Turowski, Louis Andrew
Polish exileAs far as the name is concerned, Louis Andrew Turowski, who traveled from coast to coast between 1834 and the 1870s, left nobody in the United States to carry the Turowski name after his death. He was one of 234 Polish exiles who sailed into New York on March 28, 1834, on two Austrian frigates, Guerierra and Hebe, under Baron Francesco Bandiera, an admiral in the Austrian Navy, to seek political asylum, and was the first Turowski of whom we have any record in the United States. Carl Turowski, who came from Trieste, Italy, on the Commaquid on December 12, 1836, when he was 32 years, 11 months old, left no records of his fate in the United States. The next tier of Turowski families in the United States wanted bread and butter more than political freedom.
Not all experts agree with Professor Rymut that Turowski originated in the Polish word, turac, for wild ox, which disappeared in Poland in the 17th century. More recent authors (Hodorowicz - Knab and Hoffman) linked it to turon, "one who dressed as a beast and led carolers." Nevertheless, nearly six thousand persons in Poland owe their last name to the answer.
Upon news that President Andrew Jackson signed a bill in the White House on June 30, 1834, to give each Pole brought over by Admiral Bandiera - 141 exiles on one frigate and 93 on the other - 96 acres of land in either Illinois or Michigan to create their own kingdom, Turowski couldn't wait until two of them selected the land they wanted for a New Poland. Turowski was one of the first exiles to go to the promised land about 80 miles from Chicago in Illinois. Squatters, however, already held the land and would not move. Without money, Turowski and other exiles often slept under the open sky. Few strangers, if any, could help them find a job or a place to live. The Illinois congressmen primarily took the side of the squatters and essentially denied refuge in Illinois to the insurgents from the Polish uprising.
Little is known of Turowski's movements in the coming years. Nobody monitored them. Not to mention the censuses taken every ten years. In the 1840 census, Turowski, written Teruski, found living alone by the census taker, was probably nothing more than a farm hand, as he was later in life, a strawberry picker, or whatever an Arkansas farmer wanted him to do. The farm on the edge of Searcy, the county seat of White County, in central Arkansas, was as isolated as any frontier town could be, and one wonders how, when the Mexican War broke out in 1846, he heard about Washington, in the extreme southwestern corner of Arkansas, where American troops were mobilized.
Turowski rode on his horse to Little Rock, very near the center of Arkansas, where William Field gave him a place to sleep for one night and fodder for his horse, for which Turowski paid him $4.68, and continued on his journey the following day to Washington, a distance of 125 miles. As soon as he talked to them, Dr. Solon Borland recruited Congressman Archibald Yell, Turowski and others to fight in the Mexican War and resigned as editor of the Arkansas Gazette in Washington on June 6, 1846, when he was elected captain of a company of volunteers. For four weeks, while tailors were making a blue jacket and grey pantaloons, with red stripes at the side, for each recruit, nothing else was on the mind of the companies from different counties in Arkansas but the election of regimental officers. Naturally Yell, who had served in the War of 1812 and gone to Washington to represent the frontier state over the years, was easily elected colonel and led the First Regiment of Arkansas Mounted Volunteers to northern Mexico.
Due to the lack of troops, Turowski often found himself in different companies. For example, when Borland and 34 enlisted men were captured on January 23, 1847, at Encarcion, Mexico, Capt. Christopher C. Danley, who had organized two companies of young volunteers in Pulaski County, Arkansas, took over the remains of Borland's company and, without raising his rank, made Private Turowski the Quartermaster Sergeant of the unit. Ironically, in this position, when Colonel Yell - the second governor of Arkansas - was killed at the battle of Buena Vista, February 23, 1847, it would have been Turowski's responsibility to ship his body to Arkansas in a whisky barrel. Only Turowski was wounded in the same battle, and needless to say, while he was in a hospital at Saltillo, someone else shipped the colonel's body.
The war shifted to southern Mexico following the heavy losses of Mexican troops at Buena Vista and forced more changes in the dwindling troops from Arkansas. Beginning in May of 1847, each volunteer from Arkansas who had enlisted for twelve months was mustered out of the "mounted devils," as the regiment was nicknamed, and Captain Gaston Mears "reenlisted" them in his company for "the duration of the war." The Arkansas regiment remained in service until the close of the war, but was not engaged in any actual battles. Turowski, who was promoted to 2nd Sergt. on July 27, 1847, was mustered out at Camargo, Mexico, on June 24, 1848.
In 1850, instead of showing up in Arkansas, where the devils on horseback in Colonel Yell's regiment were celebrated war heroes, one of the census takers found Turowski in a one-year-old settlement named Rough and Ready, lying along the western slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains about 60 km from Sacramento, California, and it was unclear whether the head of the mining company after which it was named or the first settlers, who had served under General Zachary Taylor (nicknamed "Old Rough and Ready") in the Mexican War, kept in touch with Turowski. He was listed as a trader. Whatever goods he could have brought to Rough and Ready, whether it was lumber, clothing, chickens, eggs, liquor, and so on, is shrouded in mystery. The first settlers used a prayer book to bury the dead. Everybody drank - some more and some less - and told many stories of people who dug for gold.
Unfortunately, no evidence of Turowski reared its head again until he registered to vote at the age of 63 in 1866 in Siskiyou County, California. After the discover of gold in 1851, the county, lying on the Oregon border, was flooded by thousands of prospectors. In 1870, when Siskiyou County had a population of 6,848 persons, 1,449 of them were mostly Chinese gold miners. Had a census taker treated Turowski as he did the 206 persons from China in South Township of 668, near Etna, California, where Turowski was a farm laborer, his story would have ended in Rough and Ready, now a ghost town. All but two of the Chinese population in South Township were gold miners and nameless. No doubt Turowski gave his horse a name. The census takers skipped the first and last names of the Chinese miners. Exactly where Turowski died is still unknown.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)