This book presents the first edition of diaries and letters by the earliest pioneers to settle on San Simeon Creek. In the 1850's and 60's, decades before Hearst's Castle was a gleam in the eye of William Randolph, phenomenally hard-working and family-focused American pioneers were living in cabins along the creek at the foot of what would later be called the Enchanted Hill - farming, ranching, establishing schools, roads, medical services, and a legal system. One clan was the Clarks, Mathers and Pinkhams, who have left a detailed and highly personal record of their astonishingly varied activities, hardships, and emotions in a Hispanic region that still struck them as thoroughly foreign. The remarkably energetic Dr. E.A. Clark, great, great grandfather of the author, not only ranched and farmed but was also a practicing doctor, dentist, lawyer and the area's first school teacher. Colahan was raised on the Central California Coast, to which he often returns to visit. He is Anderson Professor of Humanities and Professor of Spanish at Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA. He has published several books on Spanish literature, including the English translation of Cervantes' last novel (University of California and Hackett presses, with Celia Weller). Introduction
Yet with detailed knowledge came sadness, and I almost turned away from learning more about those years. The man for whom I was named had found success – a professional career and recognition as a public servant and essayist, but only after an emotional ordeal. The women closest to him - his wife, two daughters, and a sister – had died from tuberculosis and been buried on that hill during the exhausting period of homesteading. Then after the death of his wife, he left his bereft children for a time in the care of others in order to get established as a professional in San Jose. But finally, it has been the diaries and letters themselves that have won me over. They open a rare window not only on my family history but on the daily tasks, trials, choices and challenges of pioneer life in the region. And yes, his brief but unfailing daily notations in the diaries do overflow with evidence of that same analytic and scientific habit of mind visible in his motto. As he explained at length in a later essay, "The Power of an Idea," he believed optimistically that the human mind is capable of dissecting and so solving nearly every kind of problem. He also wrote two long, detailed letters bearing on the San Simeon years, letters that strengthen the impression that he was in fact very much an optimist and a problem solver. One is to his wife and sisters in Michigan urging them to rejoin him in California, supplying a wealth of practical information and advice. The other, based on his participation in the San Luis Obispo Vigilance Committee of 1858, details and attempts to justify how he played a leading role in implementing a typically frontier solution to the problem of widespread lawlessness; it was composed for his friend, J.J. Owen, editor of The San Jose Mercury, where it was published some years later. We are fortunate, in addition, to have a number of letters written by his two sisters Lovina and Sarah Mariah - and other members of his articulate and expressive extended family – complementing from varied perspectives his view of the three siblings' circumstances and offering above all more home-centered reactions to the hardships and opportunities of pioneer life. Both sisters were also present at San Simeon, and eloquent writers from a family that valued education. E.A.'s sister Sarah Mariah was an unmarried teacher, one of the very first in the county, who shared his family cabin and helped care for the children. The other sister, Lovina Clark Dart , was until her untimely death, the wife of a pioneer and mother of several small children. She has left five revealing letters full of her thoughts and feelings in that new and remote corner of the Union. Descriptions of the novel landscape, how family members are bearing up under the demands of starting new farms in an unfamiliar land, nostalgia for the garden flowers of the East, how the young children are growing, and many other endearing aspects of the experience take us more fully into the time and place. Further opening the window onto life at San Simeon Creek in the 1860's, an examination of the inherited diary for 1868, at first thought to have been written by E.A. after returning to San Jose, reveals that it is instead by his son-in-law, Chester Webster Pinkham, who ran the farm for him at those times when he was away working in San Luis Obispo and later back in San Jose. E.A.'s grief at the death during these years of not only his sister Lovina but also of his wife, Lydia Helen Washburn Clark, and of their daughter Olive, finally drove him back to the city. But he made that decision, characteristically, after thinking through and testing his situation –as a widower, doctor, lawyer, farmer, and would-be public office holder - in a way that stands out as both remarkably thorough and as a stubborn refusal to consider the possibility of settling for anything less than the useful and successful life he and his sisters had been raised to expect. Still, during the time when E.A. was reestablishing himself in San Jose it would have been impossible for him to keep his homestead and provide for his children had he not been helped by Chet, as Chester Webster Pinkham is referred to in the diary, the husband of his daughter Sarah Minerva. He had arrived in California as a sailor and then moved to the county at the same time as the Clark's, apparently establishing a farm nearby with a brother or cousin and perhaps a sister. He had often shared tasks with E.A., both before and after marrying Minerva. His help had been almost certainly essential to keep the Clark place going on the many occasions when E.A. was away in San Luis Obispo and elsewhere in the county teaching school, lawyering, tax assessing or engaged in other business. When in 1866 E.A. went back to San Jose, Chet and Minerva either began or continued to live in E.A.'s house, taking responsibility for the care of both the younger Clark children and their own small child and the operation of the farm. Chet, like E.A., kept a diary and accounts – partly to be able to show his father-in-law how he had managed - and it shows the many kinds of work required at San Simeon in 1868 to support a large family on what was becoming more and more a commercial fruit ranch, as well as how the local community rallied around to help with the children and the needs of Minerva, who was dying, probably another victim of tuberculosis. The San Simeon homesteading years of the Clark's and Pinkham's illustrates basic elements in the immigration of Americans to California in the mid-nineteenth century. The United States, as a land of immigrants, has perennially drawn to itself the bright, the energetic, the optimistic; California was of course no exception. San Luis Obispo County had welcomed its fair share of New Englanders and Europeans, some of whom arrived well before Stockton and Fremont's revolt and the Bear Flag Republic, gaining positions of wealth and social prominence through talent and daring, indeed often marrying into landed Mexican-California families. The young Dr. Clark came alone through the Golden Gate as one of the eagerly expectant "49ers." Nine years later, his wife and children and sisters had rejoined him in San Jose and were with him when he arrived to homestead at San Simeon Creek. Again he came to a new home for them with great expectations. Indeed, the family had reason to believe that their close ties, hard work and perseverance would succeed. E.A.'s professional education and family background, and that of his sisters and wife as well, must have been confidence builders, and he chose to use the title "Doctor." The physical and emotional hardships of the frontier, in combination with disease that they almost certainly had brought with them from the East, resulted in suffering, death and grief. But through an alliance of practical skills, family loyalty, and the help of their frontier neighbors, some survived to bear witness to an opportunity courageously seized. Evaluation of the book by two California historians:Clark Colahan's disclosure of new source materials and his well-documented presentation of their historical context portray the reality of pioneering on San Sim3eon Creek in the mid-19th century. The Clark family's diaries and letters vividly reveal their great expectations of a bright future on a bountiful farm, their abiding love and affection for one another and their reliance on neighbors and friends starkly contrasted with the harsh reality of hard work and financial reversals, as well as their poignant despair over poor health and untimely deaths that threatened to overwhelm them. This is genuine life in the country; full of beginnings and endings. I commend Colahan's important contribution and recommend the book to anyone interested in the history of the Central Coast. "Professor Colahan has consulted not only published information on the area in the period, transcribed and annotated the original documents handed down in his family, but also searched out the relevant primary sources surviving in the County. He has carefully and clearly assembled the material into a fascinating and readable story."
|
