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.