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Updated: May 18, 2025
I only had a two months' leave of absence, during which General Smith, his staff, and a retinue of civil friends, were making a tour of the gold-mines, and hearing that he was en route back to his headquarters at Sonoma, I knocked off my work, sold my instruments, and left my wagon and mules with my cousin Charley Hoyt, who had a store in Sacramento, and was on the point of moving up to a ranch, for which he had bargained, on Bear Creek, on which was afterward established Camp "Far West."
Sonoma is an Indian word, and means the Valley of the Moon. That was what the Indians called it for untold ages before the first white men came. We, who love it, still so call it." And then Saxon recalled the mysterious references Jack Hastings and his wife had made to it, and the talk tripped along until Billy grew restless. He cleared his throat significantly and interrupted.
One of these was Manuel Garcia, better known as Three-Fingered Jack, who had been ranging over the Sonoma valley for several years, occasionally varying the monotony of murder by tying a victim to a tree and flaying him alive. Joaquin Valenzuela was another, a middle-aged outlaw who had learned the finer arts of bushwhacking down in Mexico under Padre Jurata, the famous guerrilla chief.
At this, his uncle snatched his pistol from the table at the bedside, and fired the fatal shot. This almost incredible news was so harrowing that I could scarcely think of anything, except grandpa chained in a prison cell, grandma in hiding away from home, and excited groups of people gathering about the thoroughfares of Sonoma discussing the tragedy.
They live on a rancheria near by and are making adobe bricks, hoping soon to build a church like the old Mission long since crumbled away. The last of the Missions was built in 1823 at Sonoma, and proved very active in church work, some fifteen hundred Indians having been there baptized. Father Junipero Serra died at more than seventy years of age, at San Carlos.
When I was at work in Sonoma County, California, a little fellow came and worked for ten days, who once travelled 200 miles inside the cowcatcher of an engine. Most English people know the wedge-shaped pilot in front of the American engine well enough by repute to recognise it. When the engine was in the yard over the hollow track he crawled in, taking a board to sit on inside.
On the Sausalito side, a jammed together happy vacation crowd, grotesquely varied and elaborately gotten-up hikers, bags and suitcases to fall all over everywhere, professorish looking men off, "taking a book along," people laden with all the cheap magazines in the market, smartly dressed people on their way to country homes in Marin and Sonoma, a well modulated, nicely groomed crowd bing, the doors slide back and everybody rushes off for a holiday.
But the man, for purposes of robbery, had slain an entire family the postmaster, his wife, and their three children, in the upstairs over the post office in the mountain village of Chisholm. For two weeks the man had eluded and exceeded pursuit. His last crossing had been from the mountains of the Russian River, across wide-farmed Santa Rosa Valley, to Sonoma Mountain.
All right, here goes. Which would you sooner have me and the money, or me and the ranch?" "But " she began. "No buts. Me and the money?" She did not answer. "Me and the ranch?" Still she did not answer, and still he was undisturbed. "You see, I know your answer, Dede, and there's nothing more to say. Here's where you and I quit and hit the high places for Sonoma.
But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on both sides, Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in; beautifully green, for it was then that favoured moment in the Californian year, when the rains are over and the dusty summer has not yet set in; often visited by fresh airs, now from the mountain, now across Sonoma from the sea; very quiet, very idle, very silent but for the breezes and the cattle bells afield.
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