I know of no old-timer from whom I could have obtained more reliable information than from my Uncle Nick Bristow. His first-hand knowledge of the Old Trail, and of the early history of the West, is reflected throughout this article.
My uncle, Nicholas Bristow, who died here November 12, 1890, age 69 years, came to Kansas before the Old Trail was in active existence—just how early, I do not know. When my father wrote his brother from their old home in Tennessee, he would send his letters in care of the Floyds at old Doniphan, a steamboat landing on the Missouri river about five miles north of Atchison. How often my uncle would get his mail depended upon how often he drove his lumbering ox-team across the forty mile stretch of intervening prairies to the river for supplies. Uncle Nick kept that yoke of oxen a long time. I remember seeing him break prairie with old Buck and Jerry, two rangy Texas steers with long spreading horns tipped with brass knobs.
And when my Uncle Nick wrote his cousin, Stephen Sersene, in California to ask, in substance, if he were really finding the gold—the lure that had snatched the said relative from his old Kentucky home and sent him scampering across the plains to the Pacific slope in 1849—and could he himself, should he go out there, stand a reasonable show of filling his own poke with gold-nuggets, he posted that letter at old Doniphan and it went to California by way of the Isthmus of Panama.
Had Uncle Nick been so fortunate as to get that letter in the mails so as to reach the Atlantic seaboard in time to connect with a semi-monthly sailing it would have reached his cousin Steven in about thirty days. With the inauguration of the Central Overland Stage Line, letters mailed at Granada or old Powhattan were taken through to the western coast in seventeen days—and later, by Pony Express, in ten days. Now, if he were living, my uncle could have his letters delivered in California by air-mail in ten hours. Thus have we progressed! Now, too, as all know, with three enabling devices, one can telegraph, talk, and sing to California, at will—and, if your photograph is of importance to the news service, it can, within certain bounds, be wired to California at the rate of an inch a minute for the breadth of the finished picture.
And had my uncle decided to go to California, the Isthmus route would have been his quickest and best way, if not the only safe way. However, notwithstanding the perils and delays of overland travel, more than a hundred thousand people crossed the plains in the first two years of the gold rush—many of them passing this way.
Our former townsman, Sneathen Vilott, whose home was then in Illinois, and who came to Kansas in 1855, went to California by way of the Isthmus of Panama during the gold excitement. I have often heard him talk entertainingly about that experience. Also, William J. Oliphant, father of Mrs. Robert T. Bruner, of Granada, went overland to California in 1849, and returned by way of the Isthmus. However, the goddess of gold did not smile upon either of these men. Indeed, they both worked in menial pursuits to earn return passage.
Like nearly every one else in those days, Uncle Nick was gold-minded. He coveted some of that gold. In fact, we all did in our day—uncle, father, brother, and I.
With sails all set for California and the placers, my father, William Bristow, actually got out as far as Kansas in 1856. But someone in old Doniphan, a relative of the Floyds who had been to California, took the wind out of his sails with a negative report. My father was then twenty-one years old. He visited his brother here, then went back to Nashville, got married, and came out here again with his family in 1865. He finally went to California to live out his last years. He died at Fresno in 1908.
In California, my father did not take up the hunt for gold—though, on one occasion when I was visiting him, he drove with me over to the old site of Millerton, which was one of the rich placers in the early days. It is where the San Joaquin river comes down out of the mountains. The only remaining evidence of that once hell-roaring town of 10,000 inhabitants is the old territorial jail, a large stone building with heavily barred windows and three foot walls — a relic of the wicked past.
While standing on the west bank of that swift flowing stream, watching the foaming waters among the boulders rush past, my father, pulling at his own whiskers in a sort of meditative way, said, with apparent regret, “If it hadn’t been for that old long-whiskered cuss back there at Old Doniphan, I might have been out here when there was something doing; and probably”—he glanced toward the old jail which was then closed to the public—”have gotten to see the inside of that building.”