|
 As
Thoreau says in Economy, "I should not obtrude my
affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very
particular inquiries had not been made...," so:
My name is Bob Graham. I am 68 years old
(Medicare)--old enough to remember when  being
called Bob wasn't funny. I live in Sacramento,
California with my wife of forty-three (44) years, Jane. We
have twin sons who both live on the San Francisco Bay
Peninsula. Bob is an aerospace engineer at Lockheed Martin
in Sunnyvale, and Bill, who is married to Susan, is Vice
President, Physician and Business Development, at Sequoia
Hospital in Redwood City. Bill and Susan have two
children--Will and Meg.
Our own youngest, Clara, graduated from Caltech with a
degree in engineering and applied science and moved to
Redmond, Washington, where she took a job as a software
engineer with Microsoft. After raising her parents on Macs!!
But she has recently taken a new software engineering job
for Washington Mutual at their headquarters tower in
Seattle.
 I
used to raise pears in the Sacramento River Delta. Shown
here  as
a 13 year-old fork lift driver in the summer of 1955. I also
raised corn, wheat, tomatoes, safflower, and sugar beets,
but I always thought of myself as a pear grower. I
was always interested in progressive agricultural methods,
and was a pioneer in Integrated Pest Management. I
frequently worked with the University of California
Extension Service in studies and test plots. My own projects
also included a ten-year study of pear growth rates, and the
writing of a program to forecast coddling moth flight peaks.
I was also, for a period of twenty years, a trustee of, and
manager of, Reclamation District No. 349 - Sutter Island in
the Sacramento River Delta. I was also a landowner (a
requirement) on that island, so this was a catch 22
conflict of interest, but also expedient, and I did
send out the lowest maintenance assessments of any
Reclamation District. But when an opportunity to sell out
came my way a few years ago, I made the decision to take
advantage of an offer that doesn't come along often, and I
sold.
This was the buyer: http://www.stillwaterorchards.com/
So, now I have a lot of fun doing things like this.
 Here
is our house, which was built in 1929 by an
architect/builder known locally as "Squeaky" Williams. It is
in an area called the Land Park in Sacramento--in the 1850's
it was the town of Sutterville, surveyed by Lt William
Tecumseh Sherman--three miles south of Sutter's Fort. Not
untypical of the whimsical Williams, the 2-story living room
and library loft are of actual post and beam construction:
adzed finished, and assembled with mortise and tenon joints
secured with wooden treenails.
Why this Frémont
interest?
 My
3-great grandfather was Captain John Grigsby.
Grigsby's were farmers, stockmen, and frontiersmen--from
Aaron Grigsby's arrival in Virginia from England in 1660. By
1808, they were moving into Tennessee, and later, ever
westering, they were in Missouri.
The next step was necessarily a big one; John and his family
left Missouri for Oregon in 1845. But when they got to Fort
Hall, they encountered mountain man Caleb
Greenwood.
"Old Greenwood," as he was called, and indeed, he was 82
years old at the time, had been sent out as a roving-agent
by John Sutter to recruit settlers to New Helvetia
(Sacramento) with the free offer of, as party member B. F
Bonney recorded, "six sections of land of his Spanish land
grant." A party, called The Grigsby-Ide Party, was formed to
follow Greenwood to California. Late that year, they crossed
Truckee Pass (called Donner Pass after the 1846 tragedy) and
arrived at Sutter's Fort in October, 1845.
But when they arrived they were advised that all
foreigners had been ordered by General Jose Castro to leave
California within forty days. With their animals worn out
from the long journey, and without money or supplies, they
decided to remain. John Grigsby moved his family to the Napa
Valley, and obtained land from George Yount, and later, from
Salvadore Vallejo.
 I
want to keep this short. John Grigsby, rather than leave
California, chose to become a member of what became known as
The Bear Flag Party. Thirty of them captured the Military
Garrison at Sonoma one morning and declared California an
Independent Republic. They didn't know it yet, but war had
broken out with Mexico. Frémont soon became active in
the Bear Flag Revolt, and commissioned John Captain of the
Garrison. Some months later, under a commission by Commodor
Robert S. "Fighting Bob" Stockton, he served as Captain of E
Company in Frémont's California Battalion of Mounted
Riflemen on the march to Los Angeles and The Capitulation of
Cahuenga, which ended the hostilities in California.
My 2-great grandfather, William "Uncle Billy" Edgington,
who came overland in 1846 and married John Grigsby's
daughter Teresa, also served in the California Batallion in
Captain Lansford
Hastings' F Company. Capt. Grigsby's brothers Jesse and
Franklin, and his son Granville, served in John's E
Company.
 Back
to Frémont : In 1992 (I wrote it down) I bought a
$12 copy of Upham's 1856 Life of Frémont at an
antique store 1/2 mile from my home. Published for
Frémont's 1856 presidential candidacy, it contained
excerpts from Frémont's expeditions, including the
Sierra crossing in 1844.
I had spent much of my youth in the Sierras. My grandfather
took up fly fishing about 1910, and we were always off
fishing and hiking and birding in the Sierras. When I read
Frémont's vivid descriptions of the route, I realized
that "I know these places!"
I started buying more books -- anything to do with
Frémont's Expeditions. When I eventually obtained an
original Senate edition of the 1845 Report, I found
all of Frémont's Barometrical and Astronomical
Observations and determinations of positions in the back --
a bonanza! Except for one thing...
I didn't know anything about celestial
navigation.
I set out to learn.
I bought a lot of books, including ephemerides for
the period, and I bought a GPS receiver.
I also studied how Frémont had made his
determinations of altitude. I had no computer then, but I
had written lots of programs for my old HP 67 card-reading
calculator (I still use it). I wrote programs to crunch
through all of his determinations of altitude. I studied how
Frémont had made his determinations of latitude and
longitude, and, with the tables printed in the 1845 Report,
I was able to work through his reductions. I found
out that then the north star, polaris, wasn't even in
the same place in the sky that it is today. I also noted
that some coordinates printed in the narrative portion of
the 1845 Report were either typos or transpositions (never
corrected to this day), and by using the latitude
determinations reported in the Report's Astronomical Tables,
and adjusting for errors of time in Frémont's
longitudes, I was able to absolutely locate his 1844
campsite at Carson Pass in the Sierra Nevada. I am
continuing with this all the time.
Polaris has moved.
See the Long Camp site.
And the navigation thing grew!
In the fall of 1998 I went to a meeting where Brian
Kelleher was speaking about his suggested Drake landing
site at Campbell Cove on Bodega Head. I had followed the
debates of twenty years ago, so I was interested in what
Brian had found in his studies of the records that remain of
the voyage. Brian, an environmental engineer from Silicon
Valley, had done much statistical analysis of the
accuracy of Drake's determinations of longitude. Brian had
shown the range of error in Drake's determinations, but not
the reason for the error. If Drake had been at Brian's
Campbell Cove site (N38 19) in the summer of 1579, why would
he report the latitude as N38 30? Was this just a matter of
error in using the instruments of the time?
When we talked about it later, Brian said, "Bob, Why
don't you look at the latitude problem?"
I started to look at it, and Brian would point me to
source materials. I located the books on-line, and books
were arriving for weeks. I spent four months busting my head
on the problem. I found the errors in Wm. Bourne's
then-current Tables of Solar Declinations, and I did a
spreadsheet analysis (I now had one of my daughter's castoff
computers) of Drake's possible determinations by putting a
virtual sun in his sky for each day of the sojourn.
And then one day I emailed Brian--Read the email
exchange. 
This was very exciting and a lot of fun. I later built an
astrolabe, and used it for a well attended on-site media
demonstration to show the accuracy that Drake could have
obtained. The determination came out exactly as predicted. I
am looking forward to a Department of Parks and Recreation
dig on the site -- this summer I hope. If the State
finds no evidence, it will not prove Drake was not
there: extensive digs over many years on all the other
proposed sites, expecially in the Drake's Bay area. have not
yielded any evidence of Elizabethan era occupation. But we
will know that Drake's conuenient and fit harborough
at N 38 deg 30 min was Campbell Cove, under Bodega
Head, at N 38° 19".
The Internet has proved to be my best resource for
just about anything.
Books that I had spent years searching for I found were
available from dealers all over the world.
Web sites were also something I knew nothing about, but I
have had a lot of fun learning to use
html and javascripts and creating graphics. In addition
to this site, I now have three others that I have created or
maintain for others.
The best part of the Internet and the website is all the
friends and contacts I have made, like this email from a
Forest Service nature guide 
I am gratified to find
that my site has acquired links from many educational web
sites and resource sites, including he
following:
- The National University of Singapore
- The University of Bonn
- Celestial Navigation in the Classroom
- World Book online
- Lehrstuhl für Didaktik der Physik
Würzburg
- Columbia University
- Southern Polytechnic (Georgia)
- United States Corps of Topgraphical
Engineers
- University of California San Diego
- Education on the World Wide Web
- Trails West --Markers of the California
Trail
- Indigenous Peoples Institute
|
- Education America Network
- The University of Kansas
- Four Directions Institute
- Plebius - Architecture of the Mind
- BigTome.com
- Lassen County California: History and
Culture
- Minnesota Public Radio: The Writer's
Almanac
- ENFIA -- The Eldorado National Forest
Interpretive Association
- Mill Valley Schools
- Wirtualna Polska
- Museum of Local History; Fremont, CA
|
|
The articles and information on this
website are ephemeral--when I am
gone away, it goes away. For those finding
it of more permanent value, it is also
available archived on CD
or thumb drive.
|
|
|
 H-CALIFORNIA,
H-NET.MSU.EDU
[Editor's note: Bob tells me that the Long Camp
site is his hobby. And what a hobby!
The camp site referred to above is depicted on the
site in a photo that Bob took after hiking to it in
snowshoes!! The site has a number of other
Fremont-related links.. DSS]
|
And in these recently published
books:
|
 Pathfinder;
John C Fremont and the Course of American
Empire, Tom Chaffin, Hill & Wang, New
York, 2002
A very nice mention and the URL to this website
on the first page of the introduction. Wow!
|
 John
Charles Frémont: Western Pathfinder,
Barbara Witteman, Capstone Press: Bridgestone
Books, Part of Exploring the West Biographies, New
York, 2002
This one is from a series of youth books. It
contains links to the publisher's accompanying
Internet search feature--FactHound--which leads to
this website. A credit and url are also in the
book.
|
|
Devil's
Gate: Owning the Land, Owning the Story
, Tom Rea, University of Oklahoma Press,
2006.
The history of the Sweetwater River valley in
central Wyoming--a remote place including Devil's
Gate, Independence Rock, and other sites along a
stretch of the Oregon Trail.
|
 And
the Eldorado National Forest Interpretive
Association's new guide, Hiking
in the Greater Carson Pass Region, contains
a map and hiking directions to Frémont's
Long
Camp, the historic site first discovered
and presented on this website.
|
 I
like to fish; I'm a 3rd generation Sierra fly fisherman. I
usually fish the West Fork of the Carson, and the Silver and
South Forks of the American. I've been tying flies since I
was about 10 years old. My favorite rod (there is NOTHING I
would trade this rod for!) is a little 7 1/2 foot 2 3/4
ounce cane rod made in the 1930s by George Varney when he
was manager of the Montague Rod Company. Fittings are all
nickel silver, including the patented Varney ferrules.These
rods were made by planing 6 pie-shaped segments of cane and
glueing them into a hexagon. The tips of this rod, though
assembled from six separate strips, measure only 3/64"
across the flats. It carries a first series 1930's Pfleuger
Medalist 1492 reel with plain click, and I still prefer
Phoenix handmade tapered silk lines.
In the spring, when waters are high, I usually use my dad's
8 1/2' Edwards, which he bought in the late 1930s.
I also like just hiking around in the mountains. Jane
and I like the coast as well, and we get there frequently.
We are also VolksWalkers
and cyclists. Every morning at 7 a.m. I ride my black 1971
Raleigh Sports the two miles to Freeport Bakery for
cappuccino and an apple pinwheel and a read. Rain or
shine.
|
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no
longer despair for the future of the human
race."--H.G.Wells (1866-1946)
|
Something I'm really glad I have never run into in my
scouting around!
Oh yeah; in 1976 I was the co-founder (with Elliot M.
Sayward) of the British-American Rhykenological
Society, and for a period of 10 years Elliot and I
published a quarterly publication called Plane Talk.
This was research into the history and developement of
the carpenter's and joyner's plane--Planemaking was an
important trade from the late 17th Century into the early
19th Century.
That association has, phoenix-like, been re-established;
this time the Crooked Knife (mo-co-tag-an) is the
subject of our interest.
I have recently taken over the creation and maintenance of
my friend Shelley Burns' website. Shelley is a jazz
vocalist (a chanteuse)--extraordinaire. This
site is a lot of fun.
And also Silver Spur Publishing's pages for their
excellent series of books on the life of Mountain Man and
explorer Joseph R. Walker by G. Andew Miller.
|
