More than a century on the Big Sur coast
True stories of the Plasketts and their neighbors — bears and gold, shipwrecks and weddings — drawn from letters, newspapers, and family memory.
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A month before it burned, I turned seventy at the cabin and took my grandchildren up Plaskett Ridge to a swing that hangs out over the ocean. That swing is now 875 feet inside the fire. The cabin is 820 feet outside it.
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My grandmother drove the whole California coast to see if anywhere was more beautiful, and came home. Now a fifth of the Plaskett Fire is burning ground that last saw flame in 1970 — the same fire that took the last cabins at Manchester.
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The 1966 Lopez Point wreck and the debris remembered at Willow Creek — what the record proves, and what a ten-year-old on the beach saw.
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The family says Sarah Barnes came of French Acadians expelled in 1755, and that her mother was first cousin to a signer of the Declaration. One of those is likely; the other does not survive checking.
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Mabel wrote him up in 1961: the mailman who filled grocery orders and played bass viol in the symphony. Her grandson rode in his van to Monterey — back when the coast ran on trust.
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A rattlesnake struck Ed Plaskett's horse on the mountain mail trail. The horse left the county. The story has a happy ending — eventually.
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Ed Plaskett and his brothers built a way to the top of Plaskett Rock — where centuries of seagulls had left a crown of first-rate fertilizer, free for the scraping.
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Phil McGuire of Gorda could look at your face and hand you your portrait minutes later.
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At Carson Sink in 1848, the Plaskett wagon company fell in with John C. Frémont's party.
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No physician within a hundred miles — so the William & Mary man nursed the cholera camps of Sacramento, and set the coast's bones ever after.
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His father fought the Revolution; his uncle crossed the Delaware. William Lucas came from fighting stock.
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In 1898 Linwood Mitchell packed Luther Burbank's cuttings down the coast and planted a legend.
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