CHAPTER III - EXCERPT

It is around this time that George Monroe is reported to have been employed by Washburn. Henry Washburn and German immigrant Herman Schlageter  were likely old friends, said to have shared a cabin during their younger years. A corner of Schlageter’s Hotel was occupied by Louis Monroe’s tonsorial parlor, so there’s a good chance that Monroe was Washburn’s barber. Amid the lively ambiance of Schlageter’s “commodious barroom” amid the scent of bay rum and tobacco smoke, Louis might have been applying final touches to Washburn’s beard while apprising him of young George’s special talent for horses. Or it may be that George was already making a name for himself, perhaps helping out at local livery stables. According to a later article:

“ … [George Monroe] entered the employment of A. H. WASHBURN & CO., as a Yo Semite guide in 1866. In 1868 he commenced driving stage for the same company ….” [i]

It is more likely that Monroe was hired by Washburn in 1867. Washburn doesn’t appear to have entered the Yosemite tourism business until that year, and though he ran “carriages and buggies,” Monroe would have to wait until 1869 for Washburn to start running stages.

In his first job as a guide for Washburn & Cook, George Monroe was one of at least four employees who would carry travelers by carriage and then by saddle-train through Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove. Monroe’s fellow guides in 1867 were named in the Mariposa Mail: J. H. Wilmer, James Ridgway , and a man identified only as  “Parteta.” From scant data such as this, and occasional reports of vehicles used or purchased by the company, it would appear that Washburn and Cook may have started out with fewer than a dozen wagons of various description, and perhaps half that many drivers or guides. These numbers would, of course, increase with demand. By the early 1880s, there were about twenty stage drivers mentioned by name in various sources as working for Washburn and company, and by the end of the century, it was reported that in some years Washburn had as many as fifty regular drivers. [ii]

During his first years of employment, George Monroe would have ample opportunity to develop his skills, spending hours training and tending the horses at the stables, and out on the trails and roads driving carriages and leading saddle-trains. Having a full-time job, he would be seeing less of his parents, who were busy making plans for their own future. Washburn, too, was making plans that would keep George busily engaged for years to come.

By April 1869, the new partnership of Washburn & McCready  owned three livery stables in Mariposa. That year, Cook and Bruce are no longer listed as Washburn’s partners. Cook still ran his drugstores in Mariposa and San Francisco, the latter location being where in 1874 he would also serve as a travel agent for Washburn & McCready. Bruce reappears as Washburn’s partner by 1877. [iii]

As Washburn was growing his business, Louis and Mary Monroe were pursuing their dream of property ownership. July 1868 brought the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment  to the United States Constitution, which cemented and expanded the rights of citizenship for African Americans without interference from individual states. At this point, any questions about the Monroes’ right to homestead seem to have been resolved, and within two years they would be land owners. It was also around this time that they would have received word of the death of Mary’s mother, Polly Millen , though exactly when or where she died remains unknown. [iv]

Louis Monroe, as an agent for The Elevator  newspaper, was sharing copies with the local press as evidenced by a letter from the Mariposa Mail to The Elevator in 1868:  

“[To] The Elevator.—We are under obligations to L. A. Monroe, agent at this place, for several numbers of the San Francisco Elevator, the organ of the colored people of the Pacific Coast. We find it an able and dignified journal, earnestly and efficiently laboring for the intellectual, moral, religious and material advancement of that people. We comment it to the encouragement and support of every friend of the black man.—Mariposa Mail.” [v]

In 1870, the Gazette reported a surge of Yosemite-bound tourists through Mariposa—400 travelers in 25 days from May 13 to June 14. [vi] Around this time, certainly by the following spring, Washburn and McCready were well into the tourist stage business:  

“New Stage.—Washburn & McCready, who are running a daily line of stages between Mariposa and Clark & Moore’s, where they connect with their saddle train for Yo Semite, received on Saturday last a splendid eleven-passenger stage, which they immediately placed upon the road. It runs smooth and is just the thing for the mountains. It was made in Stockton.” [vii]

Clark & Moore’s  was the current business name for Galen Clark’s rustic hotel, midway between Mariposa and Yosemite Valley. At the end of the 1860s, Clark & Moore’s employed an African American  named George McEwen, whose brief exchange with a foreign tourist drew notice in the local news:  

“George McEwen is also there [at Clark’s], assisting everybody in his usual quiet and gentlemanly manner. George was rather taken aback the other day, when a long gander-legged Dutchman, on a tour of the Valley, and eager to receive every attention without regard to the convenience of others, stepped up to George and demanded to know where his master waz. Cooly surveying the imperious individual a minute or so, George replied: ‘Don’t know—haven’t seen him since the war.’” [viii]

"A very well written, carefully documented story."
  – Dr. John Oliver Wilson, School of Social Welfare,
University of California at Berkeley