Solving a History Mystery
A number of years ago, I participated in a podcast interview about early Petaluma history for Onstage with Jim and Tom, hosted by Jim Agius and Tom Gaffey at the Phoenix Theater. Joining me were local historians Katie Watts, Skip Sommer, and Chuck Lucas. In the interview, we discussed at length Garrett W. Keller, who developed the town of Petaluma in 1852, before mysteriously disappearing.
After the podcast was broadcast, a woman claiming to be a descendent of Keller sent us an email informing us that we had it all wrong—her ancestor was not the man we made him out to be, a scam artist who illegally claimed land he didn’t own, divided it up into lots that he then sold to unsuspecting new settlers, and then vanished with the proceeds without a trace. He was actually an honest, well-respected fellow who went on to do good in the world, and who founded a town in Kansas after leaving Petaluma. I made another online search of Garrett W. Keller, but, as usual, finding nothing on the man, filed the woman’s email away
Years later, after accidentally stumbling upon it, I decided to contact the woman. She responded, and after some back and forth and digging around in ancestry records, we determined that she wasn’t in fact a descendant of Garrett W. Keller, but rather a descendant of another Keller who had resided sometime later in Petaluma.
But the point she made about Keller establishing another town in Kansas was a new lead in an otherwise cold case. As anyone who has engaged in researching family genealogy knows, such leads often go nowhere, but sometime they are the thread to a major discovery. Such a breakthrough is fraught with suspense, as it can lead to information that have been deleted, omitted, or else revised in family lore.
Communities are no different. Garrett W. Keller had been a vital part of Petaluma’s creation myth for 170 years. That he himself was something of a blank slate made it easier to fit him into the colorful myth of the wild west scam artist.
Such lore and mythology are important in passing down a sense of shared heritage and social identity, whether in families or cultural groups, apocryphal or not. History through is something different.
As any aspiring family genealogist discovers, it is first and foremost about inquiry, and the willingness to go where the inquiry takes you. Historian Jill Lepore calls it “the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence.” It’s an art that when done well gives us a richer and perhaps more inclusive humanistic view of our past in order get our bearings in moving forward. It’s always one that’s open to revision as new evidence comes to light.
In the case of Garrett W. Keller, my new evidence initially led me nowhere. In frustration, I turned to the historical sources that identified him as Petaluma’s founder. The first mention of him is in Robert Allan Thompson’s Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California, published in 1877. Thompson refers to him merely as “Keller,” with no first name nor middle initial.
It’s in J.P. Munro-Fraser’s History of Sonoma County, published in 1880, that he appears as “Garrett W. Keller.” In a footnote on page 260, Munro-Fraser points out that a “Garrett W. Keller” was appointed Petaluma’s first postmaster on February 9, 1852, which leads him apparently to conclude that he was the Keller who originally laid out of the town.
The next county history, 1889’s Pen Pictures From the Garden of the World, An Illustrated History of Sonoma County, written by longtime Petaluma Argus editor Samuel Cassiday, makes no mention of a Keller at all, although Cassiday first arrived in Petaluma in 1854, only two years after Keller had left.
Tom Gregory’s History of Sonoma County, published in 1911, basically picks up Munro-Fraser’s identification of Garrett W. Keller. The two historians appear to serve as the source of Ed Mannion’s legendary history column “Rear View Mirror,” which ran the Petaluma Argus-Courier in the early 1960s, and served in part as the basis of Adair Heig’s History of Petaluma: A California River Town, published in 1982, with Mannion as an advisor.
For help finding the primary source of Munro-Fraser’s discovery of Keller as Petaluma’s first postmaster, I turned for help to Katherine J. Rinehart, the former manager of the Sonoma County History & Genealogy Library. She provided me with the copy of an official handwritten record of Sonoma County’s first postmasters in the 1850s. This was apparently the same document Munro-Fraser discovered in his identification of Garrett W. Keller.
The first thing I noticed is that Munro-Fraser has incorrectly transcribed Keller’s name. In the handwritten record his first name is spelled “Garret,” with one “t”, and his middle initial is clearly not a W, but instead either a U or a V.
That question led me to a document I found in an online government depository entitled A Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval in the Service of the United State that had been typeset and printed in 1853 by the U.S. Department of State. In it, a “Garret V. Keller” is listed as the first postmaster of Petaluma, appointed February 9, 1852, and replaced in December, 1852. In a search of Newspapers.com, I also found a listing of California postmasters published in the November 15, 1852, edition of the Sacramento Daily Union newspaper, that confirmed “Garret V. Keller” to be the postmaster of Petaluma.
With the new name spelling and my earlier clue about Kansas, I began searching Findagrave.com for anyone with that name who had been buried in Kansas in the late 19th century. The site led me to a Garret V. Keller who died in 1901 in a small rural Kansas town of outside of the city of Leavenworth. There was no description of his life, but there was a link to the gravesite of his father, George Horine Keller, which did include a memorial drawn from a Kansas history book.
Reading down the text I suddenly hit paydirt:
“In Platte County, Missouri, [George Horine Keller] engaged in farming and manufacturing till the year 1850, but catching the gold fever, he sold out, equipped a large train with merchandise and went to California during the spring of that year. Settling down in the Sonoma valley, he founded the town of Petaluma, now a prosperous city of some 10,000 people. He returned in 1852 to Weston [Missouri].”
I quickly discovered in Google books a copy of the source cited in the memorial—Transactions of the Kansas Historical Society Collection, Vol. 10, 1907-1908, edited by George W. Martin. The book featured a short biography of George Horine Keller, noting that after founding Petaluma, he went on to help establish the town of Leavenworth, Kansas.
With that information, I also discovered online two other historical sources that provided more details on George Horine Keller’s life: William G. Cutler’s History of the State of Kansas, published in 1883, and The History of Leavenworth County, Kansas, written by Jesse A. Hall and Leroy T. Hand, published in 1921.
From a search of old newspaper clippings at Newspapers.com, I discovered that George Keller and his wife Nancy had one daughter and five sons. On the wagon train that took him to California in 1850, Keller had taken along with him with his oldest son, Garret Valentine Keller (named for his two Dutch grandfathers), as well as his new son-in-law Andrew Thomas Kyle, both of whom were 19 years old.
After being disappointed in the gold fields, the Keller party headed to Sonoma County, where, after Keller made his land claim and laid out the new town of Petaluma, his son Garret, then 21 years old, was appointed town’s first postmaster.
The one mention of George Keller I found in old Petaluma newspapers was in an article published in the Petaluma Weekly Argus in 1876 about a group of men who, while preparing Main Street Plaza (today’s Penry Park) for America’s centennial celebration, unearthed a coffin. From John E. Lockwood, who established Petaluma’s first trading post in 1850, reporters learned that it was the burial site of the first white man to die in the village in the fall of 1851. He and some other men dug the grave, and George Keller gave the service.
While sources indicate that George Keller and his son-in-law Andrew Kyle left Petaluma to return to Missouri in the fall of 1852, Garret Keller stayed behind in California for the next seven years, although it’s unknown exactly where. Postal records indicate he had vacated his position as Petaluma’s postmaster by December, 1852.
A brief biography of Garret Keller in Cutler’s History of the State of Kansas notes that in 1854 he married a woman in California named Jane E. Hoagland, who was a native of Fort Leavenworth in Kansas Territory. They moved to Kansas in 1859, where Garret purchased a farm in Springdale outside of Leavenworth. He apparently lived an otherwise quiet life.
As for George H. Keller, after returning in 1852 to Weston, Missouri, he became a prominent figure along with his son-in-law Kyle in establishing Leavenworth, the first town in the new Kansas Territory, under another illegal land scheme.
But there was another side to Keller, one in which he distinguished himself at the risk of his own life as an abolitionist leader who was elected to the first Kansas Territorial Legislature during the violent conflicts over establishing Kansas as a slave state or free state. Upon the outbreak of the Civil War, he enlisted in the Kansas Frontier Guard at the age of 60, and was immediately dispatched to Washington, D.C., to guard President Lincoln at the White House. After the war was appointed the first warden of the Kansas State Penitentiary by the state’s governor.
When he died in 1876, after retiring to a farm near the farm of his son Garret, Keller was highly lauded in newspapers throughout the state of Kansas.
Which leaves us with a much more complicated picture than we had for the previous 170 years with the blank slate known as “Garrett W. Keller.” The story of Petaluma’s true founder acknowledges what history does best, which the sociologist W.E.B DuBois noted was expose “the hideous mistakes, the frightful wrongs, and the great and beautiful things that people do.”
*****
A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier, February 11, 2021.
SOURCES:
Newspapers
Lawrence Tribune: “Settler’s Defense,” July 1, 1868.
Leavenworth Times: “Kyle’s Reminiscence of Early Border Life,” January 11, 1902.
Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Ed Mannion’s Rear View Mirror,” April 2, 1960.
Petaluma Courier: “Death of Major Singley,” March 2, 1898.
Petaluma Weekly Argus: “Centennial Resurrection,” March 31, 1876.
Sacramento Daily Union: “Post Offices in California,” November 15, 1852.
Books, Magazines, Journals
Samuel Cassiday, Pen Pictures From the Garden of the World, An Illustrated History of Sonoma County (The Lewis Publishing Co., Chicago, 1889), pp. 109-114.
William Connelley, editor, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, Volume 14 (Chicago: Lewis, 1918), pp. 1209-1210; Frank M. Gable, “The Kansas Penitentiary,” p. 379.
Thomas Jefferson Gregory, History of Sonoma County, California, With Biographical Sketches of Leading Men and Women (Historical Record Company, Los Angeles, 1911), p. 177.
Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), p. 29.
Jesse A. Hall and Leroy T. Hand, History of Leavenworth County, Kansas (Topeka, Kansas: Historical Publishing Company,1921), pp. 116-123.
LeBaron, Blackman, Mitchell, Hansen, Santa Rosa: A Nineteenth Century Town (Historia, Ltd., 1985), pgs. 16, 26-27.
George W. Martin, editor, Transactions of the Kansas Historical Society Collection, Vol. 10, 1907-1908 (Kansas Historical Society).
Henry Miles Moore, “Sketches of the Early Settlement of the City and County of Leavenworth,” Western Life (Leavenworth, KS), August 3, 1900.
Henry Miles Moore, Early History of Leavenworth, City and County (Samuel Dodsworth Book Co., Leavenworth, KS, 1906), pgs. 21, 24, 56, 86, 103, 123-127, 147, 161, 171.
J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), p. 131, pp. 259-262.
Robert Allan Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), pp. 53-54.
“Territorial Legislature of 1857-58: George Horine Keller,” Kansas Historical Society Collection, Vol. 10, 1907-1908, edited by George W. Martin, p. 211.
Websites
“Guarding the White House,” The White House Historical Association, whitehousehistory.org
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/press-room/press-timelines/guarding-the-white-house
“1851, March 3 – 09 Stat. 631, Act to Settle Private Land Claims in California,” US Government Legislation and Statutes.
https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/hornbeck_usa_2_d/7
A Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval in the Service of the United States, 1853, United States, Department of State. https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Register_of_Officers_and_Agents_Civil/C5EDAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0