Colusa Biographical Sketches – Chapter 12 – Autobiography of the Hon. W. S. Green – Page 345-351 - Transcribed by: Patrick Hogue - October 19, 2013.
“Robert Green, whose father was an officer in the body-guard of William Prince of Orange, came to this country from England in the year 1712, and settled with his uncle, Sir William Duff, in King George County, Virginia. He married a Miss Dunn, and had seven sons. His third son, Duff married a Miss Willis, who was an own cousin to George Washington. William Green, my grandfather, was the third son of Duff Green, and moved to Kentucky, while that State was yet a wilderness. He married a daughter of Markham Marshall and a cousin to Chief Justice Marshall. They had ten children, and my father Henry Lewis Green, married Miss Lucy Bird Semple, and I, their eldest child, was born December 26, 1832.
“John Semple was a lawyer and rightful heir to the title and estates of the Lords Semple of Scotland. These estates had been confiscated during some of the revolutions in that country. He came to America, at what precise date I am unable to tell, and married a Miss Walker. His eldest son, John Walker Semple, my grandfather, married Miss Lucy Robertson, the daughter of Isaac Robertson, the Scotch school-master, who educated James Madison (see Adam’s “Life of Madison”). My mother’s eldest brother, General James Semple, was offered the titles and estates of his ancestors if he would enjoy them as a British subject, but he refused. He was afterwards a Judge of the Court of Appeals of Illinois, a United States Senator from that State, and Minister to the Republic of Colombia, South America, under Martin Van Buren. Dr. Robert Semple, another brother, was president of the first Constitutional Convention of California, and Colonel Charles D. Semple laid out the town of Colusa. So much for my ancestors.
“I was born at the Horse Shoe Bottom, on the Cumberland River which was then in Wayne, but now in Russell County, Kentucky. My father inherited something of a fortune, but as he went into unfortunate speculations, I had to ‘hoe my own row’ from the time I was twelve years of age to the present. The old field school in the backwoods of Kentucky afforded me about all the educational advantages I ever possessed, and my time at that was limited. Joshua Wright, my principal teacher, wrote upon the blank leaves of my speller, ‘Will Green, his book.’ I went to school about three months to Rev. William Neal, a Cumberland Presbyterian preacher and a man of superior attainments, who had married my father’s sister. I worked on a farm as soon as I could reach a plow handle, and after I was fifteen years of age I got a man’s wages, which in that country at that time was $7 a month. When I was a little fellow, I used to look over my school atlas to find a place for my future home, for I had very early made up my mind to ‘go West.’ California, and especially the Sacramento River, always seemed to have a peculiar charm for me. When the gold fever reached us, in 1849, I concluded to try my fortune there, if I could manage the ‘ways and means’ part of it. I borrowed the money and agreed to pay, and did pay, four hundred per cent interest on it.
“In company with Colonel C.D. Semple, John W. Semple and a son of Dr. Semple about my own age, and James Yates, who resided about four miles above Colusa, I left my old home at Seventy Six, Clinton County, Kentucky, on the first of August 1849. We went to Louisville and thence down the river to New Orleans. We found no means of conveyance from that place to the Isthmus. A notice appeared in a day or two calling a meeting of the California-bound passengers to discuss means for further progress. The result of this meeting was that one hundred and three of us chartered the old condemned steamer Portland, and in that crossed the gulf to Chagres. The trip across the Isthmus at that time was, of course, romantic in the extreme, but I have not space to give any incident not entirely personal to myself, and but few of those. When we got to Panama we were fortunate enough to secure passage on the steamer California, and had to wait there only a week, although there was a large number whom we found there that we had to leave behind us. We arrived at San Francisco on the tenth day of October, 1849, and chartered a launch to take us to Benicia, where Dr. Semple was then residing.
“The day after I got to Benicia, a man came into the hotel and said he wanted someone to dig on the foundation for a house. I took the contract for $100, and completed the job in two days. James Yates and I then procured an ox-team and hauled wood to Benicia, but hearing that shingles were worth $40 a thousand and that there were redwood forests some sixteen miles back of Martinez we went into that trade. I, with some others, made the shingles, and Yates hauled them to Martinez. We could always produce enough shingles in the woods to make over a load, at $20 a thousand, so we got $20 for hauling shingles sixteen miles. But the roads soon got so bad that we could not haul them at that price, so we all went to Benicia. I then took a contract to carry the mail from Benicia to the old town of Sonoma. There was but one house on the road between Benicia and Napa, and but one between Napa and Sonoma. I carried the mail in my pocket. I made a few trips and then sold the contract. I then took charge of the Lucy Long, a steam ferry-boat, across the Straits of Carquinez. In July, 1850, I came to Colusa, and camped alone for several weeks, seven miles above the present town, where the city was first laid out. In company with Colonel Semple, I had a small stock of goods. We had a story-and-a-half house built on Levee Street, between Fifth and Sixth, which we used for a time as a store and then James Yates and myself occupied it as a hotel. It was afterwards, in 1851, when the town began to grow, the City Hotel, and was burned in the fire of 1856. In the fall of 1851, Yates and I started a bakery on Main Street, near the corner of Fifth. In 1853, in company with Dr. Semple, I located a farm near Freshwater Creek, on the plains. In 1855, I purchased a vegetable garden just above Colusa and sold cabbage and sweet potatoes at a bit a pound and in the fall of the year went to the Hoe Hamilton farm.
“After my arrival in California, I spent all my leisure hours reading and studying. Although mathematics is a particularly hard study for me, I tackled the higher branches, with a teacher, and in 1855, being then twenty-three years of age, ran for county surveyor, and defeated Colonel William M. Ord, a brother of General Ord, United States Army, now deceased, but in 1857 I was elected and held that office for ten years. In 1855, I began writing stories, essays, etc., for The Golden Era, The California Farmer and other papers. In 1862 I married Miss Josephine Davis, and that fall went on a farm on Grand Island. Two successive crop failures upset me financially.
“The Colusa Sun had been started in 1862, by C. R. Street, and in September, 1863, it was offered for sale, and John C. Addington and I purchased it. I began my editorial career amid the exciting scenes of the Civil War, and maintained ultra state rights doctrines. I wrote and I felt and believed, without regard to consequences, and hence the Sun became a conspicuous mark for opposing journals. I tried all the time to treat the opinions of others with that degree of candor and consideration which I demanded for my own, and hence, while the Sun has been regarded as one of the most positive of journals on the coast in the expression of opinions, it has received more flattering notices than any other newspaper in the State.
“In 1867, I was elected to represent Colusa and Tehama Counties in the Assembly. My principal work was systematizing the land laws of the State. I prepared a long bill and passed it unanimously through both houses, and against the opposition of the lobby. Much has been said against and much in favor of the land system then inaugurated, and I am free to confess that the light of succeeding years has revealed some weak points in it, but there was no man in either house or in the lobby who could point them out at that time. It legislated a number of locating agents out of office and they opposed it. It sent the swamp-land money from the State treasury back to the counties and hence it was opposed by a number of capitalists who held certain scrip which they expected that money to pay, hence they opposed it. I sat down by most of the members or went to their rooms and explained it to them so thoroughly that I was enabled to kill any amendment to which I did not consent, and hence I am responsible for the whole law, the bad with the good. But I am not responsible for the amendments made since, many of which have been very bad.
“In 1868, I found that the Secretary of the Interior had withdrawn from sale the even-numbered sections in the ten-mile indemnity limits of the California and Oregon Railroad. After examining the point, I concluded that the withdrawal was contrary to law and filed an application to enter some twenty-eight thousand acres of land on the plains in Colusa County. The land operators of the day laughed at the idea of making the secretary take back his order, but after I filed my brief a flood of applications followed mine. A rich banking firm at Marysville took my list of lands and followed it through word for word, and made the technical objection that I had not made the tender of the money. Of course I was appealing from the action of the register, which never receives any money, and had nothing to do with the receiver. But to make a long story short, the point was good enough in the hands of rich men against a poor one to cause a couple of divisions, and I came out with a little over one-fourth of the land applied for. In the meantime, settlement I had to protect these and I then sold what I had left and paid my debts. If I had gotten the whole of it, of course I would have been a very rich man, but I have no regrets and no word of reproach for those who came between me and fortune. The question as to whether their accumulation will retard their progress through the eye of the needle is one for a higher court to determine.
“At this time, I was reading everything that came in my way. A number of infidel books fell into my hands, but they failed to convince me. They undertook to overthrow revelation by pure reason, and hence I required that they should maintain a consistent and logical argument throughout, but I found none in which I could not detect the most flagrant sophism. I acknowledged, however, my utter inability to establish a creed of my own, or determine which sect was right. The claims of the Catholic Church I did not consider worth examining; that was simply a relic of a past dark age, whose superstitions would soon melt under the scorching sun of advancing civilization. When I married a Catholic girl, and she wanted the ceremony performed in her church, I fancied that I was acting very liberally when I consented. Influenced, however, by the quiet and practical life of a pure Christian woman, who never attempted any argument with me, I began to examine into the doctrines of the church. The dogma that the church established by Christ must be an infallible teaching body, struck my mind with overwhelming force. If we were commanded to hear the church, must not God make the voice of the church infallible that is, right? But no matter about the process of reasoning – suffice it that it was entirely satisfactory to myself-the party in interest-and on the eleventh day of April, 1869, I was baptized in St. Joseph’s Cathedral, Marysville, by the Rev. J. J. Callan, Jacob Myers being sponsor.
“I visited my old home in Kentucky in 1870. In 1871, I conceived the idea of a central agency in San Francisco for the sale of farming lands and went there to establish it. The bottom about that time dropped out of real estate. Stocks were all the rage. I struggled along for a year, seeing all the time that my plan was right and must succeed as soon as there was any movement in land. I started Green’s Land Paper as an auxiliary, but the expense was so heavy that I had to give up the business after sinking some $15,000 and selling lands I owned at a sacrifice. Altogether, it was a disastrous venture, but as I could see that under more favorable circumstances I could have built up a business worth tens of thousands of dollars annually, I could not blame myself. I played for a big stake and lost. While at San Francisco, I edited for some nine months the Catholic Guardian, and was assured by the clergy and the press of that church that I had at once placed that paper in the front ranks of journals of that class.
“All this while I held on to my property in Colusa and to the Sun. After my return here in 1873, I determined to devote my whole energy to the building up of a great paper in the Sacramento Valley. The Sun has grown with Colusa County, and while I might have made more money in active speculation, my employment has been more congenial to my taste. I determined years ago that office-seeking was entirely incompatible with independent journalism, and hence that I would run for no office, but I did accept the position of town trustee, with no pay attached, for three years.
“Someone else in writing this sketch would doubtless allude to what ‘Mr. Green’ had done in the way of advocating and promoting enterprises for the benefit of the town and county, but it would hardly be consistent with modesty for me to dilate upon this subject. I might recall with that pleasurable pride which the consciousness of having always endeavored to benefit those among whom I have lived and labored forty years, that nearly a quarter of a century back I was an earnest and studious advocate of irrigation. As a surveyor, I was thoroughly familiar with the topography of the county, and studied in season and out of season, and have walked and ridden all over it in order to ascertain how best to supply its rich lands with water. At the same time, in the columns of the Sun, it has been my aim to instruct its readers in what irrigation has so profitably accomplished in other sections of the State. It seems to be now like the realization of a bright dream to record here that the Central Irrigation Canal, which will water and fructify one hundred and sixty thousand acres, and thus place these lands beyond the possibility of a crop failure, at the same time stimulating the cultivation of fruits and vines, for which they are peculiarly adapted, and expanding their area will soon be an accomplished fact. I rejoice in this even as the land will shortly rejoice with unfailing abundance, when its fecundity, now almost sterilized by the neglect to apply that element which alone can render it fruitful, shall be quickened into vigor, receiving and imparting life to the grain-field, the orchard and the vineyard, thus multiplying homes, diversifying products, establishing a market and placing Colusa County in the van of production, of usefulness and of domestic comfort. To have been of some service to its citizens in my day and generation is to feel that the end and attainment of a busy life have not been reached in vain.
“Finally, it might be proper in closing a sketch already too long, and I fear tiresome to those who have had the patience to read it, that few men in this age have been blessed with a greater degree of domestic happiness. When I married, I found a wife in the higher and nobler sense of the word, but she passed to her reward May 29, 1881.”
