March 16, 1829 [Preble County, Ohio]–January 24, 1893 [Los Angeles]
Kercheval crossed the continent with a group of miners from Peoria, Illinois, leaving from St. Joseph, Missouri, on April 20, 1849. Kercheval is probably the first person to be called a “Los Angeles poet” in the Los Angeles Times (Jan. 6 1882) which noted that he had recently arrived in Riverside and “spent two days taking inspiration from the Riverside orange groves. He had arrived in California in 1849 and became a miner (the mines provided the inspiration for much of comedic work), eventually turning his attention to growing oranges and grapes. Eventually president of the County Board of Horticultural Commissioners, he introduced the Australian ladybug, Vedalia Cardinalis, to combat the cottony cushion scale, an insect that made itself to the US on orange trees imported from Australia. Kercheval married Sarah Adelaide Wilson in 1857; they had a son and two daughters, one of whom, Rosalie, herself became a poet. In an obituary published in the Los Angeles Herald, the author wrote: “Had his poems first appeared in the great eastern centers they would have brought to him a reputation like that of Brett Harte or Joaquin Miller. In many respects he was their superior both in the easy flow of his versification and in his exact reflection of the society of the early mining days.” He appears to have stopped writing after the publication of his collected woks, Dolores, and Other Poems in 1883.
