Jared Dixon Sheldon, a Vermont native and carpenter by trade, possibly arrived in California in 1839–the same year as John Sutter. Sheldon spent time in California’s capital at Monterey, where he built the customhouse, but by 1841 he
Women and children constituted the majority of individuals who survived when the California-bound Donner Party wagon train was stranded in the Sierra Nevada over the winter of 1846-47. Fourteen year old Elitha Donner was rescued
One of the first cooks at the wilderness outpost called Sutter’s Fort was a thirty year old English sailor named William Daylor, said to have deserted his ship in California five years before Sutter hired him in 1840. There he met and
Swiss immigrant John Sutter was not the only eminent foreigner in Mexican-owned California during the sleepily pastoral 1840s decade, although for a while he was the only settler in the Sacramento Valley