| Notes |
- James was once well known for a newspaper column in San Francisco -"Dear Old Pard."
He was elected to the Oakland City Council in 1895.
1860 Federal Census of Yreka, Siskiyou County, California (3 Jul 1860)
James M. Bassett 29 M Indiana Editor --- 1000
Living with several others
1880 Federal Census of Oakland, Alameda County, California
J.M. Bassett 48 M IN NY CT Head Ed. of Paper
Carrie 21 F NY VT VT Wife Keeping House
Barnard 1 M CA IN NY Son
Bassett 4/12 F CA IN NY Daughter
Anna Harelim 12 F MA VT VT Sister At Home
William Harelim 19 M NY VT VT Brother
"OLD PARD" BASSETT JOINS ANCIENT ENEMY
James Madison Bassett, Author of Sardonic, Biting Lette
to C. P. Huntington, Succumbs to Heart Diseas
25 Apr 1903 San Francisco Chronicle
James Madison Bassett, better known as "Old Pard", has followed his
ancient enemy, Collis P. Huntington, to the great beyond. Mr. Bassett died
yesterday in Oakland of heart disease.
Mr. Bassett was known from Siskiyou to San Diego by the "Old Pard"
letters, whose biting words and sardonic humor, backed by an intimate
knowledge of the inside history of the Central Pacific railroad, made the late
Collis P. Huntington writhe and, what was worse, hurt him in his most tender
spot, the pocket. Doubtless Mr. Bassett's persevering and remorseless literary
campaign did much to create the public sentiment that ultimately compelled
full repayment of the government debt owed by the Central Pacifi
Mr. Bassett was secretary to Senator Stanford in the early years of
the railroad, and when Stanford was ousted from control by Huntington, Bassett
was discharged. He never forgave Huntington. Soon the "Old Pard" letters began
to make their appearance in the "Golden Area", the "Star" and "Report". So
pertinent were they that the attention of the whole country was drawn to them.
"I will make you rue the day that you discharged me. I will make it
cost you millions. I will pursue you to the grave, and beyond it," were the
words addressed to Huntington by Bassett. The old fox laughed at the
declaration as though it were an idle threat.
But Huntington did not laugh when he found that people were reading the
letters, and they were supplying a mine of pertinent and specific information
in readable form concerning the crooked practices of the railroad building.
Huntington tried all he knew and all he could to have the letters suppressed,
but he failed.
James Madison Bassett was born in Marion County, Indiana, and w
seventy-two years of age. He learnt the printer's trade in a small newspaper
office. He came to California in 1850, was connected with the Yerka "Journal",
and later the Sacramento "Bee". He founded the "Golden Era" in San Francisco
and afterward was editor-in-chief on the Los Angeles "Herald". His wife and
four children survive him.
The funeral will be held this afternoon from the family residence, 828
Eighth street, Oakland.
The Yreka Journal, Wednesday, January 29, 1908
In Early Days
Posthumous Letter of Pioneer Relates Story of Interest
Saw More Gold in Yreka than He Thought was in the World
I was born November 9, 1830, at the town of Shelbyville, Shelby county, Indiana. My mother was born in Kentucky and my father was born on the shore of Lake Champlain, New York.
From birth until about 16 years of age I did not do much of note except to have regular old ague with shakes and fever every third day. In 1846 the Bassett family of seven moved to Illinois and settled on a farm, near Quincy, Adams county. I farmed some on myh own account and traveled up and down the Mississippi river between Quincy and St. Louis, quite as much as was good for me. Went to school in winters ? perhaps two or three months each year for four or five years. My schooling was not extensive. Never saw the inside of a high school or college as a student.
In 1850 started for California. Went as far as west side of the state of Missouri, when company collapsed and went back home. Started again in April, 1851. Worked my way by driving three yoke of oxen and a wagon from Pike county, Illinois, to Fort Hall, Idaho. From there I drove a band of horses to the foot of Mount Hood in Cascade mountains. At Mount Hood stopped and picked up abandoned cattle that had fed up and rested. Drove seventeen head of cattle and two horses into the Willamette valley. One horse was never claimed. I retained it and from the money received from owners of the cattle saved, bought a mule, and in company with three other fellows, started about the 1st of November for California, each having two animals, one packed, the other to ride. From the point where Eugene City is now located we dodged Indians. In Roque River valley we found the bodies to two white men who had been killed by Indians.
We reached Yreka on the evening of December 15, 1851. I visited the gambling tents that night and saw more gold dust than I had before believed there was in the world. I mined on the Yreka Flats and down near Hawkinsville until about April, 1852. That spring the creek diggings fever raged violently. There were five of us fellows as partners. Ben Miller and I went Cottonwood and the other three to Deadwood. All were to share in what either party found. Miller and I found plenty of gold, but it was on the plateaus above the water; and the idea of conveying water where you wanted it, by means of ditches and flumes, had not yet occurred to the miners. Three days later we returned to Yreka and found one of the partners waiting for us. We all went to Deadwood where the other three partners had taken up five claims of fifty yards each on the mouth of Deadwood creek. The ground was rich, but the gold was on or near the bedrock. We fooled around making expenses and no more for about a year. Then the boys began to wary, and one and then another left for better prospects. By and by the four left, and then I owned the entire claim.
I spent the starvation winter of ?52-53 on Deadwood. The snow was seven feet on a dead level, and 40 to 50 feet in gulches and on hill sides. For two months there was nothing to eat except the starving wild animals ? deer, wolves, bear and ?beef straight?. We balanced course salt scraped from empty pork kegs with gold dust at $192 per Troy pound, and were glad to get it. Towards spring D.D. Colton and some others worked a few mule loads of flour over the Siskiyou mountains from Rogue River valley. I paid him a dollar per pound for a 50-pound sack of flour, and packed it on my back from Yreka to Deadwood, 12 miles. Among the first stuff that came in over Scott mountain was a back load of tobacco, brought in by a young Irishmen named Mike Brown. I paid him $12 for a plug of heavy wet navy, plug weighing one-third of a pound. He sold his entire pack at the same price per one-third pound.
Through the fall and winter of ?52-53, I succeeded in draining the bedrock, but in doing so I had nearly reached the upper end of the claim. In a few weeks I took out about $3,000, enough to pay my debts and buy a horse, rifle and revolver.
By this time it was April, ?53, and the Indians of Rogue River valley had concluded to scalp the few hundred men, women and children who had settled there. There was a call for volunteers, and two companies went over from Yreka. I cleaned up my arms, mounted my horse and started for the4 scene of carnage. The second night I reached the camp, where Ashland now is, and joined one of the Yreka companies which was commanded by Capt. Jake Rhodes. The greater number of this company came from Humbug creek, and as I remember called themselves ?the Humbug Volunteers.? In a day or two we were mustered into the United States service under Lieutenant Alden, the only man in the field who held a commission in the U.S. army. Alden had been stationed at Fort Jones, Scott Valley, in the command of the regulars. Although a good fellow, neither Lieutenant Alden nor his regulars, knew any more about fighting Indians then a heathen Chinee knows about the Christian religion, so it was decided to turn over the command of all the men ? a total of 800 ? to Gen. Joe Lane. We did a good deal of fighting. Old Joe, Chief of the Rogue River Indians, had about 3,000 warriors who were well armed and always ready to fight us man to man. They frequently made it lively for us. We did a good deal of skirmish fighting and occasionally had a pitched battled. The fighting lasted several months. Toward fall, or late in the summer, we had an all-day battle on the headwaters of the creek then known as ?Jump Off Joe.? I believe it is now called Evans creek. In the evening the Indians gave up the fight, and after a long talk with Gen. Lane, Old Joe agreed to come to our camp near Table Rock with his warriors the following Saturday and surrender their arms, which they did and there has never been an Indian disturbance in the Rogue River valley from that day to this. In the last battle Lieut. Alden was severely wounded and five of the regulars killed in making a fool charge on a party of Indians hidden behind rocks. Lane advised Alden not to make the charge, but he did, with disastrous result.
After the Indians surrendered their arms and promised to be ?good Injins,? we were mustered out of the service and returned to Yreka. I went out and mined awhile on Greenhorn. Then Capt. Charles McDermitt and I started a pack train running from Red Bluff to Yreka. Once McDermitt went down to Napa valley and shipped a quantity of wheat which was landed at what was then called the Big Bend of the Sacramento river. The town of Colusa stands there now. I met McDermitt and the landing with the pack train and we loaded our mules with the wheat. It was the first seed wheat taken into Scott and Shasta valleys.
When Siskiyou county was a youngster, Charlie McDermitt was elected Sheriff and Hiram G. Ferris county clerk. I was deputy in Ferris? office for awhile. McDermitt did not care for the sheriff?s office, and at my insistence he made D.D. Colton undersheriff and left the whole business in his charge. In time the office became valuable and Colton figured to succeed McDermitt, which he did.
In the mean time, I had drifted back to Deadwood where I was elected constable, having under my jurisdiction a territory equal to a small state. When Sam Fair was sheriff, I was deputy sheriff with all the western part of the county to look after. We had lively times. Money was plenty and the boys played high. I had to look after Fred Patterson, Jimmy Smith, Jack Heenan, the ?Bencicia Boy,? and dozens of others, Heenan never game me any trouble. He was a gentleman if he was a pugilist. I was on good terms with all the ?boys?. Arrested Patterson several times, but we were always friends.
McDermitt and I had packed up to Yreka from Red Bluff a Washington printing press and some type and other printing material. It belonged to Caleb Thornbury and Bill Slade, and with it they printed in Siskiyou county. I became connected with the Herald, wrote articles, swept the office floor, set type and inked forms. In 1855 Colton, Tyson and others, purchased the Herald and changed the name to Yreka Union. In 1857 Sam Fair, sheriff, and Ira Mayfield, a printer, owned a printing outfit which printed the Siskiyou Chronicle. It did not amount to much, as Ira preferred to blow a horn in a theater band than run a newspaper. I, Clay Fowler, and a printer named Dumas, leased Mayfield?s material and commenced publication of the Yreka Weekly Journal. I was good property from the start. In a few months I bought Fowler and Dumas out and became sole owner. By the end of the presidential campaign of 1860 I had cleaned up $8,000. I had the patronage of the Lincoln, Breckenridge and Bell parties. The Union, the real democratic organ, had the support of the Douglas end of the democracy. In the spring of 1861 Mayfield came back from a horn-blowing expedition to Portland, Oregon, and demanded his press and material, and I turned it over to him. He ran the paper for awhile and then sold out to Robert Nixon, who had been editor and proprietor of the Journal from 1861 up to [August 15, 1907 when it was passed into new hands. The Journal is now in its fifty-fourth volume] now, and is by far the best newspaper in the northern part of the state.
In the early spring of 1861, I went home to the old place in Illinois and was in New York when Sumpter fell. I was married in New York and returned to Yreka late in the month of May of that year.
Cyrus A. Thomas, who had been telegraph operator at Yreka for years, wanted to leave for Panama. I took up the business, learned to operate, and soon made chief operator and manager. In about four years Supt. Gamble appointed me division superintendent of the line between Yreka and Portland. About ?67 or ?68 I went to Sacramento and built the double line of telegraph for the Central Pacific railroad, from summit of the Sierras to Sacramento thence to Stockton, to San Jose, and on to San Francisco. Then I was appointed division superintendent of the telegraph line from San Francisco via San Jose, Gilroy, Visalia, Bakersfield to Los Angeles.
Somewhere along here, I was editorial writer on John Nugent?s San Francisco Daily Herald and on the Stockton Republican, and evening daily, democratic paper, as chief editor, for two years and a half. Then returned to San Francisco on invitation of Henry George and wrote with him on the Post. Later was managing editor, under Charles de Young, on the Chronicle. Frank Pixley was chief editorial writer, and when I would reject one of his articles he would swear it was the best thing the ever wrote. Left the Chronicle in 1872 and accepted a position as editor-in-chief and general manager of the Los Angeles Daily Herald. Made it valuable property and a good paper.
My wife was thrown from a buggy in the summer of 1857, and died within a week of her injuries. Soon after my loss, I returned to San Francisco. Edited a democratic paper in Oakland during the campaign of 1876 for Laura DeForce Gordon. I find on release of files that I published a literary paper in November and December of 1877, called ?The Portico.? The name was dug out of the rubbish of ancient Greece or Rome or Japan or Africa by my friend Hawley who was a literary make-up of a good deal of force. ?The Portico? was short lived as I bought the Golden Era and merged the new venture into it. Ran the Golden Era more than a year, then sold, and the purchaser moved it to San Diego. I married again November 5, 1877. After selling the Golden Era, Mr. Everett, now proprietor of Wood and Grain, a trade publication, issued in San Francisco, and myself, started the Wine and Tobacco journal in San Francisco. I edited it and Everett, who was a first class solicitor, did the business which was good. Not long after we got underway, I, in a nominal way, became a member of the Southern Pacific railroad law department, but in reality the confidential of President Stanford. I was also the companies? general inspector, but this was only known to Stanford, Huntington, Chas. Crocker and General Manager A.N. Towne. A general inspector of a railroad could not be of much value if all the employees knew his business.
There is little that I can say of my fourteen years in the employ of the president of the railroad company. I was not really a railroad employee. Stanford was my employer and under his direction I worked, yet I did a great deal of work for Huntington and Crocker, mostly for Huntington. My duties were private and confidential. I traveled much, visited every city with a population of 75,000 or over in the Unites States, and saw large portions of Canada and Mexico. Wrote much that only Governor Stanford saw and read. Did a large amount of private and confidential business for Huntington who expressed a high degree of confidence in my ability and integrity. For him, I bought railroads and secured rights-of-way which he said no one else could reach. Governor Stanford, who was a man of fine literary ability, often said I could write more in fewer words than anyone he ever read after.
I have made Oakland my home since 1877. In 1895 I was elected councilman at large of the city and served the term of two years. I am the attorney-in-fact of some English stockholders of the Central Pacific railroad, and now have and action in the United States circuit court to prevent the absorption of the Central by the Southern Pacific company of Kentucky, of which under the conditions of their charter are responsible for but $1,000,000.
I am a mining expert a do a good deal in that line. I have for some time been a man of great expectations and am like Micawber waiting for something to turn up. I am nearly 72 years of age and whether something will turn up in the line of my great expectations, before I am turned down, is the unsolved and perhaps unsolvable problem that gives me much concern.
J.M. Bassett
The above article by a Siskiyou Pioneer now deceased was sent us by a friend of his, knowing it would be read with much interest by the men who knew Bassett when a young man among them, fifty years ago.
San Francisco Call, Volume 93, Number 146, April 25, 1903
Author Of The ?OLD PAR? Letters Passes To His Rest
James M. Bassett, Whose Journalistic Warfare Against C.P. Huntington
Brought Him Prominently Before the Public, Dies of Heart Disease.
James M. Bassett, famous in California as the ?Old Pard? of Huntington letter fame, a pioneer journalist of the old school, a former City Councilman of Oakland and the erstwhile confidential secretary of the late Leland Stanford, is dead.
This sturdy through picturesque character in the Golden State?s history passed away at 6 o?clock yesterday morning at his residence, 728 Eighth street, Oakland, heart disease, following a severe illness from bronchitis, being the cause of death.
It was his journalistic warfare against the late Collis P. Huntington that brought "Old Pard" Bassett into more than local prominence. After Leland Stanford had been deposed by the Huntington interests as president of the Southern Pacific Railroad Bassett, who had been Stanford's confidential man, went out with his chief, to whom he had been closely attached. Footloose and free from all of his railroad connections # bitter over the defeat of Stanford, the former private secretary declared war upon Huntington and began a remarkable campaign against the man who had gained control of the great railroad properties.
OPENS HIS ATTACK.
Bassett opened his attack with the publication of a series of letters signed "Old Pard" that appeared in the San Francisco Daily Report. For months he almost daily launched a screed, revealing the very inmost secrets of railroad operations, with which he had a most intimate knowledge.
For fifteen years through various public mediums "Old Pard" hammered Huntington, and for much of the agitation, State and national, that the railroad president had to meet Bassett was alone responsible. He carried his warfare into the halls of Congress, and even after Huntington settled the Central Pacific debt continued his literary fusillade.
Born at Shelbyville, Ind., in 1830, the departed journalist grew to manhood on the frontier. At the age of 21 years, after learning the printer's trade, he crossed the plains, arriving in California in 1S51, and mined for a time' on the Feather River. His first newspaper venture was on the old Yreka Journal. In the gold fields Bassett was a companion of Joaquln Miller, and Bret Harte was a compositor for him on the old Golden Era.
Mr. Bassett was a member of the Sacramento Bee staff under the elder McClatchy. Subsequently he edited the Los Angeles Herald for seven years. He founded the Golden Era in San Francisco, and his work on that journal attracted Stanford's attention. Before entering the service of the railroad president the veteran journalist had served in editorial capacities on the San Francisco Chronicle and the Post. In 1877 he moved to Oakland, and there gained repute with John L. Davie as the organizer of the Davie Ferry and Transportation Company, in opposition to the Southern Pacific Company's creek route.
FARES ARE CUT.
Davie and Bassett cut fares on that line to 5 cents; the bigger company met the cut, and to this day has maintained that rate between Oakland and San Francisco on the creek route. The Davie Company finally dissolved.
Prior to that time Bassett, Davie, J. M. Dameron and others organized a fight against the Oakland Water Front Company for possession of lands at the foot of Harrison Street. Shotgun guards and riflemen lent a picturesque side to the contest, which dragged through the courts, where the cases still hang.
Out of all this Davie was elected Mayor and Bassett City Councilman of Oakland in 1895. Two years later Bassett was defeated for re-election. The aged pioneer was twice married. His surviving wife was Miss Caroline Hazeltine of Los Angeles. The children are Bernard Bassett, an artist on the Sunset Magazine, and William, Kathleen and Dorothy, students at the Oakland public schools. ? Mr. Bassett was a member of Alcatraz Lodge No. 244, F. and A. M.
The funeral services will be held this afternoon at 2 o'clock at the Bassett residence. The Rev. Charles R. Brown, pastor of the First Congregational Church will officiate.
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Bassett Family Association Database
1830 - 1903 (72 years)