When William H. Kilgore started for California in 1850 with “four good middle Sized Horses and one mule, with a good new waggon” plus “about a thousand pounds” of “everything in the way of an outfit prepared” he was going in the best American tradition and at a moment of high promise.

This young man of thirty-two came from Virginia stock, of pioneers born to the land. He and his father, Matthew, had freed their slaves because of a deep conviction that no human being had the moral right to own another human being. Since a large plantation could not be maintained without slave labor, they sold the land and headed west. Indiana, Ohio, and finally Iowa were successively home until in 1850 they decided to go to California. Leaving their families at Keokuk, they made the long trek into the unknown. Matthew returned by way of Panama and in 1852 brought the others over the earlier route.

While the promise of gold may have partly influenced their decision, it was evidently not the prime reason for the move. Throughout the journal, the author is alert to mining activities but his real enthusiasm is for the beautiful pasture lands and the possibilities of cultivation. When he rode through fields of wild oats in the Sacramento Valley the grain was so high that it could be tied over the top of the saddle! This was the land of promise to which their strenuous trip had brought them. Its golden beauty appealed more to the farmer in them than did the inexhaustible mineral wealth over which men were already fighting. Consequently, they never went into the mining district.

The tale of how people left everything they held dear; the friends of generations, the security of civilization and its most elemental creature comforts, has been told many times and perhaps more colorfully. But with the passing of almost a hundred years, we have all too easily forgotten the heroic basis of our present affluence. There is an austere pleasure in reading, without sugar-coating, the day-to-day account, told without sentiment or complaint, of how our streamlined highways and prosperous cities had their beginnings. Whatever the ultimate reward, the path to California was not paved with gold.

No one, perusing the incredibly fine handwriting of the original manuscript with a reading glass (as he must) would have the temerity to criticize the punctuation, irregular though it is. It was accomplished in ink when that must have involved a quill pen and a carefully husbanded supply of fluid. Sometimes Kilgore’s desk was his saddle, and he wrote once in a cave, and at other times on the shore of some dangerous, soon-to-be forded stream. Only such changes have been made as seem necessary to keep the even flow of the story.

The journal was written so that his family might have some knowledge of the experiences of the small company on the journey. It was preserved by his grandchildren as a family relic without the realization that other people might be deeply interested in it as an historic document. To Mrs. Mattie Ashcraft of Santa Barbara, granddaughter of William H. Kilgore and great granddaughter of Matthew, we are indebted for the use of the original manuscript and for permission to present this volume.

The reader will feel the deep sympathy which Kilgore records for the German woman who begged to be allowed to join her husband as she saw him drowning “from the fact of her being left entirely alone among strangers and at the same time being Pregnant.” Indignation, which is not even hinted at by the journal’s author, must rise at the account of men first in the field, fencing off the desperately needed grass and selling it to wearied travelers, many of whom were destitute, for “three hundred Dls a ton.” The casual mention, time and again, of “we see near this a fresh grave” or “we see a dead man, laying by the Road Side. He was left here yesterday by his Company and Died last night” suggests in the text, neither callousness on Kilgore’s part nor inhumanity in those who so left him, but rather, the harsh realities of their condition.

It is regrettable that one page at the very end of the journal has been lost through the long years. It would have completed the list of mileages from point to point, the cost of “ferriage” and the names of Indian tribes with whom they met. But we can be grateful that the rest of the manuscript has come down in excellent condition. It is now in the collection of Carl Schaefer Dentzel of Northridge, California.

JOYCE ROCKWOOD MUENCH

Santa Barbara, California