Before Big Sur: The Mendocino Years
Fifteen years before Pacific Valley, William Lucas Plaskett rehearsed his dream in Anderson Valley — where the family named a daughter Mendocina, left their name on a mountain meadow that still carries it, and stopped twelve feet short of a different life.
Before there was a Pacific Valley, there was another valley. Fifteen years before William Lucas Plaskett drove his ox teams over Pacheco Pass to the Big Sur coast, he tried out his dream on a different rough edge of California — and the proof is still printed on the federal maps.
Getting there was the hard part
The family’s road to Mendocino County was itself a saga. William Lucas had gone west with the gold-seekers in 1848, taken $2,000 out of the Sutter diggings, mined at Cherokee Hill and French Corral, and gone back for his family. In 1852 he brought Sarah and their two small sons — Byron and Leonidas — out by the Panama route: across the Isthmus in carried chairs, Sarah borne over the Chagres River on a native carrier’s back, then up the coast to San Francisco and inland to the Cherokee mining camp, where their son Reason was born that December among the sluice boxes.
Anderson Valley, 1854
Two years later, William Lucas moved his family out of the gold country entirely, to Anderson Valley in Mendocino County — then about as far from settled California as a wagon could reasonably go. He farmed and raised stock. The family appears in the valley’s 1860 census, among the Smalleys, Ornbaums, Busters and the other first families whose names are still on that country’s roads and ridges.
And the Plaskett name stayed on the land itself. High in what is now Mendocino National Forest, at six thousand feet, a pair of three-acre trout lakes and the grass around them still carry the family’s name: Plaskett Meadows and Plaskett Lakes, on a USGS map sheet that is itself titled “Plaskett Meadows.” A family that would later put its name on a creek, a ridge, a rock and a beach in Big Sur had already left it on a mountain meadow two hundred miles north.
The girl named Mendocina
In September 1856, in Anderson Valley, Sarah gave birth to the family’s first California daughter — and they named her for the place: Mendocina.
The family record says it plainly: “Here was born little Mendocina, the first white child born in that county.” However that claim would fare against a courthouse ledger — the county had been organized in 1850, and settlement was thin but not empty — what it tells you is how the family understood themselves: first people in, on ground nobody else wanted yet, proud enough of it to write the county’s name on a daughter.
The Plasketts named their children the way other families kept diaries. Reason was born in a mining camp; Mendocina was born on the frontier and carries its name to this day on every map of the family; and fourteen years later, the first Plaskett born at Pacific Valley — James Samuel, February 1870 — arrived five months after the ox teams did, the first entry in the coast’s new ledger.
Mendocina’s own life became one of the family’s longest threads. She married Curnell H. Mansfield, the cattleman whose Pacific Valley holdings grew to four thousand acres, was widowed in 1906 when a runaway team killed him, and in 1911 — a practical, inventive woman — patented a water trough of her own design. The girl named for one county spent her life shaping another. She died in 1936, just short of eighty.
Twelve feet from a different life
The Mendocino years also produced the family’s great what-if. Around the end of the decade, William Lucas and a partner were tunneling near Virginia City. The rock got hard, nothing was in sight, and they sold out and came home — learning soon after that they had stopped twelve feet short of the Comstock Lode. That story has its own page.
Had the pick gone twelve feet further, there would have been no Fresno homestead, no ox teams in 1869, no Pacific Valley, and no family on the Big Sur coast. The Plasketts’ whole coastal century sits on the far side of twelve feet of Nevada rock.
The pattern
Set the two valleys side by side and you can see William Lucas thinking. Anderson Valley in 1854: remote, unclaimed, hard to reach, good grass. When it filled in, he moved to Fresno; when that “became too thickly settled,” as the family record puts it, he went looking one more time — and in 1869 found the one valley that would never fill in, because the mountains and the sea would not allow it.
Mendocino was the rehearsal. Pacific Valley was the performance. He was not running from civilization so much as pacing it, always one valley ahead — and on the Big Sur coast he finally found a valley civilization couldn’t catch.
Sources: the family record as compiled in Plasketts Among Early Coast Settlers; the Anderson Valley Historical Society’s settler rolls and the 1860 Anderson Valley census; Mendocino National Forest records for Plaskett Meadows. The meadows sit at 39.7288 N, 122.8460 W — north of Anderson Valley proper, near Mendocino Pass, which suggests the family may have summered stock in the high country; if a descendant knows more about how the name got up the mountain, we would love to hear it.