The County Board of Supervisors gave Sheriff James Murphy the job of exploring a route over the Santa Cruz Mountains in 1857, with the idea of opening a road to stagecoach travel. Fortunately for Sheriff Murphy, he was an excellent horseman and not easily discouraged by the rough, steep terrain.

After Jones’ Road ended at the sawmill on Limekiln Gulch flat, Murphy had to follow the trails left by loggers through the mountains, descending into ravines, climbing out again and keeping on the alert for grizzlies and mountain lions along the way. If a road could be built from Forbes’ Mill through this almost impassable territory to the summit of the mountains, travel would be possible between the Santa Clara Valley and the port of Santa Cruz. Freight wagons could carry supplies and lumber, and stagecoaches could carry passengers back and forth. Word had reached him that Charley McKiernan already had done some road-building up on the Summit, so he pushed on in the direction of his cabin.

Reaching McKiernan’s cabin after a grueling climb, Sheriff Murphy sat down with him beside a nearby cool spring and explained his mission. The idea of a road through the mountains appealed to McKiernan, and when Sheriff Murphy wondered whether it would be possible to ever get any wheeled vehicles over such a road, Charley informed him that not only was it possible, but that it had already been done. It seemed that a widow lady from back East—a Mrs. Farnham—had driven her buggy over the summit of the mountains, alone.⁴¹ Sheriff Murphy was so impressed that he proposed the summit pass be named in her honor, but since Mrs. Farnham didn’t stay around to defend the title her accomplishment became lost in obscurity.

To those who knew Eliza W. Farnham, this information probably would not have surprised them unduly. Eliza set a very firm course in life and was not to be easily deterred from it. She was a lady with a mission, and she would not let the lack of a road or a few wild animals (if she even considered this possibility) stand in her way. Her late husband, Thomas Jefferson Farnham, a lawyer, died in San Francisco in 1848, after spending eight years adventuring in California. Bancroft, in his Pioneer Register, wryly described him as "a writer of somewhat fertile imagination," and roundly criticized his writings on California as "worthless trash" and "a tissue of lies." He and Eliza had three children, and upon learning of his death, his widow decided to go to California—possibly to settle some financial matters.

A photograph of Eliza shows her to be a rather gaunt-faced woman with a prominent nose and a firm determined chin. She is wearing wire-framed spectacles and her dark hair is parted in the center, smooth on top, with fashionable shoulder-length "sausage curls." Bancroft warily described her as ". . . a woman bent on doing the world as much good as possible. . . "⁴² —and probably one to be avoided at all cost by the hell-raising male population in the California goldfields.

The trip around the Horn to California was a long, expensive undertaking, and Eliza hit upon the idea of financing it and accomplishing a good deed at the same time. She well knew that the man who had scrambled to the placer mines and diggings led godless, dissolute lives; and she also knew how to correct the situation. What these lost souls, abandoned to drinking, gambling, and (Heaven forbid) worse, needed was the uplifting, gentling influence of some good women in their lives.

On February 2, 1949, advertisements appeared in several Eastern newspapers calling for "intelligent, virtuous women" to go to California with her as "checks upon the many evils there." She received more than two hundred responses. There were a few strings attached: the ladies must be single or widowed, and over twenty-five; they must bring with them a character recommendation from their clergyman or other authority in their town; and they must be prepared to put up $250 to pay the costs of the voyage, plus something to live on until they became gainfully employed in California, or, better yet, married.

Eliza’s plan had the support of such dignitaries as William Cullen Bryant, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and the great advocate of western migration, Horace Greeley. Armed with this authority and gratified by the response, Eliza planned to charter a ship to carry about 130 brides-to-be to San Francisco, but the great enterprise began to fall apart. Someone started a whispering campaign that Eliza was acting as a procurer to lure virtuous women away from the safety and respectability of home and family, and by the time she was ready to leave for California only three women were still willing to go.⁴³

Such a defeat would have discouraged a less determined person, but Eliza went ahead with the trip to California in 1850 and began writing about her experiences in the new state. Six years later her book, California Indoors and Out, was published. Some time before Sheriff Murphy’s arduous trip in 1857, she made her trek over the summit of the Santa Cruz Mountains, possibly gathering material for her book.

At the time when widows were expected to stay at home, or to at least remain in the background, she pushed her way into the outside world and the excitement of a new state to make a name for herself as a writer.

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