappointed, Wharff sold his ranch for $200 to a man named Brad Baily, and sailed with his family back to San Francisco, where he built a new house on the corner of Pacific and Leavenworth streets.
After less than a year in the city however, Wharff was lured back to Sonoma County by the idea of starting a cattle ranch with his new brother-in-law Frank Green. A former neighbor told him 160 acres were for sale adjacent to Wharff’s former potato farm. Wharff paid the owner, Tet Carpenter, $200 for the property, which came with a small two-room house.
Back in San Francisco, he purchased twelve head of cattle from a rancher near the Mission Dolores for $480 ($14,000 in today’s currency), herding them aboard a new steamer Charles Minturn, the Ferryboat King of San Francisco Bay, had recently installed on the Petaluma Creek to Haystack Landing just south of Petaluma.
Wharff wrote he thought the ranch land was in the public domain, allowing him and Green to purchase it without a deed. That belief was rooted in the Preemption Act of 1841, which allowed settlers to purchase from the federal government up to 160 acres of any land in the public domain, assuming they had either lived on it for at least 14 months or made improvements to it for five years. In either case, it wasn’t necessary for a settler to hold actual title to the land while establishing homesteading rights.
California, however, presented a problem for aspiring homesteaders, as most of the desirable farming land was held in Mexican land grants, ownership of which was legally protected by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 that ended the Mexican-American War. For squatters like Wharff and Green, that would soon become a rude awakening.
The average Mexican land grant measured 17,000 acres. Owners with clear title, like General Mariano Vallejo, whose 66,000-acre grant extended from the east side of the Petaluma Creek all the way to the town of Sonoma, spent the 1850s selling off parcels of their land holdings to newly arriving American settlers. But a number of the land grant had changed hands so many times since the Mexican-American war that their legal trails were cloudy, with competing or even fraudulent claims.
In response, California created a land commission to review the legal status of the state’s 813 land grants. The reviews, which ran from 1852 until 1856, ultimately confirmed 514 of the 813 claims filed. Almost all of land commission’s decisions were appealed in the courts, creating a bureaucratic quagmire that added to the uncertainty and confusion of grant ownership, opening the door to speculators and land sharks.
Prospective settlers were faced with two choices: either purchase land from a claimant whose claim might be challenged and reversed by the land commission or courts in years to come, or else squat on the land illegally, hoping the land commission would eventually void the claim, placing the land in the public domain for purchase under the Preemption Act.
The extent to which Wharff and Green made this “pre-empt” squatter’s gamble is unknown. Although their land purchase was not recorded with the county, tax records indicate that in 1855 they paid state and county property taxes. By that time, the land commission had already ruled on the claim of the Rancho Cotate land grant they were squatting on.
Totaling 17,000 acres, Rancho Cotate had been originally granted in 1844 to Captain Juan Castenada, a secretary of Mariano Vallejo. At the outbreak of the Mexican-American War in 1846, Castenada sold the grant to Thomas Larkin, the U.S. Consul to Mexico’s Alta California. In 1849, Larkin sold it to an American trader, Joseph S. Ruckle, who held it for only two months before selling it to Dr. Thomas S. Page, an expatriate American physician practicing in Valparaiso, Chile.
Page remained in Chile after the purchase, making him an absentee landlord and subjecting his land grant, which would one day encompass Cotati, Rohnert Park and Penngrove, to illegal squatters, including Wharff and Green. In 1852, he filed his claim with the new land commission. The claim was approved in August 1854, around the same time Wharff and Green purchased their land from the squatter Carpenter. As with most land grants, the land commission’s ruling was immediately appealed, leaving the land in legal limbo until the courts dismissed the appeal in March, 1857.
As one last formality, a survey of the land was scheduled to be undertaken in August 1857 before Dr. Page could assert his claim. What happened next illustrates the gambling mentality of former gold miners at the time.
Before the surveyors arrived, Wharff and Green sold their 160 acres to a man for $500 ($14,000 in today’s currency) and squatted on an adjacent 161-acre parcel. Whether or not they were looking to make a quick profit is unknown.
In February 1858, after a patent was issued to Dr. Page, giving him clear and legal title to Rancho Cotate, he began immediately selling off 160-acre parcels to settlers, beginning with the squatters already in place. The settler who purchased the Wharff and Green ranch the year before for $500 paid Page $1,800 ($50,000 in today’s currency) to obtain legal deed to the property, bringing his total outlay for the land to $2,300 ($70,000 in today’s currency).
Wharff and Green purchased the 161 acres they had recently squatted on from Page for $1,610 ($45,000 in today’s currency). A short while later, they also bought back their former ranch from the man they sold it to, paying him $2,500 ($75,000 in today’s currency).
The escalating land values had to do with a flood of new settlers to the area in the late 1850s. By 1860, Sonoma County had 12,000 residents, most of them farmers, living on 756 farms, with more than 200,000 acres under cultivation. The primary driver of that expansion was the California wheat boom.
After the Crimean War cut off Russian wheat exports in the 1850s, Australia and New Zealand turned to California for wheat supplies, setting off a minor boom. The boom went into overdrive in the 1860s, following the disruption of Midwest wheat exports to Europe during the Civil War. By 1867, 80 percent of the wheat grown in Sonoma County was being shipped around the Horn to Europe’s central grain market in Liverpool, England, making Petaluma not only a thriving river town, but also an international shipping port.
In addition to riding the wheat boom, on their two ranches Wharf and Green also raised barley and oats, and annually produced 600 pounds of butter, 100 tons of hay, 400 pounds of honey, along with poultry and cattle. A tobacco chewer, Wharff was known for nailing the lids of his Star Tobacco tins to his barn, which was covered in them.
In 1871, Mary Jane and Frank Green decided to move to San Francisco. Wharff and Green sold the 161-acre ranch they had been living on, the one they purchased together directly from Page, to James and Lydia Goodwin, owners of a furniture store in San Francisco, who operated it as a second residence. They retained their original ranch, which was located along Old Redwood Highway near where the Green Mill Inn was erected in 1932.
In the mid-1870s, the California wheat market began to decline due to an international recession and increasing competition from the Midwest. Like many of his neighbors, Wharff shifted to planting apples and grapes as part of a new fruit boom.
After the restless Argonaut odyssey of his twenties, Wharff ultimately found his golden fleece in Penngrove, settling with Olive for 55 years on the same ranch, where they raised seven children. Only three of whom survived beyond childhood, the others falling victim to diphtheria and scarlet fever. They were surrounded by family, as two of Olive’s brothers, George and John Densmore from Nova Scotia, joined them to settle in the area, and Mary and Frank Green eventually moved back to Penngrove in 1893, as the area began to experience a new egg boom, filling the countryside with chicken houses.
In 1905, the Wharffs leased their ranch and farmhouse to a neighbor, Antone Ronsheimer, who with his half-brother John Formschlag had purchased in 1865 the farm in downtown Penngrove where Wharff first grew potatoes in 1853. The Wharffs built a small cottage on the ranch for themselves and lived there until 1909, when they left Penngrove to live with their daughter Belinda Hoadley in San Francisco’s Mission District. Olive died there in 1913 at age 85, and David in 1918 at age 89.
By that time, swaggering, opportunistic Argonauts like Wharff had been recast in local lore as Pioneers, a little flamboyant perhaps, but always purposeful in channeling the wild exploitations of the Gold Rush into building California. Wharff’s daughter Belinda maintained that her father was not the adventurous, “harum scarum” type of Argonaut, but a quiet family man of tenacious courage, whose feet, like thousands of others who tilled the land, were firmly placed on the soil.
She clearly hadn’t seen him in his youth.
*****
Thanks to Lee Torliatt, Chuck Lucas, Katherine Rinehart, and Rich Wharff for their research assistance.
SOURCES:
Newspapers & Magazines
Petaluma Argus: “Personal and Social,” May 5, 1883; “A Bit of Penngrove History,” November 28, 1901; “Has Read the Argus for Over Fifty Years,” March 31, 1906; “The Death of Mrs. F. B. Green,” February 5, 1909; “Celebrated 57th Wedding Anniversary,” February 20, 1909; “Celebrate Sixtieth Anniversary of Their Marriage Tuesday,” February 20, 1912; “David Wharff Passes Away,” September 16, 1918.
Petaluma Courier: “Their Golden Anniversary,” February 20, 1902; “Celebrate Anniversary,” February 18, 1909; “Ancient Land History,” November 30, 1912; “Mrs. O. Wharff Enters Rest,” April 20, 1913; “Frank B. Green, Penngrove Pioneer, Found Dead in Kitchen at Country Home,” November 9, 1913.
Sacramento Bee: Harry P. Bagley, “From Sedate Boston to the Wild Gold Country of California,” September 12, 1942.
Sacramento Daily Union: “From the South (Page’s deed),” October 4, 1852.
Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “A Pioneer Woman of Petaluma Dead,” April 20, 1913.
Scientific American, “Agriculture in California,” November 27, 1852 (price of potatoes). https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/agriculture-in-california/
Sonoma Democrat: “Patents Received in Sonoma (Page grant),” April 1, 1858.
Books, Journals, Websites, Other
Paul Bailey, Sam Brannan and the California Mormons (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1943), p. 124.
Christopher Warren Haskins, The Argonauts of California, Being the Reminiscences of Scenes and Incidents that Occurred in California in Early Mining Days (New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1890) p. 462.
Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982).
Katherine Johnson, “West Penngrove Historical Resources Survey,” Master of Arts Thesis, Sonoma State University, 1994. https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/downloads/g445cg87h?locale=en
John Haskell Kemble, “The Gold Rush by Panama, 1848-1851,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 18, No. 1, Rushing for Gold (University of California Press, February, 1949), pp. 45-56.
“Central America: Nicaragua,” The Maritime Heritage Project. https://www.maritimeheritage.org/ports/centralAmericaNicaragua.html
J.P. Munro-Fraser, “George B. Williams,” History of Sonoma County (Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), pp. 604-605.
Thor Severson, Sacramento: An Illustrated History, 1839 to 1874 (California Historical Society, 1973).
Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream 1850-1913 (Oxford University Press USA, 1973), pp. 49-68.
Robert A. Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch Of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), pgs. 18, 24, 55.
Lee Torliatt, Golden Memories of the Redwood Empire (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2002) pp. 18-20.
David Wharff letter to William Farrell, dated April 10, 1914. From personal collection of Richard Wharff.
David Wharff letter to A.P. Behrens, dated April 26, 1918. From personal collection of Lee Torliatt.
Rich Warff, “David Wharff,” Portraits of Early Sonoma County Settlers (Sonoma County Genealogical Society, 2016) pp. 115-122.
Luzena Stanley Wilson, 49er: Her Memoirs as Taken Down by Her Daughter in 1881 (Mills College, Calif., Eucalyptus Press, 1937). www.digitalhistory.uh.edu.