Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party

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The Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party party consisted of ten families who migrated from Iowa to California prior to the Mexican-American War or the California Gold Rush. The fifty-member group left near present-day Council Bluffs, Iowa on May 22, 1844. They left with a larger group of Oregon-bound settlers in a group of forty wagons. They were most famous for being the first wagon train to cross the Sierra Nevada during the expansion of the American West. Fifty travelers left Iowa; 52 arrived in Sacramento (there being two births along the way).

Elisha Stephens was elected captain of the wagon train, because he had spent several years as a mountain man and beaver hunter in the Pacific Northwest. He also had skills as a blacksmith and resigned his position at the Potawatomi Council Bluffs Subagency beforehand.

Dr. John Townsend, his wife, Elizabeth, and her younger brother, Moses Schallenberger, were going west because he was a man of vision and wanted a chance at grand adventure and opportunity in California. He would become the first licensed physician in California.

The largest family group in the party was headed by Martin Murphy, Sr. Their family was comprised of 23 members. Mr. Murphy was seeking religious, economic, and political freedoms in the West. Another member of the party who played a role in the western emigration as a guide was "Old" Caleb Greenwood.

The Stephens Party is significant in California history because they pioneered the first route for wagons across the Sierra Nevada at or near Donner Pass in 1844, two years before the Donner Party and five years before the 1849 Gold Rush.

Upon arrival in California, Stephens settled in the San Jose/Cupertino area, where Stevens [sic] creek is named for him. In 1862, he left the area, heading to Kern County in Central California, where he was the first non-native settler in what is today the city of Bakersfield California. A state historic plaque in that city marks the approximate site of his homestead there. Stephens died in Bakersfield in 1887, and is buried in Union Cemetery there, but the exact location of his grave is not known with certainty.

Elisha Stephens

"Stephens" Pass Plaque at Donner Pass California.

The most likely plot for the grave of Elisha Stephens, Union Cemetery, Bakersfield California.

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

  • Stewart, George R. The Opening of the California Trail: The Story of the Stevens Party from the Reminiscences of Moses Schallenberger as Set down for H. H. Bancroft about 1885, Edited and Expanded by Horace S. Foote in 1888. 

George R. Stewart "The California Trail" McGraw-Hill, 1962

Celia Hayes "To Truckee's Trail" (novel) Booklocker, 2007