Wesley's Spring
The mountain spring in Mabel Plaskett’s poem “A Day at Wesley’s Spring” — willows, a noon halt, and the whole Santa Lucia range standing up to the west. It carries no official name: the USGS gazetteer records no Wesley Spring anywhere in California, and the 1949 topographic sheet leaves it unlabelled. The name survives in one poem.
Named for Wesley Barnes Plaskett (1894-1959), youngest of Byron Gianavil Plaskett’s eleven children and brother of Mabel’s husband Edward. Wesley bought Anthony ‘Than’ Dani’s homestead — T21S R7E section 17, patented 1920 — in 1924, ground that touches at a corner the Westlake Ranch he and Edward had held since 1914. The coordinates here are a research estimate: the head of the only mapped watercourse inside section 17, read off the 1949 USGS Cosio Knob quadrangle and georeferenced against its neatline, +/- about 150 m. Section 17 straddles the northern boundary of Fort Hunter Liggett. There is no public access, and the surrounding country holds protected Salinan rock art.
mabel poem
A Day at Wesleys Spring
A day's ride up a steep mountain trail with two companions, to lie beneath the willows at Wesley's spring — a place that appears on no map. We found the ground: Wesley Plaskett's section in the Oat Hills, inland from Jolon.
mabel article
Dani Family History Is Told
A shelf of level land a thousand feet above the sea: the Dani place, where Gabriel Dani built a one-armed empire and Lucia got her name.
Everyone the family archive records in the story of this place. Descendants: if one of these is yours, we’d love to hear from you.
- Edward Abbott Plaskett 1881–1973
- Gabriel Dani 1832–1908
- Mabel Eva Sans Plaskett 1896–1964
- Wesley Barnes Plaskett 1894–1959
- Wesley Plaskett 1831–
- Wilbur Harlan 1882–1881