Paiute People

Paiute People
Copyright Joanne Heyser Harris 2009

I only knew some of the people who were on the mountain from a child’s point of view. I’ve mentioned Louie the Indian. Frank and Jenny King were an old couple. At least, they seemed ancient to me. They lived over on what we called King Creek. Frank did placer mining to keep his claim. And he had about a half acre garden. Once he thought he was going to save time and plough his garden with his horse, Pasco. He got Pasco hitched up and the horse took off over the barbed wire fence, plough and all. I don’t know if Frank ever found all the harness.

Frank was tall, old and thin. He drank a lot. He hunted to keep them in food. The Kings did whatever was necessary to live up there comfortably. There may have been a little bootlegging, but I don’t know. I don’t know if they call it bootlegging if you just do it for your own use, rather than selling it. Jenny was a Swede and had been a nurse during the First World War. She was short and rotund and really, really, really nice. She was always very good to us kids. I never particularly knew Frank one way or another.

Their cabin was very close to Tommy’s cabin, about an eighth of a mile. We were on the same flat. We used to walk back and forth all the time.

Old Nick, as I understand it, was the first white child born in Havilah County, which later became Kern County. In Bakersfield there is either a museum for him or he is in a museum. We used to call him “Ten Daughters Nick,” because he had ten daughters and one son. He called the son “Boy.” There was a lot of talk about who fathered whom and who was really whom. When we knew Nick, Nita Williams was the daughter who was around all the time. She and Mother used to work cattle with Nick. There was another daughter they used to call “Little Bits.”

Nick’s wife had been dead for some years. He had a large ranch in Walker Basin where Mother and I stayed that one year, and he also had a very long meadow, French Meadow, probably about five or six miles long, up on Paiute Mountain. He had a log cabin in that Meadow that he didn’t use any more. We kids used to play in it. Every time we would wander by we would go in it. It kept getting lower and lower to the ground, but it was there for a long time. The cabin had this wonderful spring beside it, maybe a hundred gallons a minute coming right out of the ground. Nick ran his cattle up on Paiute during the summers, and wintered down in Walker Basin.

Nita Williams was my ideal, a genuine cowgirl. They tolerated me. I remember the summer I was seventeen. I and some other people helped brand and castrate some calves. I helped give shots and hold legs. They would rope a calf with a horse and dragged it near the fire. Then, after somebody would throw the calf, I sat on the ground with one foot against and just above the hock of the bottom leg and held the top leg with both hands and leaned back to really keep the legs apart. Then people would knew what they were doing would castrate, brand and earmark the calf, and then let it go. They had a lot of help from people who had never done anything like it before. It was an interesting time.