Josephine Clifford McCracken

Josephine Clifford McCracken (or McCrackin) (1839–1921) was a California writer and journalist (a contemporary of Bret Harte, John Muir, Ina Coolbrith, and Joaquin Miller), as well as an environmentalist.

Her father, a former soldier at Waterloo, foresaw trouble from citizenry calling for revolution, and so gathered his family in 1846 and emigrated to St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States.

McCracken wrote articles for Harper Brothers and for the newspapers Out West and Western Field while traveling through New Mexico and lower California,[1] and once in San Francisco, turned full-time to her love for writing and literary pursuits.

[2] She befriended poet Ina Coolbrith, who she called one of the Golden Gate Trinity along with the other two pillars of the Overland Monthly, Bret Harte and Charles Warren Stoddard.

As McCracken was both a friend and a member of the Pacific Coast Press Association,[6] Hill wrote a letter of concern to Josephine, which she published in the Santa Cruz Sentinel along with an article urging people to rally around the cause.

[5] On June 29, 1915, McCracken traveled from Santa Cruz, where she had moved after the fire, to attend Ina Coolbrith Day at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.