Hill ran counter, afterward, of Deputy Sheriff "Shorty" Green of Mariposa County in an affair at Indian Gulch in that county and was killed by the latter with a pistol bullet that pierced his skull in the forehead center. Whatever became of Davis no one recalls.
Aldridge was an inoffensive old fellow whose Democratic friends good naturedly would escort him to the polls, and one of the candidates for governor remembered him by sending him a fine hat in care of the county clerk. Aldridge declined to wear it until the county should give a Republican majority, but he passed away and the hat disappeared long before that event came to pass in an old time Democratic stronghold, built up by early settlers who very generally hailed from the southern states, and strengthened by those who came during and after the war and whose sympathies being with, the South religiously voted that way.
Organization year was one of small beginnings with Fresno. In 1856 the county was credited with 1,620 acres under cultivation as follows:
Acres Bushels
Wheat 1,000 30,000
Barley 520 20,800
Oats 100 3,500
Grapevines were estimated at 2,000. Los Angeles County exceeded every other district in the state then in the cultivation of the grape, with 726,000 growing vines.
Two canals taking water out of the San Joaquin for mining purposes were reported, the first of these almost opposite the fort but never completed. These were the Fort Miller Mining and Water Company, two miles long and to have cost $100,000: and Mace. Hatch & Company's five-mile canal at Clark's Bar. The only steam sawmill was Alex. Ball's, about fifteen miles east of Millerton, erected in 1854, operating one saw with capacity of 6,000 feet and valued at $8,000.
Fresno was on one of the seven principal wagon roads leading from California to the East — the Tejon route from Stockton via Millerton and the Kings River to the Tejon Pass to Los Angeles, San Bernardino and the military road to Salt Lake City, 1,100 miles.
Lieut. Lucien Loeser of the Third Artillery commanded the garrison of three officers and seventy-seven men at Fort Miller. He was the officer who was sent from Monterey to Washington with Colonel Mason's report on the gold regions, and carried with him a tea-caddy full of gold dust, besides cinnabar from New Almaden. The report was made ten days after the proclamation of the Mexican War peace treaty.
Hugh Carroll was postmaster at Millerton, and William Innes at Scottsburg, the only post-offices in the county at the time. Carroll was another of the tribe of squaw-men, known among the Indians as "What-what," meaning goose or gander and applied to him on account of his waddling and shuffling gait.
CHAPTER XVI
The milestones in the eighteen years of Millerton's fleeting history may be set down in the following order:
1851, April — Establishment of military post on the south bank of the San Joaquin River, one mile above the later county seat village site.
1856, May 26 — Meeting of commissioners to arrange for county organization details, with: election of first county officers on June 9.
September 10 — Fort Miller evacuated. Regarrisoned in August, 1863, during the war and until final abandonment and sale of buildings, not very long afterwards.
1857, February 23 — Acceptance of first county built jail structure.
1861-62, Winter — Damaging river flood.
1865, January 28 — Publication of first number of ten of the Millerton Times.
1867, Summer — Completion of the courthouse and jail.
1867, December 24 — The big flood, with washing away of nearly half the village site.
1870, April 27 — First number of the Weekly Expositor newspaper.
July 3 — The great fire of Millerton, with destruction of the Henry Hotel and reported $8,000 property loss.
1874, March 23 — Election on removal of county seat.
September 25 — Removal of county offices to Fresno.
A writer from memory in the Expositor of January 1, 1879, presenting what is the first attempted and at the time the most ambitious effort at a historical write-up of the early days of Fresno Count v, originated in print the since oft quoted description of conditions ruling in Millerton in 1853 that has passed down as an accepted historical fact. Said he: "The mines on the banks of the river were then rich, and the county officials and the officers and men at Fort Miller had a very agreeable time with Millertonites, and everything was conducted in a loose, devil-me-care sort of a style. County court was adjourned one day to give the jury an opportunity to attend a horse race, and the board of supervisors would adjourn twenty times a day in order to go and take a drink." (The writer probably meant twenty adjournments in a day for twenty drinks, and not twenty adjournments to take one drink.)
The writer of these "Reminiscences of Early Times" in that New Year's day number was undoubtedly William Faymonville, whose "kindly aid" is duly acknowledged editorially. He was an old timer, an office holder as far back as February, 1861, when he was appointed assessor to succeed W. H. Crowe resigned, elected county clerk and recorder in September, 1863, and reelected two years later. He was prominent as a citizen and as a politician in Millerton and in Fresno. The earliest mention of him is as an election clerk in the fall of 1851 at the Texas Flat (Coarse Gold Gulch) precinct. He was in a position to treat from personal knowledge of the early days that he wrote about. Anyhow, the social "historical fact" has never been traversed.
That things in private and public life were "conducted in a loose, devil-may-care sort of a style" in those early times in Millerton was true in no restricted sense of the expression, and the record bears it out. For years the county did business without an official seal. One was not adopted until February 13, 1873, when the design in use to this day was accepted of County Clerk Harry Dixon, who brushed up his youthful classic recollections to build up the hog-Latin motto, "Rempublican Defendemus," — "We defend the public good" — as he rendered it. And there was no one to gainsay him.
At clerical work, men were set who were more competent to manipulate a shovel or a flail than a goosequill. No record is kept in the supervisors' minutes as canvassers of election returns until 1862, and no declaration of results. Tabulated returns were then inserted and paid for at the rate of fifty dollars and more for a total county vote recapitulation less in number than in a single Fresno city precinct today. Nowhere in the record is there anything concerning the organization of the county, save months and months later in casual references to the organization act in connection with boundary line resurveys.
Office holders were landlords of the county, receiving rent for public office quarters. County employees were paid extra for services in the line of their work. Was any responsible person short of money and the treasurer a good fellow, a loan was negotiated, and the money came forth from the public treasury, evidenced by personal note of the borrower. Supervisors met quarterly only, and the "per diam," as their minute clerk insisted upon writing it, was ten dollars, besides mileage.
FIRST ERECTED MILLERTON CALABOOSE
It is recorded as a commentary upon the looseness of the times that at the initial meeting of the first board of supervisors on June 23, 1856, after the county organization preliminaries consideration was given the subject of a jail. A county rate of fifty cents was levied as a tax for jail and courthouse, and one of seventy cents on the $100 for state purposes. The jail contract was awarded