The Death of the Patriarch — 112 Living Descendants
'A Venerable Patriarch of 112 Living Descendants' — the Salinas paper's farewell to William Lucas Plaskett, 1818–1909.
William Lucas Plaskett died April 26, 1909, at ninety-one, in the house on Maple Street in Salinas where the family had retired in the 1890s. The Salinas Daily Index headline called him “A Venerable Patriarch of 112 Living Descendants.”
The obituary told the arc of his century: he came with the gold seekers in 1849, ranched and mined across the state, bought the Buchanan copper mines in Fresno County, and settled at last in Salinas. Still active and working to the end, he suffered a bad fall some months before his death that broke ribs which never healed — the frontier’s last bill for a working life.
On an Election Day late in his life he was proudly escorted to the polls by his son-in-law Allen McLean to cast his vote for William Jennings Bryan. He left 11 children, 53 grandchildren, and 58 great-grandchildren — and a valley, a creek, a ridge, and a rock that still answer to his name.