ADOBE DAYS

Llewellyn Bixby
Aet. 33

ADOBE DAYS

BEING THE TRUTHFUL NARRATIVE OF THE EVENTS IN THE
LIFE OF A CALIFORNIA GIRL ON A SHEEP RANCH AND IN
EL PUEBLO DE NUESTRA SEÑORA DE LOS ANGELES
WHILE IT WAS YET A SMALL AND HUMBLE TOWN;
TOGETHER WITH AN ACCOUNT OF HOW THREE
YOUNG MEN FROM MAINE IN EIGHTEEN HUNDRED
AND FIFTY-THREE DROVE SHEEP AND CATTLE
ACROSS THE PLAINS, MOUNTAINS AND DESERTS
FROM ILLINOIS TO THE PACIFIC COAST; AND
THE STRANGE PROPHECY OF ADMIRAL
THATCHER ABOUT SAN PEDRO HARBOR

BY
SARAH BIXBY-SMITH

Revised Edition

THE TORCH PRESS
CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA
1926

Copyright 1925 by
Sarah Bixby-Smith

Second Edition, 1926

The Torch Press
CEDAR RAPIDS
IOWA

To My Father

LLEWELLYN BIXBY

Born in Norridgewock, Maine October 4, 1825
Arrived in San Francisco, July 7, 1851
Died in Los Angeles, December 5, 1896

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Several years ago I wrote a short account of my childhood, calling it A Little Girl of Old California. At the suggestion of friends, I have expanded the material to make this book.

The recent discovery of diaries kept by Dr. Thomas Flint during two pioneer trips to this coast which he made in company with my father, and the generous permission to make use of them granted me by his sons, Mr. Thomas Flint and Mr. Richard Flint, have added much to the interest of the subject. I at first contemplated including them in this volume, but it has seemed wiser to publish them separately and they are now available through the publications of the Southern California Historical Society.

My information regarding the earlier history of the Cerritos Ranch was supplemented by data given me by my cousin, the late George H. Bixby.

The interesting letter predicting the development of the harbor at San Pedro, written by Admiral Henry Knox Thatcher to my grandfather, Rev. George W. Hathaway, is the gift of my aunt, Miss Martha Hathaway.

I wish here to express my gratitude to my husband, Paul Jordan Smith, and to my friend, Mrs. Hannah A. Davidson, for their constant encouragement to me during the preparation of Adobe Days.

Sara Bixby-Smith

Claremont, California October, 1925

NOTE TO SECOND EDITION

For certain suggestions and information which have been incorporated in this revised edition I wish to thank Mrs. Mary S. Gibson, Mrs. D. G. Stephens, Prof. Jose Pijoan and Mr. Charles Francis Saunders.

S. B. S.

Sept. 1926.

CHAPTER I
BACKGROUND

I was born on a sheep ranch in California, the San Justo, near San Juan Bautista, an old mission town of the Spanish padres, which stands in the lovely San Benito Valley, over the hills from Monterey and about a hundred miles south of San Francisco.

The gold days were gone and the time of fruit and small farms had not yet come. On the rolling hills the sheep went softly, and in vacant valleys cropped the lush verdure of the springtime, or, in summer, sought a scanty sustenance in the sun-dried grasses.

Intrepid men had pushed the railroad through the forbidding barrier of the Sierras, giving for the first time easy access to California, and thus making inevitable a changed manner of life and conditions.

I am a child of California, a grand-child of Maine, and a great-grand-child of Massachusetts. Fashions in ancestry change. When I chose mine straight American was still very correct; so I might as well admit at once that I am of American colonial stock, Massachusetts variety.

Up in the branches of my ancestral tree I find a normal number of farmers, sea-captains, small manufacturers, squires, justices of the peace, and other town officers, members of the general court, privates in the militia, majors, colonels, one ghost, one governor, and seven passengers on that early emigrant ship, the Mayflower; but a great shortage of ministers, there being only one.

How I happened to be born so far away from the home of my ancestors, the type of life lived here on the frontier by a transplanted New England family, and the conditions that prevailed in California in the period between the mining rush and the tourist rush, is the story I shall tell.

The usual things had happened down the years on the east coast,—births, marryings, many children, death; new generations, scatterings, the settling and the populating a new land. Mother’s people stayed close to their original Plymouth corner, but father’s had frequently moved on to new frontiers. They went into Maine about the time of the Revolution, when it was still a wilderness, and then, by the middle of the next century, they were all through the opening west.

My father was Llewellyn Bixby of Norridgewock, Maine, and my mother was Mary Hathaway, youngest daughter of Reverend George Whitefield Hathaway, my one exception to the non-ministerial rule of the family. And he was this by force of his very determined mother, Deborah Winslow, who had made up her mind that her handsome young son should enter the profession at that time the most respected in the community. She was a woman called “set as the everlasting hills,” and so determined was she that Whitefield should not be lured off into ways of business that she would not allow him to be taught arithmetic. Like the usual boy he rebelled at dictation, and when at Brown University became a leader in free-thinking circles, but suddenly was converted and accepted his mother’s dictum. His own choice would have been to follow in the footsteps of his father, Washington Hathaway, a graduate of Brown and a lawyer. His sermons showed his inheritance of a legal mind, and he exhibited always a tolerance and breadth of spirit that were doubtless due to the tempering of his mother’s orthodoxy by his gentle father’s unitarianism. She, dear lady, would not have her likeness made by the new daguerreotype process lest she break the command, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, nor any likeness of anything—.”

Grandfather graduated from Williams College and Andover Seminary and accepted the call to the parish church of Bloomfield (Skowhegan), Maine, which position he held for a generation. Afterward he was several times member of the Maine Legislature and was, during the Civil War, chaplain in the 19th Regiment of Maine Volunteers. When I was still a child he came to California and spent the last years of his life in our home.

My father’s family had been in Maine for a longer time, his two great grandfathers, Samuel Bixby and Joseph Weston, going in from Massachusetts about 1770, and settling on the Kennebec River. Joseph Weston took his eleven year old son with him in the spring to find a location and prepare for his family to come in the fall. In September he left his boy and another of fourteen in charge of the cattle and cabin and went home to get his wife and other children. But he was balked in his purpose because of the setting in of an early winter and consequent freezing of the river highway. The boys had to stay alone in the woods caring for the cattle until spring made travel possible. When the family arrived they found the boys and cattle in good shape, the boys evidently being excellent Yankee pioneers.

By the middle of the nineteenth century Somerset County was full of Bixbys and Westons. When Rufus Bixby entertained at Thanksgiving dinner on one occasion he had one hundred fifty-six guests, all kinfolk. He was a brother of my grandfather, Amasa Bixby, the two of them having married sisters, Betsey and Fanny Weston. A third sister, Electa Weston, married William Reed Flint and became the mother of the two cousins who were father’s business associates all during his California life.

The Maine farms were becoming crowded and there was no land in the neighborhood left for the young folks. Father was one of an even hundred grandchildren of Benjamin Weston and Anna Powers, a sample of the prevalent size of families at that time. The early American farmers were not essentially of the soil, but were driven by the necessities of a new country to wring support from the land. At the first opportunity to escape into callings where more return for less physical output promised, they fled the farms. I remember that my uncle Jotham who had rather short stumpy fingers used to maintain that he had worn them down in his boyhood gathering up stones in the home pastures and piling them into walls.

In the spring of 1851, Llewellyn Bixby, an erect, square-shouldered young man of twenty-five, with gray eyes and black hair, was studying engineering at Waterville. He had finished his education at a district school and Bloomfield Academy some time before and had taught, had farmed, had even undertaken the business of selling books from house to house, for which latter effort he confessed he did not seem to have the requisite qualities. He then determined to go into engineering, a field of growing opportunity, and was well underway when one day his father appeared unexpectedly at the door of a shop where he was at work, with the proposal that he join his brother, Amasa, Jr., and his cousin, Dr. Thomas Flint, in a trip to California, whither the latter’s brother, Benjamin, had gone in 1849.

The plan appealed to him and he returned to Norridgewock with his father, to make an immediate start for that far off coast which was to prove his home for the rest of his life.

It was July, 1851, just too late to be technically called pioneers, that they reached San Francisco, but to all intents and purposes they belong to that group of early comers to this state who have had so large a part in determining its destiny.

The next year, two more of my father’s brothers, Marcellus and Jotham, ventured around the Horn, and ultimately the rest of the children followed,—Amos, Henry, Solomon, George, Francina and Nancy, (Mrs. William Lovett), making in all eight brothers and two sisters. Amos who was the last to come, was a lawyer and editor and had been instrumental in the founding of Grinnell College in Iowa and the University of Colorado in Boulder as he made his gradual progress from Maine to California. He founded and edited the first newspaper in Long Beach.

Allen Bixby, now state commander of the American Legion is the grandson of Amasa, the brother who accompanied my father in the first trip across the isthmus. It is this sort of bodily transplanting of young stock that has left so many of the New England counties bereft of former names, but has built up in new communities many of the customs and traditions of the older civilization.

Not only did my father’s immediate family come to this state but also many of his friends and cousins. I am told that at the presidential election in 1860 all the men in Paso Robles who voted for Lincoln came from Somerset county, Maine.

Because this migration is typical and because many of these cousins made names for themselves beyond the limits of the family, I am going to mention a few of them.

Among them was, for instance, Dr. Mary Edmands, who was an early physician in San Francisco in the days when it took grit as well as brains for a woman to gain a medical education. She succeeded as a mother as well as a professional woman, her sons and daughter at present standing high in their respective callings.

Nathan Blanchard of Santa Paula was a son of still another Weston sister. He, after many hardships and almost unbelievable patience, succeeded in making a success of lemon culture in Southern California, and worked out the fundamental principle of curing the fruit that is now in vogue wherever lemons are grown for market.

Another name widely known is that of Mrs. Frank Gibson, the daughter of another cousin. She has been a leader among women for many years, and member of the State Board of Immigration. Her son, Hugh Gibson, is at present United States Minister to Switzerland.

These are but a few of the several hundred from this one Maine family who are scattered up and down this western land.

CHAPTER II
THE VERY LITTLE GIRL

I was born, as I have said, on a sheep ranch in the central part of California during its pastoral period, but it is doubtless true that the environment and influences about me during the first few months of my life were very little different from what they would have been had my Maine mother not left her New England home about a year before my birth.

But as the months passed and the circle of my experience widened, I was more and more affected by the conditions of my own time and place.

My first memory relates to an experience characteristic of a frontier country in which the manner of life is still primitive. I remember very distinctly sitting in my mother’s lap in a stage-coach and being unbearably hot and thirsty. After I was a grown girl my father took me with him to inspect the last remaining link of the old stage lines (between Santa Barbara and Santa Ynez), that formally ran up and down the state from San Diego to San Francisco, and I, being reminded of that long ride in my babyhood, asked him about it. He told me that on the return trip to San Juan after my first visit to Los Angeles, instead of going north by steamer they had traveled by stage through the San Joaquin Valley, encountering the worst heat he had ever experienced in California. Then he added that I could not possibly remember anything about it since I was only eleven months old when it happened. I maintain, however, that I do, because the picture and the sense of heat is too vivid to be a matter of hearsay alone. I was so small that my head came below my mother’s shoulder as I leaned against her outside arm at the left end of the middle seat. There were no other women in the stage, papa was behind us, and opposite were three men, who were sorry for me and talked to me.

The months went by and I came to know my home. It was among rolling hills whose velvety slopes bounded my world. Over all was the wide blue sky, a bit of it having fallen into a nearby hollow. This was a fascinating pond, for water ran up hill beside the road to get into it. Then there were many fish, none of which ever would get caught on my bent-pin hook. It was into this water that I once saw some little ducks jump, and, like many of the younger generation, greatly alarm their mother, who, being a hen, had no understanding of her children’s adjustment to strange conditions.

The ranch house was a new one, built by the three partner-cousins, large enough to accommodate their families. It was reminiscent of Maine, with its white paint, green blinds and sharp gables edged with wooden lace, something like the perforated paper in the boxes of perfumed toilet soap,—perhaps meant to remind them of icicles. The house and all the auxiliary buildings were built on rising ground, so that under each one, on the lower side, was a high basement, usually enclosed by a lattice. Under the veranda that extended across the front of the house was a fine place to play, with many treasures to be found, among them sacks of the strange beet seed, reminders of an early interest in sugar-making, and sweet potatoes that are very good for nibbling, raw; they taste like chestnuts.

At the rear of this house was a low porch, without a railing, where the carriages drove up many times a day, for, with the large family, the wide acres, and active business, there was much coming and going. This veranda served as an annex to the dining room. In those days fruit came after breakfast instead of before, and it was here that we ate it, tossing the squeezed oranges and the scalloped watermelon rinds into a conveniently placed box that was frequently emptied.

Directly back of the kitchen was a small building containing a storeroom where Dick and I were accustomed to climb the shelves like a ladder for packages of sweet chocolate, while Aunt Francina, oblivious, skimmed the many large milk pans. In the building also was a laundry, containing a stove upon which I have seen soft-soap made and tallow prepared for the candle moulds. In a corner, made by this house and a retaining wall, was a large sand pile, and from the great oak on the bank above hung a long swing. I wonder if it is any more delightful for an old person to penetrate the sky in an aeroplane than for a little girl to do the same when pushed by the strong arm of her father.

Down towards the pond was the horse barn, with its long rows of stalls on one side, and its shelter for the carts and buggies beside the hay-mow on the other. I was warned of dangerous heels and was duly circumspect, but liked to get, occasionally, a nice, fresh, long hair from a tail for purposes of scientific experiment. I was going to turn a hair into a snake if possible. In a similar attempt to verify popular statements I spent many an hour with salt in my hand, trailing birds.

On one of my ventures behind the horses I was rewarded by the discovery of a very heavy little bottle, standing on a dark ledge. It contained mercury. Great was my joy to get a few drops in my hand, to divide them into the tiniest globules, and then to watch them coalesce into one little silvery pool.

The building standing back up the hill was the one in which the imported Spanish merino sheep were kept. I seldom went there, but in the corral behind the barn next lower several cows stood every night to be milked, among them Old Muley, my friend, on whose broad back I often sat astride while the process was going on. There were large, pink-blossomed mallows bordering the fences and this barn, and under the latter many white geese could be seen between the slats of the open siding. How excited I was when the day for gathering the feathers came!

The hired men occupied the original ranch house; in the usual basement was the tool room, open to us children. I here learned to hammer, saw and plane, and, most charming of all, bore holes with an auger in the wooden boxes we used in the making of figure-four traps. I also learned about gimlets, chisels, pliers, brads, rivets, and screws and thus prepared myself to be a general handy man at college and in my own home. It was in this shop that papa made me a fire-cracker holder,—a willow stick with a hole bored in one end in which to place the lovely red symbol of patriotism, so that I could celebrate without endangering my fingers.

In front of the house was the flower garden, enclosed by a white picket fence as a protection against chickens and other wandering ranch animals. Ladies-delights turned up their smiling little faces beside one walk, and nearby grew papa’s favorites, cinnamon pinks. I liked the red honey-suckle and the dark mourning-brides that were like velvet cushions stuck full of white-headed pins. There was one orange tree that bore no fruit important enough for me to remember, but, in spring, had many waxy white blossoms that smelled so good it made one hurt inside.

In larger enclosures, bounded by the same white fencing, grew vegetables and fruit trees. Sometimes we pulled a pungent horse-radish root and pretended that a bite of it made us crazy, an excuse for much running and wild gesticulation. Under a long row of loaded blackberry vines Dick once asked me the riddle, “Why is a blackberry like a newspaper?” Do you know the answer? It is: “Both are black and white and red all over.” I presume the play upon the word “red” was my introduction to puns.

The orchard contained peaches, plums, pears, apples, and apricots, but, to my mind, the cherry trees were the chief glory. One evening while Annie Mooney, our nurse, was taking in some clothes from the line, my little sister and I had a feast of fallen cherries, but she ate with less discrimination than I, for when, a few minutes later, we drank our supper milk she had convulsions. A quick immersion in a tub of hot water cured her, and we had learned about babies and cherries and milk, all mixed up together.

Down in the far corner of the orchard was a spring, with marshy ground about it, where the children were forbidden to go. But one morning, bored by the lack of novelty in our lives, one of the Flint twins and I boldly ventured into the tabooed region. We had hardly arrived when we saw an enormous black snake, which drove us back in terror, chasing us, with glittering eyes and darting tongue, over the ridges and hollows of the new-ploughed ground that clutched at our feet as if in collusion with the black dragon guard of the spring. I laid, during those few minutes, the foundation for many a horror-stricken dream. The snake was real. I wonder if the pursuit was merely the imagining of a guilty conscience.

Beyond the summer house, beyond the fence and at the hilltop end of a little grassy path, was the family burying ground, where, under the wild flowers, lay a few baby cousins who had gone away before I came, and papa’s young brother, Solomon, who, while reading poetry in a lonely sheep camp, had been shot to death by some unknown hand.

Our home was in a little valley, with no other houses in sight, but a mile and a half away, down a hill and across a bridge, lay the old town of San Juan Bautista, with its post-office, store, adobe inn and its homes, a medley of Spanish and American types. The mission church with its long corridor, arched and tile-paved, and its garden, where peacocks used to walk and drop their shining feathers for a little girl to pick up, was the dominating feature of the place, its very cause for being. Inside was dim silence; there were strange dark pictures on the walls, and burning candles, a very large music book with big square notes, and a great Bible, chained to its desk.

There was another church in San Juan, one that was wooden, light, bare and small, where I learned from a tiny flowered card, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” which, being interpreted for my benefit, meant, “Sallie mus’n’t quarrel with little sister.” I ate up a rosebud and wriggled in my seat during the long sermon and wondered about the lady who brushed her hair smooth and low on one side and high on the other. Had she only one ear?

I have been told that my church attendance involved certain distractions for my fellow-worshippers, and that my presence was tolerated only because of the desirability of training me in correct Sunday habits. On one occasion my restlessness led me into disaster. My parents had gone to the chancel, carrying my little sister Anne for her christening, leaving me in the pew. It was a strange performance. The minister took the baby in his arms, and then put something from a silver bowl on her forehead, and began to pray. I must know what was in the bowl! Everybody had shut-eyes, so there was a good chance for me to find out without troubling anyone. I darted forward and managed to discover that the mysterious something was water, for I spilled it over myself.

The trip to church was made in a two-seated, low carriage, with a span of horses, while my every day rides with papa were in a single buggy, but with two horses, also, for we had far to go and liked going fast. Sometimes we went to Gilroy, and sometimes to Hollister, often just about the ranch to the various sheep camps, which were widely separated.

I began these business trips almost as soon as I was old enough to sit up alone. When we started I would be very erect and alert at papa’s side, but before long I would droop and be retired to the bottom of the buggy, where, wrapped in a robe, and with his foot for a pillow, I would sleep contentedly for hours. I remember my disgust when I had grown so long that I must change my habit and put my legs back under the seat, instead of lying across in the correct way. I objected to change, but was persuaded that it would be inconvenient for me to get tangled, during some pleasant dream, in the actualities of the spokes of a moving wheel.

At one time papa and I were very much occupied clearing a field, a piece of work which he must have reserved for himself, since there were no other men about. He also enjoyed chopping wood and this may have been his “daily dozen.” We cut down several large oak trees, cleared out underbrush, and, piling it up against the great stumps, built fires that roared for a time and then smouldered for days.

Sometimes I walked with mamma on the hills back of the house, and when we were tired we would sit down under a tree and she would tell me a story and make me a chaplet of oak leaves, folding and fastening each leaf to the next in a most ingenious way. If our walk took us into the lower lands she made bewitching little baskets from the rushes that grew near the water’s edge. I also found the strange equisitum, that I sometimes called “horse-tail,” and sometimes “stove-pipe,” which latter I preferred, because none of the horses that I knew had disjointable tails, while the little hollow tubes of stem that fitted into each other so well must serve the fairies most excellently for their chimneys.

Several spring mornings as I grew older, I got up at dawn with mamma, went to the early empty kitchen for a drink of milk, and then went out with her for a horseback ride, she in her long broadcloth habit and stiff silk hat, and I, a tiny timid girl, perched on a side-saddle atop a great horse. From the point of view of horsemanship I was not a great success, but the joy of the dawn air, the rising sun, the wild-flowers, the companionship of my mother is mine forever.

It was on one of these morning expeditions when we were comparing notes about our tastes in colors, that I found she liked a strange shade of red that to me looked unattractive. I was overwhelmed by the thought that perhaps it did not look the same to both of us, and that if I saw it as she did I might like it also; but there was no way for either of us to know how it actually looked to the other! I realized the essential isolation of every human being. However, I forgot the loneliness when papa joined us on the road beside the pond, where the wild lilac scattered its blue-violet lace on the over-hanging bank, and cut for me a willow whistle that sounded the shrill joy of being alive.

On the Sunday afternoon walks when we all went up into the hills together I learned, among other classics:

“Little drops of water,

Little grains of sand,

Make a mighty ocean

And the wondrous land.”

But it was at night when I was safely put in my bed that I heard through the open door, mamma, at the parlor piano, singing to me:

“I want to be an angel,

And with the angels stand,

A crown upon my head,

A harp within my hand.”

I suppose that neither she nor I were really in immediate haste for the fulfillment of that wish, but it made a good bed-time song. Another favorite was, Shall we Gather at the River?, and there was occasionally a somber one called Pass Under the Rod.

My bed was a very safe place, for did not angels guard it, “two at the foot, and two at the head”? I knew who my angels were,—my very own grandmother, who had died when my mother was a new baby, the aunt for whom I had been named, my little cousin Mary who really should have been guarding her brother Harry, and a fourth whom I have now forgotten.

The songs were not gay, but my life was not troubled by thoughts of death. Heaven seemed a nice place, somewhere, and angels and fairies were normal parts of my universe.

I did have a few minor troubles. My language was criticized. “You bet your boots” did not meet with maternal approval. Then, if I carelessly put my sunbonnet strings into my mouth, I got my tongue burned from the vinegar and cayenne pepper into which they had been dipped for the express purpose of making the process disagreeable. Those sunbonnets, with which my head was sheathed every time I started out into the airy out-of-doors, were my chief pests. I usually compromised my integrity by untying the strings as soon as I was out of sight. I would double back the corners of the bonnet, making it into a sort of cocked hat with a bow on top, made from the hated strings, thus letting my poor scratched ears out of captivity.

My cousin, Mrs. Gibson, tells me that she also suffered the martyrdom of sunbonnets; I suppose in those days girls were supposed to preserve natural complexions, it not being considered decent to have recourse to vanity boxes. Her mother was more ingenious than mine in making sure that her child did not jeopardize her skin. She made buttonholes in the top of the bonnet through which she drew strands of hair and braided them outside the bonnet, thus insuring it against removal.

Papa and I went to the circus on every possible occasion. Once, at Hollister, I saw General and Mrs. Tom Thumb, Minnie Warren and Commodore Nutt, whose photograph—with Mr. Barnum—I have preserved. Minnie Warren was supposed to be the size of a six-year-old, but the standard for six-year-olds must have come out of the east. I was several inches taller than she.

A pretty lady, dressed in pink tarleton skirts, who rode several horses at a time, and jumped through tissue paper hoops, was my first heroine. Dick and I kept her picture for months on a ledge under the office desk, and there rendered her frequent homage.

The mention of this desk calls to mind other activities centering in that office. On one occasion, when I was suitably young, the spirit moved me to carry a shovelful of live coals out through the door to the porch, and there coax up a fire by the addition of kindling wood. The same spirit, or another, however, suggested a compensating action. I summoned my mother to see my “nice fire,” to the salvation of the house.

Fire, candles, matches, revolvers, all held a fascination. It is evident that neither my cousin Harry nor I were intended for a violent death, for it was our custom to investigate from time to time his father’s loaded revolver, turning the chambers about and removing and replacing the cartridges. Our faith in our ability to handle the dangerous weapon safely seems to have been justified by our success.

It was deemed wise to keep me occupied, so far as possible, in order to thwart Satan, ever on the lockout for idle hands. So I was taught to sew patch-work and to knit, to read and to spell. There were short periods when I had to stay in the house, but like most California children, I spent out of doors most of the time not given over to eating and sleeping. Now-a-days even those duties are attended to upon porches.

Under mamma’s guidance I once laboriously and secretly sewed “over and over” a gray and striped “comfort bag” for a birthday gift to papa. It was modelled on the bags made for the soldiers in the Union army when my mother was a girl. We made a special trip to Hollister to buy its contents, black and white thread, coarse needles, buttons, wax, blunt scissors, and to top off, pink and white sugary peppermint drops. That bag remained in service for twenty years, going always in father’s satchel whenever he went away. It came to my rescue once when I had torn my skirt from hem to band. As he sewed up the rent for me with nice big stitches, first on one side and then on the other, he told me it was a shoemaker’s stitch and had the advantage of bringing the edges together just as they had been originally, without puckering the cloth. Mamma used the same stitch to mend the torn pages of books and sheet music, in those days before Mr. Dennison invented his transparent tape.

Time went by slowly, slowly, as it does when one is young. All day there was play, except for the occasional stint of patchwork, or the reading lesson,—every day but Sunday, with its church in the forenoon and stories and walks in the afternoon. Mamma would say, “When I was a little girl in Maine,” until to me Maine meant Paradise. In that country there was a brook where one could wade, and the great river, on whose banks in the woods children could picnic and hunt for wild berries,—what a charm in the words, “going berrying!” Even the nest of angry hornets with their sharp stings did not lessen my enthusiasm. At San Justo there were no Martha and Susan, no Julia and Ella for me to play with,—just boys, (who seemed to answer very well for little tom-boy Sallie when Maine was not in mind).

When I heard of snow and sleighs and sleds and the wonderful attic with its cunning low curtained windows and the doll colony who lived there, I forgot the charms of the ranch and the boy play. It was nothing to me that there were horses and cows, ducks, geese and chickens. It was nothing to me that Dick and I could make figure-four traps, and, walking beyond the wool-barn, set them on the hillside for quail; that once we had the excitement of finding our trap upset, our captives gone, and great bear tracks all about. The long sunny days of freedom with the boys, the great herds of sheep that came up for shearing, the many rides with my father through the lovely valleys and over the hills were commonplace, just what I had always known. No, life in California was very tame compared with the imagined joys of Maine.

CHAPTER III
DOWN IN MAINE

Twice mamma took me to Maine to see grandmother and grandfather and Aunt Martha, once when I was two-and-a-half years old and once when I was nearly five. In each case we stayed about six months so that I became acquainted with New England in all its varying seasons.

Perhaps it was the being there just when I was forming habits of speech that has fastened upon me an unmistakable New England way of speaking, however much the pure dialect may have been corrupted by my usual western environment.

My aunt tells me that when she first saw me she could think of nothing so much as a little frisking squirrel, my dark eyes were so shining and I darted about so constantly. I couldn’t wait after my arrival at the strange place even long enough to take off hood and coat before demanding scissors with which to cut paper dolls. When the outer wraps were removed, the interested relatives saw a slender little girl, with straight yellow hair, brown eyes and a smooth skin, tanned by wind and sun.

Evidently there was much excitement attendant upon reaching grandmother’s, for when I was tucked away for a nap, with a brand new book purchased the day before in Boston to entertain me until sleep should come, I occupied myself with tearing every page into pieces the size of a quarter. I have no suggestion to offer as to why I did it. When the situation came to adult attention, papa sat down on the trunk beside the crib and gave me the only spanking he was ever known to bestow upon his family. The rope was behind the trunk. I saw it while lying across his knees.

The ill-fated book was not the only purchase made in Boston. Mamma and I had our pictures taken, and bought clothes for the cold winter ahead. I had a bottle-green dress and a bottle-green coat to match, also stockings and bonnet. They put me up on the counter to try the things on me, and I was glad when mamma chose the velvet bonnet with a white ruche and little pink roses, for I liked it best of all. Then there were kid gloves, dark green and white, both of which I hated, because my poor little fingers buckled when they were put on. When I was taken to call on the cousins in Beacon Street, I was dressed up in all the regalia, even to the white gloves. Alas, there was a coping beside the steps, just the right height for a hand-rail for me, and unfortunately, dust is black even in Boston. Missy was in disgrace when she reached the front door. She was better adapted to play in mud pies than formal calls.

Even if I liked dirt and freedom, I also liked clothes well enough to remember those I have had, so that now I would venture to reconstruct a continuous series of them, extending back to babyhood. An early favorite was of scarlet cashmere, cut in “Gabrielle” style, with scalloped neck, sleeves and hem, buttonholed with black silk, and on the front an embroidered bunch of barley, acorns and roses. With this dress went a little white fur overcoat, cap and muff, all trimmed with a narrow edge of black fur. So much for clothes. They were ordinarily buried under aprons.

Maine was a wonderful place! The leaves on the trees were red and yellow, brown and purple, instead of green, and when the wind blew they fell off. It left the trees very queer, but the dry leaves on the ground made a fine swishing noise when one scuffed in them, and when a little breeze picked them up and sent them scurrying after one they looked like the rats following the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Mamma gathered some of the prettiest, pressed them and waxed them with a hot iron and a paraffine candle. We took them back to San Justo with us and pinned them on the lace curtains, to remind us of Skowhegan.

Whenever we went to town on an errand or to church, we crossed the bridge, under which the great river rushed to pour over the falls below, a never failing wonder. On the far side of the island the water turned the wheels for cousin Levi Weston’s sawmill, an interesting, if dangerous, place to visit.

We had not been long in Maine before the air filled with goose feathers, only it wasn’t feathers, but wet snow. Then came sleds and sleighs, a snow man and Christmas, with a piggy-back ride on grandfather to see the tree at the church.

The snow was so deep on the ground and it was so cold, the chickens had to stay in the barn all the time; every morning grandmother and I took my little red bucket and went to feed them, out through the summer kitchen, the wood-shed, past the horse’s stall to their house.

While I was in Maine I learned odors as well as sights. I know the smell of snow in the air, of pine trees in winter, of a woodshed and barn, of an old house that has been lived in for long, long years. I came to know the fragrance of a cellar, apples and butter, vegetables and preserves, and can recall its clammy coolness.

To have a bath in a wash-tub by the kitchen stove was a lark for a little wild-westerner who had known only a modern bathroom. The second time we were at grandfather’s there was a curious soft-rubber pouch for a tub, which was set up when wanted before the fire in the north bedroom. The bottom rested on the floor, while the sides were held up by poles, resting on chairs. After a week-end tubbing, mamma and I would say together,

“How pleasant is Saturday night

When all the week I’ve been good,

Said never a word that was cross

And done all the good that I could.”

I have other memories of that fire-place. Once, during the first visit, mamma left me for a few days in the care of my inexperienced aunt, of whom I took advantage. I assured her that my mother every night rubbed my chest with camphorated oil and gave me a spoonful of Hive’s cough syrup. Evidently I had recently enjoyed a cold. So every night I got my oil rub and the sweet sticky dose, and, wrapped in an old shawl and called a “little brown sausage,” was rocked during some blissful minutes of story-telling. Mamma was shocked when she returned to find the empty bottle and to know the whereabouts of its contents.

Still another fire-place memory,—papa was taking care of me in this room, and was having so good a time reading and smoking that I thought I would do the same. I climbed up and took from the mantel a pretty twisted paper lamp-lighter, then seated myself beside him, put my feet as high as I could on my side of the fireplace, adjusted my newspaper, lighted my cigar, and in mouthing it about, managed to set my front hair on fire. That attracted papa’s attention to his job.

Soon the time approached for us to be starting west again. Hardly had we reached Chicago when there was a dangerous fire in the business section; it was not so long after the great fire that people had forgotten the terror and panic of it. So we must flee the hotel, although papa kept saying that if men would tear up the carpets and wet them and hang them outside the building they might save it. Mamma dressed me and packed the trunk as fast as she could, and I went out into the hall and looked down the elevator well, where the door had been left open. It was the first chance I had ever had to see what a deep hole it was, but mamma called me to come back, and I thought she was frightened to see me leaning over and looking down. We went away in Uncle Jo’s buggy through streets filled with pushing shouting people, and, as we looked back, all the sky was red with fire. We went to a small boarding house over by the lake, and all there was in it was a red balloon, many mosquitoes and a wonderful talking doll that the dear uncle brought me.

San Francisco came next, a few days at the Grand Hotel, a ride on the octagonal street car that diagonaled off from Market Street, a visit to Woodward’s Gardens, and then home by train and stage. It was good after all to get back to California. Here was our own sitting-room, with its white marble mantel, its dainty flowered carpet and its lace curtains. On the wall were colored pictures of Yosemite and a Sunset at Sea, and engravings of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, all hanging by crimson cords with tassels. I liked the dancing girl better, but mamma preferred the sad one.

I was also glad to get back to my old toys, my book about Ten Little Indians, and the boy cousins who lived at the other end of the house. And here, soon, came little sister, who was the cunningest baby that ever was. They rolled her up so close in blankets that Aunt Francina was afraid she would be smothered. I didn’t want her to be smothered. What a long time it does take for a baby to grow up enough to play with a person born three years ahead of her!

Two years later mamma took me and little Anne back again to Maine, for she had had letters telling her that grandmother was very ill. It was a harder trip with two children and so my mother planned to simplify it in every possible way. She invented for us traveling dresses of a medium brown serge, with bloomers to match, a whole generation before such dresses came into general favor for little girls. With these, fewer bags and satchels were necessary, and we looked as well dressed at the end as at the beginning of the journey; and, moreover, I was able to stand on my head modestly, whenever I felt like it. I am glad that I did not have to be mother of restless me on such a long, confined trip; I am also glad that restless I had a mother who could cut out such fascinating paper boxes and tell stories and think of thousands of things to do. Perhaps having two children to take care of kept mamma from grieving so much about her mother.

I realized little about the illness, because, except for a daily good-morning call, we children were kept out of the sick room, usually playing out-of-doors. We rolled down the grassy slope in the south yard, or drove about in the low basket phaeton along the winding, shady roads. Sometimes we had a picnic,—I remember especially the one on my fifth birthday. Georgie Hill, who helped Aunt Martha with the house work, made a wonderful cake, which contained a button, a thimble, a penny, and a ring; in some very satisfying way, the section containing the ring came to me. I had always wanted a ring. I was happy, happy, and then the very next day I lost it, making mud pies with Annie Allen. I never had another ring until I was grown up, not even a bracelet, which might have consoled me. But if I had had either I probably would have had to suffer the sorrows of separation, since it was my habit to lose my treasures. My gold pins are sowed up and down the earth; my sister still has every one she owned. Perhaps it was in recognition of my capacity to mislay things, and to encourage stoical acceptance of the situation, that led grandfather to write in my autograph album:

“My little grand-daughter,

Just do as you ought to,

Neither worry nor fret

At what can’t be mended,

Nor wait to regret

Till doing is ended.”

It was on this same birthday that Elizabeth came to me, and her I have not lost. She was a doll almost as tall as I, that had been made by my great-grandmother, Deborah Hathaway, for her son’s little girls. The doll came last to my mother, who was the youngest, and from her descended to me. Elizabeth had a cloth body, stuffed with cotton, white kid arms and hands and a papier mache head. She was so unfortunate soon after her arrival in California, as to suffer a fracture of the skull, due to contact with a hammer wielded by my small sister. Elizabeth survived the grafting on of a china head, and is now eighty or more years old, but looking as young as ever.

I possess many letters written to my father by my mother at this time, from which I can gain ideas regarding what manner of woman she was, to supplement my own memory of her whom I lost while still a child.

I seem to have been something of a puzzle to my gentle mother. I quote from one letter:

“Sarah ... the strangest child I ever saw ... so affectionate, but will not be coaxed ... super-abundance of spirits.... She tries to remember all the new rules of life. [I was five years old] ... brown eyes. I hope those eyes will not hold a shadow caused by her mother misunderstanding her and crushing out in her by sternness anything sweet and beautiful. I would not want to love her so fondly as to make a foolish, conceited woman of her, but I don’t know that that is any worse than to give her life a gloomy start.”

I love this letter. It delights me that my mother, a high-bred New England lady, to whom foolishness and frivolity were anathema, should prefer even them to harshness and a broken spirit for her little daughter. However, her desire to give my life a happy start was not incompatible with good discipline. She expected obedience and got it, sometimes in very ingenious ways. On one occasion when I had been fretful—“whining” she called it,—she suggested that as I was usually a good girl and did what she wanted it must be that I was really unable to improve my voice, that my throat must be rusty and in need of oil to cure the squeak, so she proceeded to grease the inside of it with olive oil applied on the end of a stripped white feather. Do you wonder that it was years before I learned to like French salad dressing, with its reminder of disordered vocal chords?

In the later summer grandmother died, but as we had seen so little of her and were kept away from the evidences and symbols of death, it did not make much impression upon us.

We stayed on in Skowhegan until papa was free to come to Maine for us. In the meantime both mamma and Aunt Martha visited the Centennial and their reports of its sights and wonders made me most anxious to go to Philadelphia, also. When it was proposed that our return trip should be made by way of that city, in order that my father might visit the exposition I was delighted, but when he arrived and said he could not, on account of the state of his business affairs, I received one of the great disappointments of my life. I shall never forget my unavailing efforts to persuade them that they ought not to make me miss that Centennial, since I could not possibly live a hundred years for the next one.

Soon after we left the old home was sold, and grandfather and Aunt Martha moved to California, where the rest of us lived. The man who bought the place cut down the beautiful trees, tore down the house and built two small ones in its stead. But although the original house is gone in fact it will live in my mind as long as I do. I could draw its floor plan; I could set much of its furniture in the correct position.

The arrangement of the dining-room was for years very important for me, because the only way I could distinguish my right hand from my left was by seating myself in imagination beside grandfather at table where I was when I first learned which was which,—left toward him, right toward cellar door. And, being so seated, I recall another lesson,—vinegar should not be called beginniger.

It was in the south yard that we built the big snow-man; it was there that the sleigh upset when we turned in from the street with too much of a flourish, and pitched Nan and me deep into a snow bank; it was here under the apple trees that we turned somersaults; it was here that the horse stood on his hind legs to shake down his favorite apples from the tree. The same horse would come to the stone door-step by the kitchen and rattle the bucket there when he was thirsty; that was the doorstep where I placed my feet when papa made my little shoes shine like his boots; and here Elizabeth was packed in grandfather Weston’s old clock-case for her long ride to California,—as if she were going in a coffin to heaven. But the San Justo heaven lacked the great beds of lilies-of-the-valley, such as grew under the trees in the Maine yard.

These impressions were planted deep in my mind during the months I spent in the beautiful village, with its dignified white houses, its tall trees, its great river. But, once again on my westward way, they slipped back into the files of memory, displaced by the renewal of other old impressions, for I was making my fourth trans-continental trip, my fourth stop in Chicago with my mother’s brother, Josiah Hathaway.

What fun there was, riding a whole long week in a Pullman car with its many friendly people, and a new routine of life. In those days dining-cars, with leisurely meals and dainty service had not been discovered. There were irregular stops with only twenty minutes for refreshment, so that a child must depend largely on the luncheon basket. The bringing of the table and opening the tempting boxes and packages was a welcome break in the long day. There were tall green bottles of queen olives, and pans packed with fried chicken, and all the bread and jam one might eat. We had a can of patent lemonade,—strange greenish sugar, needing only a few drops from the little bottle embedded in the powder, and train water to make it into ambrosia. Such a meal involved soiled hands, but even the washing of them had a new charm, for mamma took with her to the dressing-room a bottle of Murray and Lanman’s Florida Water, a few drops of which in the alkali water made a milky bath fit for the hands of a princess.

When interest within the car failed there was the window, with its ever new pictures. If there were no houses or people, mountains or clouds to be seen, there might be a village of prairie dogs, and the rhythm of passing poles carrying the telegraph wires never failed. I saw cowboys on their dancing horses, and silent Indians, the women carrying on their backs little Hiawathas, and offering for sale bows and arrows or beaded moccasins.

Then night came, and with it the making of magic beds by the smiling black genie. Once, after I had been deposited behind the green curtains, we stopped at a way station, where, pressing my nose against the window pane, I saw by the light of a torch, a great buffalo head mounted on a pole, and many men moving in and out of the fitful light.

With groans and creakings, with bells and weird whistles we were soon under way again, and, to the steady song of the wheel, in the swaying springy bed, I was being whisked over the plains in as many days as father had once spent in months driving the first sheep to California.

We went back to San Justo and stayed there forever; and then, when I was almost seven, we went south to the Cerritos for a never-to-be-forgotten summer with my cousin Harry. When fall came, instead of returning to the ranch at San Juan we moved to Los Angeles, a little city, and there I lived until both it and I grew up.

CHAPTER IV
FATHER’S STORY

Soon after we settled in Los Angeles I was very sick, due, I fear, to the hasty swallowing of half-chewed raisins when my foraging expedition to the pantry was menaced by an approaching mother. She did not know for several hours about my disobedience of her law against “swiping” food between meals,—if I were really hungry I would be glad to eat dry bread without butter or jam,—but the punishment for sin was as sure as it was in the Sunday school books. I sat for a long, long time screwed up in a little aching knot in front of the Franklin stove before I was ready to admit an excruciating pain. I think now-a-days it would have been called appendicitis.

The doctor took heroic measures: caster oil, tiny black stinking pills, steaming flannels wrung out of boiling vinegar and applied to my shrinking abdomen; awful, thick, nasty, white, sweetish cod-liver-oil. I survived.

I was only seven, and not used to staying in bed for a month at a time, so papa, sorry for me, day by day, told me the story of his life. He told me about his home, the brick farm house at Norridgewock on the Kennebec, the same river that I had seen when I was in Maine.

When he was a little boy there were no matches and no kitchen stoves, so that his mother had to cook before an open fireplace, and the clothes for all the family were made at home. His mother spun wool from their sheep and wove it into cloth and dyed it in the great indigo pot that stood when she was not using it just inside the shed door. When they killed a cow for beef they saved the hide, and then in the fall a traveling shoemaker came to the house and made boots for them, right there where they could watch him.

When papa was six he secretly learned to milk one of the cows and then with great joy exhibited his prowess, only to be informed that thereafter it was to be his daily chore. Another duty that fell to him about this time was to take care at night of each two year-old whenever its place in the cradle was taken by a new baby. Somehow the oldest child in the family, Francina, managed to escape the usual fate of an oldest daughter, that of secondary mother.

The most wonderful hat that papa ever had was made by cutting down a white beaver of his father’s—possibly a “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” campaign hat. Once when it was worn on a berrying expedition he hung it on the limb of a tree for safe-keeping—and then could never find the tree and precious hat again, a tragedy of youth.

Papa drew an amusing picture of himself at ten years of age in his “Sunday-go-to-meeting” clothes. His trousers came half way between knee and ankle, his jacket was short and round, his collar so high he could not turn his head, although he could rest his neck during the long service by using his ears as hooks over the top of the collar. A stove-pipe hat completed the outfit.

During those evening stories while I was convalescing I learned many things about the boy’s life in the far-away Maine, of his many cousins, of his schooling, and why he elected astronomy in place of French at Bloomfield Academy; of the years when he taught school or worked on a farm and then of his decision to go to California. He told me of the sea voyage and the stay in Panama, of San Francisco, and of the life in Volcano, the little mining town; of the return to Maine and of the journey west across the plains, driving sheep and cattle. He told me the story in detail until he reached Salt Lake City, and then one evening something intervened, I was well again and the absorbing tale was postponed and then again and again, never to be taken up.

Three years later, Uncle Ben, one of the travelers across the plains, died; in a few years more father was gone, and I suddenly realized how little I really knew of the venturesome expedition of the young men. So I wrote to Dr. Flint, the survivor, asking that he tell me something of their pioneer experience. He replied that he had kept diaries on both journeys and that I was welcome to see them at any time. But before the opportunity came he too had died, I was in the thick of a very busy life, and his letter was forgotten. Twenty years later I found it and immediately asked his son to see the journals, but their existence was not known. A holiday devoted to a search among old papers was rewarded by the discovery of the valuable documents.

And so, while I cannot recall all the detail of the charming tale my father told me, I am able, because of these records, to give an accurate report of how the cousins came to California and brought across plains, mountains, and deserts to this Pacific Coast some of the first American sheep, and thus were instrumental in developing an industry that for many years was of great importance.

It was May 21, 1851, when Amasa and Llewellyn Bixby and Dr. Thomas Flint left their Maine homes and followed the trail of the gold seekers. They sailed from New York on the steamer Crescent City, and met the usual conditions of travel at that period. A retelling of these facts might become monotonous; the actual experiences of each traveler were new, and varied according to the personal equipment and sensibility.

After a week the young men landed at Chagres. They started up the river on a small stern-wheel steamer, which they occupied for two days and two nights, during the latter tied up to the bank. At Gorgona they transferred to a small boat, propelled by the poles of six natives. The railroad was in course of construction, but not yet ready for use.

All the afternoon of the third day and the entire fourth was spent in a leisurely tramp over the mountain trail that led down to the Western port. This walk they enjoyed greatly, observing the strange tropical land. Several times during the long day they refreshed themselves by bathing in the clear mountain pools. When from a high point of land they saw the blue Pacific, they felt like Balboa on his peak in Darian.

While waiting for the S. S. Northerner for San Francisco,—on which they had passage engaged—a number of days were spent happily, comfortably, and at reasonable expense in the ancient walled city of Panama.

The steamer, when it came, proved a very poor means of transportation, being much over-crowded, dirty, infested with vermin, poorly supplied with food and leaking so badly that it was necessary to use the pumps during the entire journey. A stop for a day at Acapulco brought a welcome change with dinner at a good hotel and an attractive walk into the country.

They arrived in San Francisco the sixth of July, but made no stop, going on that afternoon by boat to Sacramento, and from there on to Volcano Diggings, their objective point. Here they found Benjamin Flint, a brother of Thomas, who had come out in 1849. Their time from home was fifty-three days.

Volcano was a characteristic mining town, not far from Sutter’s Mill, Mokelumne Hill, Hangtown, and other places familiar to all who have read of those early California days. It was the point on the overland trail to which Kit Carson was accustomed to conduct emigrants, leaving them to find their own way from there on to their various destinations. The wheel marks of the old wagons may still be seen on the limestone rocks above the town.

After a few months father’s brothers, Marcellus and Jotham, came around the Horn in a sailing vessel, the Samuel Appleton. Uncle Marcellus commented in his diary on the monotony of the long trip—“a dull business going to California on a sail ship.” He spoke of the beauty of the extreme southern mountains like white marble pyramids, of the killing of an albatross with a fourteen-foot wing-spread, of the cape pigeons, “the prettiest birds alive.”

With these brothers came two cousins, making the family group in this one little settlement about a dozen.

They all of them dabbled more or less in the search for gold, but gradually turned to agricultural pursuits. Father’s mining days were limited to one week, employed in driving a mule for gathering up pay dirt; that satisfied him. He took a job in the local butcher shop at one hundred and fifty dollars a month, with “keep,” a very important item in those days of high living cost. He preferred the sureness of stated wages to the uncertain promise of gold.

Apparently he and the Flints soon purchased the business and continued to conduct it as long as they remained in Volcano. They were associated in some way with Messrs. Baker and Stone, of the Buena Vista Ranch, very fertile mountain meadow land upon which heavy crops of barley were grown, and cattle were fattened for market.

After a year and a half the three of them, young men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty, determined to “unite their fortunes for the undertaking of bringing to California sheep and cattle, more for the trip than profit.” Consequently, on Christmas Day, 1852, they left for home, making their way out of the mountains over roads so buried in snow as to be almost impassable. In Sacramento the river was twelve miles wide and the streets so full of water that the hack from hotel to steamer was a flat boat pulled by a horse.

In San Francisco they investigated possible ways of returning to New York. First cabin was three hundred dollars, “and get across Isthmus from Panama at your own expense.” The plan adopted was to go steerage on the S. S. Northerner, the one upon which Dr. Flint and father had come, then unseaworthy, but now making her first trip after a thorough overhauling. The fare to Panama was only fifty dollars, which pleased their thrifty souls, and, as there were few passengers, the third class accommodations were very comfortable, a great contrast to their previous experience. They sailed January first.

One of their problems was the safe transfer of their gold to the mint at Philadelphia. Express charges were so high they decided to avoid this expense by carrying it with them in buckskin jackets especially made for that purpose. They soon found the weight, about thirty-five hundred dollars apiece, too burdensome, so they appropriated a vacant state-room, put the treasure between two mattresses and set a guard, one or the other of them remaining in the berth day and night.

Before leaving the steamer at Panama they packed this gold in a large chest which contained their blankets and clothing, the extra weight not being sufficient, in so large a container, to arouse suspicion, as would have been the case if they had attempted to carry it in a valise, which, Dr. Flint comments, “would have had to be backed with a revolver.”

On landing they hired a muleteer to carry the precious box while they followed on foot, taking pains to keep the pack train in sight most of the time.

They walked as far as Cruces, spending a night on the way. They were hardly settled comfortably at the Halfway House, when there arrived a much bedraggled party, westward bound, containing women and children, whose thin-soled shoes had been little protection on the rough and muddy trail. I venture a comment that the granddaughters of these women with light shoes would have been prepared for the exigencies of such a trip with knickers and hiking boots. Those were days of gallantry, so our young men surrendered their place of shelter, and moved on in the rain to a distant shack, where, at first, there seemed no prospect of food; later, when the owner of the cabin came in, their recently acquired ability to speak Spanish stood them in good stead, and they each were favored with a cup of hot stew.

From Cruces they took a small boat down the Chagres River to Barbacoa, to which point the railroad had been completed. Here there was some delay incident to the refusal of a negro to accompany his master further on the return way to Virginia. He had discovered that by staying on the Isthmus he would escape the slavery that was his. An attempt was made to take him by force from the garret in which he had taken refuge, but was given up when the storming party, as they went up the rickety stairs of the old building, were met by the very deterring muzzles of big-bore Mexican rifles. The sympathy of the young Maine men was, naturally, with the negro. The diary comments that it was a frequent custom for Southerners to take slaves with them to do the actual work in the California gold fields.

At Aspinwall passage on an independent steamer was found for twenty-five dollars, making the total fare from San Francisco but seventy-five dollars, as contrasted with three hundred dollars, the first cabin rate.

They stopped at Kingston, Jamaica, for coal. “Llewell stayed by our deposits” while the others went ashore, just as he had done at Aspinwall. I am interested to learn from these early entries that the capacity for “staying by” in times of stress was as characteristic of father in his young days as it was in later years when I knew him.

Twenty-seven days out from San Francisco they reached New York, and, taking their gold in a valise, set out at once for Philadelphia. They arrived at night and went to the Hotel Washington, where they took a room together in order to protect the valuable satchel. The next morning it was safe in the mint, where everything was assayed, fifty dollar slugs, coins from private mints of San Francisco, and native gold.

Of the experience in Philadelphia, Dr. Flint writes: “January 29: Got our mint receipts of the value of our deposits. We were dressed a little rough when we arrived, and at the hotel were seated at the most inconvenient table. But as we dressed up somewhat and the report of our gold got more known we were moved pretty well up in the dining room before we left.”

The next day they went on to Boston where they stopped at the United States Hotel, a hotel to which my father took me nearly forty years later, when he escorted me east to enter Wellesley College.

The evening of February first they reached their home, just a month from San Francisco. The journey west two years before had taken nearly twice as long.

Since they were among the first to return from the gold fields, they were objects of great interest to all the neighbors round about. They had scores of visitors, all eager for news of their own men-folk in far away California, the land so vaguely known, its great distances so under-estimated. They assumed that the returned travelers might know everyone in the new state.

They visited at home for five weeks. “We talked,” says Dr. Flint, “until our vocal chords could stand the strain no longer and were glad to start west.”

CHAPTER V
DRIVING SHEEP ACROSS THE PLAINS

On March 8, 1852, the cousins began the long return journey by rail, horseback, emigrant wagon and foot that ended just ten months later at San Gabriel, in Southern California. Dr. Flint, at the end of his diary, sums up the distances as follows:

“Today closes the year 1853, and one year from the time we left San Francisco on the steamship Northerner; in which time we have traveled by steamship 5,344 miles. By railroad 2,144 miles. I have, by steamboat on Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, 1,074 miles. On horseback and on foot 2,131 miles, making a total of 10,693 on a direct line between points reached.”

This diary is said to have especial historical value because the author put down daily specific facts of cost, distance and conditions of travel. Many accounts of the overland trip are but memories.

As I have read the journal I have been impressed with the idea that while it took vision, health and character on the part of the young pioneers to accomplish their object, the burdens came only day by day and would not be refused by the vigorous young grandsons whom I know now, were the same rewards offered for enterprise and endurance.

The railroad journey from Boston to Terre Haute, the western terminus of the road, was a very different one from that of today, taking then a week instead of a few hours.

They went down from Anson and Norridgewock to Boston where they exchanged their “money at Suffolk Bank for their bills, as they were good anywhere West, and none others were.”

Leaving Boston at 8 A.M., an all day ride took them to Albany, where they spent the night at the Delavan House. They went on early the next morning to Buffalo, which was reached at 11 P.M. Here they “put up at the Clarendon House. Tired. Sleepy.” At eleven in the forenoon they left for Cincinnati, reaching Cleveland at 8 P.M., Columbus at 4 A.M., where they changed cars, and arrived at their destination late at night, after a thirty-six hour ride in day coaches. They rested at Cincinnati until the next afternoon, when they went over to Dayton for the purpose of making an early start on the last lap of the railroading. The entry for March 16 reads:

“Called at 2 o’clock A.M., went aboard cars at 2 1/2. No breakfast, nor could we get a mouthful until we arrived in Indianapolis, at 2 1/2 o’clock P.M. The R. R. was new, rough and no stations by the way. Arrived in Terre Haute about 5 P.M.”

Here they stopped for a week at the Prairie House. They organized their firm of Flint, Bixby & Co., in which Benjamin, who had been longer in California, had four parts to three each for the others. They wrote letters, bought three horses, fitted saddles to them, and, on March 19th, started west for Paris, Illinois, over “roads as bad as mud can make them.”

They went across the state, a few miles a day, calling occasionally on an old friend or on one of their many cousins who had settled in the Middle West. Once they stopped over night in Urbana at the Middlesex House, where they found six beds in a 6 x 9 room, and had for breakfast “fried eggs swimming in lard, the almost universal food in this part of the world.”

By April first they had arrived in Quincy. “Had a hard time finding the town,” says Dr. Flint. “Most of the way through oak-wooded prairie, uncultivated.... Horseback distance from Terre Haute, 348 miles.”

Quincy was their headquarters while they were seeking and buying sheep, finding a few at one place, a few at another. Father once told me of the vexations they had at first, trying to drive in one homogeneous band all these little groups of sheep, each with its own bell wether.

During the last of April and the first of May, while still buying stock, they sheared their sheep at Warsaw, Illinois, selling the wool, 6,410 pounds, for $1,570.45 to Connable-Smith Co., of Keokuk, Iowa. At this time it is recorded that father received a remittance of $1,000.00 from a California acquaintance, undoubtedly a welcome addition to their funds with such an undertaking ahead of them. They must have had their trip well planned before they left Volcano, for Pacific Coast mail to meet them thus.

On May 7 they started off for the overland journey with 1,880 sheep, young and old, eleven yoke of oxen, two cows, four horses, two wagons, complete camping outfit; four men, three dogs, and themselves. They ferried across the Mississippi River at Keokuk for $62.00.

At some time during the trip the number of sheep was increased for I have always heard it said that the flock contained 2,400, and I have a later brief resume of the trip, made by Dr. Flint, in which he mentions the larger number.

There was much travel across the plains at this time. The entry for May 8 is: “In Keokuk. Visited the Mormon camp where it was said there were 3,400 proselytes from Europe, 278 emigrant wagons ready to convey them to Salt-Lake. A motley crowd of English, Welsh, Danes, etc.”

Father and Ben went on across Iowa with their train, while Dr. Flint went alone by steamer to St. Louis to purchase further supplies, which he took up the Missouri on the S. S. El Paso to meet his partners at Council Bluffs.

It is interesting to note that while he was in St. Louis he heard Prof. Agassiz lecture on geology. St. Louis was a far Cry from Cambridge, but in this golden age of American lectures men took long and hard trips to carry knowledge to eager learners. How fortunate that Mr. Bryan had not yet arisen to combat the spread of scientific thinking!

The trip up the river from St. Louis to Council Bluffs took ten days, due in part to the many stops for loading and unloading, and to the necessity for tying up at night because of changing currents and shifting banks. There is mention of frontier settlements, of Indians along shore and of the varied passengers, among them a group of fourteen Baptist ministers, going to attend a convention. Their presence brought about the curious anomaly of “prayer meeting at one end of the saloon, cards at the other.” By Sunday, the 29th, the preachers had disembarked, and the steamer was “getting above moral and religious influences as we leave civilization behind and touch the wild and woolly west.”

The steamer arrived at Kanesville (Council Bluffs) on May 30, where the supplies were landed during a severe storm. The place was a “town of huts, and full of sharp dealers who live off the emigrants ... the outpost of the white man.”

Here Dr. Flint met Ben and Lewell with their sheep and wagons, but the crossing of the river was delayed for a week by the heavy rains.

After a final gathering of supplies, the purchase of an additional saddle horse and another wagon, the stock was ferried across the Missouri River and they found themselves “fairly on the plains.”

The personnel of the party varied from time to time. Dr. Flint says there were fifteen men, but does not name them all. Three men, after a couple of weeks, became faint-hearted and turned back. The teamsters, Jennings, who served also as butcher, White, the carpenter, and John Trost, the “Dutchman,” appear to have made the entire trip with them.

There is frequent mention of William C. Johnson, who, with his bride Mary, left the party with whom they had been traveling and added their wagon to ours. Mrs. Johnson, the only woman in the train, contributed to the general comfort by baking bread for them all, and on gala days making apple pie or doughnuts.

This comparatively small group of men and wagons, with much stock, made conditions somewhat different from those recently pictured in the “The Covered Wagon,” and yet this film has made real to many the hazards and fatigue, the courage and the heartbreak, the manner of life and travel that were common to all who crossed the plains.

The route chosen by my people differed from that picture in that it lay altogether north of the Platte River, but they encountered many lesser streams across which their stock must swim.

From the first of June until the middle of July they were on the prairies; from then on they were in the Rocky Mountains until the first of September, when they came down into the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. By the first of October they were well under way again, following the Fremont Trail to San Bernardino, a journey of three months. I have given a brief report of their route; the diary is full of interesting details of daily happenings, of the type of country through which they passed, of the things that grew by the wayside and of the various animals they encountered. Comments on the landscape give a hint of the love of beauty in the writer, but, being a New Englander, he does not indulge in much emotional or florid language.

I was interested in several mentions of the guidebook, Horne’s, which evidently mapped out the routes with more or less detail. Sometimes they found the statements accurate, sometimes not.

The sending of a letter home from time to time makes one realize that the trail, though long and hard, was a traveled one, and that they were not entirely isolated. Occasionally they were overtaken and passed by those who could go more rapidly, unhampered by the slow-moving sheep. Father often said that he walked across the continent; he had a saddle horse, Nig, but, going at a sheep’s pace, he found it pleasanter on foot.

When they first started out from Council Bluffs they met reports that Indians ahead were troublesome, but they did not encounter any for nearly a month. Then one day a couple of Omahas, carrying an English rifle, were in camp for a time. Two nights later the man on guard, James Force, was shot dead by an Indian who was attempting to capture Dr. Flint’s horse. Father told me it was his watch, but this man had taken it that fatal night, in return for some favor father had shown him.

The last of July they had a second meeting with Indians, but fortunately without casualties on either side. Dr. Flint says: “Soon after halting, an half dozen Indians bounded out of the brush and commenced to pillage the wagons. The teamsters, Johnson, Palmer, and Jennings, were scared out of their wits and offered no resistance, but Mrs. Johnson went after their hands with a hatchet when they went to help themselves to things in her wagon.... Two more Indians joined those already present,—one of them with a certificate that they were Good Indians. It was written in faultless penmanship, expressing the hope we would treat them well, so we gave them some hard tack and a sheep that was lame.... The Indians were greatly astonished when they found that we could use the Spanish language. We found that they were a hunting and marauding party of Arapahoes from Texas.”

Shortly after this our party overtook a desolate train of Mormons,—mostly women and children from England,—who had been robbed of all their provisions by these “Good Indians,” and who would have perished but for the timely arrival of our people, who supplied them with sufficient food to carry them through to their destination.

By the middle of August the company crossed South Pass and “drank from Pacific Springs.” They went past Fort Bridger, where they left the Oregon Trail and turned southward through the mountains into Utah. As they were going down the last defiles into the broad valley they were met by watchers who enquired if they were saints or sinners. When it was known that they were the people who were the saviors of the robbed and stranded Mormons, they were given a royal welcome by Brigham Young and his saints. Their flocks were turned into the Church pastures, and they were given free access to the gardens. After long months of camp fare they enjoyed greatly the plenty of this promised land, the green corn, squashes, potatoes and melons.

It had been their intent to drive their stock directly across Nevada and the Sierras into Central California, their destination, but the season was so late they feared the heavy snows that were imminent in the high mountains. They therefore determined to travel southwest into Southern California and from there to drive up the coast.

After about three weeks of rest and recuperation, they set out, with flocks augmented by purchase from the Mormons, upon the hardest portion of the trail.

From this time on there is frequent mention of other parties engaged in similar enterprise. A number of these joined forces for mutual protection against the Indians, who were very troublesome in the Southwest. They attempted to stampede the horses and cattle, which were easily frightened. The sheep were not so hard to protect, for they when alarmed huddled closer to the camp fire.

Although the men were constantly annoyed by the attempts of the Indians to run off stock, they managed to avoid actual conflict and no lives were lost.

When the Indians did succeed in cutting out some of the stock they would return it, on being paid at the rate of two “hickory” shirts (the khaki of that day) for a cow, and one for a calf. On one occasion the Indians brought in venison for sale, which was bought and eaten, before it was discovered that the number of “deer” corresponded exactly with the number of colts that were missing.

Anyone who has made the rail trip between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles can appreciate the references made in the diary to the rough and stony trails, the dust, the days without water or food for the animals, to sage-brush and cactus, and can but wonder how it was possible to get flocks across the desert country at all.

On the earlier part of this trail, where there was still some noticeable vegetation, they lost many sheep through the eating of poison weeds. They lost others through the drinking of poor water or the entire lack of it for many weary miles.

At one place they had trouble with quicksands, at another the sheep balked at crossing the Rio Virgin and father and two helpers spent a whole afternoon packing on their backs one sheep at a time across a hundred-foot ford.

On the fifth of December, the Flint-Bixby train and the Hollister train started together on the hardest portion of the whole trip—about a hundred miles without water, except for the meager Bitter Water Springs. Most of the wagons and the cattle went on ahead, and, after three days, reached the springs, where they waited for the other men with the sheep. On the fourth day the first of the Hollister sheep came in; on the fifth, in the morning, came Ben and father, and in the afternoon Hub Hollister. Dr. Flint mentions the oxen as being “famished for want of food and particularly for water, a sad sight of brute suffering.” With the arrival of the sheep, the cattle again went on to the Mojave River. The sheep did not arrive until the fourteenth, after eleven days spent in crossing the desert. The diary tells something of the trouble experienced. Dr. Flint says: “I packed my horse with provisions and started back to meet Ben and Lewell with the sheep. Met them some six miles out. They had used up all their water and food, hence it was a relief to them when I hove in sight. Some of the men had such a dread of the desert that they were beside themselves, imagining they would parish from thirst before getting over the forty miles.” It appears from this that the prime movers in the enterprise must not only be brave and fearless themselves, but must also provide courage for their helpers.

It was this stretch of desert that caused the greatest loss to men who imported sheep in this manner. Just how many of ours died, or had to be abandoned, I have never heard, but my father told me that they were fortunate in losing fewer than the average.

After reaching the Mojave River they all rested for several days, “the men loafing about the camps or pitching horse shoes.” Evidently this favorite masculine sport did not defer its entry into California until the arrival of the Iowa contingent.

Conditions at last were better. They camped on dry burr clover instead of sand and stones and “had a big fire of cottonwood, which gave a cosy look to the camp.” They had a stew of wild ducks and got “a mess of quail for Christmas dinner on the morrow.”

On the 29th they “moved on towards the summit of the Sierras. Warm and pleasant. Green grass in places two inches high. Snow clad mountains on our right.”

On Friday the 30th they crossed the mountains through Cajon Pass, and on New Years Day, the scribe to whom we are indebted for the detailed account of this long, long journey was the guest of the Hollisters at San Bernardino for dinner. Father told me they celebrated by having doughnuts. It is evident that the two trains came in together, sometimes one ahead, sometimes the other. I make note of the fact of their traveling in company because I have seen it stated in print that Col. Hollister was the first to bring American sheep to California. I am pleased to be able to offer this contemporary witness to the fact that there are others to share the honor. Mention is made of the sheep of Frazer, White and Viles, and McClanahan as well as of Col. Hollister and Flint, Bixby & Co., all of whom shared the hardships of the trail those last days of 1853.

The San Bernardino into which they came after their long trip across the desert was a Mormon colony which had been founded three years earlier.

After spending the New Year at San Bernardino the herds that we have followed across the plains moved on to the “Coco Mongo” ranch and vineyard.

This was apparently a current spelling as it occurs in official government documents. It is a word of Indian origin meaning a sandy place. The first grape vines which still surprise the passer-by with their growth in seemingly pure sand had been planted some ten years before this. The old winery stands just north of the Foothill Boulevard between Upland and Cucamonga.

The next drive took the men and sheep across the valley to the Williams Ranch, the Santa Ana del Chino, and after a night there they moved on to San Gabriel, which they reached the evening of January seventh. The entry of the journal for January ninth would indicate that new comers seventy years ago were as impressed by orange trees, as are the tourists of today:—“A beautiful scene at sunrise. There had been a light flurry of snow during the night which stuck to the orange leaves and to the fruit, which, when lighted by the clear morning sun made a most beautiful contrast of colors tropical and arctic.”

On that date they moved over to the ranges of the Rancho San Pasqual where they had been able to rent pasturage. This is the site of the present city of Pasadena. Here they camped for the remainder of the winter.

“The only incident out of the ordinary routine of camp life for two months,” says Dr. Flint, “was the birth of a son to Mr. and Mrs. Johnson.”

In the spring they moved northward, through Ventura and Santa Barbara; thence through the mountains to Paso Robles and San Luis Obispo, again over the high hills and onward until they came to San Jose, where they rented the Rancho Santa Teresa and pastured their sheep for fourteen months. They sheared and sold their wool to Moore and Folger, familiar names in those old days. They sold wethers for mutton at $16 a head and bought a thousand sheep at $5.00. Then in the summer of 1855 they moved to Monterey county in search of feed, and, in October, bought from Francisco Perez Pacheco the Rancho San Justo, half of which they soon sold to their friend Col. Hollister. It is on this latter portion that the city of Hollister now stands.

Rancho San Justo

CHAPTER VI
RANCHO SAN JUSTO

With the purchase of the first land, the Rancho San Justo, Flint, Bixby & Co., were definitely located, and for forty years San Juan Bautista was their headquarters. After father’s death the firm was dissolved and the properties separated, the Flints retaining the lands in the north and the Bixby heirs those in Southern California.

As time went on the flocks increased beyond the capacity of the original ranch to support them, and since the wool business was profitable, other land was bought. As a little girl at San Justo I used to hear my father tell of necessary trips over to the “Worry-Worry” ranch. In later years I discovered that he was speaking of the Huero-Huero. Another of the ranches in Central California was the San Joaquin.

In 1866 the firm bought in Los Angeles county the Ranchos Los Cerritos, and a little later took a part interest in the adjoining Los Alamitos. They held a half interest in the western part of the Palos Verdes, the seventeen thousand acres, which since its sale has figured so prominently in real estate literature. Flint, Bixby & Co. were also half owners of the great San Joaquin Ranch in Orange Co. with James Irvine, to whom they sold their interest in the late seventies. They owned these great tracts of land when there were so few people in Southern California, that it was possible to utilize them for grazing purposes. When settlers came in the lands were sold in comparatively large parcels to men who had sufficient capital to subdivide and retail them as small farms or town lots.

Flint, Bixby & Co. were primarily stock raisers, but they branched out into a number of other lines.

Beginning in 1869 they operated the Coast Line Stage Co., which carried passengers, Wells Fargo express and mails between San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego, until 1877, when the Southern Pacific completed a line between the first two cities. The stage time between San Francisco and Los Angeles was sixty-six hours.

The making of beet sugar interested them and they, with others, organized and built at Alvarado, Alameda Co., the first successful sugar factory not only in California but in the United States. The initial run was in 1870. Flint, Bixby & Co. transferred their interest to a second factory in Soquel, Santa Cruz Co. This new industry suffered from drought, insect pests, price cutting by competing cane sugar interests and the fact that at that time the process of making sugar from beets had not been developed to the point it now is, and the product was not popular. In 1880 the Soquel factory was closed. Father, however, retained a belief in the ultimate practicability of sugar-making in California, and his last business undertaking was an attempt to re-establish it on the Cerritos, near Long Beach. It was in 1896, the year of the free-silver agitation, and he was unable to finance a sugar factory himself, but he induced the Clark interests to put one up on adjoining territory at Los Alamitos, thus obtaining a market for future beet crops.

It is hard now-a-days to visualize conditions in California during the fifties outside of San Francisco or the mining camps. The vast stretches of open valley and hill land were practically uninhabited, and were infested with wild beasts, and sometimes, wilder men. A very vivid impression of this may be obtained by anyone fortunate enough to read an account of “A Dangerous Journey From San Francisco to San Luis Obispo” given by J. Ross Browne in his book called Crusoe’s Island. We spent one of his nights in the old inn at San Juan, where the young Maine stockmen were so soon to settle.

The venture of bringing the sheep across the plains having proved good and a wide estate having been acquired the young men turned their thoughts to home-building, which is in a primary way, state building. Not content with the women the west at that time afforded, each in his turn, like Jacob of old, made a pilgrimage back to the land from which he came in search of a wife of his own people; but, unlike the old patriarch, it did not take long to find the bride willing to return to that far-off, glamorous California. Benjamin Flint’s wife was Caroline Getchell and Dr. Flint’s was Mary Mitchell, both girls from their home town of Anson. Father married Sarah Hathaway of Bloomfield, now a part of Skowhegan.

The way of it was this. Soon after his return to Norridgewock, he, with many others, was a guest at the annual church party at the home of Mr. Hathaway, the minister of the parish at Bloomfield. He had been told that he would find “a passel” of pretty girls there, and was advised that Margaret, the second, was especially beautiful. That was a fateful party! Out of it came the destiny of all the five daughters, for four of them married Bixbys and the fifth became foster mother to three of us children.

It was not the recommended, witty, black-eyed Margaret, however, who won the love of Llewellyn, but the oldest girl, tall, blue-eyed Sarah, whose name I bear. She captured his heart, and soon left Maine to go with him the long way, by Panama, to the distant ranch of San Juan.

What more natural than when, after a time, brother Jotham returned to his home, he should go over to the neighboring parsonage to bear the greetings of his sister-in-law, Sarah, to her family? It is told that, when upon this errand he met at the gate the lovely Margaret, he lost his heart completely. He never regained it. When he was eighty he told me emphatically that his wife not only had been the most beautiful woman in California, but that she still was.

A few months after this meeting Margaret traveled with friends across the Isthmus, and up the coast to San Francisco, there to be met by her sister and taken to San Justo to await her marriage day, which came shortly. She was married in her new home in old San Juan by the minister, Dr. Edwards, who had recently been a missionary among the Choctaw Indians. A letter describing the ceremony tells of the usual preparations, the making of bride’s cake and wedding cake, of putting the finishing touches on the little house, of the arranging of the wedding veil and the gathering in the early evening of the group of friends and relatives, including three little folks that had already come into the different families.

The home began immediately, and a few days later a call at the house discovered the bride happy in her house work and doing the first family washing.

This wedding ceremony was the first that Dr. Edwards had ever performed for white people, but it is reported to have been so well done that no one would have guessed inexperience. It is to be hoped that his later services in this line were as successful as this one. He was still the minister in San Juan when I was a child and he was wont to entertain me by repeating the Lord’s prayer in Choctaw.

The same letter which reports the marriage speaks of the new ranch house that was building and of the hope that it would be ready for occupancy in about two months, which dates the building for me,—early in 1863.

Each of the cousins when he married had brought his wife back to the San Justo, where they occupied in common a comparatively small house, which in my childhood was used for the hired men. But children were coming and a larger home was necessary. The men were intimate and congenial, and dreamed of an enlargement and continuation of their associated lives; the income was ample so they proceeded to build them a great house, a communal house, a staunch Maine house, white-painted and green-shuttered, as solid and true today as sixty years ago,—but, alas, now idle. This was the house in which I was born.

They planted the garden about it and the orchard, and made below it the pond where the hills could look to see if their trees were on straight. In winter time those hills were as green as any of Maine in June, but in our rainless summer they were soft tan or gold against the cobalt sky.

To accommodate three families there were three apartments, each with sitting-room, bedroom and bath, and in addition, for the use of the whole group, a common parlor, large office, dining room and kitchen, together with numerous guest rooms in the upper story. Every convenience of the period was included,—ample closets, modern plumbing, sufficient fire-places.

The plan for housekeeping in this large establishment was for each wife in turn to take charge for a month. It was no small undertaking to provide for the household, with the growing flocks of children and the frequent addition of visiting sisters, cousins, or aunts. The women involved, being individuals, had differing capacities and ideas, and each had the desire for a home managed according to her own idea. Imagine sitting down to every meal with six parents, twelve children and half a dozen guests! Inevitably the communal plan could not but fail to be altogether ideal. For a wonder it held together in a fashion for fifteen years, but there were many trips to San Francisco to relieve the strain, or long visits of mothers and children in Maine, that I guess might not have been so frequent or of so long duration if there had been individual homes for the cousin-partners. Ultimately the Ben Flints took up a permanent residence in Oakland and we moved to Los Angeles, leaving the Dr. Flints on the ranch.

CHAPTER VII
LOS ALAMITOS AND LOS CERRITOS

For many reasons our choice of Los Angeles as a residence was a very happy one. In the first place it gave my father an opportunity to keep in touch with his business interests in the southern part of the state, and in the second it fulfilled two dear wishes of my mother.

It had been her desire, for years, to get away from the large ranch house at San Justo, with its crowds of people, and into a small home of her own where she could surround her children with influences and conditions that accorded with her ideals.

Again, it was joy to her to be near her two sisters, who lived on the neighboring ranches, Los Cerritos and Los Alamitos, and to her father who had recently come to Southern California.

Rancho Los Alamitos

The three families were doubly related,—Hathaway mothers and Bixby fathers, Mary and Llewellyn, Margaret and Jotham, Susan and John. I have told of my father’s marriage to Sarah Hathaway. She was always a delicate girl and lived only six years after she came west as a bride. There were no children, much to the disappointment of them both. After an interval of six years father returned to Maine and married my mother, Mary, the little sister of his loved Sarah, who had, in the twelve years passed, grown to womanhood. When I came I was given the name of this beloved older sister and wife.

Before this time Jotham Bixby and his family had moved from San Juan to the Cerritos ranch, bringing with them for company at the isolated home, his wife’s sister, Susan, who, in the course of time married the young cousin, John W. Bixby, newly come from Maine. They fell in love and became engaged and kept their secret right under the noses of interested friends and relatives who were planning all sorts of matrimonial alliances except the one that was planning itself—one destined to exceptional happiness.

When they married they left the Cerritos and lived in Wilmington, where they remained for several years. They moved their home to the Alamitos about the time that we came south to settle in Los Angeles.

The intimate connection of double blood-kinship and of business association made the three families seem like one and us children like brothers and sisters.

Our home in Los Angeles became the headquarters for the out-of-town relatives, and several times a week we had some of them for luncheon guests. On the other hand we of the town grasped every chance to spend a day, a week, or the long summer vacation at one of the adobes. All the festival days were shared. Cerritos claimed the Fourth of July most often, for its bare court yard offered a spot free from fire hazard. What a satisfying supply of fire-works our combined resources offered! There were torpedoes, safe for babies, fire-crackers of all sizes, double-headed Dutchmen, Chinese bombs,—to make the day glorious,—and, for the exciting evening (one of the two yearly occasions when I was permitted to stay up beyond bed-time) there were pinwheels that flung out beauty from the top of the hitching post, there were dozens of roman candles with their streams of enveloping fire, and luscious shooting stars, and sky-rockets that rose majestically with a disdainful shriek as they spurned the earth and took a golden road to the sky.

Inter-family feasting at the three homes in turn marked Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years Day. It was the laden tree on Christmas Eve that offered the second annual escape from early bed-time rules, in itself enough to key one up to ecstacy, without the added intense joy of mysterious expectation and satisfied possession of the largesse of Santa Claus. A Christmas celebration at Cerritos when I was four stands out distinctly in my memory,—a tall, tall tree, as much as twenty feet high, judged by present standards, stood in the upper chamber whose ceiling, unlifted by an excited imagination, is about eight feet. From that tree came Isabel, my most beloved doll, a small bottle of Hoyt’s German Cologne,—how I delighted in perfume,—a small iron stove. The latter was put to a use not contemplated by the patron saint, for I am sure he did not want me to spend the whole of the following morning in duress vile in my bed, because of that stove. This is what happened. After breakfast my almost-twin cousin Harry and I, while our mothers chatted at table, re-visited the scene of the past evening’s festivities and wished to bring back some of the joy of it. Drawn curtains gave semi-darkness, candles stolen from the closet under the stairs and placed lighted in the wide window-sills gave a subdued light, and many little stubs of the gay Christmas tapers from the tree made a wonderful illumination under the bed and in the tent made by the turned-back bed clothes.

But it was the escaping fire from the paper-stuffed toy stove which stood on the sheet about the foot of the tree that made us decide to hear the clamoring for admittance of the suspicious mothers,—we had sense enough to summon help when conditions arose with which we were unable to cope. But Harry was cannier than I, for he sent me to open the door where the worried women stood, while he escaped from the far end, going down a ladder from the flat roof of the wing to the tall weeds beyond the huge wood-pile. I was apprehended and punished. He wasn’t, not being subject to the same administration of discipline as was I. Then it was that I learned that justice does not always prevail in this world.

This Christmas visit affords my earliest memories of Cerritos, although I know I had been there several times before. It was the long blissful summer when I was seven that packed my mind with vivid pictures and remembrance of joyful activity. Is not seven a peak in childhood,—old enough for self direction, young enough for thrills?

After this visit was over and we departed for nearby Los Angeles to make ourselves a new home my life went on in parallel lines, school days in town, vacation days at the ranches. I should tell of them both at the same time to be truly realistic, but the exigencies of narration make it seem better to write of the two experiences as if they were separate. So first, the ranches.

I have told at length of my birthplace, the San Justo. Although it, as well as the southern ranches, was devoted to sheep raising, there were many differences between them. The houses and gardens at San Justo were of New England type, built and developed according to the early associations of the young men. At the other ranches the homes were of adobe, old ones, handed down from an earlier period.

The locations and surrounding country also differed greatly. In the north the house stood in a valley between wooded hills, with no wide outlook. The southern houses were each placed on the brow of a mesa, with a view across a characteristic California river which might be a dangerous torrent or a strip of dry sand, according to the season of the year. The eyes could follow across flat lands, treeless, except for a few low-growing willows, to far, blue, mysterious mountains. It was a very empty land, empty of people and towns, of trees and cultivated lands.

The people on the northern ranch were but two miles from a village, with friends, a post office and a church, and San Francisco, a real city, not far away nor hard to reach. When Aunt Margaret came to Los Cerritos there was not a railroad nor a street car within five hundred miles, and Los Angeles, the small village, was sixteen miles away—by horse power, not gasoline or electricity.

However, distance did not prevent the making of good friends, and the isolation of the frontier life was broken by an occasional visit to San Francisco, one or two trips to distant Maine (Aunt Margaret traveled East on the first through sleeper to go over the new railroad), and by the coming of visitors from neighboring ranches or from away.

On one occasion the ranch welcomed for a week the officers of the flag-ship, Pensacola, anchored at San Pedro, including Admiral Thatcher, an old friend of the family, who was in command of the Pacific squadron.

Often there was unexpected company in this land of great distances and few inns. Even after my day wayfarers used occasionally to drop in, so that it was necessary to be prepared to double a meal on short notice. Liebig’s Extract of Beef many a time counteracted in soup the weakening effect of quantity-extending water. Locked up in a large tin box a ripening fruit cake awaited an emergency call for dessert, and there was always an unlimited supply of mutton and chickens.

The young people did not have time to be lonely. Uncle Jotham was engaged in building up a large sheep business and Aunt Margaret had her sister for company; she had her children and sufficient help so that she did not suffer any of the hardships that are usually associated with pioneer life. I have observed that if a woman is occupied with a young family, and of a reasonably contented disposition it makes no great difference whether the people outside her home are near or far, few or many;—there are books for spare minutes.

It may be of interest to some to know how we happened to come into Southern California, and something of the history of the ranches, Los Cerritos, “The Little Hills,” and Los Alamitos, “The Little Cottonwoods”—beautiful, lilting Spanish names, either one of which would have been preferable to the name chosen by those who bought of the ranch lands and promoted the seaside town of Long Beach. I am glad that we are free of responsibility for the choice of that prosaic name, or for the dubbing of Cerritos Hill, Signal, because of the presence on its top of a tripod used as a marker by surveyors.

When my father sailed up the western coast on the Fourth of July, 1851, the old S. S. Northerner, unseaworthy, hugged the coast, nearly wrecking herself by the way, on the rocks at Point Firmin; he, from his place on the deck looked across the mesa to Cerritos Hill, and watched the vaqueros at work with cattle, and like many a later comer, was captivated by the country and determined, if possible, sometime to possess a portion of that land. The time came in 1866, when Flint, Bixby & Co. bought from Don Juan Temple the Rancho Los Cerritos, paying him for it in San Francisco twenty thousand dollars in gold, or about seventy-five cents an acre for the twenty-seven thousand acres, without allowing anything for the fine adobe hacienda with its Italian garden. The reason that this was possible was that the owner was growing old and anxious to settle his affairs so that he might go with his family to spend the remainder of his life in Paris. Moreover, business conditions in Southern California were bad at the time, owing not only to the war depression of the country in general, but also to the disastrous drouth during the years ’62-’63 and ’63-’64, during which practically no rain fell. The raising of cattle had been up to this time the chief industry, but with the failure of vegetation thousands of them starved to death. It is told that it became necessary for the citizens of Anaheim, where their fine irrigation system kept their colony green, to use their surrounding willow hedge as a defense and post men to fight off the inrush of the famished cattle. It was the wiping out of this industry that brought about the sale of many of the large holdings of land in Southern California and was the beginning of the development of varied industries and the opening of the land for settlement.

The lands which came into the possession of our family about this time were those of Don Abel Stearns and Don Juan Temple, who were both heavy losers as the result of the drouth.

Both these men came to Los Angeles from Boston before 1830 and were among the first Americans to settle in the pueblo. They married native Californians and adapted themselves to the life of the community they had chosen for their home, and their names occur frequently in all accounts of early Los Angeles affairs.

They both owned city property. Stearns’s home, El Palacio, was on the site of the Baker Block, near the plaza. In 1859 he built at the rear, facing Los Angeles Street and looking down Aliso the Arcadia Block, named for his wife Arcadia de Bandini. For this building he used bricks from the first local kiln. In order to complete it he borrowed twenty thousand dollars from Michael Reese on a mortgage on the Rancho Los Alamitos, and because of his great losses of cattle during the great drouth of the sixties he was unable to repay the loan and so lost the ranch.

John Temple’s general merchandise store stood where the post office does today. In 1859, the same year that marked the building of the Arcadia Block, he built at a cost of forty thousand dollars and delivered to the city a market house surmounted by a town clock with a bell “fine toned and sonorous.” This was the court house of my childhood and its clock ordered our days. It stood where the new Los Angeles City Hall is now rising. He, with his brother, F. P. A. Temple built the fine block that marked the northern junction of Spring and Main Streets and has stood until this day of rerouting of Spring Street. By the way, the cutting out of the diagonal part of this street marks the final disappearance of the last bit of the oldest road in town, that which followed the base of the hills out to the brea pits which were the source of their roofing material. Temple Street was originally a gift of John Temple to the city, and the suggestion that its name be changed to Beverly Boulevard does not meet with the approval of those who know what this man meant to the young city. He was one of ten Americans who came to Los Angeles before 1830 and might well become the patron saint of those later men out of the east who come to develop us; for it is due to his public spirit they must trace all the land titles of the city. When after we had come under the rule of the United States it seemed advisable to survey Los Angeles the impecunious city council had no money so Temple provided the necessary three thousand to pay for the Ord Survey upon which all titles are based.

At one time he extended his operations into Mexico where he acquired lands and wealth, part of the latter due to an arrangement with the Mexican government whereby he and his son-in-law performed the functions of a mint, making the money for the government on a commission basis.

Those who are interested in seeing pictures of the don and his lady, who dreamed and built the Cerritos House and garden may find old portraits in the museum at Exposition Park.

As for the ranches, Cerritos and Alamitos, they were both part of the great grant of land made to Don Manual Nieto in 1784 by Governor Don Pedro Fages, representing the King of Spain. This grant amounted to about two hundred thousand acres which extended between the San Gabriel and Santa Ana rivers and from the sea back to the first foothills. It was the first of four grants made to retired soldiers before 1800. The second was the San Pedro to Juan Jose Dominguez and the third was the San Rafael to Jose Maria Verdugo. The fourth was beyond the Santa Ana river, the Santiago, granted to N. Grijalva and which early in the nineteenth century was divided between his two daughters, one the wife of Jose Antonio Yorba, the other of Juan Pablo Peralta. Don Antonio Maria Lugo who remembered back to 1790 is authority for this order of grants.

At the death of Don Manuel Nieto his lands were divided into four parcels for his heirs. The Rancho Santa Gertrudis, upon which Downey and Rivera now stand, went to Doña Josefa Cota de Nieto, the widow of a son; Los Alamitos, Los Coyotes and Palo Alto were the portion of Don Juan Jose Nieto, the new head of the family; Los Bolsas was the portion of Doña Catarina Ruiz, and Los Cerritos that of Doña Manuela Nieto de Cota, whose title to it was confirmed in 1834 by Governor Jose Figueroa on behalf of the Mexican government. In December, 1843, judicial possession was given John Temple, he having paid each of the twelve children of Doña Manuela the sum of two hundred and seventy-five dollars and seventy-five cents. He also paid someone twenty-five dollars for the ranch branding iron and the right to use it. I presume that this went with the ranch and was the familiar triangle with a curly tail that I knew in my childhood. Temple at once proceeded to build his house and lay out his Italian garden.

It was in 1866 when Flint, Bixby & Co. bought the Cerritos. At the time of the purchase my father’s younger brother, Jotham Bixby was made manager, and was given the privilege of buying in at any time. In 1869 a half interest was deeded him, and the ranch carried on by him and the older firm under the name of J. Bixby & Co.

When California came under United States rule there ensued much confusion as to land titles and all must be reviewed and passed upon by a specified commission. I have seen a formidable looking transcript of these proceedings in regard to Los Cerritos, copied out in long hand with many a Spencerian flourish, rolled in a red morocco leather cover and tied with blue tape, all of which went to confirm the title of the land to Don Temple.

The deed from J. Temple to Flint, Bixby & Co. and the later one of one-half interest from that firm to Jotham Bixby are in the vaults of the Bixby offices in Long Beach.

Because of the possible interest of the many thousand land holders now in Long Beach and Signal Hill I recapitulate the list of early owners of the land. The first of record is Don Manual Nieto, 1784; from him it went to his daughter Manuela de Cota and later to her twelve heirs; Don Juan Temple bought it in 1843, and Flint, Bixby & Co. in 1866, selling a half interest to Jotham Bixby in 1869. In 1880 four thousand acres of this were sold to the American Colony under the leadership of W. E. Willmore and from this beginning has gone into the ownership of an untold number. The name at first was Willmore City but was changed to Long Beach about four years later when it was bought by a group of men interested in developing it as a Chautauqua town.

The ranch was held intact for some time after its purchase by my people and used at first almost exclusively for the grazing of sheep, at one time there being as many as thirty thousand upon it. Later cattle were added, but not allowed to range at will as in the Mexican days, but confined in large fenced fields or potreros.