Page:California Historical Society Quarterly vol 30.djvu/112

86 still-film of each of the Franciscan establishments, from San Diego de Alcala to San Francisco Solano at Sonoma, showing them at various stages of their existences. Mr. Planer concluded by pointing out that, while the missions have outlived their original purpose on a remote frontier of Spain's newworld empire, they were still making converts.

During the course of the meeting, Col. Waddell F. Smith, great-grandson of W. B. Waddell, presented the Society with a large, handsomely executed plaque, commemorating the services of the Pony Express, of which his ancestor was one of the organizers. (See this Quarterly, March 1950, pp. 73–75).


 * Word received from Gen. David Prescott Barrows, now on a Mediterranean cruise in the hope of recovery from a recent severe illness, conveys to us the good news that he will make his luncheon address of September 14, 1950, "California in Retrospect," into an article for the, instead of the informal transcript announced on page 375 of the December 1950 issue.

I first met Mrs. Maloney in the early 1930's, after the death of her husband, Michael Maloney, publisher of the Coos Bay Times, with whom she had been associated in the paper's management. The training she had acquired as a journalist, her familiarity with the area served by the Times (she, herself, was a native of Marshfield, Oregon), could, she felt, be put to good use in research into the less well-known phases of northwest history and its extension into California. I therefore assigned her a table in the Bancroft Library, and we consulted frequently—to my pleasure, for she had a delightful humor. How correct she had been in planning to use her time in research is shown by the titles of the papers she published in the of the California Historical Society between 1937 and 1945: "John Gantt, 'Borderer, and later three of his letters, for which she wrote the introduction and notes; "Peter Skene Ogden's Trapping Expedition to the Gulf of California, 1829-30"; "Some Oatman Documents" (introduction by Mrs. Maloney); "The Distressingly Virtuous Isaac—Biographical Notes on Isaac Cox, Author of the Annals of Trinity County; "Fur Brigade to the Bonaventura—John Work's California Expedition, 1832–33, for the Hudson's Bay Company" (issued subsequently as one of the Society's special publications and sold out in a short time); and "A Botanist on the Road to Yerba Buena— Journal of William Dunlap Brackenridge, October 1-28, 1841" (this included an account and list of the plants, mentioned in the journal, by Alice Eastwood). For the John Work publication I wrote a foreword, in which I paid tribute to Mrs. Maloney's indefatigable care in assembling materials