"Last month a number of gentlemen left Arkansas for California; among the number was our family physician and nearest neighbor Dr. Brunson." Victoria Trulock's teacher Ann Kirkwood was no doubt standing over her shoulder when she wrote those lines to her grandmother on April 27, 1850. Still, the letter is most impressive coming from a child of 11.
"Mrs. Brunson felt very sad when he left, and he too felt badly when leaving her; and when he parted with Mrs. Brunson he called to bid Mother good-bye, but was then so much affected that he could not speak."
Charles Asahel Brunson (1821-1890) was born in Tennessee. In 1842 he graduated from the "medical department of the University of New York," according to his entry in Goodspeed's Biographical and Historical Memoirs; several institutions in New York State were offering medical degrees by the 1840s, and it's hard to tell from the Goodspeed's entry, written decades later, which institution is meant. (Entries in Goodspeed's were usually written by the subjects or someone close to the subject, so while they are useful, the temptation to vain exaggeration means that they deserve only a little more credence than a Facebook post.)
Asa Brunson first appears in the Trulock correspondence late in 1845 when he bought the house that the Trulocks had been renting since they arrived in Jefferson County in January. "The house that we occupy at this time is sold to a Doc. Brunson, newly married," Amanda Trulock wrote. "They expect to live here next year. She [Alcinda Elizabeth Frances Simpson] is very much of a Lady, so you see we shall have near neighbours and a physician likewise, which we have found very espesial, since we came to this Country. He is a very good physician."
It is unclear from Amanda's account of her husband's death (December 1849) whether Asa Brunson was among the three physicians in attendance who tried to relieve what appears to have been a pulmonary embolism by applying mustard plasters and bleeding Trulock at the temple; in Amanda's words, "every thing was done that the power of man could invent." In any case, Victoria describes Brunson, only a few months later, as "our family physician," and he turns up in a few more of Amanda's medical narratives, with her respect.
It is also unclear what Asa Brunson planned to do in California. Gold mining obviously had its allure, but the gold rush caused such a scarcity of goods and services that migrants could make secondary fortunes offering beef or clothing or medical attention. (Long before he came to Arkansas, Mifflin Wistar Gibbs did well in San Francisco by selling shovels to miners.)
Leaving behind his wife, child, and property (including slaves) suggests that Brunson hoped to return from California, assuming he made it all the way there. He was back in the Trulocks' neighborhood by Oct. 25, 1852, when Amanda noted that he had paid them a call.
How many Arkansas residents made it to California and returned? The Encyclopedia of Arkansas contains an entry on the effects of the California Gold Rush on Arkansas; its author Patricia Etter concludes that there is no solid estimate. As for overall Arkansas-to-California migration, Etter cites John L. Ferguson's finding that by 1860, 2,000 Arkansas natives lived in California.
"Natives" is the word Ferguson uses in his 1966 Arkansas history textbook, meaning people who reported to the census taker that Arkansas was their place of birth. The number of former Arkansas residents living in California would be larger, and larger still if we were to include those who just passed through. Nevertheless, the gold rush did not cause the depletion of Arkansas' population that some had feared.
More significant than any diminishment of population was the opening or improvement of overland trails from Fort Smith to points west. (Etter, who edited the autobiography of Robert Brownlee, has published studies of southern overland routes; Elliott West's "Continental Reckoning" contains a history of ways west, as well as the transportation revolution that was hastened by the demand for ways west.) Etter points out that, though the route varied some, "the Fort Smith-Santa Fe trail ultimately became Interstate 40 across Oklahoma, New Mexico, and northern Arizona into California."
Robert Brownlee made a secondary fortune by opening a tent store. His associate James McVicar also prospered in California but, like Asa Brunson, returned to Arkansas. My vote for the most notable return of all goes to that of Kent Pennington, an enslaved man who accompanied the son of his owner to California in 1849. The son returned to Arkansas in 1851, but Kent Pennington stayed three more years; entry documents from New Orleans strongly suggest that he returned by the isthmus of Panama. For a fuller account of his story, see Kelly Houston Jones' article in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly (spring 2016).
Returning to Victoria Trulock's passage above: When it comes to hasty generalizations about the 19th century, I am as guilty as anyone else; I detest Romanticism in literature and music and reject the emphasis on emotion over reason. (Reason is not the same thing as pure, sequential logic; that's another conversation.)
But Romanticism was not as pervasive as our worst generalizations would cause us to think: Witness the fact that a child in 1850, a child bearing the most 19th-century of names, supervised by her Yankee teacher, could take up a pen and write an emotional scene with such propriety and restraint. Props to Ann Kirkwood. And to Victoria.