Mendocino Papers

The idea of this book, the first in a series, is to give readers a sense of what vast Mendocino County is like, really like, from its beginnings to now. The contents derive from my readings of the scant formal histories of the county, and from my readings of the slightly more abundant memoirs of early settlers. My experiences are mixed in, and some of the book is autobiographical because you may want to know something about the person telling you these things. My family’s history is intertwined in mostly oblique ways with the county, whose written history commenced with its merciless first settlers, the long, lethal sons of Missouri who rode west from the gold fields to occupy what must have seemed to them an endless, empty Eden of well-watered little valleys. But there had been people in this Eden for 12,000 years. Those people were annhilated before they could teach us what only they knew. The bouncing ball of the narrative you’ll find here moves back and forth across time conveying, I hope, my sense of an accelerating history of often absurd, often bloody events visited upon a uniquely beautiful part of the country.