Street Detective

War brings change. The Mexican War brought a lot of Americans to California. Some of them went back east again to acquire fame in another war -- William T. Sherman, Joseph Hooker, etc. Some of them stayed to eke out a living on the far west coast. It was a place of uncertain prospect that took three months to get to or get away from, and even after gold was discovered at the close of the war, survival was a dicey business. But Captain Joseph Libbey Folsom was particularly talented, and by the early 1850s was one of the new state's richest men.

Or would have been if he didn't owe so much money to his lawyers. There was a lot of contention over his acquisition of William Leidesdorff's holdings on the Rio Americano, and Folsom was always striving to overcome debt. He did manage to build a big house in San Francisco, complete with water and gas pipes, which must have been a sight in a city that was all sand and tents just a few years before. He also managed to found Granite City as a mercantile gateway to the gold-mining region, on his property upriver of Sacramento City, and hired Theodore Judah, later of Trancontinental Railroad fame, to lay out the streets. All this while he'd been suffering from "neuralgia," which can be interpreted a number of ways, but I imagine it as a raging bout with sciatica relieved only by copious amounts of whiskey and shots of laudanum. For all that, he died in 1855, while visiting friends, of kidney failure, at the age of 38. Granite City was renamed Folsom in his honor.

I've worked in Folsom for over twenty years and am very familiar with its layout. The old downtown, sustained for so long by the prison made famous by Johnny Cash, is criss-crossed with streets named by Folsom under various influences. As a historian type, I'm naturally curious in a vague way how old city streets got their names. Folsom is unique in that there's no Main St. or High St. or streets given numbers and letters. It is a grid laid out in the old style on a slope above the river, but the street names mix the obvious with the obscure. The obvious include Sutter and Leidesdorff (who, along with Folsom, also have streets in San Francisco); and then there are the rest. A local historian is quoted in Sierra Foothills Magazine:

"Figueroa was a California governor back in the 1830s. Persifer (Smith) and John E. Wool were U.S. generals. Native American heritage is represented by Natoma, believed to be derived from noto mom, the Nisenan Maidu word for the river at this point, ‘east water.’ Decatur was Folsom's nephew and Forrest was his sister's married name," says Puffer. He's managed to connect every street to something or someone relevant to Folsom's life except one: Sibley.

This last has been stuck in my mind for years. It's a mystery. Mysteries need solving. It's also a street I drove on to get to work before a new bridge and a divorce changed my commute. So when I was reading a book on an entirely different aspect of California history and encountered a contemporary named Sibley, my attention was captured, like a squirrel in a trap.

Alexander Sibley was a 49er, a gold miner, an unremarkable man in historical terms but an acquaintance of various men who did acquire fame if not fortune as early-days pioneers, and while I've yet to encounter proof that he knew Joseph Folsom, it is my official hypothesis that he did; and that they were friends, close enough friends, for Sibley to be one of the few men honored with a street name in Folsom's new town.

I'm not historian enough to care about proving it. The folks in their folding chairs at the Folsom History Museum might appreciate it, but no one else will. (Herb Puffer would, but he's dead.) My first thought was not to rock the world of local history on its heels by offering a mouse-sized answer to a mouse-sized question, but simply to use the idea, true or not, as an element in fiction. I have a story in mind that involves two famous men, and for the purposes of objectivity I need a third man's viewpoint. I was going to invent one when research dipped my eyes into serendipity. Rather than strive to get half a paragraph in some newsletter, I'll just state the matter as if closed in a story.

But these are real people, and I need to know about them. Alexander Sibley may be obscure, but he's real, and may even have family somewhere. Like everyone, he deserves a good effort at appropriate representation. To this end, I have a couple avenues of investigation.

1) Contact the author of the book I was reading and find out what more he knows. This may be a challenge as the book was published in 1986--

Well, looking further in order to complete that sentence, I found he died in 1993. One avenue, then.

1) Alex Sibley's letters are preserved at the Huntington Library in San Marino (about four hundred miles away). I've written to them to see if they've been photographed or transcribed at all. Meanwhile, lack of that data shouldn't stop me. I can create a character and tweak it to more or less fit reality later. Shouldn't stop me, no.

Shouldn't. The question has been raised, however, if I'm really a writer or more of a researcher. I can hunt shit down all day. Composing my spirit into an artful place shielded from continuous distraction is very much another matter. And there's a lot of distraction. My attention is captured like a squirrel in a trap often, every day, many times a day -- and let loose again, and off it goes, dodging traps, and getting trapped again. How does a Writer deal with that? Huh? Huh?

Shaking that off, positing answers to historical questions is fun. A mystery can only be solved once, to the detective's everlasting fame. If nothing else, I'll have that.