Thanksgiving had spotty start in California during the Gold Rush

Thanksgiving didn’t become a truly national holiday until after the Civil War. It was virtually unheard of in California during the Hispanic and Early American period.

“I well recollect my first Thanksgiving day in San Francisco, of course we had to celebrate by eating turkey,” wrote Joseph A. Coolidge in The San Francisco Call on Nov. 22, 1896.

“I bought one, a small one, and paid $16 for it. But it was young and alive. I bought it several days before and gave it in charge of a French cook to fatten. He stuffed it alive until it was as plump as a partridge. It made my mouth water to look at it.

“The day before Thanksgiving he picked it alive and allowed it to run around without any feathers. But when that turkey was served, I tell you it was fit for Lucullus” (Roman god of feasting). I don't know where it came from, but I was satisfied with it.

“I think that by the time I paid the cook for preparing that turkey and the extras that were necessary to go with it, together with a few other things requisite for the dinner, it must have cost at least $50. But it was worth it, and I didn’t leave much.”

Coolidge was from a family that traced its roots back to the Massachusetts Bay Company and the early classes of Harvard College. He arrived in San Francisco in 1851 and found that few were interested in celebrating what was still regarded as a “Puritan” holiday. So he was obliged to make his own singular feast.

I doubt that Mr. Coolidge’s Puritan ancestors would have approved of his French chef’s stuffing the live bird in the fashion of a fois gras laden duck. Nor would they have approved of plucking the poor turkey while it was still living, or for that matter the $50 cost of the dinner for one. But Coolidge’s intention was to honor the feast day of his ancestors, however bizarre the implementation.

This was at a time when the Gold Rush had inflated prices. A good measure of the $50 meal for one was the $10 a day that Myron Angel, later to become an editor of this and other papers in San Luis Obispo, was offered to shingle a roof in San Francisco.

We don’t know when the first Thanksgiving meal was served in San Luis Obispo. It probably had to wait until the arrival of significant immigration from New England in 1865 and later.

We do know that American forces in Monterey and Yerba Buena (San Francisco) held a “Thanksgiving Day” celebration on Dec. 6, 1846.

Ironically, this was just hours before the defeat of Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny at the hands of the Californios led by Gen. Andres Pico on Dec. 6-7, 1846 at the Battle of San Pasqual near Escondido, northeast of San Diego.

On Nov. 29, 1849, Gen. Bennett Riley, California’s seventh and last military governor, issued a Thanksgiving Day proclamation on what had become a War Department holiday.

California’s first elected governor under the 1849 state constitution, Peter H. Burnett, set aside Nov. 30, 1850 as the legal holiday for Thanksgiving. His aim was to proclaim “the American” ownership of California. All official business was stopped. Many of Sacramento’s merchants were men from New England. They banded together to form The Sons of New England. They planned a banquet in the dining room of the Columbia Hotel.

Everyone was invited to the feast, even if they weren't New Englanders. The walls of the banqueting room were covered with bunting.

Flags and shields and the names of each of the 31 states formed a frieze.

Gov. Burnett nearly missed the banquet. Hardin Biglow, a political ally of Burnett’s, died a few days before in Monterey. The governor hurried to the funeral. He went by stagecoach from California’s old capital to San Francisco, catching a ferryboat upriver to Sacramento just in time for the celebration.

Forty different dishes were served, including the traditional turkey and pumpkin pie, and eight different wines. Festivities went on until midnight, when all feasting abruptly came to an end.

Dec. 1, 1850 was a Sunday. All good Puritan feasts stopped at the beginning of the Sabbath.

This story was originally published November 22, 2014 at 5:35 PM with the headline "Thanksgiving had spotty start in California during the Gold Rush."