Adobe Days

In this rollicking reminiscence Sarah Bixby Smith tells of Los Angeles when it was "a little frontier town" and "Bunker Hill Avenue was the end of the settlement, a row of scattered houses along the ridge." She came there in 1878 at the age of seven from the San Justo Rancho in Monterey County. Sarah recalls daily life in town and at San Justo and neighboring ranches in the bygone era of the adobes. Exerting a strong pull on her imagination, as it will on the reader's, is the story of how her family drove sheep and cattle from Illinois to the Pacific Coast in the 1850s. The daughter of a pioneering woolgrower, Sarah Bixby Smith became a leading citizen of California.

Gloria Ricci Lothrop is a professor of history at California State Polytechnic University.