Radio Script #1220

Little Talks on Common Things
December 9, 1979

Today our broadcast is about a Waterville native who had an interesting career in California after he went there at the time of the gold rush.

Henry Hiram Ellis was born in Waterville in 1829, and was twenty years old when gold was discovered at Sutter’s Creek not far from Sacramento in California. He had, during his teens, become a skilled seaman and had already commanded a small vessel before he was hit by the fever of the gold rush.

Henry and his father, Charles Ellis, left Boston in January 1849 in a sailing vessel around Cape Horn for California. Henry signed on as second mate at $18 a month, to be paid when they reached San Francisco. After three weeks they arrived at Port Fairview, a convict settlement at the southern tip of Patagonia. There, for some undisclosed reason, Henry left the ship, while his father stayed on the vessel. Later Henry learned that the ship was nearly lost in a storm off Cape Horn, but managed to limp on to Santiago, Chile where, after repairs, it sailed on to San Francisco.

Meanwhile, at Port Fairview, Henry made the acquaintance of a young man of his own age, whom Henry’s memoirs call only George. He was employed as interpreter for the Governor of Patagonia, who helped Henry get temporary employment on the docks until April, when the schooner William G. Hackliff arrived from Boston on its way to San Francisco. The Hackliff did not try to go around the Horn, but took the less hazardous passage through the Straits of Magellan to the Pacific side.

The voyage to California was uneventful. The only incidents recorded by Henry being the catching of a huge 400 pound turtle near the Galapagos Islands, and encountering a fleet of ships catching sperm whales, whose oil was much used for lights before the coming of kerosene. They reached San Francisco on January 25, seven months after Henry’s departure from Boston.

Henry’s reason for going to California was not the lure of gold. In fact, he had little trust in the stories of mining wealth that had reached Maine. He felt that the huge crowds of men going there would greatly increase his chances as a seaman once he reached the west coast. When Henry came to San Francisco his skepticism turned to enthusiastic amazement. He found gold piled up in the street ready for sale, gold dust and nuggets in separate piles. Gambling rooms were everywhere, with gold at the tables. Silver was selling at 16 ounces for one ounce of gold. Mechanics were being paid $20 a day, chickens sold for $5 apiece, and whiskey was a dollar a glass.

Coming from ports allover the world were prospective miners of every nationality. Henry wrote: “There was a babble of strange tongues, costumes and countenances that entered this confused, indescribable melting pot. In the harbor I could see ships of every kind, size and nationality, all packed so close together one could almost step from boat to boat across the harbor.”

The day after his arrival in San Francisco, Henry got passage on a small boat up the bay to Sacramento. It was really a small freighter, carrying flour from Chile. It had no cabins but allowed about fifty passengers to sleep on the open deck. Henry said the mosquitoes were so bad that the river boats found it hard to keep their crews who rapidly took other jobs to escape the insects.

From Sacramento they walked to Lucy’s Bar nearer the gold fields. Situated on the American River, the place got all its goods by huge oxcarts on solid, unspoked wheels that made a loud racket as they passed over the rough roads. At once Henry began to pan gold. He wrote: “The first gold I found, about half an ounce, I put in a letter and mailed it to a certain lady in Boston.”

Before he left Waterville, Henry Ellis had made arrangements with the brother of a prominent Waterville family to go into a joint venture of operating a steamboat on the Sacramento River. The two brothers, William and Daniel Moor, did not actually leave Waterville, but sent to California as their agent Anson Crosby, who was to be paid $1,000 a year for his services, and it was with Crosby that Henry Ellis started his boat operation in California.

Crosby proved unreliable and soon departed. Meanwhile Henry’s panning near Lucy’s Bar was yielding less and less gold. Henry, learning about a place called Gold Lake, decided to investigate. Joining four other men, Henry had a meeting with a woman in Sacramento who was said to know where the lake was located. The woman said that her husband, in company with 30 other men coming west from the Missouri River, had entered the Sierra Nevada mountains when two of them turned off and entered a canyon, seeking feed for the horses. Finding a place with both feed and water, they set up camp.

Nearby was a lake about a mile long, on the shore of which was an Indian village, where the huts were not animal skin wigwams, but small houses with walls of quartz. A ledge jutted into the lake, and from the base of the ledge the two men dug out in less than an hour enough quartz-encrusted gold to load down two pack mules. Not attempting to rejoin their party, the two set out across the mountains and reached Sacramento. She said the lake was about 30 miles east of Steep Hollow, a well known stop on the Emigrant Trail.

So Henry Ellis joined a party of 30 men to try to find the lake and secure some of its treasure. They gathered a hundred horses and mules, a huge quantity of provisions, pick axes, shovels, screen pans, and other mining equipment. At Steep Hollow they met unsuccessful returning parties who had been on the same search. Henry said: “They were a miserable forlorn-looking lot, half starved and in rags, their money gone, their horses and mules lost, their tools thrown away.” Right then, Henry’s party abandoned their enterprise, deciding the Sacramento woman had perpetrated a cruel hoax on them.

So off they went to another gold field they had heard of on the Yuba River. They crossed many small streams, finding some gold in all of them, but not in paying quantities. Finally they settled at Foster’s Bar already crowded with prospectors, they moved up the Yuba and made their stake on a series of bars about a mile long. In a deep gorge where they saw the sun only three hours a day, they labored for two months, seeing no other persons. They did get a good quantity of gold, but dividing it among many men made each one’s share rather small. Anyhow it was too dangerous to remain in the narrow gorge when the big rains came, and they pulled out.

Trying other spots with no greater success, Henry Ellis left the group and returned to Sacramento, where the only lodging he could get cost him $2 for the privilege of spreading his blanket on a barroom floor with 20 other sleepers. Henry decided he didn’t belong with mining prospectors, his place was at sea. So he made a deal with a merchandising firm to operate a small schooner of 660 tons. On their very first trip up the bay they made $6,000, giving Henry Ellis his stake for even better shipping ventures.

Gradually accumulating more money, Henry was able in 1851 to buy his own vessel, a brig in which he started to carry cargoes between San Francisco and the Hawaiian Islands, with occasional trips also down the coast to Mexican ports. He continued these voyages, serving personally as the ship’s master, until 1854.

Now let us have something in Henry’s own words. He wrote: “Much smuggling is going on, and I became involved in it. Out there smuggling was considered an ordinary, honest business, especially in Mexico and the South American states. The slogan was: ‘A people who can trade and won’t must be made to do it.’ When the authorities began to clamp down and I learned of other shipmasters losing their vessels and going to jail, I decided the practice was too dangerous, and I gave it up.”

In 1853 Henry Ellis returned to Boston and married the girl to whom he had sent his first ounce of panned gold. Her name was Elizabeth Capen. They returned to California by way of the Isthmus of Panama, then a malaria-ridden route, but much shorter than around the Horn. Henry Ellis then entered the San Francisco police force in 1855, serving until 1877, the last 15 years as Chief of Police. Of his experiences Henry wrote: “At no time was our force adequate to combat the depraved society that flocked to this supposed haven of riches. Counterfeiting, forgery and confidence games were added to the usual larcenies and burglaries. A serious problem came from the Chinese Tongs, cleverly smuggling Chinese into the country. They were very adroit at playing the game of No Savy. Many of their fellow Chinese were brought in tied up in sacks.”

In 1866 the bankers of San Francisco presented Chief Henry Ellis with a gold badge for his success apprehending forgers and counterfeiters. The San Francisco Bulletin said: “Henry H. Ellis is a native of Maine, in the sixth generation of a family of seamen. Before he joined our police he was the owner and master of ocean-going ships. He has been involved in many commendable civic enterprises.

When Henry Ellis retired in 1877, his fellow officers presented him with a gold watch inscribed with the Ellis coat of arms. After his retirement Henry formed the partnership of Ellis and Miller; hay, grain and feed merchants in San Francisco. In 1879 he took his family on a voyage around the world. In 1880 he returned to Maine, where he collected many family heirlooms for shipment to San Francisco. In 1899 he had been U. S. Consul in the Turks Islands in the West Indies. The last years of his life were spent in a fine home he built at Sunol Glen, California, where he died in 1909, sixty years after his arrival at the time of the gold rush.

Year: 1979