Sacramento
Bee
Sacramento,
California
Sunday, October 24, 1976
Scene page 1
By Jim Anderson
Bee Staff Writer
A DRUM ROLL, please. A page in history is about to be turned. A wee little page to be sure, but that after all, is what makes history the little stories collected and bound.
This is the story of a family drawn to California by gold fever during that frantic period between 1848 and 1852. They panned the streams and rivers around Coloma and El Dorado County, never with much success.
And when discouraged gold seekers began the big exodus to their homes in the East or down to Sacramento and San Francisco, this family stayed and stayed and stayed.
Their 109-year old Kloepfer-Luneman ranch, now totaling 539 acres between Rescue and Coloma, is being sold. Being sold, at least partly, to make room for the new rush into the gold country - a rush by city dwellers who want to get away from the crowds and back to the simpler ways, the ways of nature and independence.
But the story goes back further than 109 years. Louis and Elizabeth Kloepfer came across the plains from St. Louis in an oxen-drawn caravan arriving in Coloma in 1852, and four years after the tragic Donner Party attempted to cross the Sierra.
THEY WERE but a handful of the estimated 87,000 adventurers who arrived in California that year in search of gold. Preceding them had been 90,000 in 1849, 36,000 in ‘50 and 27,000 in ‘51. Some say 1852 marked the end of the gold rush - in that year 23,000 left the gold fields for home.
Their trip across the plains had been marked by tragedy, a nephew lost to Indians and their own child stillborn and buried in a shallow grave near the California-Nevada border during an Indian alert. Louis himself had been wounded accidentally in the knee during an Indian raid.
Louis’ granddaughter, Anne Luneman Baldwin, said in a recent interview with the Bee that she felt that the knee wound was the main reason her grandfather stayed in El Dorado County rather than returning east as most of the miners did in the 1850s.
"My grandmother accidentally shot him during an Indian attack and his knee bothered him for the rest of his life. He thought there would be no work for him back in St. Louis because he was crippled."
MRS. BALDWIN recently published a history of her family, their friends and neighbors and life in El Dorado County titled, "Joys and Tears of Yesteryears."
Her grandparents, she said searched for gold for several years with very little success. They lived in the common housing of the time, a bush house. The mills were shut down and no one was willing to give up the search for gold to go back and produce lumber. So buildings, if they weren’t made of brick, were constructed of rocks, mud and brush.
By 1857 it had become apparent to the Kloepfers that they weren’t going to get rich mining for gold - or even make a decent living, for that matter - and they began looking for agricultural land. In that year they found and purchased 160 acres for a total of $500, paying $100 a year for five years.
Louis continued to work the creeks in the area for gold, but more and more time was devoted to planting vineyards, vegetables and grains, Mrs. Baldwin said. A large, outdoor oven built shortly after 1857 for baking bread still stand today. It was made of rocks cemented together with mud and straw.
MRS. BALDWIN’S father, Francis X. "Frank" Lunemann (the last "n" was later dropped), was Elizabeth Kloepfer’s stepbrother. "My father was an adventurer," Mrs. Baldwin said. He had a short-lived career with a Mississippi River boat vaudeville troupe, she said, and he "joined the Army during the Civil War against his mother’s wishes."
After the war, she said, he "wanted to come out and visit his cousins in California, so he and another boy started walking, walking westward." When they could they hitchhiked a ride on a river boat, she said, but mostly they "hiked and hiked."
They reached Promontory, Utah in time to witness the joining of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads on May 10, 1869. "But he missed the big celebration that was going on in Sacramento," Mrs. Baldwin laughs. "And he would have enjoyed that more because that was his kind of fun, a lot of excitement."
Frank never left California. He stayed to marry Louis and Elizabeth Kloepfer’s daughter, Adelaide and buy 160 acres adjacent to her parents. He built his own home in 1879 shortly before his marriage. Over the years Frank’s sons acquired more land adjacent to the two ranches, bringing the family holdings to 539 acres.
THE RANCHES are 12 miles northwest of Placerville and just a few miles above Rescue which had been called Pinchem-Tight when the Kloepfer’s arrived in the area. (It had been called Pinchem-Tight because of the way the proprietor of the local general store, taking payment on sales, measured gold dust between his thumb and two fingers. The miners would exclaim, "Pinch ‘em tight!")
Mrs. Baldwin was born on the Luneman ranch in 1898. Growing up on the ranch, she said, was primitive. "We were quite isolated, really way out in the sticks." Of course there were no telephones, no automobiles and no running water in the house."
The occasional trips to Placerville were an adventure. "Oh, it was quite a ride in the old buckboard. In the summertime the dust was two or three feet deep on the road and mother would wear a white or beige duster and it would be just full of dust. In the wintertime that dust turned to mud. And it took four hours each way." Today the trip can be made by automobile in 20 minutes.
Her first remembered visit to Placerville was when she was about four years old. "The reason I recall it is because my mother sat me on a stool in a store and I was not to run around because I’d dirty my dress. And they had all of these confectionery containers, a row of them on the wall, and they had all kinds of candies in them. My mouth just watered for candies, yet I couldn’t have any. I didn’t dare ask for anything like that. And I just sat there and at those candies."
ALMOST ALL the visits to Placerville, she said, repeated the same simple schedule. "We got out at the livery stable and waited around the corner past the old post office and into Simon’s Dry Goods Store. It was located several stores above Kelly’s Groceries where my father shopped for staples. Simon’s was mother’s favorite store because Mr. Simon always greeted her with open arms. The sales never amounted to much, $3 or $4 at the most for dress material." An then, Mrs. Baldwin said, "we returned to the stable and rode home."
Most of the time, of course, was spent on the ranch. There were happy times, as when "the boys found a tiny emaciated fawn ...and brought it home. As he grew he became quite a pet as well as a pest because he took over the farmyard. Raiding our mother’s garden was one thing, but when he realized that he had horns and was beginning to butt anyone who came near him ... he was taken four or five miles away from home in an isolated spot and left to run free."
THERE WERE also the unpleasant times. She recalled one morning when she and her brother and sister discovered newly born piglets in the pig sty. "We leaned over the rock wall and, as children do, we laughed and cried out in glee at the little fat wonders ... We must have gone down to look at them a number of times that day ..." But later in the day, when one of her brothers went to feed the pigs, "the scene that met his eyes was and is too horrible to describe. The sow ... was whirling around the pen and tearing and chewing up the last of her tiny family ..."
The Lunemans made "two ventures into the grape business. But just as soon as the grapes were producing, the bottom fell out of the market." Years later they went into the cattle business, on their ranch and on land they bought in Pilot Hill.
Gradually family members moved away from the home ranch. The Kloepfer ranch was rented, and two of Mrs. Baldwin’s brothers, George and Fred, remained alone at the Luneman ranch raising cattle. George died in 1943 and Fred was alone on the ranch until he died in 1972.
AND NOW BOTH ranches are being sold. Mrs. Baldwin said she wrote her book because, "I felt that it was a shame that all these families up there were part of El Dorado County history were all moving or passing away. Their ranches were going to someone else. New people were coming in, strangers.
"I won’t make any money on the book. In fact, I might be a few hundred dollars in debt, but I don’t care. I didn’t expect to make money. The reason I wrote (the book) was because the families were fading away and no one realized what they went through and how interesting there lives were."
Mrs. Baldwin lives in San Bruno now but visits El Dorado County frequently. Her sister, Margaret Carpenter, lives in Rescue, just a few miles from the home ranch.
But the story of this family of Gold Rush descendants isn’t over. There are the Carpenters in rescue (Margaret has two sons living there also), the Flanagans (cousins) have moved back to the area from Redwood City, and another cousin, Billy Cooper, has bought a home bordering on the home ranch.
It’s as if this part of El Dorado County had a claim on this family and it wasn’t about to give it up. Even with the sale of the ranch. Even with departures and deaths. Pinchem-Tight has them between thumb and two fingers and is squeezing.
This article was accompanied by several photos with the following captions: ABOVE: The 109-year old Kloepfer-Luneman ranch in El Dorado County. RIGHT: Anna Luneman Baldwin, granddaughter of the ranch founder. BELOW: Scenes at the ranch including and old smokehouse and the remains of a car. Bee Photos by Dick Gilmore and Skip Shuman.