Western Gregory, Jackson: The Desert Valley. v1. 19 Feb 2013

[crutledge]

Jackson Gregory (12 March 1882, Salinas, California, USA, 12 June 1943, Auburn, California). Western writer Jackson Gregory was born on 12 March 1882,in Salinas, California, the son of Judge Durrell Stokes and Amelia Hartnell Gregory. He spent much of his youth living on a ranch near Point Pinos Rancho (now Pacific Grove), where his father was part owner of a sawmill. The year after Jackson's birth, the governor of California appointed his father to fill a vacancy on the Superior Court of San Luis Obispo County. D.S. Gregory, who had been practicing law since he was 20, settled in California the year after the 1849 Gold Rush. In 1860 he was named a delegate from California to the Democratic National Convention at Charleston, South Carolina. He passed away on 12 June 1889, at San Luis Obispo, just a couple of days shy of his 64th birthday. Sometime after his father's death Jackson, along with his mother and two siblings, went to live with the family of Jackson Gregory Jr., an uncle who lived in Alisal, California. Amelia Gregory died in 1916 at Berkeley.

Excerpt
You see the bobbing ears of a pack-animal and the dusty hat and stoop shoulders of a man. They are symbols of mystery. They rise briefly against the skyline, they are gone into the grey distance. Something beckons or something drives. They are lost to human sight, perhaps to human memory, like a couple of chips drifting out into the ocean. Patient time may witness their return; it is still likely that soon another incarnation will have closed for man and beast, that they will have left to mark their passing a few glisteningly white bones, polished untiringly by tiny sand-chisels in the grip of the desert winds. They may find gold, but they may not come in time to water. The desert is equally conversant with the actions of men mad with gold and mad with thirst.

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