My Westcoast Pioneer Ancestors
Some of my ancestors were among the first white settlers in the western United States. In this day and age, it is so rare for people living on the west coast--especially California--to have any record or family history of earlier generations living here. My great, great grandmother, Sarah Cummins, came to the Willamette Valley, near Salem, Oregon, in the spring of 1845. Later in life she wrote and published a book titled "Autobiography and Reminiscences", in which she gives an account of that great adventure. The whole book is here.
The Hames Family was related to the Cummins family. John Hames was the founder of Soquel, California, in Santa Cruz County, having come around the horn and founding the village in 1852. John was my great, great, great grand uncle. John Hames' wife, Drucilla, who is buried about 400 yards from my home, was the daughter of Thomas Jefferson Shadden. Thomas Jefferson Shadden was among the first 500 white settlers west of the Mississippi, coming west to Sacramento in 1842 from Lee Creek, Arkansas, in the second wagon train. He is my great, great, great, great grandfather. Lots of people on the west coast of America sprung from him. His daughter, Drucilla, gave birth at Sutter's Fort to son Willy, who was the first male child born to an American citizen in California. (The very first child born to an American citizen in California was a girl, Isabel Larkin according to some records. Thomas Larkin was Isabel's father, and Larkin and John Hames were business partners and friends for many years).
Through the years my family has known much about Sarah Cummins because of the book she wrote and because up until recently older family members who lived a long time remember Grandma Sarah from when they were children. My grandfather, Theodore Roosevelt Walden, and my mother, Verna (Walden) McCubbin, were born on the 1,000-acre ranch that Sarah and husband John Walden homesteaded in the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon, above the mountain village of Weston. As I was growing up in eastern Washington (Richland) I heard many stories and gained many impressions of my family's adventures in the early west. Some of those stories and impressions are preserved here on this website. Here is a brief biographical note about me.