CHAPMAN'S CHICO

A California history scholar explores the life and legacy of a relatively obscure West Coast settler.

In the late 1970s, after buying an old farmhouse in the Chapmantown neighborhood in Chico, California, Shover became interested in the area’s eponymous Augustus “Gus” Harley Chapman, an entrepreneur and politically active Republican who died in 1899. After decades of research, she presents readers this history of Chapman, Chico, and late-19th-century Northern California. Originally draftedin the 1980s, the book includes Shover’s more recent research, which made use of internet search tools and genealogical services. The author notes that most other histories of Chico emphasize the role of U.S. Rep. John Bidwell in the town’s growth, but this book places Chapman as an equally important, if unheralded, town founder. Admirably, Shover’s recentering eschews a fawning tone, and although she highlights Chapman’s personal charisma and entrepreneurial spirit, she doesn’t shy away from noting, for instance, his “questionable ethics by modern measures.” Chapman is also engagingly portrayed as a man plagued by “an inability to find satisfaction in any one accomplishment”; at various times, he was a lawyer, politician, and entrepreneur who dabbled in mining, farming, ranching, and selling lumber. The book’s first section focuses on Chapman’s early life and decision to move to California; the second and third concentrate on his political and economic ventures in the tumultuous 1870s and ’80s. The final part surveys his final years, concluding with a chapter on his descendants (“The Twentieth Century Chapmans”) and a 1909 fire that ravaged his former “big house.”

Shover, a former political science professor at California State University, Chico, and the author of multiple works on the history of the Golden State, effectively demonstrates that Chapman and Chico were “so intertwined that the history of one illuminates the other.” She does so through the use of numerous vignettes and deep dives into the daily dramas of post–Civil War California. As such, this is also a rich local history of Chico’s economic, political, and social life. Moreover, Shover connects Chico—a town of 100,000 people now, which was home to only 4,000 residents at the time of Chapman’s death—to the wider history of the West, exploring anti-Chinese violence, Republican politics, gender dynamics, and shadowy Gilded Age business practices. These strengths, however, are occasionally overshadowed by overly detailed sketches of late-19th-century life that sometimes feel more trivial than enlightening. The book’s impressively thorough endnotes and bibliography, however, demonstrate a firm grasp on the relevant historical literature and commendably centers on primary sources. Archival collections across the state—including diaries, letters, scrapbooks, and public records, as well as Chapman’s own personal writings and ephemera—provided the author with ample material to analyze her subject’s contributions to Northern California. They also provide an intimate perspective on a complex man who was always looking for a new project. In addition, the author’s extensive use of local newspaper stories provides a colorful portrait of the daily lives of Chicoans.

A well-researched, if sometimes overly dense, biography of a forgotten Californian and his times.