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
Before 1890 the mail came by horseback from Jolon. Seventy years of coast mail carriers — including the Plaskett boys swimming icy rivers with the pack mule.
Family spotlight
Thomas Alderson was born January 19, 1827 in Grassington, England, one of seven children (five sons and two daughters) to God-fearing parents - his father was a local preacher in the Methodist church. On August 30, 1851, his twenty-fourth birthday, he married Miss Jane Fawcett. In 1854 he emigrated …
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On the Ohio River in 1791, the flatboat carrying William Plaskett's family came under attack.
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Days after the Pigeon Roost Massacre of 1812, William Plaskett wrote down what the survivors saw.
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Carl Sans was being hauled up from the bottom of a well when the rope failed him.
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Olive Sans married at fifteen, dark-eyed and sun-browned from the coast — and died carrying her child.
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A courtroom divorce was almost unheard of. Ed Sans got one, then left for Reno to start over.
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