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How Freemasonry Came to California and Hawaii
Freemasonry came to California and Hawaii by land and by sea. Overland it was carried by no ordinary frontiersmen but by picked adventurers who challenged the wilderness and mastered it. They trapped the beaver, lived on bear and buffalo, fought Indians and caroused away their hard-earned wages. They were known as the mountain men.
When the American frontier moved swiftly from the Mississippi to the Pacific, these men were the leaders, the guides, the scouts, the soldiers the peace officers and the statesmen. As statesmen they displayed the pragmatic wisdom one might expect. For it was the same pragmatic wisdom seen so clearly in Brother Benjamin Franklin's view of morality and politics. It was a morality which deliberately cut free of theology by urging concentration not on abstract thought nor ideal virtue, but on human deeds and their consequences for good or evil.
Most of the mountain men came from Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio with a long tradition of Indian fighting and pioneering behind them. But in the Rockies everything - the savages, the animals, the climate, the country itself - was bigger, wilder, fiercer than anything their fathers had known. Those who survived the constant danger and hardship were toughened to an extraordinary degree of courage, skill and physical fitness.
Among the earliest to bring moral restraint, respect for law and justice and for the rights of each individual human being, attitudes learned at the altar of Freemasonry, was Christopher "Kit" Carson who arrived in California in 1829. He was born December 24, 1809 in Kentucky and became a Mason in Montezuma Lodge No. 109, New Mexico, under the jurisdiction of the Grand Lodge of Missouri. Carson carried the first overland mail from Taos, New Mexico to military headquarters at Monterrey, California in 1842. He was with Fremont at the capture of Sonoma, California in 1846. During the Civil War he was a Colonel and later brevetted Brigadier General of the First New Mexico Cavalry.
So far as can be determined the first Master Mason to establish permanent residence in California was Abel Stearns who came from Salem, Mass. and settled in the "pueblo" of Los Angeles. Here he prospered and had the distinction of shipping to the Philadelphia mint in 1842, the first gold mined in California. Stearns obtained the gold in his mercantile business from miners who had discovered and worked the mines in Placerita Canyon, near the San Fernando mission in Los Angeles county. It is interesting to note that this discovery of gold in 1840, in amounts sufficient to send to the United States mint caused not a bit of interest beyond the area of discovery, whereas the finding of a few flakes of gold at Sutter's Mill on the American River in 1848 caused a mad rush to the hills of California, the like of which the world has never known.
The first American settler in the Napa valley, famous today for its grapes and its wines, was George Yount, an associate of Kit Carson's. Yount received the degrees of Masonry in Benecia Lodge No. 5 and from 1856 to 1864 served as Grand Bible Bearer of the Grand Lodge of California. History records that he built the first log fort in California.
The first Masonic charter carried to California was brought by the Reverend Saschel Woods, a Cumberland Presbyterian minister and member of Wakanda Lodge No. 52 of Carrollton, Missouri. That charter dated May 10, 1848 was for Western Star Lodge No. 98 of the Grand Lodge of Missouri, to be opened at Benton City, California. Woods traveled to California with Peter Lassen who was named as Junior Warden in that Charter. Lassen in 1848 was the leader of an immigrant train of twelve wagons, whose owners planned to settle on Deer Creek in California. They came to California by a remote and impractical route since named Lassen route. History recounts the trials the party endured until finally rescued.
Between this first charter and 1850 some fifteen other charters and dispensations found their way to California. The following were used to form Masonic Lodges:
California Lodge No. 13 (now No. 1) San Francisco, chartered by the Grand Lodge of the District of Columbia, November 9, 1848
Pacific Lodge (now Benecia No. 5) Benecia, dispensation from the Grand Lodge of Louisiana Ancient York Masons, June 5, 1849
Davy Crockett Lodge (later Davy Crockett No. 7 and San Francisco No. 7) San Francisco, dispensation from the Grand Lodge of Louisiana Ancient York Masons, 1849 (exact date unknown )
Connecticut Lodge No. 75 (now Tehama No. 3) Sacramento, chartered by the Grand Lodge of Connecticut, January 31, 1849
New Jersey Lodge (later Jennings Lodge) Sacramento, dispensation from the Grand Lodge of New Jersey, March 1, 1849
Sierra Nevada Lodge (now Madison No. 23 of Grass Valley) Centerville, dispensation from the Grand Lodge of Indiana, May, 1848
Lavely Lodge (later Marysville No. 9 and Corinthian No. 9) Marysville, dispensation from the Grand Lodge of Illinois, October, 1849
Pacific Lodge, Long's Bar, dispensation from the Grand Lodge of Illinois, October, 1848
Lafayette Lodge No. 29 (later Nevada No. 13) Nevada City, California, chartered by the Grand Lodge of Wisconsin, April 2O, 1850
Gregory Yale Lodge, Stockton, dispensation from the Grand Lodge of Florida, 1849
Many of the outstanding leaders of early California came from Masonic ranks. Benjamin Wilson arrived in 1841 and became the second Mayor of Los Angeles and a member of Los Angeles Lodge No. 42. Dr. Robert Semple came to California in 1844 and affiliated with Benecia Lodge No. 5. He served as President of the first California State Constitutional Convention held in Monterrey in 1849. Nine of the 48 delegates to that Convention were Master Masons but their influence far outweighed their numbers. They brought California into the Union as a slave free state and adopted a strong public education platform.
As our late Past Grand Master Leon Whitsell points out the first Masons to reach California were seafaring men who traded along the coast from San Diego in the south to the Russian settlements in the north. They were a hardy lot fearing neither man nor the elements. Their trading and whaling took them as far as the Sandwich Islands now better known as our Hawaiian Paradise. The Lodges in Hawaii are today a part of the Grand Jurisdiction of California and one of the most pleasant duties of the Grand Master of California in his annual visitation to the Hawaiian Lodges where hospitality and brotherhood are practiced to a degree excelled nowhere.
The first Masonic Lodge to be formed west of the Missouri River was organized on board the whaling ship Ajax in Honolulu harbor, Sandwich Islands, on April 8, 1842 by Captain M. LeTellier who held a commission dated 1841 from the Supreme Council 33d of France to "set up Lodges in the Pacific Ocean and elsewhere in his voyages; to issue warrants, to call upon the Supreme Council for charters; to make Masons at sight; to forever be given the Grand Honors upon his appearance in any Lodge of his creation." The work was that of the first three degrees in the Scottish Rite, conferred in French. The charter received was dated April 8, 1842 and the Lodge named Le Progles de l'Oceanie No. 124. Among the charter members in addition to LeTellier, were John Meek and Henry Sea. Captain Meek had settled in the Islands in 1809 only Thirty-one years after their discovery by that illustrious English Freemason, Captain James Cook. Meek was born in Marblehead, Mass., November 14, 1797. He is reported by the noted California historian, H. fl. Bancroft, as Captain of the Amethyst engaged in otter hunting under Russian contract along the California coast in 1811 and 1812. Thus Meek is believed to be the first Mason to visit California. Although Meek served as Senior Warden of Le Progres Lodge and at the time of his death was noted in the minutes of the Lodge to have been a member for thirty-two years, no one seems to know where he was made a Mason.
For the first Mason to settle in California, honors again go to a seafaring man, named Robert Jonathan Elwell. Captain Elwell was raised in Lodge St. Andrew at Boston, January 23, 1823. The shipping registry shows him as Master of the Washington in 1828 and some time Iater he is described as taking a cargo of horses to Hawaii. In 1829 he married Senorita Vicenta Sanchez and settled in Santa Barbara where he "engaged in trade" until the time of his death in 1853.
Many other seafaring men who were Freemasons, visited California in the 1830's. One of the most colorful was Captain John Paty a founder and charter member of Le Progres Lodge. He was trusted advisor to the Hawaiian Court. In 1846 King Kamehameha III appointed him official representative of Hawaiian interests in California and Commodore of the Hawaiian Navy. In that latter capacity Paty is said to have worn a resplendent uniform which delighted the natives. Kamehameha III himself became a Mason in Hawaiian Lodge. His handwritten application for the degrees may be seen in photocopy of the original in the library of the Grand Lodge of California in San Francisco.
And so Freemasonry came to California by sea and by land, car a fed by men whose lives were influenced by its teachings and who in turn were influential in the development of the great Hawaii and California we enjoy today.
-- Eugene S. Hopp, F.P.S. (taken with permission from the 1975 volume of the Philalethes Magazine)
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