Butte County
Biographies
JOHN W. MORAN
JOHN W. MORAN.—Not every life story of even heroes and multi-millionaires commences with shadows and high-lights such as marked the boyhood of John W. Moran, the rancher of East Biggs, who is accomplishing wonderful results in the raising of fruit, beans and alfalfa on the forty-two choice acres which he proudly calls his own. He was born in New York State, the son of a Union soldier who was killed in the Civil War; and as his mother was also dead, he was placed, when very young, by the Federal Government in a soldier’s orphan home on Staten Island. Most unfortunately, when he was four years of age, the institution became so overcrowded that he was taken, with a car-load of the others, and sent to Iowa City, Iowa, where he was given into the charge of John Yetter and his wife, farmers, who lived sixteen miles east of that city. There his boyish efforts to please were rewarded with the harshest kind of treatment, especially at the hands of Yetter himself; and as the environment did not prove attractive, and there was nothing whatever congenial about the new home, he made repeated efforts to run away. Finally he succeeded and got as far as Marshalltown in that state; and later, when he was eleven years old, he managed to get to Chicago, where he underwent many hardships as bootblack and newsboy. In this way, he grew up a city waif in the streets of Chicago.
Hearing that his legal custodian was dead, John went back to Iowa and worked on the farms there, remaining in the middle west until he decided to move on to the Golden West. While in Iowa, he attained to the franchise and the very first vote that he ever cast was for a Prohibition candidate. Leaving Iowa, he went by train to Walla Walla, Washington Territory, and there, for a year, worked on an edger in a saw-mill in the Blue Mountains. In August, 1882, he came to Sheridan, Cal., and entered the service of the Southern Pacific Railroad. He ran a wood lot, then became car-inspector at Truckee for four years, and worked his way up until, for several years, he was member of a wrecking crew. From Truckee he was transferred to Sacramento, for the same department of work, and from the capital he was sent to Ashland, Ore., where he became chief car-inspector for both the Southern Pacific and the Oregon and California Railways. As wrecker for the Southern Pacific, he had several hair-breadth escapes, as the work was exceedingly dangerous, especially before the introduction of the Westinghouse air brakes. Coming down through the snow sheds in the vicinity of Truckee, this side of the Sierras, the brakes would often give out, and many trains became unmanageable, jumped from the track and piled up in horrible wrecks, with fearful loss of life.
In 1887, Mr. Moran was married to Miss Laura Briggs, daughter of Jonathan and Maria (Woodworth) Briggs, natives of Rhode Island and Iowa respectively. The parents, who married in California, are now dead, leaving six children living. Laura is Mrs. Moran of our story; Jonathan resides at Shandon; Lucy is the wife of J. Z. Hoffman of Vallejo; Susan has become Mrs. Charles Thurman of Thermalito, of Butte County; A. E. Briggs lives at Newcastle; and Ira is a rancher with a farm near Briggs.
Saving his money, and longing to detach himself from the railroad work for a more open and invigorating life, Mr. Moran became interested in sheep, and at one time ran as many as three thousand head in Butte County, east of Biggs. He saw advertised the forty-two acres now owned by him as a home ranch and which was then a part of the Hatch and Rock fruit ranch, came and looked it over, bought it and at once began to improve it. He built a modest but exceedingly comfortable home, a large fine dairy barn, put up fences, sunk a well, and set out fruit trees and sowed alfalfa. His herd includes some of the finest of Holstein dairy cattle and a pure Holstein bull; he gathers crop after crop of the finest of alfalfa; he has one of the finest fruit orchards for family use, and a particularly fine prune orchard; and he enjoys the freshest and the most healthful returns from a fine family garden. Ever since some higher and unseen Power lifted him from the obscurity and dangers of gutter life in a great city, Mr. Moran has believe implicitly in the hand of Profidence; and truly, as one sees the present environment of this pioneer and his wife, it would seem that he has not trusted Providence in vain. Mr. Moran is still a hard worker; but in leisure hours he yet finds time to enjoy solid reading, for he is a good student of affairs, and knows what is transpiring in the wide, wide world which at one time must have seemed to him very vast and quite unconquerable.
Transcribed
by Sharon Walford Yost.
Source: "History of
Butte County, Cal.," by George C. Mansfield, Pages 1220-1221, Historic Record Co, Los Angeles, CA, 1918.
© 2009 Sharon
Walford Yost.
Golden Nugget Library's Butte County Biographies