Ezra Drown

Drown was an attorney in Fairfield, Iowa,[1] when he and his wife, Adeline,[2] were called to California during the 1849 California Gold Rush by Adeline's father, Thomas Dickey, who had set up a pack horse business in that territory. "Much of the mining country was impractical to wagons, and everything had to be packed in on the backs of mules."[3]

Drown did not make it to the mining country, but instead he settled in Los Angeles, where he became "an able lawyer, eloquent and humorous, and fairly popular; but his generosity affected his material prosperity, and he died, at San Juan Capistrano, on August 17th, 1863, none too blessed with this world's goods."[4]

Drown and his family were in passage for San Francisco from San Juan del Sud, Nicaragua, in 1853 aboard the Independence, which struck a reef or rocks south of Margarita Island off the coast of the Baja California Peninsula, caught fire and sank.[5][6][7]

Drown, being a good swimmer and a plucky fellow, set his wife adrift on a hencoop and then put off for shore with his two children on his back. Having deposited them safely on the beach, he swam back to get his wife; but a brutal fellow-passenger pushing the fainting woman off when her agonized husband was within a few feet of her; she sank beneath the waves . . . .[4]

After the survivors arrived in California, Drown wrote a 1,623-word description of the tragedy, which was printed in the Alta California newspaper on April 2, 1853.[5]

Oh God! What a situation to be in! Planks, spars, trunks and coops, covered with human beings struggling energetically for life, some wafted to the shore, others out to sea, some sinking, others being miraculously preserved. Here I saw females and children providentially rescued — then lost! Here was a kind husband who had sworn before God to protect her whom his soul loved, struggling for her safety; there was a father bearing his affectionate son to safety to the shore, looking around but to see the wife of his love dashed from the position in which he had left her, by mad and unthinking men jumping upon her and driving her to the bottomless deep.[5]

A group of the passengers and crew later authorized Drown to "subscribe our names to an article for the public press to be prepared by him, in which he may charge the loss of the steamship Independence on the 16th of February 1853 to the carelessness, mismanagement of willfulness of Capt. Sampson," who supposedly "dismissed the rocks as whales."[5][6]

When Drown finally arrived in Los Angeles about May 1853, the lawyers already present in that town "got on a bust," in his honor, "and ordered champagne and cigars first, then supper . . . . About midnight the crowd had become hilariously noisy . . .," and a brawl followed.[8][9]

On October 12, 1857, a mass meeting at the Pavilion on the Los Angeles Plaza was held in concern over the Mountain Meadows Massacre by Mormons and American Indians in Utah Territory. Drown was appointed to a committee to draft a resolution which, the next day was adopted and called for "prompt measures" to be taken "for the punishment of the authors of the recent appalling and wholesale butchery of innocent men, women and children."[10]

• The Maritime Heritage Project, for more on the S.S. Independence.