Mining District Founders
On September 4, 1873, six men drafted the Mineral King Mining District Resolutions and Bylaws and unanimously adopted them. Thus, with a flourish of their pens, they created the Mineral King Mining District.
In celebration of their accomplishment and its lasting impact on the area, we offer short biographies of the men, listed in the order in which they signed the document that established the Mineral King Mining District.
Johnson Parks Ford (1825–1904)
Ford was a forty-eight-year-old rancher on the Tule River when he took on the leadership role in the founding of the Mineral King Mining District.[1] He was substantially shorter than his co-founders… only 5’6” with dark skin, brown eyes, and brown hair that he retained well into his senior years.[2] Over the course of his life, he was a miner, carpenter, wheelwright, spiritualist, unionist, fervent (and arguably eccentric) populist, and vociferous complainer about sidewalk nuisances until his death shortly after this photo was taken in 1904 when he was about seventy-nine years old.[3] Born in New York, Ford started his working life as a farmer’s son. When the California gold rush accelerated in 1849, Ford was twenty-three and living with his immediate family in Michigan.[4] Ford didn’t join the gold rush, but instead married the eighteen-year-old Sarah Winchester.[5] They purportedly welcomed their first child into the world exactly nine months after the wedding date.[6] The cholera epidemic of the next several years may have pushed them to finally head west in 1856 with Sarah’s family.[7] In Lassen County, Ford etched his name in the history books as a man of some repute. With friends such as Salmon Belden (who was to be the first to sign his name on a Mineral King mining claim),[8] Ford helped establish the Euro-American presence in the county. He homesteaded land, raised crops, was elected the first justice of the peace in Janesville, and demonstrated a new set of skills by building the waterwheel for the first gristmill.[9] During the Civil War he was a private in the volunteer regiment, in which a gentleman named Leroy Nathan Arnold was an officer.[10] (You may want to remember him.) Lest Sarah be ignored, we should note that she helped stitch the first Union flag raised in the area,[11] maintained the home, and raised three girls and a son.[12] In 1863, while Sarah was pregnant with their fifth child, their three-year-old son Martin died.[13] Then, in 1865, a flood sent the gristmill waterwheel down the river, and the Ford family had to abandon their home and escape to higher ground.[14] Understandably, they decided they were done with Janesville. The Fords moved south to the Redwood District on the western edge of today’s Silicon Valley, where Ford tried to establish himself as a wheelwright[15] and Sarah died in 1870.[16] At this point, Ford had only $150.[17] At about this time, he married the twenty-five-year-old Mary Jane Dennison.[18] According to some descendants, she gave birth to a little boy just four months later.[19] In 1871, Ford decided to join his friend Belden and other spiritualists on ranches in the Tule River watershed.[20] From there, Ford was only an arduous mule ride away from Mineral King. From 1873 through 1882, he owned all or portions of thirty-four mine claims and four mill site claims.[21] One of these was in the settlement of Mineral King Proper, more commonly known as Ford’s Camp, where he and his family hosted musical soirees.[22] Ford was the first person to hold the lucrative and powerful position of mining district reorder,[23] and he became the acting superintendent of the New England Tunnel & Smelting Company’s (NET&S) operations and the sawmill foreman.[24] Ford developed a questionable reputation as a knowledgeable mineralogist and promoter of Mineral King.[25] He also developed a reputation for currying favor, and he purportedly “gave his oldest stepdaughter” to the NET&S supervisor as a mistress.[26] As it turns out, one or all of Ford’s daughters were sired by none other than Leroy Nathan Arnold, the man with whom Ford had served in the Civil War .[27] With the demise of the “New England Thieving and Swindling Company” in 1878,[28] Ford and his family left Mineral King. His wife and their children moved to Mussel Slough, while Ford pursued a bachelor’s life in Hanford.[29] Ford died in 1905.[30]
[1] United States Census Bureau (Tulare County) (hereafter cited as Census).
[2] Great Registers, 1866–1898, California State Library, Sacramento, CA (hereafter cited as Great Register).
[3] “Labor Day Celebration,” Fresno Morning Republican, 6 September 1904, p. 8. Census records, voter registrations, and a multitude of newspaper articles track his career.
[4] Census (Michigan)
[5] Washtenaw County Marriage Records (Michigan)
[6] Washtenaw County Marriage Records (Michigan); descendant records.
[7] Census (California); A. Fairfield, Fairfield’s Pioneer History of Lassen County, California (San Francisco: H. S. Crocker, 1916), 67, 155 (hereafter cited as Fairfield); “Passing of J. P. Ford,” Hanford Sentinel, 27 April 1905, p. 1 (hereafter cited as Ford Obit).
[8] Mineral King Mining District Records, Volume 1: 6 (hereafter cited as MKMD).
[9] Fairfield, 10, 67, 99, 101, 155, 308; Ford Obit.
[10] Fairfield, 357.
[11] Fairfield,146;
[12] Census (California).
[13] Descendants; Census (California). According to Fairfield, 334, 26 people died “of a sort of mountain fever.”
[14] Fairfield, 338.
[15] Great Registers.
[16] Ford Obit.; Saratoga CA Cemetery records.
[17] Census (Sana Clara County)
[18] California Marriage Index.
[19] Other records indicate she gave birth to him 14 or 16 months later.
[20] Great Register; Ford Obit.
[21] MKMD, Volume 1, Volume 1, Transfers.
[22] Tulare Weekly Times, 10 October 1874.
[23] Ford received $5 for each claim location, relocation, and transfer. This translated to at least $3,100.00 in 1873, 1874, and 1875, the years Ford was district recorder. In purchasing power, this would be equivalent to more than $70,000 today.
[24] Orlando Barton to William Wallace, 22 August 1905, Wallace Papers, Annie Mitchell History Room, Tulare County Library, Visalia, CA (hereafter cited as Barton Letter); ‘Mineral King’. Mining and Scientific Press 32(26). 24 June 1876, p.405 (hereafter cited as MSP).
[25] “Mining Summary: Tulare,” MSP 31(20). 13 November 1876, p. 312.
[26] Barton Letter.
[27] California Marriage Index. The index that recorded the first marriage of Sarah’s daughter Josephine Susan clearly states that her father was Leroy Arnold.
[28] L. Di Silvestro, “Thieving and Swindling: Negotiating Local Control of Industrial Production in a Nineteenth Century Silver Mining District in California, U.S.A.” (master’s dissertation, University of Leicester, 2019), 24–25.
[29] Census (Tulare County); Great Register; Ford Obit. Although he lived in Hanford, Ford did maintain an interest in several Mineral King mines, and he continued prospecting.
[30] Ford Obit.
James Abraham Crabtree (1829–1913)
When Crabtree helped found the mining district, he was an exceptionally tall blue-eyed forty-four-year-old who had just moved to a ranch on the Tule River with his wife Paulina and their children.[1] There they would nurture dreams of wealth tinged with great sorrow. Crabtree was born in Illinois, the fourth of seven children who survived to adulthood.[2] His father had served for about five months in the War of 1812 and fought in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815.[3] According to family lore, during the battle, Crabtree was one of body guards of General Jackson, who had lived with the Crabtrees as a boy.[4] This story isn’t supported by the historic record and may be one of the family myths that adorn the Crabtree and most other families. The family began a series of moves when Crabtree was only one year old, migrating to Arkansas, Missouri, and then Texas.[5] It was in Texas that Crabtree evidently learned to read, write, farm, and raise cattle.[6] In 1852, the family embarked on an ill-fated journey to California, during which they purportedly lost their oxen and nearly died on a ship.[7] In California, the family continued its restless travels until Crabtree visited Tulare County. After dabbling in the hog business, the entire family moved to the county in 1859 and settled on the Tule River.[8] There Crabtree married Paulina in 1860, and they welcomed their first child nine months later.[9] Perhaps Crabtree was still restless, however, because they moved to Santa Clara County, where they had two more children.[10] They returned to the Tule River area in about 1868 and bought some ranch land.[11] After a failed sheep raising venture with his brothers and Salmon Belden,[12] Crabtree and his family moved onto their property in 1873.[13] That was the year Crabtree and his neighbors located their mine claims on the White Chief lode and established the mining district.[14] At about that time, the Crabtrees’ two youngest children passed away.[15] Like their neighbors and mining district co-founders, the Crabtrees were spiritualists. Spiritualists believe that the dead still exist as spirits and can communicate with the living through mediums. The faith provides great solace to those who have lost loved ones. In the nineteenth century, it appealed to the educated and those of scientific bent because the seances seemed to provide evidentiary proof.[16] It is the Crabtree family that gave us the Mineral King creation myth. According to James’s brother John in 1911, the brothers were visited by a spirit who showed them where to mine.[17] It is uncertain whether John was even there, however, as he did not locate a claim on the White Chief lode at that time. James co-located the White Chief Discovery claim with Salmon Belden, and was the second person to sign his name on a mine claim notice in the district.[18] Over the next decade, he co-owned thirteen more mine claims and three mill site claims, and continued to prospect and relocate promising claims thereafter.[19] In addition to prospecting, he grew citrus, peaches, apricots, figs, and grains, and he raised turkeys and quail.[20] He claimed to have killed the largest grizzly bear ever to live in the region.[21] It was his passion for the mining district that persisted, however, a passion that he passed on to his descendants who continued to prospect in Mineral King through the 1920s.
[1] Great Register; Census (Tulare County).
[2] Census (Texas).
[3] US, War of 1812 Pension Files, 1812-1815.
[4] J. Guinn, History of the State of California and Biographical Record of the San Joaquin Valley, (Chicago: Chapman Publishing Co., 105), 813 (hereafter cited as San Joaquin History); E. Menefee and F. Dodge, History of Tulare and Kings Counties, California: With Biographical Sketches of the Leading Men and Women of the Counties who Have Been Identified with Their Growth and Development from the Early Days to the Present, (Los Angeles: Historic Record Company, 1913), 516–518 (hereafter cited as Tulare Kings History).
[5] Census (Texas); San Joaquin History, 813; Tulare Kings History, 517.
[6] Census (Texas); Tulare Kings History, 517.
[7] Tulare Kings History, 517.
[8] Ibid.
[9] California Marriage Records, 1849-1980 (Tulare County); Census (California).
[10] Great Register (Santa Clara County).
[11] Census (California); Tulare Kings History, 517.
[12] “Dissolution,” The Tulare Times, 8 June 1871, p. 2.
[13] Tulare Kings History, 517.
[14] MKMD, Volume 1: 6, 7, 9, 10, 108.
[15] Census (California).
[16] A. Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth Century America, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 4.
[17] ‘Bill Clough Writes from Mineral King’. Visalia Daily Times, 21 July 1911, p. 10.
[18] MKMD, Volume 1: 6.
[19] MKMD, Volume 1, Volume 1, Transfers.
[20] “From Porterville,” Tulare Daily Register, 22 November 1894, p. 1; “Porterville,” Tulare Daily Register, 27 December 1894, p. 1; “Porterville,” The Daily Tulare Register, 28 February 1895, p. 1; “Porterville,” The Daily Tulare Register, 27 June 1895, p. 3; San Joaquin History, 813.
[21] Tulare Kings History, 517.
Salmon Belden (1832–1884)
Salmon Belden was a forty-one-year-old self-proclaimed miner when he became the first person to sign his name on a mine claim notice in the Mineral King Mining District.[1] Belden’s background is uncertain. He was born in New York, and some records suggest he was the eighth of at least ten surviving children who grew up on a farm. At some point, he traveled west to mine in California. By 1857 he was in the spiritualist stronghold of Janesville with his future mining co-founder Johnson Parks Ford.[2] The Civil War found him working as a landless laborer in Plumas County.[3]. He joined the Union forces and was assigned to the First Nevada Infantry Battalion. Stationed at Fort Churchill, Nevada in 1864, he deserted the army after several months.[4] By 1867, he was living in Tulare County on agricultural land that straddled the south fork of the Tule River near its confluence with the main fork.[5] It was good agricultural land, however he considered himself a miner.[6] We don’t know what sort of mining he pursued… panning for gold in the river or seeking the fabled lost mines in the mountains… but it is unlikely that mining contributed much, if anything, to his income. Nevertheless, that same year, he married Katherine “Katie” Jane McGinnis, an eighteen-year-old from Ireland.[7] By 1870, Belden had partnered with John Franklin Crabtree and William Newton “Newt” Crabtree, the brothers of James Abraham (whom we already met). The brothers were living with Belden, Katie, and their newborn and farming the property. The household’s collective personal wealth totaled $2000.[8] A drought and a possible disinclination to farm may have inspired Belden to spend time prospecting. On 24 July 1873, Belden and nearby rancher James Abraham found a belt of silver-bearing mineral at the headwaters of the east fork of the Kaweah River. They decided to name the mineralized lode the White Chief.[9] The Crabtree legend that a spirit had shown the miners the way to the lode altered the story, however. It erased Belden and replaced him with John Crabtree.[10] Nevertheless, Belden appears to have had a personal connection to the White Chief. A potential relative named George Pfouts Belden had died in 1871. Towards the end of his life, he had achieved considerable national fame by publishing accounts of his adventures living amongst the tribes in the Dakota Territory. Significantly, he was known throughout the U.S. as the ‘White Chief’.[11] Like Crabtree, Belden was a spiritualist who believed the spirits of the dead could guide them and speak to them through mediums. Did Belden, perhaps, attend a seance that featured the White Chief? As the only miner at the White Chief discovery, Belden played a key role in laying out the mine claims and establishing the Mineral King Mining District.[12] Despite failing health, over the course of the mining rush Belden owned or co-owned twenty-one mine claims and three mineral mill sites.[13] In 1876, Katie followed suit by locating a mine claim with three other women.[14] Belden died in 1883,[15] shortly after the end of the mining rush, leaving Katie with four children and a Mineral King legacy that would rapidly fade.
[1] Census (California); MKMD, Volume 1: 6.
[2] Census (California); Fairfield, 67, 155.
[3] Civil War Draft Registration Records, 1863–1865.
[4] Compiled Service Records of Volunteer Union Soldiers Who Served in Organizations from the Territory and State of Nevada, 1861-1865.
[5] Great Register; Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office Records: AGS-0354-276 (hereafter cited as BLM).
[6] Great Register.
[7] California Marriage Records, 1849-1980 (Tulare County); Census (California).
[8] Census (California).
[9] MKMD, Volume 1: 6.
[10] “Bill Clough Writes from Mineral King,” Visalia Daily Times, 21 July 1911, p. 10.
[11] G. Belden, Belden, the White Chief, (Cincinnati: E.W. Start & Co., 1875); History Nebraska, “George Pfouts Belden, 1844-1871 [RG0741.AM]”, https://history.nebraska.gov/collection_section/george-pfouts-belden-1844-1871-rg0741-am/.
[12] MKMD, Volume 1: 7.
[13] MKMD, Volume 1, Volume 2, Transfers.
[14] MKMD, Transfers: 150.
[15] Cemetery Records (Visalia Public Cemetery).
Asahel Loop (1821–1892)
When he co-founded the Mineral King Mining District, Asahel Loop was fifty-two years old[1] and a bit unlucky in love. Loop was born and raised in New York.[2] He married Cordelia Milks in about 1843,[3] and the new couple moved to Wisconsin with Loop’s family.[4] There Loop’s mother died,[5] he welcomed a daughter into the world,[6] and he purchased land that would become a significant iron mine only after he sold it.[7] While in Wisconsin, Loop met Caroline, a married woman with a young daughter.[8] Caroline gave birth to a second daughter named Olive in 1854.[9] At about this time, the entire extended Loop family moved back to New York.[10] Apparently, however, Loop didn’t end his relationship with Caroline. The two of them abandoned their families and went to California with young Olive. They initially went to Solano County, where Caroline gave birth to another daughter in 1858.[11] They then went to Napa County, where Loop farmed and Caroline gave birth to two sons.[12] It is uncertain when the family moved to Tulare County, but it was between 1867 and July 1873 when Loop located his mine claim on the White Chief lode and became one of the founders of the district.[13] In October of 1873, when the founders signed the Mineral King Mining District into being, Caroline married Jason Newton Lee.[14] Records suggest that Lee was a robber who had been released from the San Quentin penitentiary in 1871.[15] It was, perhaps, a marriage of convenience, as there is no record that Caroline and Lee ever lived in the same household.[16] Indeed, Caroline and Loop ended up homesteading adjacent properties in 1888.[17] Over the course of the Mineral King mining rush, Loop owned or co-owned eight mine claims and one mill site claim on which he built a cabin.[18] Perhaps as testament to his relations with Caroline and her husband, he named one of the mine claims the ‘Lee Discovery’.[19] Although Loop had no prior experience in mining, Mineral King initiated a passion for prospecting and mining that that he sustained the rest of his life and passed on to his sons.[20] His first claim on the White Chief lode was the most notable, however. It soon became known as the Loop Claim. The New England Tunnel and Smelting Company (NET&S) purportedly bonded it for $300,000.[21] The company hired Chinese miners to blast an adit, known as the Loop Tunnel, on the claim during the autumn of 1875.[22] Intended to provide easier access to the White Chief lode than was afforded by the numerous shafts on the lode, the adit was never completed. In 1882, Loop, Crabtree, and surveyor Peter Yaple Baker were awarded a patent for the Loop Claim.[23] As the decades passed, people forgot the name Loop. Unaware that the Loop Claim was thousands of feet north of the White Chief Discovery excavations and that there were numerous mines on the lode, they began to call the Loop Tunnel the White Chief Mine. Thus, history is forgotten and fables forged.
[1] Census (California).
[2] Great Register (California).
[3] Descendants. The Loop Family in America. https://www.theloopfamilyinamerica.org/CHAP18JO.htm.(hereafter cited as Loop Family).
[4] Census (Wisconsin); BLM.
[5] Cemetery Records (Eureka Cemetery, Eureka, Winnebago County, Wisconsin).
[6] Census (Wisconsin).
[7] G. Frederick, “A study of the “Iron Ridge” Mine: an excerpt from When Iron Was King in Dodge County, Wisconsin,” Field Station Bulletin27(1) (1994), 1-36.
[8] Census (Wisconsin).
[9] Census (California).
[10] Census (New York); property transfers (Loop Family).
[11] Census (California).
[12] Great Register; Census (California).
[13] MKMD, Volume 1: 10; Bylaws.
[14] California Marriage Records, 1849-1980 (Tulare County); Census (California).
[15] California, Prison and Correctional Records, 1851-1950; Census (California).
[16] Great Register.
[17] BLM: CA1580__.236, CA1580__.045.
[18] MKMD, Volume 1, Volume 2, Transfers.
[19] MKMD, Volume 1: 81.
[20] Great Register.
[21] “Mineral King,” Tulare Weekly Times, 27 May 1876, p. 6; “From Mineral King,” Tulare Weekly Times, 21 July 1877, p. 5. It is currently uncertain who owned the Loop Claim at that time. On 11 July 1877, an anonymous writer asserted that NET&S leased the Loop Claim for $300,000, but that the Crabtree brothers never owned it. The extant mining district records do not include any records of transfer to the Crabtrees; however, James Crabtree apparently sold a 1/3 interest back to Loop for $1000 in 1876 (MKMD, Transfers:188).
[22] MSP 32(26). 24 June 1876, p.405.
[23] BLM: CACAAA 133362.
Sewell Langdon Goodhue (1839–1912)
At thirty-four, Goodhue was one of the younger founders of the Mineral King Mining District in 1873.[1] The son of a farmer in New Hampshire, Goodhue was not pressured to follow in his father’s footsteps.[2] He attended the New Hampton Literary and Biblical School,[3] and at the age of twenty was a school teacher in Yuba County, California.[4] Perhaps farming still had a lure, however, because in 1868, he and his brother were farming together in San Mateo County.[5] It didn’t last long. He left in 1868 to take up paper milling in the mountains west of San Jose.[6] In 1873, he was trying out a new profession in Mineral King.[7] At 6’2”, Goodhue was an exceptionally tall man with dark skin, gray eyes, and brown hair.[8] He partnered with three other men to claim the first extension north of Beldon and Crabtree’s White Chief Discovery claim.[9] One of his partners was Oliver Wolcott Catlin… the brother of the lover of fellow mining district founder Asahel Loop. Catlin had been a farm laborer in the vicinity of the paper mill where Goodhue had been employed. Mining district co-founder Johnson Parks Ford and his family had also been residing in the vicinity, and it is likely that they all met each other there.[10] Goodhue mined in Mineral King 1873 through 1878, owning or co-owning eleven mine claims.[11] In 1876, he was elected constable of Mineral King,[12] and a large boulder near the Smith Hotel and Saloon was named Goodhue’s House.[13] By 1880, he had returned to his brother and the farming profession in San Mateo,[14] where he died in 1912.[15] He never married and he left no descendants to pass on his legacy. Nevertheless, he didn’t depart without leaving some evidence of his life behind. In 1897, some Exeter merchants displayed an “ancient-looking washboard” in their store. Locals believed it was used by Goodhue and John Crabtree at one of their claims in the White Chief area. The proprietors were thinking of donating it to the “old revolutionary room of odd things at the Golden Gate Park Museum.”[16] Perhaps it is hidden away in the de Young Museum archives to this day.
[1] Census (California).
[2] Census (New Hampshire).
[3] “A catalogue of the officers and students of the New-Hampton Literary and Biblical Institution, at New Hampton, N.H., 1854-55,” 17.
[4] Census (California).
[5] Great Register.
[6] Ibid.
[7] MKMD, Volume 1.
[8] Great Register.
[9] MKMD, Volume 1:9.
[10] Census (California).
[11] MKMD, Volume 1.
[12] “Proceedings of Board of Supervisors,” Tulare Weekly Times, 19 August 1876, p. 5.
[13] MKMD, Volume 2: 229.
[14] Census (California).
[15] California, Death Index, 1905-1939.
[16] “Lindsay News,” Tulare County Times, 7 October 1897, p. 4.
Marcus Dietrich Sinn (1846–1928)
Co-founding the Mineral King Mining District may have been the apex of Sinn’s career. At twenty-eight years of age, he had emigrated from Germany via New York only six years earlier and was working as a farm laborer in the Tule River area.[1] He and Eli Hockett claimed the third extension north on the White Chief lode.[2] Evidently Sinn and Hockett may not have invested the mandatory $100 in annual improvements because others tried to relocate it in 1874 and 1875.[3] Perhaps John Crabtree and mining district co-founder Salmon Beldon decided to come to their rescue. In 1876 they purchased Hockett’s share for $200, and John referred to the team as Sinn & Co.[4] Sinn was more interested in farming than mining, however, and Crabtree and Beldon sold the claim in 1879.[5] Sinn moved to Hanford in about 1884,[6] where he eventually found a job doing lawn maintenance and gardening at the courthouse[7] and struggled to make ends meet. After foreclosures[8] and failure to pay taxes for more than a decade, the county forgave his back taxes in consideration of his age.[9] Sinn remained single and lived independently, but not friendless, until his death in 1928.[10]
[1] Census (California); Hamburg Passenger Lists, 1850-1934.
[2] MKMD, Volume 1: 108.
[3] MKMD, Volume 1: 57, 446.
[4] MKMD, Transfers: 143, 605.
[5] MKMD, Transfers: 290.
[6] Great Register.
[7] The Hanford Weekly Sentinel ran articles covering Sinn’s work as gardener at the courthouse 1904–1907, including regular notices of his pay.
[8] According to the Hanford Weekly Sentinel, beginning in 1904, Sinn became heavily mortgaged on lots he purchased in Hanford. Property was attached in 1913 (Hanford Weekly Sentinel, 22 November 1913).
[9] “Rebate Tax Bill,” Hanford Daily Sentinel, 9 February 1926, p. 6.
[10] “Marcus D. Sinn, Pioneer Passes,” Hanford Daily Sentinel, 25 June 1928, p. 1; “Funeral Services,” Hanford Morning Sentinel, 27 June 1928, p. 7.