The forest fire that saved the redwoods
Santa Cruz Sentinel
By ROSS ERIC GIBSON
Ambrose Bierce was a close friend of Josephine Clifford McCrackin, both popular writers and journalists. Bierce came to visit her Loma Prieta home on the weekend of Oct. 7 and 8,1899, bringing his 23-year-old protegee, poet Herman Scheffauer. They stayed at Hotel Bohemia, in the hamlet of Burrell, on Loma Prieta Avenue and Summit Road.
The hotel was built specifically to serve California’s literary community, most visiting McCrackin at her Monte Paraiso ranch on the other end of Loma Prieta Avenue.
Unpretentious and direct, McCrackin attracted literary giants like Jack London, George Sterling, Ina Coolbrith, Joaquin Miller, C.W. Stoddard, and Mark Twain, who’d disembark at Wright’s Station, then reach the hotel by foot or stage. She’d built her 1880 home on 200 acres of woodland, before marrying Jackson McCrackin in 1882. Her literary circle dated from her friendship with author Bret Harte, the father of the “Western,” who founded the Overland Monthly magazine in 1868 at his honeymoon cottage in Santa Cruz. Just as the magazine chronicled, the writers had come for the California experience.
This photograph by Andrew P. Hill shows the formation of the Sempervirens Club in the womb of a tree. It’s charter members were (from left): Louise C. Jones (VP), San Jose Women’s Club president Carrie Stevens Walter (secretary), Ben Lomond winemaker J.F. Coope (VP), Boulder Creek rancher J.Q. Packard (treasurer), Boulder Creek road-maker Andy Baldwin, Charles W. Reed (president), W.W. Richards (sporting sec.), and Roley Kooser. (Contributed)
