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Story of the Crow Emigrant Train of 1865 - Section 6
The Bordeaus were the first to leave us after we got into California. They went off down towards Los Angeles and we never heard of them again. The Brannons forked off from us at Sacramento and went up around Willows and settled. We afterwards visited with them there.
The latter part of August we arrived at Two Rock about eight miles north of Petaluma. There was a pretty good place to camp there and we stopped six weeks until we got located. We camped on the Ferguson ranch. Ferguson was a bachelor and already an old man. The first woman who ever cooked a mess of grub in his house was my mother.
We rented a ranch on the dobe flats just north of Petaluma. That county is all in orchards now and doesn't look anything like it used to. When we got located father was feeling pretty blue. He had only twenty-five dollars in cash left. Whenever he complained to the neighbors they just laughed at him. They told him that he had nothing to worry about- that often times ranchers in California cleared ten thousand dollars on a single crop of grain.
One of my brothers went to work for a man by the name of Watson who had cleared twenty-five thousand dollars is 1864, the year before, on a crop of potatoes. When the rest of California had burned up in the dry year of 1864, Petaluma had the good fortune to have just as much rain as ever and got tremendous prices for its crops.
We went to raising grain. In three years father cleared about fifteen thousand dollars. There is no telling how much better he would have done if we had had the kind of machinery they have nowadays. The best that father ever had to farm with was two horse teams each pulling a single twelve inch plow. There were no machines to sow grain. It all had to be broadcasted by hand- the Armstrong method, we called it. Harvesting was done with a reaper. Did you ever see one of these things work? The machine cut the grain and let it fall on a platform. A man followed along behind the reaper with a rake in his hand. As fast as there was enough grain to make a bundle he raked it off on the ground and another man came along and tied it up in a bundle. Pretty slow way of doing, wasn't it?
We farmed the first year on the dobe flats but the next two years father rented two hundred and fifty acres about two miles west of Lakeville. He rented from a man by the name of Louie Prusso, grandfather of Mrs. John Rhodes and Louis E. Prusso of Livingston.
Father always sold his grain to Joe McNear, a grain buyer in Petaluma. He had an office opening right out on the street. One day when father was going past McNear called out: "Hey, Emigrant! Come in." A person had to live in California at least a year or so before people would stop calling him "emigrant."
Father came into the office and sat down. McNear told him jokingly: "I did well on your wheat and I feel that I ought to do a little better by you than I did." Father never got less than two cents a pound for his wheat any time he was in California.
This particular time McNear had paid him two and a quarter cents. McNear took five twenty dollar gold pieces out of the safe and gave them to father as a present. "I made half a cent a pound on your crop," said McNear.
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