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A small park and some history in downtown Marysville. Have a seat and enjoy the nearby mural!
James Pierson Beckwourth was born in Virginia in 1798 to Sir Jennings Beckwith, a descendant of Irish and English nobility, and an African-American mulatto woman about whom little is known.
His life is best known from the book The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth from 1856, which was rejected by early historians of the Old West as being ridiculous campfire lore, but has been rehabilitated since as not reliable in details, but a valuable source of social history. The civil rights movement discovered Beckwourth as an early afro-american pioneer and he is subsequently named a role model in children's literature and textbooks.
From 1844 he traded on the Old Spanish Trail between the Arkansas River and Mexican California. With the beginning of the Mexican-American war in 1846 he returned to the United States, not without stealing around 1800 Mexican horses and bringing them as spoils of war. In the war he was a courier with the US Army and participated in suppressing the Taos Revolt, where his former employer Charles Bent as interims governor of New Mexico was slain.
1848 saw him back in California, in the Gold Rush he opened a store at Sonoma, he sold quickly, going to Sacramento living as a professional card player. In 1850 he discovered Beckwourth Pass, the lowest mountain pass through the Sierra Nevada and in the following year he established Beckwourth Trail, a road through the mountains. It began near Pyramid Lake and the Truckee Meadows east of the mountains, climbed to his pass and on a ridge between two forks of Feather River down to the gold fields of northern California at Marysville. The road should spare the settlers and gold seekers about 150 miles and several steep slopes, such as Donner Pass. It was supposed to be paid by the business communities of the gold towns in California, but when Beckwourth tried to collect his payment in 1851, Marysville suffered from two huge fires and was unable to pay.
Beckwourth Pass, named in honor of James Beckwourth, is located in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Plumas County, California. State Route 70 crosses the Sierras at an elevation of 1,591 m (5,221 ft.), making it one of the lowest crossings of the Sierra Nevadas in California. It is also the route that the Union Pacific Railroad (former Western Pacific Railroad) used to cross the Sierra's along their Feather River route. The pass is located east of Portola, California.
In 1851, Beckwourth, following an Indian trail, discovered a low elevation pass over the Sierra Nevada mountains into California. He improved what became known as the Beckwourth Trail through Plumas, Butte and Yuba counties. In August, 1851, he led the first intact wagon train into the burgeoning Gold Rush city of Marysville, California, named after Mary Murphy, a survivor of the Donner Party in the winter of 1846-47. Beckwourth demanded payment for improving the trail, claiming he had an agreement with the city and its merchants. When the city failed to pay him, he had no standing as a dark-skinned man in a California court to sue for damages. An estimated 10,000 people used the trail to enter Marysville in the following decade. In 1996, at the urging of promoters of Beckwourth Frontier Days, a living history festival, the city of Marysville's largest park was renamed Beckwourth Riverfront Park in recognition of the debt owed by the city and Beckwourth's significance to the growth of the city.
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