Harriet and Fred Rochlin, Pioneer Jews: A New Life in the Far West, Houghton Mifflin Co.: Boston, 1984. 1854, 1853
Solomon Nuñes Carvalho [1815-1897],
" . . . Another memorable sojourner was Solomon Nuñes Carvalho [1815-1897], oil painter, photographer, and daguerreotyper, who spent one extraordinary year in the Far West. From September 1853 to September 1854 he participated in a historic and treacherous expedition, which he recorded in oil paintings, daguerreotypes-the first taken of the Far West-and a trip diary and letters upon which he based Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West. The book opens with a description of his first meeting with the organizer and leader of the journey, which occurred on August 22, 1853.
"After a short interview with Col. J.C. Fremont, I accepted his invitation to accompany him as artist of an Exploring Expedition across the Rocky Mountains. A half hour previously, if anyone had suggested to me the probability of my undertaking an overland journey to California, even over the emigrant route, I should have replied there were no inducements sufficiently powerful enough to have tempted me. Yet in this instance, I impulsively, without even a consultation with my family, passed my word to join an exploring party, under the command of Col. Fremont over a hitherto untrodden country in an elevated region, with the full expectation of an arctic winter . . . I know of no other man to whom I would have entrusted my life under similar circumstances.
"Colonel John C. Fremont, celebrated American soldier, explorer, and politician, planned the arduous winter journey, his fifth and final expedition in the West, to demonstrate the feasibility of a year-round transcontinental rail route along the thirty-eighth parallel. Carvelho's task was to provide Fremont with daguerreotypes to illustrate the proposal.
" . . .
"Cared for by the Mormons, Carvalho recuperated, then continued on to Los Angeles. He spent from June until September in the City of Angeles, where on the invitation of Samuel and Joseph Labatt he participated in the organization of the Hebrew Benevolent Society, the first Jewish organization in Los Angeles. The Labatts in turn helped Carvalho start a photographer's and artist's studio to earn money for his trip home.
" . . ." pp. 175, 176
Gertrude Stein,
" . . . In the early 1900s Gertrude Stein, figuratively, swam far out to sea, caught an incoming wave, rode it to shore, and planted her flag triumphantly in the twentieth century. Of her abundant achievements, none superceded her early understanding and enthusiastic espousal of the baffling new age. She sensed the character of the emerging epoch, said Stein, because she was a westerner and had a pioneer's affinity for the new. Like other westerners who went east (to Paris) to find the timeless West within the mind (as literary critic William Gass put it), Stein was most extravagantly a westerner when far from home.
" . . . Stein described her longtime companion, Alice B. Toklas, the granddaughter of a Jewish forty-niner, to be "as ardently Californian as I." The pair met in Paris in 1907. Their relationship was partially revealed in the best-selling Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein's rendition of her dutiful but acerbic mate's views of the great and obscure who passed through their ménage.
" . . .
" . . . In 1892 Gertrude went to live with her relatives in Baltimore (after her parents' deaths) and then enrolled at Radcliffe to be near Leo (her favorite brother) who was studying at Harvard. Three years later . . . the pair established themselves in Paris . . . at 27 rue de Fleurus (sic). . . Leo began collecting the works of Monet, Renoir, Cézanne and Picasso. . .
" . . .
" Alice Babette Toklas was born in San Francisco in 1877 . . . and was raised in Seattle . . . she enrolled in the University of Washington to study music, hoping to become a concert pianist. . . . sent to live in San Francisco . . . her friends Michael and Sarah Stein, Gertrude's brother and sister-in-law . . . traveled to Paris in 1907 . . . The forty-year union ultimately yielded a controversial body of novels, plays, poems, essays, and criticism; friendships-enduring and ephemeral-with some of the twentieth century's cultural pathfinders . . . " pp. 188, 189, 190, 191