Against the perimeter of 29,942 acres · built 11 September 2026 11:01 UTC
The Plaskett Fire is burning over the Los Burros gold district. This is what the family archive says was on that ground, set against where the fire had got to when the last aircraft flew over it.
Located by Ed Plaskett, the third of the adjoining claims. The Plasketts bought a mill in San Francisco to process the ore and sent it back to the mint there.
About thirty thousand dollars of ore came out of these three, and close to a hundred thousand over their working life — until a miner named Lawrence Cardoza absconded with a whole run of gold and was never heard of again.
A named canyon off the ridge.
The family holding as carried in the land records — 1,523.3 acres in the 1922 and 1926 entries, 2,000 acres in an undated earlier one.
Ground the family has held since William Lucas Plaskett homesteaded at Gorda in 1869.
Located by Lawson Plaskett alongside his brother Dudley's Ocean View. Mabel: the three claims were 'all joining'.
One of the three adjoining family claims worked from the 1911 strike.
The district itself. The 1921 USGS sheet of it labels Melville, Buclimo, Gorda and Los Burros mines, and Krenkel's Ranch.
The centroid of the whole gold district sits inside the perimeter.
The division line between the Plaskett and Mansfield holdings.
The Mansfields are the most-written-about family in the archive after the Plasketts themselves — twenty-three files mention them.
Located on Plaskett Creek by Marion Plaskett, who did a great deal of work there and used an arrastra run by water power. Mabel, writing around 1960: 'which can be seen to this day'. She places it one mile above the campground, and describes giant redwoods, ferns in profusion, a narrow gorge of solid rock below the cabin and cascades falling into a pool fifty feet down. Above the cabin an incline shaft brought ore on a narrow sled to the arrastra, worked by a blindfolded mule going round in a circle.
Bill photographed an arrastra in Plaskett Creek in 2026 — redwoods, ferns, a worked timber. The position here is reasoned from Mabel's wording along the creek, not surveyed, and is a search box rather than a fix.
The first major strike of the Los Burros gold rush, at the head of Alder Creek. Recorded in the county reports as the Buclimo.
It is the mine the whole district grew from, and it is the anchor point the 1921 USGS map was georeferenced against.
Located in May 1911 by Dudley Plaskett, son of Byron, after he found several small nuggets of solid gold at the mouth of Plaskett Creek near the beach. Following the creek up, he came to a large landslide on the steep north side of Plaskett Ridge that had opened a great quantity of gold-bearing quartz.
A Plaskett family claim, patented, and still held by the heirs of William E. Plaskett when Mabel wrote.
Signed off South Coast Ridge Road, gated. The board reads LOCKED GATE 2 and points to McKERN ROAD.
Position measured from a photograph's GPS on 1 September 2026, replacing an estimate that sat 1.10 miles away and had this junction well inside the fire when it is on the edge of it.
A gold town from about 1875 to 1895. Three hundred and fifty people at its height, a hundred still there in 1889. It burned in 1890. Nothing is left but stamp-mill remnants and an E Clampus Vitus marker on Willow Creek Road.
This is the third time fire has come to Manchester. It burned in 1890, it burned in the Buckeye Fire of 1970 that took nearly every cabin still standing at Los Burros, and it is inside this one.
The jade beach below the highway.
Note: this project's road-status page publishes the fire edge as 0.28 miles from Jade Cove; this archive position gives a different answer. Neither has been surveyed and the two disagree.
These have a story and no coordinate. Mabel describes where some of them are well enough to look — the Bull Frog is four miles up the north side of the ridge, in a clearing by a spring under live oaks — but a description is not a position and none of them is drawn on any map here.
The first mine on Plaskett Ridge, discovered and worked by the older Plasketts, Reason and Marion. They dug the ore with pick and shovel and hauled it in large canvas sacks on sleds drawn by a stout mule to an arrastra built by Grandfather Plaskett — above the old orchard, now part of Plaskett Creek Campground, run by a water wheel in the creek above.
Mabel Sans Plaskett, 'Pacific Valley Gold Claims Still Producing', in the Plaskett family archive at plaskett.family. Written for the coast newspapers between 1959 and 1964.
Relocated by Alonzo Davis of Santa Maria, who married Lucy Plaskett, daughter of Byron and Martha, and lived several years on the ridge working it. Mabel places it in a small clearing near a spring surrounded by live oaks, well up on the north side of the ridge about four miles from the coast road.
Mabel Sans Plaskett, 'Pacific Valley Gold Claims Still Producing', in the Plaskett family archive at plaskett.family. Written for the coast newspapers between 1959 and 1964.
Located by John Bushnell on the south side of the ridge around 1910, and proved good prospects.
Mabel Sans Plaskett, 'Pacific Valley Gold Claims Still Producing', in the Plaskett family archive at plaskett.family. Written for the coast newspapers between 1959 and 1964.
Located by Henry F. Melville, a native of Australia who came to Soledad when the railroad ended there. He would cover over a good prospect to keep it for later and sometimes could not find it again himself. A man of giant stature: he once lifted a loaded wagon so his sons could take a wheel off rather than wait for a jack.
Mabel Sans Plaskett, 'Henry Melville Attracted to Coast by Los Burros Gold', same archive and period.
The last trip Melville made into the mountains was in 1932, when he located this.
Mabel Sans Plaskett, 'Henry Melville Attracted to Coast by Los Burros Gold', same archive and period.
Labelled on the 1921 USGS district sheet. Thirteen files in the archive mention the Krenkels.
USGS Los Burros district map, 1921 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; original from the Los Burros Mining & Historical Society). Held in the archive as a georeferenced overlay, placement approximate.
Every mine, prospect and occurrence the USGS Mineral Resources Data System holds for this country, tested against the same perimeter. Positions are as MRDS records them, compiled from old reports and quadrangle maps rather than surveyed, and the names are reproduced exactly as the federal record spells them, typos and all.
Named in Mabel's account of the district.
Located by John Bushnell on the south side of the ridge around 1910, and proved good prospects.
The family name on the federal record.
Named in Mabel's account of the district.
Bushnell worked the Plaskett claims as well — Mabel names him with Billy Cruickshank and Jim Trickle as the men who knew every phase of mining, that being their life work.
The mine the district is named for.
Henry F. Melville's, a native of Australia who came to Soledad when the railroad ended there. Mabel: he would cover over a good prospect for later and sometimes could not find it again himself.
The family name again, spelled as the record has it.
This is the grid every claim, patent and county mineral report in the district is described against. Of its 36 sections, 18 are wholly inside the fire and 29 are more than half inside.
Section 35 — the quarter-section the California Division of Mines put the Buclimo in, the first big strike of the Los Burros rush — is about 66% inside.
BLM National PLSS CadNSDI · 21x21 regular grid per section; points tested for section membership and then for the fire perimeter. A sample, not an intersection — good to a couple of per cent.