John Veatch

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John Allen Veatch (March 5, 1808 – April 24, 1870) was an American surgeon, surveyor, and scientist. He is best known for discovering large borax deposits at Tuscan Springs, California, on January 8, 1856. Veatch and his family moved to Texas in 1834, where he surveyed for the Mexican government and received two land grants in 1835—one near what would become Beaumont, Texas, and another near Sour Lake, Texas. After serving as a surgeon in the Texas Revolution, he moved to California, where he found borax in Lake County. He later lived in Oregon, where he taught at the Willamette University College of Medicine. Veatch has been suggested as a real-life inspiration for the enigmatic Judge Holden in Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession and in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, due to his size and his work as a field surgeon and scientist in the West.