STEPHEN SAKS / ALAMY / HÉMIS.FR
Investigation“California, a French history” (1/6.) Miners, artisans, peasants, engineers … The French have largely contributed to the building of the Golden State. They also left their marks there. So with this prospector who came from Rouen and who, fortune made, planted the first fruit trees in the region.
Claude Chana left neither writings nor descendants. His name has not gone down in history either in Rouen or even in California. To be honest, we would have missed out if the modest locality of Auburn, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, had not erected a statue worthy of a hero of ancient mythology.
The monument was erected at the entrance to the historic district between the saloon and the post office, the oldest west of the Mississippi. A 45-ton, 12-meter-tall block of cement carved in 1975 by local dentist Dr. Kenneth Fox in his spare time. Probably the most impressive trace ever left by a Frenchman in the Californian landscape…
Not knowing what his model looked like, the dentist gave him thick features, a hard-working face, far from the exaltation that drove the gold diggers to work for hours between scorching sun and icy torrent, clothed, the day , the cloak that they used as a blanket at night. Doctor Fox, installed in Auburn in 1947, bequeathed to the village other equally imposing monuments: a Chinese coolie, symbol of the exploited who built the transcontinental railway; an Amazon, drawn from the fantasies of the conquistadors who believed California to be populated by warriors (a statue very little dressed to the taste of the local notables who had the school buses diverted). The French miner was his last work. Claude Chana is one of the most common names in Auburn. We cross Chana Drive to go to high school at Chana High. But few people know where it comes from.
Like “embarking for another planet”
When the miner arrived in 1846, California did not arouse much interest in the rest of the world. To discover the territory, you had to cross the Rockies, an exercise that was already perilous enough, and calculate your moment, you were always at the mercy of early snow, and God knows there was (and there was) a again). Go through the Rockies or face Cape Horn. The Panama Canal did not exist. From Le Havre there was at least six months. Some dared to take a shortcut, crossing the isthmus of Panama on foot, in a dugout canoe, or on the back of a mule, but this third route required defying poisonous species – animal and human – and malaria.
The safest, albeit longest – 16,000 km! -, there remained the crossing of the Atlantic, to Rio, then the doubling of Cape Horn, which, depending on the winds or their absence, could take almost forty days. The boats then sailed up the Pacific coast; halfway through, Valparaiso, the only stopover town, had the effect of returning to civilization: more than sixty days at sea to San Francisco!
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