Gaster's disappearance on August 11, 1866, left Mrs. Emma C. Gaster to face the world, handicapped with the care of four children. About two and one-half years later she married Converse, who in February, 1868, had been divorced. His end was also a tragic one.
CHAPTER XVIII
The eighteen years of village life history of Millerton, with the added burden of misfit county-seat honors, are singular for the lack of civic progress, remaining during that period practically at a standstill and positively retrograding. Was a structure dismantled for removal, which was not infrequent, was one destroyed by fire, or washed away by flood, there was no replacement. It was never predestined to live as a town, and the fact was emphasized at the county seat removal election in March, 1874.
The only noteworthy building spurt was at the founding in the first half of the 1850 decade. The only picture of the ragged village is from a photograph of 1870, by Frank Dusy, after the big flood. It shows a scattered collection of sixteen houses and local landmarks, including Chinatown at the upper end of the village street into which it debouched, the Indian rancheria on the bluff across the river, with the courthouse and Oak hotel looming up as the principal stone structures, and with more vacant than occupied spaces on both sides of the roadway.
There was an Indian rancheria above the fort and another below the village, hence the ferry landing name, "Rancheria Flat."
The hotel was erected by Ira McCray in 1858, at a cost of $15,000, with brick burned and stone quarried right on the ground, and for the day it was a pretentious structure and a comfortable caravansary that the flood razed to one story. McCray never recovered from this misfortune, it was the turning point in his affairs.
Never was there a town plat of Millerton. There never could have been one. It never had town incorporation or officers. The county supervisors were the town governing body, if any assumed the prerogative, and before county organization it was practically without government, because of its remoteness from Mariposa's county seat. The village site was on no man's land, on unsurveyed government land in which no one could have ownership, yet buildings were erected, leases entered into, lots sold and bought, the courthouse site included, and no one had more tangible claim than a squatter's possessory holding from which he might be turned off at any time, but was not — another evidence of the "loose, devil-me-care" spirit of the times. When the fort was abandoned at the close of 1863, the late Judge Hart bought the government buildings for a song as a home residence, and after the land survey he located a homestead on the surrounding land, including the fort site.
So it was with the village on the river bank. The homestead filed by George McClelland, whose house was central in the village, embraced the site as far as McCray's, the township line cutting across the town riverwards just beyond the opposite courthouse. This homestead right came to the late W. H. McKenzie by purchase, and so his estate (he was born at the fort as was his half-brother, Truman G. Hart) is the owner of the fort, village and courthouse sites, besides the 12,000-acre cattle range on both sides of the river, excluding only the eighty-four-acre sulfur springs property below town and in the river bed in part, which the Collins brothers never would part with.
Judge Hart owned the crowded quarter of the Chinese at the upper extremity of the village, occupied by them for years after the evacuation. He was their trusted legal adviser, and business agent, and regarded by them as a man second to none in power and influence. He was a man of ample physical girth, and this alone gave him distinction, so that on his later day business visits to Fresno his progress through Chinatown was always one long welcome ovation. This Chinatown of Millerton was typical as the most populous part of the village, in little one-story structures, principally of brick. It was as every other Chinatown distinguished for squalor, crowding of human beings into narrow confines, with all the characteristic bad smells and grime, and sublime indifference to sanitary measures that marks the oriental's quarters. The river water was used for drinking, and Hotelman Henry, as one of the committee of citizens, presented protest to Hart against his tenants dumping stable manure and house sweepings into the stream to pollute the water. In 1860, the census showed a population of 4,605, of which 4,305 were whites, 300 Chinese including five women, besides 3,294 Indians.
There never was but the one bisecting roadway or street in the village, on either side of which the scant buildings of the day were irregularly located or faced. The roadway traveled today to the fort is not the one of Millerton. From Pollasky, winding along the riverbank to 'merge into the village street, it is a later creation, primarily for the convenience of the ranch. In the olden time, Millerton was entered by two stage lines from the back hills beyond the fort, or from across the river at the ferries and fords. The riverside road was not laid out until nearly twenty years after scattered settlement towards the plains had begun. Before the advent of the railroad, with the Central Pacific Railroad opened in May, 1869. Millerton was on one of the seven eastern wagon roads — the longest one, the Tejon route, through the interior valley. It was from Stockton by way of the village and the Kings River, south through the Tehachapi and Tejon passes to Los Angeles and San Bernardino and the military road to Salt Lake City, 1,100 miles. It was a stage station on the Stockton-Visalia route with Kingston on the river as the next halting place. From the Santa Clara Valley, ran another road, entering the valley at Pacheco pass from San Benito, traversing the West Side plains, following the Elkhorn grade used to this day, and striking the main Kings River road. The name was taken from the fact that over the door of the great barn of the stage company there was fastened the head and horns of a huge elk. Elk's head is no more, but the road is there yet to the Kittleman plains in the oil field.
With all the cobbles and gravel in the river bed, the one village street, ending practically in cul de sacs at both ends, never was paved or macadamized. In dry seasons it was a dusty path; in wet, a thick mud pudding. There was no alignment of the houses, more vacant spots in horse and cow corrals, littered up house yards and stable grounds than occupied ground, low one-story adobe, or up and down boarded wooden structures with a few notable exceptions, and cow and footpaths connecting with the main street as side-paths. That main street never had official name. It was variously referred to as Main, Center or Water, the rear of the houses on the river bank crowding upon the latter, even hanging over the water, or being built up on stone bulkheads to bring them on a level with the street in front.
What really possessed the early villagers to locate where they did, and why was so much built on the riverbank, when as much and more could have been located back of the courthouse, on higher and better drained ground, removed from all flood danger? In the flood of Christmas eve 1867, the water rose in the river thirty feet higher than ever before known, covering townsite to the very courthouse steps. From that flood visitation, the village never recovered. It was then in the stage of decadence; the flood accelerated the finale. The question regarding the site location cannot be satisfactorily explained. The fort was undoubtedly placed at the highest and most practical military point on the river, one mile above the village. As to the latter, it was probably governed by the fords and ferries for the stages, and the accessibility to the river water for domestic purposes.
There have never been authentic figures estimating the yield of the gold placers at, near and above Millerton. In 1856, the county had a revenue of $1,000 to $1,200 from the four-dollar foreign miner's tax representing from 250 to 300 delving miners. Their average individual daily earnings were ten dollars— collectively $2,500 or $3,000 a day, $75,000 or $90,000 a month, and continuing with fluctuations for some years. There is a well authenticated tradition given corroboration by Jesse D. Musick, as an accepted authority on early historical subjects, that by 1852 one million dollars in gold dust had been extracted from twenty acres of the parcel of eighty-four, three-eighths of a mile below the town, where the mineral water gushes out of a cleft