Three-fingered Jack McCall, Part 1

Another desperate family story

Isaac Graham’s three-room house on the Zayante Creek. This board and batten style was typical of the cabins and houses of that era. The planks are redwood cut in Graham’s own mill. Possibly the house built for him in 1847 by Hugh McCall.

Three-fingered Jack

I recently discovered a new cousin, name of Three-fingered Jack McCall, who died in a shoot-out trying to rob train outside of Goshen, California, on March 19, 1896. It was his first train robbery. Prior to train-robbing he had earned a living as a lumberjack, which explains how he lost two fingers and earned his nickname. His real name was Daniel McCall.

He was born in Soquel, Santa Cruz County, California, in 1852 to Dolores Moxica and Hugh Pablo McCall. Dolores was Old California, descended from early Spanish settlers, remembered in her old age as respectable and Catholic. Hugh Pablo was a restless wanderer, a mountain man, a bigamist, an alcoholic, and a person who could not maintain his focus long enough to succeed at anything. When he arrived in California, he supported himself as an itinerant trapper and lumberjack, a model for his son. He was also my 5xgreat-uncle, born in New Jersey (as so many of my ancestors were), a long-time resident of Norfolk County where I grew up, and a veteran of the War of 1812. His real name was Hugh Percival McCall.

Before I tell you about Three-fingered Jack, I have to tell you about his father.

One of the world’s great wanderers

Useless to ask a wandering man
Advice on the construction of a house.
The work will never come to completion.
-From the Chinese Book of Odes, in Chatwin The Songlines

I’ve always been fascinated by stories of people who disappear, are declared dead, but then, one day, come home again, having lived another life in secret somewhere else and far away. Or folk stories about penniless younger sons who must go away to earn their fortunes, only to return one day rich and accomplished. Or tales of international spies with five passports under different names able to weave amongst their different lives without ever having to settle down and face the consequences.

My bad boy uncle Hugh McCall wrote the book on such disappearing acts when he ran away from home and family in 1827 at the age of 35 only to turn up 45 years later with vague stories about where he had been all that time. His Canadian wife and children being dead, there was no one left to complain of his absence; the village of Vittoria gave him a welcome home parade, and when he passed on in 1874, his death register listed his occupation as “one of the world’s great wanderers.”

There are clearly two ways of looking at this, I think to myself, now that I have achieved an age of wisdom and mature judgment. First, there is the mythic tale of the nomad, sloughing off the tedious responsibilities of civilized life, possessions and attachments, and slipping away into a world of romance and adventure. Think: Jack Kerouac on the road. But on the other hand, the unromantic hand, Hugh McCall abandoned his wife and three small children to the winds. E. A. Owen, the Long Point Settlement chronicler, wrote that “He was possessed of a roaming disposition and was fond of adventure.”¹ But he was clearly something of a wastrel and inept. Every money-making venture he put his hand to failed.

And what was he doing all that time away? The story his nephew F. W. Walsh told after the wanderer died is that he made his way as a hunter, something like Daniel Boone, traveling down the Mississippi to Mexico where he took part in a revolution, but picking the wrong side, the “Monarchial” faction, he ended up in a Mexican prison. Some indeterminate time later he teleported to California for the Gold Rush, but typically managed to fail at finding gold. At which point, he turned up in Vittoria in southern Ontario ancient in years but triumphant. (This last part still mystifies me, the apotheosis of the serial loser.)

New Jersey to Norfolk County, the early years

Hugh Percival McCall was one of my New Jersey ancestors, the youngest child of a Scottish soldier Donald McCall (my 5xgreat-grandfather), a Highlander from island of Mull, a veteran of the siege of Louisbourg (1758), the capture of Quebec (1759), and Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763-65). Donald McCall was demobilized in Philadelphia where he met his wife Elsie Simpson, and the two of them homesteaded in a Scottish settlement near Basking Ridge, Somerset County, New Jersey. In total they had nine children, five sons and four daughters. Hugh Percival came late, born in 1793.

Somerset County enclosed by the broken red line. Basking Ridge is at the northeastern tip, roughly the “R” in Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. This is where the Donald McCall and Elsie Simpson settled in about 1765, leaving for Canada finally in 1797.

Here is my go-to map of Norfolk County, Lake Erie and Long Point at the bottom. The orange circle encloses Vittoria and St. Williams, the area where the McCall family settled after leaving New Jersey. The blue circle is where my Glover forebears settled, also the Havilands where Hugh Percival met Anor.

An early landowner map showing Vittoria (shaded), Young’s Creek, and the lots owned by Donald McCall, the old Scottish soldier, and his sons Duncan and Daniel. Hugh Percival McCall inherited Donald’s land when his father died in 1818. You can see the location of Hugh’s school where an “Indian Trail” crosses the creek.

By 1797, the family had settled in what would become Norfolk County in southern Ontario, scene of my childhood. They chopped farms out of the bush just west of Vittoria along Young’s Creek a few miles north of Lake Erie. Briefly, Hugh Percival went to school; at least he learned to sign his name. But mostly he grew up wild, already uprooted, the accidental child of older parents (his father was 58 and his mother 46 when he was born) consumed with obtaining the bare necessities on the frontier. He occupied himself in hunting (wolves, 2 shillings a head) and fabulous feats of strength. Once he and his posse challenged each other to lift the grinding wheel in a bark mill (for grinding tree bark to extract the tannins for tanning leather). Owen describes the wheel:

The wheel was six feet in diameter, eighteen inches thick, solid, and made of oak timber. In addition to the weight of this ponderous wheel was that of the propelling shaft, or lever as it was called, around which the wheel revolved. When it is considered that this shaft was about fifteen feet long, passing through the wheel four feet from the outer end where the lifting was done, the difficulty of the task may well be imagined…

Hugh seems to have imprinted not on his father but on his eldest brother John McCall, a large, turbulent, hard-drinking man who, in New Jersey, had owned a slave. According to Owen, the soul of discretion, John McCall “was possessed of a rough-and-ready nature, and was a conspicuous personage in the settlement. He was endowed with a coarse vein of humor, and being an expert hunter, was one of the best known characters of his time.” Thomas Welch, an Anglican and a member of the local land-owning elite, described him less judiciously as an “abandoned Character . . . accustomed to escape from the penalties of the Law in New Jersey, where nothing less than Grand Larceny is laid to his Charge. . . . He is certainly a very bad Man.”²

War of 1812 and after

John McCall owned a boat that he used for trading up and down and across the lake. When the War of 1812 broke out, Hugh Percival was 19 and full of vim. In early August, 1812, Sir Isaac Brock, the British commander in what was then called Upper Canada, organized a party of Norfolk militia, put them in boats at Port Dover, and sailed up the lake to Detroit, which they promptly captured. John McCall’s boat formed part of the armada, fitted with a cannon in the bow, Hugh Percival in the crew.

Norfolk was harried country during the war. Its farms were the bread basket of the British Army, but most of the time the British Army hung back at Ancaster on Lake Ontario and left the farm county open to depredations from the lake and by land. Americans were forever coming over and burning things. My short story “The Battle of Malcolm’s Mills” is a fictionalized account of an incident during the famous McArthur Raid of 1814. Hugh Percival was a sergeant in the Flank Company of the Norfolk Militia, then joined Col. Henry Bostwick's Royal London Volunteers. He seems to have fought in a various skirmishes, most notably at the Battle of McRae’s Farm on the Thames River (roughly where Chatham is today) under the command of Lt. Henry Medcalf in December, 1813.

By late 1813, the Americans had pushed the British out of Detroit and killed the great war chief Tecumseh at the disastrous Battle of Moraviantown in October. The Americans had set up forward posts well inland from Detroit. In December, the militia in Norfolk got wind of a large herd of cattle grazing on the prairie at Rondeau. Medcalf organized a unit, including Hugh, to bring them in. When Medcalf and his men arrived at Rondeau the cattle had disappeared, but a local informant reported that a party of American troops were stationed at McRae’s farmhouse up on the Thames. Though his men were exhausted and cold, Medcalf decided to take advantage of the situation; he had surprise on his side.

The Canadians surrounded the house in the night, shouted for surrender, then poured a volley through the windows. One American was killed, the rest captured. Hugh, in particular, was praised for his energy and bravery. Which was all well and good except that the Canadians retreating with their straggling band of prisoners managed to let most of they escape before they reached the British lines. Whether this was accidental or intentional is open to debate. Evidently, the experience scarred Lt. Medcalf who was promoted to Captain but soon thereafter disappears from the public record.

A marriage of like minds

Meantime, earlier in 1813, Hugh had married Anor Haviland. He was 20 and she was 25, also a wild child, and illiterate. Like the McCalls, the Havilands were Loyalists from New Jersey, with land grants at the north end of Norfolk in Townsend Township (I went to Boy Scouts with Haviland boys from nearby Boston). My genealogically inclined late cousin John Cardiff wryly observed, “Hugh and Aner appear to have been a couple of rascals who probably did the neighbors a favor when they married each other.”³ They had five children: George (b1814), Isaac (b1815, lived only 10 days), Mervyum (b1817, died the same day), Allen (b1818), and Sarah (b1820).

At first Hugh tried farming in Townsend Township near Anor’s parents, but in 1818 his father died, leaving him the family farm near Vittoria on condition that he look after his aging mother. This arrangement didn’t suit Hugh past the first year (or maybe it didn’t suit Anor). He sold the farm to his brother James and put the money toward a boat, following the example of his older brother John. But he wasn’t very good a sailing either. Famously, in 1819 he got caught in the lake ice off Port Rowan with a load of salt. Salt prices rose $2 a barrel in the aftermath. In 1820, Anor took the children and moved back to her parents.

According to John Cardiff, “A heavy drinker, Hugh lost the boat then became a seldom trusted pilot for hire. Several times he drank his commission in the U.S., woke up broke and had to walk home to Aner who yet again took him in and put him to work improving whatever poor housing she had at the time.” Typical of his efforts, according to Owen, “Mr. McCall was awarded a grant of land in the township of Sombra, but he could not tie himself down to the task of improving it.” By 1827, Anor was reduced to squatting on a piece of property in Townsend, making do with handouts from her parents. Hugh Percival exerted himself to make one final effort to earn enough to help her buy the land. “For a time, says Owen, “he engaged in the fur traffic.”

But that year or the next he finally he gave up and lit out for the territory.

Anor moved the remains of her family west to Yarmouth in neighboring Elgin County to a farm her father owned. Her daughter died at the age of 12 in 1832. She remarried, then remarried again and had to take out a restraining order against that man. Her son George died and she stepped in to take care of his wife and children. Then her remaining son died. In 1864, at the age of 76, she died. She was buried next to her daughter.

Hugh Percival not at the Alamo

Until recently, no one really knew what Hugh was doing for the next dozen or so years. The only evidence, such as it was, was contained an a sentence in E. A. Owen’s book and a newspaper memorial written by Hugh’s nephew F. L. Walsh around the time of his death. Owen wrote, “For a time he engaged in the fur traffic. Finally he went to California, and did not return until he had grown old.” Walsh had more to say, but much of it is vague and confusing.

A few years after that war (1812—14) was ended, from not having been successful in maritime pursuits on the lakes and other causes, Hugh McCall left this country and being much of a sportsman, went southward along the then confines of settlements — rifle in hand — surpassing many of the renowned hunters of that time, by the numbers taken by his unerring aim on the famed hunting grounds of the West, until he finally reached Mexico. There he settled and was successful in gaining property for several years, when out of pure philanthropy, as they have since evinced, their affectionate neighbours persuaded the Mexicans that to be politically happy was to do as they had done — become independent. Acting upon this advice, a revolution took place. When the subject of these remarks as well from his Monarchial principles, early inculcated as from a sense of duty, in return for kind offices which had been extended to him by those in authority, he joined the forces in defense of Spanish supremacy. They were discomfited and he with others taken, was forthwith pinioned to be shot; but it so happened that one in authority amongst the insurgents was a Scotchman and he hearing or seeing the name McCall amongst those of the doomed prisoners, came to him and asked him if he came from Scotland, being answered that he was the son of a Scotsman, he calmly remarked, Perhaps it might be as well not to execute that man — his life was spared but not his property. He was hurried far into the interior of the country and retained a prisoner until Mexican independence had been gained, which if a blessing must have been one in disguise as their subsequent history has shown.

After being released from captivity Hugh McCall made his way to California where his efforts to settle himself comfortably promised for a time to be crowned with success , but his plans were again frustrated by the angel of evil omen which had ruined his prospects in Mexico — overshadowing regions West of the Rocky Mountains which caused the mania which seized the many thousands to flock to that country in the hope of getting gold. But this did not benefit the subject of these remarks, quite the contrary.

He continued however to plod on in California in very reduced circumstances from one year to another, until recently when, from bodily infirmity and age, he was induced to return to this country of his youth…⁴

Walsh had this story from Hugh Percival himself, or from another nephew Simpson McCall (Owen’s information came from Simpson McCall), and it is about as garbled as you can get. By the late 1820s Mexico was already an independent country no longer ruled by Spain. So the words “independence” and “Spanish supremacy” are meaningless. It comprised all the territory that became Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California, as well as the remnant that is modern Mexico. In 1827 American settlers were flocking to Texas, taking advantage of generous land grants by which the Mexican government hoped to erect a civilized barrier against the Comanche. But Mexico had outlawed slavery, which annoyed those American immigrants who wanted to extend their cotton empire into the new lands. These American Texans did attempt to persuade their Mexican neighbors to rise for independence, and some did. The upshot was the Texas Revolution (1835-36), the massacres at the Alamo and Goliad, and the eventual surprising defeat of the Mexican army under Santa Ana (like Hugh Percival, Santa Ana proved inept at almost everything he tried).

Helen McCall Pincombe, the family authority on Hugh McCall, decided he went to Texas, that the political events in Texas roughly paralleled the events described in Walsh’s memorial. She thought he was imprisoned until 1848 when the Treaty of Hidalgo was signed, giving all the country from Texas to California to the United States. His release, so she thought, in 1848 coincided with the discovery of gold at Sutter’s mill in California.

For a while, I bought this story, for lack of an alternative. Hugh was a Loyalist and a Tory, an enemy of the American democratic experiment. He was grateful to Mexico for its open-handed land grants. When it came time to choose sides, he threw in his lot with the Mexican government against the American revolutionaries. In other words, he sided with the Mexican government against Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie and all those Walt Disney heroes of yesteryear. But then who took him prisoner — the Texans he fought against? And who wanted to shoot him? And why did he end up in a Mexican jail after fighting on their side? In fact, the whole shooting episode sounds invented, a B movie Hollywood script, and the reasons for his imprisonment remain obscure. His settling in Texas is only a threadbare theory.

Hugh Percival becomes mountain man Hugh Pablo

There are no records of Hugh in Texas. Those years are a tabula rasa. But just in the last couple of months I found fresh documents, and, lo!, there he was, now Hugh Pablo McCall living in Soquel, Santa Cruz County, California where he appeared in censuses and voters lists from 1850 to 1870.

In the summer of 1969 I braced myself against the sun and the glittering reflection off the waves on the pier at Santa Cruz little knowing how near I was to Uncle Hugh with only a century between us.

The date of Hugh Pablo’s appearance in California is squishy; a grandson’s obituary published in 2014 says he arrived in 1828.⁵ The Riptide Newspaper’s Centennial Pioneer Edition of 1950 contains a sketch of the life of mountain man William Ware⁶, which claims that Ware was “certainly trapping in the great basin by ‘28 for I have the statement of J. P. McCall and others who knew him in the Rockies this year.” The anonymous author goes on to say, “He prob. came to Calif. with [Isaac] Graham about ‘34 from N Mex.” Leon Rowland, in Santa Cruz, the early years⁷, describes Hugh Pablo as “the old French Canadian who had come over the Santa Fe trail in the middle 1930s.” Years later, Graham’s daughter Mrs. Mathilda Jane Graham Rice confirmed that Hugh Pablo McCall was part of Graham’s brigade of mountain men, along with, amazingly enough, Kit Carson. “Of the company who came to California with him I only remember the name of Trout, McCall, Billy Ware, Henry Nail, a young man Graham raised. The rest I have forgotten. And Kit Carson.”⁸

Isaac Graham⁹ was a well known mountain man, turbulent, violent, scheming, rebellious, also a, like Hugh, bigamist who had left wife and children behind; he was born in Virginia but his family moved to Crab Orchard, Kentucky, when he was three; at the age of 20 he went to live with his mother’s cousin Daniel Boone and was present when Boone died in 1821. Graham first appears in Santa Cruz County in 1833, head of a party of trappers and traders, including William Ware, who took the Old Spanish Trail from Santa Fe and Taos. He established a saw mill on the Zayante Creek (modern day Felton) where Hugh Pablo, Billy Ware, others of the mountain man ilk settled and worked as sawyers, lumberjacks and trappers. In 1847, Hugh Pablo built a house for Graham¹⁰, and in 1849 he leased the mill with a partner, another mountain man named Gervais Hammond. He also found time to marry a local woman, Dona Maria Vaselas, and sired two sons with her, Francisco McCall (b1846, but according to census figures as early as 1842) and Juan McCall (b1847) (John for Hugh’s black sheep older brother).

These dates contradict theory #1, Hugh Percival going to Texas and participating in the Texas Revolution. Now we have Hugh Percival heading south, self-advertising as a hunter and trapper, somehow finding his way to St. Louis and hanging a right along the Missouri River following all the other hunters and trappers heading into the Rockies. From this point, some men headed along the river toward the northwest hinterlands; others veered southwest from Kansas City along what was known as the Santa Fe Trail because, yes, it ended up in Santa Fe. Brigades of trappers would congregate at Taos and head north into the mountains and the Great Basin. But there was also a southerly route, the Old Spanish Trail, that terminated in Los Angeles. It seems likely that Hugh Percival, within a year of leaving Norfolk County, joined these mountain men, trapping and trading in the Rockies before washing up with Isaac Graham and Billy Ware in Santa Cruz County in 1833.

The Santa Fe Trail from Columbia, Missouri, to Santa Fe in what was then Mexico.

The Old Spanish Trail from Santa Fe to Los Angeles. Monterey Bay is on the far left between San Jose and Salinas.

These mountain men were figures of romance and myth. Think of Robert Redford in the film Jeremiah Johnson (1972), the very image of Hugh McCall I am sure.

But there is also Kit Carson (1940) starring Jon Hall. Kit Carson was perhaps the most famous mountain man and was in Isaac Graham’s 1833 brigade to California with Uncle Hugh. The movie begins with a text preamble: “A century ago, the land from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast Range of the Rocky Mountains was still a mysterious wilderness, its tremendous primeval fastness unexplored except for the wanderings of a few hard-bitten American trappers, among whom Kit Carson was a leader.” No mention of the people already living there.

As an nine-year-old in 1957 I was transfixed by Walt Disney’s mountain man soap opera The Saga of Andy Burnett, learned the two theme songs by heart, dreamed of being a mountain man (the TV show’s politics of misogyny, racism, cultural appropriation, and Manifest Destiny no doubt had a detrimental effect, but I am completely cured now, thank you very much). Coincidentally, Andy Burnett (carrying a rifle made by Daniel Boone) starts in Pittsburgh in 1820, travels down the Ohio, thence to St. Louis, and the Santa Fe Trail, finally launching into the mountains from Taos after a flirtation with the divine Estrella. In my imagination I was following Uncle Hugh without having any idea who Uncle Hugh was at the time.

The Saga of Andy Burnett

The way was long and the desert hot
And many knew fear, but he did not
Danger and dust and honest sweat
All part of the Saga of Andy Burnett

Andy made the trails, opened up the land
Andy gave America a mighty helpin' hand
Andy's on the move, Andy won't rest
Andy Burnett, he's a'travelin' West

Okay, shoot me; I was only nine after all. The other theme song went like this:¹¹

Ladies in the Sky

Blow the wind from the mountains
Ladies proud and high
Blow the wind from the mountains
Ladies in the sky
No lover ever had a sweeter dream
Than I remember by a mountain stream

Lost my heart to the mountains
There I want to roam
Goin' back to the mountains
Where I feel at home
I will be faithful until I die
I will always be faithful to those ladies in the sky.

In the 1840s, Graham and his mountain man cronies are briefly suspected of fomenting rebellion (something like the Texas Revolution). Graham and 40 others are arrested and shipped off to prison in San Blas, only to be returned with apologies and indemnities within the year. Could this have been the seed of Hugh Percival’s wild stories of firing squads and imprisonment? I can’t find him on lists of known participants, so I rather doubt he was directly involved. But he may have been inspired by events to goose his resume (which is what I think he was doing telling stories in Vittoria, always a bit player trying to raise his billing).

Santa Cruz County. Felton is where Isaac Graham had his mill on the Zayante Creek. Branciforte was roughly where the “Cruz” in Santa Cruz sits on the map. Branciforte settlers would graze their cattle on the banks of the Soquel Creek.

Dona Maria Vaselas died after Juan is born. Both boys were living in Soquel in 1850 with a young woman identified as Dolores McCall. For some reason, on the date of enumeration Hugh Pablo was not present. He was, as they say, dividing his time. In 1848-49, he was looking for gold in Calaveras and Stockton with another Soquel settler named Lodge¹², who was married to a Mexican heiress, owner of a vast tract centering on Soquel. Someone murdered Lodge in Calaveras; Hugh Pablo returned to Zayante without any gold. He and a friend, Gervais Hammond, leased the old mill from Isaac Graham, but true to form he only ran the mill for two months before selling his share to Hammond. In the same vein, he was named one of two county supervisors in Santa Cruz on September 21, 1850, but resigned on October 14.

The Riptide Newspaper’s Centennial Pioneer Edition¹³ contains a sketch of Hammond’s later career and his friendship with Hugh Pablo. Gervais (also Jarvis) was

measuring plank for Graham '49; perhaps one of the mountaineers, certainly a man who had a lot to say about his acquaintance with Capt. Graham, none of it good but all disproved in court through which, until his death in ‘54, his tales to the public administrator dragged by the nose the swashbuckling old veteran of many a good scrap. Tho’ Hammond's purpose is not clearly revealed, the testimony adduced in these old cases have added highlights to the history of the west between '28 and '46. He with Hugh Pablo McCall were lessees of Graham's ‘upper mill’ [in] ’50, buying M’s interest in the property later in the year when living in the Santa Cruz potrero; lessee with Hoy of part of Martina Castro’s Soquel Rancho this year; partner of William R. Phipps in a hotel at ‘Watsonville Landing' '52 when with a nephew, James Hobbs, he was living at Soquel, dealing extensively as share-cropper, blacksmith, teamster and woodsman. His estate, represented largely by huge, uncollectable notes, was left almost entirely to his friend, McCall.

Hugh Pablo married Dolores (maiden name Moxica, 1823-1915) on April 3, 1852, and their son Daniel (the future train robber named for another McCall brother) was baptized on October 2. Hugh Pablo was 59, Dolores was 29. A daughter Susannah appeared in 1856, followed by Santiago (James) in 1859, and, surprisingly, another son David in 1870 when his father was 77, all born in Soquel.

The secret wife of my 5xgreat-uncle Hugh Percival McCall. She was Three-fingered Jack’s mother. (Santa Cruz Evening News, December 18, 1915)

Dolores lived to be 93. An obituary in the Santa Cruz Evening News, December 18, 1915, memorialized her as “a member of one of the old time Spanish families and can remember the days of the old Mission Fathers. She was a devout Catholic and worshiped in the old Mission Church.”

The Prodigal Returns

The nomad becomes a farmer, settles down, raises his children, without amounting to much. In 1860, he owned two horses (value $110) and just 37 “improved” acres out of his 160-acre farm (value $555). He fell behind. After being credited with helping to start the lumber industry in Soquel, he drifted into obscurity. His sons become labourers, teamsters, lumberjacks and train robbers. He lived 35 years in California, almost exactly the same amount of time he spent in Canada.

Then something happens. Was it the birth of another son in 1870? Or was he just restless, always restless. Perhaps crucially, the transcontinental railway had just delivered its first batch of east-west passengers to San Francisco on September 6,1869, opening up an easy route home.¹⁴

I couldn’t find any mention of his second disappearance in the California records and genealogies. A willed forgetfulness on the part of the family. He last appears in Soquel in the 1870 federal census, occupation farming, and — poof! — he’s gone.

The next thing you know they’re holding a parade for him in Vittoria.

There is always a Bible quote for such occasions.

It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found. Luke 15:32

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Here is Part 2.

Here is Part 3.

1. E. A. Owen, Pioneer sketches of Long Point settlement, or, Norfolk's foundation builders and their family genealogies, 1898.

2. Dictionary of Canadian Biography entry for Duncan McCall.

3. See John Cardiff’s Norfolk Genealogy website for Hugh McCall.

4. Quoted in Helen McCall Pincombe’s invaluable book Loyalists Hugh McCall and Anor Haviland McCall and their Descendants, pp. 28-29.

5. Thomas James McCall obit

Birth: 1932

Death: 2014

Thomas James McCall Jr.

June 7, 1932 – June 26, 2014 Fourth Generation Santa Cruzian Tom McCall, loving father, grandfather, and Santa Cruz native passed away June 26, 2014 at the age of 82. Tom came from a long lineage of local Santa Cruzians beginning with his great-grandfather Hugh Pablo McCall, who arrived in Santa Cruz in 1828. Tom’s grandfather, James B. McCall, was one of the first fisherman in the Monterey Bay, and his grandmother, Clara McCall, was a member of the Rodriguez family of Villa de Branciforte. James and Clara’s son, Tom McCall Sr., was a successful businessman who owned McCall’s Furniture at Pacific Avenue for over 25 years. In his lifetime, Tom McCall Jr. experienced an amazing era of Santa Cruz history and culture.

Antique dealer, appraiser, fisherman, storyteller, and all around pirate, Tom was not a man who lived by convention. With one eye missing and the other on the prize, Tom searched for treasure every day of his life. He was a man measured not by current standards or net worth, but by his life experience and the desire to travel his path, with friends galore and a few enemies to match.

There are hundreds of adventures and stories to be told, so we invite you to share in a celebration of Thomas James McCall Jr’s life on Monday, July 14th, from 4 to 7 PM at Aldo’s, next to the Santa Cruz harbor.

Tom is survived by Judy McCall, his children Tom and Bonny McCall, and grandchildren Jackson, Tuesday, and Sean McCall.

From <https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/obituaries/thomas-james-mccall/>

6. Found here.

7. You can read Leon Rowland’s book online here.

8. This is in Leon Rowland’s notes archived at the University of Santa Cruz. Rowland Card Collection Database, Leon and Jeanette Rowland Collection, UCSC Special Collections and Archives.

9. See his Wikipedia page.

10. See Card B-3, 223, in the Rowland Card Collection Database.

SAWMILLS Graham 1849.

Hugh Paul McCall built house for Graham at Zayante in 1847. In 1849 he and Gervais Hammond leased “the old mill” from Graham. In 1852 they transferred their activities to Soquel.

11. Song lyrics from this site.

12. See Card B-3, 323.03, in the Rowland Card Collection Database.

Lodge with Hecox went to the mines in ‘48 and remained there 15 months. H. P. McCall was at Caleveras[sic] and Stockton with Lodge in 48-49 and after November 1, 49, ran the mill for two months, when lumber sold for $90 per M. Lumber value in ‘47 had been $30.

13. Riptide Newspaper’s Centennial Pioneer Edition, 1950.

14. According to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History fact sheet, “In 1870 it took approximately seven days and cost as little as $65 for a ticket on the transcontinental line from New York to San Francisco; $136 for first class in a Pullman sleeping car; $110 for second class; and $65 for a space on a third- or “emigrant”-class bench.”