On April 15, 1854, Tom Camron boarded the steamer Secretary in San Francisco to return home to Petaluma. He had come to the city to explore investing in the refurbished Secretary, which had begun plying its way to Petaluma just three weeks before.[1]
For “forty-niners” like Camron, the Gold Rush might have ended, but gold fever still ran high. With bays and rivers serving as early California’s main highways, steamboats were the new investment frenzy. Camron wanted in. So did many others.
Competition on the waters was so fierce that passenger fares and freight rates had dropped to unprofitable levels. Operators complained their only profits came from the liquor dispensed in the steamers’ saloons. On the wharves, ticket promoters tussled in shouting matches and fisticuffs, proclaiming to prospective passengers the superiority of their boats .[2]
The rivalries didn’t end there. Daredevil crews, hell-bent on proving their steamers the best, engaged in spontaneous races on the waterways, while on their decks, excited passengers made their bets on the match.[3]
Towns with navigable waterways like Petaluma flourished. Shortly after the town’s founding in 1852, the steamer Red Jacket began making trips three times a week to and from San Francisco on the tidal slough then known as the Petaluma Creek. By 1854, Petaluma had developed into a bustling agricultural river port of 400 residents with steamers and schooners navigating the creek’s 19 narrow, winding miles daily.[4]
That caught the attention of speculators, including Vulcan Iron Works, a San Francisco manufacturer of steam engines and boilers, who decided to get in the game by refurbishing an old tub called the Gabriel Winter.[5]
Like many of California’s early steamboats, the Gabriel Winter was originally dismantled on the East Coast during the Gold Rush and shipped around the Horn to San Francisco, where it was reassembled and put into service on the Feather River between Sacramento and Marysville.[6]
The biggest danger facing steamboats was boiler explosion. If boilers were not carefully watched and maintained, pressure could build up in the boiler and cause a spectacular and deadly explosion. Racing only increased that danger. On its maiden run, the Gabriel Winter was challenged to a race by the steamer Fawn, whose boiler blew up during the race, killing a number of passengers on board.[7]
To purchase and overhaul the Gabriel Winter, Vulcan Iron Works raised $20,000 in capital ($785,000 in today’s currency). They spruced the boat up with a new coat of paint, a new boiler, and an engine scavenged from the remains of a recently exploded steamer. Rebranding it the Secretary, they dispatched it on runs up the Petaluma Creek.[8]
It is unknown what drew 41-year-old Camron to the Secretary as a potential investor. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he spent his younger years in Illinois, where he befriended a young Abe Lincoln, who boarded for a time with the Camron family. (Lincoln asked for the hand of one of Camron’s 11 sisters in marriage, but was rejected because he was too poor.) The family then moved to Iowa, where Camron and his father, the Rev. John Camron, operated a general store.[9]
In 1849, members of the extended Camron family set out on a wagon train for California. Camron and his father spent the winter working the gold mines before settling in Sonoma County. His father purchased a farm near Sebastopol, where he also started the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. Camron and his wife Cynthia settled with their four children on a farm in Two Rock along Spring Hill Road, near those of his sisters Nancy and Mary Jane and their respective husbands Silas Martin and Charles Purvine.[10]
On the day Camron boarded the Secretary, he was returning home to a new daughter his wife had given birth to nine days before.[11] The Secretary disembarked that morning with 65 passengers aboard. Two hours into the five-hour cruise, another steamer, the Nevada, drew up beside them as they approached San Pablo Bay.[12]
The Nevada was making its second trip to Petaluma. A sternwheeler, it was narrower and more maneuverable than the Secretary, a sidewheeler, in the winding, shallow waters of the Petaluma Creek, which prior to any dredging had an average depth of only six feet at high tide.[13] In a race, the Secretary’s only chance of beating the Nevada to Petaluma was in reaching the creek first.
As the Nevada began to overtake the Secretary, the captain in the pilot house shouted through a speaking tube down to the engineer, “Let her go!”
Instead, the engineer ordered the fireman to increase the steam pressure. “Shove her up, damn it,” he yelled, “shove her up!” He then lashed an oar over the lever of the safety valve to keep it from tripping.[14]
Realizing they were engaged in a precarious race, Camron reportedly went to the engine room to get the engineer to pull back.[15] He failed. As the two boats approached the Petaluma Creek entrance at Black Point, the Secretary began shaking and jerking. Within minutes the boiler exploded, ripping the boat apart. Bodies were blown into the air, heads flying in one direction and limbs and trunks in another. Sixteen passengers were killed, and 31 badly scaled.[16]
The tragedy of the Secretary led to calls for stronger steamboat regulations. Instead, market forces prevailed. A few weeks before the explosion, a group of the major steamboat operators formed a monopoly called the California Steam Navigation Company in an effort to end the profitless chaos on the waterways.[17]
They quickly cracked down on steamboat racing by eliminating independent operators, either through buyouts or other means. That included the Nevada, which they allegedly wrecked by paying its captain to run her aground.[18] Denounced as “a monster steamboat company conceived in sin and born in iniquity,” the group then imposed considerably higher rates and fares throughout California.[19]
Charles Minturn, a founding partner of the group, operated the monopoly on the Petaluma Creek, charging exorbitant fees for transportation on dilapidated and dangerous vessels. His monopoly ended in 1870, after the San Francisco & North Pacific Railroad laid down its tracks in Sonoma County, opening a new port on the Petaluma Creek below Lakeville called Donahue. Likewise, the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 broke the group’s broader monopoly in California.[20]
With the shift to rail transportation, Petaluma soon found itself replaced by Santa Rosa as the county’s main agricultural shipping hub. Steamboats continued to ply the Petaluma Creek, but the city’s population remained stagnate until the local invention of an efficient incubator set off an egg boom in the early 1900s.[21]
Some days after the explosion of the Secretary, Tom Camron’s body was found on the beach and buried in Petaluma.[22] His wife Cynthia remarried, but continued to live with her children on the farm in Two Rock, where along with the Purvine and Martin families, they gave rise to generations of local Camron descendants to come.[23]
A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier April 12, 2024.
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] “Trial Trip of an Iron Steamer,” Sacramento Union, July 24, 1851; “Explosion of the Steamboat Secretary,” Daily Alta California, April 16, 1854; Alice Purvine Murphy, The Rev. John M. Camron and Descendants 1790-1962 (A.P. Murphy,1962), FamilySearch.org; Casey Gauntt, “Thomas P. Camron,” Write Me Something Beautiful.com, January 19, 2022. https://www.writemesomethingbeautiful.com/2022/01/19/thomas-p-camron/
[2] Wilbur Hoffman, “When Steamers Sailed the Feather,” Sutter County Historical Society News Bulletin, Vol. XVIII, April 1979; Jerry McMullen, Paddle Wheel Days in California (Stanford University Press, 1944), pp. 17-19.
[3] Hoffman.
[4] Robert A. Thompson, Historical And Descriptive Sketch Of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), pgs. 18, 24, 55, 56; Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), pp. 69-70.
[5] “Explosion of the Steamboat Secretary,” Daily Alta California, April 16, 1854.
[6] “Trial Trip of an Iron Steamer,” Sacramento Union, July 24, 1851.
[7] “Steamboat Racing and Steamboat Explosion,” Sacramento Union, August 18, 1851; “Explosion of the Steamboat Secretary,” Daily Alta California, April 16, 1854; Hubert Howe Bancroft, Chronicles of the Builders of the Commonwealth (San Francisco: The History Company, 1891), pp. 133-134.
[8] “Explosion of the Steamboat Secretary,” Daily Alta California, April 16, 1854.
[9] Gauntt.
[10] “Obituary,” Sonoma Democrat, March 16, 1878; Helen Purvine Kolb, One Hundred Years on the Ranch: A Study of the Purvine and Martin Family Efforts to Establish Part of the Community of Two Rock, 1969, Sonoma County Library; Gauntt.
[11] Gauntt.
[12] “Explosion of the Steamboat Secretary,” Daily Alta California, April 16, 1854.
[13] “Old Steamboat Days,” Petaluma Argus-Courier, August 17, 1955.
[14] “Explosion of the Secretary,” Daily Alta California, April 17, 1854.
[15] Gauntt.
[16] MacMullen, p. 26; “Explosion of the Steamboat Secretary,” Daily Alta California, April 16, 1854; “The Grand Jury and the Steamer Secretary; Letter To The Public,” Daily Alta California, June 5, 1854.
[17] Hoffman.
[18] MacMullen, pgs. 27, 61.
[19] Hoffman; MacMullen, p. 27; Bancroft, p. 137.
[20] Heig, pp. 73-75; Hoffman; Bancroft, pgs. 138, 142.
[21] “Completion of the Railroad,” Petaluma Argus, December 31, 1870; Gaye LeBaron, Dee Blackman, Joann Mitchell, Harvey Hansen, Santa Rosa: A Nineteenth Century Town (Historia, Ltd, 1985), pp. 42-43, 102; “City of Petaluma, Sonoma County,” Bay Area Census, http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/Petaluma.htm.
[22] Gauntt.
[23] Kolb.