Lost in the Snow

Peter Q. Turner (1828-1882) is my great-great-great-grandfather and someone I've been researching for years.  He was an early California settler, arriving in Visalia in the 1850s and eventually settling in the Dunlap area of the foothills east of Fresno.  He and his wife Emily had at least fourteen children.  I have lots more I could share about him but, for today, I wanted to share this little article I found last week.  I was so excited to find it because it confirmed a family story about him.  I had been told by a relative that Peter had been lost in a snowstorm and, because of frostbite, had his legs amputated.  However, that's all I knew and, even then, didn't know how accurate the story was.  This article from the Sacramento Daily Union on December 30, 1864, gives all the details of what happened to Peter that day.

Sacramento Daily Union, Dec. 30, 1864 -- BADLY FROZEN -- The Grass Valley Union of December 27th says:  On Saturday last four men -- P.Q. Turner, Misservy, Irons, and another whose name we could not learn -- were overtaken by the storm a few miles from Aurora (Nov.) as they were coming in from Adobe Meadows, and all of them were more or less frozen.  The three last mentioned escaped without being seriously injured, but Turner became so exhausted that he was obliged to stop some two miles from town, where he lay all night in the snow, and was terribly frozen.  In the morning Sheriff Francis and a party went to search for him, and found him making his way to town on his hands and knees.  His feet, hands and face are frozen in a most shocking manner.  We are informed that the doctors waiting upon him say that both his feet will have to be amputated.

We do know that Peter did have both his feet and fingers amputated because an article in The Fresno Bee on August 30, 1879 describes him as “a man well advanced in years, with a large family, not rich and without feet or fingers--but a good scholar, a good writer and a man whose bond no property owner would hesitate to go on.”