God, I love country life. Where else can you combine target practice, good old gory entertainment, and creepy-crawly revulsion all in one night's excitement?

Makes you wanna live here too, I bet.---A very funny story by Kieran Lyons.

We were in Kieran's part of the world today, as the Sacramento Historical Society had a lunch meeting in Auburn. Rich and I drove up and found the City Hall, which is in an old school building. One of the first things we did was have a tour of an old schoolroom. The docent, a retired teacher, told us all about it. Out in the hallway they have mementoes from an old hotel in town. The old school auditorium is where the City Council meets. This is a great use for an old building that was to be torn down and replaced with some modern monstrosity.

Rich had picked a table behind a pillar, and I complained, but it's where the president of the history society, a couple of other mucky-mucks, and our speaker (who turned out to be the priest who gave us the tour of the Cathedral last week: that particular penny had dropped just before we left, because the flier for the event had only called him a "board member", not "Father") also sat. I picked their brains on where to research the California Merci Boxcar and contents. It turns out that SAMCC (Sac Archives and Museum Collection Center, Sacramento's attic) may have some. We talked about the Merci Train and other old things. The man sitting across the table had seen Oregon's boxcar last week. Two of our table-mates had stayed at the Grey Whale Inn in Fort Bragg. It's an old hospital and they were telling how the Irish nurses would hand-carry patients up and down the stairs for surgery and so forth. The place sounds wonderful!

The luncheon was catered by the Shanghai Restaurant. Yummmm. Then Father got up to talk about the presence of Catholics, and by extension religion in general, in the goldfields. Very little of his talk duplicated last week's. The man is a skilled raconteur.

Father Thomas Dalton, Irish, huge, a missionary priest from 1858-1891, was the "ecclesiastical dictator of Grass Valley." Marysville Diocese was everything north or 39th parallel and over across Nevada. Bishop O'Connell was to move it to Grass Valley, but Dalton said, basically, "this is MY town, you can't come here." O'Connell didn't like priests and they returned the feeling, so he stayed in Marysville and managed the diocese from Marysville. Grass Valley had a population of about 6000 pop. in the mid 1860s.

Patrick Manogue was born in Ireland in 1829 or 1831. His family made its way to Chicago where he started with the seminary, but then came to California to quartz mine. When Bishop Allemany sent him to Paris to finish his studies, besides the church he admired, he also admired the trees and he was one of the people who made sure Sacramento is the "city of trees."

Manogue was in Virginia City from 1862-1881 which is where he befriended James and Theresa Fair, and James MacKay (of the MacKay school of Mines at UNReno.) In 1881 the Bishop asked Manogue to be the associate bishop for O'Connell. He was the third to be asked, since no one wanted it, and he dickered to get Sacramento as the Cathedral City. Manogue was 6'3" and 250 pounds, so O'Connell was afraid of him! (This is the sort of thing most history books don't mention.)

O'Connell died in 1884 and Manogue became the Bishop. The diocese was moved in 1886. There were reasons Sacramento was better: it was on rivers, while Grass Valley was in decline after hydraulic mining was outlawed. While Sacramento was regularly inundated and incinerated, the city fathers had surmounted these troubles by raising the streets and building levees. The railroad was the real appeal. The Central Pacific was turning Sacramento into a major terminus.

Our Cathedral was the largest single Catholic church building west of the Mississippi until 1975 (when St. Mary Maytag--- don't get me wrong, I love the place, but that's what it's called--- was built in San Francisco. When it was finished, at a celebration dinner, one of the toasts was

Of all the Bishops who are now in vogue
The greatest of all is Bishop Manogue.

After lunch, Rich and I walked into Old Auburn to look at the "joss house", which is really a Chinese Association Meeting House, which the Auburn Historical Society is renovating for show. It's very interesting. Someday it'll be as nice as the store in Fiddletown.

We looked around at the mining stuff, and the big statue of the miner near the freeway. His name was Claude Chana. I had no idea it was a real person! There's a Pelton Water Wheel, invented in 1877. It's driven by a monitor, and skooshes the water off to the sides.

The City Courthouse is a museum on the first floor. They have fossils! There's a nice film about Highway 40. The California Department of Highways was formed in 1895. In 1910 there were 180,000 cars in the U.S. Carl Fisher had the idea of the Lincoln Highway in 1913 and in 1916 Congress passed a law and construction was started. Post World War I highways were given route numbers and it became Route 40. That's the National Pike in Pennsylvania! People wanted it to be year-round, and in 1931 there was a ski jump competition in the Sierra, and it was so popular US40 became an all-weather road.

Auburn was originally Woods Dry Diggins. It was renamed not for the other Auburns back east but mostly because of the red rock.

Well, that was an interesting day!