Transcriber’s Notes:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
The whole number part of a mixed fraction is separated from the
fractional part with -, for example, 2-1/2.
Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.
* * * * *
ADOBE DAYS
* * * * *
[Illustration: LLEWELLYN BIXBY
Aet. 33]
* * * * *
ADOBE DAYS
BEING THE TRUTHFUL NARRATIVE OF THE EVENTS IN THE
LIFE OF A CALIFORNIA GIRL ON A SHEEP RANCH AND IN
EL PUEBLO DE NUESTRA SEÑORA DE LOS ANGELES
WHILE IT WAS YET A SMALL AND HUMBLE TOWN;
TOGETHER WITH AN ACCOUNT OF HOW THREE
YOUNG MEN FROM MAINE IN EIGHTEEN HUNDRED
AND FIFTY-THREE DROVE SHEEP AND CATTLE
ACROSS THE PLAINS, MOUNTAINS AND DESERTS
FROM ILLINOIS TO THE PACIFIC COAST; AND
THE STRANGE PROPHECY OF ADMIRAL
THATCHER ABOUT SAN PEDRO HARBOR
BY
SARAH BIXBY-SMITH
[Illustration]
REVISED EDITION
THE TORCH PRESS
CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA
1926
* * * * *
_Copyright 1925 by
Sarah Bixby-Smith_
_Second Edition, 1926_
The Torch Press
CEDAR RAPIDS
IOWA
* * * * *
_To My Father_
LLEWELLYN BIXBY
Born in Norridgewock, Maine October 4, 1825
Arrived in San Francisco, July 7, 1851
Died in Los Angeles, December 5, 1896
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I BACKGROUND 11
II THE VERY LITTLE GIRL 18
III DOWN IN MAINE 32
IV FATHER’S STORY 45
V DRIVING SHEEP ACROSS THE PLAINS 55
VI RANCHO SAN JUSTO 69
VII LOS ALAMITOS AND LOS CERRITOS 76
VIII THE RANCH STORY CONTINUED 109
IX FLOCKS AND HERDS 125
X EL PUEBLO DE NUESTRA SEÑORA LA
REINA DE LOS ANGELES 133
XI MORE ABOUT LOS ANGELES 151
XII THE BACK COUNTRY AND THE ADMIRAL 164
XIII SCHOOL DAYS 185
XIV PIONEERING AT POMONA COLLEGE 194
XV CONCLUSION 208
FOREWORD
Several years ago I wrote a short account of my childhood, calling it
_A Little Girl of Old California_. At the suggestion of friends, I have
expanded the material to make this book.
The recent discovery of diaries kept by Dr. Thomas Flint during two
pioneer trips to this coast which he made in company with my father,
and the generous permission to make use of them granted me by his
sons, Mr. Thomas Flint and Mr. Richard Flint, have added much to the
interest of the subject. I at first contemplated including them in this
volume, but it has seemed wiser to publish them separately and they
are now available through the publications of the Southern California
Historical Society.
My information regarding the earlier history of the Cerritos Ranch was
supplemented by data given me by my cousin, the late George H. Bixby.
The interesting letter predicting the development of the harbor at San
Pedro, written by Admiral Henry Knox Thatcher to my grandfather, Rev.
George W. Hathaway, is the gift of my aunt, Miss Martha Hathaway.
I wish here to express my gratitude to my husband, Paul Jordan
Smith, and to my friend, Mrs. Hannah A. Davidson, for their constant
encouragement to me during the preparation of _Adobe Days_.
SARA BIXBY-SMITH
Claremont, California
October, 1925
* * * * *
NOTE TO SECOND EDITION
For certain suggestions and information which have been incorporated in
this revised edition I wish to thank Mrs. Mary S. Gibson, Mrs. D. G.
Stephens, Prof. Jose Pijoan and Mr. Charles Francis Saunders.
S. B. S.
Sept. 1926.
CHAPTER I BACKGROUND
I was born on a sheep ranch in California, the San Justo, near San Juan
Bautista, an old mission town of the Spanish padres, which stands in
the lovely San Benito Valley, over the hills from Monterey and about a
hundred miles south of San Francisco.
The gold days were gone and the time of fruit and small farms had not
yet come. On the rolling hills the sheep went softly, and in vacant
valleys cropped the lush verdure of the springtime, or, in summer,
sought a scanty sustenance in the sun-dried grasses.
Intrepid men had pushed the railroad through the forbidding barrier of
the Sierras, giving for the first time easy access to California, and
thus making inevitable a changed manner of life and conditions.
I am a child of California, a grand-child of Maine, and a
great-grand-child of Massachusetts. Fashions in ancestry change. When
I chose mine straight American was still very correct; so I might as
well admit at once that I am of American colonial stock, Massachusetts
variety.
Up in the branches of my ancestral tree I find a normal number of
farmers, sea-captains, small manufacturers, squires, justices of the
peace, and other town officers, members of the general court, privates
in the militia, majors, colonels, one ghost, one governor, and seven
passengers on that early emigrant ship, the Mayflower; but a great
shortage of ministers, there being only one.
How I happened to be born so far away from the home of my ancestors,
the type of life lived here on the frontier by a transplanted New
England family, and the conditions that prevailed in California in the
period between the mining rush and the tourist rush, is the story I
shall tell.
The usual things had happened down the years on the east
coast,--births, marryings, many children, death; new generations,
scatterings, the settling and the populating a new land. Mother’s
people stayed close to their original Plymouth corner, but father’s had
frequently moved on to new frontiers. They went into Maine about the
time of the Revolution, when it was still a wilderness, and then, by
the middle of the next century, they were all through the opening west.
My father was Llewellyn Bixby of Norridgewock, Maine, and my mother
was Mary Hathaway, youngest daughter of Reverend George Whitefield
Hathaway, my one exception to the non-ministerial rule of the family.
And he was this by force of his very determined mother, Deborah
Winslow, who had made up her mind that her handsome young son should
enter the profession at that time the most respected in the community.
She was a woman called “set as the everlasting hills,” and so
determined was she that Whitefield should not be lured off into ways of
business that she would not allow him to be taught arithmetic. Like
the usual boy he rebelled at dictation, and when at Brown University
became a leader in free-thinking circles, but suddenly was converted
and accepted his mother’s dictum. His own choice would have been to
follow in the footsteps of his father, Washington Hathaway, a graduate
of Brown and a lawyer. His sermons showed his inheritance of a legal
mind, and he exhibited always a tolerance and breadth of spirit that
were doubtless due to the tempering of his mother’s orthodoxy by his
gentle father’s unitarianism. She, dear lady, would not have her
likeness made by the new daguerreotype process lest she break the
command, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, nor any
likeness of anything--.”
Grandfather graduated from Williams College and Andover Seminary and
accepted the call to the parish church of Bloomfield (Skowhegan),
Maine, which position he held for a generation. Afterward he was
several times member of the Maine Legislature and was, during the Civil
War, chaplain in the 19th Regiment of Maine Volunteers. When I was
still a child he came to California and spent the last years of his
life in our home.
My father’s family had been in Maine for a longer time, his two
great grandfathers, Samuel Bixby and Joseph Weston, going in from
Massachusetts about 1770, and settling on the Kennebec River. Joseph
Weston took his eleven year old son with him in the spring to find a
location and prepare for his family to come in the fall. In September
he left his boy and another of fourteen in charge of the cattle and
cabin and went home to get his wife and other children. But he was
balked in his purpose because of the setting in of an early winter and
consequent freezing of the river highway. The boys had to stay alone in
the woods caring for the cattle until spring made travel possible. When
the family arrived they found the boys and cattle in good shape, the
boys evidently being excellent Yankee pioneers.
By the middle of the nineteenth century Somerset County was full of
Bixbys and Westons. When Rufus Bixby entertained at Thanksgiving dinner
on one occasion he had one hundred fifty-six guests, all kinfolk. He
was a brother of my grandfather, Amasa Bixby, the two of them having
married sisters, Betsey and Fanny Weston. A third sister, Electa
Weston, married William Reed Flint and became the mother of the two
cousins who were father’s business associates all during his California
life.
The Maine farms were becoming crowded and there was no land in the
neighborhood left for the young folks. Father was one of an even
hundred grandchildren of Benjamin Weston and Anna Powers, a sample of
the prevalent size of families at that time. The early American farmers
were not essentially of the soil, but were driven by the necessities of
a new country to wring support from the land. At the first opportunity
to escape into callings where more return for less physical output
promised, they fled the farms. I remember that my uncle Jotham who had
rather short stumpy fingers used to maintain that he had worn them
down in his boyhood gathering up stones in the home pastures and piling
them into walls.
In the spring of 1851, Llewellyn Bixby, an erect, square-shouldered
young man of twenty-five, with gray eyes and black hair, was studying
engineering at Waterville. He had finished his education at a district
school and Bloomfield Academy some time before and had taught, had
farmed, had even undertaken the business of selling books from house to
house, for which latter effort he confessed he did not seem to have the
requisite qualities. He then determined to go into engineering, a field
of growing opportunity, and was well underway when one day his father
appeared unexpectedly at the door of a shop where he was at work, with
the proposal that he join his brother, Amasa, Jr., and his cousin, Dr.
Thomas Flint, in a trip to California, whither the latter’s brother,
Benjamin, had gone in 1849.
The plan appealed to him and he returned to Norridgewock with his
father, to make an immediate start for that far off coast which was to
prove his home for the rest of his life.
It was July, 1851, just too late to be technically called pioneers,
that they reached San Francisco, but to all intents and purposes they
belong to that group of early comers to this state who have had so
large a part in determining its destiny.
The next year, two more of my father’s brothers, Marcellus and Jotham,
ventured around the Horn, and ultimately the rest of the children
followed,--Amos, Henry, Solomon, George, Francina and Nancy, (Mrs.
William Lovett), making in all eight brothers and two sisters. Amos who
was the last to come, was a lawyer and editor and had been instrumental
in the founding of Grinnell College in Iowa and the University of
Colorado in Boulder as he made his gradual progress from Maine to
California. He founded and edited the first newspaper in Long Beach.
Allen Bixby, now state commander of the American Legion is the grandson
of Amasa, the brother who accompanied my father in the first trip
across the isthmus. It is this sort of bodily transplanting of young
stock that has left so many of the New England counties bereft of
former names, but has built up in new communities many of the customs
and traditions of the older civilization.
Not only did my father’s immediate family come to this state but also
many of his friends and cousins. I am told that at the presidential
election in 1860 all the men in Paso Robles who voted for Lincoln came
from Somerset county, Maine.
Because this migration is typical and because many of these cousins
made names for themselves beyond the limits of the family, I am going
to mention a few of them.
Among them was, for instance, Dr. Mary Edmands, who was an early
physician in San Francisco in the days when it took grit as well as
brains for a woman to gain a medical education. She succeeded as a
mother as well as a professional woman, her sons and daughter at
present standing high in their respective callings.
Nathan Blanchard of Santa Paula was a son of still another Weston
sister. He, after many hardships and almost unbelievable patience,
succeeded in making a success of lemon culture in Southern California,
and worked out the fundamental principle of curing the fruit that is
now in vogue wherever lemons are grown for market.
Another name widely known is that of Mrs. Frank Gibson, the daughter of
another cousin. She has been a leader among women for many years, and
member of the State Board of Immigration. Her son, Hugh Gibson, is at
present United States Minister to Switzerland.
These are but a few of the several hundred from this one Maine family
who are scattered up and down this western land.