Joshua Elliot Clayton

 Father of Catherine "Kate" Jessie Clayton who married Nelson Seymour Trowbridge.  Joshua Elliot Clayton was from Georgia, came west in the gold rush and became a prominent mining engineer and consultant.

Joshua Elliot Clayton (Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, via Spence article)

Most of his siblings (including half-siblings from his father's first marriage) stayed in the southeast, but one sister, Joanna "Jo" Bruce Clayton and her husband William Cogan Buckalew came west.  They bought Clayton Ranch in Yuba CA (need to track down origin of this ranch -- one website says it belonged to her brother "John" but this is probably a mistake, although there was a half-brother John who stayed back east -- perhaps it was really her brother Joshua).  After her husband died Jo moved to the bay area.

Joshua Elliot Clayton was married to Naomi B. Wagner, and they had six children, including Kate.  He travelled extensively throughout the west, while it appears that Naomi and the children maintained a home in the east bay.  It appears that they either divorced or perhaps quietly separated.  Naomi went to live in Butte, Montana, with her daughter Mary Jessie, who was married to a John William Gunn. Joshua went on to have a second marriage with Helen Maria Huntley, who had two children from a previous marriage.  One of them, William Huntley Hampton, apparently went into business with his stepfather.

According to the Spence paper (see below), Joshua Elliot Clayton was killed in a stagecoach accident near Wardner, Idaho.  He was buried in Portland, OR, where his second wife had family.


 Sources about Joshua Elliot Clayton's career:

1. An academic paper all about his mining career can be found in:
Spence, C. C. (1980).  Joshua E. Clayton: Pioneer Western Mining Engineer.  Arizona and the West, Vol. 22, Issue 3, pp. 211-222.

2. Documents relating to his mining career are at Yale.

3. The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley also has documents, including his diaries (which are mostly about his mining activities).  From A Guide to the Manuscript Collections of the Bancroft Library, Vol. 1, pp. 306-307:

4.  A few more letters by JE Clayton are at Brigham Young University's library.

5. A 1958 pamphlet, Ghost Mines of Yosemite, by Douglas Hubbard, tells a brief anecdote involving Joshua Elliot Clayton. The text of the pamphlet is at the Yosemite library online.
6. Mark Twain mentioned Clayton in a letter to his brother, Orion Clemens, in 1862: "These mills here are not worth a d--n -- except Clayton's -- and it is not in full working trim yet." (Mark Twain's Letters: 1853-1866, M.B. Frank & K.M. Sanderson, Eds., p. 186).  The end notes explain:

7. From the Masters thesis of Emily S. Dale, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Nevada Reno, Archaeology on Spring Street: Discrimination, Ordnance 32, and the Overseas Chinese in Aurora, Nevada:

Smith, Grant H.1998.  The History of the Comstock Lode. Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geologyin association with the University of Nevada Press, Reno, NV

Stewart, Robert E. 2004 Aurora: Nevada’s Ghost City of the Dawn. Nevada Publications, LasVegas.