Timbuctoo

California Gold Rush Camps

The Book Club of California 1998 Keepsake

Miner's Cabin
His cabin built of logs, and in
A quaint, primeval style.
Intended but to shelter him
Unitl he makes his pile.

THE EAST VESTIGES of once-booming Timbuctoo, California's Historic Landmark No. 320, have disintegrated into faint outlines of old ditches and cellars, a few foundations, ancient and feral rose bushes and, most prominently, a single large pile of rubble. It is a ghost town.

However, the townsite southwest of Rough And Ready figured prominently on N. Westcoatt's (1861) Official Map of Yuba County and still made an appearance on the USGS Quadrangle for Smartsville as late as 194 3. The town was a mining companion to the Yuba River's string of placer camps-Rose's, Ballard's, Park's, Foster's and Long's Bars. But it, Sucker Flat, and Smartsville wore not "bar towns," but set back from the left bank of the river.

Erwin Gudde repeated Aubroy Drury's explanation of the strange place-name. Supposedly, the first whites on the scene in 1848 found a "blackamoor" already hard at work. Neither author made it clear just why prospectors would memorialize a black miner by choosing the name of the ancient, remote caravan city on the south edge of the Sabara Desert. Gudde half-believed that the black miner, himself, was named, or nicknamed, Timbuctoo, but then suggested that the place was possibly so dubbed because of a popular Gold Rush song with the line, "For he was a man from Timbuctoo." Journalist Noah Brooks, who was there in 1860, wondered if it wore so named because of its African heat in September.

All of those origins seem far-fetched. I consider the name to be a double metaphor combining the Oxford English Dictionary definition, "the most distant place imaginable," with the old usage of the sub-Saharan city's name as a legendary place of much gold.

The first identifiable miner (1850) was storekeeper William Morgan from Rose's Bar. William Gregory erected the first permanent residence (1855), and Jacob Dufford's hotel and the Stewart Store went up that same year. By 1859, the town was bustling with a pair of hotels plus a half-dozen boarding houses, eight saloons in addition to the hotel bars, a bank, a drugstore, two general merchandise stores, three clothing and dry goods shops, and a church made out of a remodeled saloon. Its population rose to 1,200, including 800 voters, on the eve of the Civil War, but then it declined steadily. When it dropped to 350 souls, 150 of them wore Chinese. Fire eventually destroyed almost all of Timbuctoo except for the sturdy Stewart (Brothers) Store.

By the 1860s, hydraulic mining devoured the land around Timbuctoo. Prominent in the left foreground is the Stewart Brothers store, now the rubble remnant of the town. [Courtesy California State Library]

Around the time of the Civil War, attorney, politician, and, ultimately (1869), U. S. Minister to Japan, Charles E. DeLong was a constant visitor, especially at Dunbar's Saloon. As a northern Democrat for reelection to the Assembly in 1859, he was elated when he carried Timbuctoo by thirty-nine votes, but lost in the southern Democratic landslide. The cocky DeLong continued his courtroom chores as defense attorney retained by an Irishman for an assault case and by some "ladies of pleasure" involved in a cutting affray. That year, during the grand July 4 turnout at Smartsville, he was impressed by Timbuctoo's hook and ladder-company of fire "bhoys," also other Irish from that town, parading with pikes. Politicians orated in a Timbuctoo theater, and DeLong attended the firemen's ball of the Rescue Hose Company, whose thirty men paraded at sundown. The ball, attended by eighty-five couples, lasted until dawn.

Timbuctoo's Union Club had the regional honor of calling for a Union Convention (in Marysville) as war clouds gathered in 1861. Its Democratic delegates, including Timbuctoo's J. Mallis, approved Lincoln's Republican administration, calling loudly for "Principle Above Party."

When Noah Brooks stepped off the stagecoach in 1860, he found once-thriving Timbuctoo already in the first stages of decay. "No African town," he wrote, "but hot and dry enough to be in the Desert of Sahara." Lounging in the doorway of the stage-stop hotel wore a bummer, a miner on a "bust," a hungry-looking village lawyer, the hotel's portly landlord, and a "sharp" boy. Those rustics stared so intently at the coach's two female passengers that Brooks sarcastically termed them Timbuctoo's Committee of Public Safety.

In 1925, the Native Daughters of the Golden West repaired and re-roofed the Stewart Store, and in 1928, Wells Fargo Bank & Union Trust Company presented a plaque "dedicated to the memory of pioneer men and women of Timbuctoo." A few years later, when Carl Wheat edited DeLong's journals, he mentioned the renovations, and in the early 1930s, Carl Glasscock found Timbuctoo's surviving structure to be an excellent example of Gold Rush vernacular architecture. The mortared stone and brick general store, featuring supposedly hreproof iron doors and window shutters, also housed a Wells Fargo Express Office, post office, saloon, and gold dust exchange in its prime. Now the Wells Fargo Office and Pioneer Museum houses worn and faded relics.

At some date before her 1948 Mother Lode Album, Otheto Weston "shot" Timbuctoo's last survivor. It was in good condition, protected by a pitched roof of galvanized, corrugated sheet iron behind a brick false front. A similar, slanting, shed-like metal roof sheltered its facade.

When I made my first pilgrimage there in the early 1950s, the Stewart Store was still in pretty good shape. But when I returned I found the stout planking of the floor ripped up and great holes gouged into the walls with pick-axes. The work of local or visiting vandals had been exacerbated by fools in mindless searches for caches of gold in the old "Wells Fargo Building."

In April 1974, one of the iron fire doors disappeared, and the back wall was down. The 1860s lettering on the left and center front walls, though, was still legible:

Stewart & Brothers have for Sale Dry Goods, Boots and Shoes, Ready Made Clothing, Groceries & Provisions, Crockery, Hardware & LIQUORS.

Gold Dust Bought. Wells, Fargo & Co. Low Brothers & Co Exchange for Sale on all the Principal Cities of the Atlantic States and Europe.

On a recent visit, I found only the pile of rubble that was the tumbled-down store. It was belatedly protected (!) by a chain-link fence so high that I had to clamber atop my wife's van in order to photograph the sad remains. The story of Timbuctoo's fate is a cautionary tale. It has, alas, fallen victim to two characteristics of our modern civilization, vandalism and greed.

RICHARD H. DILL.ON

RICHARD H. DILLON is an on-going contributor to The Book Club of California and has written numerous books on the Golden State.