Tag: George H. Keller

Petaluma’s Birth in a Devil’s Playground

Heman Bassett, 1870s (photo Philadelphia Studios, courtesy of Kay Bassett)

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]

Petlauma House (from 1857 map of Petlauma, Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

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.

Lilburn Boggs (photo courtesy of Missouri Historical Society)

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]

Etching of “The Family” commune outside Kirtland, Ohio (illustration Brigham Young University)

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]

Joseph Smith, Jr. (photo courtesy of Dan Larsen, Desert News)

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]

Missouri Mormon War of 1838 (photo Mormon Musings)

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] 

William Boggs, 1870s (photo Sonoma County Library)

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]

Map of Petlauma, Thomas H. Thompson, 1877, Bassett’s Addition at lower left (public domain)
Bassett’s Addition, Map of Petaluma, Thos. Thompson, 1877 (public domain)

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]

Map of Petaluma, 1855 (photo Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

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.

Lucy Celesta Stanton Bassett (photo in public domain)

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]

********

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.

Petaluma Homesteading (Petaluma Granjas)

(Spanish translation provided by Petaluma Historical Library & Museum)

By the time of Petaluma’s founding in 1851, homesteading had become quite common in the American West, thanks to the Preemption Act of 1841. Under the act, a squatter was permitted to purchase up to 160 acres of any land he found in the public domain, assuming he had either resided on the land for at least 14 months or made agricultural improvements to it for five years.

En el momento de la fundación de Petaluma en 1851, las granjas se habían vuelto bastante comunes en el Oeste americano, gracias a la Ley de Prevención de Derechos de 1841. En virtud de esa ley, un ocupante ilegal fue se le permitió comprar hasta 160 acres de cualquier terreno que encontrara en el dominio público, asumiendo que había residido en la tierra durante al menos 14 meses o había hecho agricultura mejoras a la misma durante cinco años.

But early settlers in California, most of them failed gold miners, discovered that the land most coveted for farming and ranching was not available in the public domain, but privately held in Mexican land grants. That included Sonoma County, which was made up of 26 land grants. Thanks to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, which brought an end to the Mexican-American War, those grants were legally protected under U.S. law. At least they appeared to be.

Pero los primeros colonos en California, la mayoría de ellos mineros de oro fracasados, descubrieron que la tierra más codiciado para la agricultura y la ganadería no estaba disponible en el dominio público, pero propiedad privada en mercedes de tierras mexicanas. Eso incluyó el condado de Sonoma, que se hizo hasta 26 mercedes de tierras. Gracias al Tratado de Guadalupe Hidalgo de 1848, que trajo con el fin de la guerra entre México y Estados Unidos, esas subvenciones estaban legalmente protegidas por los ley. Al menos parecían estarlo.

In 1851, Congress passed the California Land Act, which subjected all Mexican land grant claims, some of which were sketchy, incomplete, or outright fraudulent, to a legal review by the California Land Commission. Two-thirds of their decisions were then challenged in a court of appeals.

En 1851, el Congreso aprobó la Ley de Tierras de California, que sometió a todas las tierras mexicanas otorgar reclamaciones, algunas de las cuales eran incompletas, incompletas o rotundamente fraudulentas, a un revisión por la Comisión de Tierras de California. Dos tercios de sus decisiones fueron entonces impugnado en un tribunal de apelaciones.

The original grant holders, many of them land rich but cash poor, found themselves subjected to a laborious and costly legal process that, on average, lasted 17 years. They also faced the added burden of California’s property taxes, which became an incentive to either intensively cultivate the land or subdivide it. As a result, many grant holders were forced to sell out to their Yankee lawyers or American speculators.

Los titulares de subvenciones originales, muchos de ellos ricos en tierras pero pobres en efectivo, se encontraron sometidos a un laborioso y costoso proceso legal que, en promedio, duró 17 años. Ellos también enfrentó la carga adicional de los impuestos a la propiedad de California, que se convirtió en un incentivo para cultivar intensamente la tierra o subdividirla. Como resultado, muchos becarios fueron obligados a venderse a sus abogados yanquis o especuladores estadounidenses.

The land grant battles were intensified by a huge influx of American settlers following the Gold Rush. In 1850, the U.S. census for Sonoma County counted only 500 people. By 1860 that number had grown to almost 12,000 and, by 1870, 20,000.

Las batallas de concesión de tierras se intensificaron por una gran afluencia de colonos estadounidenses que siguieron la fiebre del oro. En 1850, el censo de Estados Unidos. Para el condado de Sonoma contaba solo a 500 personas. Por en 1860 ese número había aumentado a casi 12.000 y, en 1870, a 20.000.

The new settlers were faced with two choices: either buy land from a Mexican grant holder, risking that his title might be assigned to another claimant in years to come, or squat on the land without permission in hopes the claim would be thrown out and land placed in the public domain, allowing them to establish preemptive rights to the property.

Los nuevos colonos se enfrentaron a dos opciones: comprar tierras de una subvención Mexicana titular, arriesgándose a que su título pueda ser asignado a otro reclamante en los próximos años, o ponerse en cuclillas en la tierra sin permiso con la esperanza de que el reclamo sea descartado y aterrice colocados en el dominio público, lo que les permite establecer derechos de preferencia sobre la propiedad.

The latter strategy was used to establish the town of Petaluma, which sat at the northern tip of a 13,000-acre land grant known as the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio. In 1851, a brazen gold miner from Missouri, George H. Keller, made his own claim to 158 acres of the grant. With the help of two surveyors, he laid out the streets and lot lines for a new town he called Petaluma. Opening up a real estate office by the river, Keller sold the lots to unsuspecting new settlers before returning home to Missouri with his ill-gotten gains.

Esta última estrategia se utilizó para establecer la ciudad de Petaluma, que se encontraba en el norte punta de una concesión de tierra de 13,000 acres conocida como el Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio. En 1851, un el descarado minero de oro de Missouri, George H. Keller, hizo su propio reclamo de 158 acres de la subvención. Con la ayuda de dos topógrafos, trazó las calles y las líneas de lote para un nuevo pueblo que llamó Petaluma. Al abrir una oficina de bienes raíces junto al río, Keller vendió los lotes a nuevos colonos desprevenidos antes de regresar a casa en Missouri con sus ganancias mal habidas.

It would take the courts 20 years to sort out the town’s tangled legal ownership, as the land grant got caught up in a marathon legal battle between competing claimants.

Los tribunales tardarían 20 años en resolver la propiedad legal enredada de la ciudad, ya que la concesión de tierras quedó atrapada en una batalla legal maratónica entre demandantes en competencia.

In the spring of 1859, Petaluma settlers formed a chapter of the Settlers’ League to ferret out crooked land sharks. As a group, they pledged not to purchase property held in any of the county’s land grants until the titles of those grants were legally “settled and reliable.”

En la primavera de 1859, los colonos de Petaluma formaron un capítulo de la Liga de Colonos para hurgar tiburones terrestres torcidos. Como grupo, se comprometieron a no comprar propiedades en ninguno de los concesiones de tierras del condado hasta que los títulos de esas concesiones fueran legalmente “establecidos y confiables.”

Their efforts came to a head later that summer with the “Bodega War,” when 80 armed league members were dispatched to the town of Bodega to defend 48 settlers being evicted by a land grant claimant and 40 armed hirelings from San Francisco. The claimant backed down.

Sus esfuerzos llegaron a un punto crítico más tarde ese verano, cuando 80 miembros de la liga armada fueron enviado al pueblo de Bodega para defender a 48 colonos desalojados por una merced de tierra reclamante y 40 mercenarios armados de San Francisco. El reclamante se echó atrás.

Tensions escalated again in the summer of 1862, when Sheriff J.M. Bowles of Petaluma was dispatched to the Healdsburg area to serve eviction notices on squatters. Anticipating trouble, he brought with him a posse comitatus of 300 largely unarmed men. They were met in Healdsburg by 50 armed and determined members of the Settlers’ League, who shot and killed a member of the sheriff’s posse. Two months later, the governor ordered Sheriff Bowles to return to Healdsburg with the Emmet Rifles and Petaluma Guard, Petaluma’s Union militias, who succeeded in peacefully evicting the squatters.

Las tensiones aumentaron de nuevo en el verano de 1862, cuando el sheriff J.M. Bowles de Petaluma fue enviado al área de Healdsburg para entregar avisos de desalojo a ocupantes ilegales. Anticipando problemas, trajo consigo una pandilla comitatus de 300 hombres en gran parte desarmados. Ellos eran reunido en Healdsburg por 50 miembros armados y decididos de la Liga de Colonos, que disparó y mató a un miembro de la pandilla del sheriff. Dos meses después, el gobernador ordenó el sheriff Bowles regresará a Healdsburg con los rifles Emmet y Petaluma Guard, la milicia de la Unión de Petaluma, que logró desalojar pacíficamente a los ocupantes ilegales.

It wasn’t until the 1870s that the legal status of all land grant claims, including Petaluma’s, were finally settled.

No fue hasta la década de 1870 que el estado legal de todas las reclamaciones de concesión de tierras, incluso de Petaluma, finalmente se resolvió.

*****

SOURCES (FUENTES)

Books

Samuel Cassiday, An Illustrated History of Sonoma County, California (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1889).
LeBaron, Blackman, Mitchell, Hansen, Santa Rosa: A Nineteenth Century Town
(Historia, Ltd., 1985).
Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall
Associates, 1982).
Harvey J. Hansen and Jeanne Thurlow Miller, Wild Oats in Eden (Santa Rosa, CA,
1962).

Newspapers
Petaluma Argus: “Letter from the Seat of War,” July 16, 1862; “The Settlers’ Troubles Happily Terminated,” October 1, 1862.
Sacramento Daily Bee: “Land Difficulties in Sonoma,” July 19, 1862.
Sonoma County Journal: “The Bodega Difficulty,” June 3, 1859; “The Healdsburg War,” July 18, 1862.

How Petaluma’s Founder Saved Abraham Lincoln

The north front of the White House, 1861 (photo White House Historical Association)

On April 12, 1861, five weeks after moving into the White House, Abraham Lincoln found himself stranded in the nation’s capital. Railroad tracks leading into the city had been torn up, bridges burned, telegraph lines severed. Across the Potomac River, a seditious mob gathered to either kidnap him or hang him from a tree on the South Lawn.

Army units protecting the capital had been dispatched to the western frontier by the previous administration, just before Lincoln’s arrival. What military remained consisted of clerks, ceremonial guards, and a military band, none of whom had fighting experience.

When news reached the capital that day that Confederates had fired upon Fort Sumter in South Carolina, the Union residents of D.C., surrounded by the slave states of Virginia and Maryland and anticipating an imminent siege, began fleeing the city.

In desperation, Lincoln turned to a group of battle-experienced office seekers staying at the Willard Hotel a block from the White House. Among them was Petaluma’s founder, George Horine Keller.  

Keller and Lincoln had met the previous year, when Keller helped escort Lincoln during his five-day visit to Leavenworth, Kansas, the city Keller co-founded shortly after establishing Petaluma.

Like Lincoln, Keller was born in Kentucky. At age 12, he enlisted to fight in the War of 1812, but was rejected because of his youth. After operating an inn in Indiana, he settled down for 15 years with his family on a farm in Weston, Missouri, before catching gold rush fever and setting off in 1850 for California.

Striking out in the gold mines, Keller found his way to a meat hunters’ encampment at the headwaters of the Petaluma Creek, where he opened a makeshift store and overnight lodge for disappointed miners like himself. Many came searching for land to homestead, only to be thwarted by California’s Mexican land grants.

In the fall of 1851, a group of frustrated settlers encouraged Keller to illegally claim 158 acres at the northern tip of a 13,000-acre land grant known as the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio. Hiring a surveyor, he platted and subdivided 40 acres of his claim into a town he called Petaluma, selling off the lots to land-hungry settlers.

1855 map of Petaluma (photo Sonoma County Library)

In 1853, Keller returned to Weston, Missouri, leaving behind a town built on fraudulent land deeds, which, along with a protracted court battle over the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio land grant, would leave Petaluma on shaky legal ground for the next 20 years.

When Kansas Territory opened for settlement in 1854, Keller and a handful of partners from Weston formed a development company to create Leavenworth, the territory’s first town, along the Missouri River.

As was the case in Petaluma, Keller and company squatted on land they didn’t own—in this case, land held by the Delaware Indian tribe—with plans to subdivide it, reap the rewards, and address the legal consequences down the road (which they eventually did, settling with the Delawares).

Two days before the Leavenworth Town Company began auctioning off town lots, Keller and his son-in-law A.T. Kyle opened the town’s first hotel, The Leavenworth House, to a full house of land buyers.

Ad for Keller’s Leavenworth House in the Leavenworth Herald, October 13, 1854

Or so they thought. It quickly became clear most of their guests were activists from Missouri, more interested in establishing residency for voting purposes in Leavenworth than actually living there.

The seeds of the influx were planted in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which left it to territory residents to determine whether to eventually become a free or a slave territory.

Authored by Stephen Douglas, a Democratic senator from Illinois looking to boost his presidential prospects, the act overturned the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which banned slavery above the latitude of Missouri’s southern border.

Enraged by the act, abolitionists formed the Republican Party to stop the further spread of slavery. Lincoln, who had returned to legal practice after serving a term in the U.S. House of Representatives, was so incensed he decided to reenter politics to run against Douglas in the next senate election.

Leavenworth rapidly turned into a hotbed of electoral fraud, assaults, and murders, in a violent struggle between pro- and anti-slavery factions known as “Bleeding Kansas.”

Kansas Territory abolitionist militia (Jayhawkers), 1858 (Photo Kansas Historical Society)

An abolitionist, Keller turned his hotel into a popular gathering place for militant “Free-Staters” known as “Jayhawkers,” as well as part of the network providing refuge to escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad, making him a target of the “Border Ruffians,” a pro-slave militia openly assaulting Free-Staters on the streets, in their homes, and at public meetings.

Shortly after fending off 20 armed Border Ruffians one night at his hotel, Keller was taken prisoner and confined to a blockhouse in Weston, before eventually escaping to safety in Nebraska Territory.

In 1856, after most of the partisan violence had been quelled, Keller returned to Leavenworth to find Border Ruffians had taken over his hotel. He quickly built a new hotel, the Mansion House. Dubbed “Abolition Hill” by pro-slavers, it soon became the local Free-Staters headquarters.

Leavenworth, Kansas, 1867 (photo courtesy of Legends of America)

Among his allies in town, the amiable Keller acquired the fond moniker “Uncle George” for resourcefulness and generosity—“the husband of all the widows and the father of all the orphans.” In 1857, he was elected to the first Kansas Territorial Legislature, which created a constitution establishing Kansas as a free territory.

Their request for statehood was blocked by Southern legislators in Congress until January 1861, when enough Southern states seceded from the Union to override the blockage. On April 4, 1861, Kansans elected James H. Lane as one of their first U.S. senators.

James Henry Lane, U.S. Senator from Kansas, 1861 (photo Library of Congress)

A lawyer known for electrifying oration, the daring and flamboyant Lane was a close colleague of Keller. He was also a Mexican War hero, and had commanded the Free State militia during “Bleeding Kansas,” ruthlessly and cunningly out maneuvering much larger pro-slaver forces.

Lane befriended Lincoln during Lincoln’s visit to Leavenworth in 1859, a year after his senate race against Douglas. Despite Lincoln’s defeat, his debates with Douglas—in which Lincoln argued that the fundamental rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness triumphed over Douglas’ advocacy of states’ rights for institutions like slavery—elevated him to the national stage.

Postage stamp commemorating the 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas durung the U.S. Senate race (image in public domain)

By the time of Lincoln’s visit, Leavenworth had grown to 10,000 residents, making it the largest city between St. Louis and San Francisco. Lincoln used the city as a focus group for a speech he was planning to deliver two months later at the Cooper Union in New York City, an event that would launch his campaign for the presidency.

After Lane’s election to the senate, Keller accompanied him and dozens of former Free State militia veterans to Washington to lobby President Lincoln for commissions in the Union army or federal appointments back home. Most of them checked into the Willard Hotel, just down the street from the White House.

On April 17, 1861, five days after the attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln received reliable intelligence that Confederates across the Potomac River in Virginia were preparing to march on Washington. He immediately summoned Senator Lane to the Oval Office, and asked him to assemble an armed militia of his Kansas colleagues to defend the White House.

Lincoln in his White House office (photo White House Historical Association)

Back at the Willard, Lane formed the Frontier Guard of Kansas, ultimately comprising of 115 members of his former militia, including Keller. They marched in formation down the street to the White House, where they set up camp in the East Room, arming themselves with crates of pistols, rifles, bayonets, and ammunition.

Mounting a propaganda campaign, Lane spread rumors throughout D.C. that the Frontier Guard was more than 1,000-men strong and planning a counter attack on the Confederate stronghold across the river. For ten tenuous days, the Frontier Guard defended Lincoln in the White House until Union troops were able to break through the Confederate blockade.  

Frontier Guard of Kansas on South Lawn of the White House, April 1861 (photo Library of Congress)

Lincoln thanked each of the guard members personally for having saved the government from overthrow. The guard returned to Kansas, where they formed the nucleus of two Union companies during the Civil War.

Keller assumed command of Leavenworth’s “Old Guard,” protecting the city from Confederate forces. A year after the war ended, the Kansas governor rewarded him for his service by appointing him the first warden of the Kansas State Penitentiary.

Keller died on his farm outside Leavenworth in 1876, two years after the legal battle over the Rancho Arroyo de San Antonio land grant, on which he had founded Petaluma, was finally settled.

*****

A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier

SOURCES:

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.

Jelani Cobb, “How Parties Die,” New Yorker, March 15, 2020.

William G. Cutler, History of the State of Kansas (Chicago: A.T. Andreas, 1883).

Adair Heig, History of Petaluma: A California River Town (Petaluma, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1982), p. 29.

David Hornbeck, “The Patenting of California’s Private Land Claims, 1851-1885,” Geographical Review, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Oct., 1979), pp. 434-448.

Jesse A. Hall and Leroy T. Hand, History of Leavenworth County, Kansas (Topeka, Kansas: Historical Publishing Company,1921), pp. 116-123.

George W. Martin, editor, “Territorial Legislature of 1857-58: George Horine Keller,” Kansas Historical Society Collection, Vol. 10, 1907-1908, p. 211.

James McClure, editor, Abraham Lincoln’s Stories and Speeches (Chicago: Rhodes & McClure Publishing Company, 1908), p. 111.

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.

James P. Muehlberger, The 116: The True Story of Abraham Lincoln’s Lost Guard (Ankerwycke, 2015). 

J.P. Munro-Fraser, History of Sonoma County (San Francisco: Alley, Bowen & Co., 1880), p. 131, pp. 259-262.

Donald J. Pisani, “Squatter Law in California, 1850-1858,” Western Historical Quarterly, Autumn, 1994, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 277-310.

Robert Allan Thompson, Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, California (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts & Co., 1877), pp. 53-54.

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

Newspapers

Leavenworth Bulletin: “The Flag Still Waves (Election results),” November 4, 1863; “Lane Pays His Own Expenses,” August 3, 1864.

Leavenworth Times: “The Old Guard,” July 31, 1861; “Official Vote of Leavenworth County,” November 10, 1861;”Kyle’s Reminiscence of Early Border Life,” January 11, 1902; “The Planters House Is a Monument to Exciting Past,” February 25, 1940; “Lincoln’s Visit to the First City of Kansas,” February 14, 2018.

National Republican (D.C): “The Military Movements Yesterday,” April 20, 1861; “Gen. James H. Lane’s Company,” April 24, 1861; “The Frontier Guard,” April 27, 1861; “Visit to the Capital,” April 29, 1861.

The Search for Petaluma’s Real Founder

Solving a History Mystery

Petaluma History Podcast , Onstage with Jim & Tom, Phoenix Theater, September 30, 2014., r-to-l: John Sheehy, Katie Watts, Skip Sommer, Chuck Lucas, Tom Gaffey, and Jim Agius with back to camera (photo courtesy of The Phoenix Theater)

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.

1855 map of Petaluma (courtesy of the Sonoma County Library)

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.

Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Sonoma County, by Robert A. Thompson, 1877

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.

History of Sonoma County, by J.P. Munro-Fraser, 1880

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.

History of Petlauma by Adair Heig, 1982

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.

Garret V. Keller, Post Master Appointment, National Archives

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.

A Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval in the Service of the United States, 1853, United States, Department of State

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.

Garret V. Keller in later life (photo courtesy of Alex Finlayson)

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.

Fifth Street in Leavenworth by Alexander Gardner, 1867 (photo courtesy of Legends of America)

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.

George H. Keller gravesite, Leavenworth County, 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