WWE:
Posting here a little late in the game as far as this thread is concerned, but I thought I'd add the following information as regards to Californians in the mid 19th Century:
My hometown in the Eastern High Sierra of California was founded by a man named Samuel Bishop.
He came to this howling wilderness in the Owens Valley, east of the Sierra, near the Nevada border from Fort Tejon in 1861 and established a cattle ranch along a creek for the purpose of sending beef north to the boom town of Aurora, Nevada. Mark Twain lived in Aurora at the time and wrote the book:
Roughing It based on his experiences there. The town of Bodie was later (in the 1870s) established nearby.
The area around Samuel Bishop's ranch soon became a town called "Bishop Creek," and later, after 1889, just "Bishop."
It was wild here in the 1860s with trouble from the hostile Paiute Indians and many shootouts among Cowboys in the cowcamps of the Owens Valley. This area is only 80 miles south of Bodie, the wildest town in the Old West. Bodie made Tombstone and Dodge City look like children’s daycare centers by comparison. Read
Gunfighters, Highwaymen & Vigilantes by Roger McGrath about this area. There are still many wild horses (mustangs) around here.
Before he came to the Owens Valley, Samuel Bishop was a justice of the peace at Fort Tejon. This is what Captain Gardiner of Fort Tejon wrote about Samuel Bishop in 1858:
“I have here a Justice of the peace on my hands…and he, the Justice, is now preparing himself by reading a thick volume of California laws. His appearance is not very judicial. He is in his shirt sleeves, with a hat considerably the worse for wear, a huge pair of Mexican spurs, with buckskin leggings, and of course, what no Californian travels without, revolver in his belt.”Was Bishop’s revolver an 1851 Colt’s Navy or a Colt’s Dragoon? Gardiner doesn’t say but surely if it was carried in a belt it was one of two. California was a rough place back then.