Artist’s conception of Lt. Col. Righetti’s P-51, “Katydid,” named for his wife.

By my count, 106 young San Luis Obispo County men were killed during World War II. Twenty-seven of them were airmen, most in the Army Air Corps and a few Navy fliers; there was a Naval aviation training school at Poly during the War.

I’m not sure why it is, but death in the air seems even more capricious and cruel than death in ground combat, and I think that’s because so many of those 27 county residents were killed in stateside accidents. [There were numerous fatalities in local crashes: a P-38 in Oceano, another that plunged into a Santa Maria cafe; a P-39 Aircobra that left a huge crater in Shell Beach.] Combat airplanes don’t forgive a lot, not even a moment’s inattention:

• Frederick George Gillis was an air cadet who died in Lancaster when his trainer went out of control and flew into a mountain. Both Gillis and his flight instructor bailed out in time. Gillis’s parachute didn’t open.
• A midair collision of two B-25 medium bombers “on a routine training flight” from Tampa killed Lt. Randoph Donalson over Newberry, South Carolina.
• When his B-17 pilot tried to make a crash landing in a meadow near Roundup, Montana, Staff Sgt. Charles Valys died when the plane hit the ground, exploded, and broke apart.

All of these men were in their twenties.

The “old man” among our lost fliers was Lt. Col. Elwyn Righetti, from San Luis Obispo, a P-51D pilot shot down near Dresden in the weeks following the notorious fire-bombing there. Righettti, 30, was the winner of the Silver Star with four oak leaf clusters for both his kills and his superb leadership of the 55^th Fighter Squadron. Righetti survived his plane’s crash-landing. He radioed his comrades that he was all right, yet he was never found and is still listed as “missing in action.” There is a chance that he was killed by German civilians; another downed American was summarily executed the day before Righetti was shot down.

Jack Langston’s P-38 would have looked like this one, with its D-Day markings.

Righetti’s body was never found, and neither  was 2^nd Lt. Jack Langston’s. He was shot down by ground fire in his P-38 during a low-level attack on Cherbourg in the weeks after D-Day. Many of these fliers simply disappeared; Langston’s fighter exploded in the air.

A doomed B-17.

Sgt. Donal Laird was a ball-turret gunner in a B-17 named “Strictly GI,” shot down over Karlsruhe, a city of scientists once visited by Thomas Jefferson. Flak probably claimed 1^st Lt. James Pearson, from Paso Robles, and the crew of his B-26 Marauder over Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge.  An Army Air Corps captain and friend of flight engineer Loren Bubar found his body, later positively identified, a year after Bubar’s B-17 collided with a German ME-109 fighter near Frankfurt.

Loren lies today amid other young Americans in a military cemetery in Luxmebourg, 5,500 miles away from home.

Loren Bubar’s grave.

A preview of the next book. Hopefully, out by mid-summer!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvi7SjWzc-w

Californio outlaw Tiburcio Vasquez was hanged in 1875 San Jose.

The passage below is from the acknowledgements to the new book, on outlaws. I am already receiving messages from folks urging me to reconsider the scholarship and portray California outlaws like Vasquez, Salomon Pico, and Pio Linares as patriots, as social outlaws, or what the Marxist historian Hobsbawm called “primitive rebels.” They are going to be unhappy:

Forty years ago, I found Hobsbawm’s thesis thrilling, because his was one of those books that forced you to look at history in a totally different way. I even took a college course in social outlawry–in Missouri, not far from towns that Jesse James once haunted–and wrote my paper on Vasquez.

I took the class because I inherited my Irish-American mother’s instinctive distrust of the powerful and her faith in the poor and working people who, like her ancestors, suffered so much under men like the oligarchs who are such a potent presence in our government today. If anything, the wealthy are as powerful or even more powerful now than they were in Jesse James’s lifetime, and they are the most clear and present danger to American representative democracy. I can think of no decision since Plessy  v. Ferguson that has been more injurious than Citizens United.

But I am forty years older from the time I read my Hobsbawm. Some Marxists age well–Eugene Genovese, now a rabid conservative, wrote Roll, Jordan, Roll, an incandescent history of slavery, when he was younger and more sensible, and it is still brilliant–but my Hobsbawm-inspired treatment of Tiburcio Vasqeuz is trite and shallow.

In the course of researching the outlaws book, I found overwhelming evidence to explain the satisfaction Latino Californians took in the actions of  the men, like Vasquez, whom they identified as social outlaws, because these people were driven out of the gold fields, politically marginalized, and their land was seized. But I finally decided that what makes a social outlaw is not what he does, but how he dies. Outlaws like Vasquez die  at a young age and  their deaths are invariably violent. What’s left behind is what I used to call “the James Dean effect:” the suddenness of their deaths is a powerful catalyst for creating myths they really don’t deserve.

Emiliano Zapata, killed in 1919.

In life, they are neither heroic (Joaquin Murieta shot unarmed Chinese miners) nor consciously and deliberately acting to make a political statement. Vasquez pleaded that he was, but he was in jail facing the possibility of hanging, and his pleas were intended to generate sympathy, which they did.

There is, then, a vast difference between a Californio bandit like Salomon Pico and a Mexican revolutionary like Emiliano Zapata. Both men were killers. Pico killed to satisfy Pico. Zapata killed because the wealthy sugar planters of Morelos had a monopoly on farmland that starved peasant families to death. There are men, like the Morelos sugar planters, whose lives are improved immensely by killing. While he fought them, Zapata promulgated the Plan de Ayala, a cogent statement of revolutionary justice. The outlaws I met in researching the book had to rely on the writers of pulp fiction to give their lives a sense of justice. These are the lives that their admirers truly deserved. They exist only in fiction and in our dreams.

From the San Luis Obispo Tribune:

County Correspondence

SANTA MANUELA SCHOOL

EDITOR TRIBUNE:–Following is a report of the Santa Manuela school for the month ending November 2^nd, 1883. Total days attendance 299 1/2; days absence 22 ½, whole number of pupils enrolled 19; average number belonging 15. Present during the month, Joe Branch, Julius Hemmi, Leroy Jatta, Charlie Kinney and Addie Hemmi.

CLARA GANOUNG,  Teacher.

Arroyo Grande, Nov. 3, 1883.

When the Lopez Dam was completed in the Upper Arroyo Grande in 1969, San Luis Obispo County officials were hopeful that it might fill in five years. It filled in one. So much rain came in 1968-69—the opposite of the terrible 1860s drought−that the dam spilled in April. During the winter, Arroyo Grande Creek filled to twenty feet deep where it flowed under Harris Bridge, at the intersection of Huasna Road and today’s Lopez Drive. School had to be canceled some days. With the high school built on top of hardpan in the floodplain of the Lower Valley, upperclassman joked that the standing waters were too deep for freshmen,so the school board had chosen wisely at placing such short people on a separate campus, atop Crown Hill. One of the great examples of historical foresight came when authorities moved the historic one-room Santa Manuela School away from what would have been lake bottom. Today it sits near the swinging bridge that spans the creek in downtown Arroyo Grande. It is a lovingly preserved and charming evocation of the kind of education that mattered most to 19^th century farmers.

That meant, for students like Julius Hemmi, the wisdom of the basics. Julius would have been one of the bigger boys of the nineteen students and near the end of his education, because the high school was still thirteen years in the future. Julius, if he was attentive, and his father was a clever man, would have mastered, by the time the 1883 notice appeared in the Tribune, his times tables and percents, his state and his European capitals, would be able to recite “The Gettysburg Address” and to write, for a boy, passable longhand. That was all that Julius would need to take up farming with his immigrant father, Peter. If Julius was a big boy, and he probably was, there is always the chance that he got to practice the kind of tyranny over his younger classmates depicted in novels like Tom Brown’s School Days.  But, with nineteen students, a big boy like Julius would have been on Miss Ganoung’s short leash. If she was typical of rural schoolmarms in the late 19^th century, she kept that leash tight, she protected the younger children, and she kept a small circle on her blackboard against which saucy students would press their noses, without moving, for an hour at a time.

Julius, and we don’t know this, may not have needed the chalkboard circle at all, because the other names in the newspaper notice—Branch and Jatta, for example−belonged to families far more important and far more established than the Hemmis. Joseph Branch’s grandparents had been the first to settle the Arroyo Grande Valley, in 1837, and his grandfather had had to contend with monstrous grizzly bears and Tulare Indian raids, and he had vanquished both threats. Leroy Jatta’s family, Canadians, were more recent arrivals, but the Jattas would marry into the Loomis family and together they would form the foundation of Arroyo Grande’s merchant class, families together that would be important to the Valley deep into the twentieth century, families known for their enterprise and, even more, for their integrity. We do know this much about Julius: he had a little sister, Addie, to look after at school, and he would always know that she was looking at him. We know, too, that Mrs. Hemmi adored her son.

It was April Fool’s Day, 1886, so the teachers in town, at the two-story school that stood on the site of today’s Ford agency in Arroyo Grande, would have refused to believe the boys that morning, a little ashen-faced, as they walked into the Arroyo Grande Grammar School to hang their coats and hats on two tiers of brass hooks, and below place them their lunches, wrapped in oilcloth. These boys attended a school monstrously bigger than Santa Manuela. (The Arroyo Grande kids would have seen Santa Manuela as a school for country hicks.) Since they were boys of the town, a little more sophisticated and a little more jaded than the children from the one- or two-room schools of the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, Los Berros, Edna, or Nipomo, no teacher with more than two years’ experience would have believed for a moment any of them when they insisted that they’d seen two men hanged from the Pacific Coast Railway trestle at the upper end of town, just below Crown Hill. No teacher would have hesitated to rebuke a little boy with such a cruel April Fool’s joke, one so tasteless that it merited a circle on the blackboard or, even better—far better−a mouthful of powdered soap.

But the little boys weren’t lying.

There were two men hanging from the Pacific Coast Railway trestle, and they would remain there until the coroner drove down that afternoon from the city, from San Luis Obispo, stared up at them, testily convened a work party that doubled as a panel for his inquest, and ordered them finally cut down for examination. One of the bodies belonged to Addie Hemmi’s big brother. He had strangled at the end of his rope.

Julius was fifteen years old when the good citizens of Arroyo Grande lynched him from the little railroad bridge over the Arroyo Grande Creek. He would have been as stiff as a dead mule deer buck by the time the awed little third-graders found him the morning of April Fool’s Day. This was the only kind of death these little boys might ever have seen, a hunter’s death, dealt at the hands of their fathers. Above the empty stiffness of his body, Julius Hemmi’s face would have been the color of clay. So would the face of his father, Peter, who was hanging next to him. The little boys did not yet know that these deaths, too, were dealt at the hands of their fathers.

The modern Durgan Bridge, Downieville, marks the spot of the earlier bridge that served as Juanita’s gallows.

His name was Joseph Cannon, and he was just that subtle. He was a big man, over six feet tall and two hundred thirty pounds. On July 4, 1851, in the mining camp at Downieville, even though Cannon was an Australian, he was determined to celebrate the Fourth and he had decided that every miner in the settlement needed to celebrate with him. So big Joseph Cannon began pounding on the cabin doors, causing them to shudder, since they were held gingerly in place by wooden latches and leather hinges. The inevitable happened: he broke down the door of a cabin belonging to a young couple who occupied a precarious place in Downieville’s social order. The cabin belonged to José, a gambler. He and his kind were seen as parasites, and they were a bit too well-dressed and smooth-talking for the rough-and-tumble miners. His lover, or common-law wife, was a prostitute named Juanita. José and Juanita were Mexicans, and that, too, made them vulnerable in a place like Downieville.

Meanwhile, Joseph Cannon, either despite or because of his boisterous nature, was a popular miner. But he compounded his error by knocking down the cabin door and then falling with it, tumbling into the private space of the horrified young couple. In a society were order was based on the respect of property rights, Cannon was the most egregious of trespassers. A drinking companion righted the big man and pushed him back outside.

It was José who took up the issue of trespassing the next day when he confronted a reasonably sober Cannon with the issue of the broken door. The conversation between the two began amicably, some said, but soon grew heated, bilingual, and profane as the massive Cannon began to jaw at point-blank range with the smaller gambler. That’s when Juanita, perhaps out of protectiveness, joined the argument. Cannon called her a whore. Juanita raised the ante with a Bowie knife. She killed Joseph Cannon with it.

A platform had been erected for the Fourth of July observance and it now became the stage for an extemporaneous murder trial as 5,000 enraged miners crowded around it, howling for Juanita’s execution. They got it, and promptly, despite the intervention of a local doctor, who maintained that Juanita was pregnant. The crowd nearly turned on him, too.

Juanita was perhaps the calmest person in Downieville on July 5, 1851. She carefully climbed a ladder, along with an executioner, to a noose suspended from the crossbeams of the Durgan Bridge. She told the men below her that she would do the same thing again had any of them insulted her honor the way that Cannon had. The last thing she did was to free a braid of her hair from the noose before it was cinched tight.

Her full name was Maria Ramona de Luz Carrillo Pacheco de Wilson. I think. I accidentally found this photograph of her, age 37, while I was looking for something else entirely, which is how I usually find the material I need the most for writing history. It’s a puzzler, that.

She, more importantly, was born a Carrillo, in San Diego, which immediately assigns her a special place in our history. There was no family more prominent in Mexican California. Her father was the commandante of the Santa Barbara Presidio, her son would become the twelfth governor of California, and her (second) husband, Yankee sea captain John Wilson, owned the lengthily-named Rancho Canada de Los Osos y Pecho y Islay, which translates in modern terms, to pretty much everything between Montana de Oro and Cambria.

Owning that much land boggles my mind. I grew up on three acres, and thought that much land immense.

Here is the point: She is, at 37, a handsome woman. It is difficult to imagine the self-assurance a man must have felt with a woman like this on his arm.

And she must have been, at sixteen, a delight.

To watch her dance must have been mesmerizing, and Californio women didn’t expend that much energy at fandangos. Dancing was prized, but it was a male pursuit. Young men, and even older men, like Juan Bandini, reputedly the best dancer in Mexican California, did the dancing, like Mick Jagger roosters on Dexedrine, and sixteen-year-olds like Maria moved chastely and modestly, their lacquered Chinese fans held aloft and their long lashes cast downward, while the young men, as is the the perfect right of young men, made fools of themselves in public.

Even Maria Ramona’s downcast eyelashes, I believe, must have been devastating. I would consider giving one or more arms to get the chance to go backward in time to see her at sixteen.

But this photograph–undoubtedly, part of a group portrait, because you can detect, at lower right, the wedding lace or First Communion lace or the quinceañera lace of another woman–is a revelation. It’s one more reason why I love women. I don’t “cherish” them. You don’t “cherish” a human being who can give birth to another human being with the density of a bowling ball and the kinetic energy of a herd of buffalo on the Yellowstone. No. You love them. You acknowledge your own gender’s fragility, then you move on, loving them, and trying to keep up with them.

Maria, for example. She was born in 1812 and died in 1888, the same year my two-room school, Branch School, was built. When my parents drove me to that school for the Hallowe’en carnival (Houses were too far apart in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley for trick or treating. You’d wind up in Pozo.), I could see, in the limbs of California oaks, bandidos reaching to snatch me from the car, especially if the moon was full. There was always history, in my little-boy imagination, just beyond the moonlight.

One of my first memories in the Valley was that of the home of another Californio matriarch, Manuela Branch, as it caught fire, about 1958, in the corner opposite the Valley from our home on Huasna Road. I had never seen anything burn so bright, and it would take me a few years to realize how costly that fire had been, how completely it had erased the traces of a woman so important. She was buried over the hill from our two-room school, alongside her husband–from Scipio, New York, of all places–-and alongside him, three little girls taken by smallpox in 1862, and, a few yards beyond their tombstones, the common tombstone of a father and son lynched in 1886.

How did they endure? Maria Josefa Dana gave birth to twenty-one children and lost more than half of them at birth or within five years. Nine of Manuela Branch’s survived, but she lived thirty-five years beyond her husband, who died in 1874. Maria Ramona de Luz Carrillo Pacheco de Wilson’s progeny was modest by Californio standards: seven children, but three of them would die before they’d reached twenty-five.

So here she is, in 1849, looking squarely at the photographer without flinching, and this was an age when the camera lens remained open so long because the “film” in those days, on glass-plate negatives, was so slow, that chancing a smile, even a faint one like hers, likely meant that her face would be lost to posterity. It would be a blur. Matthew Brady, in his Washington City studio, kept on hand a variety of neck and head braces, reminiscent of the Inquisition, to keep his subjects, including Lincoln, perfectly still.

And here she is, smiling, albeit faintly, like some kind of San Luis Obispo County Mona Lisa.

What is she smiling about?

It is, more than likely, an event in which she is a peripheral character. If it is a First Communion, a quinceñeria, or a wedding, it is certainly not hers. She is merely a guest. But the fact that she is included, even at the edge of what seems to be a group photo, one in which the celebrants wanted her presence, is indicative of her prominence and indicative of so much more: her personal strength, her unshakable calm, her dignity, and, most of all, her integrity.

You cannot “cherish” a quality like integrity. You either understand it, or you don’t. This woman was bred into it, born into it, grown into it, and she would impart it in the generations who lived far beyond her death in 1888.

Her husbands were lucky enough to live with it, and with her.

She lived a life as strong as Christ’s rock—Jesus, fond of puns, changed Simon’s name to Peter, or “rock”—and soft as velvet. This is a proud woman.

She has every right to be.

James Beckwourth

The horse’s hooves punctuated the long ride with a steady tattoo of crunches as they crushed grass stiffened by winter. His rider had to admit that it was getting harder to leave the warmth of a December hearth. He was nearing fifty now, in mid-century, and, truth be told, he shouldn’t have lived this long, but he had an instinct for detecting death and pulling his horse up short of it. That’s what had happened when he’d found what was left of Hugh Glass back on the Yellowstone. Glass was the army scout, the famed survivor of a grizzly attack, the man who’d taken months to heal himself and then to track down the trappers who’d left him for dead. He wanted it back.  Later, the Arikara got Glass. That was fifteen years ago, in 1833.

There could be no greater contrast with the somber discovery of a cold scalped white man than the Christmas ribbons and the children who had surrounded the rider, James Beckwourth, in the adobe ranch house he’d left sixty miles ago. He’d picked up the mail there, in Nipomo, California, at the home of a Yankee ranchero named William Dana. Beckwourth liked children, didn’t mind them climbing on him, and there were seven young climbers so far, at the Dana adobe and two more in their teens, nine of the twenty-one Dana and his wife, Josefa, ultimately would bring into the world. They would lose half of them in infancy or a little beyond. Beckwourth’s children were lost, too, but in a different way. There were four that he knew of, mothered by Crow and Mexican women he’d left behind in a lifetime of trapping, exploring, scouting, and now, carrying the mail north along El Camino Real, the old highway the Franciscans had traveled, north to Monterey.

It was long enough between Nipomo and the Dana children and his next stopping place, San Miguel and the Reed children, so that as he got close, Beckwourth clucked encouragement to his mount, who responded eagerly because there would be oats and the great relief of a currying and a rubdown with blankets once the saddle and the mailbags had been removed.

But even the horse might have sensed something wrong, either in the scent that reached his nostrils or in the dark that cloaked the mission colonnade at San Miguel. There should have been light, even if it was the flicker of a single candle. There should have been voices from the warmth of the tavern William Reed kept in the old adobe outbuildings, now beginning their inexorable decay back into the California earth. Most of all, there should have been children.

Beckwourth’s instincts, for once, almost failed him. Maybe he was getting too old. When he dismounted, slowly and stiffly, he walked cautiously into the Mission grounds, toward the tavern kitchen the Reed family kept so well, along with the other black man, other than James Beckwourth, in this part of California.

Dark comes quickly in December, and Beckwourth tripped over something in the kitchen doorway. When he kneeled next to the obstacle and ran his fingers over it, it was cold as Hugh Glass. He realized it was a corpse. Beckwourth sprang to his feet and went back to his mount to retrieve his pistols from their saddlebags, and the animal shied and retreated a step when he reached for them.

Beckwourth didn’t know it, but his horse did. They weren’t alone.