Even More Paiute People

The John Weiss and Earl and Mattie Morelands lived up on top of the mountain, about 6000 feet where the firs grew. I don’t know anything about their background. Weiss had a small cabin, tightly chinked, a really good cabin. The Morelands had a bigger cabin and even had a bunkhouse and a barn. They had the Lone Star Mine, I believe it was, and worked it for years. A shaft went down 200 feet with stopes going off here and there. Daddy and I got to go down there once.

Herb and Irma Gorman were up there for years and years. They lived in the Claraville flat area. Claraville was an interesting area because there was a public meadow there, something like twenty acres. It had been kind of a city back in gold rush days. There was one little cabin there, known as the Recorder’s Shack, the oldest cabin in the Claraville area. It was made out of squared logs. When Mother built the fireplace at our cabin, the mantle log came from the Recorder’s Shack. My brother carved “Blessed by that spot where cheerful guests retire, to pause from toil and trim their evening fire” on it, a few letters at a time. Fritz was good at carving. My mother always liked the quote, she said, because it showed that guests were supposed to work.

Also we lived in a comparatively big cabin that was rotting into the ground that for a while, Tip Fulton’s old place. Now there was another real character. I wish I could remember what Tip did for a living. Everybody was supposed to be a miner because that’s the only way they could hold their claims. There was very little private property other than Nick’s meadow up there. I don’t know if any of the claims had ever been patented. I suppose a few had way in the past.

A lot of people lived in this old cabin through the years. It was abandoned, but had board floors. I think it had two rooms and an old stove. It had what you needed. And it had an old outhouse back a ways from it. So a person could move in and be sort of comfortable.

Kelso Creek wasn’t more than three- or four-hundred feet from the Claraville Meadow. You couldn’t drink out of it, but you could use the water for cooking and other things. Also, the Claraville Meadow had a wonderful spring that had been rocked in so the livestock couldn’t drink out it, but could drank out of the overflow instead. That’s where we got water for that cabin.

I don’t think Tip was married in the early days, but he got married some time when I was young. Tip liked to tell stories. He was famous for talking about the time the pigs ate Little Nevy, and how it rained for forty days and forty nights. And it was either he or his father got bit by a rattlesnake and he sucked the venom to “keep the pizen from gettin’ to his heart.” Tip was kind of a gossip and scandal monger, according to my folks. He had a lot of stories.

Later on, when we lived over on French Gulch, Tip owned a cow. Every day in the evening we kids would walk over to Tip’s place, probably a couple miles, to get a half gallon of milk. We had milk all that summer.

I actually don’t know the background of these people very much because I saw them through a child’s eyes.

Copyright Joanne Harris 2009