Lure Lore

The second installment of the George Hardy and Hardy Ranch story talks of his establishing the first schoolhouse in Downieville, his somewhat volatile temper and a shooting that landed Hardy in jail. The following is an excerpt from historian Katie Willmarth Green’s book, Like a Leaf Upon the Current Cast.

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George and Mahala Hardy were eager to have their numerous surviving children educated well, and thus George led the movement to raise a subscription to construct the first schoolhouse in Downieville in 1856. This accomplished, he improved the trail covering the mile from Hardy Ranch into town so they could reach school, markets, church and the like without too much effort. The family commitment to education was manifested in their daughter, Mary, who from age seventeen until she married, served as a teacher in Sattley, Sierra City and Morristown (where she met her future husband, miner Joseph Dryden Alexander) and Meadow Lake in Nevada County.

The Hardys sold the big upper ranch to George Jenkins in 1864 and bought a smaller parcel at the home belonging to Q.A. Clements down along the river. Clements had terraced this piece  and George Hardy either inherited the trees or himself planted apples – Miss Belle cites old varieties like permains, northern spies, and sheep noses – and peaches, berries and, of course, vegetables. They also sold butter from their milk cow and kept a rather aggressive strain of Italian bees to pollinate and for honey. An abandoned mine tunnel near the boundary of the Jenkins Ranch was used for storing crocks of butter and jars of milk in summer. It was in this second house that Belle Alexander and her older brother were both born, Mary (Hardy) and Joseph Alexander having joined the population exodus from “Over North” to live with her parents for a few years after they were married. 

Years later, Belle enthused about her grandparents’ house, which she dearly loved, recounting how the children would spend hours looking out on the passing scene from the kitchen windows. By this time the Yuba Gap Wagon Road was built closer down to the river, replacing the trail up on the ridge. She remembered watching “a line of Chinamen going down the road in single file – no matter how wide the thoroughfare they never traveled abreast – each with a pole across his shoulder with a pack made of straps at either end.” 

When the river rose in winter, how exciting it was to see the big saw logs floating down the river, “rising and dipping with the force of the current”. The droves of beef cattle fascinated her and the freight teams “were a never ending delight with twelve or fourteen horses drawing two large wagons with canvas covers stretched over and around. On the first six horses were rows of bells arranged on a curved rod on the harness of each horse. These served as a signal to approaching vehicles at there were few wide places on the road where wagons could pass.

It was the river-front that caused George Hardy to come a-cropper. While he sounds, at first blush, like a model citizen, his good nature definitely had its limits. On May Day, 1873, when he should have been dancing about the maypole with the school children of Downieville on their annual picnic to the Flat, George took up his pistol instead and shot a man. His antagonist was a French miner who was called variously Capt. La Chaze, Caze, or Cazz. (Foreign spellings were the downfall of editors.) 

The two men had been at odds for years, The Messenger stated, quarreling over a piece of mining ground along the river which each thought he had rights to. On the day in question, the altercation escalated to the point that when Case refused to leave the disputed claim, Hardy went home and fetched his pistol. Upon his return, Caze began to hurl stones at Hardy. Some of the school children, who not only witnessed the disgraceful display but were warned away from the scene by the deranged participants so they could continue their quarrel unimpeded, claimed that both men were tossing boulders at each other. 

Can’t you just see it? Hardy, who stoutly denied throwing rocks, said that after Caze had aimed about four stones in his direction, he shot at the miscreant. Caze was struck, a physician was summoned to attend to his wounds, after which Hardy went to town to deliver himself up to the Sheriff. “The Court held Hardy to answer, fixing his bail at $4,000,” said the paper. Following issues of the newspaper printed charges and countercharges from friends of both parties. Captain Caze recovered. 

At first I concluded that the occurrence was out of character for the estimable Mr. Hardy, that every person can be pushed beyond his or her limits of endurance at some time in life. However, the very same issue of The Messenger contains an article entitled ‘The Devil in the Church’, telling of a disagreement between an inebriated black barber, Albert Callis, and George Hardy, over a hat. (Callis, you will recall, was a member of Major Downie’s original mining party that slithered down Secret Ravine in 1849 and was with him again at Breyfogle Flat in 1850 or ’51.) The upshot was that “a cane in the hand of Mr. Hardy came in violent contact with the occiput of said Callis, causing the blood to flow quite freely.” One may then wonder if Hardy did not indeed possess an ungovernable temper, a dark side no one speaks about lest it stain the memory of his more praiseworthy deeds. 

His granddaughter, Belle, did write that George was strict and wanted to be obeyed instantly upon giving an order. He “was a stern man and we stood greatly in awe of him – at least I did – tho’ he was very kind to us. He always carried a stick of licorice in his pocket. These sticks were about 6 inches long and flattened at one end. It was hard and brittle and he would break off small pieces and give them to us. I can also remember his taking my smallest sister on his knee and bounce her up and down as he sang to her, most of his songs being ones he had known when a boy in England. One was called “Van Dieman’s Land”. 

George passed to his judgement, whatever it was, in July of 1900. After his death, his loyal wife, Mahala Reed Hardy, lived with her children by turns. She died in the winter of 1902 at the home of her daughter, Amy Eldora Blatchley, in the Sierra Valley having reached her 83^rd years. Only mentioning that she was “an old and highly respected resident of the county,” the paper does her a disservice by skimping on her true pioneer status and by glossing over details of her fine personal attributes. She was married to George Hardy for about sixty years, and maybe the editor delicately eschewed belaboring the point that a long marriage to a volatile man was accomplishment enough. She had six living children at her death. 

The following history is an excerpt from local historian James Sinnott’s book, Downieville – Gold Town on the Yuba.

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One of the earliest of the ranches of the vicinity of Downieville was the George Hardy Ranch on the upper bench of a flat that was early known as Breyfogle Flat located a mile east of Downieville and on the south side of the then-named South For of the North Fork of the Yuba and adjacently northeast of Slate Castle Creek.

George Hardy, the grandfather of the children of Joseph Dryden Alexander – Belle, Roxie, Amy, James, Elden and Dryden – came to Downieville first in 1849 and then left to return with his family in 1852. The family early settled on the above described ranch what then became known as the Hardy Place. Mr. Hardy widened the primitive trail from the ranch to Downieville to be a sled road so that his children could more easily get to school and so that he could better deliver the produce of his ranch to the Downieville and Goodyear Bar people. He cultivated the land of the natural flat, raising vegetables and fruit. Water for the ditch was obtained from Slate Castle Ravine by a ditch about a half mile long by a spring at the southern end of the ranch supplied for domestic purposes.

The Hardys lived on the ranch from the early 1850s until 1888 when Mr. Hardy sold it and moved to Downieville. The Mountain Messenger of September 8, 1888 speaks of his having his ranch for sale. Successful owners of the ranch have been: Watt Hughes – one of the owners of the famous Young America Mine and Sardine Lake – Mr. Jenkins, John Costa (from 1915 into the 1930s), Ballard White Sr., Ballard Jr., Mr Wienicki and Art Loveland and Associates. John Costa was the last to cultivate the land, several of the years he had the ranch he raised fine potatoes.

During the years from the early 1900’s into the time when the ranch was not cultivated the field became the place where many of the baseball games between teams from Downieville, Sierra City, and Forest City were played.

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The following excerpts of the Hardy family are from historian Katie Willmarth Green and her book Like a Leaf Upon the Current Cast.

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During the same period our Mr. Breyfogle was mining along the Yuba, the capacious flat became the residence of an English stonemason, George Hardy, a ’49er who preceded his wife and family to the goldfields by a year. Born in Derbyshire in 1809, George Hardy had progressed in his migration across the U.S. as far inland as Lockport, Will County, Illinois by 1841, when he met and married Mary Mahala Reed. A sweet family story describes the first encounter of George and Mahala this way: ‘Of this meeting it is said that one day she rode bareback up to the blacksmith shop where he was working and remarked “Well, there’s the girl for me”. Their granddaughter, Belle Alexander, wrote the following account of George’s trip and early experiences in California.

“In 1849 my grandfather hearing of the discovery of gold in California decided to come to this state, and leaving his wife and three children in Lockport came via the Isthmus of Panama and made his way to Downieville; and it was while he was working at Coyoteville that he lost the sight of his left eye from a premature blast. The report reached his wife in Illinois that he had lost the sight of both eyes, and great was her relief when she found this report was untrue.”

After building a house at Breyfogle Flat, George returned to Illinois for his wife and firstborn children, remaining long enough to be naturalized there, and then returned to California in 1851 with the family – via the Isthmus of Nicaragua this time. Mahala Hardy later reminisced to her grandchildren about riding on a mule atop a high Spanish saddle and being brushed to the ground by an overhanging branch along the jungle path. Their party on the ship “Pacific”, which sailed from San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua to San Francisco in December 1851, included 20 women and 30 children. The ship was becalmed for some days mid-journey, so that provisions ran short, anxiety high.

Mirroring the experience of the Mason and the Wrights, the arrival of Mrs. Hardy and her children caused a sensation. Belle Alexander wrote ‘ The family came up the Yuba River form Marysville riding horseback along the narrow trail which, some distance from the river, followed its winding course on the hillsides above. Few women lived in Downieville at this time and the sight of two women (Mahala and her sister Zarilda Reed), accompanied by three children, was a very unusual one. Groups of miners, working along the river bed below, upon seeing the cavalcade, placed their hands to their mouths and uttered a long drawn out ‘O-o-o Jo-o-o’ to attract the attention of miners working further up the river.

George continued to scratch in the earth for gold for a short time after his return to Sierra County, but then turned in the main to farming his 157 ¼ acre section of Breyfogle Flat, growing fruits and vegetables. Mrs. Hardy emblazoned her borders with a profusion of cutting flowers, which, fashioned into bouquets, her son sold in town. They built a swinging bridge across the Yuba, a necessity for transporting themselves and their produce to town. Four more children were born to them at the ranch. The family was shaken by grief in 1856 when two of the children perished during an outbreak of diphtheria, twelve year old daughter Sarah and four year old son Joel Wilson Nevada Hardy. The latter, born 28 April 1852 at the ranch, was said to be the first white male born in the Downieville area. The children were buried in adjoining graves with slabs of slate marking the head and foot of each grave. An evergreen was planted to shade the spot and a white fence enclosed it. The tree was cut down by a later owner of the ranch, “an act of vandalism not easily forgiven, as the fence was still there and the headstones”, wrote Belle indignantly.

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We have yet to discover the grave sites of Sarah and Joel on the far end of the meadow, but we have every reason to believe the slabs of slate are still in the ground – probably covered over by a century of organic material. In the case we ever do discover this grave site, a new fence will be erected, paying homage to these pioneers whose time was cut short by the rigors of frontier living.

The next installment of Lure Lore will dive further into the story of the Hardy family, which includes an altercation with a neighbor ending in gunfire and George Hardy’s arrest.

From adventure and connection with nature to abandoned mining camps and the lure of gold still hiding in riverbanks, there are countless treasures to be discovered in the Lost Sierra. And sometimes a discovered treasure can lead to a meaningful history lesson. A few months ago while metal detecting on the property up Slate Castle Ravine, I unearthed an old metal shovel head hiding in a tailings rock pile under a thick layer of moss. Although sporting a layer of surface rust, the semi-circular shaped shovel head looked barely used, as it had almost no dents, chips or scratches on the blade. I concluded that the shovel had hardly been used before either being lost or thrown to the wayside after the wooden handle broke. 

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Born in Albany, New York in 1833, Alvord made his way west during the Gold Rush to start his own steel and iron mining supply company named W. Alvord & Co. in Marysville in 1850, which is most likely where this shovel originated. The company was successful enough that Alvord moved his business to San Francisco and began importing wholesale hardware goods. In the process, Alvord became quite wealthy, and after selling his portion of the business in 1866, in 1871, Alvord was nominated for Mayor of San Francisco. 

 
He was appointed commissioner of Golden Gate Park from 1873 until 1882, and later served as San Francisco police commissioner from 1878 until 1899. Alvord even helped organize memorial services for both Ulysses S. Grant in 1885 and William McKinley in 1901. 

At the time of his death in 1904, Alvord was president of the Bank of California, a title he held for more than 25 years. Alvord’s papers from 1874 to 1904 are preserved in the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. 

What started as a simple outing with the metal detector to find some miner trash turned into a history lesson, just one of the many reasons why I love the Lost Sierra and The Lure property so much.

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Since the dawn of the Gold Rush, there have been countless tales of finding the “big one”, but one of the most intriguing stories of unearthing perhaps one of the largest gold nuggets ever discovered (221 pounds!) happened right above The Lure property, in Slate Castle Ravine in 1852. The following tale was printed in the Cincinnati Enquirer on September 8, 1882. Could it be true, or just a tale? Well, as Mark Twain said, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

An “Honest Miner” Tells How He Found a 221-Pound One in Sierra County 

[Letter to Downieville Messenger]

In the early ties in this State, claims were small and road agents numerous, and men, if they found a nugget of extraordinary size, were afraid their ground might be jumped or themselves robbed and perhaps murdered going below, and thus kept the largest gold finds a secret until they could get out of the mountains and the State. The following facts, that have never before been in print, I came across in a most singular way, and I can rely on the word of the narrator. In 1851 and 1852 I mined with a man from Massachusetts named John Dage on several flats and places around Downieville and the Middle Yuba. In 1853 I lost sight of him but heard he had gone East. In 1858 I went with the rush to British Columbia and worked out a good claim, and then took a trip to Australia. 

In going from Sydney up to the mines we camped on a creek by the roadside where a great many teams stopped on their up and down trip, as water supply in that dry climate was a long way apart. The great teams and American wagons arrived along toward evening on the creek in a perfect stream. As we were eating supper we heard a teamster’s voice that I thought was familiar, and driving into camp I strolled among the teams, and almost the first man I met was my old Downieville partner. He was most glad to see me, and I being so recent from Downieville, he requested me to call after he had fed his animals and eaten his own meal, to talk over old times in California. He owned the whole outfit that he was driving – was freighted up, buying hides, tallow and other Colonial products on his own account for back freight. He had married into the country and was doing a profitable business with his team.

After talking of old times here in California, the whereabouts of old friends and acquaintances, he said: “By the by, George, you never knew why or how I left California so suddenly?” I answered “No;” but he had not slipped from my memory; but many men in the mines like ourselves were missed, and often turned up thousands of miles away. He said, “I can give you the eventual story now.

Well, when we worked together in the summer of ’52, on the Middle Yuba, I heard you tell of the rich claim and coarse gold you found on Slate Castle Ravine, on the South Fork, one mile above Downieville. Myself and Bill Hopkins, together with a German partner, went quietly to work there in the summer of ’53, and occupied an old cabin that had been deserted and the ground abandoned. We stripped the claim in another direction, and came across the lead containing coarse gold, as you had described, and made for two weeks per day per man from one to three ounces. The ground was getting deeper and heavy to strip, and I started a small drift to see how wide the lead was before we stripped further ahead. It was Saturday, about noon. The ground continued still to pay, and we were down in a soft slate crevice, when I struck the pick into a bright lump of gold that seemed to run into the solid gravel. I tried to pry it out, but it was too firmly imbedded (sic). Then I worked carefully around it, and it appeared to grow larger as I dug the gravel away. We placed one on the lookout to see that no one surprised us, and I tell you we were excited; and after some time I got it loose, and by hard lifting, and there it lay, almost pure gold, nearly the shape of a heart, and it fitted exactly the bottom of the crevice. 

The quartz attached to it was chrystallized (sic), and would not exceed three pounds in weight. We got it in the cabin as quick as possible, in a sack, and placed it under one of the bunks, intending to examine it more thoroughly at night. We stayed away from town on Saturday and Sunday, and brought it out at night to feast our eyes upon it again, and each guessed it would weigh at least two hundred pounds. We concluded not to take it to town to weigh, but divide it some way; for if it were known there would be intense excitement. We had gold scales, but they would only weigh one and a half pounds. After some time spent in consultation, Bill Haskins suggested a rough pair of original scales; we piled on rock and iron weighed by the gold scales till we got the balance, and the nugget brought down two hundred and thirty one pounds, gold weight. We burned the quartz, and thoroughly picked it out with the point of a knife; the pure gold then brought down two hundred and twenty-seven pounds, and the grand specimen looked more beautiful than ever. If we had taken it to Longton’s Express Office there would have been the wildest excitement.

On Monday we cleaned up the remainder of the crevice and it paid well, but to us the pay now seemed small in comparison. Now each had enough. We had at least $50,000 to divide, enough to make all three comfortably rich. No doubt we could have made more by exhibiting it, but we could not run the risk. We came to the conclusion to cut it up, divide it, roll each one’s share up in his own blankets and start for the steamer to Panama and the Atlantic States. I went to town on Monday evening, got a sharp cold-chisel made to cut and divide the prize in equal shares, and it took us about  all night to cut and weigh it with our rude appliances. 

It seemed like vandalism to destroy the grandeur of such a precious specimen of nature’s work, At the first blow of the chisel it sank deep into the pure yellow metal, it was so soft and yielding. Before daylight we had completed our singular dividend. We caved down the bank near the mouth of the drift, took a brief sleep, got breakfast, rolled up our blankets and passed through town early, not caring to bid any one good-by, and then no explanations were required. We left the cabin and every thing for the first lucky ones to possess. There was plenty more gold, no doubt, for the ground we left contained big pay; but we had $16,000 or $17,000 each, and were satisfied with our good fortune. We tried to appear like three prospectors, carrying our blankets past Goodyear Hill, and hurried to San Francisco, arrived in time to board the next seamer, and landed safe in New York. I have many a time regretted the way we destroyed that natural gold specimen, perhaps the largest ever found in the world, in ancient or modern times.

When I returned to Downieville after fourteen years’ absence I visited old Slate Castle Ravine and tried it once more, but twenty years had nearly exhausted its riches; still, I tried and made small wages, but its glory had departed. My old partner Dodge was an earnest, truthful man. I believe tons of gold were carried below in early times by the lucky ones, and all kinds of devices were adopted to evade the highwaymen and often large parties went below together well armed; and, perhaps, many a large nugget never again saw the light until it was safely deposited in the banks or mint of the Atlantic States. 

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One thing that makes The Lure property unique is our bridge spanning the North Yuba River. The bridge is symbolic of the getaway feel of this property – once you cross over, you enter an entirely different realm, “a bridge away” from the rest of the world. 

In the early 1900s a new bridge was constructed to bear the weight of automobiles, but washed away in a flood during the early 1920s. By 1928, then owner John Kerfoot opened Slate Castle Auto Camp, a dude ranch concept of sorts with saddle horses for guests to ride. One of Kerfoot’s first missions was to rebuild the washed away bridge. A temporary Flying Dutchman was being used in the interim, but clearly it didn’t meet the needs of a resort. 

The bridge Kerfoot built collapsed a decade later under the weight of an overloaded lumber truck. The bridge was rebuilt once again in the early 1940s and lasted in its original state until 1986, when an overloaded California Fish and Game Department truck collapsed the main truss beam span, doing irreparable damage to the span. 

In 1986, Jerry Ellsworth of Indian Valley along with Pete Bovinich of Sierra City acquired an 86 foot long railroad flat car to replace the main span, lifting it into place with a 145,000 pound crane. The structure of the railroad car is very sturdy and is only limited by the concrete abutments in the river that date back to the original bridge in 1940. 

The bridge was thoroughly inspected by an engineering firm in 2019, and was upgraded from a previous 7 ton weight limit to an 11 ton weight limit. Aside from some needed routine maintenance, the bridge is in very good health with many years of life left in it. There are dreams of eventually building a new bridge spanning the North Yuba; either replacing the existing bridge or building one in a new location. A new bridge would be invaluable for the health of the property and the convenience of our guests, providing more amenities, more cabins and large events in Slate Castle Meadow. 

We are still learning more about the history of our bridge. Do you have photos or stories of the old bridge? We’d love to see and hear what you know, so please reach out to us!

Downieville is one of the most historically rich of all the Gold Rush Era towns in the Sierra Nevada. First settled by the white man in 1849, this town that once boasted more than 5,000 residents (now barely 200) was originally known as “The Forks”. A mile upstream from The Forks lies what’s historically known as Hardy Ranch and Breyfogle Flat; a unique combination of habitable riverfront land and above it, a sprawling meadow boasting one of the largest flat pieces of ground in the narrow, winding canyon of the North Yuba River.

Originally this was one contiguous 70+ acre property, one of the first pieces of land to be settled in the canyon by the Englishman George Hardy and his family. It is also reported to be the site of the first non-native white person to be born in the canyon, Joel Wilson Nevada Hardy, born April 28, 1852.

But in the last century, what’s now known as The Lure Resort and Slate Castle Ranch have been separate properties with separate owners. That is until October 2018, when Lost Sierra Development, LLC (LSD, LLC) – a group of 18 friends with ties to the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship – banded together and bought both properties. For the first time in nearly 100 years, the two properties became one again.

Any time there’s a bridge over a river with more than one property owner on the other side and a shared water source, it’s a recipe for issues, which is exactly what previous owners of these two properties discovered. It all started in the late 1940s to early 1950s when one owner wanted to block bridge access to the other owner. When the other owner said, “well, you get your water from the spring on my property, so go find your own water”, the problems began.

Ever since Hardy Ranch was split up, there’s been nothing but disputes, disagreements, arguments and vitriolic lawsuits. In the end, the only real winners were lawyers. Both the owners and the property itself suffered great losses in these disputes, as well as the greater Downieville community that depends on this property as a community asset.

It is the mission of LSD, LLC to bring this property back to its full potential, making it once again an invaluable local community asset. It is also our mission to tell the story of this historically rich and beautiful property, which is what Lure Lore is all about.

We are blessed to have guests who’ve been visiting The Lure for generations, and we want your stories. The best way we can tell the history of this place is through the people who’ve been coming here for decades. We invite you to share your photos and stories; whether it be through email, or when you come and visit us. We’ll be putting guest journals in every cabin, and invite you to scribble your memories of this place while sitting along the North Yuba; what it looked like, where the old cabins were, stories of previous owners, all the gold you found and trophy fish you caught.

2020 is going to be an amazing year, and we look forward to sharing memories both new and old with our valued guests.