Reverse Research Road Trip by Zina Abbott

 

 

 

 

I have been known to do things backwards. Onsite research is no exception.

Last month, after spending too many days burning up the highway between home and Fresno, a city an hour and a half drive away where my husband goes for medical care, we decided it was time for a one-day road trip for fun. We enjoy exploring the mountains and foothills to the east of us, so that was where I decided to go. To stay away from the freeways, I planned a trip that kept us mostly on the two-lane highways. The only time we were on a freeway was the short jaunt between Placerville (originally Hangtown) and Pollock Pines.

Map courtesy of Google Maps

We started by taking the back roads from our house until we reached Snelling, the first county seat when Merced County broke away from Mariposa County. I have yet to set a story there, but do not count it out as a future book setting. 

From there, we traveled J59. On the way was this scene, the land in which my characters in Kendrick, Cole, and Madeline would have traveled, and where Cole would have built his ranch. 

This takes us to Hwy 120, the road we take to Sonora, where most of my A Watchman for Willow was set. The volcanic landscape which, over time, has been formed into table mountains, has always fascinated me.

However, Sonora was not our destination that day. We cut off and traveled to Copperopolis, a town that was on the Milton-to-Sonora stagecoach route. Those who have read A Watchman for Willow will recall from my author notes that in real life, Peter Kelly, who died from a gunshot wound in Sonora in 1886, owned and ran the livery and stage station in Copperopolis.  I do not believe that building is still there, but I enjoyed getting a picture of the Union Guard Armory, established in 1864. Copperopolis was a major source of copper for bullet casings used in the Civil War.

 From there, we cut over to Angels Camp, a town that was part of the setting for Madeline, then up California State Highway 49, also known as the Golden Chain Highway because it connects so many of the major gold mining towns and camps in the Mother Lode. Jesse in A Watchman for Willow might not have traveled past this remains of this 1850s rock Butte mercantile, but he probably saw many like it. We also stopped in Mokelumne Hill but using the pictures I took, that town will get its own blog post sometime.

Along this highway, we drove through several little 1850s gold mining camps  that Will and Jeremy from Clara tried their luck in during 1859. One was Drytown. 

 

From there, we continued up Hwy 49 until we reached today's Placerville, the city originally known as Old Dry Diggin's and then Hangtown. Some of the buildings would have been there when Will and Jeremy arrived in California. However, the bell tower did not come into existence until 1865 after several fires devastated the town.

 When Will and Clara from Clara married, this Cary House hotel, built in 1857, might have been where they spent their wedding night. 

Here's another old-time Placerville building that is currently a historical museum--the Soda Works.

From Placerville, we drove on Hwy 50 east to Pollock Pines, where we exited on Sly Park Road. This area was known as Sly Park at the time of Clara, ever since one of the Mormons who traveled east to Utah found the area, then later came back and claimed it. Sly Park Road connects with Mormon Emigrant Trail, which was cut in 1848 as members of the Mormon Battalion decided to return to the Salt Lake Valley area. It was a EMIGRANT, not an immigrant, trail, because those who blazed that trail were leaving California to travel east. 

However, many thousands used that same trail to immigrate west. Will, Jeremy, and Clara in Clara all traveled this trail, which later became known also as the Carson Pass Trail. Because of the difficulties of the Donner Pass/Truckee trail, this became the preferred California Trail to the gold fields.

Jenkinson Lake did not exist at the time of Clara. Sly Park Dam was built and the area filled in 1955. This photo was taken from the Mormon Emigrant Trail road. It is not far from the area where those first emigrants were required to build fires and chisel rocks to build a section of road. To get over giant granite boulders, they dismantled their wagons and used ropes to pull their belongings and livestock up and over. By the time of Clara, the West Bypass had been built, which took travelers around the boulders. 

We did not travel far on the Mormon Emigrant Trail Road, which would eventually have taken us to Carson City, Nevada, before turning around. After returning to Sly Park Road, also known as E16, we continued west toward Pleasant Valley, the "jumping off" point for that first group of Mormon Emigrants. In Clara, Will and Jeremy end up at the home of a widow with two children along this road. I placed her apple orchard and grain farm east of Pleasant Valley. 

It is too bad that we did not make this trip last winter instead of last month. I knew there was an elevation along the Mother Lode foothills was just right for growing apples. Just north of where I placed her farm is the "Apple Valley" region north of Hwy. 50 between Placerville and Pollock Pines. However, I would have put her farm in a more realistic setting if I had put her in Pleasant Valley. Oh, well.

 

There is a lot of agriculture that takes place in the Sierra Nevada Mountain foothills. After we turned south, we passed several wine vineyards tucked between pines and oaks. Italians, especially, found homes for their various farms from orchards, vineyards, and truck farming, since the region reminded them of where they came from in Italy.

In Clara, Will and Jeremy stopped at Fiddletown for the first time on their way to the Pleasant Valley region. However, we stopped there on the way home. While there, from a Chinese doctor, Will bought herbs to fight the infection and fever Jeremy developed after breaking his leg. He very easily could have made his purchase from the Chew Kee Store that was established in 1850. There are several Chinese buildings and businesses that have been restored and preserved in Fiddletown by the current residents of Chinese descent. It is another gold rush town that will get its own blog post one day.

Our last big stop was Milton. Milton, which now is nothing more than a wide spot in the road, was the end-of-the-line town for the Stockton & Copperopolis Railroad, which, in 1886 at the time of A Watchman for Willow, was leased to the Southern Pacific Company. From there, starting on Rock Creek Road, the Milton-to-Sonora stagecoach transported foothill-bound travelers to Sonora by way of Copperopolis. This is the start of the Rock Creek Road in Milton.

From there, we headed home through Oakdale, a town also mentioned in several of my California novels. 

Even though I have been familiar with several of these areas for decades, some like Copperopolis, Mokelumne Hill, and Fiddletown were new to me. I hope you enjoyed the pictures I shared.

 

A Watchman for Willow is now available as a paperback. To find the book description and purchase options, 

please CLICK HERE

 

To find the book description and purchase options for Clara,

 please CLICK HERE

 

 

To find all my books on Amazon, including the other books mentioned in this post, please visit my Amazon account by

CLICKING HERE

Covering Baby’s Bottom in the 1850s

My latest book is set in 1854 Columbia, California. At that time, California had been United States territory for only six years and a state for only four years. However, the gold rush still continued in 1854, and women and children were there, even though they were in far smaller numbers than men.

So, what happens when a bachelor finds himself with a baby? What was available for him to care for that child? The reason Waggles the goat is part of the story is because canned milk was still several years away from being invented. 

My other question was, how did folks at that time handle the diapering situation? Were safety pins invented? There were no disposable diapers or plastic diaper covers then, so how did parents keep the little darlings dry…or did they?

The information out on the internet is sketchy, but here is what I found.

One of the most common responses to the difficulties of diapering has been to toilet train early. At the end of the seventeenth century John Locke recommended putting babies on a "pierced chair"–a chair with a hole in the bottom under which a chamber pot could be placed. Some of these chairs had a space for a hot brick to help keep infants warm for the time, sometimes considerable, in which they were strapped to the chair while their mothers waited for them to "produce." 

Holding babies over bowls or a potty was popular. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, parenting manuals commonly recommended that toilet training begin almost immediately after birth. Some manuals promised mothers that diapers could be dispensed with altogether within three or four months.

Chamber pot for the masses

By the early to mid-nineteenth century, English children (and we can assume their American counterparts) were not commonly swaddled but dressed in diapers, underpants, and long woolen dresses with swaddling bands only around their abdomens. Swaddling cloth of oiled silk was developed in the eighteenth century in an attempt to prevent leaks.

Fabric diapers came into wide use to replace swaddling. They were generally made of linen or cotton, perhaps muslin or flannel. They generally were square and folded to fit around the babies’ bottoms. The English called them nappies, but in the United States, even in the 1800s they were known as diapers.

What about keeping those diapers clean? In the 1850s, the role of bacteria and how it grows was not understood. Wet diapers were often hung out to dry and then reused. If there was water readily available, they might have been rinsed first. Only the heavily soiled ones merited laundering, and they may have been merely scraped clean, rinsed, dried, and reused between washings with soap and water.

Before we get too critical and say “Oh, gross!” we need to remember many women back in the day did not have access to the conveniences we enjoy. Doing laundry was hard work. Often, especially for pioneer women traveling by wagon train, water was not easily available. For others, water was dipped from a river or creek, or an outdoor well. Not everyone had access to a pump either in the yard or in the house. Also, a woman may have been fortunate to live within a reasonable distance from a mercantile where she could buy soap, but many women still made their own soap. That required having rendered fat from butchered animals. 

In 1850s Columbia, California, the availability of water was a serious issue. The town grew because of gold found in what was named Maine Gulch (the Hildreth party who discovered gold there came from the state of Maine.) This was a seasonal gulch created by snow runoff. By late June or July, the gulch was dry until the rains came later in the autumn. The nearest sources of water were the springs at Springfield about a mile away (owned by a Mexican woman who sold the water), Mormon Creek which had its headwaters at the spring, and another Creek which was five miles away.

How did mothers keep those diapers on their little darlings? Sometimes the diapers had ties sewn on which were used the tie the fabric in place. Sometimes they were folded and tucked. (I imagine neither of these methods were foolproof for keeping a diaper on.)

Samuel Slocum is among those credited with developing and widely distributing the straight pin with a head so they stayed in place in cloth. These pins were used for decades even after the availability of safety pins. I wonder how often the little darlings got poked by the exposed end of a straight pin? Ouch!

A great advance in diapering was the invention of the safety pin, patented by Walter Hunt in 1849. 

U.S. Patent Office - inventor Walter Hunt

It did not widely used in place of the straight pin for securing diapers until the 1880s. (However, in my story set in 1854, the baby’s mother would have had the financial means and incentive to buy the latest and greatest for her sweet baby girl.) By the late 1800s, infants in Europe and North America were wearing garments similar to the modern cloth diaper. A square of linen or cotton flannel was folded into a triangular or rectangular shape and held in place by safety pins.

Modern soakers with gripper snaps and velcro

The diaper was sometimes covered with an absorbent pant called a "soaker" or "pilch," made of tightly knitted wool. In modern times, here has been a move back to using soakers made of wool fabric. The snugger style is made possible with the use of gripper snaps and Velcro—fastenings that were not invented until long after the 1850s.

Diaper rash in the nineteenth century was commonly remedied with burnt flour or powdered vegetable sulfur.

The truth of the matter is, mothers saved themselves a lot of laundry and diaper rash by often dressing their babies’ bottoms as shown above.

For examples of cloth diapers and how they might be secured, please CLICK HERE.

Kendrick is Book 9 in the popular Bachelors & Babies series. Kendrick, a Bachelor satisfied with being single, has his world turned upside-down the day the county sheriff shows up at his butcher shop with a baby and informs him that the deceased mother named him as the father. You may find the full book description and purchase link by CLICKING HERE.

Sources:

https://sweetheartsofthewest.blogspot.com/2017/03/normal-0-peculiar-bit-oftrivia-by-e.html

http://www.zephyrhillblog.com/2012/08/how-grandma-did-diapers/

https://www.greenmountaindiapers.com/pages/flat

http://www.faqs.org/childhood/Co-Fa/Diapers-and-Toileting.html

https://dirtydiaperlaundry.com/the-history-of-cloth-diapers/history-of-cloth-diapers-timeline/

https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/who-invented-straight-pin-what-used-468034