From Green to Governor
by Lyn Allison Yeager

In 1832, a young man named Peter Burnett wore "a suit of jeans" with "elbows out." He later wrote that he knew the glances people gave toward him, and the winks they exchanged, that they considered him "green." That boy never knew that a century later jeans, cut to scraggly shorts or worn long with the knees out, would be stylish with teenagers.

Peter had an interesting pioneer life, part of it in Clay County, Missouri, and he felt it worthy of record. His book, Recollections and Opinions of an Old Pioneer preserves in his picturesque experiences those historic times.

When young, Peter saw a steamboat on the Missouri River. That vessel was propelled by a "stern-wheel." The boat’s large wooden figurehead was the shape of an immense snake through which the steam escaped. He also saw keel boats transport merchandise from St. Louis to Liberty Landing. The transport rates were so high that most pioneer farmers could not afford to "pay especially for iron and salt."

The transportation of the Burnett family’s furniture from Franklin County to Clay County was by "flat-boat" which had to be towed most of the way by men who walked on the river bank pulling a long rope attached to the boat. They sometimes had to cut a path through the willow trees.

Burnett wrote of how pioneers tried to preserve their clothing possessions: "I have seen young women, going to public places, stop a short distance from reaching the place, take off their coarse shoes and put on their Sunday shoes." Of men’s wear he said, "In Clay County about 1824-1825 there were only three or four men who could boast of a suit of ‘broad cloth.'" (Broadcloth was finely twilled wool or woven cotton of high quality.)

In those early days, sugar was scarce so Peter’s parents made do with maple syrup made into maple (brown) sugar. After the syrup from local maple trees was bailed "it was stirred off" and the rich sugar molded into "sugar sticks of cakes" and placed in a black walnut chest "under lock and key." Ants, as well as people, yearned for that lucious, tongue-tickling sweet so the chest had been made with four legs set in square boxes kept filled with water for somehow those ants did not swim.

In Clay County, the Burnetts had a large variety of wild foods, Peter listed fruits - raspberries, blackberries, and wild plums, and an even larger variety of meats - deer, black bear, squirrel, opossum and ‘coon plus quail, duck, goose, even swan, prairie chicken and turkey. All of these were supplemented by wild greens and vegetables from the family garden. It seems that Clay County pioneers did not go hungry.

The "green" boy, Peter Burnett, was not uneducated. He studied law in Richmond, Missouri, and became a lawyer, a mercantile business man, and the first governor of California, inaugurated on December 20, 1849.