Editor’s Note: The following is the third installment in a
series commemorating Morgan Hill’s 100th anniversary. The Morgan
Hill Times is taking a trip back in time to 1906. From now through
November, we will feature stories in Tuesday’s paper about the
people, places and events instrumental in the founding of the
city.
Morgan Hill – In the winter of 1882, Daniel Murphy lay dying. He had his beloved daughter, Diana vow she would never marry Hiram Morgan Hill, a young man Murphy distrusted. But in fact, the couple had already secretly eloped. That covert marriage helped bring about the founding of the city of Morgan Hill
Murphy is a true pioneer of the West. At age 17, he journeyed to California with his pioneer Irish family, led by his patriarch father, Martin Murphy, Sr. On that nine-month trip from across the plains, desert and mountains to Sutter’s Fort, the young lad proved himself a true leader.
One day, while out scouting the trail ahead, he and several of the wagon party’s men happened along 200 Native Americans on a war path. Murphy’s courage was tested by the encounter.
“Dan later said he was inwardly shaking but decided to put on a bold front,” wrote Marjorie Pierce in her book The Martin Murphy Family Saga. “He signaled to the strangers to dismount. They did. In fact they turned out to be friendly members of the Snake tribe.” Luckily, these Indians were looking for a band of Sioux warriors.
Murphy’s wagon train was the first one to ever cross over the rugged Sierras. During that winter ordeal, the young lad led a group to check out the terrain for an easy route over the mountains. Going off on his own, the teenager was the first non-indigenous person to walk along the shores of a great blue lake high along the Sierra’s ridge. It would later be known as Lake Tahoe.
Reaching California, Murphy participated in some of the most exciting events of the West’s history. The adventurous young man led raids on California ranches to provide horses for Americans fighting in the Bear Flag Rebellion. And he also joined John C. Fremont’s corp of California volunteers to fight the Mexican army. With Fremont’s soldiers, he fought in the Battle of Natividad against General Manuel Castro. In this skirmish, he saw the Mexican soldiers kill his good friend Joseph Foster, who had been a member of the overland wagon train.
Murphy described his brief military experience marching with Fremont as an arduous affair. “Most of the time we sloshed through mud in heavy rain and cold,” he later wrote.
After the Mexican-American War, as California settled into statehood, Murphy’s father bought a large ranch in the southern region of Santa Clara Valley (property that’s now Morgan Hill) from a Mexican land grant owner. The strong and energetic Murphy helped in the day-to-day work of raising of cattle at his father’s Rancho de Ojo de Agua de Coche. Here he also learned business skills, including how to auction off the livestock, that would later make him rich.
In 1850, he met a 15-year-old girl named Mary Fisher, who was the daughter of the owner of the Rancho Laguna Seca a few miles north of his father’s ranch. “Dan, tall, strongly built with dark skin, and a gray streak through his black hair, was said to be the most handsome man in California at the time with more than his share of charisma,” Pierce wrote. “Mary, a beauty in her own right, inherited her fair skin and blue eyes from her English father, Captain William Fisher, and her dark almost black hair from her Spanish mother, Libereta Cesena.”
The two married at the Mission Santa Clara in January 1851. Shortly before the marriage, Mary’s father died. The newlyweds acquired his 19,000-acre ranch. (Libereta was unable to manage it.)
Over the years, Murphy’s business savvy made him an extremely wealthy man in the West. He raised horses, mules, oxen and cattle. And he also grew grain and kept a vineyard. He built a sawmill to cut the redwood trees in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and also constructed a flour mill to grind locally-grown grain.
Among his business pursuits, he helped build a horse-drawn railroad between Santa Clara and San Jose along the tree-lined Alameda. And he was also a major stockholder in San Jose. With an eye for the future, he provided much of the capital to start an electric company – the forerunner of what’s now Pacific Gas & Electric – and he served as its first director.
In his brief political career, he served in several government offices, including the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors.
With his wealth, he bought great tracts of land throughout the West. One of his agents purchased for him a four-million-acre ranch in Durango, Mexico – making him one of America’s wealthiest property owners.
Murphy and his wife, Mary, had six children, but three died in infancy. Daughters Molly and Diane and son Daniel Martin lived into adulthood.
With so much of his time focused on business, his relationship with Mary was a rocky one. “It was rumored that he had a roving eye for the ladies,” Pierce said. “Mary filed for divorce, but they decided simply to live apart.”
In his later years, Murphy moved away from Morgan Hill to live in Nevada at his ranch in Elko. While tending his cattle, he caught pneumonia during a snowstorm. As he lay dying, he made Diane make the promise about Hiram Morgan Hill that she knew she was already breaking as the words passed through her lips.
Daniel Murphy was buried at the Mission Santa Clara. In a twist of historic irony, his son-in-law – the man for whom Morgan Hill was named – would later be buried next to him.
The Elko Independent’s obituary called Murphy “a man of remarkable social qualities” who had “endeared himself to a large circle of friends by his generosity, integrity in all business transactions, and his universal good nature, always having a good word for rich or poor alike.”
