Monthly Archives: March 2023

Table Mountain and Oregon City

Posted on March 31, 2023 by nancyleek

Spring is running a bit late this year. With all the cool and cloudy skies we have had lately, the flowers are only just getting started. But with all the rain, the wildflower season will only get better and better. … Continue reading →

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Classroom Visits

Posted on March 30, 2023 by nancyleek

Fairview School’s Community Read-In is back and that makes me happy. Ever since I worked at the Orland Free Library, I have enjoyed visiting Fairview School in the Spring for the Community Read-In. All kinds of adults come to read … Continue reading →

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Luzena Goes into Business

Posted on March 28, 2023 by nancyleek

After two or three days Luzena and Mason Wilson sold their oxen for six hundred dollars and bought a hotel. Whatever you may picture as a hotel in 1849 Sacramento, your imagination exceeds the reality. The hotel we bought consisted … Continue reading →

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What Mrs. Fisher Knows

Posted on March 26, 2023 by nancyleek

Mrs. Abby Fisher must have been some cook. Her friends persuaded her to put her recipes in a cookbook, the first published by a black woman west of the Mississippi. Abby and her husband Alexander came to California in 1877. … Continue reading →

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Luzena’s First Day

Posted on March 25, 2023 by nancyleek

Luzena Wilson got up on her first day in Sacramento and went right to work. There was no time to lose. There was money to be made feeding hungry miners. There was no credit in ’49 for men, but I … Continue reading →

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California at Last

Posted on March 23, 2023 by nancyleek

Luzena Wilson finally made it to the crowded tent city around Sacramento. There she encountered men who were lonesome for the comforts of home. It was almost dusk of the last day of September, 1849, that we reached the end … Continue reading →

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Luzena and the “Languishing Spark of Womanly Vanity”

Posted on March 21, 2023 by nancyleek

Luzena and her husband and their two little boys were on the western, downward, side of the Sierras and close to the end of the trail— The first man we met was about fifty miles above Sacramento. He had ridden … Continue reading →

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A Hard March

Posted on March 17, 2023 by nancyleek

All the emigrants on the trail to California faced that desert. Forty miles of sand and alkali with no water. To get across it they had to drive their oxen relentlessly on in spite of heat and thirst. To hesitate, … Continue reading →

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The 40-Mile Desert

Posted on March 15, 2023 by nancyleek

Remember the Independence Company? That was the company of young men who set out, with flags flying and a brass band playing, at the same time as Luzena and Mason Wilson’s wagon train left Missouri. Luzena, afraid of the Indians, … Continue reading →

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Lightening the Load

Posted on March 13, 2023 by nancyleek

Wagon train pioneers inevitably had to lighten their loads. First to go were heavy items like the rocking chair and the cast iron stove. Some emigrants took equipment that they thought would pay off in their new home, like pickaxes … Continue reading →

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