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To Subscribers:
My apologies. Endemic sloth, our move within Bernal Depths, health issues, no-excuse digressions, and Golden State hoops (83 TV games so far) combine as inadequate excuses for an unproductive Substack winter. Until now.
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Notes
Crowds
Contemporary newspaper reports on Coloma’s hangings estimate the crowds of onlookers at 5,000 or more. It’s a default number, a journalistic staple when nobody actually counts heads.
The Restoration Press
Just now concocted by True Yarns, Ltd., this whimsical news service publishes imaginary historic dispatches with real facts and observations assembled from available sources. (Beware. Some may be twisted, based on shaky assumptions, out-of-context, or in need of background. Textbooks and most histories – including [sigh] the Restoration Press – tend to overlook these probabilities.)
By framing history as news, the format invites readers to experience news events of the bewildering past. It doesn’t allow updates, aftermath, or whatever happens to David E. Buel.
So, a few updates.
Updates
Mass Migration
The valley of the American River’s South Fork had been home for tens of thousands of years to tribal communities with dome-shaped lodges of cedar bark. In 1846, Nisenan tribal workers from the Yalisumni and Koloma rancherias alert carpenter Jim Marshall to a few flecks of gold at the bottom of his tailrace for a sawmill under construction. They had no way to know that the shiny stuff – worthless to them –would in fewer than five years sweep away their wonderland. The workers get no credit. Jim’s revelation soon sets off the Gold Rush, a worldwide migration to backwoods California by as many as 300,000 optimists.
“The Gilded Man”
In El Dorado County nine years later, about 80,000 would-be tycoons try to upturn every piece of ground, cut down every live oak, and turn every trout stream into a mosquito bog. One traveler names the Coloma river valley “The Devil’s Punchbowl.” Others choose El Dorado, “the Gilded Man,” then at the heart of what will be known as the Mother Lode.
The First People never had a chance. But their name Cullumah (“beauty”) is preserved, with a translated variation, as Coloma.
David E. Buel
After his feat in extracting Jeremiah from a lynch-obsessed mob, El Dorado County voters would have re-elected their herculean sheriff for a lifetime of law enforcement. Colonel Buel, an honorary nickname, is also known as Uncle Dave. He chooses instead a lifetime of moving from place to place, job to job, and mine to mine. After a Klamath stint as an honest (rare) Indian agent, he founds four Nevada towns, runs as a losing candidate for mayor of Austin and governor of Nevada, gets rich from hydraulic mining ventures, and sails seven times to and from Europe on business trips. He acquires considerable wealth, says an obit in 1888, “and an insatiable appetite for strong drink.” He drinks himself into abject poverty. Long since divorced from El Dorado County’s Nina Terrill, he lives in Salt Lake City but dies in Pulaski, Missouri, age 62. “He was a big-hearted, generous man.”
Disremembered
In El Dorado County last October, actors playing Susan and Jeremiah appear at the Placerville Union Cemetery in “The Newnham Murder,” one of four skits in the fifth annual Save the Graves campaign to restore regional cemeteries.
“Most people have never heard of these crimes,” theatrical director Kathleen Young tells the Mountain Democrat newspaper. (True Yarns, Ltd., relies on Young’s encyclopedic mastery of El Dorado County’s history.) A docent at Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park in Colma, she is involved also with Cemetery Players.
Otherwise, the two double hangings are long forgotten, even in today’s diminished ghost town (population 289). No plaques. No postcards. No history.
No surprise.
Few teachers, professors, novelists, and historians give much attention to California’s inglorious past. Joaquin Murrieta (or his imitators) becomes a Robin Hood, not a robber and casual murderer. John Sutter is a genial empire builder, not a half-soused pedophile and slavemaster. John Frémont is a brave explorer, not the vindictive leader in 1846 of three unknown massacres of hundreds of First People.
Accordingly, Golden State textbooks, state agencies, tourism brochures, TV dramas, and most movies paint the frontier era, the Gold Rush, and lethal cholera outbreaks as a time of adventure, romance, enchantment, and heroism.
Empty Archives
Searches of the California Digital Newspaper Collection come up with almost no post-gallows mentions of Free, Craine, and their send-off duet. Same with Newspapers.com, Google browsing, and digital archives of major newspapers. Exceptions include Mountain Democrat history columns by Herman Daniel Jerrett (1915), J. Barton Hassler (1962), Richard Hughey (2000) and Doug Noble (2020). Four.
The only book about the case is a hard-to-find, 40-page treatise, self-published and self-serving, written in jail by Jeremiah Craine himself. (A copy is available by appointment at the the Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park in Coloma.) Mickey reportedly writes a 5-cent booklet. No copies are known to have survived.
A two-part series by local history writer Jerrie Beard appears in 2012 in a Folsom-based regional magazine, Style. Nicely written but unevenly researched, the article isn’t helped by an editor’s choice of a fallacious title: “In History: El Dorado County’s Romeo and Juliet.”
The weekly Empire County Argus comes out the day after the second hangings with a Page 2 news report. All of seventy words.
Coloma
Thirty years after Jim Marshall sees gold in the tailrace near Coloma: “There is no hamlet in the Sierras more serene and poetic; the air is perfectly ethereal, during the day mellow and golden, during the night silver and purple. Then the moon rises over the hills, arraying orchards and piney summits and quiet cottages with veils of silken radiance.” – History of El Dorado County.
More than 2,500 acres of hillside vines replace today the ingots of gold extracted from El Dorado County’s hills by the cast-iron shovels of the Gold Rush. Two dozen small wineries produce chardonnay, grenache, zinfandel, and other high quality varietals in a stretch from Placerville to Fair Play and Camino. Two miles from Coloma, the only gold at Gold Hill Vineyard is the color of Tiny Bubbles sparkling wine, $15, “real good.”
Forgotten
Mickey lacks only a good press agent to rank with Joaquin Murrieta, John Joel Glanton, Andreas Hall, Slobbery Jim, and other hellhounds of the time. In a big city, Jeremiah’s lethal obsession could have been exploited by Pulitzer or Hearst in search of another circulation booster like big-brained Edward H. Rulloff, “The Murderous Philologist of Binghamton.”
Instead, Mickey and Jeremiah are soon disremembered. So is their implausible gallows musicale.
Hangings
Nooses are cheaper than bullets. A firing squad in the Revolutionary War carries a smoothbore Brown Bess musket, lead roundballs, a flask of black powder, and costly tools. This may explain how the penny-pinching U.S Congress, its arsenals empty, rules that a knotted, waxed rope is better for executions. Hard to tell. Spanish and Mexican rulers in Alta California prefer to blindfold and shoot their alleged felons, but public hangings come in with the 49ers. Imported are unforgiving laws from noose-addicted Great Britain (6,069 men and 375 women hanged from 1735 to 1799, years of the American revolution).
In 1872, appalled California legislators order a stop to public executions like the 66 hangings thus far in Coloma and elsewhere. Sheriffs must install scaffolds within the their jails and limit invitations. In 1891, much to the relief of the sheriffs, the job is shifted to the state. Until gas replaces the noose in 1927, 92 prisoners hang in the state prison at Folsom; 215 at San Quentin.
Graves
After 170 years, wooden markers make lousy tombstones. The former townlet of Ringgold is now farm country. El Dorado County grave preservationists are convinced that Susan Newnham’s parents would have buried her near the now-vanished farmhouse where she died, forever 17. If so, she lies beneath meadow barley in tiny Ringgold Cemetery at Big Cut and Quarry roads in the woodlands a few miles southeast of Placerville. No map. No caretaker. No headstone.
Soon after the hangings, Ben and Elizabeth Newnham say goodbye to Susan’s grave. They move the family back to Carroll County, Missouri, and, eventually, to Stephens County, Texas.
Necropolis investigators are convinced that Mickey Free and Jeremiah Craine reside in unmarked (and unknown) graves just outside Pioneer Cemetery in Coloma.
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Sources (partial)
“The Execution.” Sacramento Daily Union, Oct. 29, 1855. The editors give credit to observations by the Placerville American.
“Save the Graves digs up historical crime stories.” Placerville, CA: The Mountain Democrat, Oct.13, 2024.
Lauren Lutz. “The Empowerment of Specters.” Blog (undated). Ball State University, Muncie, Ind.
Andrew Jackson Davis. The Great Harmonia: Being a philosophical revelation of the natural, spiritual, and celestial universe. Boston: B.B. Mussey, 1850-51. Online: Internet Archive.
“Execution of Craine and Mickey Free, at Coloma.” Sacramento Daily Union, Oct. 27, 1855.
Charles Elmer Upton. Pioneers of El Dorado. Placerville: The Nugget Press, 1906.
Jeremiah Craine. The Conspirators’ Victims, or, The Life and Adventures of J.V. Craine, who was hung at Coloma, Cala., October 26, 1855. “Written by himself in prison, containing full details of his courtship and murder of Miss Susan N. Newnham, of Ringgold, El Dorado County, California.” Sacramento: Printed by Gardiner and Kirk], 1855. A copy is available by appointment at James Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park in Colma.
Benjamin Robert Tubb. “The Music of Henry Russell.” Website: Public Domain Music. Online: https://dirkncl.github.io/pdmusic_org/index.html
“A Relic of ’55.” Truckee Republican, April 9, 1884.
“Execution of Murderers.” Petaluma Evening Argus, Nov. 3, 1855.
Sacramento Daily Union. Dec. 15, 1855, p. 1. Copied from Miners’ Advocate, Diamond Springs, CA
Robert K. Elder. Last Words of the Executed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023.
“The Execution.” Placerville American, Oct. 29, 1855.
Albert L. Hurtado. “Field Note: Indians and the Gold Discovery at Coloma in 1846.” Western Historical Quarterly, Winter 2022.
Edward S. Slagle. Larger Than Life – The Exploits of the Miner and Adventurer David E. Buel. San Francisco: Everand/scibd (ebooks), 2013.
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