Editor’s note: This is Part 1 of a four-part story on the history of ranching in Plumas County. Read Part 2 May 24, Part 3 May 31 and Part 4 June 5. All four are part of a series devoted to the history of Plumas County.
It’s spring in Plumas County. The snow is melting from the peaks, the alpine valleys are vivid green, wildflowers are in bloom, and soon the cows are coming home. In honor of the season, this month we take a closer look at the history of ranching in our region.
The Lost Sierra opens for business
It all started with a story of treasure told by a madman. In 1850 Thomas Stoddard wandered out of the woods with a small bag of gold and a tall tale about a lake so rich that nuggets lay along the shore. A troop of hopeful prospectors followed him back into the wilderness, to the area now known as Lakes Basin. Although they never found the promised gold lake, they did find gold in the rivers and streams of the region.
The same year, James Beckwourth charted the lowest-elevation path through the Sierra Nevada, running from just east of Reno through the northern end of Sierra Valley, through what is now Portola and Quincy, over Bucks Summit to Oroville, and finally to Marysville. In 1851 Beckwourth led the first wagon along the new trail. After the much-publicized Donner Party disaster of winter 1846-1847, many settlers favored the more sheltered and accessible route.
Suddenly, miners had a reason to come and settlers a way to get here.
Those miners needed supplies. Travel was difficult. Savvy business people were quick to spot opportunities to provide goods and services. And once the heady early days of the rush were over, many would-be miners found themselves ready to settle down to a more stable and consistent agrarian existence.
Settlement
Many of the first ranchers who arrived in Plumas in the 1850s came from elsewhere in the United States, traveling overland with Beckwourth or seeking out quality land after abandoning the gold fields. The Cates, who were among the first to settle in American Valley, came from Massachusetts and Vermont. The Stovers of Big Meadow were Pennsylvania Dutch (German). They traveled to California as teenagers during the gold rush, and stayed on as cattle ranchers. David Derr Newman, of Sierra Valley, was born in Philadelphia. He sailed for California via Panama in 1853, settling in Sierra Valley in 1858 after several years mining in Downieville and dairy farming in Forest City.
By the mid-1860s, a new wave of Swiss-Italian ranching families was settling in the Sierra. Forced out of their homelands by decades of brutal fighting and famine, immigrants from southern Switzerland came to the United States in high numbers throughout the mid-19th century, with most arriving in the 1880s. The Swiss were seen as desirable workers, and the California Immigration Union made a concerted effort to attract them (Hacken 2020). Many answered the call.
In a 1990 interview with University of Nevada, Reno, researchers, Frank Dotta recalled, “My father and his brothers came to Sierra Valley in 1864. … Their decision to come here was mostly based in economics: there were too many people for the land in Switzerland” (Blue and King 1990). It became common for people who were getting established here to send money so that relatives from Switzerland could come to work on their ranches or in their businesses, wrote Barbara Pascoe of the Plumas-Sierra Cattlemen’s Association in the California Cattleman magazine.
Barns and other innovations
Early Sierra Nevada “ranchos” were more like farms, cultivating a variety of crops and raising dairy cattle. Dairy farming remained common up through World War II, when a combination of labor shortages due to the war and pasteurization regulations made the business impractical and unprofitable. Since the midcentury, beef cattle have been Plumas County’s main agricultural product.
Barns were the first permanent structures in Plumas County. They were typically built using large cedar rounds or hunks of granite as foundation blocks. Hand-hewn beams connected by mortise and tenon joints, or sometimes simple wooden pegs, formed the framing, with boards or shingles for the walls and roof. Most Plumas barns have gable or broken gable roofs.
These were multipurpose structures intended for storage, winter lodging and feeding for livestock, and milking. Loose hay was piled in the center of the barn. Mangers were arranged on two or three sides facing inward, allowing animals to be fed with ease from the hay in the center. Often, sliding wooden windows ran along the outer walls at intervals, so that manure could be shoveled outside during the winter, to be collected and spread as fertilizer in the spring.
In Sierra Valley, two features emerged to help transport the loose hay into the barn. In one method, a long ramp was used to drive a wagon right up to the second-floor hayloft door. The wagon sides could be let down, dropping the hay inside. The ramps were portable, and could be drawn by horse to different locations, explained Bill Copren, a local expert and member of the Sierra County Historical Society. In another method, Sierra Valley barns were equipped with a pulley system, which allowed large nets filled with hay to be lifted to the hayloft door and dropped inside, according to the Sierra County Historical Society’s “Barns of Sierra County in Sierra Valley.”
Below: The remnants of a portable ramp used to load hay into the second story of a barn on the Lemmon Ranch in Sierra Valley. Photos by Lindsay Morton
As ranchers transitioned away from raising dairy cattle, the old barns fell out of use. Beef cattle were driven to lower ground or shipped via rail to the Central Valley or the desert for the winter, making hay storage unnecessary. Many historic barns have been dismantled so the wood could be reused. Recovered wood is visible inside pizza places and bars, said Copren. Two large Sierra Valley barns are currently for sale.
Ranches and conservation
Today ranches play an important role in preserving and protecting the Sierra Nevada.
“Ranches can preserve open space and clean water for the livestock and people who live on a ranch,” said Beth Reid, who, with her husband Russell, owns the historic Chandler Ranch in American Valley.
That is the premise behind much of the work of the Feather River Land Trust, a local nonprofit founded in 2000. Kristi Jamason, land protection manager for the trust, works with ranching families to preserve the range through conservation easements.
She explains the legal process this way: Ownership includes a bundle of rights — water rights, development rights, mineral rights and so on. By transferring development rights to the land trust while retaining ownership in other respects, owners ensure that the property can never be developed, helping to preserve it for future generations.
It’s an idea many ranchers have embraced. In Sierra Valley alone, more than 54,000 acres are preserved through the Feather River Land Trust and others, including California Rangeland Trust and Pacific Forest Trust — a little under half the 120,000 total acres in the valley.
Stewardship can also improve rangeland productivity in tangible ways. In 2005 Lane Labbe, who owns the New England Ranch in American Valley, did a creek restoration project at Clear Creek where it flows into Greenhorn Creek on his property. The project “totally transformed that 10 acres” and opened up additional grazing, he said. In the future, he’d like to restore more of the Greenhorn Creek wetlands.
Coming up
In future installments, we take a look at some of the historic ranches of American Valley, Indian Valley, Big Meadows/Almanor and Sierra Valley.
References and further reading
Barns of Sierra County in Sierra Valley. Sierra County Historical Society, 1997.
Blue, Helen M., and R. T. King, editors. Sierra Valley Memories with Artie Strang, Frank Dotta and Rita Bradley. University of Nevada, Reno, 1990.
Copren, William G. “A General History of Sierra County.” Sierra County Historical Society, website, 2013.
Copren, William G. “Agriculture in Sierra County from 1880 to 1890, Part II.” Sierra Valley Historical Society Bulletin, December 1974.
Eldred, Anne. “The Carman Valley.” The Sierran. The California Historical Societies and the California Association of Museums XXII, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2004).
Hacken, Richard. “A History of the Swiss in California.” Swiss American Historical Review 56, no. 1 (2020).
Hall, Helen. “Cattle Ranching a Tradition of Plumas County.” Portola Reporter, Oct. 15, 1986.
Neal, Mary. “Local Design Architect Wins Award.” Feather River Bulletin, July 2, 1986.
Pascoe, Barbara. “The Cattle Industry in Plumas and Sierra Counties.” California Cattleman, Sept. 1978, 38–41.
