In case one should ask in the years to come how it happened that I,
Martha Early, who was born in Ashley, Pike County, in the state of
Missouri, and lived there until I was twelve years old, journeyed
across the prairies and deserts to California, the question can be
answered if I write down what I saw when so many people from our county
went to make new homes in that state where gold had been found in such
abundance.
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For my part, I used to wonder why people should be willing to leave
Missouri, enduring the many hardships they knew awaited them on the
journey of two thousand miles, in order to buy land in a country where
nearly all the inhabitants were Spaniards and Mexicans.
I suppose the stories told about the wonderful quantity of gold which
had suddenly been found in California caused our people to think
particularly of that far-off land. When the excitement of getting rich
by digging in the earth a few weeks or a few months had in a measure
died away, there came tales regarding the fertile soil and the beauty
of the country, until nearly every one in Pike County, as well as in
the county of the same name just across the Mississippi River in the
state of Illinois, much the same as had a fever for moving.
Perhaps that is why the people we met while journeying called all
the emigrants "Pikers." You see there were so many from both the Pike
counties who went into California in the year 1851, that it appeared to
strangers as if every person on the trail had come from Pike County.
"JOE BOWERS"
Then, too, fully half of all these emigrants were singing or whistling
that song of "Joe Bowers," which was supposed to have been written by
a Piker, and to represent a man from Missouri or Illinois.
Surely every one remembers it. The first verse, and if I have heard it
once I certainly have a thousand times, goes like this:--
"My name it is Joe Bowers
And I've got a brother Ike.
I came from old Missouri,
Yes, all the way from Pike."
The song was intended to show that this Joe Bowers came from our
county, and, perhaps, because so many of the emigrants were singing
it, all of us who went into California in the year 1851 were, as I have
said, called "Pikers."
However the name came about, I was a Piker, and before we arrived in
this wondrously beautiful country, I wished again and again that I had
been almost any other than an emigrant, for the way was long, and oh!
so wearisome.
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I must always think of Missouri as being one of the best of all the
states in the Union, because it was there I was born and there I went
to school until father caught the California fever, which resulted in
our setting out on a journey which, for a time, seemed endless.
My father had no idea of going so far simply to dig for gold. He had
seen many who went across the country in 1849 believing they would come
back rich as kings, yet who returned home poorer in pocket than when
they left; therefore he came to understand that only a few of all that
vast army of miners who hastened into California after the discovery
at Sutter's Mill, got enough of the precious metal to pay for the food
they ate.
Father thought he could buy better land in California than was to be
found in Pike County, for to have heard the stories told by some of the
people who had come back disappointed from the land of gold, you might
have believed that one had only to put a few seeds at random in the
ground in order to gather marvelous crops.