Recollections of Joseph Mailliard
by Laurie Thompson
The California Room is grateful to bookseller Michael Good and philanthropist Jeff Craemer for the recent donation of a rare autobiography of Joseph Maillard, whose family settled in the San Geronimo Valley in the 19th century.
The pamphlet — titled Autobiography of Joseph Mailliard- was reprinted from the natural history journal The Condor, Vol. XXVI, January, 1924. The copy we have is inscribed to “L. T. Compton: With the compliments of the perpetrator, Joseph Mailliard.”
Maillard provides a bit of family history:
My paternal grandfather was the private secretary of Joseph Bonaparte, as was later my father also; and my mother was the granddaughter of Lieut.-Colonel Samuel Ward of Rhode Island, whose name is mentioned in various annals of the American Revolution. Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, probably most widely known as the author of the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ was a sister of my mother, as was also Mrs. Crawford, mother of Francis Marion Crawford, the late well-known novelist….
Mailliard tells that his father’s had travelled to San Francisco with his brother-in-law in 1850 and that when his health broke down in 1867, he decided to move the family from the East Coast to California. The family sailed from New York to San Francisco, via Panama, on the steamer Henry Chauncey on January 11, 1868.
Mailliard recounts:
My family settled in San Rafael, Marin County, and lived for several years in that village. Later, my father built a house on the Rancho San Geronimo, eight miles west of San Rafael, and we moved into the new dwelling on Thanksgiving Day, 1873.
Marin County was a paradise for young fellows in those days. Deer, bear, quail, wild pigeons, and trout, a horse for the catching, with such nuisances as fences and trespass signs almost unknown, — what more might one want? Even on our own place, not an hour’s ride from the ranch house, we had a hunting camp where it was as wild as one might want and where another human being might not stray by for months at a time. That is, until ‘hiking’ o’er the hills became fashionable. It was no uncommon thing to find on these hills, bleached-out shed horns of the Roosevelt Elk; and some of the houses and barns, more especially on the Point Reyes peninsula, had pairs of these horns, well preserved, nailed up in prominent places. Wood Ducks were frequently seen along the fresh water streams and the Fulvous Tree Duck occasionally drifted into the country.
My first start in the line of natural history was the one most common among boys -the collecting of birds’ eggs. I must have been at about the age of 12 or 13 then, and carried on my collecting in the usual happy go-lucky manner of youth.
Originally published at https://annetkent.kontribune.com.
