Lawman - The Beginning

Lawman, The Beginning
Chapter 3
In The Settlers Series
By HLGordon


At 22 years of age, Hans Muller left the family milling business in Germany and immigrated to London in search of work. It was late 1835 when he hired on with a labor firm building a railroad from London to Edenborough. Once settled in London, he worked as a laborer and saved his money. Being a business minded person and not wanting to spend his own life as a laborer, he sought opportunity within the labor camps that were building roads and coal mines along the border between Scotland and England.

Supplying food and equipment to the labor camps was a full time career in its self. Hans, knowing the family business of milling wheat into flour, soon met up with a young Irish born man named Phillip Mooney who’s father grew wheat. The two bonded quickly and with Mooney’s connections with local farmers and government supply buyers and Muller’s savvy in the milling trade and his uncanny talent at building just about anything, the two soon built one of many flour mills that supplied flour to the labor camps. From there the two branched out into bakeries and their business flourished.

Toward the end of 1841 it all came to an end when a stray bullet struck and killed Muller’s wife, the niece of Mooney, as she boarded her carriage. Muller became despondent and in a drunken rage he and Mooney fought. Muller killed his partner and was arrested for murder.

A friend of the Local Constable, Muller was able to gather up some of his finances and hide it. He was tried and imprisoned for 9 years for the killing. He was released from custody in 1850 and booked passage on the first ship to America under the name of Homer Miller. Into the new world he took his business sense and enough money to see him out west where he once again became a laborer for a short time. He later took a job in security and gave up laboring and went into being a lawman.

By 1854 Homer Miller married Kelly Kroeger, a homesteaders daughter and lay roots in America. He turned to one of two trades that were available to most immigrants. He could become a bandit, robbing travelers on the trails of the new world or join the other side and hunt down outlaws and bring them to justice. Thus, Hans Muller became Homer Miller and a long line of lawmen were born.

Homer and Kelly Miller bore 13 children.

1855 – Twin girls – Addie & Abigail.
Abigail died of the flu at 9 months of age.
1856 – Homer
1857 - Asbury
1858 – Henry – died at birth
1859 - Buford
1861 – Twins girls- Connie and Rachel
1862 - Cordell
1863 - Otto
1865 - Lily
1866 – Raymond - killed by a horse at age 9
1867 – Johnny


Central California, 1858

The years between 1845 and 1855 brought a flood of prospectors into California. Lured by land and gold, hordes of newcomers poured into California, penetrating the most remote valleys and mountains searching for gold, timber, &land. The hoard overwhelmed the native peoples. Gold had been discovered in the Sierra Nevada as far south as Coarse Gold Gulch (Texas Flat) in the foothills and in the San Joaquin River by 1849. By January of 1851, the miners had begun to arrive. First a few and then more men came that were determined to wash the gold from the streams and rivers of this region. Territorial rights of the Indians meant nothing to the white men. The resulting confrontation between the Anglos and Indians was ugly and brutal. Throughout the state the native peoples were the victims of an almost every conceivable tragedy brought on by disease, starvation, and outright genocidal campaigns. In a less than ten years, the Indian population of the central valley and adjacent foothills and mountains plummeted from 150,000 to about 50,000.

What had been a desolate and an untouched wilderness suddenly began to change as the stream of prospectors, flooded into San Francisco. From there they walked, drove wagons or rode mules and horses to every square inch of the entire foothill range from the northern slopes of the eastern San Joaquin Valley to the Tehachapi Mountains. Every river, stream and gully was investigated as the new breed of Americans came from every corner of the globe, seeking their fame and fortune. Gold fever was epidemic. There were one hundred seventy (170) gold claims within 40 miles of Bakersfield and fifty (50) claims within 40 miles of Fresno.

Along with the Gold diggers came the US Army, stationed at the newly built Fort Miller, near Table Mountain. The Central California foothills turned not so friendly when it came to hoards of white men tramping through the hunting grounds of the Indians, and even worse, through the Native American’s sacred burial grounds. The miners and gold seekers had no respect for the Indian customs and religion and often desecrated burial sites looting trinkets that could be sold or bartered. An industry for “savage artifacts” sprang up in the influential societies in Chicago and New York as Wild West shows turned the Wild West into a carnival atmosphere.

Cattlemen and ranchers moved into the Valley and grazed the cattle that fed the rapidly growing population of San Francisco. Wheat became a growing concern for the much needed bread that the growing population demanded. Cattle, to the indigenous Indians, became that much more game to be hunted. Peace was fragile and skirmishes became frequent. Remote cabins began to spring up along the base of the Sierra Nevada foothills from prospectors who became stranded or could go no further. Many gave up the search for gold and turned to survival. The trees that were so plentiful along the valley floor and foothills supplied lumber to build cabins where miners could hold up for the winter. Many of these refuges found themselves as havens in the wilderness for other miners traveling up and down the foothills. These men became traders in furs, horses, mules, mining equipment and food for those that worked their way higher into the mountains and streams.

Each stream or river that flowed from the Sierras cut deep ravines that washed its’ sediment out onto the fertile valley floor. These locations became pristine sites for weigh stations as men worked the mouths of the streambeds up the mountainside toward the headwaters. One such place was Cactus Corner. A rocky outcrop on the valley floor, near what would later be the town of Orange Cove.

“Flatter than a tabletop
Makes you wonder why they even stopped here
Wagon must have lost a wheel or they lacked ambition one.

On the great migration west
Separated from the rest
Though they might have tried their best
They never caught the sun…

So they sunk some roots down in the dirt
To keep from blowin' off the earth
And built a town around here…”

Levelland
Robert Earl Keen

Mill Creek drained into the valley lakebed and flowed down toward the Kings River. Ions of erosion had cut the deep gorge through the mountains and foothills as the waters receded. Outcrops of rocks and boulders scattered over the alluvial plain were left exposed as a haven for squirrels, coyotes and rattlesnakes. The miners, working the watershed put up lean-tos for shelter at the base of the foothills as a resting point before they began working up from the mouth of the gorge toward the headwaters. These locations became remote beacons in the wilderness for rendezvous and supplies for the prospectors who worked the Central Sierra’s. Soon a route was established that ran from Bakersfield, north along the foothills to Lemon Cove, Woodlake, Visalia, Stone Corral, Yettem, Orosi, Orange Cove, Cactus Corner, Navelencia, Minkler, Clovis, Fort Miller and Fresno Crossing.

Homer and Kelly Miller settled in Visalia where Homer found a job as Deputy for Sheriff David Hudson. The Sheriff’s Office had grown since the Gold Rush as conflicts between the Indians and prospectors skyrocketed. Until Fort Miller was built, the jurisdictional Sheriff was the only law in the southern portion of the valley. Homer spent most of his nights camped out on the grassy slopes between Visalia and Cactus Corner. Pete Thompson, the Deputy from Fresno Crossing was his counterpart to the north and covered Fresno, south to Cactus Corner. The Army had hired the half-breed Tommy Nine Toes to Marshal the Indians. The three often met at the Post at Cactus Corner and spent many nights at the campfire talking about their work and families that none of the men saw very often.

Tommy Nine Toes was the son of Rancher Dorset McGowan and his wife the Yokut Princess, Darcy Yono, granddaughter of a Chow-chil-lies Chieftain named KAY-O-YA. Dorset had insisted the boy be educated in the white man’s schools and his wife, who usually got her way with the rancher, saw to it that he was also schooled in the Chow-chil-lies fashion. The boy was gifted in the Indian tradition and grew up in both worlds and was respected by both the whites and the Indians. He was christened Tommy Dorset McGowan but his name was changed to Tommy Nine Toes after a slip with an axe as a young boy left him with only nine toes.

The local Cattlemen and a small village of Yokut Indians had been fighting over a stand of sacred Sycamore’s near Woodlake. The sight was an ancient burial ground and the Cattlemen had been grazing their cattle under the trees that sheltered the burial sight. To the Indians a deer that grazed in a burial site was blessed and the hunter that brought down such an animal outside of the burial grounds would also be blessed. But cattle were different. To the Yokuts the cattle had no souls and were destroying the grasslands and driving the deer away. This was disturbing to their ancestors and would bring bad luck upon the village. The Yokuts drove the cattle out of the area and scattered them. In the process a few of the cattle came up missing and the Cattlemen blamed the Indians. A report had come into Sheriff Miller that the Cattlemen were putting together a band of hired prospectors and former soldiers and were preparing to ride against the small Indian village. Homer was sent to meet up with Tommy and Pete to investigate the trouble and try to avoid an incident and keep peace between the Cattlemen, the local Indians and the Army.

Tommy had tracked the missing cattle south of Woodlake to Crawford’s Valley, south of Fresno. There he found that three cowboys that had worked a variety of ranches in the area had cut the cattle out of the herd after they had scattered and drove them back into the small valley to hide them. Tommy rode back to meet with Homer and Pete. Together the three cornered the three rustlers in the valley and rode in to make the arrest and return the cattle before a war broke out.

The mouth of the valley was about a quarter mile wide. Once through the mouth the landscape opened up into a pristine valley that went back against the foothills nearly a mile wide and as long. At dusk, the three lawmen spread apart about three hundred feet and rode through the opening into the alluvial valley gorged out of the granite by ice over forty million years ago. As the ice receded and melted, the gorge filled with water to form a shallow lake. The lake eventually filled in with sediment and had grown deep and fertile through the years as the lake dried up and the valley formed. Tommy rode to the North, Pete rode down the center and Homer took the south side. If the cowboys tried to run they would be seen.

The three slowed as the smell of smoke reached them. On further through the opening they saw the twinkle of fire in the distance. They closed ranks and rode in on the camp of rustlers.

As the rustlers sat around the fire, Pete, Homer and Tommy edged up in the darkness to surround the small camp. From the darkness Homer yelled out, “Why Jesse Tyler Moore? Is that you nestled up against that campfire with those stolen cattle,” to the cowboys who sat around the small fire.

The three rustlers dove for their weapons but Pete and Tommy were on them before they had run ten feet.

“Hmmmm. White man no smart,” Tommy threw in humorously. “On run, steal cattle, build fire for all to see. Hmmm. Not good.”

Seeing their predicament, the smaller cowboy dove for his rifle that leaned up against the stump of an old Sycamore that had fallen in the winter of
’47. Homer drew his weapon and fired from twenty-five feet out. The slug ripped through the rustler’s neck severing his juggler and breaking his neck. The cowboy was dead before he hit the dirt.

“Ok you boys. Throw down or wind up like your friend there.” Pete chimed in. Four hands reached for the sky and the skirmish was over.

With one strapped across his saddle, two in cuffs and eight head of cattle tied front to back, the group headed out at first light back to Woodlake to return the cattle to the Ranchers and then on to Visalia to deal with the rustlers.