Physician, Visionary, Scoundrel
O.M. Wozencraft, signer of the California Constitution, was the prototype for the new wave of Californian pioneers; he was also sort of a jerk
By Joe Livernois
HE WASN’T IN MONTEREY more than six or seven weeks, but Dr. Oliver M. Wozencraft was an outsized presence as a delegate at the state constitutional convention in Colton Hall in 1849. He charged into the place with white male certitude, one part eager visionary and one part dark scoundrel.
Beyond Monterey, the doctor charged into the big bad world, certain he would influence the future of the state he helped found.
Before we start, let’s get the scoundrel part out of the way, since it will provide some context to everything else that should be known about him: Dr. Oliver Meredith Wozencraft held despicable racial beliefs that disqualify him from a legacy of honor in U.S. history. In that regard, he was very much like the 47 other mutton-chopped male delegates who convened in Colton Hall in 1849 to draft and sign the California Constitution.
And while true that delegates at the convention unanimously voted to reject slavery in the new state they were creating, it’s equally true that they did the right thing — bless them! — but for all the wrong reasons — damn them! They rejected slavery because they didn’t want Blacks in the state at all, for any reason, even as slaves. In the end, the delegates couldn’t work out the details of their exclusionary sentiments. Instead, they left it up to a future state legislature to draft a no-Blacks-allowed law, a law that never got drafted.
In this day and age, the minutes from the state constitutional convention’s proceedings is not recommended reading for the easily offended. Delegates seemed preoccupied with discussions about the admittance of “free” Blacks into California, and they spent an inordinate amount of time talking about it.
The result is a record that would make Tucker Carlson blush, if that’s possible.
And it was Dr. Oliver M. Wozencraft, one of the dozens of delegates who immigrated to California from southern states, who best summarized the sentiments of the assembled when he wondered aloud, early in the going, why the question was even being debated. “I think it … important that we should exclude the African race,” he declared. “The free negro is one of the greatest evils that society can be afflicted with.”
Wozencraft was certainly a racist’s racist, a learned man who had thought long and hard about the matter. He claimed to have come by his beliefs after a careful study of the Black people he had encountered during his life. His disgraceful observations of Blacks bubbled from the dark treachery of the Antebellum South, a culture that normalized the dehumanization of others.
Wozencraft was born and raised in Ohio, but as a medical student in Kentucky he lived next door to Jefferson Davis. Yeah, that Jefferson Davis, the leader of the confederate/seditionist states.
That Wozencraft was expressing the prevailing attitude of the time at the Monterey convention is no excuse. It is difficult to imagine today that anyone, anywhere, anytime — especially thoughtful people who like Wozencraft professed a love for a Christian God — would countenance slavery, the degradation of living souls. And it wasn’t just blacks that Wozencraft hoped to keep out of California; later, after the convention and when the rail tracks were being laid, he argued strenuously against Chinese immigration.
Having said that, I submit that Wozencraft might be the quintessential California pioneer: A flawed fellow with wild dreams who managed to get some things done, not all of it great.
Consider that he signed the state Constitution, and in so doing helped set in motion a range of mostly decent policies (excluding all the blatant racism, of course). Consider that he insisted the state build hospitals to care for those unable to afford basic health care. Consider that he exerted influence up and down California, from the state’s southern border with Mexico, where he dreamed of an audacious irrigation project, to the far northern territories, where he was one of the first men to witness the eruption of the Lassen volcano. Consider that as an Indian agent, he publicly — desperately — exposed despicable atrocities against natives committed by white men who staked claims on tribal lands. Consider that he was elected a state legislator, but abandoned the post because most of his colleagues seemed to care more about drink and less about governance.
He spent only a couple of weeks in Monterey, but his mad passions and his influence at Colton Hall on the future of California are worthy of note.
Wozencraft was an enigma, a California blend of the good that comes with the evil. The guy was certainly an intrigue, and there is some sad justice that he died a broken man.
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MY GUESS is that fewer than 1 percent of modern Californians could name a single participating delegate at the California Constitutional Convention in Monterey. I don’t mean that as an indictment on the educational system. There really is no reason to put any of those men on pedestals. They were pioneers who elbowed their way into a golden land, and it wasn’t always a righteous endeavor.
So what does it say about me that I have become a nominal expert about the life and times of Dr. Oliver M. Wozencraft, signer of the California Constitution? I tripped over his name some years ago while doing some stupid research about stupid things in California’s stupid history, and he sort of stuck with stupid me.
The more I learned about him, the more I was intrigued. Chalk it up to a morbid curiosity for insufferable jerks who reach a certain level of prominence before failing spectacularly. If you hold similar curiosities, read on.
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AS AN AMBITIOUS young physician, O.M. Wozencraft had ventured into New Orleans and was soon put to work tending to afflicted patients during a cholera outbreak that ravaged the city in 1848. He worked around the clock in the pestilential slums, working the clinics of New Orleans until his own health broke.
He moved to Brownsville, Texas, to recuperate, only to encounter an even worse cholera epidemic there. Residents in that town pleaded with him to help “in the name of humanity” after they learned he was a doctor, but he fled across the river, to Matamoros, Mexico. He eventually caved to the cries of desperate families in Brownsville, and he set up practice there. But then news of gold’s discovery in California reached Texas and he was off to seek his riches.
Wozencraft didn’t come to the Golden State to do the grubby work of mining; instead he followed the excited rush of speculators as a pioneer physician who would capitalize on the new civilization being formed in California. He recognized it as a land of opportunity, even beyond the promise of gold.
If the accounts are true, his journey from the South to California must have been a terrifying adventure. Two members of his travel party died in the broiling sands of the Sonoran Desert in the southeastern corner of California, and he could do nothing to save them. He later claimed that as he struggled for survival himself he had a vision that this forbidding land had transformed into a lush oasis. It might have been a hallucination, a vivid mirage. Or maybe the mystical angels of Providence unveiled to him a glimpse of the land’s potential. In either case, Wozencraft obsessed over this vision for the rest of his life.
A mere four months after his brush with death in the desert, Wozencraft was elected as a delegate to the state’s constitutional convention, one of several representatives from the San Joaquin District. That’s the way it was back then: A stranger who sounded reasonably intelligent could show up somewhere and immediately emerge as a Man of Consequence, could get himself elected to some position of prominence.
The doctor was the subject of controversy upon his arrival in Monterey, as some members of the delegation claimed he wasn’t actually eligible due to confusing election irregularities. Eventually he was allowed to participate after the convention agreed to increase the number of delegates from San Joaquin.
Once empaneled, Wozencraft was among the most active delegates on the floor, lashing out indignantly at colleagues in Colton Hall who deigned to disagree with his points of view.
For instance, he was the first Californian to push for free public health care in the state. Wozencraft argued vehemently that the Constitution should include provisions establishing public hospitals for people who couldn’t otherwise afford to treat their afflictions. His colleagues ridiculed the proposal; one of them called it “building castles in the air.” Wozencraft responded with indignation. He told delegates that they would certainly change their tune if they had seen what he had seen and treated in New Orleans and Brownsville. From the floor, he accused opponents of ignoring “suffering humanity,” of lacking conscience and moral turpitude, of turning their backs on people stricken by disease and misfortune.
Wozencraft (bottom right) with Konkow Maidu tribe members
AFTER THE INK HAD DRIED on the constitution and California was admitted as the 31st state of the union, Wozencraft got himself elected to the new state legislature; he quit soon after when he sensed that none of his colleagues were taking their job seriously. So he petitioned to become an Indian commissioner.
During the convention, Wozencraft had opposed all efforts to enfranchise Native Americans, opposing measures to treat them as legal citizens of the state. But then, after his appointment, he was appalled by the genocidal atrocities committed against tribes. In a bleak report to Washington, he wrote that the murderous treatment of Indians in California “would blot the darkest pages of history that has yet been penned.” Newspapers published his scathing indictments against white settlers who committed mass murders and who stole Indian land. Wozencraft ultimately brokered equitable treaties with tribes that the government refused to ratify. He was dismissed from his job; his supervisors in Washington D.C. refused to pay him for the time he had put into the service, relenting only after Wozencraft traveled to Washington to plead his case.
While an Indian agent, Wozencraft visited the far corners of California, north to south. While scouting around the upper reaches of the northern territories in 1851, he and his party reported seeing flames shooting from the earth to the heavens. He was apparently one of the first to witness the most recent volcanic eruption of Mount Lassen.
That same year, he led a search party into the Shasta region to chase down Indians from the Yuki tribe suspected of ambushing and murdering a party of packers. The suspects avoided capture, but they apparently abandoned a 3-year-old girl in their camp while making their escape.
Wozencraft “adopted” the girl and sent her to his wife in San Francisco, where proper Christians could raise her as part of their family. They named the girl Shasta, after the mountain on which she was discovered. (Or so the story goes. See more below.)
After getting sacked from his Indian commissioner post, Wozencraft set up a practice in San Francisco, got active in the city’s cultural and political life. He lost a bid to get elected coroner of San Francisco County, and was active in the Democratic Party. He was even quoted once in a newspaper article by Mark Twain, then writing for the San Francisco Morning Call. Twain was not impressed by Wozencraft’s oratory: “His speech was simply a rehash of all the whinings and hypocrisy of Copperheads since the conflict began,” Twain wrote, adding that his speech “continued for about twenty minutes in the usual strain of his ilk.”
Still a doctor, Wozencraft spent time in China to help treat patients during yet another cholera epidemic. After his tour of China, he claimed in medical journals that he had found an effective treatment for cholera: “Camphor, Opium, Rhubarb and Capsicum, a half of a teaspoon for a dose to the adult, given in Brandy.”
In a 1875 edition of the Pacific Medical and Surgical Journal, he claimed that his practice of “animal magnetism” and “mesmerism” had cured a patient “with a living head on a dead body.” His claim was swiftly refuted by a doctor from Petaluma who complained that “no good thinker in the regular medical profession can read it without feeling chagrined that such an article should appear in a regular medical publication, for it has all the absurdity of healing by ‘laying on of hands,’ or by the imagination of homeopathy.”
Wozencraft may have engaged in some state-of-the-art 1870s quackery, but he was mostly interested in land development. Specifically, he poured his obsessive efforts into a big crazy water project that became his life’s ambition. Propelled by his mystical visions when he nearly died in the Sonoran Desert, he hoped to divert Colorado River water into the vast alkali sump hole that ultimately became known as the Imperial Valley. It was an audacious project, and he spent a lifetime trying — and failing — to convince Congress to deed him millions of acres in the desert so that he might turn the region into the oasis of his dreams.
He was constantly laughed out of Washington, D.C. No one took him seriously. The Sonoran Desert was too distant from civilization, not worth the time or the money. He lacked crucial political backing from his home state. A Civil War diverted attention from big engineering ideas. His plans were thought to be too grandiose and too complicated to undertake. Like building castles in the air.
It also appeared that Wozencraft was losing his grip. He bought a stately mansion in San Bernardino, and left most of his family in San Francisco so he could concentrate on his project. In the 1860s, the Southern California newspapers reported a wild shoot-out involving Wozencraft and someone purported to be a county judge. According to reports, Wozencraft showed up at the judge’s doorstep late one evening to demand payment on a debt. He was apparently drunk. Words were exchanged, a mother was insulted. The men stepped outside and pulled their pistols. Neither was mortally wounded, but Wozencraft was shot in the arm and the breast.
The years that followed were unproductive, as Wozencraft tried and failed to generate political support for his desert reclamation project.
Finally, the War Department financed a topographical engineering expedition that showed that Wozencraft’s scheme was feasible, if not costly. Wozencraft worked with a surveyor to map out a route for the canal. In 1887, he returned again to Washington to press his case and he was once again rebuffed. He had spent a fortune promoting the project, and he had sold his house in San Bernardino to cover his lobbying expenses. He moved into a rooming house in Washington.
One final time, a Congressional subcommittee rejected a bill that would make his dream come true. This time, a committee member called the plan “the fantastic folly of an old man." Broke and in despair, Wozencraft died alone in the boarding house a few days later, at the age of 73.
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ALSO IN 1887, the orphaned Yuki girl “adopted” by the Wozencrafts was forging her own misadventures in Los Angeles. Life apparently hadn’t been easy for Shasta.
The historical record about her role in the Wozencraft family is hazy, but evidence indicates that her treatment might have been another dark blot on the good doctor’s legacy. Rather than “rescuing” an orphan, as the newspapers called it at the time, Wozencraft likely used Shasta solely as a servant — free labor — under provisions of a state law that allowed whites to keep Indian children under their guardianship.
In 1853, a couple of years after Wozencraft found the girl, Shasta was abducted from the San Francisco home. Her kidnappers were apparently Black abolitionists intent on liberating Indian children from the clutches of their oppressors. Kidnapping charges were filed against one of her accused kidnappers, Charlotte Sophie Gomez. Prosecutors were hampered at trial because they were unable to produce the girl, who had been secreted to a safe place. Gomez had apparently cut Shasta’s hair and dressed her as a boy. But Wozencraft persisted, hiring a private eye who tracked the girl down in Stockton three years after the trial.
She was returned to the Wozencrafts’ custody family after the doctor filed a writ of habeas corpus.
Thirty years later, Shasta had changed her name and was living in Los Angeles. The subject of numerous police-blotter briefs in the L.A. dailies, Kitty Wozencraft had been charged, cited or convicted of two-bit crimes. The charges ranged from public drunkenness to stabbing another woman with a fork. She was also cited and fined for running a brothel. On the latter charge, Kitty Wozencraft brought an alibi witness to court with her, but the witness, a fellow named “Bronco Bill,” failed to convince the judge or her innocence.
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Postscript: After fits and starts, Oliver Meredith Wozencraft’s great irrigation project was built about 20 years after he died, by another man, an engineer who now gets all the credit. Imperial Valley remains one of the most productive agricultural regions in California.
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Sources:
Freedom's Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, by Stacey L. Smith. University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
“Profiles of the Signers of the 1849 California Constitution, With Family Histories,” compiled and edited by Wayne R. Shepard from original research by George R. Dorman, with additional contributions from the members of the California Genealogical Society, 2020.
“The Debates in the Convention of California on the Formation of the State Constitution in September and October, 1849,” by J. Ross Browne, appointed convention reporter.
The Salton Sea, An Account of Harriman’s Fight with the Colorado River. George Kennan, The MacMillan Company, 1917.
Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era, Kevin Starr, 1986.
The Colorado Conquest. David O. Woodbury, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1941.
“Epidemic Cholera,” by Oliver Wozencraft. Pacific Medical and Surgical Journal. December 1873.
“To the people living and trading among the Indians in the State of California,” report to the U.S. Congress by Oliver Wozencraft, 1851.
Various newspaper archives, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Daily Alta Californian, The San Bernardino Sun, The Sacramento Bee, The San Francisco Examiner and others.