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
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.