James Sutton Branson

James Sutton Branson, son of Alvin Thorpe Branson and Mary Eliza Simmons and second of their five children, was born 8 July 1886 at Silver Lead Mine, Mariposa County, CA, where Alvin was then employed as a miner. The site was north of the still-extant town of Hornitos about two miles from “Grasshopper Ranch,” the longterm home of grandparents John and Martha Branson. James was given his middle name in honor of Alonzo Sutton, the family friend who accompanied his grandmother from Missouri to California in 1853 via the Isthmus of Panama.

James grew up amid the mining culture of the Mother Lode and it is apparent he felt so comfortable in that milieu that he simply refused to abandon it, even though the industry collapsed when he was a young adult. James never enjoyed the financial rewards that the same career had brought to his grandfather. Where John Sevier Branson was a pillar of his community; James Sutton Branson was inconsequential. This lack of success and thwarted ambition had a telling effect on the course of James’s life. He found it impossible to sustain his marriages, and drowned his sorrows in alcohol to an unhealthy degree.

On 25 July 1908, after spending his late teens and early twenties as a bachelor miner in the ever-less-productive hardrock mines of the county, James abruptly obtained a wife. She was Mary Ethel Harrigan. She had been born in 1892 in Merced, CA -- the nearest town of any size to the vicinity of Hornitos and Quartzburg. The wedding occurred in Stockton. Stockton would be the community that Alvin and Mary Eliza and all their children would come to reside in within the next ten years.

The decision to marry does not appear to represent a conscious change of lifestyle on James’s part. It must have been a shotgun wedding. Comments later written by his brother Ivan and by his sister Maude suggest as much in a between-the-lines way. A far more blatant clue is that the couple’s wedding date and the birthdate of daughter Melba Arlyne Branson are only seven months apart. In addition, Mary Ethel -- the daughter of a widow, Nellie Robinson Harrigan, who had been scraping by as a domestic servant just downstream from the Branson family’s cabin at Exchequer -- was not even sixteen years old at the time of the conception. What is no longer clear is whether James and Ethel (called that to distinguish her from her mother-in-law Mary) had been sweethearts, and had perhaps ended up as prospective parents merely as a result of “anticipating the preacher” a little bit, or whether their liaison had been of a more casual nature and they only attempted to have a formal relationship as a consequence of the pregnancy. It is even possible Ethel had been working as a prostitute due to her family’s poverty and lack of more respectable jobs in their corner of the Mother Lode in those days.

James and Mary functioned as a couple for no more than two years. Ivan Branson, who was only seven to nine years old during his brother’s marriage, later described the union as having consisted of less than a year on good terms. James and Ethel do not seem to have ever established their own home. They lived with Alvin and Mary at their rented home in Mariposa (where Melba was born), probably at similar quarters in Quartzburg/Mt. Gaines, and at the house Alvin and Mary owned at Exchequer, next to Alvin’s “Last Chance” claim. (The Exchequer house is shown at right in a photo taken during the brief period James and Mary were a couple.) Ivan mentions in an autobiography an incident in his childhood when he, as a practical joke, posed a dead rattlesnake in the pile of lumber that his father had purchased with the intention of using it for the construction of a house for James and his young family at Exchequer, but it is not clear that structure was ever completed. The census of 1910 highlights the family dynamic. The Alvin Branson household appears in two places, in Township 1 of Mariposa County (Quartzburg and Grasshopper Ranch district), and Township 2 (Exchequer). The enumerator filled in the Township 1 page on 25 April 1910. The household includes Alvin, Mary, daughter Maude with her little daughter Doris Curtis (spending time away from John Curtis, who had contracted tuberculosis), daughter-in-law Ethel and little Melba, and children Florence, Walter, and Ivan -- but not James. The Township 2 page, recorded 29 April 1910, lists all the above plus James. This discrepancy is consistent with family writings that indicate James often arranged to lodge away from his wife.

The marriage ended in divorce in 1910. Ethel played little part in James’s subsequent life, though Melba remained actively involved with the Branson clan, closely associated with her grandparents, her uncle Ivan, and her aunt Maude.

Shortly after 1910, profitable mining became almost impossible in the Hornitos region. James began to roam, finding mines where he could. He was young, restless, and drifting. His 1918 draft registration card shows him as an inmate at San Quentin Prison -- what offense he was convicted of has yet to be determined, but it is easy to speculate he took the “rough and tumble” nature of his existence a little too literally.

The 1920 census shows James at that point in Grass Valley, Nevada County, CA, living in a miners’ boarding house. It may have been in this northern end of the Mother Lode that his second marriage occurred. In June, 1921, he married a woman from Arizona named Carrie Hayes. Carrie had three children from a previous marriage. This time James made a more concerted effort to be a husband and parent, but in spite of that the marriage endured only a few years, ending in divorce.

The 1930 census confirms that James was still a miner, though by now he had given up actually living in the hills and had found lodgings in a boarding house in Stockton. This put him near his parents and siblings. As he proceeded into middle age and his health declined and his drinking (if possible) increased, it was agreed that he was best off seeing as little of other people as possible. His brother Ivan had the financial wherewithal to pay for his lodgings in a cabin back in the Hornitos area, so this arrangement was made, and James spent much of the last fifteen years of his life dwelling there in more or less constant isolation. James died in Stockton 19 June 1945. His body was interred at Stockton Rural Cemetery, where many other Bransons are buried.

All in all, James Sutton Branson lived a lonely and unhappy life. In the early iterations of the writings that would culminate in the book Bones of the Bransons, Ivan Branson composed a short biography and then a commentary about his brother Jim and Jim’s life, to help explain why his brother would find it so hard to reach out to people and evolve out of his circumstances. The latter is quoted here in full. The photograph of James at age nine seems appropriate to include, showing him at a point when he was still Alvin and Mary Branson’s little boy.

I believe it was Marc Anthony who said: “I come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him.”

So, before commenting upon the personality of my late and beloved brother, I wish to remind the reader of the times in which we deal, for the “praises of yesterday have short echoes.”

In the eighteen eighties and nineties, many “second generation” Native Sons were being born into an economy and a way of life that by today’s standards beggars description. For almost a half-century GOLD had been the mainstay of most California activity. With the depletion of the placers, and Congressional action against hydraulic mining, only the richest of the small lode mines could operate. These, of course, had but a single crop. When jobs in these mines did appear, the wages were from two to three dollars for a 12-hour “shift,” usually in dripping wet shafts or drifts, and often amid clouds of silicon dust. Of course there was freight to be hauled, and hay and grain to be grown for the horses to pull freight wagons, and roads to be built and repaired, but little else to sustain commerce. Paydays were never more than once a month, and frequently a mine would fail, and the employees be turned loose with two or three months’ back pay due them. I will not comment on the usual hardships of the times, such as grinding your own coffee, or the hand-sawing of wood, etc., etc., these items are well known. Just to sum up the hard facts in the mining country after the bloom was off, believe me it was plenty tough to find food and clothing and transportation. Shelter wasn’t too good, either.

Entertainment, as we know it today, just didn’t exist. The saloon (ladies not welcome) was the normal forum for all who cared to socialize. Card games had to be the main indoor sport. Saturday night, of course, there would be a dance, somewhere, in a lodge hall or school house, and it was a dull evening if no fisticuffs developed.

In the family, James had quite a team. 44 first cousins in the Branson group [this counts four who are actually siblings, not cousins], 20 more in the Simmons group.

Schooling? Well, it was popular not to finish grammar school.

Neighbors? There were still Yosemite Indians in the home town. One did not associate with them; at least not intimately. Also there were original “Californios” -- grand Spanish people, but too often referred to as “greasers” to be caught getting friendly with. And there were a few Chinese who failed to go back to China with the Exclusion Proclamation; but these too were “low” people and not subject to friendship. Other folk had to be left off the roster of friends because of “politics.” The Civil War had been “settled” with Lee’s Surrender, but the bitterness had not yet been buried. [This paragraph requires careful reflection. Ivan is certainly not condemning any of these groups, but portraying reasons why Jim may have felt he was not supposed to bond with the people he was surrounded by. Other family members lived with and even married native Americans and Californios, some lived with Chinese friends and thought so much of them and their culture as to learn to speak Chinese. The Bransons may have been creatures of their narrow-minded times, but on the whole were tolerant and loving people -- Jim was in the end responsible for creating his own demons. What is fair to say is that he had many bad examples of bigotry around him in old-time Mariposa County to give him an ample supply of excuses he could use to justify his personal isolation.]

Except for his alcoholic problem, James was a most popular man, making friends quickly, and keeping them always. He was sincere and energetic, fully honest, and a fine conversationalist. Naturally an outdoorsman, loving to fish and hunt, and when not employed by miners or hay farmers, he prospected or worked mines for himself or with partners; a way of life pursued by his father and his grandfather.

His travels included the western states, with a trip to Peru in the 1920s to mine for the Guggenheim interests.

Most of his life was lived in California’s famous Mother Lode country. Among the mines and mining towns where he received his mail were: Mariposa, Hornitos, Exchequer, Mount Bullion, Bear Valley, Jamestown, Sonora, Plymouth, Soulsbyville, Tuolomne, Springfield, Downieville, Butler Creek.

His last years were spent mainly at his cabin in Hornitos. His early passing is attributed to lung cancer, possibly induced by silicon dust from deep mining.

Child of James Sutton Branson with Ethel Mary Harrigan

Melba Arlyne Branson

For genealogical details, click on Melba’s name.

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