Historian explores Gus Chapman’s role in shaping the city of Chico
“Augustus Hartley Chapman’s name,” writes historian Michele Shover, “hovers like the wisp of a phantom in Chico.” Gus Chapman died in 1899, when Chico had fewer than 4,000 residents, and though he had a remarkable part to play, except for “Chapmantown” his name has mostly been lost to history. Until now.
“Chico’s Chapmans: The California Years 1861-1899” ($35 in paperback from Stansbury Publishing) is Shover at her indispensable finest. The fruit of 40 years of research, her book is a compelling narrative of daily life in Chico focused on the man from Michigan who worked for John Bidwell and then turned into a longtime rival.
In more than four hundred pages, including dozens of historical images, Shover captures a community beset by economic downturns, fires, political squabbles, controversy over whether to split Butte County (take that, Oroville!), failing wooden water pipes, family tragedies, anti-Chinese sentiment, murders.
It was Chapman who in 1877 “formed a private vigilante committee of business leaders — the Citizens’ Executive Committee on Anti-Chinese Crimes — to circumvent Chico government’s refusal to act”; it was “the only vigilante committee in Chico history” and burnished his reputation “as a man of principle, courage and leadership.”
Chapman was also very much a man of his times.
In 1865 he “left with Bidwell’s partner George Wood to open a competing store.” Five years later, with both Bidwell and Chapman selling lots on their respective subdivisions, Chapman, elected as a school trustee, voted to put the new Oakdale school near his own property. That despite Bidwell’s offer to sell property for the school “on the east side of Orient Street (‘Old Chinatown’)” for a dollar.
As Shover notes, “A school board member today who did what Chapman had done would be indicted. However, nineteenth-century government, in general, enforced no business standards or public ethics.”
Chapman and his wife Sarah celebrated “their shared birthday and their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary” in 1883. Sarah kept the family together (and Shover pays due regard to her work).
When Gus died, despite his many failures, “only his creditors were aware of one point central to his honor: he had paid off every debt in full. He died owing no man.”