California’s Clara Barton

  She was a businesswoman, a landowner, a healer and a founding mother of a wild land that would become California. And she was a Spanish senorita. Juana Briones was the daughter of a ranching and military Spanish family that pioneered what is now San Francisco. She suffered from a poor marriage to an abusing drunkard who fathered her eight children. She left him and learned to survive and prosper--she sold milk and beef to crews of Russian, American and Spanish ships that docked in the