Brother Jonathan was a paddle steamer that struck an uncharted rock near Point St. George, off the coast of Crescent City, California, on July 30, 1865.

[4][5] It was commissioned by Edward Mills, a New Yorker who tried to operate a shipping business during the California Gold Rush,[4] and was named after Brother Jonathan, a character personifying the region of New England.

After President James Buchanan signed the bill admitting Oregon to the Union on February 14, 1859, the news was wired to St. Louis, carried by stagecoach to San Francisco, and loaded on Commodore on March 10.

[10] By 1861, the ship had fallen into disrepair and was sold again to the California Steam Navigation Company, who retrofitted it, restored the original name of Brother Jonathan, and kept it on the northward route from San Francisco to Vancouver via Portland, allowing prospectors to work the Salmon River Gold Rush.

Over the next several years, the vessel gained a reputation as being one of the finest steamers on the Pacific Coast, being the fastest ship to make the run, sixty-nine hours each way.

[9] When Brother Jonathan traveled north from San Francisco and arrived in Victoria, British Columbia, on 12 March 1862, it brought along a miner infected with smallpox.

Or, one could say, with a less charitable view, that they deliberately drove the Indigenous people out of town, and that spread the disease back to their home communities up and down the coast.

Portland State University anthropologist Robert T. Boyd suggests that, by the end of 1862, 14,000 indigenous people along the coast had died from the outbreak.

[12] At least half of the population of indigenous peoples along the coast died, leaving behind "mass graves, deserted villages, traumatized survivors and societal collapse" that facilitated the colonization of the area.

[17] A heavy ore crusher had been loaded in the cargo hold directly above the portion of the hull that had been repaired a month earlier and smashed through it as well.

Only a single surfboat, holding eleven crew members, five women, and three children, managed to escape and make it safely to Crescent City.

On the last day of their 1993 expedition, men involved with Deep Sea Research (DSR) decided that the ship had drifted underwater to hit bottom 2 miles (3 km) from where it smashed into the rock.

[citation needed] Led by Donald Knight (whose father had found a piece of the wreckage),[27] and under risky conditions, a mini-sub discovered the ship in the predicted location on October 1, 1993.

[citation needed] Among the thousands of other items eventually raised were 19th-century cut-crystal sherry glasses, white porcelain plates, beer mugs, terracotta containers (once holding mineral water from Germany), glassware, cups, glass containers, multi-faceted cruet bottles, wine and champagne bottles, crates of goods (including axe handles and doorknobs) and tinctures of medicine.

[32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39] However, California officials told DSR that they would take the fight up again to the Supreme Court on the facts, and the state received 20 percent of the recovered gold in a final settlement,[40] as well as ownership of the wreck itself.

The salvors also hired national experts including numismatists Robert R. Johnson, Ronald F. Umile, and Konstantin Balter to work with the volunteers in these efforts.

[31][49] This small historical society has been refurbishing and maintaining the artifacts, as well as having an exhibit on Brother Jonathan's demise and a variety of the objects that were reclaimed.