Robert A. Eccleston

Robert A. Eccleston (1830-1911), pioneer, forty-niner, diarist who recorded the discovery of the Tucson Cutoff and Yosemite Valley.

Eccleston was born in New York City, on March 4, 1830 one of ten children of Irish immigrants Edward Eccleston and Mary Anne Cristie. In Spring of 1849, at the beginning of the California Gold Rush, Robert with his older brother Edward Eccleston joined the Fremont Association formed to travel to California and mine gold there. The Association traveled by sea to Texas and then purchased wagons for an overland journey with a U. S. Army expedition to establish a military road from San Antonio to El Paso. The Association then joined with John Coffee Hays and his experienced party of frontiersmen for the journey from El Paso to California. Robert kept a diary of this journey from April 3, 1849, when they sailed from New York, to December 27, 1849 when they reached the borders of California at Fort Yuma. In this book he records of how the Tucson Cutoff was found and first traveled by his party.

Months later Eccleston's diary began again in the Southern placer mines at Agua Frio, on October 20, 1850. It describes life in the mines and his experience of the 1850–1851 Mariposa Indian War fought in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. In it he also recorded the discovery of the Yosemite Valley by one of the militia columns marching against the mountain tribes.

On September 17, 1857, Robert Eccleston married Emily Josephine Young in Colusa and had their first child there. By 1861 they were in New York, where they had their second child. Returning to California after 1861 he settled down on a ranch to have several children in Forbestown, California.

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