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Text originally published in 1925 under the same title.
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Although in most cases we have retained the Authors original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern readers benefit.
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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 SEORA DE LOS ANGELES 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
REVISED EDITION
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 .
SARAH BIXBY-SMITH
Claremont, California
October, 1925
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. Mothers people stayed close to their original Plymouth corner, but fathers 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 mothers 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 mothers orthodoxy by his gentle fathers 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.
