Joseph Branson

Joseph Branson, third son of John Sevier Branson and Martha Jane Ousley, was born 14 November 1849 in Osage County, MO. He is not to be confused with his nephew Joseph William Branson, the son of John Sevier Branson, Jr., who was born in 1890 and grew up in Madera County. Nor is he to be confused with his second cousin Joseph Russell Branson (sometimes called “Devil Joe” Branson). The latter Joseph was the son of Isaac Branson. Isaac, like his first cousin John Sevier Branson, moved to the Mother Lode from Missouri during the Gold Rush. Thereafter the families of John, Isaac, and Isaac’s half-sister Irena Branson Scott lived as neighbors, schoolmates, business partners, friends, and, of course, as kinfolk. The two Josephs spent part of their childhoods literally living next door to one another, and in adulthood could be found drinking together at the Hornitos saloon. One of the key life-history differences is that Devil Joe never married or had children.

No middle name for Joseph turns up in any surviving documentation, and it seems likely he had none, in keeping with naming patterns common before the mid-1800s. However, all his siblings except Reuben have known middle names, and there remains the possibility Joseph in fact had one. There is one tantalizing hint. On his son John Joseph Branson’s death certificate, the “father’s name” box is filled in with Joseph J. Branson. However, the informant of the death certificate, John’s daughter Gertrude Ellen Branson Gabriel, may have in her grief succumbed to the impulse to guess that her grandfather’s name was a flip-flop of her father’s, i.e. that it was Joseph John Branson. Though the name Joseph John Branson would fit very well, due to the lack of corroborating evidence, Joseph has been give no middle name in this biography.

By the time of Joseph’s birth, his father had already arrived in the Trinity Mountains of California, chasing gold along with other 49ers. Joseph’s birthplace was probably at the home of his maternal uncle, William Ousley, where his mother was staying while her husband was absent.

John decided to remain in California. During this period of geographical separation, Martha and the children lived part of the time with William Ousley, but also at the home of John’s father, Thomas Branson, near Mt. Sterling in Gasconade County -- though not after 1851, because Thomas passed away that year. In 1852, John gave up on his claims in the Trinity Mountains and came down to the San Francisco Bay Area. Potatoes were in great demand, so he planted a crop in the Santa Clara Valley, where the city of San Jose and its suburbs now sprawl. With the Far West becoming more hospitable to women and children, John sent for his family -- or Martha grew tired of waiting and arranged to join her husband. Joseph was barely three years old in late 1852 or early 1853 when he and his mother and brothers, escorted by family friend and neighbor Alonzo Sutton, set out for California via the Isthmus of Panama.

The travellers discovered that John had moved slightly eastward in the Coast Range to the Livermore Valley. Reunited, they stayed there just long enough for Joseph’s first sister, Phoebe, to be conceived and born. By then, the demand for potatoes had crashed, ending the attempt to make a living from farming for the time being. John decided he would try mining again. In 1854 the newly minted Californians trekked across the San Joaquin Valley to the Sierra Nevada foothills to Mariposa County. The focus of John’s hopes lay along the Merced River. In this respect he was like many others. There was never a time when the Mother Lode was more active than the 1850s, and Mariposa County bristled with miners. In the 21st Century, the places where the Bransons lived are invisible to the hordes of tourists who flock through the local foothills to Yosemite Valley. The sites lie beneath Lake McClure, a reservoir.

John tried several spots -- Harte and Johnson’s Flat the first year or two, then upstream to Barrett City, a major mining center. The family lived as close as practical to his worksites, in cabins and at times in tents. By 1859 they had settled on the east side of the river at Phillips Flat. The gravel beds here proved to be especially productive, and Phillips Flat became the household’s base of operations for nearly a decade. This was where Joseph came of age, reaching an impressive height of six foot three. His eyes were blue, his hair light brown -- all in all a man with presence, though he was not so handsome that people commented on his appearance as they did his brother Thomas.

Joseph was in his late teens when John and Martha, having hoarded the income from the Phillips Flat years, decided that they could risk aiming at a better life elsewhere. They loaded into the Conestoga wagon and headed north. A brief stop in the Trinity Mountains to investigate the gold-mining possibilities there convinced John there was no point in lingering. The journey continued up into the Willamette Valley of Oregon. John became a farmer and rancher once again. This time he would stick to the occupation, but doing so in Oregon proved to be temporary. Martha found the climate too wet and the skies too grey for her taste, so back the family came in 1869 to Mariposa County. John bought a ranch east of Phillips Flat, on the other side of a ridge of low, smooth, grassy hills. The parcel was a few miles north of Hornitos, near the mining outpost of Quartzburg. There he raised cattle and feed and hauled wagon loads commercially, prospecting only occasionally as a sideline. The couple resided on the property, called Grasshopper Ranch, for the rest of their lives, completing the raising of their brood of ten offspring.

By the time the family had founded Grasshopper Ranch and Joseph was a full adult, the Mother Lode was reaching the end of what had been a wild era. The Hornitos area had seen its share of frontier excitement -- the famous Mother Lode outlaw Joaquin Murietta had been caught by men who set out from Quartzburg. Joe’s own account of just how dramatic his youth was has been preserved in The Call of Gold by Newell D. Chamberlain, originally published in 1936. Chamberlain interviewed Joe in 1933 or early 1934, and here is what Joe said of his boyhood days:

“My brothers and I witnessed many shooting and stabbing affairs. Outsiders never interfered with the participants and even if there was a killing, the public took a casual look and then passed by for they knew that curiosity, at such times, might be costly.

“I well recall a morning when two Mexican dance-hall girls fought it out, with daggers in the Plaza. Each had a mantilla, or blanket scarf, which was generally worn around the neck, but, when fighting with daggers, was thrown over the left arm as a shield. No one interfered and both girls were mortally wounded.

“Another case, which we witnessed, was a fight between two Mexicans and a white man. One of the Mexicans stabbed the white, who immediately whipped out his gun and shot his assailant, killing him outright. The second Mexican made a lunge for the white, who, although wounded, fired at his new assailant but the shot did not kill instantly. Just at this time, a Chinese happened along, carrying on a pole two jugs of vegetable spray. Paying no attention, he came close to the dying Mexican, who stabbed him. The Chinese dropped his load and ran up the street with the dagger sticking in his ribs but soon fell dead. Four were killed, one of them being an innocent passerby.

“At another time, we boys were going down the steps into the Fandango Hall, under the Campodonico store, when we heard shots within, so we ducked low and watched. Two Mexican musicians had been playing on the stage, when a dispute over the music arose among the dancers, and the two musicians were killed. Almost immediately, it seemed, two others took their places and the dance went on.”

The 1870 census shows Joe at Grasshopper Ranch, but by the end of that year he had turned twenty-one and it was not long before he established an independent life. The 1872 Great Register of Voters of Mariposa County lists Joe separately from his father, though as a resident of Hornitos (anyone from Quartzburg would have been described as “of Hornitos” in terms of voting precinct). County tax records of 1876 show Joe had his own homestead of 320 acres in the Bear Valley region of Mariposa County, a little east of Hornitos. Seventeen years earlier, on 2 February 1859, Ellen Margaret Geary had been born near there, and by 1876 or 1877 may have started teaching at the Bear Valley one-room schoolhouse. As the decade wore on, she and Joseph became an item, and they married 28 November 1879, a few weeks before her twenty-first birthday. By then, Joe was thirty.

Shown above is an excerpt from a letter Joe wrote to his brother Alvin Thorpe Branson in 1922, offered here as an example of his penmanship and manner of expressing himself. In this fragment, Joe is informing Alvin of the death of their second cousin Hiram Branson, who had been Alvin’s business partner thirty years earlier.

About the time of the marriage, Joe acquired a ranch of 1300 acres just across the road from Grasshopper Ranch. Where he obtained the money to purchase this huge spread is not clear. Perhaps he had met with good luck mining in the 1870s. More likely he had done well raising cattle or other livestock. His bride does not seem to have been the instrument. Her parents had little to spare for a dowry. They were John Geary and Ellen Moran, a pair of Irish immigrants who had fled their homeland in the Potato Famine. The Gearys, having arrived in San Francisco in 1847, had enjoyed the advantage of being in California when gold was discovered, but this good luck had not translated into lasting wealth. Though described as a miner in the 1870 census, John found it easier to make a living by operating a butcher shop -- his obituary in the Mariposa Gazette credits him with opening the first butcher shop to exist in the vicinity of the town of Mariposa, and he is listed with the occupation of butcher in the 1860 census. The latter census describes his wealth as $100 worth of real estate and $100 in cash. Younger daughter Mary Jane Geary had already moved out of the house to take a job as a servant in the household of Joseph’s sister Phoebe McDonald in Merced.

Speaking of Mary Jane Geary, she would in a few years marry Michael Bauer. Michael was a younger brother of Frances Bauer, who had married Joseph’s brother Thomas Branson. This Bauer, Branson, Geary connection was yet another example of the many ways Mariposa County pioneer families are interwoven genealogically.

John Geary and Ellen Moran, like John Sevier Branson and Martha Jane Ousley, are a set of great great grandparents of Dave Smeds, the creator of this website. They are the subject of a large “sidebar” page about them and their descendants. Click here to go to that page.

This is Joseph and Ella Branson’s ranch as it looked at Easter, 1993 during a visit by some of the couple’s descendants. The only real signs of former habitation are the foundations of the main house. These foundations, made of native stone, can be seen near the main group of visitors pictured above. The three individuals in that group consist of Joe and Ella’s elderly granddaughters Marian Ruth Warner Weldon and Josephine Alberta Warner Smeds and great great granddaughter Lerina Amanda Smeds. In the distance is great great grandson Niilo Eliel Smeds.

Whatever the means, once Joe succeeded in obtaining his land, his money worries soon ceased. A rich deposit of gold lay underground. There was enough ore to sustain two active mines throughout the Mother Lode mining era. Joe was able to live as a “gentleman miner,” i.e. it was not necessary for him to exhaust himself personally handling a pick or shovel. Though his house was a mere hundred yards from the mine entrance and he closely supervised the operations, he left the hard manual labor to his hired crews. Joe housed his employees in a large barracks. The foreman/caretaker enjoyed a house of his own at the western edge of the site.

The mines, the tracks, and the living quarters were only part of a complex that included a huge barn and stables, a water tower, and a blacksmith shop. It strongly resembled the sort of tiny, rustic town mythologized in so many Western gunslinger movies. In the 1920s, while the mostly-vacated structures were still intact, a film company used the ranch as a shooting location. What movie the footage ended up in is not known. Most likely it was one of the thousands of low-budget, cheap-entertainment efforts that did not survive to be included in the recent preservation of Hollywood’s early black and white silent films.

Naturally, such a large piece of property meant Joe could also maintain a large herd of cattle. His livestock operation often prospered, which was a comfort given the varying output of gold the mines produced from year to year. (Perhaps he provided his father-in-law’s butcher shop with meat animals.) Joe described himself as a farmer, not a miner, in censuses and voter registration rolls of the last two decades of the century. The land’s ability to serve as pasture proved to be its lasting virtue when the mining economy of the Mother Lode collapsed circa 1910, killed by falling bullion prices, a new law forbidding certain ecologically-disruptive mining practices, and by the availability of gold from other parts of the world. Joe shut down his diggings and let most of his employees go at about that point, or possibly a few years earlier. Once the mines were boarded up, Ella would not allow them to be reopened, because she was still heartsick over the loss of her son Alvin in a mining accident. (For more on that tragedy, refer to Alvin’s page, linked below.) The couple subsisted on cattle-ranching revenue from that point on, at first supervised by Joe himself. By the 1920s Joe retired. The land was leased to a young rancher named Horace Meyer, though with the understanding that Joe and Ella would continue to live on-site.

Given his pioneer upbringing, Joe retained a certain coarseness of affect. He loved to relax in Hornitos at the local saloon. His language was peppered with crude expressions, to the mortification of his prim daughter Grace. Inasmuch as Hornitos remained an edge-of-civilization milieu of rattlesnakes, cow pies, and stubble grass even after it had lived out its 49er phase, Joe fit right in. He was well liked, and regarded as an upstanding and successful man of the community. Of all the sons of John Sevier Branson, Joe was the only one to leave a substantial estate and to live out his twilight years in financial comfort. Nephew Ivan Branson describes Joe and family in the book Bones of the Bransons as “lovable and honorable people.”

By the latter part of the 1920s and first part of the 1930s, Joe was the only one of his birth family to linger in Hornitos. In fact, he was among the few people of any sort who remained. The place never became a ghost town, in the sense that even at the low point, a few hundred residents remained, but there were very few left to “tell the tale” of the place’s history. Joe was looked upon as one of the valued repositories of memory. In addition to providing Newell Chamberlain with the interview for The Call of Gold, he was also called upon in 1927 to testify in a court case as to the value of his father’s old placer claim at Phillips Flat. This occurred because the heirs of his brother-in-law Charles Arthur (husband of Lizzie Geary, Ella’s youngest sister) felt the government had short-changed Charles, who had been the owner of the claim when the land was seized by the government as part of the creation of Lake McClure. Joe described the value by pointing out, “Well, my dad raised ten children, clothed and fed them first rate, sent them to school, and never owned a dollar in his life. All from the lesser portion of that claim.” Thanks to his testimony, the heirs received a handsome judgment of $7500.

Joe passed away 23 August 1934 in at Mercy Hospital in Merced, CA, after an illness of several months.

Ella survived Joseph. She preferred to remain at the increasingly isolated and empty ranch, somewhat to the dismay of her children. It was only possible for her to stay because her eldest boy, John, was willing to look after her there, even though this was awkward for him because his own home was along the Central Coast, and his wife and daughter continued to live there. Ella only abandoned her home at the very end of her life as her health collapsed, and she was admitted to Mercy Hospital, the very same facility where Joe had expired. She died there 29 June 1946.

Joseph and Ella are buried in the Catholic Cemetery next to St. Catherine’s in Hornitos, a church built in 1851 and now preserved as a historical landmark. Joe was not Catholic, but by the early 1900s Hornitos had become small and close-knit, and an extension of the cemetery was made open to people of other faiths.

A half-interest in the ranch remains in the hands of Joe and Ella’s daughters’ heirs to this day, Horace Meyer having acquired the other half as the sons died off and their heirs chose to sell -- Horace’s son George still runs cattle there. The parcel now backs onto Lake McClure. If the footage of the silent film still exists, it would offer a glimpse of a place long erased from the real world. Once Joe and Ella had both passed away, the buildings were left to crumble. The main house was last to go, burning down in the early 1960s. Now if one stands on the site of Joe and Ella’s home, one sees the view shown in the photo above, containing almost nothing from horizon to horizon to indicate there was ever such an extensive human presence except for weed-covered mounds of mine tailings.

Children of Joseph Branson with Ellen Margaret Geary

John Joseph Branson

Marguerite Ellen Branson

Alvin Arthur Branson

Grace Mildred Branson

Eldridge Geary Branson

Ernest Elton Branson

For genealogical details, click on each of the names.