Agua Fria

California Gold Rush Camps

The Book Club of California 1998 Keepsake

Miner's Claim
We see the minder hard at work
As steady as a saint;
His ground is rich, and he has got
Poor ground to make complaint.

A GUA FRIA (COLD WATER) -- somehow the Spanish words sound a bit more romantic -- is a tiny place situated in a lush meadow in the foothills of Mariposa County. It was at one time the county seat of the largest county in California, which reached from its neighbor to the north, Tuolumne County, to points as far south as Los Angeles and San Diego counties. Today, even the site where Agua Fria once existed cannot be located except by those who have been informed just which side road to take and exactly where to stop and let their eyes rest on a meadow, across which they see nothing but a rippling stream of refreshing water, with perhaps a few young lambs feeding there in spring time.

But in its day (1850-1854), it was a place of great activity and importance, especially when it was named county seat by an act of the legislature, February 18, 1850, which officially determined the locations of all the county seats. Quickly, an act of March 2 required that all the designated county seats should begin at once with the election of their officers.

Many of the officials thus elected later became famous, such as Judge James Bondurant. But the most legendary was Sheriff James Barney, who owned the only substantial log cabin at Agua Fria, and who charged the county not only for the rental of a part of the cabin as a kind of lock-up for criminals awaiting trial, but also for their food and occasionally for their clothing. He also charged the county a rental for the rest of the cabin, as a place where the judicial and fiscal operations of the county could be conducted. Additionally he charged for doing what would seem to be routine sheriff's duties, such as "receiving (a criminal) to jail" ($5.00); and on one occasion he charged the county an extra $50.00 for presiding at a public hanging. This practice, plus the extreme difficulty of collecting taxes from itinerant miners, eventually ran the county into debt, and it had to be bailed out by the legislature.

An 1850s letter sheet of Agua Fria shows most miners engaged in domestic chores while waiting for a freighter to arrive with kegs of whiskey. Along the icy-cold creek, a lone panner tests one of the mounds of earth thrown up for later washing, a rocker stands id e, and two miners search for a glimmer of gold in a long tom. [Courtesy Wells Fargo Bank]

But the most interesting story to come from so romantic a place is the legend of the Lost Gold of Agua Fria. In December of 185 I, County Treasurer J. Asbury Marr returned from a trip during which he collected taxes wherever he could. According to the legend, he had some $15,000 in fifty-dollar gold slugs. Thinking that Sheriff Barney's log cabin was not completely safe from theft, he decided to take the 300 fifty-dollar gold coins, about fifty-five pounds, on a horseback ride to Stockton. Leaving Agua Fria late in December 1851, he was never heard from again. He was believed to have drowned, and the money has never been found. Thousands of people believed this legend, searching up and down the stream beds of every river and creek along the Mother Lode for about 130 years.

But in 1980 the legend lost its luster. Some hitherto unknown archives were discovered in Mariposa, and among them was a letter, dated December 30, 1851, written by the County Clerk, which recounted the decision in a coroner's inquest as to the death of County Treasurer J. Asbury Marr. It read, in part, "We [the jury] believe that he was murdered by a blow fracturing his skull, by some person or persons unknown," but that the money belonging to the county was recovered. Only Asbury Marr was lost, to his loving brother who also had a tent at Agua Fria, and lost also to his family in Texas.

The county seat moved to Mariposa in September 1854, the post office followed in 1862, and Agua Fria disappeared into the ground. Then, a century later, in 1952, I tagged along on a class field trip with a Fresno State colleague, a professor in historical geography. After crossing a barbed wire fence meant to keep sheep in and tourists out, he pointed to some slightly rounded lumps among the grass. By outlining their shapes, we saw that they were square or rectangular- the rain-melted residue of adobe homes and stores! The beauty of the area, and the fascination of locating something so abandoned as to be almost invisible, led me to research the whole thing.

To my joy, in the beautiful county court house at Mariposa, I found the original manuscript "Supervisors' Minutes." From those handwritten notes, authenticated by the signature of presiding judge James M. Bondurant, the county's guiding spirit, I reconstructed the most important events. My California's Agua Fria appeared in 1954 -- haunted by the ghost and gold of Asbury Marr. Yet, historical research moves on. Our recently acquired knowledge has obliterated forever the myth of the Lost Gold of Agua Fria.

RAYMUND F. WOOD

DR. RAYMUND F. WOOD, active in the Jedediah Smith Society, Los Angeles Corral of Westerners, and E Clampus Vitus, passed away on April 3, 1998, leaving this legacy to The Book Club.