Joseph Branson

Joseph Branson, third son of John Sevier Branson and Martha Jane Ousley, was born 14 November 1849 in Crawford Township, Osage County, MO. He is not to be confused with his nephew Joseph William Branson, the son of John Sevier Branson, Jr., who was born in 1890 and grew up in Madera County. Nor is he to be confused with his second cousin Joseph Russell Branson (sometimes called “Devil Joe” Branson). The latter Joseph was the son of Isaac Branson. Isaac, like his first cousin John Sevier Branson, moved to the Mother Lode from Missouri during the Gold Rush. Thereafter the families of John, Isaac, and Isaac’s half-sister Irena Branson Scott lived as neighbors, schoolmates, business partners, friends, and, of course, as kinfolk. The two Josephs spent part of their childhoods literally living next door to one another, and in adulthood could be found drinking together at the Hornitos saloon. One of the key life-history differences is that Devil Joe never married or had children.

No middle name for Joseph turns up in any surviving documentation, including the entries Joseph himself made in his family Bible, and it seems certain he had none, in keeping with naming patterns common before the mid-1800s. This is a bit unsual, though, given that all of his siblings except Reuben had middle names. There is source that suggests a middle name for Joseph. On his son John Joseph Branson’s death certificate, the “father’s name” box is filled in with Joseph J. Branson. However, the informant of the death certificate, John’s daughter Gertrude Ellen Branson Gabriel, aka Trudy, may have in her grief succumbed to the impulse to guess that her grandfather’s name was a flip-flop of her father’s, i.e. that it was Joseph John Branson. Though the name Joseph John Branson would fit very well, it’s a safe bet Trudy just got things wrong.

A year and a half before Joseph’s birth, his father headed west with partners Isaac Paulton and Charles Alonzo Sutton to see if the Oregon Territory might be a good place to settle. They only made it as far as Nevada before returning, but no sooner did they get back than word of the discovery of gold in California reached Missouri. John and his two buddies set out again, this time with greater experience and planning in their favor. Joseph was conceived during the relatively brief period when John was able to be back home with his wife. Martha spent most of the pregnancy without her husband’s company. By the time of Joseph’s birth, John was in the Trinity Alps of California, prospecting there rather than in the Mother Lode, where many of the good claims had already been snatched up by others. While John was away, Martha and her three boys -- the two slightly older ones being Reuben and Thomas -- stayed with her brother William Ousley on his farm in Crawford Township.

John remained in California until 1850, and came back at the end of that summer only long enough to inform Martha that he had decided they should all reside permanently out West. However, his plan was to continue to be a placer miner for at least two more summers, and then he needed to find a decent place to live so that when the rest of his family arrived, they would have a home to move into. So Joseph spent a bit more of his boyhood in Missouri. Some of this period was spent at the home of his grandfather Thomas Branson and step-grandmother Susannah in Third Creek Township in Gasconade County -- i.e. on the very farm where his father had been raised. This would not have been a long interval, because Thomas died in 1851, and if she had not already done so, Martha took herself and the kids back to her brother’s farm. There they waited for word from the man of the family. The summons probably arrived toward the end of 1852 or the early part of 1853, at which point John had panned enough gold in the Trinity Alps to become a farmer and maintain a family household. He moved to the Santa Clara Valley, planted potatoes, and began the final wait for Martha and the boys to show up.

Getting to California was of course a challenge for a young woman and three very young sons. Three family friends agreed to escort Martha. The group journeyd down the Mississippi River to New Orleans and took ship for the Isthmus of Panama. The men spoke for years afterward of the challenge of carrying the “little bud” -- i.e. Joseph -- on their shoulders across the mountain ridge of the isthmus. Apparently little Joe was not willing to ride on the pack mules, or at least not on a consistent basis. A northbound ship on the Pacific side took the party up to San Francisco.

Upon reaching the Santa Clara Valley, Martha and the boys discovered that John had moved slightly eastward in the Coast Range to the Livermore Valley. Reunited, they stayed there just long enough for Joseph’s first sister, Phoebe, to be conceived and born. By then, the demand for potatoes had crashed, ending the attempt to make a living from farming for the time being. John decided he would try mining again. In the mid-1850s the newly minted Californians trekked across the San Joaquin Valley to the Sierra Nevada foothills to Mariposa County. The focus of John’s hopes lay along the Merced River. In this respect he was like many others. There was never a time when the Mother Lode was more active than the 1850s, and Mariposa County bristled with miners. In the 21st Century, the places where the Bransons lived are invisible to the hordes of tourists who flock through the local foothills to Yosemite Valley. The sites lie beneath Lake McClure, a reservoir.

John tried several spots -- Harte and Johnson’s Flat during the first year, then upstream to Barrett City, a major mining center. The family lived as close as practical to his worksites, in cabins and at times in tents. In 1858 they settled on the east side of the river at Phillips Flat. The gravel beds here proved to be especially productive. John and his partners -- the very same three men who had carried the “little bud” on their shoulders across the isthmus -- purchased the placer-mining rights to a claim there for a three year term, and renewed it twice, for a total tenure of nine years. Phillips Flat was therefore where Joseph came of age, spending the formative span of age nine to eighteen there.

In about 1866, i.e. about a year before the Phillips Flat mining rights were to again come up for renewal, John decided he had had enough. He and Martha decided to look for new opportunities in some other place. Joseph was old enough that he could have remained behind, but every indication is that he went along as the family loaded into the trusty old Conestoga wagon and headed north. A brief stop in the Trinity Alps to investigate the gold-mining possibilities there convinced John there was no point in lingering. The journey continued up into the Willamette Valley of Oregon. John became a farmer and rancher once again. This time he would stick to the occupation, but doing so in Oregon proved to be temporary. Martha found the climate too wet and the skies too grey for her taste, so back the family came in 1867 (or perhaps 1868) by ship from Portland to San Francisco (bringing along the Conestoga wagon). They returned to Mariposa County, where John and Martha bought the Daniel and Margaret Mahon ranch. This property was situated about two miles from the town of Hornitos and less than ten miles from their old haunts at Phillips Flat, and it lay along the northwest boundary of the Washington Mine parcel. The Washington Mine outpost in turn was part of the greater mining community of Quartzburg. There John raised cattle and feed and hauled wagon loads commercially, prospecting only occasionally as a sideline. The couple resided on this land, called Grasshopper Ranch, for the rest of their lives, completing the raising of their brood of ten offspring. Joseph lived at Grasshopper Ranch in the earliest years of this span.

Joseph was blue-eyed, with light brown hair and a fair complexion. In adulthood he became remarkably tall for a man of his era. The 1892 voter register lists him as six foot three. His granddaughter Emily Thistle Christensen’s notes describe him as six four. All in all he was a man with presence, though he was not so handsome that people commented on his appearance as they did his brother Thomas.

The photograph at left shows Joseph in his forties. This was scanned from a print still in the possession of a great-granddaughter. It is also available in Fifty Years of Masonry in California, Vol. 1 by Edwin Allen Sherman, published in 1898 by George Spaulding & Company, Publishers; San Francisco, CA. A page of that book features photographs of all ten of the 1898-1899 officers of the Hornitos Lodge (Lodge No. 98). Joseph at that point was a Junior Warden.

In becoming an adult, Joseph -- becoming better known by then as Joe -- reached the culmination of what had been quite a wild and colorful upbringing. The local part of the Mother Lode had seen its fair share of frontier excitement. The famous outlaw Joaquin Murietta had been pursued and caught by men who set out from Quartzburg. Joe’s own account of just how dramatic his youth was has been preserved in The Call of Gold by Newell D. Chamberlain, originally published in 1936. Chamberlain interviewed Joe in 1933 or early 1934, and here is what Joe said of his boyhood days:

“My brothers and I witnessed many shooting and stabbing affairs. Outsiders never interfered with the participants and even if there was a killing, the public took a casual look and then passed by for they knew that curiosity, at such times, might be costly.

“I well recall a morning when two Mexican dance-hall girls fought it out, with daggers in the Plaza. Each had a mantilla, or blanket scarf, which was generally worn around the neck, but, when fighting with daggers, was thrown over the left arm as a shield. No one interfered and both girls were mortally wounded.

“Another case, which we witnessed, was a fight between two Mexicans and a white man. One of the Mexicans stabbed the white, who immediately whipped out his gun and shot his assailant, killing him outright. The second Mexican made a lunge for the white, who, although wounded, fired at his new assailant but the shot did not kill instantly. Just at this time, a Chinese happened along, carrying on a pole two jugs of vegetable spray. Paying no attention, he came close to the dying Mexican, who stabbed him. The Chinese dropped his load and ran up the street with the dagger sticking in his ribs but soon fell dead. Four were killed, one of them being an innocent passerby.

“At another time, we boys were going down the steps into the Fandango Hall, under the Campodonico store, when we heard shots within, so we ducked low and watched. Two Mexican musicians had been playing on the stage, when a dispute over the music arose among the dancers, and the two musicians were killed. Almost immediately, it seemed, two others took their places and the dance went on.”

It’s unfortunate that to modern ears, Joe’s references to Mexicans and Chinese make him sound like a bigot. While there is surely something to that, by the standards of the time and place, he was tolerant of diversity. This was particularly true in the case of his attitude toward the Chinese denizens of Mariposa County. As a boy back in the mining camps, his mother had had her hands full caring for her babies. She had no choice but to let her older three kids fend for themselves and be supervised by whoever was handy. Joe and Reuben and Thomas therefore often were to be found hanging out with the camp cooks, who were Chinese. This bond grew so deep that Joe ended up able to speak their language. His brother Thomas was even more fluent. Together the two boys would drive their mother nuts using Chinese (probably meaning the Cantonese dialect) as their secret language when they didn’t want her to know what they were talking about. Another demonstration of his capacity for acceptance was his close friendship with Moses Logan Rodgers, the superintendent of the Washington Mine. Joe is shown with Moses in the image shown higher up on the right. The picture was taken in the early 1890s in front of the Barcroft Saloon in Hornitos. Moses, who had been born a slave, was a close business associate of the Bransons. To Joe, he was a fellow lodge member, a saloon-drinking buddy, and a fellow Missourian.

The 1870 census shows Joe at Grasshopper Ranch, but by the end of that year he had turned twenty-one and it was not long before he established an independent life. The 1872 Great Register of Voters of Mariposa County lists Joe separately from his father, though as a resident of Hornitos (anyone from Quartzburg would have been described as “of Hornitos” in terms of voting precinct). County tax records of 1876 show Joe had his own homestead of 320 acres in the Bear Valley region of Mariposa County, a little east of Hornitos. Seventeen years earlier, on 2 February 1859, Ellen Margaret Geary had been born near there, and by 1876 or 1877 may have started teaching at the Bear Valley one-room schoolhouse. As the decade wore on, Ellen -- better known as Ella -- and Joseph became an item, and they married 29 November 1879, a few weeks before her twenty-first birthday. By then, Joe was thirty.

From the beginning, religion was an issue between the couple. Ella was Catholic and was firm that she wanted to continue to be Catholic. Joe, like most of the male Bransons, was skeptical of traditional organized religions. He was a Mason, and proud it. Somehow the pair made it work. They stayed together until death. It took various compromises to accomplish this. The very first instance rose up right from the git-go. Ella would have loved to have a church wedding, but Joe would not convert. Joe would have been satisifed to have a local justice of the peace do the officiating -- neighbor Samuel Walker Carr played this role at a number of Branson weddings. In the end, Joe and Ella were married in the home of his sister Phoebe and brother-in-law William McDonald in Merced, Merced County, CA, and the rites were conducted by the Reverend Father McNamara.

Shown above is an excerpt from a letter Joe wrote to his brother Alvin Thorpe Branson in 1922, offered here as an example of his penmanship and manner of expressing himself. In this fragment, Joe is informing Alvin of the death of their second cousin Hiram Branson, who had been Alvin’s business partner thirty years earlier.

About the time of the marriage, Joe sold his Bear Valley land and acquired property adjacent to Grasshopper Ranch. Does this mean he did well raising cattle in Bear Valley during the 1870s? Perhaps so, but it seems likely at least some of the funds needed to “come home” to Quartzburg were due to the contribution of his bride. Ella’s parents were John Geary and Ellen Moran, a pair of Irish immigrants who had fled their homeland in the Potato Famine. They had as young people -- Ellen with her parents, John possibly on his own -- gone to Australia, quite possibly by being “transported" as the English officials tended to do with Irish who had become homeless. After the birth of their first child, Bridget, in Sydney, John had heard the siren call of gold and come to California, making his way to Mariposa County. After a few years, he had enough funds to send for his wife and daughter. Reunited, he and Ellen spent the rest of their lives at Whitlock Mine outpost a few miles from the village of Mariposa. John acquired a productive mining claim quite early in the Gold Rush, and while the Irish couple would not have much money left by the time they died, they may have been able to provide daughter Ella with a dowry, or perhaps had put their mining claim up as collateral so that Joe could buy more land. The couple were probably eager to see at least one child end up in comfortable circumstances. Three of their six kids had already died. Another was an invalid due to chronic health problems. That left only Ella and her sister Mary Jane. The latter was only a teenager and not yet wed. Her circumstances were still tentative -- so in flux, in fact, that at the point when Joe and Ella’s wedding occurred, Mary Jane was a domestic servant and nanny for Phoebe and William McDonald. (Mary Jane would go on in a few years to marry Michael Bauer. Michael was a younger brother of Frances Bauer, who had married Joe’s brother Tom. This Bauer, Branson, Geary connection was yet another example of the many ways Mariposa County pioneer families are interwoven genealogically.) Whether the support of his in-laws played a critical role or not, Joe got his land.

John Geary and Ellen Moran, like John Sevier Branson and Martha Jane Ousley, are a set of great great grandparents of Dave Smeds, the creator of this website. They are the subject of a large “sidebar” page about them and their descendants. Click here to go to that page.

One reason why Joe might have been able to acquire so much land is that he may have purchased agricultural rights only -- meaning the mineral rights were not included, and so it was up to others to exploit the gold potential. But Joe didn’t care. His scheme was to raise cattle. All he needed was the grass and the open spaces. This proved to be a savvy strategy. While brothers such as Reuben and Alvin kept hoping to strike it rich from mining and never did so, Joe maintained his herds and made a steady profit -- selling his animals not only at the yards in Stockton but to such local customers as George Reeb, owner of the Hornitos Market, a highly successful business of old Hornitos. The livelihood was so steady that Joe was able to stay put in Quartzburg-Hornitos on a constant basis, as none of his siblings managed to do. He is the only one of the family other than Thomas to linger there in extreme old age, and even Thomas went through periods based in the communities of Merced and Manteca.

This is Joseph and Ella Branson’s ranch as it looked in two widely separated points in time. The upper black and white image shows it still in its prime in the early 20th Century. The lower color photo shows it as it looked at Easter, 1993 during a visit by some of Joe and Ella’s descendants. Both images were captured from a similar spot, with the black and white image aimed a bit more toward the west, and the color one a bit more toward the north, but both centered on the main house. The upper view shows just how built up the ranch was during its inhabited era, yet in the lower view you see can see for yourself the only remaining clear hint of that anyone ever lived on-site. The foundations of the main house, made of native stone, can be seen near the main group of visitors. The three individuals in that group consist of Joe and Ella’s elderly granddaughters Marian Ruth Warner Weldon and Josephine Alberta Warner Smeds and great great granddaughter Lerina Smeds. In the distance is great grandson Dave Smeds.

On the domestic front, things remained steady, aside from the interpersonal tensions such as the aforementioned Catholic vs. non-Catholic agendas. Joe and Ella produced six children -- a medium number for his generation of the family. John, Marguerite, Arthur, and Grace were born during the first half-dozen years of the marriage. In the early 1890s, these four were joined by twin boys Ernest and Eldridge. All came up through childhood colored by the cattle-raising life. And therein lie the roots of a dysfunction. Joe was a man’s man and met his existence head-on. He was proud of his ability to command his livestock, proud of his success, and dismissive of sensitivity. The problem was that he tended to be judgmental toward his kids, and he played favorites. His offspring needed to measure up to his expectations. When that didn’t happen, he could be mean. He was particularly hard on his daughter Grace and his son Eldridge. Grace lacked confidence. Eldridge was mild-mannered. Joe was disappointed in them, and unfortunately was willing to tell them so. Grace had additional reason to be uncomfortable because she was prim enough to be mortified by the lingering vestiges of her father’s pioneer upbringing. He loved to relax in Hornitos at the local saloon. His language was peppered with crude expressions. She was so embarrassed by him, and so conscious of these qualities, that when she had children, she did not allow those children to stay at the ranch overnight with their grandparents.

By contrast, Marguerite’s three daughters were overjoyed by the opportunity to stay at the ranch and at times even thought of it as their primary home. Joe doted upon these three, his first grandchildren. And toward the outside world, there is no question Joe was a figure of admiration. In his book, Bones of the Bransons, Joe’s nephew Ivan Branson refers to Joe and Ella as as “lovable and honorable people.” And indeed, Joe was a great friend to many neighbors. He was a mentor and sponsor, a civic leader, and he could be downright magnanimous. Of all the sons of John Sevier Branson, Joe was the only one to leave a substantial estate and to live out his twilight years in financial comfort. He had the ability to be generous, and he did not fail those around him in that respect. For example, he helped out his aging brothers Reuben and Alvin when things were going poorly for them, which is one of the reasons Ivan, son of Alvin, was so complimentary of Joe in print so many decades later.

Joe was rich enough by 1897 that he bought out his parents and brother Tom and acquired Grasshopper Ranch. His holdings expanded further over the years. In the end, he and Ella would own 1300 acres, incorporating most or all of Quartzburg. Many of the acquisitions occurred in the 1910s after the collapse of the gold industry had made his neighbors’ acreage worthless for anything but grazing. In some ways, it was just a case of “more of the same,” i.e. just a bigger spread on which to maintain the herd. But there were some lifestyle changes involved as well. A new house, for example. The old one wasn’t good enough, so after the 1897 purchase, Joe and Ella moved into a new house that was not on the piece they had bought in 1880(ish). Neither would ever know another home. Another shift was that if the couple had indeed not owned mineral rights to any of their property in the past, they had those rights now. In the early 1900s, as the local gold industry got one last kick in the pants, that was good news indeed, because the Branson land contained two mines that still have enough gold in them to be worth going after. Joe therefore became not just a cattleman, but a “gentleman miner,” i.e. he owned the mines, but did not have to personally handle a pick or shovel. On the downside, the closest stamping mill was within sight just up the slope of the nearest hill. The racket began in the morning of every workday. His children went to school to the obnoxious chorus of chunks of quartz being smashed to get at the embedded gold.

Aside from his rare visits to San Francisco, Joe seldom saw much of the “new-fangled,” cosmopolitan world, but he nevertheless embraced progress when it had a direct bearing on his circumstances. In the 1890s, he was quick to acquire a surrey “with the fringe on top,” the type of carriage made famous in the musical Oklahoma!. He was the envy of his Mariposa County neighbors whenever he took it up to the town of Mariposa to serve on the grand jury, or when he and Ella and various offspring pulled up at the Hornitos Hotel to attend a major social event. (Shown at left is a 21st Century reproduction of a surrey.) His pride in that conveyance did not prevent him from going on to become one of the first people in the local area to own an automobile. He purchased a Ford Model T not long after dealers began to offer it. (Ford Motor Company issued the Model T beginning in 1908.)

During the era when the mines were active, Joe housed his employees in a large barracks. The foreman/caretaker occupied a house of his own at the western edge of the site. The mines, the ore-car tracks, and the living quarters were only part of a complex that included a huge barn and stables, a water tower, and a blacksmith shop. It strongly resembled the sort of tiny, rustic town mythologized in so many Western gunslinger movies. In fact, in the summer of 1921, while the mostly-vacated structures were still intact, the ranch served as a shooting location. In subsequent decades some of the particulars became vague, but finally they have been rediscovered with the help of articles published at the time in the Mariposa Gazette and in movie-industry trade publications, and by consulting the personal reminiscence written in 1979 by Joe and Ella’s granddaughter Emily Thistle Christensen, who as a nine-year-old had an immediate perspective on the event. This is the story in a nutshell:

In 1921, veteran comic actor and film-producer Milburn Morante spearheaded the establishment of The Long Beach Motion Picture Company. The firm’s goal was not only to make money doing movies of their own. They had soundstages and parking lots and teams of accountants, caterers, prop-makers, and so forth, ready for other filmmakers to utilize -- all at rates that would be industry-competitive, but would be high enough to generate meaningful income for LBMPC. As the founders saw it, the city of Hollywood was enjoying an unjustified monopoly, and it was time to break that hold. They asked themselves, why shouldn’t other towns have a chunk of the movie-making business? A reasonble idea. Their plan would ultimately fail, but on the surface, it was solid thinking.

LBMPC needed first of all to show that they could deliver on their claims. That meant they needed to make at least one good, full-length feature film. It was the only way to lure in the major investors they needed in order to have the sort of capital reserve any filmmaking company needs in order to survive. Westerns were popular at the time. LBMPC decided its first major production would be in that genre. The working title was The Dashing Ranger. So far, so good. Now they needed to attach known marquee names to the project, so as to boost the credibility of the enterprise. This was something of a challenge. Top actors and actresses declined to sign up because the firm was so new. The partners had to make do with second-tier talent. Fortunately, they did manage to land individuals the movie-going public would recognize. William Bertram agreed to be the director. Major cast members included Leo Maloney, Helen Holmes, and Dixie Lamont.

The image at right was part of the marketing materials associated with the movie. Strictly speaking, it is not a poster -- though the actual posters were probably similar. This was a glass slide. Projectionists in theaters would slip such slides into still-projection equipment in between showings of other movies in order to show what coming attractions had been booked. This was less elaborate and expensive than running an actual movie preview through the main projector. This particular scan accompanied a listing at a movie memorabilia auction website. As you can see, by the time of release, the original title had fallen out of favor.

Plans were made to shoot interiors at Balboa Studios, where Morante’s regular series of one-reel comedies were generated. The exteriors? The company decided to do those in the Mother Lode. For a few scenes, they sought out specific spots that had the elements required by the script. One such place was Sugar Pine Lumber Company’s flume in the mountains of Madera County. Joe’s brothers Reuben and John had worked for Sugar Pine. The flume was already famous in family lore. In 1891, when Reuben’s wife Louisa was in the midst of a prolonged labor as she tried to give birth to daughter Gertie, Reuben and Louisa had climbed into a carved-out log at the upper end of the flume and had sped at sixty-five miles an hour down its length to the city of Madera in order to reach a doctor with enough skill to deal with the problem. (The ride scared the laces out of their shoes, but the effort was worth it. Gertie was born healthy and lived a long life.) But then the production took on an even more pronounced association with the Branson clan. The vast majority of the movie was shot in and around Hornitos. Descending upon the village in June, 1921, Bertram and his stars and a production crew of three dozen doubled the number of people usually to be found in the vicinity of the village square. They rented every room of the Hornitos Hotel -- in fact, they rented every room for a year in anticipation of a series of Westerns being shot not only locally, but even within the hotel itself. They installed lighting systems in order to be able to film indoors, dispensing with the idea of building sets at Balboa Studios. And yes, in the midst of everything else, some filming was done at the Branson ranch. This includes interior scenes in the barn and several more within the family home. In one of the key scenes, the heroine runs into the parlor, hides behind the horsehair sofa -- an extremely uncomfortable article of furniture that Branson family members avoiding sitting in if at all possible -- only to be discovered by the villain and pulled from her hiding place. In return for letting their own residence be used, the film company took a photograph of Joe and Ella standing outside their house and presented them with prints that ultimately were widely distributed among the family.

On 12 August 1921, LBMPC announced a private showing of the completed (or nearly completed) film. The purpose was to prove to potential (and current) investors that the company had managed to pull together something good enough to compete with Hollywood. They did not meet with the reaction they hoped for. To be fair, not all of the blame can be placed upon the quality of the film, which was apparently not that different from the usual fare being generated by Hollywood at the time. Today its rating on the internet is two stars out of five, which is to say, it was good enough that money could have been made. The lack of (further) investment was more a matter of timing. Men with capital were reluctant to be swept into plans to turn Long Beach real estate into movie-studio complexes when it was obvious where Long Beach was heading. The city was becoming an oil industry hub. In the absence of a full-tilt distribution agreement, the film ultimately got little push. Released to public audiences in 1922 as The Western Musketeer, it played only in, as one source puts it, “the hinterlands.” Too bad for Hornitos, because it sounds like the village might well have developed a name for itself as a place where lots of movies got made.

By the time the movie was made, Joe and Ella were on their own at the ranch, except for visits. Son Ernest had been the last child to move away, doing so in 1920. The resident workers were gone as well, the mines having long been closed, nor would Ella allow Joe to consider reopening the tunnels because she was still heartsick over the loss of son Alvin in a 1905 mining accident. (For more on that tragedy, refer to Alvin’s page, linked below.) Now in his seventies, Joe decided to retire. A huge fire consumed all of the ranch structures with the exception of the main house -- a consequence of the drought that claimed the region throughout the decade, with the exception of a single wet year. The drought meant there was so little natural feed that it was an easy decision to sell off the family herd. The land was still used as pasturage, but now whatever grass managed to grow benefitted the cattle of young neighbor Horace Meyer, who would go on to rent the acreage for grazing purposes until his death in 1988. Rental arrangement aside, the house continued to be Joe and Ella’s place of residence.

At the end of 1929, the ranch was the venue of a big celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Joe and Ella’s wedding. The event was attended by all five surviving children as well as many other family members, with the clans of his brothers Alvin and John particularly well represented. (Alvin and John themselves were among the guests.) All those individuals had to travel there from other parts of California, because by the latter half of the 1920s, Joe was the only one of his birth family still lingering in Hornitos -- and had been ever since the death of his brother Tom in 1924. He and Ella were, in fact, among the very few people of any sort who remained in Hornitos. The village never became a ghost town, in the sense that even at the low point, a few hundred residents remained, but there were very few left to “tell the tale” of the place’s history. Joe was looked upon as one of the valued repositories of memory. In addition to providing Newell Chamberlain with the interview for The Call of Gold, he was also called upon in 1927 to testify in a court case as to the value of his father’s old placer claim at Phillips Flat. This occurred because the heirs of his brother-in-law Charles Arthur (husband of Lizzie Geary, whom he had married despite her invalid status) felt the government had short-changed Charles, who had been the owner of the claim when the land was seized by the government as part of the creation of Lake McClure. Joe described the value by pointing out, “Well, my dad raised ten children, clothed and fed them first rate, sent them to school, and never owed a dollar in his life. All from the lesser portion of that claim.” Thanks to his testimony, the heirs received a handsome judgment of $7500.

Joe passed away 23 August 1934 after an illness of several months. The event occurred at Mercy Hospital in Merced, CA, with family members maintaining a death vigil once the doctors indicated he had only days and perhaps only hours left to live. His daughter Grace and son-in-law Bert Warner happened to be in the room when he literally took his final breath.

Ella survived Joe. She preferred to remain at the increasingly isolated and empty ranch, somewhat to the dismay of her children. It was only possible for her to stay because her eldest boy, John, was willing to look after her there, even though this was awkward for him because his own home was along the Central Coast, and his wife and daughter continued to live there. Ella only abandoned her home at the very end of her life as her health collapsed, and she was admitted to Mercy Hospital, the very same facility where Joe had expired. She died there 29 June 1946.

Joe and Ella are buried in Hornitos Cemetery, the secular section of the graveyard that lies beside St. Catherine’s, a Catholic church built in 1851 and now preserved as a historical landmark. Their resting place was another example of their lifelong compromise of religious preference. Had it been up to Ella, they would have been buried in the Catholic section near the church building, or might have been placed at St. Joseph’s Cemetery in the town of Mariposa with her parents and siblings. Had it been up to Joe, they would have been buried in the Oddfellows Cemetery of Hornitos with his parents and Branson-clan cousins. In deference to her wishes, it was a Catholic priest who conducted the rites, namely Reverend Father Corrigan of Yosemite.

A half-interest in the ranch remained in the hands of Joe and Ella’s daughters’ heirs until the year 2016, Horace Meyer having acquired the other half as the sons or their heirs chose to sell. Horace’s son George still runs cattle there. As vividly demonstrated by the photographs higher up in this biography, the house is no longer there. It was left unoccupied and it rapidly deteriorated through the 1950s into the early 1960s, at which point Horace Meyer burned down the ruin because it was becoming a hazard for his cattle.

Children of Joseph Branson with Ellen Margaret Geary

John Joseph Branson

Marguerite Ellen Branson

Alvin Arthur Branson

Grace Mildred Branson

Eldridge Geary Branson

Ernest Elton Branson

For genealogical details, click on each of the names.