Page:California Historical Society Quarterly vol 22.djvu/120

 Gentleman from Vermont

Royal H. Waller

By Dolores Waldorf

OYAL HIRAM WALLER, one of San Francisco's early day judges, was an astonishing man to find on any frontier, most of all on the gold rush frontier. He was a staid and pious gentleman who waited thirty-six years before setting out to seek his fortune in far lands.

Costumes and conventions have varied a good many times in the past two thousand years, but the essential characteristics of a conservative have remained the same. Royal H. Waller had them all. He was austere, rockbound in his convictions and afraid of nothing but a scene. He flew against tradition in politics but three times in his life. Each time the nation rocked with the forces which brought the change about.

Royal H. Waller was born on November 29, 1802,^ in the village of Royalton, Vermont, northeast of the famous Green Mountains. He came into a world temporarily at peace. Napoleon was First Consul of France, immersed in the business of revising the codes and map of conquered Europe. George Washington had been dead less than three years, and Thomas Jefferson had been in the office of President but a little over eighteen months. Andrew Jackson, who in years to come would lure Waller from a New Englander's devotion to the creed of John Quincy Adams, was judge of the Tennessee Supreme Court, with most of his stormy career before him. The nation was still in knee breeches, hardly out of Colonial swaddling clothes. Waller's entire sixty-three years spanned the growth of the new democracy to crisis and the test by fire. He died in the turbulent "carpet bag" days, just a little over a year after the end of the Civil War.

Royal Waller reversed the usual formula for living. The average boy roves until he marries and then settles down. Educated for the law. Waller hung out his shingle in Rutland, Vermont,^ a small but busy hillside town in the valley cut by Otter Creek between the Green Mountains and the Taconic Range. Just outside of Rutland the famous marble quarries were already producing building stone for a booming nation. Waller was appointed post-master^ for Rutland by President Andrew Jackson; and in 1834 he won the hand of Elizabeth A. Hodges, daughter of Dr. Silas Hodges, local plutocrat and political factor since 1783.* By all precedent. Royal Waller should have settled down in Rutland for the rest of his life.

But in 1836^ he and his good wife set out for the "Great West," as Michigan was known in those days. After a journey which must have been a test of endurance, the Wallers arrived in Detroit, a frontier town^ of some three