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.
My father was Llewellyn Bixby of Norridgewock, Maine, and my mother was Mary Hathaway, youngest daughter of Reverend George Whitefield Hathaway, my one exception to the non-ministerial rule of the family. And he was this by force of his very determined mother, Deborah Winslow, who had made up her mind that her handsome young son should enter the profession at that time the most respected in the community. She was a woman called “set as the everlasting hills,” and so determined was she that Whitefield should not be lured off into ways of business that
