Iowa to the “Land of Gold”

Eliza Ann McAuley

INTRODUCTION

Shortly after leaving the [Des Moines] river we were overtaken by an old man who rode along talking to us for some time. When he went home he told of a train he had seen. He said there was an old man, two boys, a lady and a little girl, Tom being the “old man” and I the “little girl.” Five years difference in our ages.

Diary entry for April 15, 1852.

This is a diary written by a 17-year-old girl: Eliza Ann McAuley, born December 2, 1835.1 The “old man,” Tom, who was 22 in 1852, was the acknowledged leader of their wagon train and Eliza’s older brother. The two boys were Winthrop and Merrick Cheney, nephews of the J. P. Tiffanys’ whom the travelers had visited on the first night of their journey, in Mt. Pleasant. Winthrop was twenty, and Merrick was 16 years of age.2 The “lady” was Eliza’s older sister, Margaret, who was 28. They had left mother, Esther McAuley, and sister Catherine (Kate), wife of James Robinson, home in Mt. Pleasant, Henry County, Iowa. Now they ventured forth over the plains to meet their father, James McAuley, who had preceded them to California. He was listed in the 1850 California U.S. Census as living in Placerville, El Dorado County, “57 yrs. old, b. Ireland.”

The young people started their long journey on April 7, and they reached northern California in mid-September, 1852.

It was on April 24th that their party was joined by the “Eddyville company,” as Eliza called it. These were William Buck and Oliver and Ezra Meeker. With Ezra were his wife, another Eliza, and a baby of six weeks named Richard.

It is our good fortune that this was the same Ezra Meeker who many years later, as a very ancient gentleman living in Seattle, would become a prime mover in the marking of the overland trails, and who would travel the overland route in 1924 by airplane from Seattle to Dayton, Ohio.3

In Meeker’s book, Ventures and Adventures of Ezra Meeker,4 he told of his family’s overland journey in 1852 and described in soaring words the three McAuley overlanders:

 

Thomas McAuley became by natural selection the leader of the party, although no agreement of the kind was ever made. He was, next to his maiden sister [Margaret], the oldest of the party, a most fearless man, who never lost his head, whatever the emergency, and I have been in some pretty tight places with him. While he was the oldest, I was the youngest of the men folks of the party and the only married man of the lot, and, if I do have to say it, the strongest and ablest to bear the brunt of the work … and so we got along well together until the parting of the way [to California and Oregon] came. This spirit, though pervaded the whole camp both with the men and women folks to the end.5

 

Meeker wrote that Margaret McAuley was “resolute and resourceful and almost like a mother to Eliza, his wife and their young baby.” He wrote the following about the younger McAuley sister, Eliza:

 

Eliza, the younger sister, a type of the healthy handsome American girl, graceful and modest, became the center of attraction upon which a romance might be written, but as the good elderly lady still lives [1909], the time has not yet come, and so we must draw the veil.6

 

Two years after her arrival in California, Eliza Ann McAuley was married in Sacramento to Robert Seely Egbert, who had been a Forty-Niner.7 He had emigrated to the Far West from Milford, Indiana, having been born in New York State on November 17, 1825. He had engaged in some mining in the Illinoistown area of Placer County in the gold region. Then he went into freighting of merchandise out of Sacramento to supply the mining camps. For another period he contracted with the Central Pacific Railroad to saw lumber and to build snow sheds through the mountains. In later years the Egberts owned a large ranch in Solano County in the Rio Vista area.

During the years immediately following their marriage, the Egberts lived in Illinoistown.8 They had seven children, five boys and two girls. They are listed in a report at the California State Library as Charles, Effie, Alvin, Walter, Amy, Warren, and Norman, from oldest to youngest.9

Robert Seely Egbert died in Rio Vista July 20, 1896. Eliza lived on many years. She died in Berkeley on November 16, 1919, at the age of 83 years, 11 months, and 14 days.10

For several years we thought that we would publish this remarkable document as it appears in typescripts both at the Library of the University of California at Los Angeles and at the California State Library in Sacramento. These are duplicate copies made by Warren Egbert, the next to the youngest son, in January 1935. He evidently sent copies to several libraries.

Then we had the good fortune to contact the Searls Historical Library in Nevada City, California, associated with the Nevada County Historical Society. Librarian Edwin L. Tyson wrote to tell us of a Thomas Macaulay of Reno, Nevada, who had visited them in connection with their family history.

Since that letter we have been in contact with the Thomas Macaulays in Reno. The elder, Thomas William Macaulay, now 88 years old, is the son of the Thomas who made the journey with his little sister, Eliza. His son is Thomas R. Macaulay. They have opened the Macaulay world to us. Incidentally, the Thomas Macaulays had changed the spelling of their former name, McAuley.

It turns out that they have the actual hand-written diary, 5” x 7”, a little red book. These new friends have obliged us by comparing Warren Egbert’s typewritten copy with the original and noting down all discrepancies, and there were mighty few. It is with the permission, nay the encouragement, of the Macaulay clan that the diary is here published as a major dynamic record by a bright young woman of the family’s crossing of the plains in 1852.

Incidentally, they inform me that part of the way through the original diary Eliza ran out of ink, so the latter part of the journey is described with ink she made from plants along the way.

 

1 Certificate of Death, California State Board of Health, Sacramento, Eliza Ann Egbert.

2 Much of the information here comes from the “Forward” of the typewritten copy of the diary. Some information was given, too, by Thomas R. Macaulay, Reno, Nevada.

3 “Ezra Meeker, the Pioneer,” Washington Historical Quarterly, xx, No. 2 (April, 1929), P. 124.

4 (Seattle, Washington, 1908).

5 Ibid, P. 54.

6 Ibid, P. 55.

7 Notes on back of wedding picture supplied by Thomas William Macaulay, Reno, Nevada, also Nevada County, California, book of marriages, Book 1, P. 9, Searls Historical Library, Nevada City, California.

8 Thomas R. Macaulay, letter of April 1, 1984.

9 Daughters of the American Revolution, “Records of Families of California Pioneers,” VI (San Francisco, 1938), PP. 241-44.

10 Certificate of Death, California State Board of Health, Sacramento, Eliza Ann Egbert.