Canfield Cemetery has a story that stretches back to Sonoma County’s earliest days

Reflecting on the Memorial Day just past, we are moved to remember a more peaceful time in our history.

Before far too many wars shifted the emphasis of this observance to those lives lost in battle, the day was known as Decoration Day and it was for honoring our departed family members, however they came to die.

It was when people with kinfolk resting in the tiny cemeteries that dot our rural landscape considered it not only tradition, but their duty, to spend the Decoration Day weekend weeding and raking and sometimes wielding a sickle or scythe to put the graves of their forebearers in proper order for the another year.

It was a family duty that showed respect.

It wasn’t as somber as it sounds and was often accompanied by a picnic where the brothers and sisters who had moved to the city returned to spread blankets under an oak tree, bring out the deviled eggs and ham sandwiches and do their duty.

It was an occasion to tell old stories, to talk family history.

In the Canfield Cemetery southwest of Sebastopol, there’s a story that goes way beyond family history. It is a pioneer tale of terror and hardship as well as great good luck that brought the Canfield family to rest in Sonoma County.

brek

I’ll get to that story soon enough. But first, understand that this is not an active burial site we’re talking about. No one has been buried there for more than a century.

It is on private property that was originally part of land settled by William Canfield and his wife, Sallie, in 1852. The first burial was their daughter Sylvia Ann, who died in 1854, one day before her 11th birthday.

The Knowles family members, Canfield in-laws, are buried there, along with the Salsburys (another in-law name), the Gossages, and Woodworth and Bartlett and more - a couple dozen tombstones scattered on an oak-studded hilltop.

Do you suppose that, 70 or 80 years ago, families still picnicked there and cleaned up around the stones?

They don’t any more, as property owner Tom Warren will tell you. Visitors are rare. Visitors with garden tools are rarer still, although Brad Davall stopped by several years ago to dig tombstones out of the tangle of vinca vines and poison oak that was at least 2 feet deep when Jeremy Nichols paid a visit in 2002. Davall is a kind of phantom grave-keeper who tends our old burial grounds as his time allows. Nichols is the author of the definitive work on Sonoma County cemeteries.

This year - just last month - it was the young community activists of the Canfield 4-H Club.

A work party of 4-Hers and their parents climbed the steep hill, with tools to whack weeds, rake leaves, clear the broken oak branches, dig out partially buried grave markers.

It was very hard work - the kind of thing 4-H members learn to do.

Break

I heard about all this from Art Volkerts who, at 96, is still living on the family ranch near Hessel. The Volkerts home - on Volkerts Road - overlooks the upper end of Blucher Valley and, while he and Tess, his wife of 78 years, may not have a clear view of the Canfield Cemetery, they know where it is. And, in recent months, Art has been increasingly worried about its condition.

That’s why, several weeks back, he went to a club meeting and challenged the Canfield 4-H kids to take on a cleanup of the place as a club project.

Art, who was editor of The Press Democrat for more than 30 years, has 88 years of Canfield 4-H history.

His mother was the founder and first leader of the club, in the late 1920s. And Art joined at age 8, which makes him, I believe, the oldest 4-H alumnus in Sonoma County - and maybe beyond.

Judy Buttke, one of the current club leaders, told me the young members were very receptive - “very quiet, very attentive” - to what Art had to say.

His talk was brief. There was a full agenda.

So he didn’t tell these young people the Canfield history, which is a story that might have come from the pages of a Zane Grey novel or the opening reel of a John Wayne western.

I’m going to tell it for him. So they will know.

Break

William Canfield was one of two men (maybe three, it depends on who is telling the tale) who survived the Whitman Massacre of 1847.

(This was one of the few massacres of settlers by Indians on the Pacific Coast. Most massacres, as we have come to understand, were done BY white men TO Indians.)

The Canfields and their five children came west from their Iowa home to the Oregon Territory in 1847. They made the trip in a train of 100 covered wagons heading for the Willamette Valley to claim land.

Word of their arrival preceded them and, near present-day Pendleton, the Canfields were met by Marcus Whitman. Whitman is an important figure in the history of the American northwest. A physician and a missionary to the Native Americans, he and his wife, Narcissa, had established a community in 1835 (near today’s Walla Walla, Wash). It became a first destination for emigrants.

Whitman learned Canfield was a blacksmith and urged him to winter at the mission, which was in need of his skills.

The mission had other problems, well beyond a blacksmith’s abilities. Earlier wagon trains, stopping by, had brought an epidemic of measles - not usually serious to whites with natural immunity, but deadly to native peoples on first contact.

A neighboring band of once-friendly Cayuse Indians had lost many people, most of them children.

They blamed the mission in general and Whitman specifically, accusing him of poisoning their children.

The Canfields had been there about a month when the Cayuse attacked, killing Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and a dozen men.

Canfield, who was in the blacksmith shop, was shot in the hip but managed to hide in the attic and escaped the massacre.

As the Cayuse took over the little village, holding the 54 women and children for ransom, Canfield set out under cover of night, to walk 140 miles to the nearest settlement, known as the Lapwai Mission, to get help. It took him six days, without food, without sleep, he would later recall.

Meanwhile, an agent of the Hudson Bay Company had managed to ransom the women and children and the family was reunited in Oregon City. Canfield joined a party of men bent on punishing the guilty Indians, but did not stay around to see eight of them hanged.

He booked passage for the family on a ship to California in 1849 and settled the family in the pueblo Sonoma while he headed for Sacramento to take advantage of Gold Rush commerce, establishing a successful soda water company.

In 1852, he returned to the county and settled on the land still watched over by his cemetery on the hill.

Break

Old Bill Canfield was something of a legend in these parts. He and Sallie lived good, long lives, celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary before Sallie’s death in 1888. Bill died in 1893, at the age of 82.

But, most assuredly his name lives on, not only on the cemetery, but also on the still-country road that winds past his old ranch at Knowles Corner.

There was once, before unification, a Canfield School District.

And, of course, the Canfield 4-H Club.

Maybe next time, they should put a picnic table on that hill.