Leonard Kip (1826–1906) was a scion of Old New York who joined the Gold Rush to California for a year of adventure before returning to his home state for a long career in law and literature.
Kip, born September 13, 1826, descended from prosperous and distinguished Hudson River valley Dutch and Huguenot landowners who had settled in the New Amsterdam colony in the early 17th century.
and was preparing to commence a legal career when news of the mining bonanza at Sutter's Mill excited his curiosity and ambition.
[3] After several months in mining country near Stockton, Kip left California predicting the collapse not only of gold fever but of any significant future the state due to “a climate presenting the most insufferable extremes of heat and cold,” worthless soil, scarcity of water, and the growing threat of cholera in what was already a “stronghold of dysentery”.
William Ingraham Kip (1811–93) followed in 1853 and remained until his death forty years later, a major figure in the state's development as the first Protestant Episcopal Bishop of California and a noted religious writer and church historian.