Stories

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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Mabel loved chatting with the postman — and the valley's gossips made her pay for it.

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Quilting bees, threshing bees, barn raisings: on the coast, no one was paid and nothing was left undone.

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The best record of pioneer life is a 56-page comedy Mabel helped live: the great deer hunt of 1910.

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Harrison Rich survived the frontier but not his pipe.

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Short, stout, red-haired and dark-skinned, Jeanetta Rich dressed like a duchess and charmed like one too.

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Uncle Charley Sans: French goatee, iron sinews, and a thirst that was its own legend.

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Born in a mining camp, Reason Plaskett built churches with one hand and collected rare plants with the other.

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Gordon Plaskett, one of Ed and Mabel's sons, died in a plane crash at King City in 1953.

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Bombardier Kermit Plaskett's bomber went into the English Channel and never came out.

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Curnell Mansfield married the first white child born in Mendocino County — and died under a runaway horse at 71.

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Charles Henry Plaskett fell building the Spreckels sugar refinery in 1912, leaving five children.

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Typhoid took Alice Isabelle Plaskett at nineteen, at home, on an April evening in 1909.