California

Mal Huntley runs an insurance agency in Marysville, California, and makes his home in the foothills on the edge of the valley. In May 1981 he traveled to England with his daughter Jen. Their stop at Boxwell Court, near Tetbury in the Cotswolds, took him to the family seat the Huntleys had held, generation after generation, since 1582.

The estate had stayed in the family without a break except for about forty years in the nineteenth century, when Sir Henry V. Huntley, the owner at that time, was forced into bankruptcy, known in chancery, after risky business ventures went wrong. Sir Henry was an adventurer who spent much of his adult life in the New World, on the African coast and in the Pacific Northwest, and he later served as governor of Prince Edward Island.

Years afterward, Mal browsed an antiquarian bookshop in Chicago with a companion, who noticed a volume titled California: Its Gold and Its Inhabitants by Sir Henry V. Huntley. Mal bought it and, on reading it at home, found Sir Henry's firsthand account of his journeys through Northern California and of life around Marysville during the Gold Rush. The venture that cost the family Boxwell Court was the Dicksburg Mine, near Hansonville (now Rackerby), roughly ten miles from Mal's own house.