HISTORY

“Timbuctoo, California”

by Lane Parker

In the spring of 1848 Jonas Spect acted on a hunch. As the homeward-bound Easterner passed through Sacramento, Calif., he learned of James Marshall’s gold discovery at Sutter’s Mill, 45 miles east on the American River. Avoiding the rush, Spect opted instead to try his luck on the Yuba, in the Sierra Nevada foothills to the northeast. An Indian guide led him to a promising sandbar on the river, where Spect, according to his own account, “met a large number of Indians, all entirely nude and eating clover.” The clover must have been of the four-leafed variety, because on June 2 the pioneering prospector “washed some of the dirt and found three lumps of gold worth about $7.” Not a fortune, but enough to bring the gold rush to Yuba County.

By 1850 placer miners had worked their way up the ravines into the foothills, erecting a makeshift camp on a rise they called Sand Hill. There, with the introduction of hydraulic mining, one company struck gold. Itching to get at the riches, independent prospectors pulled up stakes and ventured south across a ravine. By 1855 they had named the new diggings Timbuctoo.

Why Timbuctoo? One account has it that the first white miners in the area found a black man already at hard work with pick, shovel and pan and named the place after the famed gold-rich Saharan caravan city. Another story suggests local storekeeper and part-time gold miner William Marple began making more from his claim than from his mercantile business—a rare feat in gold country—at which point fellow miners took to calling him “The Sultan of Timbuctoo.”

As early as 1849 prospectors were burying their dead in graves scattered throughout the diggings. Townsfolk created an official cemetery in 1855 around the time notorious ne’er-do-well Jim “the Timbuctoo Terror”
Webster shot three men foolish enough to jump his claim. Or perhaps the outlaw jumped theirs; the specifics of the shooting remain hazy.

In 1855 Timbuctoo came into its own. For one, builders completed the town’s only theft- and fireproof building, shared by a Wells Fargo office and the Stewart Brothers store. Its heavy iron doors and shutters were
shipped around Cape Horn from the East Coast, while the builders used local fieldstone to construct the side and back walls. Its redbrick facade and wooden awning made the building, in the words of author Carl Glasscock, “an excellent example of Gold Rush vernacular architecture.” That same year Jacob Dufford built Timbuctoo’s first hotel, and William Gregory built the first house, on Main Street just east of the bank building.

The November 1857 opening of Timbuctoo’s theater made the San Francisco papers. Perched atop a brick basement, the large wood-frame building seated 800 and hosted both local and touring companies. Politicians
also held forth from its stage, starting in the 1860s.

By then Timbuctoo was on its way to becoming the biggest town in eastern Yuba County. At its peak some 1,200 people lived in or around town. In addition to the express office and store, Gregory’s house, the hotel, and the theater, Timbuctoo boasted a second general store, a second hotel, a post office, church, blacksmith shop, drugstore, lumberyard, barbershop, livery stable, two carpenter shops, two tobacco and cigar stores, three clothing and dry goods stores, three bakeries, three shoe shops, six boardinghouses, eight saloons and a host of simple cabins. With so many wooden structures so close together, fire was always a danger, and in 1878 an especially severe blaze leveled a number of buildings, including the post office and Dufford’s hotel.

Spect had given up placer mining and become a merchant by the time hydraulic mining filled the Yuba with tailings. Thirty years later, in a landmark environmental case, the 1884 Sawyer Decision effectively ended large-scale hydraulicking in California. It also effectively doomed Timbuctoo. Old-timers died off. Others moved away. Chinese immigrants squatted in the rundown theater basement while prospecting for overlooked gold. The town
suffered a further setback when State Route 20 bypassed it in 1937. Two years later Timbuctoo was designated a California Registered Historical Landmark. Unfortunately, preservation efforts couldn’t save its stoutest and most famous structure. By the late 1980s vandals in search of rumored hidden gold had battered down the walls of the Wells Fargo building.

Today only a handful of people call unincorporated Timbuctoo home. The first house remains standing, and though its current owners have slightly modified the interior, the original 1855 structure remains unchanged. And ghosts will be happy to know that Timbuctoo still has a working cemetery, the most recent burial occurring on Feb. 5, 2018.

First appeared in a slightly different form in the December 2018 issue of Wild West magazine.