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Mountain man wrote everything down
By Carl Heintze
I claim James Clyman as an ancestor by tenuous means--one of my aunts married into his family. Nonetheless, I'm proud of old Jim.
Jim Clyman was a mountain man, that intrepid breed of pioneers who came West in the first quarter of the 19th century to trap beaver in the Rocky Mountains--or anywhere they could find them--and who had more stories to tell, true and otherwise, than anyone alive today.
Clyman was born on land owned by George Washington in Virginia. He came West to fight in the Black Hawk War (he was in the same company with Abraham Lincoln), trapped with Jedediah Smith, perhaps the greatest mountain man of all time, and guided wagon trains over the plains to Oregon.
His claim to fame in California is that he crossed the Salt Lake Desert and the Sierra Nevada in 1844 when no one was here but Indians and Mexicans (and there weren't many of them). He went back over the mountains, met the Donner Party on his way east and lived for a time in Wisconsin. He told the Donners not to take the route they did, but they didn't listen. Old Jim was right; they ended in disaster and
cannibalism. He survived long after they were gone.
But then he was a survivor. He lived through half a dozen scrapes with Plains Indians and various bears, not to mention drunken trappers.
After Wisconsin he guided a wagon train to Oregon. A member of the train was a minister's daughter named Hanna Meachum. Clyman married her when he was 57, came south to the Napa Valley and built a house which is still standing. They raised five children, only to have four of them die of scarlet fever. Clyman lived to be 93 and wrote awful poetry, even though it rhymed.
Aside from all these qualities, Clyman had one other great virtue. He wrote everything down. Not only did he keep a journal which is now a basic document in the history of the West, but late in life he recollected (apparently accurately) many of his adventures in the Rockies.
Once, for instance, he sewed up Jedediah Smith's scalp with a needle and thread after Smith had an unfortunate encounter with a grizzly bear.
Clyman's papers eventually ended up in the Huntington Library in San Marino, there to be preserved for future historians. You can read them there if you can convince the library you've got a legitimate reason to do so.
But they also are available in book form: Diary of a Mountain Man, Mountain Press, Missoula, Montana. This book is based on an earlier work by a University of California professor named Walter Camp, who found the diaries in the hands of my aunt and uncle and got them to sell them to the Huntington Library.
The only existent picture of Clyman makes him look a lot like my uncle, who was his grandson. It was taken when he was in his 90s and he looks like someone with whom you would want to be friendly.
My tie to Jim Clyman, as I've said, is pretty tenuous, but I do remember playing in and around his house in Napa when I was a child. The house has two stories. When I was a boy it was surrounded by barns, a tank house, a machine shop, a vegetable garden, a berry patch, a cider press, apple trees, pasture, hay fields and much more.
Alas, hat's all gone now, lost to subdividers who bought up the land and filled it with residences. But the old house, much painted and minus its outbuildings, is still there on Redwood Road.
Unfortunately, no one ever thought to preserve it as a state or national monument and so it remains a private residence. Even so, it's not hard to think of old Jim Clyman sitting in his rocking chair on the front porch, gazing out at the hills on either side of the Napa Valley, on his more than one hundred acres and on the gradual plowing and planting of his valley.
I'd have given a lot to be able to sit on the porch beside him, just to listen as he described how he managed to walk 600 miles across the plains because he'd lost his horses to Indians, of how he talked to the Donners somewhere east of the Salt Lake and his vision of what the Rockies must have been like when the big event there was the annual rendezvous at Jackson Hole.
I can't. of course, do that. Nor can you. But fortunately for both of us, he was willing to write it down.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
