Robert A. Eccleston (1830-1911), pioneer, forty-niner, diarist who recorded the discovery of the Tucson Cutoff and Yosemite Valley. Eccleston was born in New York, on March 4, 1830 one of ten children of Irish immigrants Edward Eccleston and Mary Anne Cristie. In Spring of 1849, at the beginning of the California Gold Rush, Robert with his older brother Edward Eccleston joined the Fremont Association formed to travel to California and mine gold there. The Association traveled by sea to Texas and then purchased wagons for an overland journey with a U. S. Army expedition to establish a military road from San Antonio to El Paso. The Association then joined with John Coffee Hays and his experienced party of frontiersmen for the journey from El Paso to California. Robert kept a diary of this jo