Upper Soda Springs
The Forty-Niners found California a still very wild place in many ways. The Spanish and then the Mexicans had only lightly populated California (from Sonoma to the south). Even after the California Republic declared independence from Mexico and joined the United States in 1846, San Francisco, for example, was a distant outpost of only several hundred people.
Although there is controversy as to the exact number of Native Americans in California at the beginning of the Gold Rush, estimates of the total population of the entire state range from 200,000 to 500,000 (compared to over 30 million today). There were very few roads or stagecoaches, and Northern California, from present-day Sacramento northwards, was especially thinly-populated and unexplored by European-Americans. It is probably safe to say that the vast majority of Native Americans in Northern California had never seen a European-American.
By 1850, a few, brave pack-mule train operators wound their way north and south between California's Central Valley and the more established American settlements in Oregon. The mule trains had to depend on a network of existing Native American foot trails through the rugged mountains that separated California from Oregon. Their drivers slept where they could on these trails, and found feed for their animals as best they could growing wild along the way.
The legend is that a mule train driver, Abraham Thompson, was crossing through northern Siskiyou County in 1850, and noticed that one of his animals had pulled up a clump of grass with a gold nugget attached to the dirt. Within months, a rough little settlement known as Thompson's Dry Diggings sprang up, and within a year, by 1851, the bustling city of Yreka had formed.
Thompson's good fortune caused a significant increase in the traffic between the Central Valley and Yreka, as the thousands of new inhabitants of Yreka needed food and supplies of all kinds. In about 1851, Harry and Samuel Lockhart (who were twin brothers), apparently seeing the need for a safe place for packers and other travelers to spend the night on the Sacramento River trail, built a log cabin and stable area very near the mineral springs at the Upper Soda Springs site. (fn. 1)
Little is known about the Lockhart brothers' operation, other than that the Upper Soda Springs site was important along the trail because (for northbound travelers) it was the last crossing of the Sacramento River, and those travelers found the trail northwards to be relatively straighter and more level, compared to the winding and up and down the travellers had suffered climbing through the Sacramento Canyon.
By the mid-1850's, the main part of the Gold Rush had subsided, and those Forty-Niners who had decided to stay in Calfornia turned to agriculture or business. The Lockhart brothers were ready to sell their claim to the Upper Soda Springs site, and they found willing buyers in Ross McCloud and his wife, Mary Campbell McCloud.
