Pioneer Made a Flag That Made History

Betsy Ross remains a household name, but Kelsey's fame lasted barely as long as the Bear Flag Revolt that briefly made California a nation. Her fame was soon eclipsed by a scandal that soiled her family name: the massacre of more than 100 Pomo Indians in one of the earliest and most notorious such attacks. It became known as the Bloody Island Massacre.

Nancy Kelsey was 17 in December 1840 when her husband, Ben, got a letter from a doctor friend who had sailed around the tip of South America to the raw new land of California. His "wonderful description" of the San Joaquin Valley encouraged them to go west.

By 1841, they had signed with the John Bartleson and John Bidwell expedition leaving Missouri for the West -- the first organized band of settlers to do so. Kelsey is believed to be the first female settler to make the journey overland by way of the California Trail.

"Where my husband goes, I can go. I can better endure the hardships of the journey than the anxiety from an absent husband," Kelsey said in her memoirs. She rode horseback or walked barefoot, carrying their toddler, Ann.

When the party reached Idaho, about two dozen pioneers -- including the few women, except Kelsey and her daughter -- headed toward Oregon. The Kelsey family and 32 men stayed the course to California.

The group made its crossing through the Sierra Nevada -- five years before the ill-fated Donner party -- by way of the hair-raisingly steep Sonora Pass.

"At one time," Kelsey recounted, she and Ann were left alone as the men searched for a path through the mountains. "As I was afraid of Indians, I sat all the while with my baby in my lap on the back of my horse" in what seemed to her like "the loneliest spot in the world."

Indians occasionally swooped down on the party and took food and the livestock. Once, for two days, Kelsey said, she "had nothing to eat but acorns."

On Nov. 4, 1841, nearly six months after they left Missouri, they reached the San Joaquin Valley and the home of John Marsh, the doctor who had sent them the long-ago letter. They rested a month, then headed for Sutter's Fort, one of the few Yankee settlements in the region.