So Yesterday

Yuba City Native John Montgomery Flew 20 Years Before The Wright Brothers

Before European discovery of the Sacramento Valley, elk rummaged through tall tules beneath skies so dense with waterfowl their loose feathers floating on the water’s surface gave name to a river.

By 1850, the valley was being transformed. The elk were eradicated by hunting, tules displaced by swampland reclamation projects, and the sky thinning of waterfowl.
Today, the sky above Sutter and Yuba counties remains one of the most heavily traveled routes of the Pacific Flyway, one of the four largest migratory routes for birds in the United States. In the 1850s and 1860s, however, the bird and waterfowl population over Yuba City was much larger.

His mother told the story that, as a toddler, John Montgomery spent hours lying on the ground staring up in careful study of the birds—the shapes of their bodies, especially their wings. This boyhood fascination with the birds in the sky over Yuba City, where Montgomery was born in 1858, helped Montgomery make outstanding contributions to aviation.

Before the end of the 19th century, Montgomery conducted an historic flight. Twenty years before Orville and Wilbur Wright’s historic moment, the boy from Yuba City conducted the first controlled flight of an airplane—a glider he built with wings of unbleached muslin shaped like a gull, the first glider ever with flight controls and shaped airfoil.

Montgomery’s early research into the nature of the laws of flight by building and testing a series of gliders, and his development of improved methods of glider control, informed future generations of plane builders. In fact, the first patent for an “aeroplane” belonged to John Montgomery, a term he coined.

He held patents on hinged surfaces at the rear of the wing and a patent for the parabolic wing. In 1910, he demonstrated the first tandem wing.
Montgomery also became popular for public demonstrations of his gliders, which brought wide-spread attention to aviation.

In San Diego, site of his first flight on Aug. 28, 1883, there is an airfield named after him. His biographer, Arthur Dunning Spearman, calls him “The Father of Basic Flight.”
The Western Museum of Flight in Hawthorne, Ca., has an exact replica of the 1883 Montgomery Glider. It has a wing span of just over 23 feet, an overall length of just over 10 feet, and a height of more than six feet. It weighs 40 pounds.

At dawn on that August day in 1883, John Montgomery, then 25, and his brother, James, loaded the “aeroplane” onto a wagon and hid it under a stack of hay for a ride to the edge of a mesa on the family’s property in San Diego County.

The San Diego Historical Society gives this description of what happened next:

“Out on the mesa’s edge on the family’s Otay Valley ranch, John assembled his craft. The wings were shaped like a gull’s wings, as wide as a baseball coach’s third base box. The brothers waited until the breezes picked up. James had tied a rope on the front and waited a dozen feet or so down the slope until John shouted, ‘Now!’ James pulled the rope and together they ran a few steps until the ‘Gull Glider’ was aloft. At a height of about fifteen feet, the wiry, one-hundred and thirty pound John Joseph Montgomery flew six hundred feet to a graceful landing…It was the world’s first controlled heavier-than-air flight and preceded Orville Wright’s engine-driven flight by twenty years.”

Years later, Montgomery described how he felt during the flight.

“I took this apparatus to the top of a hill facing a gentle wind. There was a little run and a jump and I found myself launched in the air. A peculiar sensation came over me. The first feeling in placing myself at the mercy of the wind was that of fear. Immediately after came a feeling of security when I realized the solid support given by the wing-surface. And that support was of a very peculiar nature. There was as cushiony softness about it, yet it was firm. When I found the machine would follow any movement in the seat for balancing, I felt I was self-buoyant . . .”

Over the next 10 years, Montgomery continued to study the lift effects of various airfoil designs, all informed by the bird studies he first conducted in the skies of Yuba City. In 1884, his design and experimental results were published in summary form in Octave Chanute’s “Progress in Flying.” The Wright Brothers read this book.

In 1910, John Montgomery entered into an agreement with Victor Loughead (later Lockheed) to build the frame of an aircraft, a highwing monoplane with landing gear, a modern-looking yoke control stick, and a bucket type seat. While test-flying the plane on October 17, 1911, John Montgomery, who fell in love with flying while a toddler in Yuba City, and the man who coined the term “aeroplane,” crashed and was killed.

The way W.T. Ellis told it, it was in the late 1880s or early 1890s when a mass of caterpillars tried to invade the City of Marysville, a mass so large it stopped trains in their tracks.

Ellis, the levee expert and the man after whom the city’s lake is named (he sold the city the land under the lake for $1) wrote about the episode in his 1939 autobiography, “Memories: My Seventy-Two Years In The Romantic County Of Yuba.”

According to Ellis, who would have been about 20 years old at the time, the area that now comprises much of West and East Linda was a vast wilderness of trees and underbrush, wild grape and blackberry vines, especially along the south bank of the Yuba River and eastern bank of the Feather River.

One day, in an occurrence that has apparently never been repeated, this riparian forest, as Ellis noted, “suddenly developed a tremendous number of caterpillars. They were about three inches long and half an inch thick and for quite a while they spent their efforts in devouring all the leaves from all the trees and brush in this forest…”

Across the Yuba River between Marysville and Linda at that time was a wooden Southern Pacific railroad trestle and a wooden bridge for wagon and foot traffic.

When the caterpillars “had about cleaned off all such available green leaves, etc., they started across both the wooden wagon bridge and also the Southern Pacific railroad trestle, presumably on the hunt on the north side of the river for more food supplies.”

The bugs wreaked havoc with the trains, “the masses of caterpillars on the rails making them so slippery that the engine’s wheels could not get traction enough to make headway.”

To stop the progress of the caterpillars across the wagon bridge, several men from town spread many barrels of soft tar across a 20-foot wide swath of the bridge, on the floor and on the railing. But the caterpillars kept on heading toward town, climbing across those bugs which became stuck in the tar. Only after several applications of tar over several interesting days did the progression of the caterpillar mass stop, and the caterpillars gradually disappeared.

Ellis, whose book is out of print but is available for viewing on-line through the Library of Congress, is considered an expert on many things about Marysville, but he confessed about this incident, “Just what caused this immense mass of caterpillars appearing on this one and only occasion, I have never found out.”

When I was growing up, there was a feeling that not many people who left here achieved success. Well, actually, there was a feeling that unless you left here you would not achieve success, but that is a different story.

You would think, though, that since Marysville’s first elected official, Stephen J. Field, went on to become one of the longest serving members of the United States Supreme Court, that one of the state’s earliest governors hailed from Marysville, and that the first American to fly an airplane was born in Yuba City, there wouldn’t be this feeling that good things can’t happen to people from Yuba-Sutter.

But there is, and it will take a few more success stories to overcome this notion.

In the meantime, there’s Harold Ross.

I don’t know what the circulation of The New Yorker magazine is in the 95901 area code, but there is a direct connection between what that magazine is today and the city of Marysville. For in 1910 and 1911, Harold Ross, the founder of The New Yorker magazine, one of the most prestigious magazines in the world, was the teenage editor of the Marysville Appeal.

Harold Ross was born in Aspen, Colorado and, following in the tradition of Mark Twain, became a tramp reporter in the American west. Among his stops was the Sacramento Union and the Marysville Appeal, and when the Appeal’s editor died in 1910, 18-year-old Ross took over the reins of the newspaper.

He later became the first editor of the Stars and Stripes newspaper, which emerged during World War I. As the founder and editor of The New Yorker, he used his unsurpassed skills as an editor to create one of the finest magazines in the world.

More research is needed on Harold Ross’ time here–which means several trips to the Yuba County library to see what Ross was up to during his time here. One can only imagine what kind of fun he was up to in downtown Marysville during those years–he had a reputation wherever he went to be a hard-working, hard-drinking journalist.

There was a different breed of newspaper editor in the frontier American west.
At least in the California of the 1850s. Particularly in the scrappy little Gold Rush town of Marysville.
How else can you explain the early morning gun duel between the editors of rival Marysville newspapers on a lonely road south of Yuba City?
Several local histories have made general mention of the duel between Judge Oliver Stidger and Col. Richard Rust, editors of the Marysville Herald and the Marysville Express. But the Californian magazine has the most detailed account of the events at sunrise on an August morning in 1853, an article informed largely by a 1901 book entitled, “Bench and Bar in California.”
Judge Stidger, of Ohio, was an editor of the Marysville Herald newspaper, an antecedent of The Appeal-Democrat. The Herald was one of the first periodicals to spring up in Marysville, one of the first in the state, actually.
Col. Rust was a Southerner, editor of the short-lived Marysville Express, and a man whose familiarity with the weapons used in the gun duel gave him a distinct advantage.
There is insufficient research on the exact nature of the dispute that led directly to the challenge to the duel, but, not unlike many periodicals of the time, the editorials of the Herald and the Express often included sharp words—often personal—about the positions held by the opposing editors.
The Herald and Express clashed especially over the issue of slavery and other disputes between the North and South in the mid-19th century.
Although 1853 was 10 years before the start of the Civil War, the American expansion west had touched off strident wars of words over the future of what contemporary writers called the Peculiar Institution of slavery. Southerners wanted slavery expanded into the new American territories.
Northerners–mostly for economic, not humanitarian, reasons—wanted to block slavery in the newer states.
Those who came west brought with them the prejudices of their home states. And Southerners, in particular, brought with them the time-honored traditions like the “code duello”—the practice of engaging in fights to the death over the slightest injury to a man’s integrity.
And in the journalistic practice of the 19th century, a person’s integrity was attacked every day in the newspaper for the position one took on political matters. Modern political pundits might point out that things have not changed, but in the 19th century it was not uncommon for editors to not just espouse their views, but to fight for them.
In the war of words, Judge Stidger was considered the better of Rust because, his contemporaries said, Stidger “could think of more mean things to say in one minute than Rust could think of in a single day.”
When Stidger pushed his poison pen too far for his liking, Col. Rust publicly challenged the Northerner to finish their dispute “in the field of honor.”
Perhaps Col. Rust believed that Judge Stidger lacked the nerve to accept his challenge. The Southerner may have assumed that the man from Ohio lacked the spine to go through with it.
But turning down such a challenge carried consequences that many men feared more than their own death. Branded as a coward, Stidger would have to leave the immediate territory.
Stidger accepted his rival editor’s challenge and, as was the custom, was given the first choice of weapons and the distance at which they would be discharged. Stidger chose Buckeye rifles, a weapon he was familiar with, at 60 paces, but was disappointed when a pair of Buckeye rifles could not be located in Marysville.
Stidger agreed, however, to the use of Mississippi Yagers, a weapon he was not familiar with. He did not know it, but he was being set up.
One week passed between the time of the challenge and the actual duel, and in that time two things happened that had significant consequences.
First, the sheriff of Yuba County informed the men that the “code duello” would not be tolerated east of the Feather River, which forced the men to cross the river into Sutter County.
Second, word of the duel spread throughout Marysville, so that an occasion that normally involved only the participants and their trusted friends—or seconds—was witnessed by more than 100 residents of Marysville.
After a stressful week, the two men arrived before sunrise alongside a road about two miles south of Yuba City, about halfway to Sutter’s Hock Farm.
“What kind of gun do you call this?” Stidger is said to have asked a Dr. McDaniel who accompanied him. “The bore can carry a half-pound ball; if I get hit there won’t be a grease-spot left of me. I never saw a gun like this before and I don’t know how to handle it.”
The duel was fought at sunrise. At the count of three, each was to fire a single shot. Their seconds looked on in fear for the lives of their respective friends.
Stidger’s shot went high.
Rust’s shot, however, was more accurate. It entered the coat of Stidger and lodged next to handkerchief in his pocket.
“Stand straighter,” Dr. McDaniel told Stidger, complaining this his twisted posture was providing too wide a target. “You must kill him or he will kill you.”
“I don’t want to kill him” Stidger said. “He has a family to maintain.”
The contestants fired a second round—and both missed again.
Stidger, in disgust, threw down his weapon. “Doc, this gun ain’t worth a damn. I don’t believe a man could hit a barn door with it at a distance of six feet.”
The seconds called a halt to the duel before the farce could continue, claiming that both parties had been “satisfied.”
Charlie Fairfax, the second for Col. Rust, is later said to have spoken in glowing terms of Judge Stidger. “People don’t need to tell me that men born in the North are cowards. I know better. They have pluck and will die game.”

Last week, I attended a dinner honoring those individuals and businesses who make financial contributions to the Fremont-Rideout Foundation. Because Rideout Hospital is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, the event had an historical feel to it.

Interestly, at our table of eight was a woman who said she found three relatives on Kathy Sedler’s YubaRoots.comwebsite. That gave me chills, because I keep running into people who have gotten something from that site, which contains more than 40,000 pages of local history. (Keep it up, Kathy).

Also at our table was a young man who was very excited about having learned recently of some of the fascinating history of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, which he was sharing. I know nothing of the history of the church except that it was once the diocese for this area. The only other thing I know about the Catholic church here is that a church bishop was disappointed to learn that the city was not named after the virgin Mary, but rather Mary the Donner Party survivor.

And then among all the talk about history at our table was a woman who said, “I think she must be crazy, but a friend of mine insists that the first Macy’s store was in Marysville. Now that just couldn’t be right, could it?”

Well, that woman’s friend might be crazy but she is also right. Marysville was the location of the first store opened by Rowland H. Macy, at least in California, if not anywhere. During the Gold Rush days when Marysville experienced 50 years of growth in just five years, Rowland and his brother, Charles, opened a dry goods store in Marysville and operated it for a few years before Rowland headed back east. Charles, who married here and had children, stayed behind and is buried in the Marysville City Cemetery.

“Well if the first Macy’s was here, then where is the parade?” the woman replied.

I can’t quite describe my reaction to this question. It was somewhere between “You’re a genius,” and “I can’t believe I haven’t thought of this before,” with a mixture of “duh” sprinkled in.

Yes, Marysville needs a Macy’s Parade. And, I think, if I know the local costumed history crusaders well enough, there will be sometime in 2008 a Macy’s Parade. When, how big it will be, and all that I have no clue right now, but I know a good idea when it hits me in the forehead at a formal dinner for Fremont-Rideout.

Help me with ideas, folks, but I tell you that this little city would get a lot of attention having a Macy’s Parade–not on Thanksgiving, no. In Marysville, folks like to do other things than go to parades on Thanksgiving Day, like reverently watch football games and deep-fry turkeys. But sometime say in October, about when Beckwourth Frontier Days used to occur.

Watch for it. I can almost guarantee it. With any luck, Macy’s will sue to stop us and we will get even more publicity.

As an epicenter of the Gold Rush, Marysville was visited by many interesting characters in the 1850s.

James Beckwourth, the African-American mountain man who discovered the lowest elevation pass through the Sierra Nevada and led the first wagon train into Marysville, is perhaps the most colorful. Legally a slave at birth, he lived 10 years among the Crow Indians as a war chief, and was a dashing figure on a horse.

New York attorney Stephen J. Field was the city’s first elected official, instituted the whipping post as a way to dissuade vigilantes from hanging petty criminals, and became the first United States Supreme Court Justice from west of the Mississippi.

Marysville attorney William Turner led invasions of Nicaragua and Honduras, insisted that English be the official language, and was hanged.

Mark Twain visited Marysville and called it one of the most well built cities in all of California.

Some characters were less colorful, but nonetheless significant to American history. And when they crossed paths, these characters sometimes created moments that, when viewed through the lens of history, were of great irony.

Christian Louis Flick and his wife, Barbara, were political refugees from Germany, a newlywed couple who had been inspired by the political theories of Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, collaborators of the theory of Communism. Their radicalism forced the Flicks to flee the tyranny of the monarchs of Europe. Upon their arrival in America, they moved first to St. Charles, Louisiana, before joining the throng of 500,000 people who moved to California during the Gold Rush.

They settled in Marysville, where Christian opened what their descendants claim was the new town’s first barbershop and, two year’s later, a hotel they named after their first home in America, the St. Charles.

It is at the St. Charles Hotel that an odd historical connection occurred. Among the hotels first guests was Rowland H. Macy, who, along with his brother, Charles, established a dry goods store in Marysville. The former whalers from New York operated a store in their name for several years until it ultimately failed. Charles remained in Marysville, and is buried at the historic Marysville City Cemetery. His brother, however, moved back to New York, where he opened another store you may have heard of: Macy’s.

Yes, before he founded the mother ship of the giant Macy’s chain, Rowland H. Macy opened a Macy’s in Marysville. The very first one in California, if not the first anywhere.

But what makes his crossing the paths of Christian and Barbara Flick so ironic?

As one of the premiere capitalists of the 19th century, Rowland H. Macy is an icon for the free enterprise system.

And although the Flicks moved away from Communism and became quite successful as capitalists in the New World, their offspring remained wary of capitalism. Their daughter, Barbara, who was born in Marysville, met and married San Francisco writer and politician Hugh Jonathon Mohan. The Mohans had a daughter, Louise Bryant, who was born in Reno and who, as a young girl, witnessed terrible violence inflicted upon striking railroad workers. Passionately anti-capitalist, she is notorious both for her politics and her marriage to Communist writer and activists John Reed, whose life was dramatized in the 1980s movie Reds.

So Marysville, it turns out, gave birth to Macy’s, a major capitalist icon, and the mother of one of the most notorious Communists in the 20th century.

Hmmmmmm. Who says nothing ever happens here.

OK, I finally figured out how to get the 1994 Marysville City Cemetery video on You Tube. Now that I did all that work, you have to at least watch it. And then let me know what you think. You can also sign up for a Nov. 3, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. cleanup day. Or, as I like to call it, a Work Party! Sign up, sign up whoever you are.

Go here to see the video.

Just a brief post about Stephen J. Field, Marysville’s first elected official. The New York attorney who was elected alcalde three days after arriving in “Yubaville”, which was renamed Marysville on the night of the Jan. 18, 1850 election which created the city, went on to become the first United States Supreme Court Justice from the American west. Today I discovered his New York Times obituary online. Great little piece of history. Click and enjoy.

Back in the early 1990s, when Rand McNally for a second (or was it a third?) time ranked the Yuba City Metropolitan Statistical Area as the “worst” of the metro areas to live in, the Yuba-Sutter Chamber of Commerce hired me to write an article in defense of Yuba-Sutter.

In this process, I met my wife. So this was a very happy assignment, indeed.

In the article, I turned the idea that this is the worst place to live upside down.

In fact, I argued that this has been the most popular place in all of the United States to live for longer than any other area.

How can this be? Well, anthropologists from UC Berkeley believe that during the 10,000 years that the Maidu lived in this region, this was the most densely populated area of all of the North American continent.

Certainly there were so many native Americans living here at the time of European discovery of the upper Sacramento Valley that neither Spain nor, later, Mexico wanted anything to do with it. Between the Indians and the annual inland sea created by flooding this part of California was written off as uninhabitable by Europeans and Americans (maybe that was Rand McNally’s source, too.)

But the Maidu, which means “people”, thrived in the mild climate, with a ready food source. They learned to anticipate the flooding and traveled between the mountains and the valleys with the seasons. Valley in the milder temperatures, the mountains in the heat of winter.

After writing the article, I received a phone call from the woman who was designing the Chamber of Commerce publication. She wondered, she said, if I hadn’t made a mistake. Could the Maidu have lived here for 10,000 years, when Marysville had only been around since 1850?

Yes, I said. Of course–and as usual–I then spent the next 15 minutes explaining the whole thing.

Later that woman was in charge of seating for a Chamber of Commerce dinner. She arranged to sit by me. I’m so glad she liked history, because we got married five years later at Beckwourth Frontier Days on the banks of the Feather River, with native Americans, mountain men, saloon girls, miners and a clown on stilts in attendance.

Thanks, Linda, for asking about the Maidu. And thank you, Maidu.

Here’s a great link about all things Maidu.

Today was one of those days I look forward to every year. My interest in local history has given me an opportunity to do something that I consider a real honor, and something so sublime and subversive that I can’t believe they let me get away with it.

This morning I had my yearly opportunity to teach local history to the emerging leaders of Yuba and Sutter counties. For more than a decade, I have had the privilege of teaching the local history portion of the curriculum for the Yuba-Sutter Chamber of Commerce’s LEAD Yuba^Sutter program.

LEAD is a program that attracts about 15 new, mostly young business and civic leaders each year who spend one day a month for several months learning about the nuts and bolts of the community and how everything has developed and how everything works, from water and flood control issues, to agriculture, to local government, local schools, local arts…well, you get the picture.

Years ago, when LEAD was brand new, I was approached by John Cassidy, now of Sierra Central Credit Union, and asked if I would coordinate a history and cultural diversity day for the program. For three or four years, I was in charge of the whole day, and arranged tours of the Marysville City Cemetery, the Bok Kai Temple, and the Tierra Buena Road Sikh Temple. Over the years, this day has continued but I have been responsible only for the history portion, which has been whittled down from two hours to one hour.

This single hour a year, however, gives me an immense pleasure. I think about it as September approaches and I try to bring something different to the time each year.

This year, I played the 30-minute word/slide/music show that I developed for the celebration of Marysville’s anniversary and then lectured on the rivalry between Marysville and Yuba City and how Marysville’s dominance as the economic center ended in 1975 when Yuba City for the first time surpassed Marysville in sales tax revenues.

What’s sublime about this is the opportunity to have an intelligent discussion about these issues with an eager, smart crowd of folks who care enough about the community to participate in such a program. What’s subversive about it is that, because of this program, I have had the opportunity to put my spin on the history of the development of the community that has been presented to more than 150 influential and emerging leaders in the community. Many in the classes over the years have gone on to play key roles in local business, government and non-profit organizations. City council members, school board members, business owners all have been exposed to my perspective on local history, and I have never been shy about expressing my perspective. I feel good at the thought that I might have played some small part in their understanding of the community in which they serve and do business.

So what do I teach these emerging community leaders?

Essentially, that there have been three primary economies in the Yuba-Sutter region. During the 10,000 year presence of the Maidu, the economy was what the river and the valley and the mountains yielded in the way of food and beads. Following the discovery of gold, mining was king. But by the end of the 19th century, farming was the chief economy.

Civic and political loyalties were divided by the Feather River. Yuba City and Marysville were natural rivals as each sought the tallest, strongest levees, the biggest commercial opportunities, and the best high school football teams.

One antedote I love to share is the story of the Big-Little Game contests between Marysville and Yuba City, when 2,000 people on one side of the football field yelled in unison at the Yuba City Honkers, “Geese, Geese, Ducks, Ducks Yuba City Sucks,” and 2,000 people on the opposite side of the stadium rocked slowly back and forth and chanted in unison, “Poooooooooor Marysville. Poooooooooor Marysville.”

Former Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Karen Naylor told me in the 1990s that one of the issues that caused problems in bringing the business community together is that the boys from Yuba City who were in business had played football against the boys from Marysville who were now in business.

Bill Fuller, the former City Administrator of Yuba City, told me of the story passed down at Yuba City Hall about the time when former Marysville Mayor Gavin Mandery described Yuba City at a League of California Cities event as “a bedroom community of Marysville.”

I forgot to tell the story today about how Sutter County river divers used to bring the bodies of drowning victims up on the Yuba County side of the river, so Yuba County would bear the costs associated with investigating the death, or how the former Yuba City Police Chief used to escort transients to the Marysville city limits and inform them that they would be arrested if they returned to Yuba City.

I’m sure these things don’t happen anymore, but I’m glad to repeat the stories. It’s nice to think we have moved a little bit beyond the days of “Geese, Geese, Ducks, Ducks,” but my Marysville friends are still angry at me whenever I tell the story of how Yuba City is actually older than “California’s Oldest Little City.”

All in all, I don’t know how much these folks get out of my hour-long presentation, but I hope they take something of value away from it.

I certainly do.