The Morlands, The Bowman Mine

The Morlands, the Bowman Mine and Other Postcard Memories
© Joanne H. Harris, 2009

We lived in various places. We lived at Art Griswold’s Bowman Mine for a while. Daddy was a partner in the mine. The Bowman was a mine up above French Meadow, and it had been a good mine. But it was a very loose, unstable hill to go through. You had to cap and stall the tunnel: those are the things that support the ceiling, and you had to put boards all the way along.

There was a shaft in there, and a pocket of gold. But the shaft had semi caved in before anybody could get the gold out. So Art told Daddy that if he would go down the shaft and then along the tunnel for a ways, and find the pocket of gold, they would give him a third interest in the mine. So Daddy did it: he went down there and got the gold. Daddy was amazingly agile. When he worked for the fire department, he was a lineman. He could shinny up poles, climb trees. Even so, recovering the gold was an absolutely amazing thing to do. But he was young. He couldn’t have been more than 28 or 29. So this would have been around 1935 0r 1936.

There is a picture of me at the Bowman. I couldn’t be more than two years old. The chronology of when we were where, I just can’t tell you.

Mother told me this story. We were living at the Bowman Mine. A bunch of guys came up to work the mine, which had a stamp mill with three stamps, donkey engine and one of these big belts. That stuff was still there when I was thirteen years old. It was a working mine and in those days they used a lot of cyanide in processing and separating the gold. I guess they still do. Down below the stamp mill about 500 feet was a cyanide pond. It was about twenty feet across when full. It dried up after a while. We kids were always warned, “Stay away from it.” Every now and then you’d find a dead cow down there.

Anyway, Mama was at the mine and these guys wanted her to cook for them. She threw them out and they had to go cook for themselves. She had Audrey, Beverly, me and Fritz, and I guess she had Beverly's brother, Dana, too. Way up on top of the mountain Mattie Morland and her husband, Earl, had a mine. I was in there once. It was amazing. It started with a shaft that went down a couple of hundred feet.

Mattie was six feet tall, a big woman, not fat even slightly. She had heard that about a lone woman with a bunch of kids staying down at the Bowman Mine and decided she’d better come down there and meet her. Now Mother was a tough person, but she came from South Pasadena, a very civilized place. Here comes great, tall Mattie wearing overhauls and carrying a large pistol. She was very primitive looking. She walked about ten miles to introduce herself, visit, and help Mother understand how things were on the mountain.

I don’t remember this at all. This is the story I’ve heard. Mattie decided she would stay overnight. That night Mother put us all to bed and then Mattie climbed in bed with Mother. Mother was shocked. But Mattie wasn’t queer, but there was the children’s bed and the adults’ bed. This was the primitive way: you shared the bed. Mattie was a wonderful woman and my folks were friends with the Morlands until they died thirty years later. They were good people.

Nick Williams built a new board shack on the mountain. We called it a shack because it wasn’t log. He had a log cabin in the old meadow. There was a wonderful spring by it. The water just poured out of the ground, a hundred gallons a minute. He built the new cabin out of sawed boards across the road from the old cabin because the old one was rotting into the ground. He was very proud of his new cabin. It had three rooms and two doors. In back it had a nice outhouse and a barn.

Once when Nick wasn’t there my father and Mother’s brother, Norwin, played a joke. They were always doing juvenile things. They put a sign up front of the shack that said “Public Restrooms.” Daddy put a sign over the front door which said “Women” and a sign sticking out over the side door that said “Men.” This was because the building looked so out of place on the mountain. There wasn’t another one like it on the mountain at that time.

Nick and family came back and found these signs and thought, “Who could have done this?” They decided that the Morlands had done it. So when Mattie had all her clothes hung on the line and she and Earl had gone somewhere, the Williamses snuck up there and tied all Mattie’s clothes in knots. Mattie and Earl reckoned as how – I don’t know who they reckoned as how, but they didn’t think about my folks. It was a good thing because by that time jokes had begun to go around the mountain. My folks kept a low profile. I guess we were living on French Gulch by this time.