During a summer vacation that took him to Charleston, South Carolina, Marc Huehn witnessed firsthand the immorality of slavery. He watched the public flagellation of a 20-year old wench who was captured while trying to cross the Canadian border a few days earlier. Huehn later learned that she died on the night of the public flagellation after suffering from a more barbaric torture called cat hauling. The experience had a profound effect on his views on slavery.

In the succeeding years, Marc Huehn’s conviction against slavery grew strong. He began reading literature on slavery in the South, the most prominent of which was the anti-slavery novel written by abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe – the Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The book depicted the cruelty that slaves suffered in the hands of their Southern masters along with stories that exposed the grim reality of human enslavement. Marc Huehn also began attending public speeches and lectures that featured slaves who escaped through the Underground Railroad, a chain of houses and farms that helped slaves found their way to freedom.

In 1859, Marc Huehn joined the abolitionist group that was led by John Brown, a forceful figure in the crusade against slavery. Huehn was among the band of abolitionists who raided the Harper’s Ferry in Virginia, a federal armory. The raid was successful, however, Brown and his men were captured after the raid by the federal troops led by Robert E. Lee, the head of the Confederate Army during the Civil War, and were later hanged to serve as warning to the abolitionists in the South.

Marc Huehn of the California Gold Rush

When word spread that there was gold in Coloma, California, some 300,000 gold-seekers traveled West in search of fortune in a period in American history that is now popular as the “California Gold Rush”. Gold-seekers like Marc Huehn, a newly-arrived American, flocked from all over the United States and neighboring countries to California. Born in 1825 in Germany, Huehn fled to America at the age of 21 after failing to establish himself as a musician.

After a series of failed attempts to mine gold at Mother Lode (as the Gold Country of California was often called during this period), Marc Huehn decided that his fortune lay elsewhere. At 23, his dream of finding his fortune in the gold mines was gone. He later heard tales about the Mexican-born bandit, Joaquin Murieta, and joined his outlaw group. They regularly robbed the miners of the Southern Mines, and assaulted cantinas and saloons. But his thirst for adventure soon died out when the group’s leader and lieutenant were killed in 1853 by a former Texas Ranger who was commissioned by the California Legislature to hunt down the outlaws.

Marc Huehn, a few years after his escapades with Murieta, was found dead in a saloon near the town of Placerville. He died a poor man.