Reason Alpha Plaskett

Reason Alpha Plaskett — “Reezy” to the family — was born December 11, 1852, at the Cherokee mining camp in Butte County, the first white child born in those diggings, while his father William Lucas washed gold from the gravel. He was named for his mother Sarah’s brother, Reason Barnes. The miners who trusted Sarah with their gold celebrated the camp’s first native son; the frontier tested him early. As a boy he shot an Indian dog that was killing Plaskett sheep, and when the Indians came for retribution it was Sarah who hid him — and talked the party down with gifts and nerve.

He came to Pacific Valley with the family in 1869, a sixteen-year-old in an empty valley, and grew into one of its most capable men. With his brother Marion he discovered and worked the Western Star, the first mine on Plaskett Ridge, digging the ore by pick and shovel and hauling it down by mule sled to the water-powered arrastra their father built on Plaskett Creek.

In 1884 he rode the mountain trail to Jolon with his brothers Robert and Marion to build St. Luke’s Episcopal Church — parishioners’ labor, board by board. The little church still stands, serving today as a chapel for the soldiers of Fort Hunter Liggett, the most visible thing a Plaskett ever built.

Reason’s quietest legacy may be his largest. A careful self-taught botanist, he collected the plants of the coast range, and when the great botanist Alice Eastwood came to Pacific Valley to botanize, the Plasketts were her hosts and Reason her collector in the field. She named plants for him — among them Linanthus plaskettii — so that the family name is written not only on the creeks and ridges but in the flora of California itself.

A cabinet maker by trade like all the Plaskett men, he spent his later years in Cambria, married three times — the last at age seventy-five — and died there October 27, 1933, at eighty. Somewhere on Plaskett Ridge every spring, the flowers that carry his name still bloom.