More than a century on the Big Sur coast
mabel article
Her earliest known piece, under the pen name Belinda Brown - eighteen years before Coast Trails. How Cox's Hole became Pacific Valley, who named it, and the July the family left Fresno because San Joaquin was getting “too thickly settled”.
From Mabel’s pen
George Ames rode down from Santa Cruz at fourteen to work for Jim Prewitt — and rode straight into coast legend.
Family spotlight
Robert L. Plaskett, died September 18, 1902 at his father J.M. Plaskett's home in Slater, Missouri. Age 28 years, 7 months, 14 days. Born near Orearville, Missouri. Died of kidney and heart trouble after illness of several weeks. Married Mrs. Elizabeth Moore in March 1902 at Leavenworth, Kansas. Mem…
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Fourteen-year-old Charles Sans watched cholera take half his family on the wagon road to California.
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On the 1859 wagon train, six-year-old Sarah Ray found a baby abandoned by the river — and refused to leave it.
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Mabel's uncle Henry Rich married a Jolon Indian woman — one of the frontier's quiet unions of two worlds.
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James Frank Sans went to France with the Rainbow Division and a trench mortar battalion.
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One died at Corregidor. Another went down over the English Channel. The war reached even Pacific Valley's children.
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Sherman Plaskett, son of Peter, fell in the Great War.
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