Page:A La California.djvu/91

Rh to die, and he might have lived to a green old age had he not been knocked down and run over by a runaway flour-mill truck team, on Pine street, in San Francisco, in 1868. He was one hundred and four years old when he was thus prematurely cut off. It is an undoubted fact that Cimon Avilos, now or recently living at Todos Santos Bay, Lower California, was one of the military guard who presented arms when Padre Junipero Serra raised the cross at the Mission San Diego, in July, in the year of our Lord and Master 1769. This old conquistador had been a soldier in the Spanish army several years before that event, so that his age to-day can be hardly less than one hundred and twenty-five years. I have half a notion to go down there some day and get the jovial young fellow to come up to San Francisco, and take a little pasear over the Pacific Railroad. At Pescadero the claim to being "the oldest inhabitant" is at issue between Don Salvador Mosquito, a Mission Indian, and Señor Don Felipe Armas, a Californian of Spanish parentage. Armas remembers that when King Kamehameha I., of Hawaii, found that the cattle which had grown up wild on his islands had become an unbearable nuisance, and sent over to this country for vaqueros to kill them off—a historical fact—he, Armas, was selected as one of the party. He was then said to be thirty-five years of age, but so many years have since elapsed that he "has lost the run of them entirely." The number of his immediate descendants is still increasing at the rate of one yearly. Salvador Mosquito was baptized under