Sacramento County
Biographies
GEORGE W. HOTCHKISS
George W. Hotchkiss, the subject of this
sketch, was born in New
Haven, Conn., October 16, 1831.
He came to California in the ship Susan G. Owens, arriving in San Francisco October 8, 1849.
He came to Sacramento as a clerk for Scranton & Smith, who had brought from
the east a house frame and stock of goods for a general store. They
erected the second permanent building in the city near Third and J
streets. They paid $500 a thousand feet for lumber to complete their store,
and young Hotchkiss acted as both clerk and cook. In speaking of his
experiences he says: "I think it was the last part of December,
1849, that I went one morning to the slough four or five hundred feet back of
the store to get a pail of water, and found the water just cutting through the
bank, and, yelling for help, I tried to scrape enough mud with my feet to hold
the water back, but had to run for the store, where all floor goods were once
placed on the counter, and within an hour or two the water washed the under
side of the floor. This was the big flood of '49 and '50, when the water
stood eight feet deep a couple of blocks to the south of us. For a month
or more all our travel was by whale boat. As the waters receded teams tried
to enter the streets, until in March there were at least a dozen teams of oxen
and many horses, which it was impossible to save after they mired, that died
and dried up in their tracks."
In July, 1850, Mr. Hotchkiss went to the
mines and set up a tent store, doing well in it, but his father's letters
telling of failing health made him homesick, and there was also "the girl
I left behind me" writing letters saying she would be glad to see
him. He took passage for Panama in the bark St. Mary's, walked across the
Isthmus and caught the steamer Folsom for Havana, assisting during the trip in
burying twenty-eight of his fellow passengers who died of cholera. For
twenty years he was a member of the Western Association of California Pioneers,
which disbanded in 1911, when only fifteen members were left, with an average
age of eighty-seven years. He is now secretary-treasurer of the Illinois
Lumber Dealers' Association, at Chicago.
Transcribed by Sally Kaleta.
Source: Willis,
William L., History of Sacramento
County, California, Pages 647-648. Historic Record Company, Los Angeles, CA. 1913.
© 2006 Sally Kaleta.