Description: Frank Asbill (pictured here in middle age), his brother, Pierce, and the mountain man Jim Neafus, are credited as the first Euro-Americans to enter the region to the east of Blocksburg. In the spring of 1854, they were traveling with the Kelsey Party, which had been commissioned by Petaluma merchants to find a route from Sonoma County to the Trinity County gold fields. On May 17, they entered Hettenshaw Valley. The Kelsey Party continued on, but the Asbills and Neafus decided to stay. They spent the year killing deer for their hides, and the following spring hauled them to Kingsley's Trading Post near present-day Red Bluff to sell.
The Asbills and Neafus also captured Wailaki women and "drove" them east like cattle to trade for horses. Frank Asbill (son of Pierce) and Argyle Shawley wrote in their manuscript "The Last of the West":
The Missourians' trip up the high mountain took them out east of the valley, to cross the Middle Fork of the main Eel River at the foot of the mountain a few miles south of the great water falls where Wylackies had their happy fishing ground. They camped on the river the first night, and the next day traveled up the high mountain, pack horses strung out behind, and thirty-five head of little pot-bellied, brown, Wylackie trail-patters. As Jim put it, their well-calloused little feet fairly knocked the fire out of the rocks while their little, round bottoms went flipping around the trees and through the bushes.
The third night they camped on top of the mighty mountain that divides the Sacramento Valley from the coast range. Here the women began to get restless and the Wylackie language was used a-plenty. They could see that their next day's journey would take them away from the land of their happy hunting grounds, and Buckshot and Injun [two Wailaki boys they had bribed with the promise of guns] reported their talks to Jim.
"She go back, she say" Buckshot told him.
But after Jim held counsel with the two Indian boys, they went back to tell the squaws they were going to a new happy hunting ground, where syrup ran like water and beans grew just like the acorn, and the deer would be packed in so all they would have to do was roast and eat it.
The Asbill's younger brother, William Jefferson, served as the Blocksburg postmaster from 1903 to 1913 and is buried in the Blocksburg cemetery.
Reproduced with permission of the Mendocino Historical Society.
