Those who travel east on Highway 50 will recognize the names of several small towns along the way: Fresh Pond, Pacific House, Riverton, Whitehall and Kyburz. The latter was named in honor of Samuel Kyburz who played a role in the discovery of gold. 

Kyburz was born in June 1810 in Switzerland. As a young man, he immigrated to the U.S. with his father, two sisters and brother. They lived in Boston for a short time before settling in Wisconsin. It was there he met and married Rebecca Barben in 1841. 

As the idea of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion took hold in 1846, Kyburz and his in-laws packed up and headed to Independence, Missouri, where they joined a wagon company heading West. Along the trail, Kyburz was elected captain of the company and safely led the group to Sutter’s Fort in the Sacramento Valley. 

Sutter’s Fort-New Helvetia

 John Sutter, a fellow Swiss, immediately hired Kyburz to oversee his growing empire at New Helvetia. His wife was enlisted to cook for the workers, and the family was housed in a two-room addition built for their use. As Sutter’s majordomo, Kyburz inspected buildings, recommended sites for new buildings and located the lumber to build them, purchased livestock, searched for and returned lost cattle, supervised field laborers, and oversaw shipping between Sacramento and San Francisco. 

Several sources report that it was Kyburz, not James Marshall, who discovered the Coloma Valley and suggested it as the site of Sutter’s Mill. When the legal partnership for the erection of the sawmill was drawn up between Sutter and Marshall, Kyburz was one of the witnesses to the contract.

After the discovery of gold in the tailrace of Sutter’s Mill, gold seekers streamed into Sutter’s Fort. Kyburz saw an opportunity, and he and his wife opened a boarding house at the fort. Despite paying $500 a month in rent, they realized profits in the thousands each month. Beyond the prospect of a warm place to sleep, miners and settlers flocked to the hotel for Rebecca’s cooking.

By 1850, the family had moved to San Francisco where Kyburz became a naturalized citizen and a merchant, and ventured into shipping. The shipping business, which aimed to bring coffee and fruits up from Mexico and Central America, literally sank when the ship went down with its cargo.

The Kyburz family returned to Sacramento where they built a house and ran a hotel, until the flood of 1862, which drove them out of the city for good. They moved to White Rock in El Dorado County and worked at a roadhouse on Mills-Placerville Road. Kyburz acquired 160 acres of land in what is now Clarksville, built a house, and started a dairy business. 

The historic Samuel Kyburz home in Clarksville

 Kyburz remained civically active, serving as a justice of the peace in Clarksville and was also an honored member of the Masonic Fraternity, the Clarksville Grange, and Native Sons of the Golden West.

In the 1900s, after Kyburz’s death, his son Albert purchased a hotel-resort near Silver Fork. When the U.S. Postal Service established a post office there, Albert (as the first postmaster) recommended it be called Kyburz in memory of his father. The resort remained in the family until it burned down in 1946. The name of the little hamlet, however, lives on—memorializing the man who discovered the gold discovery site.

Article by Jerrie Beard // Top photo courtesy of mapcarta.com. Middle photo courtesy of adamrcollings.blogspot.com. Bottom photo courtesy of geocaching.com

sources 

cagenweb.com/eldorado/people/biographies/samuel_kyburz.html
Pioneers of El Dorado by Charles Elmer Upton, Placerville California, Charles Elmer Upton, Publisher, 1906
Mountain Democrat: August 8, 1997