Part 1

EXTRACTS FROM THE DIARY OF WILLIAM C. LOBENSTINE

Extracts from the Diary of William C. Lobenstine December 31, 1851-1858

Biographical Sketch by Belle W. Lobenstine

Printed Privately 1920

COPYRIGHT 1920 BY BELLE W. LOBENSTINE

In Loving Memory of My Father WILLIAM C. LOBENSTINE

That those of us who follow after may honor and love his memory and live worthy of his name

FOREWORD

This book does not in any sense purport to be a biography. Often during Father's lifetime, on our long walks together or during long quiet evenings at home, he would tell of his early life, repeating over and over certain incidents which had impressed him deeply and so—when after he had gone we found among his papers two closely written diaries bound in calf, telling of his trip to California and the return from there—it seemed most natural to work over these diaries, to try to make out their closely penciled pages and, when that was done, with as few changes as possible, to publish these, together with a brief sketch of his early life and a few explanatory notes, for his family, friends, and any others who may be interested in these early experiences of one who came seeking the best in this country.

The construction has been left unchanged and is very suggestive of the German, while the use of words, if at times inaccurate and somewhat flowery, is remarkable when one considers that but three years before he had come to this country an immigrant boy, knowing no English whatever. He was constantly reading, both books and the daily papers (has spoken often of how, later on, he took the _New York Tribune_ to study the editorials by Horace Greeley), and then trying to use the new words which he found—doubtless keeping his diary partly for that purpose. On the whole it would seem that he has succeeded in making his thoughts remarkably clear. Some of these are very characteristic of him as we knew him in later years—but in religious matters he had reacted from the despotism of a strong established church and of a narrow-minded bigotry without as yet knowing the deep personal religious experience which was afterwards his. As to his political views—it is hard to believe that they were written in 1852 when they might equally well have been expressed at any time since 1914.

BELLE WILLSON LOBENSTINE

INTRODUCTION

Christian Lobenstine or William C. Lobenstine, as he called himself later on in this country, was born in Eisfeld, Dukedom of Meiningen, on November eighth, eighteen hundred and thirty-one. He was the youngest in his family. The others were Theodore, Caroline, Frederic, Bernard, Dorothea, Georgia, and Henry. They were the children of Johanne Andreas and of Elizabeth Lobenstein.

His father and older brothers were tanners and also farmers. Of the brothers, Theodore, the eldest, seems to have been the most lovable, always kind to his younger brothers and sisters. Father always spoke very affectionately of him. Frederic, on the other hand, the first of the boys to come to this country, was stern and rather arbitrary to the other members of the family. These, and Henry who also came to this country, together with his father and his mother, whose gentleness and care he never forgot, were the only ones of whom he ever spoke.

The earliest known incident of his life, and one to which he often referred, came when he was about seven years old. He, with other children, was playing by a stream near the tannery, and he fell in. It was early spring and the waters were swollen by melting snows so that he was carried down stream very rapidly. His friends ran along the banks with grappling hooks trying in vain to reach him. Finally, however, the stream ran under a bridge and here Theodore ran out and with one of the great hooks used in handling hides in the tanyard, caught him by the buttonhole of his vest. He was unconscious but they were able to bring him to and carried him to an uncle who had an inn near by. After a night's rest, they took him home, none the worse for his adventure.

As he grew older he became ambitious for a good education and one day while working in the fields with his father, mustered up courage to ask him to send him away to school, and won his consent. He studied three years and a half at the Real Gymnasium in Meiningen. His life was one of the simplest and hardest. He had an attic room with some townspeople and ate his midday meal with them. His breakfasts and suppers consisted of a jug of water and a big piece of the rye bread of the country with butter. Once in a while, his family would send him down a ham. He kept his cot at the window so that he might be awakened by the first rays of the rising sun and begin to study, for he always worked hard for what he got and was an earnest, faithful student rather than a brilliant one. He kept, however, on the highest bench all the way through common school and also ranked well in the gymnasium.

After leaving school, he studied for nearly a year with a country doctor, a relative of his, going about with him and assisting in many ways, but developed no liking for the profession and so gave it up and, together with his brother Henry, decided to come to America whither Frederic had already gone. This was in eighteen hundred and forty-nine, when a new spirit was abroad in Germany and when people looked to this country both as a land of freedom and also as a place where one could almost literally pick up gold and silver on the streets. At that time it was the rule in Meiningen that upon emigrating, you forfeited all rights and claims upon that Government and before leaving he went to the Castle and signed papers giving up all rights of German citizenship. He left Germany with the definite idea of settling in the United States, making it his permanent home and becoming a part of this new country. From the first, therefore, he chose to associate with Americans and to use the English language rather than keep up his German associations.

Coming to this country from Havre to New York on a sailing ship was a long and hard journey of fifty-three days and by the end of that time, what with the hardships and poor fare, many of the passengers were down with cholera. Father, among others, was taken to quarantine, which was a very different place from what it is now. While many were dying in the hospital—and he was taken to the ward where all the very worst cases were—he did not believe that he was very ill or going to die. Watching what was going on he saw them take one patient after another and dump them into a bath without changing the water and finally they started for him. This was too much, and he jumped up and ran back into another ward where the less serious cases were. Here they let him stay until he was able to leave the hospital. He had expected to find the people of this country living in great ignorance, and came expecting to teach, but he was adaptable and finding that such services were not required from him, a young immigrant lad, he quickly turned to other things.

He went first to Wheeling, where his brother Frederic was in the leather business, and worked for him about a year. Then he took to steamboating on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. During the next two years he was first cabin boy and later steward and had many stories to tell of his various experiences. Once the steamer upon which he was steward—through a mistake in signals—struck another amidships and cut her in two. Fortunately, the few passengers on board were saved, before she sank. Another time, as he went into the kitchen to give an order to the cook, that individual, more drunk than sober, proceeded to grab up a carving knife and run Father out of the kitchen. There was much gambling at poker on these river steamers which Father saw constantly. Also much crooked work. One day a man left the table and asked another to take his hand for a few moments. This fellow lost some money and wished to repay it, but was not allowed to. So the others gradually drew him into the game and cleaned him out. Another time a man gambled his all (he had come on board with a good pile of money) and when he lost he grabbed up his money bag, ran to the deck of the steamer, and before any one could stop him—jumped overboard. Whether he reached the shore no one knew. Probably, however, he was drowned in the turbid waters of the Mississippi. These incidents, together with what he saw while in California, always gave Father a strong prejudice against cards, which he associated almost inevitably with gambling and all its evils.

After two years of this life, he decided to seek his fortune in the Far West, and his diary tells much of these days. A few other details of which he spoke may however be of interest.

The emigrant party as it started from Pittsburgh consisted of about forty men and ten wagons. They shipped their wagons down the Mississippi and up the Missouri to St. Joseph where they bought forty oxen. In Father's wagon was Captain Speers, a river pilot with whom Father had worked while steamboating. He was a farmer's son who knew about cattle. There was also a business man named Logan from Allegheny City. He was a strong Christian man, the only one in the party who carried a Bible and his life and death (for it was he whose death is mentioned in the diary) made a profound impression on Father. One evening as they sat at supper, Logan put down his cup saying, "I don't feel well," and went into his tent to lie down. There was a doctor in the party who did what he could, but the next morning at four Logan was dead—of cholera. They buried him there on the prairie, wrapped in a buffalo robe with a mound of stones over the grave and sent the little Bible back to his wife. On this whole trip Father was the cook for his mess and he has always claimed that he made a splendid one. The men of each wagon seem to have camped together and had their own mess. When night came the ten wagons were arranged in a circle—the tongue of one against the back of the next—and after the cattle had been allowed to graze till midnight, they were corralled within this circle.

Father's mates while mining were Captain Speers, McElrey, and Evans. Their camp was back in the mountains quite close to the border of Nevada, with Sacramento as their nearest city, where they went for supplies. Their claim was located several hundred feet above the level of the creek, so in order to get water they had to go back into the mountains fifteen miles. They had a surveyor survey the line and then these four men, not one of whom was a mechanic and all but one town bred, went to work to bring down water. In the first place they built a dam. Then they brought the water down hill and in one place bridged a valley two hundred feet wide. Their form of mining was called gulch mining. They built flumes or long boxes with enough fall for the water to run slowly and into these they dumped the pay dirt. The water would wash away the earth while they stood and tossed out stones, etc. Finally, after running through several boxes, the earth was all washed away, leaving only the heavy gold, which was collected by quicksilver.

The men worked in this way for three years, making no strikes and averaging about five dollars a day. Then Father and Speers sold out their claim and went to a large camp, Camp Secco, Dry Creek, it was called, and went to merchandising. They bought mules and a wagon and brought in from Sacramento the usual goods necessary to miners. After two years, the captain went home to his family. Father hired a man and kept on for another year, after which he sold out and came away, having accumulated six thousand five hundred dollars, the beginning of his fortune. He was in California from eighteen fifty-two to eighteen fifty-eight. His mates were sober, hard-working men. They made no wonderful strikes and what they got was by hard work and perseverance.

There were many robbers and desperadoes about, and Father made one dangerous trip. He had left the few schoolbooks that he had carried even out to California miles away with some people he knew, and one day when it was raining so that he could not work his claim decided to go after them. He took a mule and on several occasions had to swim swollen creeks. Finally, night came on, and he was caught in the hills alone where many a man had disappeared never to be seen again. However, after wandering about for hours in the darkness and in growing terror, he reached his destination at two o'clock in the morning.

Before leaving California in eighteen fifty-eight he was naturalized in the San Francisco court and ever held his naturalization papers as one of his most prized possessions.

His diary tells of his return to the East and his choice of Leavenworth for a home. Here he went into the leather business as the one of which he knew most and with his later life and business success, we are all familiar.

BELLE WILLSON LOBENSTINE

I

EXTRACTS FROM THE DIARY

Among the great many opinions expressed regarding usurpation of the government or despotism, one attracted my attention and agreed so much with my own sentiment that I could not but pay due merit to the moral truth of it. Despotism is despicable in its perpetrator and at all times a disgrace to human beings, depriving them perforce of their inalienable rights and their moral esteem for themselves and bringing them down on common ground with slaves. Although as just mentioned, despotism is at all times disgraceful to both sides we ought to pity those beings more who got their power as an inheritance than hate them. Who would and can deny that the early trainings of men lay the foundations to their further field of action? Therefore, when princes become the heirs of absolute governments, who can expect them to act differently than the Southern man does to his slaves? The latter, who was brought up among the family of mankind, and has accepted principles common to them, is much more to blame for his tyranny than a sovereign who was raised alone isolated from his fellowmen by a belief in his divine origin and who never imagined, therefore, nor ever dreamed of the least equality with mankind. If Napoleon was great as conqueror, he was equally despicable for the misuse he made of the confidence entrusted in him by the people, and instead of perfecting the rights and liberties of the nation, he cheated them of these very objects given to his care and usurped the government. Napoleon knew how to play the deceiver well enough to keep the people in their happy dreams. He knew how to flatter them by giving them all visible power, but he showed by his future way of action that he only played the hypocrite and that his outward course only served him to attain his inward higher object which was nothing short of grasping the nation and enslaving his own countrymen, as all other nations, which were possible for him, he conquered. Looking back from the point we started and considering once more both hereditary despots and usurpated despots, so will we certainly not think so hard of one who has got that power by inheritance, or who was raised from infancy to this sole object of keeping the people down, in poverty, and slavery, as of a usurpator, who has imbibed principles of liberty and equality, sympathises with his brothers, and becomes then their flatterer, and by abuse of his mental faculties and moral sentiments, with a happy change of circumstances, their master and commander.

It is the great political question at present, if America is bound by the treaties with the foreign sovereigns to abstain from helping the poor, downtrodden and oppressed people of those countries to their attainments of their inalienable rights. It is true that at the time when our constitution was made, our forefathers or rather their representatives in Congress, made a contract with the European princes to observe neutrality in their affairs, and declared therefore it to be the duty of this government for its own dignity as well as for the honor of the nation not to send any help to Europe, but to be free from doing such an illegal act. America being, however, the most liberal, and by that the most powerful government in the world, if it is her duty to stick to the act which our forefathers have made, there is still the other side of the argument to consider, to arrive to a proper result. Justice is the first law of nature and as all of us expect to get justice done from our neighbors, and especially the government we have chosen out of our minds, so humanity demands to see our brothers, however distant, equalized in the same way. The consistent law or the laws on which societies are framed, and reared up to developed bodies, are of various kinds, devised principally by our philanthropists and philosophers and legislators, for the best of the parties concerned. Their origin, however, being of human intellect and moral sentiment, can be only as following out very narrow sources, limited in their consistency with human happiness. Laws which are the most beneficial influence upon a society under certain circumstances and times, may be quite the opposite, with another united body, under different physical and moral conditions. Times and circumstances, therefore, cannot be suited to laws, but the latter need to be in a harmonizing cooperation with the former. If, therefore, our forefathers made laws or what is the same, the Constitution, they could not at that time, establish or devise such as should stand for all times but only for themselves and for their own generation. If Washington, John Adams or Jefferson, made treaties with foreign despots, it was for various causes arising out of their own at that time yet feebly maintained independence. But times have changed, out of that spark of freedom which fell among the population of this continent has come a powerful government, illuminating, with its might, the whole world, and whose physical powers are sufficient to crush all enemies to dust and raise downtrodden, oppressed and dishumanized mankind and brothers up to their by nature determined position of equality and fraternity. As maintained before, the exhausted position of America, which only could follow so great and sacrificing a struggle as that of the war of independence, obliged our forefathers to make friendly treaties with the foreign powers, to avoid if possible another blow upon their rights and liberties maintained so gloriously with England. But what is our strength at this moment? Are we still so feeble? Still so dependent on beings who are the scourge of mankind and deface the earth with cruelty and tyranny? We all certainly will say no. All will say America is no more dependent on anybody but themselves and nature's laws. Politics and love to live forced legislators to treat friendly with despots and now this voice of justice and humanity calls them to throw off this so long maintained mask of amity to tyrannical systems and to declare themselves at once for mankind and fellowmen. The voice of nature is mighty and omnipotent. She calls us up out of our dreamlike indifference to honorable participation in the fate of our fellowmen and makes it our duty to stand in defense of her laws on this planet and home of intellectual creatures. Let us throw off then our fastidious way of action and exert one and all of us the strength both physical and moral, for universal happiness and so lay by this the road to world's perfection.

II

VOYAGE TO CALIFORNIA

December thirty-first, eighteen hundred and fifty-one.

Left Wheeling on Steamer _Messenger_ for Pittsburgh, April twentieth. Exodus to California.

The tide of emigration for California swept me along in its progress for the same reason as thousands of others—to appropriate money enough by a few years' hard toil, to secure a future independency. When first the idea of a movement to the West took possession of me, I was wavering in the choice between California and Oregon and gave finally preference to Oregon on account of securing a homestead at the arrival there and to judge from the last news of the diggings better wages than in the latter. From an inability to make up a certain complement of immigrants I had to give up the project and go to California. I left subsequently Pittsburgh on the Steamer _Paris_, passing Wheeling without seeing my brother, and arrived after a week's journey down to the mouth of the Ohio River and from Cairo up the Mississippi to St. Louis.

The Ohio River is formed by the confluence of the Monongahela and the Allegheny at Pittsburgh, the formation of which place is alluvial bottom carried down from the mountains in previous ages. It has along its shores some of the finest agricultural country as well as numberless cities and towns, among which we count the following as the largest and where the most business is carried on: Wheeling, Virginia, Marietta, Ohio, Cincinnati, Louisville, Evansville, etc. Besides these, being all places where manufacture of all kinds is carried on, I mention from its great obstruction to navigation, rather than its cosmogenic character, the Falls of Louisville, with the nature of which I am, however, too little acquainted to give particulars. A canal, which was built years ago, to overcome this obstacle, is of so little dimensions that the larger boats can not pass through and therefore this has always been a drawback to Ohio navigation and a hindrance to more progress for the City of Louisville. Several requests have lately been made from several states to Congress for the construction of a new canal large enough to let boats of large dimensions pass at any time conveniently. The hills running alongside the river beginning at its source generally slope down to its shores, having in many places very fertile tracts for agriculture. This mountain chain proceeds most of the time in a parallel direction with the river down to about one hundred and fifty to two hundred miles below the falls where they gradually descend to a level covered with luxurious vegetation in some places while marshes extend over a considerable part of it. The confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi is at Cairo, built on a vast swampy and unhealthy desert which, but for its low level, would be the central place of the United States, for merchants, around which they would gather and from whose midst the greatest movements would emerge and be controlled. This being, however, a natural difficulty, which no human skill can ameliorate, that centralizing point has to move higher up the river to St. Louis. This latter place has within the last twenty years increased remarkably and is at present the metropolis of the West and will undoubtedly increase in importance in a ratio parallel with the civilization of California and Oregon. By the present tide of emigration to the latter countries the amount of business is very much increased. In consequence of this a great many improvements have been made, consisting in building a large number of new expensive houses for merchants and manufacturers which betray to every stranger at the first look the impression of a great and industrial city.