Every city has its colorful characters with stories of adventures and travels far and wide. When the book “1905 Souvenir History of Williamson County” was being prepared in 1904 one of those Marion characters, George W. Chesley McCoy, was interviewed. The photo accompanying this post was taken of him on that day in 1904 sitting in the stairwell of the A.F. White building that used to occupy a spot on the south side of the public square on the west corner of S. Market in the 800 block, where the Marion Civic Center now sits.
Interestingly enough, everything he said that he did is likely true. A personal diary written by another Marion citizen, Brice Holland, about a gold seeking adventure to the Black Hills in 1877 was recently made available. In it, Brice was accompanied on the trip by not only Chesley McCoy, but A.F. White, (yes, the owner of the building that he was photographed sitting in) and W.J. Aikman as well, another prominent Marion figure in our history.
In the same 1905 history book, another article that included Chesley, was written about the temperance movement of the time (1904). It indicated that Chesley may have had alcohol issues back in time but had been reformed. Of course, there is no way of gauging what an alcohol problem consisted of from the viewpoint of a temperance league member in those times.
Chesley McCoy describes his life and lets us in on a few glimpses of early Marion life in the following manner.
I was born in Jackson, Tennessee, June 24, 1825, but my parents were both natives of North Carolina and came to Tennessee when quite young. My father, James McCoy, was born Christmas day, 1803, and my mother was born May 28, 1807.
I came with my parents to Franklin County in the spring of 1837, before Williamson County was organized. We settled near where the Illinois Central Railroad depot now stands. It was all prairie then for two or three miles northwest of town and father broke up a piece that spring where the depot now stands and planted it to corn on the sod with an ax. It was known as Poor’s Prairie.
The first school I attended was taught by Spiller, an uncle of William Spiller, in 1837. He began in August and kept three months. I was then 12 years old and all the schooling I ever had wouldn’t amount to more than 12 months. About that time Isaac D. Stockton taught school in the upper story of the Court House, and all the children in the county attended it. It was a two-story frame building about twenty feet square, and the first Judge I remember was Judge Scates, who tried Jerry Simpson for killing Andrew J. Benson, in the fall of 1841.
Simpson got into a quarrel with Andrew Benson’s father, and as the old man, who didn’t want to quarrel, was going away, Jerry ran after him with a knife in his hand, swearing he would kill him. He and Andy were chums, and Andy ran up to Jerry and putting his hand on his shoulder said, “”O Jerry, you wouldn’t kill father, would you?” At that, Jerry struck backwards with his knife in his hand, probably not thinking or intending to hurt Andy, but only to shake him off and the blade entered the bowels of Andy and killed him.
Willis Allen, the father of Josh Allen, was one of the prosecution and James Shields defended him. Jerry was a man about 40. He broke jail and ran away, but was caught a year later and tried but acquitted by a packed Jury.
We had no mills in those days. Milton and Dr. Jonathan Mulkey and Capt. James Cunningham bought the machinery for a saw and grist-mill, and had it sent by ox-teams to where the Edwards Mill now stands, but no one could be found who knew enough about machinery to set it up and it lay piled up on the prairie for a long time.
After a while, about ‘43 or ’44 George Felts and John Hooper got track of the situation and came down from Belleville and built the mill and the old double log house still standing and occupied as a Negro cabin by Wm. Watson and family. They lived there and ran the mill for a good many years. People used to come for 20 miles to mill and wait their turn, maybe two or three weeks before they could get their flour or meal. This was the first steam mill erected In the County. The logs they worked up were mostly walnut and poplar.
My wife was Miss Jane Poague, a native of Saline County. We were married in the old Western Exchange building which John Paschal built for Allen Bainbridge in 1842. In 1845, I began to work at brick-making, mason work and plastering and followed it until about 1850.
I first heard of the discovery of gold In California in 1848. A man returned from there in 1849 and brought a nugget to Marion weighing about 1 ¼ ounce which he sold to a merchant here for about $18 or $19. People began at once to make their way to California, mostly across the plains. I started April 26, 1850 in company with Dr. Jas. P. Thorn, H.L. Hayes, James and Thomas P. Louden, Henry Purdy and William Lipsey. We look three yoke of cattle with us and bought another when we stopped at Independence.
We were just four months on the road and landed at Coloma, Eldorado County, August 27, 1850. CoIoma was then called Hangtown from a hanging which took place there for stealing. James M. McCoy, my brother, and Willis Aikman went in 1854 by way of New Orleans and the Isthmus.
Gold was first discovered in what was known afterwards as Placerville, about five miles from Coloma, the county seat. The whole territory where the city now stands and far beyond was all rich placer diggings, and every foot of it has been washed, and tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of gold have been taken out of it.
The first find occurred this way. Old General John Sutter, who had a big ranch on the South Fork, about 45 or 50 miles up the river from Sacramento, built a saw-mill up where the gold was found and had his men dig a race to carry the water to the mill. After the water had run for a time it was seen that the ditch was not deep enough and they shut the water off to dig it deeper.
James W. Marshall, a mill-wright from New Jersey, had charge of the job, but knew nothing of the nature of the nuggets and shining yellow stuff with which the bottom and sides of the ditch were covered, but the Mexicans who were at work for him recognized the precious metal at a glance and by their shouts of “Ora!” “Ora!” soon had the men filling their pockets with the nuggets which strewed the channel as thick as gravel-stones.
Mr. Marshall jumped on the back of a mule and took his coat pockets full down to General Sutter for examination. It is needless to say that the mill was abandoned and the country soon swarmed with gold diggers.Two years later, when I went there, they were as thick as ants in an ant-hill, and everybody was so rich they hardly knew what to do with their gold.
At first it was a common thing to take out $2,000 or $3,000 to the pan, and men would throw up their diggings in disgust and seek better ground until they got about that. One miner, Joe Beaman, of Nevada City, threw up his claim after going down 10 feet or so, and two others took it, and after throwing out a few more shovels of dirt struck it so rich that they cleaned up not less than $25,000 in two feet of dirt.
William A. Hutchinson, a friend of mine, with a company of 12 or 14 men, came down from Oregon and went into a canyon, afterwards called Oregon Canyon from their party, and it is incredible the amount of gold they took out of that canyon. There was no lumber and all used pans, but four men, who got them a rocker and went into partnership. They went in the diggings in the spring and when it grew cold in the fall they threw up their claim as rich as they found it, but they loaded a donkey with all the gold he could carry and every one of them had all they could stagger under.
Two and three thousand dollars a day was a very common result of the work of three men with pans. One of Hutchinson’s partners was digging away in his hole one day when he cried out, “Hutch, the darned hole has petered out.” “Hutch” went into the hole with him to crack his little joke and gathering up a single pan of the dirt they put it aside in a handkerchief, and when they weighed it they had 62 ½ ounces or $1125. That canyon was about ten or twelve miles long, and starting up in the mountains ran southwest into the middle fork of the American River. Probably ten million dollars of gold has been taken out of that canyon.
There were a good many disappointments and mistakes, and some surprises among the miners, though, and one of the greatest of the mistakes was the most common. Gold was so plentiful the miners thought it was inexhaustible, and didn’t prize it nor take care of what they got. I was one of the biggest of all the big fools. I went into the mines in 1850 and stayed there till 1898, and I suppose I have dug half a ton of gold, but I haven’t a dollar.
I had two brothers with me, and we once took up a very promising claim, I thought, but after holding it a while, my eldest brother got a chance to sell for $600 and after he had teased us till we gave in it was turned over and we got the $600. But in two weeks the buyers had taken out a cool $100,000 and more. That claim “petered” for us, and no mistake.
A very common way of setting the boundaries of a claim at that time in those diggings was for a miner with his pick to strike a circle at arm’s length, and $20,000, $30,000, or $40,000 would be cleaned up down to bed rock.
I left that locality after a while and went up into Nevada and Yuba Counties, on the Yuba River, where we constructed a wing dam and cleaned up $4,000 or $5,000 a day. We mined as far down as Marysville and took out from $50,000 to $100,000 to a flume. I believe that country is jet rich in gold, but this old man will never go after it.
California has had as picturesque and eventful a history as any spot on earth. She produced, twice as much gold ($50,000,000), in 1850 as the entire territory comprised in the present United States had yielded from Columbus’ time down to Marshall’s discovery in 1848. She produced more gold in 1853 ($65,000,000) than any other spot on the globe of equal area ever has turned out in twelve months, except the Rand District in South Africa, just before the Boer war. Over $1,500,000 of the yellow metal has been picked up from the Golden State’s placers or dug from its mines since 1848, and the end is not yet in sight.
I was in California five years before my wife came to me. She was a relative of the noted Dr. Benjamin Franklin, being his niece. We had five children, three of whom are now dead. I have one son in El Paso, California, and one daughter in Alton. My youngest son, George W. McCoy, went hunting in Alaska and never returned. My wife died in 1860.
On the 24th day of June, 1904, this genial relic of the past was 79 years old. A native of Jackson County, Tennessee, a son of native North Carolinians, raised to 12 years of age among the mountains, for thirteen years a resident of Williamson County, from 1837 to 1850. Then a miner in California for 48 years, the old man has preserved his vigor, his honesty and his simplicity almost unimpaired to the present time.
The snap-shot we secured of the old man shows him in his favorite corner, at the entrance of Amzi White’s residence, with his favorite paper, the San Francisco Call, on his lap. Though he consented with his tongue, his heart refused to go to the photographer’s for a good picture. This would have involved a general combing, trimming and brushing up, of which a mountaineer and Californian miner was never guilty, so I gave up the job and contented myself with a snap-shot of him in his everyday outfit, In which alone his many friends would recognize him…..1905 Souvenir History
Sam’s Notes:
When the 1870 federal census was taken, 45 year old Chesley McCoy was indeed located at Placerville near Boise in Idaho Territory and was listed as a miner and alone. He claimed to have a $500 personal estate value.
In the 1880 census, Chesley then aged 54 was still mining alone except this time he was in the country west of Butte City, Montana.
Chesley was a registered California voter living in Yuba, California in the early 1890’s.
When the 1900 census was taken, Chesley was 74, his wanderlust and passion for gold must have been overtaken by his age because he was living as a boarder and working as a farm laborer for the family of John and Belle Campbell in Denison, Illinois.
To date, I have found no record of his death.
Placer mining is frequently used for precious metal deposits (particularly gold) and gemstones, both of which are often found in alluvial deposits—deposits of sand and gravel in modern or ancient stream beds, or occasionally glacial deposits. The metal or gemstones, having been moved by stream flow from an original source such as a vein, is typically only a minuscule portion of the total deposit. Since gems and heavy metals like gold are considerably more dense than sand, they tend to accumulate at the base of placer deposits.
The containing material may be too loose to safely mine by tunneling, though it is possible where the ground is permanently frozen. Where water under pressure is available, it may be used to mine, move, and separate the precious material from the deposit, a method known as hydraulic mining, hydraulic sluicing. Wikipedia
(Data extracted from the 1905 Souvenir History of Williamson County, 1905; Federal Census Records; compiled by Sam Lattuca on 11/06/2013)