Gold-Rush Serbs of California

The California Gold Rush of 1848–1855 pulled a small stream of Serbs and other South Slavs across two oceans to the American West, where they settled as miners, storekeepers, and fruit merchants in and around San Francisco. Among the earliest was the family of Ilija and Jelena Dabović, who arrived in 1853; their son Jovan, the future St. Sebastian, was born in San Francisco in 1863 as one of the first children of Serbian parents on the Pacific coast.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox / American (glorified 2015)

A Slavic Stream to the American West

The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848 and California’s admission as a state in 1850 set off one of the great migrations of the nineteenth century, drawing prospectors and traders from every quarter of the globe to San Francisco Bay. Among the peoples swept into this movement were South Slavs — Serbs, Montenegrins, Dalmatians, and others from the Adriatic littoral of the Habsburg and Ottoman worlds — many of them experienced seafarers and merchants for whom a long ocean passage was no barrier (Hieromonk Damascene [Christensen], Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich: Serbian Orthodox Apostle to America, St. Herman Press, on the early Serbian settlement of California; on the general immigrant setting see also The Immigrant Era, in the repository’s Orthodoxy in America). These were not the mass labor migrations of the 1890s that would fill the mines and mills of Pennsylvania; they were an earlier, smaller, more entrepreneurial wave, and they concentrated in California’s port and mining towns.

The San Francisco these immigrants entered was already, by the late 1850s, gathering a multiethnic body of Orthodox Christians — Russians, Greeks, Serbs, and Slavs of various origins — who had no church of their own and worshipped where they could (Mark Stokoe with Leonid Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994, ch. 2, on the Gold-Rush-era Orthodox of San Francisco; Orthodox Church in America [OCA], “150th Anniversary of the Establishment of the North American Diocesan See in San Francisco,” used as locator). The story of Orthodoxy in the continental United States is often said to begin here, in this Pacific gathering, rather than on the Atlantic coast — a fact that gives Sebastian’s Californian birth its peculiar significance.

The Dabović Family

The family of the future saint belonged to this first stratum of settlement. His parents, Ilija and Jelena Dabović, came from the village of Sasovići, near Herceg Novi at the mouth of the Bay of Kotor (Boka Kotorska) — a Serb-populated Orthodox district of the Adriatic coast then under Austrian rule (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the family’s origin in the Bay of Kotor; the older OrthodoxWiki entry’s garbled “Sassovae” is a corruption of Sasovići). The Boka was, and is, a stronghold of Serbian Orthodoxy with its own long maritime tradition, and it sent many of its sons abroad as sailors and traders.

According to the biographical tradition, Ilija Dabović reached San Francisco in 1853, having crossed the Isthmus of Panama by donkey — the standard route before the transcontinental railroad — with members of his family and his brother Nikola (Nikolai) (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the 1853 arrival and the Panama crossing). In San Francisco Ilija opened a store, and he and his brother built up a wholesale fruit business, of a piece with the merchant character of this early Serbian settlement (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the family’s trades). The Dabovići were thus not transient prospectors but settlers who put down roots — a household within which the child born a decade later would grow up bilingual, literate, and churchly.

The First Serbian Child of the Coast

Jovan (John) Dabović was born in San Francisco on June 21, 1863 [Disputed: the modern biography and OrthodoxWiki give June 21, 1863; the OCA Life and one local account give June 9, 1863 (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich; OCA, “Venerable Sebastian Dabovich,” oca.org; the discrepancy is unresolved in the sources and likely reflects Old-Style / New-Style confusion)]. He was the fourth of seven children of Ilija and Jelena, and is described in the sources as among the very first children — and, in some accounts, the first male child — born of Serbian parents on the West Coast of America (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on his place in the family and the “first Serbian child” tradition; the ledger.news feature “St. Sebastian Dabovich: California Pioneer, Serbian Apostle, and Saint” repeats the local claim that he was “the first Serbian child known to have been born in California”). This last claim belongs to local memory rather than to any registry and should be read as such; what is secure is that he was born into the earliest generation of California-born Serbs.

The infant was baptized, the tradition holds, in December 1863 by the hieromonk Kyrill aboard a visiting Russian warship — variously named the Bogatyr — anchored in San Francisco Bay, there being as yet no permanent Orthodox church building of their own in the city (Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the shipboard baptism). Whether or not every detail of this account can be documented, it captures a real situation: the Orthodox of Gold-Rush San Francisco depended on the occasional presence of Russian naval chaplains and travelling clergy for the sacraments until a settled mission could be organized. That dependence, and its eventual remedy, is the subject of the companion file.

A Frontier, Not a Homeland

It is worth pausing on what this setting did not provide. Jovan Dabović was not born into a land saturated with Orthodoxy, with monasteries on the hills and the liturgical year woven into the civic calendar, as a child of the Boka or of Serbia proper would have been. He was born on a raw commercial frontier, into a religious minority scattered among a Protestant and Roman Catholic majority, served by a single struggling parish that had to hold Russians, Greeks, and Serbs together under one roof (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America, ch. 2, on the mixed San Francisco parish; Damascene, Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, on the community of his childhood). This is the formative fact of his life. The instinct that would later make him a pan-Orthodox missionary who served Serbs, Russians, Greeks, and Arabs indifferently, in whatever language they needed — and that made him reach for English as the common tongue of the New World — was not an ideology he acquired but the native air he breathed as a boy. He was, from birth, an American Orthodox Christian before that category quite existed.

The community of his childhood was small enough that its later achievements can seem improbable. Yet from exactly this seedbed came the founder of the first Serbian church in the hemisphere and the first American-born Orthodox priest. The improbability is the point: the American mission was built by the children of its own immigrants as much as by clergy sent from the old countries, and Sebastian is the emblematic case (see The First American-Born Priest-Saint).

References

Damascene (Christensen), Hieromonk. Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich: Serbian Orthodox Apostle to America. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood / St. Herman Press. (Family origin in Sasovići/Bay of Kotor; the 1853 arrival via Panama; the birth in 1863; the shipboard baptism; the early Serbian community of California.)
Stokoe, Mark, with Leonid Kishkovsky. Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994. Orthodox Christian Publications Center, 1995, ch. 2. (The Gold-Rush-era Orthodox community of San Francisco.)
Orthodox Church in America. “Venerable Sebastian Dabovich.” oca.org — used as locator for the OCA Life and the June 9 birth date variant.
Orthodox Church in America. “150th Anniversary of the Establishment of the North American Diocesan See in San Francisco.” oca.org — used as locator.
“St. Sebastian Dabovich: California Pioneer, Serbian Apostle, and Saint.” Amador Ledger-Dispatch (ledger.news), Roots feature — used as locator for the local “first Serbian child in California” tradition and family background.