Gordon's Ferry

Gold was discovered on the American River in January, 1848. By the end of that year, this original gold district had swollen to encompass rivers, streams, foothills and ravines hundreds of miles distant, but still primarily in California’s northern regions. In 1853, gold was found on the Kern River near present-day Bakersfield. Major Aneas Gordon began operating a ferry across the river, as a mechanized fording for gold miners.

The Kern River, which might look placid in places, nevertheless has treacherous, swift-moving currents. Gordon’s Ferry, situated where China Grade Loop crosses the Kern, was a flat-bottomed craft, judiciously propelled back and forth by an overhead cable. An adobe station house sat on the south bank of the river. The gold discoveries in the Kern River areas can be described as a “mini” gold rush, a part of the larger Southern California gold stampede; less famous than the one in Northern California, although significant for local communities. Would-be prospectors who gravitated to the Kern River, plus a growing number of settlers coming into the area, meant that Gordon’s Ferry carried a lot of traffic.

Accounts written by people who never saw the ferry, but who knew Major Gordon years later, stated that his ferryboat was large enough to carry a stagecoach and six horses across the river. This appears valid, since it is known that the Butterfield Overland Mail stages, which began operations in 1858 along what was known as the Oxbow Route for its long bowed road through the Southwest, used Gordon’s Ferry on its St. Louis-through Los Angeles-to San Francisco run.  Butterfield continued to use Gordon’s Ferry until just before the outbreak of the Civil War, when the company was ordered to change from its original route through Confederacy territory to a central overland corridor. However, other stage companies, as well as residents, continued to use the ferry until California’s disastrous “monster floods” of 1861-62 swept the location bare of all improvements.  

Major Gordon himself, however, was already gone by 1857. About 1859, he built an adobe called Gordon’s Station on the San Francisquito Road, 20 miles north of the future town of Saugus, where he sold meals and stock feed to those engaged in freighting from Los Angeles into the San Joaquin Valley.  

At the time Gordon’s Ferry flourished, the site that eventually developed as Bakersfield was a tule-marsh-filled section of one of California’s original 27 counties. Organized as Kern County in 1866, from parts of Tulare and Los Angeles Counties, Kern drew its name from the river, which had been named in 1845 by explorer Captain (later Major) John Charles Fremont. During Fremont’s second foray into California—then a province of Mexico—he named the river in honor of his expedition’s cartographer Edward Kern, who, as the story goes, nearly drowned in its turbulent waters.  

Major Gordon, described as a short, heavy man and a proficient hunter, apparently had no known wife or family in California. He is said to have died in Santa Paula around 1875. The former site of Gordon’s Ferry is designated as California Historical Landmark # 137.