A Teenager’s Letter from Sacramento

Elizabeth Keegan

INTRODUCTION

They arrived in Marysville, California, on September 17, 1852. Two months later, on December 12, Elizabeth Keegan wrote the letter we now publish to her brother and sister back in St. Louis. Her companions on the journey were her mother, also named Elizabeth, a servant girl named Kate, an an un-named hired man. Nearly eighty years later, in 1930, her great-granddaughter, Mrs. Dorothy Sims, presented to the manuscript collection of the California Historical Society in San Francisco a typescript of the letter with the note, “I have copied it word for word.” Mrs. Sims indicated that Elizabeth was twelve years old at the time of the covered wagon journey. That figure is justified by the 1900 Federal Census which lists her as being sixty years old, born in Canada.1

In an accompanying letter Mrs. Sims shared other family memories about Elizabeth Keegan as she commented, “The daring feat of three women, one practically a child, with only I male escort, I think was quite a feat of note.” The teenager “rode her pony all the way,” being a good horsewoman.

The brother and sister to whom the letter was addressed, James B. and Julia Keegan, followed their mother and sister overland two years later.

By the time of the 1860 Federal Census,2 Elizabeth had been married to William Ketchum, a 35-year-old carpenter. They were listed by the census-taker on August 23, 1860, as living in Sacramento, their personal property being worth $700. Elizabeth was noted as being the mother of two children, a girl named Missouri, four years old, and a year-old baby boy named Harry.

The information on Elizabeth Keegan is sparse, but there emerges more than twenty years after the above census records a series of references in the Sacramento City Directories from 1882 to 1895.3

The 1882 directory listed her, with a minimum of punctuation, as “Ketchum Mrs E J C, furnished rooms, Masonic Building, res same.”

In the 1884-1885 Directory she was “KETCHUM E J C Mrs, proprietress Metropolitan House, res 427 K [Streets].”

Then in 1895 there was a half-page advertisement for “THE METROPOLITAN” with “Mrs. E. J. C. KETCHUM, Propr.” The rooming house was at the “N. W. Corner Fifth and K Sts.,” and the ad told how “Electric Cars pass the door to all parts of the City.” There was also a “Restaurant in the Same Building.” Advertising was raised to the heights in the following list of statements in Italics:

 

Handsomely Furnished Rooms, Single or En Suite.
Centrally Located.
Strictly First-Class.
Special Attention to Transients.

 

In the 1895 Directory her son, Harry W. Ketchum, who had been a year old at the time of the 1860 census, is recorded as residing in the Metropolitan with his mother.

It was on May 2, 1907, in Alameda, California, that Elizabeth died of “Senility” and “Cerebral Hemorrhage.” The funeral was to take place in Sacramento two days later on May 4.4 She had been living with another son, William Ketchum, a detective, at the time.

We are grateful to the California Historical Society Library in San Francisco for permission to publish this dynamic 1852 letter. It is part of their manuscript collection.

 

1 Information from the Federal Census for 1900 by Lorraine M. Lineer, genealogical researcher, Sacramento, in response to a request for information by the author. This is noted here with gratitude.

2 United States Bureau of the Census, Manuscript Records of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860.

3 These quotes from the directories were kindly located and passed on to us by Thomas Fante of the California State Library, Sacramento.

4 Original Certificate of Death, California State Board of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Sacramento, California. The person who gave the information on the death certificate signed her name as “Zuri” Hawks. This was Elizabeth Ketchum’s daughter, Missouri, listed above in the 1860 census.