Longtime Keepa’ninnies will be glad to catch up with William P. MacKinnon, editor of the two volume At Sword’s Point: A Documentary History of the Utah War (Kingdom in the West), The Arthur H. Clark Co., 2008, 2016, and so many other journal articles, conference addresses, contributions to Keepa; former president of the Mormon History Association … and on and on. Bill will be the speaker at next month’s Juanita Brooks Lecture in St. George. I’ll post a flyer for that separately so that I can repost it as a reminder closer to the event.

In the meantime, here’s what Bill has been through in the disasters to hit Santa Barbara and other parts of California over the past season …

… Things are a bit chaotic here because of the December wildfire and almost immediately following debris flow. The fire marched sixty miles up the coast and was stopped about a mile from our house only by a wind shift and the heroic work of over 8,000 firefighters and more than 500 engines.

The air quality got so bad that on December 10, my 79th birthday, we evacuated to Carmel (230 miles up the coast) and bivouacked there for about two weeks.

A couple of weeks after we returned home a freak rain storm struck the denuded, burnt-over mountains in the Las Padres National Forest immediately above us at 3:30 a.m. and, with no vegetation to hold back the water, unleashed a flow of dirt, boulders, and trees that devastated Montecito. Four sections of town (along normally dry creeks) now look as though atomic bombs had detonated along them because of the force of the flow and the size of what was in it. Hundreds of houses were totally destroyed, and twenty-three of our neighbors were killed, with several still missing and presumably swept out to sea miles from the wreckage of their homes. I’d never seen a garage in a tree before, but have now.

In the midst of the rainstorm, a rolling boulder ruptured a major gas main that exploded, destroyed several houses, and then sent up a massive pillar of flame that disoriented much of the Santa Barbara area that could not understand in the middle of the night how such a fire could suddenly be under way in the middle of a deluge. To describe all this as a “mudslide” is wholly misleading, as the boulders involved were car- and even house-sized.

In total about 30,000 people were evacuated, the town lost all utilities for weeks, and both the Union Pacific R. R. and the main state coastal highway were cut and impassible for weeks, thereby disrupting the connection between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

This time we (our home) dodged the bullet by ten feet.

After being out for another three weeks for this event, we returned home, but with subsequent rain storms we have evacuated three more times for a total of five times since December with about six weeks away from home. Vicki Riskin, the Dan Jones descendant whom you were trying to help, lost her home. Her niece, living on a different street, was crushed to death when her house was obliterated. Vicki and her husband have removed to Martha’s Vineyard, and I don’t know if they’ll return. The novelist T. C. Boyle, who lives here, wrote a wonderful essay about this tragedy for the “New Yorker” issue of January 22. …

On April 17 I am delivering the Juanita Brooks Lecture in St. George. (I took my research notes and ms. with me during each of the five evacuations.) The title is “Across the Desert in 1858: Thomas L. Kane’s Mediating Mission and the Mormon Women Who Made it Possible.” …

Among the players mentioned are Frances Jessie Swan Kimball Clark, Caroline Augusta Perkins Joyce Jackson and her daughter (Augusta Joyce Crocheron), Rhoda Taylor Lyman, and Caroline Barnes Crosby. Since you did the ground-breaking work on Clark, Jackson, and Crocheron, you’ll be receiving full credit for that work along with your and Amy Tanner Thiriot’s related Keepa posts in the printed version of the lecture, which will be distributed on April 17 and then posted on the website for Dixie State U.’s Library.

Well, I’m rambling. if you want to post any of this message on Keepa, feel free to do so, as I haven’t been able to keep all of my friends current on what has been happening here. I’ll also send you electronically a copy of the poster announcing the Juanita Brooks Lecture. I’d love to see you there as well as those of your readers who feel moved to make the trek to St. George on April 17 (7:30 at Dixie State U.’s Cox Auditorium).

Best,

BILL

Love you, Bill, and Pat.