Petaluma’s Birth in a Devil’s Playground

Heman Bassett arrived in Petaluma in the fall of 1852 in search of redemption. An excommunicated Mormon elder cast “into the buffeting hands of Satan,” Bassett and his family set out across the county in an ox-drawn wagon to settle among some of the people who had earlier persecuted him for his beliefs, among them Petaluma’s founder, George H. Keller.[1]

A failed gold miner from Missouri, Keller had created Petaluma just months before, making an illegal squatter’s claim to 158 acres of a 13,000-acre Mexican land grant called Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio. After platting out the town on 40 acres, he began selling off lots from a makeshift general store he erected beside the Petaluma River on Washington Street.[2]

By the time Bassett arrived with his wife and five children, the new town was bustling with activity. Sailing scows laden with potatoes, meat, and grains plied the river to San Francisco. New settlers had erected fifty new homes of rough-hewn redwood. Main Street, laid out by Keller along a former Coast Miwok trading route, hosted a general store, a blacksmith, and three hotels.^[3]

One of the hotels, the Petaluma House, located at the site of today’s Odd Fellows Lodge, was for sale. Bassett decided to put a stake down and buy it.

Situated across from the river docks where boatloads of aspiring settlers disembarked, the Petaluma House welcomed overnight guests, many looking to catch the morning stage bound for Bloomfield or Santa Rosa’s Green Valley to cash in on the potato boom, and those seeking temporary living quarters until they got established as tradesmen or merchants in town.^[4]

A number hailed, like Keller, from Missouri, in fact, 20% of the 560 settlers counted in the 1850 Sonoma County census. They were most likely drawn by word of the area’s rich farmlands and mild climate from Lilburn Boggs, Missouri’s former governor.

Boggs emigrated to California with his family in 1846, after losing his merchant business in an economic depression, and also surviving a shot in the head from an alleged Mormon assassin.^[5] Initially taken in by General Vallejo at the Petaluma Adobe, he settled in the town of Sonoma, where he opened up a dry goods store and became alcalde, or judicial and administrative officer, for Mexico’s Northern California territory. After the Mexican-American War, he dealt in real estate before being elected to the state assembly.^[

Bassett knew Boggs from his own time in Missouri. He had moved to Jackson County, Missouri in the early 1830s with Joseph Smith, Jr., founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, after Smith received a revelation it was the New Jerusalem where the Second Coming of Christ would soon occur.

Just a teenager when he first met Smith, Bassett was living in a Christian socialist commune called “The Family” outside Kirtland, Ohio. Smith was accompanied by a group of missionaries on their way to proselytize among American Indians, who they believed to be descendants of the Israelites.^[7]

Soon after being baptized in Smith’s new church, Bassett had a vision of being called into the world to preach. Ordained a Mormon elder at 17, he worked the circuit of Mormon revival meetings dressed as a Native American speaking in tongues. His zealous, enraptured style was described as “that of a baboon.”^[8] While preparing to accompany Smith to Missouri, Bassett was called out as “a false spirit.”^[9]

“Heman Bassett,” Smith told him, “you sit still. The devil wants to sift you.”^[10]

Part of that sifting may have been the watch Bassett took from a Mormon brother and sold. When confronted, Bassett cited the code of community property practiced in the commune. “Oh,” he said, “I thought it was all in The Family.”^[11]

Bassett was denied missionary status, but still accompanied Smith to Jackson County in western Missouri, home to Boggs, then a state senator. The influx of Mormons quickly upset the social hierarchy of older settlers in the area, including Keller, who lived in nearby Platte County. They took issue with the Mormons’ abolitionism (Missouri was a slave state), their ecstatic performances dressed as American Indians and speaking in tongues, and their fervent belief they were to inherit the the land of their enemies in Jackson County.^[12]

Within a short time, Smith and his followers were driven from the county to parts of northwest Missouri, where tensions with locals continued to mount, finally culminating in the Missouri Mormon War of 1838. At the height of the war, Governor Lilburn Boggs sent 2,500 militiamen to eject all Mormons from the state,signing an executive order calling for their extermination should they refuse to leave.^[13]

Forcibly driven from their homes, which were then plundered and destroyed, along with their crops and livestock, a number of Mormons died violently or from the hardship of the exodus.^[14]

Bassett, along with 10,000 others, fled to Illinois, where Smith set up his new headquarters in the town of Nauvoo. After a new Mormon majority elected him mayor, the local newspaper accused Smith of polygamy. He responded by having the newspaper shut down, for which he was arrested and incarcerated. While awaiting trial, a mob stormed the jail and killed him.^[15]

After Smith’s death, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints split into two camps, one headed by Brigham Young, the other by James Strang. Bassett sided with the Strangites, joining them at their headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, where he served as an elder until 1850, when he was excommunicated for his rebellious ways.

Bassett, his wife Mary and their four children set out across the plains for California, stopping in Washoe County for Mary’s birthing of their fifth child. When they arrived in Petaluma, they found Keller and others engaged in California’s new gold rush: land speculation.^[16] There was just one hitch—the land wasn’t for sale.

Squatting had become common in the American West thanks to the Preemption Act of 1841, which entitled a squatter to purchase 160 acres in the public domain, after inhabiting the land for 14 months or making improvements to it for five years.^[17] But in California, aspiring settlers discovered that most of the land coveted for farming or ranching was privately held in Mexican land grants, protected by the Treaty of Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War in 1848.

Due to the laissez-faire legal system on the Mexican frontier, many grants were sketchy, incomplete or, in some cases, fraudulent.^[18] In 1851, squatter advocates pushed through Congress the California Land Act, subjecting all Mexican land grant claims to legal review by an appointed Land Commission. Ostensibly created to bring clarity to the legal morass, the act effectively put the grants into play, opening the door to a host of American swindlers and land sharks.[19]

That included Keller, who, with the support of frustrated settlers, made his squatter’s claim to the town of Petaluma.^[20] Despite the fact the claim had no legal bearing, his property sales were recorded by Sonoma County’s first recorder of deeds, William Boggs, son of State Assemblyman Lilburn Boggs.^[21] 

So began the Petaluma land scam, giving birth to one of California’s longest and most contested land grant disputes. Fueled by greed, exploitation, bribery, and fraud, it was a devil’s playground, one that placed Petaluma landowners in legal jeopardy for the next two decades.

Keller’s initial plat extended from the river west to Liberty Street, and from Oak Street south to A Street. In 1853, he sold off a large portion of his remaining claim to Columbus Tustin, an ambitious 26-year old from Illinois, who undertook the first extension of Keller’s development, creating a subdivision called Tustin’s Addition that ran from First to Eighth streets, and A to F streets.[22]

Stricken with money fever, Bassett purchased 40 undeveloped acres from Keller just before he departed town with his spoils for Missouri. Bassett’s Addition extended from Howard Street west to Fair Street, and from Stanley Street south to A Street, with Bassett Street laid out down the middle, adjacent to a large plaza (today’s city hall). Bassett began selling lots from his hotel on Main Street.[23]

In June 1855, the party ended when the Land Commission confirmed the claim of James Stuart, a San Francisco speculator, to the 13,000-acre Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio. Another speculator, Thomas Valentine, had filed a counterclaim which he agreed to drop in exchange for Stuart splitting his profits from rancho land sales. Two years later, Valentine sued to reopen the case, setting off 15 years of legal drama in the courts.[24]

Stuart opened a real estate office in Petaluma for residents to repurchase their property from him, regardless of whatever bogus deeds they had been issued by Keller, Tustin, or Bassett.[25]

Shortly after the Land Commission ruling, Bassett’s wife Mary sued him for divorce, settling for $5,000 ($170,000 in today’s currency). Cash strapped, Bassett forfeited his unsold sections of Bassett’s Addition and leased out the Petaluma House. A year later, he opened the Petaluma Family Grocery on Main Street.[26] It didn’t last. In 1860, he declared bankruptcy, and left Petaluma for Sacramento, to join his youngest daughter and her husband.[27]

Over the next decade, he returned to his migratory ways, settling briefly in Half Moon Bay and San Jose, where he again filed for bankruptcy, before heading to Nevada with his two younger sons to work the mines. In 1872, he reunited in Utah with a childhood companion from The Family, Lucy Celesta Stanton, who had once been married to his brother, before becoming a notorious figure in her own right.[28]

After divorcing Bassett’s brother, Stanton married a former Black slave named William McCary and started a fringe Mormon movement with him that embraced not only polygamy, but also sexual threesomes. The two traveled the countryside posing as American Indians, performing at Mormon revivals and temperance meetings in native dress, until they were excommunicated and McCary disappeared. Stanton then opened a native healing clinic in Buffalo, New York.

Just prior to reuniting with Bassett, Stanton was released from Sing Sing prison after serving nine years for an abortion she performed on a woman who died.[29]

Stanton and Bassett married and lived together in Utah until 1876, when Bassett died while on a transcontinental trip to Philadelphia for the nation’s centennial. He was 67. After his death, Stanton repented her ways and was rebaptized in the Church of Latter-day Saints. Having failed to repent his rebellious ways, Bassett was presumably cast after death into what the church calls “spirit prison.”[30]

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For more on George H. Keller:

The Search for Petaluma’s Real Founder

For more on Columbus Tustin:

A Bend in the Road: the Legacy of Columbus Tustin

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Notice,” Gospel Herald (Goree, WI), March 21, 1850; Bassett’s arrival in 1852 is confirmed by the marriage license issued on November 18, 1852, for his son Madison H. Bassett to Emily Woodward, by the California Marriage Licenses, 1850-1852, Sonoma County, and by the autobiography of his son Ralph Lowe Bassett, http://www.bassett.net/gendata-o/p15044.htm.

[2] John Sheehy, “History Mystery Solved,” Petaluma-Argus Courier, February 11, 2021; “Centennial Resurrection,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, March 31, 1876; Robert Allan Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), p. 55.

[3] J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), pp. 263; “Historical: Petaluma’s Birth and Growth,” Petaluma Courier, October 19, 1892; Munro-Fraser, p. 263.

[4] Munro-Fraser, p. 263; Ad for Petaluma House, Sonoma County Journal, September 1, 1855.

[5] “Donald Edwards, pp. 15-18; “Gaye LeBaron’s Notebook,” Santa Rosa Press Democrat, April 1, 1990; William Boggs, “Lilburn Boggs,” F.A. Sampson, ed., Missouri Historical Review, Vol. IV (October 1909-July 1910), pp. 109; Donald Edwards, “Lilburn Boggs,” Portraits of Early Sonoma County Settlers (Sonoma County Genealogical Society, 2016), pp. 15-16.

[6] William Boggs, pp. 109; Donald Edwards, pp. 15-16.

[7] Stephen C. LeSueur, The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri (University of Missouri Press, 1990), pp. 10. 17-21.

[8] Christopher C. Smith, “Playing Lamanite: Ecstatic Performance of American Indian Roles In Early Mormon Ohio,” Journal of Mormon History, Vol. 41, No. 3, July 2015, pp. 131-166;  Susan Easton Black, “Heman Bassett,” Doctrine and Covenants Central. https://doctrineandcovenantscentral.org/people-of-the-dc/heman-a-bassett/

Smith, pgs. 131, 151; “Isaac Morley Farm and School House,” Brigham Young University, Idaho. https://emp.byui.edu/satterfieldb/rel341/Isaac%20Morley%20Farm.htm

[9] Black.

[10] Black.

[11] Black.

[12] Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of the Latter Day Saints: Carefully Selected from the Revelations of God, 52:42; Norman F. Furniss,The Mormon Conflict(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 2.

[13] LeSueur, pp. 229-230.

[14] LeSueur, p. 19; “The Mormon Difficulties,” Niles National Register, October 6, 1838, October 13, 1838; Smith, pp. 159-160; “The Bloody History of Mormonism in Jackson County,” NPR Kansas City, February 12, 2015. https://www.kcur.org/show/central-standard/2015-02-12/the-bloody-history-of-mormonism-in-jackson-county

[15] LeSueur, p. 180-181.

[16] 1850 U.S. Census, Racine, WI; “Notice,” Gospel Herald (Goree, WI), March 21, 1850; Autobiography of Bassett’s son Ralph Lowe Bassett, http://www.bassett.net/gendata-o/p15044.htm.

[17] The Preemption Act of 1841, 27th Congress, Ch. 16, 5 Stat. 453 (1841), accessed from www.minnesotalegalhistoryproject.org; Paul W. Gates, The California Land Act of 1851, California Historical Society, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Dec., 1971), pp. 395–430.

[18] David Hornbeck, “The Patenting of California’s Private Land Claims, 1851-1885,” Geographical Review, Vol. 69, No. 4 (October., 1979), p. 437.

[19] Pisani, pp. 291-292.

[20] Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), pgs. 21, 29; “Centennial Resurrection,” Petaluma Weekly Argus, March 31, 1876; Robert Allan Thompson, p. 55.

[21] Donald Edwards, “Lilburn Boggs,” Portraits of Early Sonoma County Settlers (Sonoma County Genealogical Society, 2016), pp. 15-16; “Deeds of Sonoma County, 1847-1901,” film #008117705, LDS FamilySearch database. familysearch.org.

[22] Munro-Fraser, pp. 259-260; Sonoma County Deed Records, show two grants in 1853 from Columbus Tustin, one to Edward S, Jones, May 16, 1853, and the other to Fred Starkey, August 12, 1853, indicating that he was selling lots; the boundaries of Tustin’s Addition defined in Thos. H. Thompson, Map of Sonoma County, 1877. 

[23] “Delinquent Tax List,” SCJ, November 25, 1859; the boundaries of Bassett’s Addition defined in Thos. H. Thompson, Map of Sonoma County, 1877.

[24] Robert Lee, p. 266.

[25] Ad for Office Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio, Sonoma County Journal, October 27, 1855.

[26] Ad for Petaluma House, Sonoma County Journal, September 1, 1855; “Legal Notice,” Sonoma County Journal, December 29, 1855; Ad, Sonoma County Journal, May 1, 1857.

[27] “A Card,” Sonoma County Journal, January 28, 1859; “Married,” Sonoma County Journal, January 6, 1860; 1860 U.S. Census, Sacramento; “Legal Notice,” Sacramento Bee, January 5, 1861.

[28] Ralph Low Bassett Autobiography; “Insolvent Notice,” Times Gazette (San Mateo County), October 6, 1866.

[29] Angela Pulley Hudson, Real Native Genius: How and Ex-Slave and a White Mormon Became Famous Indians (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), pp. 1-16.

[30] Ralph Low Bassett Autobiography; “Died,” Petaluma Argus, July 28, 1876; Hudson, pp. 166-169.