’49ers bring Christmas traditions to gold fields of Tuolumne County
Gold Country Christmases began with the ‘49ers who paused just long enough in the placers to celebrate the holy day and holiday alone or with fellow miners.
Around a campfire on a cold, wintry day, or warmed at the hearth, many fondly remembered family and friends so far away and dreamed of joyous reunions after their pokes and pockets were filled with California gold.
Ninety-five percent of the hopefuls who rushed west from throughout the world were of the male sex. Very few women and almost no ladies arrived before 1851. Of those who did, few were suitable to serve as models for angels on a Christmas tree.
Due to the scarcity of women and children, and a normal family life, Christmas was celebrated by men in drinking, gambling and general carousing. One argonaut recorded in his diary that Christmas of 1850 was made hideous by the noisy discharge of firearms and the loud ramblings of drunken men.
Of course, not all the miners behaved this way. Some got together to quietly observe Christmas Eve with eggnog followed by dinner the next day of whatever delicacies they could muster in the camp store or in the wild.
As decent women and families began to make Tuolumne County their permanent home, Christmas celebrations started to become more traditional.
Most people are familiar with the Gunn House Hotel on South Washington Street. The center portion of the building was the home of Dr. Lewis C. Gunn, his wife, Elizabeth, and their family. They celebrated their first Christmas together in California in 1851, after Elizabeth arrived from Pennsylvania with the couple’s four children following a six month sea voyage around Cape Horn.
Dr. Gunn was a ‘49er and had traveled overland to Tuolumne County two years earlier. On Christmas 1849, he communed with two other
miners and later recorded his impressions of the day in his diary.
“Last night continual firing of guns and pistols,” he wrote. “Beautiful day. Ate pork and beans and plum pudding with my neighbors, Forbes and Thompsom, and had quite a sociable time. I enjoyed it very much. Thought much of home, how we had spent Christmas other years.”
Reflecting on her first Christmas in California, Mrs. Gunn wrote to her family a continent away.
“Yesterday was Christmas Day, and we talked and thought a great deal about all of you,” she wrote. “We filled the stockings on Christmas Eve, according to custom, and everyone had one. The children filled theirs. They put in wafers, pens, toothbrushes, potatoes and gingerbread, and a little medicine… They were all up early in the morning and after breakfast the great opening began… They received cake and candies, nuts and raisins, a few pieces of gold and a little money and instead of books, some letters.
“Their father and I each wrote them letters, and better than all and quite unexpected, they found yours and were delighted. In my stocking were a toothbrush and a nail brush and some cakes and a letter from Lewis…”
It was raining hard in Sonora that Christmas, and the shingle roof of the Gunns’ adobe home began to leak badly. The doctor spent the day trying to stem the flow and missed dining with his family on roast pork and plum pudding as he could not get the job done before dark.
While Dr. Gunn was mending his roof, Howard Gardiner was fixing a Christmas meal at the stove of a log cabin he found abandoned at a place called Secret Ravine west of Auburn.
Gardiner had ventured away from his mining company, which left Sag Harbor, Long Island, for the mines in March 1849. The men had previously worked in the gravels at Hawkins Bar on the Tuolumne River and on Sullivan Creek, the latter without much success.
Warm and comfortable in his temporary home, Gardiner prepared what passed for a gourmet meal in the wilds of Indian country: canned turkey, boiled sweet potatoes, “good light bread and butter and doughnuts of home manufacture,” black coffee and a couple of bottles of ale. He topped it off with a few pensive draws on his pipe and pronounced his Christmas feast “fit for the gods.”
Gardiner’s cousin Robert Gardiner, who came West with him, decided to remain in Tuolumne County rather than return East. He served four two-year terms as Tuolumne County clerk in the 1860s.
Three years later, the Burden family, newly arrived from Poole, England, in 1854, enjoyed their first Christmas in America at Browns Flat. Daughter Elizabeth Burden Jeffords wrote that the weather was so mild they dined “with doors and shutters open.”
As a teenager in 1860, Jeffords helped decorate the new St. James Espiscopal Church with enough fresh cedar and the red berries of toyon — often called California holly — to reach from floor to ceiling.
More evergreens shaped as wreaths, and a tree in front of the altar, were other seasonal touches. Jeffords remembered the tree as the first she had ever seen and how it was sparsely festooned with strings of popcorn and a silver star at the top.
A colorful account of Christmas on Rough and Ready Creek in the Wards Ferry area in 1852 tells of four miners trying to enjoy the occasion in a small cabin continually buffeted by fierce winds and drenching rain. One of the men. A. Dexter Hersey of New York, remembered that wet and stormy night as if it were yesterday in this edited excerpt from a reminiscence he published 34 years later:
“One of the men I had for a partner on the creek during this time was a huge, tall specimen from Kentucky. I did not live with him, but two other partners did: Uncle Slonecker and a little Canadian Frenchman called Berdeau. They invited me to come to their cabin on Christmas and indulge in roast turkey.
“I went up on Christmas Eve. The rain was pouring down in torrents and the gale had risen to a fearful violence when I reached the cabin; but what care we, housed from the storm in a comfortable log cabin with a blazing fire.
“Kentuck had killed and plucked his turkey, a fine fat bird. To celebrate the occasion and to make us all jolly he had made a huge pan of egg-nogg (sic). We enjoyed ourselves, each one doing his best to entertain the party.
“But still with all this comfort and pleasure, there was something missing – the genial presence of the other sex. We were totally deprived of a woman’s society and man, with all of his boasted superiority, soon retrogrades and goes downward in the scale of humanity without their elevating and restraining influence.
“In the middle of the night I was rudely awakened by a furious blast of the gale. I thought I heard a faint call outside the cabin. There was no sign of Uncle, so getting my boots on and again hearing the cry from the outside, I rushed out.”
Hersey vividly recalled the cabin’s canvas roof in the process of being blown off and the struggle to secure it. The fireplace and chimney held, so there was some warmth that night. At daybreak, he suggested they abandon the cabin for the camp’s store where the owners, a French couple, were serving Christmas dinner to all.
Kentuck had a feisty reply: “Get away from this old wreck! No sir. I’m going to roast that turkey or bust!”
Berdeau headed to the store “to get something to warm us up,” Hersey wrote, and added: “Kentuck roasted the turkey after all and it was fine. So we all enjoyed a good Christmas dinner, notwithstanding our tribulations.”
A year later in Columbia, the Colombo Saloon advertised it was “headquarters for Santa Claus.” Christmas Day the next year, 1854, saw such merrimaking as bonfires, shouts, songs and singing. Three years later, in 1857, Columbia made news again with a Christmas Ball at the Halfway House that drew 200 male revelers and 90 women who danced the night away.
Not to be outdone, the Fusiliers put on a Christmas Eve Ball in 1854 at the Broadway Theater in Columbia on today’s Parrotts Ferry Road at State Street. The local military group’s big bash christened John Leary’s new events venue as the men’s Armory had been destroyed in the great fire five months earlier.
Springfield was in its heyday in 1856 when the Ladies Institute was planning a Christmas fair. Unfortunately, heavy rains forced a postponement to the new year.
In 1862, when the Civil War was raging and local residents were badly divided in their sympathies, a sense of Yuletide gloom fell over the editorial column of The Union Democrat: “Our young folks don’t seem to appreciate this good old holiday as it deserves. The pleasures are not entered into with the old fashioned warmth and zest with which they used to be celebrated.”
Two Christmas seasons later, Union Democrat Editor A.N. Francisco bemoaned “the abolition administration and its high taxes, hard times, empty pockets and delinquent subscribers.” When the Civil War ended, Yuletide dances and dinners resumed in frequency and were attended by people in the latest fashions, it was reported.
For instance, in 1867, Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists had their Christmas observances together in the Presbyterian church in Columbia. Two evergreen trees were loaded with gifts, and the church was elegantly decorated in fresh greenery not unlike the first noel at St. James. Afterward, those who could not afford it in those lean, post-gold Rush times, went to the Fallon House, where a holiday spread featured turkey, chicken, duck, rabbit, oyster pie, jellies and the traditional plum pudding.
When the county’s newspapers began to advertise gifts in more detail in the 1860s, a Sonora book dealer offered Japanese inlaid cabinets, glove boxes, shaving accessories, cigar cases, Christmas and New Year’s greetings cards, and of course, a large selection of books.
Another Sonora business was stocked with “cheap toys and fancy goods”, school books, crockery, tobacco, glassware, candles and Yankee notion, small useful articles such as pins, needles, and thread.
At O’brien’s dry goods store, also in Sonora, it was “bed rock prices” for ladies’ cloaks, velvets, “cashmeres” and gloves.
Until the late 1870s, Christmas trees were seldom found in private homes. The fact two homes in Sonora had their own private trees in 1877 was an item worthy of reporting in The Union Democrat.
Another custom which began to be popular locally at about that time was for groups of young ladies and gentlemen to sing carols outside the homes of their friends, hoping to be invited inside for some Christmas cheer. And, in Confidence, folks in that mining town came togeth
er for a “public supper” on Christmas Day of 1876. A year later at Columbia, a cannon boomed and two brass bands serenaded the populace.
During the 1880s, due mainly to the public school system where children of all nationalities began to mingle, Christmas took on the form we are familiar with today: in-home trees and a wreath on the front door, the exchange of gifts and cards, stockings hung by the chimney with care and more caroling. Outlying towns of Groveland and Soulsbyville were among those to hold their own Christmas balls and other events.
Columbia Grammar School was in the vanguard of schools that had Christmas programs. In 1887, it sponsored a pageant with attendance of close to 400 people, including students. The event took in $61.50 in admissions and cleared $27 for school supplies. The evening ended with a dance.
Small rubber balls, tin horns, hand carved wooden whistles, colorful ribbons for pigtails and wooden clothespins transformed into fully dressed wooden dolls were some of the stocking stuffers that Teresa Meyer Mallard remembered from her childhood in the 1880s at her home on South Shepherd Street, across from today’s Farmers Market.
In a reminiscence before she died in 1964, Mallard vividly recalled the red flannel petticoat with embroidered flower buds made by her mother who sewed clothes for their large family. Santa left gifts popular at the time, such as games of checkers and Noah’s Ark, wagons, puzzles, dolls and scrapbooks. Her brothers generally received some useful items, such as boots, shirts and mittens.
One year, Mallard made an apron for her mother and embellished it with a crocheted scallop border. Handmade also extended to homemade goodies such as candy, popcorn balls and fruitcake. However, mincemeat for pies was a gift from Wolfling’s butcher shop where her father was employed.
Rounding up everyone for dinner took some doing, as girls who received new dolls were outside promenading them in child-sized buggies. The boys were outside, too, playing marbles, batting baseballs, riding stick horses and sledding down a nearby hill if it was a white Christmas.
The centerpiece of the day’s feast was the traditional turkey roasted on the wood-fired oven, potatoes full of homemade butter and smashed by hand, vegetables from the wagon of a produce vendor, and of course, mincemeat pie, a virtual cornucopia of minced beef, suet, apples, raisins, currants, citron, sugar, apple cider, and a variety of spices to liven up the mixture. The pie was reserved for adults. The children were served cookies and pudding.
As at Thanksgiving, after the kitchen was cleaned up with the children’s help, everyone adjourned to the parlor for family entertainment. The good time usually included Uncle Johnny Johnson’s shadow figures on a wall, riddles and stories, stereopticon slides of faraway places and singalongs with Mallard playing the piano.
The Meyer family’s nod to tradition also included evergreens and toyon berries in some of the rooms although there was no Christmas tree as Mallard’s dad, Bern, felt that the popular candles were too much of a fire risk. As part of her day, she walked with older brother George to Mass at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, where he was an altar boy.
In Sonora, the Tuolumne County Welfare Club, a local women’s organization, began sponsoring an annual community Christmas tree at Sonora Theatre in 1920. There was homespun entertainment followed by the appearance of Santa Claus, who had a gift for every child. This event became so popular that the theater could no longer handle such a big crowd. In 1934, it was moved to the Sonora High School gymnasium, where it continued until World War II.
Sometime in the mid-1920s, it became the practice to honor the season with a large outdoor Christmas tree, a silver fir, placed on top of a historical marker which stood in the center of South Washington Street, about opposite today’s Yosemite Title Co.
At an amazing 40 feet tall, the tree’s branches were heavy with colorful ornaments, tinsel and swags draped in deep folds. Pacific Gas and Electric Co. provided the tree and decorated it as well as furnishing power for lights. The company also donated smaller trees to local stores and delivered them free to its employees as part of a public relations program.
The big tree was continued in that location until the late 1950s when the stone marker on which it rested was removed by the State Division of Highways, today’s Caltrans.
Another popular tradition, dating back to the inception of our public school systems in the 1850s, was carried on in many schools in the form of costumed children in plays and skits, followed by singing and the appearance of Santa Claus with a sack full of goodies for everyone.
At Moccasin School, which was built in the 1920s, the program was held in the clubhouse that had the largest indoor tree in the county and a large fireplace at one end, from which Santa was expected to emerge with a big “ho, ho, ho” for the excited children.
In reality, several adults would stand in front of the fireplace so Santa could slip behind them on his hands and knees. Inevitably, some of the men couldn’t resist the temptation to nudge him with their heels or give him some other unwanted attention with the result that, on several occasions, the jolly old elf was heard to clearly cut loose with some very unchristmas-like expressions.
During the grim Christmases of the Great Depression, temptation was found on the pages of the Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery-ward catalogs. Probably the highest priced toy displayed was a Lionel Electric train set for just under $50, a lot of money in those lean years.
This account of Christmas past in Tuolumne County is based on material prepared by Carlo M. De Ferrari and other information in the files of the Carlo M. De Ferrari Archive which was named in the late county historian’s honor. Archive director Andrew Mattos, Brad Fisher of the Tuolumne County Historical Society, and Pat Perry, Sonora City Historian, assisted with illustrations and text.