Santa
Clara County
Biographies
WILLIAM McCUTCHEN
The third of the “big three” of the Donner Party was William McCutchen, born in Nashville, Tennessee, about 1816. He and his family joined the great overland migration of 1846 to California and were identified not only with the Reeds and Donners who crossed the Salt Desert, but also with the Gordons and others who took the longer way around by Fort Hall.
McCutchen has been described as a huge man with a powerful voice and stubborn disposition. If he had anything to say, he said it. There was no mistaking where he stood on any subject. When his party was struggling through the deserts of Nevada, just before reaching the Sierra Nevada, he and another man pushed on to Sutter's Fort in search of relief. He was taken sick there, but just as soon as he had recovered sufficiently to be up and about, he returned to the mountains, fighting his way through gigantic snowdrifts with relief for his stranded party. He was accompanied on this trip by his good friend James Frazier Reed.
As it was, McCutchen lost his daughter Harriet, but his wife survived.
On reaching the valleys of California, McCutchen settled in San Jose, where, in after years, he had other children, one of whom became a prominent San Francisco attorney. His first wife died in 1857, and he remarried in 1860. In 1853 he served as Sheriff of Santa Clara County, but toward the end of his days devoted his energies to hotel keeping and farming. He died April 17, 1905, aged 79.
McCutchen's Masonic career was only a fragment. He received his entered apprentice degree in San Jose Lodge No. 10, in 1854, and appears in the records as a Fellowcraft the following year. And there he stayed till he was dropped from the roll in 1861. Why he went no further is unknown. Perhaps being a Southerner, he became involved in some of the heated pre-Civil War controversies that were about that time splitting lodges and churches wide open.
At any rate, he was the last of the “big three” of the Donner Party to sever his connection with San Jose Lodge, and unlike Reed and Eddy, it is certain that he had no home Lodge to which he could return.
Transcribed
5-28-17 Marilyn R. Pankey.
Source: “One Hundred Years of Freemasonry in
California Vol. 1” by Leon O. Whitsell, Page 15.
Publ. by The Grand Lodge, Free and Accepted Masons of
California, 1950.