3pp.+stampless address leaf. To his father, Charles Hatch, Wellsville, New York.
Written by a 26 year-old New Yorker, estranged from his father, sailing to California on a famed voyage recorded by fellow passenger, Dr. J.D.B. Stillman – later personal physician to Leland Stanford - in the 1877 memoir, “Seeking the Golden Fleece, A Record of Pioneer Life in California”.
Hatch had hurriedly left upstate New York after a “difficulty” with a girl and unpaid debts which left his father “suspicious” that his son was a “rake”, “libertine”, “Rogue, a Knave, a Demon”. Admittedly, the young man’s “previous life” had been full of “evil deeds”, but he had “repented” since joining the Baptist Church and now claimed to be perfectly “innocent”. He had sailed from New York in a rush, “hurried off by the ships having a libel suit brought against her by a little difficulty between the Capt and some of the passengers. She left dock before she anticipated…I am now nearly six thousand miles on my voyage around Cape Horn to California, just entering Rio de Janeiro….we intend to stop but for a short time and all will be in confusion as soon as we cast anchor…” A New York merchant had “fitted me out with $315 which supplies all the comforts of life and gets some few goods for sale…they would have given me a consignment of $500 worth more if I would have taken them. I pay 10 percent of what I make for 2 years but do not bind myself to stay any certain length of time. They will send me a consignment of goods after I get there if I wish it…”
The Pacific did not reach San Francisco until five months later, on August 5, after a 194-day journey around the Horn, detailed by Stillman, full of hardships suffered by the 200 passengers - notably including J. Ross Browne and Mark Hopkins - their “misery made worse” by the “ruthless” ship’s captain. Stillman recorded some of the whereabouts of the other passengers when he wrote his book 28 years later. Hatch was listed as “residence unknown.”
In fact, the young man was soon joined by his brother Andrew, who, after teaching school in Tuolomne, became a federal surveyor, drawing some of the first maps of various California locales before moving to Nevada, where he eventually became Surveyor-General. In 1860, after the discovery of silver in the eastern foothills of the Sierra Nevada, the Hatch brothers founded the mining town of Galena, south of Reno, which, during the Civil War, became an important lumbering center. After that, R.S.Hatch faded into obscurity (though in 1882, a man of that name who was both sheriff and saloon owner in Tombstone, Arizona, was playing billiards with Wyatt Earp’s brother when Morgan Earp was assassinated.)