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Death

C. E. Kelsey obituary in "Have You Heard?" Wisconsin Alumnus 38, March 1937, p. 247, https://search.library.wisc.edu/digital/AHJJI4SQVD35BE9C/pages/ACTV3BBH32JYWZ9E.

His wife feared he would die of cancer, but instead Kelsey had a heart attack. He died on July 3, 1936, at age 74, after collapsing while locked in the bathroom at his home in Vista. One of his young nephews broke through a bathroom window and unlocked the door from inside. Kelsey’s body was cremated and shipped to the Kelsey family plot in Geneseo, New York.

Kelsey was a regular pipe smoker. He had a growth removed from under his tongue and quit the pipe before he took a job as land agent with the Southern Pacific Company in 1918. When he applied for the job Kelsey downplayed his condition, noting that “the doctors are by no means agreed that the ulcer removed from my tongue was cancerous.” Three years earlier Kelsey wrote to Matthew K. Sniffen from Yosemite about an unnamed medical problem that might be this surgical procedure: “I have so far discovered no sign of recurrence of my trouble, though my vitality is doubtless somewhat depressed, showing itself chiefly by subnormal temperature. My physician has sent me to the mountains to build me up, I suppose, so I could stand a better show should there be a recurrence.”

I was not able to obtain Kelsey’s death certificate. When I requested it from California’s Office of Vital Records some twenty years ago, they sent me the death certificate for Charles Henry Kelsey. After I followed up on the error, they sent me a “Certificate of No Public Record” for Charles Kelsey. It stated that they searched for a record of his death in the Statewide Index for the period from July 1905 to the present (“the present” being September 24, 2002) but did not find it.  

The only obituary I’ve found for Kelsey is from the University of Wisconsin’s alumni magazine for March 1937. An image of it heads this piece. I sometimes wonder why Kelsey’s family seems to have chosen not to announce his death to the many people in California who knew him.   

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Caveat Emptor

Shows Grinnell College site as the top search result for "C. E. Kelsey" in Google
Google's top search result for "C. E. Kelsey" is this Grinnell College site at https://fortheelevationofanation.sites.grinnell.edu/people/c-e-kelsey/

It’s unfortunate that a search for “C. E. Kelsey” in Google offers as the first result a webpage from Grinnell College because the webpage is riddled with inaccuracies. It is part of a student site featuring Carlos Montezuma’s correspondence. Montezuma’s papers contain only one letter from Kelsey, which offers limited information for a webpage. The letter appears to have been supplemented with fragmentary data about two different men named C. E. Kelsey found on various other websites and assembled in a haphazard fashion. The site does not invite feedback.

The quotes from Kelsey’s letter are essentially accurate (one word was missing from one of the two quotes). As agency clerk of the Green Bay Agency in Keshena, Wisconsin, Kelsey replied on October 10, 1892, to an inquiry that appears to have been sent by Montezuma to many Indian agencies. Years ago, when I viewed the microfilmed Papers of Carlos Montezuma, M.D. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1984) I did not find Montezuma’s letter to the Green Bay Agency, but I did find a letter by Montezuma to another US Indian agent on the same date (September 7, 1892) that requested a “list of returned Indian students or those who can speak and read the English language on your reservation.” Kelsey’s letter clearly responds to the same inquiry.

To put things straight, publisher Charles Edward Kelsey graduated from Amherst College in 1884. Indian agent Charles Edwin Kelsey was agency clerk at the Green Bay Agency in the early 1890s, then graduated with a law degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1896, and was first appointed as a special agent in San Jose, California in 1905. Kelsey gave a talk, “The Rights and Wrongs of the California Indians,” at the Commonwealth Club of California in 1909. The address was later published by the club as one of many articles in its transactions.

Kelsey compiled the first census of the nonreservation Indians of Northern California in 1905-06. I’m not sure whether the Grinnell site should say that he “helped to determine the number of Indians living in the U.S. that had no land to live on.” It implies a national effort to count landless Indians, and I can’t say definitively whether there was such an effort, but the idea draws attention away from the unique history and circumstances of Northern California’s native people.

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Mission Tour

Images of Mission San Fernando by C. E. Kelsey (1888) and Henry Chapman Ford (1890)

According to his descendants, Kelsey was a photographer for Henry Chapman Ford and other artists touring California missions in 1888. Ford’s sketching excursions consisted of weeks or months of touring and camping. On the 1888 trip, Kelsey photographed the sites as the artists worked; the artists could finish their drawings and paintings later by referring to the photographs. Kelsey’s photos depict the missions at San Buenaventura, San Diego, San Fernando, San Gabriel, San Juan Capistrano, San Luis Rey, and Santa Barbara. A couple of them closely match later mission paintings by Ford.

One of Kelsey’s notebooks traces his trip from Santa Barbara starting May 14, 1888. Listing mission names, campsites, and other locations, it runs for about six weeks, ending precisely at 6:05 p.m. on July 2, when Kelsey returned to Santa Barbara and wrote “Finis 672 miles.” A notebook kept by Ford in 1888, described in Norman Neuerberg’s article “Henry Chapman Ford: Painter of Early California” (page 39), lists a similar itinerary, though I have not had a chance to view it to seek verification of the Kelsey-Ford connection. The Ford notebook is part of the Henry Chapman Ford Papers at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles.

Kelsey photographed sites other than missions on the tour. Notable among them is Rancho Camulos, where Helen Hunt Jackson’s best-selling novel Ramona (1884) purportedly took place. The Ford tour gave Kelsey a chance to relate those fictional characters and events to indigenous people. The published version of Ford’s 1888 notebook mentions the “Cohuilla Indians at San Jacinto” and the “Temécula Rancheria, Pauba.” Ford later described visiting “remnant Mission Indians” at Soboba and the San Diego Mission in 1888, per Ford’s An Artist Records the California Missions, edited by Neuerberg (page 94), so it is likely that Kelsey visited them too.

The tour was educational for Kelsey in more basic ways. Not only may he have had his first encounters with California Indians and their conditions, he also mastered the art of making biscuits thanks to the tour’s chuck wagon cook. Years later Kelsey’s daughter raved about the biscuits he always made for supper: “beautiful, light biscuits, like little pillows.”

Kelsey’s granddaughter thought that Ford and Kelsey met through artist Lemuel M. Wiles. Wiles and Kelsey’s father were natives of Perry (New York) who were related by marriage. Wiles traveled to California, where he painted some of the missions and may have spent time with both Ford and Kelsey’s brother Winfield. In 1880, Winfield was a painter living in Oakland; he later moved to Ventura, a town about 30 miles south of Ford’s studio in Santa Barbara, where he ran a newspaper.

Strengthening the web of possible relationships between the Kelsey family and Ford are Ford’s connections to Chicago. Ford lived and exhibited his work there from 1863 to 1875, just before he moved to California. Once established in California, he often went east, to Chicago and elsewhere, sometimes showing his paintings. Chicago was about 200 miles from the Kelsey home in Montello. As the major urban center for the upper Midwest, it is possible that the Kelseys periodically traveled to Chicago, where they could have met up with Ford. There are no family stories of this, however.

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Camera Man

C. E. Kelsey mentioned in Buffalo (New York) Camera Club exhibition of April 1915
Summary of Buffalo (New York) Camera Club exhibition in The Photo-Miniature: A Magazine of Photographic Information, May 1915. Source: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Photo_miniature/O7caAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

The Getty Museum has a record of C.E. Kelsey as an American photographer active in the 1910s. Mentions of C. E. Kelsey appear in a number of photography journals during this decade. I’ve long wondered whether this could be “our” C. E. Kelsey, even though I cannot imagine how Kelsey could have found time to pursue serious photography in those years.

Kelsey was an early adopter of new technologies, including photography. He attended the Janesville Academy of Telegraphy in Wisconsin (probably the school operated by Richard Valentine) and worked as a telegrapher for a railroad at a young age. The telegraph may have been the first invention to capture his fancy, and he never forgot it. In one of his surviving notebooks from the 1880s Kelsey recorded notes in Morse code, and much later he used it to communicate with his son-in-law, a radio engineer. His first exposure to Morse code may have occurred while working as a telegram messenger boy or by reading one of many books on telegraphy. The 1870s was the heyday of the telegraph, before the telephone entered the scene and rapidly gained acceptance. According to Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s Online Pioneers, telegraphers were skilled and well paid information workers at technology’s leading edge, though a telegraphy post in Kelsey’s home of Montello (Wisconsin) was perhaps relatively quiet compared to such jobs in big cities.

Building on his boyhood hobby of photography, Kelsey served as a photographer for landscape artist Henry Chapman Ford and other artists touring California missions in 1888. This was probably his first visit to California. Kelsey’s camera, glass plates, prints, and several notebooks were still with the family a decade ago. One notebook entry contains his notes for preparing a photographic emulsion. “Photographer” seems to have been one of his lifelong roles, so in many family photographs he is behind the camera rather than in the picture. This makes his image even more elusive.

According to family stories, Kelsey bought the first vacuum cleaner in San Jose and was the third person to own a car–a 1907 Kissel–in that city. It was not long after Kelsey was appointed by the government to purchase rancheria lands that he bought his first car. This is evident from his notebooks, where his expenses change from fares to mileage. A heading on one page, “Odometer,” bears an initial entry of June 28–presumably 1907–with the mileage noted as 37.8.

As it turns out, it is likely that the Getty’s C. E. Kelsey is a different person than “our” C. E. Kelsey. My conclusion is based on an entry I found in The Photo-Miniature: A Magazine of Photographic Information, edited by John A. Tennant, which is pictured above. The entry (May 1915, volume XII, number 137, page 241) indicates that C. E. Kelsey was a member of the Buffalo (New York) Camera Club in 1915. Because “our” Kelsey was living in California at this time, it would appear that these are two different people.  

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Kelsey’s Rolodex

Kelsey brought some attractive attributes to the Northern California Indian Association and its chiefly female and ecclesiastical leadership. He had firsthand experience with Native Americans, knowledge of the Indian Office, and a law degree. As a white man, his actions and movements were unrestricted. He also brought his rolodex.

Being a university graduate and professional man, Kelsey had opportunities to develop connections with powerful Republicans. Among his neighbors in the Auzerais Building, where he had his San Jose law office, were fellow University of Wisconsin alumni Everis A. Hayes and Jay O. Hayes. In a time when newspapers had a significant voice in current affairs, the Hayes brothers published the San Jose Daily Mercury Herald. Everis Hayes gained even greater prominence when, in 1905, he began the first of seven consecutive terms in the US House of Representatives. In 1906 Kelsey was quoted in their newspaper, stating that “he was materially aided in his efforts to secure the [$100,000] appropriation [for California Indians] by Congressman E. A. Hayes, who took a great deal of interest in the movement.”

Kelsey also had a connection to President Theodore Roosevelt. Kelsey’s older brother, Otto, was active in state politics in New York, which was Roosevelt’s home base, and both were Republicans. When Roosevelt was governor, Otto was a member of the state assembly. During Roosevelt’s presidency, Otto served as state comptroller and state superintendent of insurance. C. E. Kelsey possessed an undated letter from Otto to the president, introducing “C. E. Kelsey, whom I recommend to you with utmost confidence.”

President Roosevelt visited San Jose in May 1903 on his Great Loop tour, the grand cross-country excursion during which he famously camped in Yosemite with John Muir. The NCIA used his visit to launch its formal campaign by presenting Roosevelt with a memorial about the history and current status of the landless Indians of northern California. A cover letter signed by C. E. Kelsey introduced the memorial. It is not known whether Kelsey personally presented the document to Roosevelt, but it seems likely. Kelsey alone among NCIA leaders had the connection–and the letter of introduction–to facilitate exactly that.