Reuben Branson
Reuben Branson, the eldest child of John Sevier
Branson and Martha Jane Ousley, was born 16 November 1846 in either Gasconade County or
Osage County, Missouri. He was a small boy when his father left for California as part of
the Gold Rush. In 1853, little Reuben came west himself via the port of New Orleans and the
Isthmus of Panama, accompanied by his mother and even smaller brothers Thomas and Joseph.
Martha and the children expected to find the man of the family in the Santa Clara Valley, where he had planted a crop of potatoes, having given up on hunting for gold in the Trinity Mountains of extreme northern California. By the time they arrived, John had shifted his farming effort twenty miles east to the Livermore Valley. The high demand for potatoes ended before John’s crop had matured, providing little income. John decided to try his hand at gold mining again. In early 1854 the family crossed the Central Valley to the Sierra Nevada foothills. The journey ended in Mariposa County -- at that point the most populous county in California aside from San Francisco (it is now one of the most vacant, aside from the hordes of tourists visiting Yosemite National Park). Reuben grew up in a variety of mining camps and makeshift towns along the Merced River, sharing rustic accommodations with an expanding brood of siblings -- eventually seven more in addition to Thomas and Joseph. In the mid-1850s the family stayed near the gravel-mining claims John was working at Harte and Johnson’s Flat, and shortly thereafter moved upstream to Barrett City, a major mining center. By 1859 they moved slightly downstream to the eastern side of the river, to Phillips Flat. (Phillips Flat and the other three sites just mentioned were later covered by Lake McClure, a reservoir.) It was a rough environment. His brother Joseph would later relate to a historian how he, Reuben, and Thomas as youngsters personally saw a number of individuals murdered in the streets of Hornitos when arguments -- usually originating inside the local saloon -- came to a head and knives and/or pistols were resorted to.
The bench gravels of Phillips Flat were apparently productive, and so the household finally had a place to stay put for an extended period. By 1868 John had earned enough to finance a relocation to the Willamette Valley of Oregon, where he tried farming. Martha found the climate too wet for her taste, so back the family came in 1869 to Mariposa County. John bought a ranch a few miles north of Hornitos. Phillips Flat was west of this homestead, out of sight behind a low, smooth, grassy ridge. The miners of Washington Mine at the outpost of Quartzburg were the nearest neighbors. John raised cattle and feed, and hauled loads to and from the local mines, prospecting himself only occasionally as a sideline. The couple resided on the property, called Grasshopper Ranch, for the rest of their lives.
Reuben spent time at Grasshopper Ranch, but it is uncertain it was ever his official residence, or that he accompanied his parents and siblings to Oregon. He had already reached full adulthood by 1867, and the 1870 census confirms he was not living at the ranch at that juncture. He had set out on his own to be a miner, and unlike his brothers Thomas, Joseph, and Alvin, he roamed. In some ways his life constituted a classic portrait of the Old West prospector. In other words, he often scrabbled to get by, sustained more by dreams of striking it rich than by any actual bonanzas.
At first, his efforts kept him within Mariposa County and often in the immediate vicinity of Hornitos. It was there he established his own household, marrying Eliza Louisa Snediker 4 July 1872. Louisa, born in Madera, CA 15 June 1857, was the daughter of William Armstrong of Tennessee and Mary Adams of Texas, but by the time she married Reuben, she had long been the stepdaughter of James L. Snediker of New York, a Gold Rush stage coach driver turned Mariposa County cattleman. (Surviving records imply William Armstrong, a miner, died some time in the early 1860s. Mary Adams appears to have thereafter been married briefly to a man named Crofford or Crawford, then she married James L. Snediker 30 January 1866.) Over the course of her life she used Eliza, Louisa, and Louise as her given name, and her last name changed from Armstrong to Snediker to Branson to Eagle (and in childhood her last name may have been Crofford/Crawford for as long as five years). This inconsistency, along with her many changes of residence, makes it a challenge to track her through surviving public records. She is Louisa Armstrong in the census for Stockton in 1860, Eliza Snediker in Mariposa County Township 3 in 1870, Eliza Branson in Hite’s Cove, Mariposa County in 1880, Louisa Branson in Raymond, Madera County in 1900, Louise Branson in Los Angeles in 1910, Louise Branson in Randsburg, Kern County in 1920, and Louise Eagle in Milton-Freewater, OR in 1930 and is Louise Eagle in the Oregon Death Index. To complicate matters future, her reported age shifted radically. Early censuses agree with her known birth year, but by the 20th Century she began reporting herself to be younger than she was, until at the end of her life, records show her as nearly fifteen years shy of her true age.
Because research about Louisa has been difficult and she herself seems to have added to the vagueness, a number of incorrect facts are associated with her in various genealogical writings. Some sources say she came from Texas. California is correct -- the family had just moved from Texas, and Texas was the birthplace of her mother and her older sister Bethaline. One record suggests her name was Laura -- Laura is actually her twin sister. Another record states her first name may have been Mary. This is probably a confusion with her mother or her younger sister Mary, born in late 1860 or early 1861, or perhaps with her sister-in-law Mary Eliza Simmons, the wife of Alvin Thorpe Branson. Snediker is misrendered in a number of sources. Her later census records put her birth father’s origin in Texas, but Tennessee is correct. One family member indicated she had grown up speaking German and had a German accent her whole life. This does not seem likely and probably results from confusing her with Frances Bauer, the wife of Reuben’s brother Thomas. And finally, several websites recently have shown Reuben as married to Harriet Slater. This is totally incorrect. It confuses him with his uncle Reuben or perhaps some other, non-related Reuben Branson.
The couple’s first child, William Henry Branson, arrived in July 1873. More children followed. A family dynamic evolved. Reuben would go off to a mining site, living almost as a bachelor, and return home to Louisa at irregular intervals for periods of a few weeks to a few months. Somehow they managed enough connection to have a huge family, perhaps because Louisa made the effort to find housing in the vicinity of Reuben’s mines whenever his working situation looked to be semi-permanent.
In Bones of the Bransons, nephew Ivan Branson includes a curious editorial aside in the midst of his description of Reuben and Louisa’s marriage. Ivan refers to mining men -- in a general sense -- living off in the hills without their families and occasionally making arrangements with, say, Indian women to wash their clothes and fix their meals. Ivan does not specifically describe these arrangements as sexual, but phrases things so that it is clear he imagines the reader will engage in such speculations. Ivan then goes on to point out how some of these men would return home to find that in their absence, their families had increased -- “and they had only been gone a year!”
The next paragraph of Bones of the Bransons reads, “An old yarn, gossiped around the pedro tables, unveiled such a hypothetical situation. A neighbor of the new mother pointed out that her man had been away from the premises somewhat over the gestation time. The reply came that the husband was a good corresponder and wrote to her often!”
Ivan does not say straight out that Reuben had bastard children with other women or that Louisa may have cuckolded him, but it is plain he had some reason for inserting that passage in his book.
Following his dreams, Reuben spent the last quarter of
the 19th Century shifting from one camp or
cabin or house in the southern sections of the Mother Lode. Many of these locales were within the
bounds of Mariposa County. Some of them were slightly south in Fresno County -- that is to say, those
parts of Fresno County immediately south of Yosemite that would by 1890 be incorporated into the
newly formed Madera County. It is not always possible to retrace his steps, but it
is known Reuben spent the mid-1870s working the McCabe or Chase mine in Mariposa County with
partner John Massman. Soon thereafter he shifted his efforts to Hite’s Cove, also in Mariposa
County -- though he may have come there in order to work as a blacksmith rather than as a
miner. (The household is shown located there in the 1880 census, his occupation listed as
blacksmith.) In 1886 he filed a claim for the “Little Maggie” mine in the Potter Ridge Mining District.
Having had at best modest luck with his diggings, Reuben took a job by the end of the 1880s with the Sugar Pine Lumber Company in the logging community of Sugar Pine, in the Grub Gulch area of what was then becoming Madera County. This was where Louisa spent the months of her eighth pregnancy. Sugar Pine was, however, not where the child would be born. There were complications with the birth. The nearest available doctor was down in the Central Valley in the town of Madera, over sixty-five miles away. The only means of transport that would give mother and baby the quickest and best care was to ride the Gertrude Flume, down which logs were sent to be milled into lumber. Their vehicle was a log cut into a triangular shape, with only eyebolts to hang on to. Somehow Reuben and Louisa made it safely to their destination. The child was born healthy, and was given the name Gertrude in honor of the flume. Gertrude ultimately lived to be over seventy years old. The flume itself, one of several that brought logs out of the Sierra Nevada in the late 1800s and early 1900s -- and a prime example of the “forgotten” major engineering projects of that era -- lasted only a few more decades.
Throughout most of the 1890s the family lived in Raymond in Madera County. Reuben was usually absent. By this point, the marriage was faltering. This may explain why Gertrude was the only child born during that decade. Reuben’s daughters, when grown, would mention that they looked to their eldest brother William as a father more than their actual father. The silver lining of this arrangement was that the family finally had a somewhat permanent home. Younger children Margaret and Gertie spoke in later years of their memories of the stonework of the community -- even the fenceposts were made of granite, a consequence of the famous quarries that formed the initial basis of the local economy. Louisa may have felt she did not have to follow Reuben in his wandering because her two eldest boys were becoming grown men and could be counted on for a certain amount of support. During the 1890s William is known to have kept cattle in the Raymond area, and David to have farmed there. The girls were hired out to neighbors as domestic servants when they reached twelve or thirteen years old.
In 1894 Reuben filed a lawsuit against the Gambetta Gold Mining Company, who had apparently infringed on the Little Maggie Mine that he had abandoned. Soon he was back in the Potter Ridge area, naming his new diggings the Gertrude Mine. In 1900 he moved to Randsburg, CA in eastern Kern County, where he accepted work with the Yellow Aster Mining Company. In that year and the next he sold various rights, permissions, and land having to do with the Little Maggie Mine, the Gertrude Mine, and the Golden Valley Mine and associated mill. His sons Robert and David continued to work at those sites during this period, however.
Louisa moved to Randsburg with Reuben, but the early years of the 20th Century brought the dissolution of the marriage. Louisa filed suit to gain power of attorney over (portions of) his estate. It is unknown if this legal maneuver was a move to fend off Reuben’s debtors or part of her pre-divorce strategy. In any case, divorce did come, the court approving it in 1903. Just how the dynamics played out is not clear. The couple’s final child, Herbert Raymond Branson, was born 18 February 1903. Was Herbert’s conception the result of one last attempt at reconciliation? Perhaps. It may also be that Herbert was not the couple’s child, but a grandchild born of an unwed daughter (if so, then Margaret would be the likely candidate), whereupon Louisa adopted him and raised him not as a grandchild but as a son. Louisa was nearly forty-six by the time of the birth, a late age to be a natural mother. However, these are speculations, and they are mentioned because this is a genealogically-based biography and it is the responsiblity of a researcher to address inconsistencies in the known record. Given that there is no hard evidence otherwise, Herbert holds his position in this archive as Reuben and Louisa’s son.
Louisa opened a boarding house to support herself. This may
have been in Randsburg, but was probably in the San Francisco Bay Area -- probably San Jose rather than
in San Francisco itself. Reuben continued to be employed by the Yellow Aster Mining Company for several
years, though he seems to have been there off and on. During some of this interval he boarded with his
son Robert and Robert’s wife Etta. Yellow Aster was also Robert’s
employer, though Robert quickly obtained an above-ground job blacksmithing and maintaining the
company’s water supply, which served the whole community of Randsburg. However, Robert temporarily
left Indian Wells Valley in the years prior to 1910, though he came back and spent nearly seven decades
more in the region, through his death in 1978. At that point, if not before, Reuben began to drift
from one temporary abode to another, and would do so for the relatively few years
of life that remained to him. Reuben’s nephew Ivan writes in Bones of the Bransons that
Reuben assisted his brother Alvin for a number of summers around 1910 to try -- vainly -- to find
gold in Alvin’s “Last Chance” claim on the Mariposa/Merced County border, near Exchequer. The 1910
census shows him living
near Alvin as a boarder in the miners’ barracks on the ranch of brother Joseph Branson. (This
census misspells his name as Rheuben.)
Right at the end of his life, Reuben stayed with his daughter Mabel and her husband George Latham in the Los Angeles area. It was not so much a relocation of residence as choosing a place to die. Not long after his arrival he was admitted to Ward 61 of the Los Angeles County Hospital in Tropico, where he spent his final twenty-two days on Earth. He succumbed 10 May 1916. His remains were buried in Old Forest Lawn Cemetery, Glendale, CA, in a grave plot purchased for him by his son Robert.
In addition to mining, blacksmithing, and sawmill operation, Reuben’s occupations included hauling wood and other goods, a trade he must have first experienced as a boy riding along with his father on his wagon-and-oxen supply runs. One of his pastimes was fiddle-playing for dancers. Informal dances were one of the forms of social amusement readily available in the gold camps. An ability with the fiddle was something Reuben shared with his brother Alvin and probably with several other male relatives of his generation.
Some nieces and nephews and descendants later characterized Reuben as a drinking man. This habit may help explain some of his lack of financial success in life, and his broken marriage, or it might have been more of a symptom of those things. Some family members maintained that he “drank himself to death.” This may be figuratively true. His death record lists “stomach cancer” as the cause of death, but that may be a way of saying liver cancer.
Louisa remained single until well after Reuben’s death, though she did live with a divorced carpenter, Charles R. Hines (or Heine), in Pasadena around 1910 (Charles appears with her in the family photograph shown below, an image from that year). The 1920 census shows her back in Randsburg with “eighteen-year-old” (actually sixteen-year-old) Herbert listed as head of household. In 1924 or early 1925 Louisa married Joseph (“Papa” Joe) Eagle, and settled with him in Milton-Freewater, Umatilla County, OR. She died in Milton-Freewater 20 November 1939, succumbing to cancer that first invaded a finger and then an arm. Amputation of the finger and then the arm failed to halt the spread of the disease. Papa Joe wanted her buried locally, but daughter Mabel Grace Branson, who along with her sister-in-law Alene had often cared for Louise during her final few years, surreptitiously arranged to bring the body to Madera, where it could be laid to rest near the graves of children William, Mamie, and Mattie at Arbor Vitae Cemetery. (Joe Eagle, born about 1867 in France, spent his widowerhood in Milton-Freewater, passing away there 2 July 1947.)
Children of Reuben Branson with
Louisa Armstrong
Herbert
Raymond “Blondy” Branson
For genealogical details, click on
each of the names.