Sacramento County
Biographies
REUBEN WALLACE TOOKER
REUBEN WALLACE TOOKER, a rancher of Cosumnes Township,
was born in New York June 21,
1829, his parents being Daniel and Maria (Dubois) Tooker. The
father, a native of the same State, was sixty-eight at his death in 1868, and
the mother seventy-four when she died in 1875. Grandfather Charles Tooker, also a native of New York,
reached the age of eighty-eight, and his wife, originally a Miss Carpenter, was
ninety-two. The Dubois family, of French origin, has been settled in this
country for several generations. Daniel Tooker
was a farmer. R. W. Tooker received a
district-school education and in his twenty-first year, in 1849, he accompanied
a missionary of the Dutch Reformed Church, named Sheffield, to South
Bend, Indiana, where he worked
for him until 1852. In that year he crossed the plains, being one of a
company of about fifty men. They had an encounter with hostile Indians of
whom nine were killed, the emigrants having two men
slightly wounded. The fight occurred on the north of the Platte,
between Mud Creek and Shell Creek. R. W. Tooker
arrived in Sacramento August 10,
1852, and first went to work on a dairy farm for wages. He owned 160 acres
on the old Jackson road for many
years, and followed the business of teaming as well as dairying for several
years. In October, 1884, he bought his present ranch of 160 acres,
situated about twenty-six miles from Sacramento
and two and one-half miles from Michigan Bar. He raises hay and stock, and
makes a specialty of raising turkeys, of which he usually has a flock of
between two and three hundred.
Transcribed 9-20-07 Marilyn R. Pankey.
Source: Davis, Hon. Win. J., An Illustrated
History of Sacramento County, California. Page 763.
Lewis Publishing Company. 1890.
© 2007 Marilyn R. Pankey.