R. F. Ford, a California pioneer and resident of Soquel, has had much more than the ordinary amount of vicissitudes encountered in one lifetime. He has traveled extensively and has observed closely, and is blessed with a retentive memory, which has enabled him to accumulate a useful fund of knowledge of places and people that he has seen. He has had the dyspepsia, bronchitis, cholera, and yellow fever and survived them all.
He was born August 15, 1829, in New Haven, Connecticut, and when seven years of age was sent to an uncle in Massachusetts. In 1835 he was apprenticed to learn the trade of saddle and harness maker, under a drunken boss, but left his place in 1837, and in 1840 went to Brooklyn, New York, and finished learning his trade. He became afflicted with dyspepsia, and to rid himself of it in 1841 he shipped for a whaling voyage. The trip was long, consuming twenty-two months, but he returned fully cured. He went on this trip around the Cape of Good Hope and fished in the Indian Ocean, stopped at New Zealand, sailed on the Pacific to Bering Strait, and returned home via the Sandwich Islands and Cape Horn. After his return he went to New York and learned the trunk trade, and in 1845 went to Newark, New Jersey, and took a contract to furnish sole leather trunks for a large house.
In 1847 he contracted the bronchitis and again resorted to the remedy of an ocean voyage. This time he shipped for the East Indies on the vessel Joseph Meiggs, with a cargo of stores for the United States squadron on the west coast of Africa. He went to the city of Batavia, on the island of Java, and retuned in 1848 to New York with a cargo of coffee. The remedy proved as efficacious as the first one. He followed several avocations for the next year, during which time he was afflicted with an attack of the cholera.
In September, 1849, he started for California on the steamer Ohio, but stopped at New Orleans, at which place he shipped on the steamer Falcon for the Chagres River; thence he proceeded to Havana. He suffered when here with an attack of Panama fever. After recovering he bought into a restaurant and then came to San Francisco on the steamer Tennessee, arriving just ahead of the steamer that brought the news of the admission of California into the Union.
He immediately went to Oregon in a schooner, and sailed up the Olympia River thirty miles. Here the captain, who was from Maine, tied his boat to a tree and proceeded to take up a mill site. Mr. Ford made an inland journey to a little village called Salem, and kept a hotel in that place during the winter of 1857. In February he started with a pack train for Sacramento. He camped one night on Shasta River, and the next morning went about five miles to a new mining camp, then called Shasta Butte City, now known in California as Yreka. He located here, built a house, and remained until 1856, at which date he went to Mazatlan, on a trading trip, bringing back with him to California an invoice of cigars. In 1857 he opened a billiard saloon in Los Angeles and remained there until 1862. At this date he had a relapse of the fever to travel, and started for British Columbia. When he arrived in Victoria he found too much snow to suite a man who had lived any length of time in California, so he returned to Portland, and from there went to the Salmon River mines, but came back and opened a store in The Dalles before the expiration of the year. In 1864 he moved to the Umatilla Landing, up the Columbiz River, and traded until 1867.
He came to San Francisco in 1868, and rented the Seventeen Miles House, at Millbrae, but did not conduct it any length of time. In 1869 he established a liquor store on the corner of Dupont and Feary Streets, San Francisco, but sold out that fall and built in Sausalito. His property was burned in 1870, and in the following year he came to Santa Cruz and remained here until 1874, when he again sold out and returned to San Francisco, and put up a building on the corner of Ninth and Mission Streets. He sold this property 1876 and went to Watsonville, where he remained until 1884, when he moved to his present residence, in Soquel.
Such is the brief record of a life full of interesting events.
History of Santa Cruz County, California
by E.S. Harrison
Published by Pacific Press Publishing Company
San Francisco, Cal., 1892
Transcribed by Yvonne Valentine
Santa Cruz County Biographies ~ Archive Biography Index ~ Archive Index
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