This happened on Paiute Mountain when Joanne was about five years old. Call it 1939. At the time Sid was up on the mountain and working at or had some connection with the sawmill. Possibly Norwin, Esther's brother, was there as well along with his daughter Beverly. Audrey and Bev were probably thirteen at the time.
At the time the cook at the sawmill was a girl in her middle to late teens. Audrey and Bev used to go up to the sawmill because it was another girl, some company. After breakfast was served the cook persuaded Audrey and Bev to go for a walk with her. So off they went for a walk. The girls didn't know that their friend the cook was running away.
In due course the three of them were missed and somehow Esther got word of it. She grabbed Joanne and Fritz, loaded them into the family flivver and went to Nick Williams. Nick asked Esther to wait for a little bit. They had some lunch. Then they drove to where a canyon emptied into Walker Basin. “Now, call to them,” asked Nick.
Audrey adds a few things to this account since she was an actual participant in the adventure. “I was the most timid and didn't want to leave (the sawmill) in the first place, but Beverly wanted to go and they chided me for being a coward, which I was. …
“Beverly always felt that no one wanted her and I think that was why she was so adventurous. She told me later that she was just showing off when she climbed one hundred feet up a big pine tree and swung the top of the tree back and forth... . She needed someone to take notice of her. The other girl was simply bored. I just wanted to go home and be safe.
“The canyon was shaped like a funnel. About halfway down the canyon it was so narrow it was hard to find a place to put our feet...At one spot there were a lot of rocks with the water running down and between them. We had to slide twenty feet down these rocks, which were very steep, once down we could not go back up. Fortunately there were leaves all over the rocks so we slid, not scraped, our way down, but the men following us were not so lucky and they had torn clothes and scratched bottoms from the slide.
“They were very angry and threatened us with having an axe handle broken over our butts.
“When it was nearly dark and we were coming to the desert, I wanted to build a bed by the river so we could sleep near water. We built a little shelter and then the mountain lion started screaming. Then they (Bev and the other girl) finally became scared too, and so we ran down to the desert floor where we met the biggest rattlesnake I have ever seen. By that time the men were close behind us and killed the snake just before Mother called us to the truck, which was parked on a dirt road nearby.”
Joanne adds that Esther called to the girls and they answered. Soon, they materialized out of the brush. Williams knew from the trail they had taken where they would have to come out in Walker Basin, and he didn't even need a global positioning device. Ranching all of your life and seeing the land from the back of a horse gives you a pretty good sense of the lay of the land.
Sid. And possibly Norwin, came out soon after the girls. He had found the tracks of a mountain lion following them. Probably the cat was curious about who was trespassing on his range.
Audrey adds, “I got to see Nick's place and one thing I remember was a huge service area with a long table and on it were large metal bowls with cream and butter in them.They looked so rich to me.
“Driving back to the mountain it was dark and cold. The headlights of the pickup brightened the bottoms of the trees and rocks, the wind blew our hair and faces, and it was silent except for the sound of the car, and the stars were bright and the feeling was eerie to be safe in the dark as the car struggled up the hill. We did not speak.”
Showing posts with label Beverly Austin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Beverly Austin. Show all posts
Friday, December 11, 2009
Friday, February 20, 2009
Frozen Dynamite and Typhoid Fever
Frozen Dynamite and Typhoid Fever
© Joanne Heyser Harris 2008
I recall however one problem building the road over that ditch. There was a tree and a large rock pile in the middle of the ditch. We couldn’t move these rocks. Nobody had a bulldozer, my goodness. So we had to dynamite it. Now Daddy had done a lot of dynamiting. I don’t know where he learned all this stuff, but, you know, at certain things he was really good. As a kid you never think your father’s a very intelligent person, but Father had to be very intelligent in many ways, as I found out in later years.
Howsomever, we needed some dynamite. Who had some dynamite? Art Griswold said that he had two cases of frozen dynamite we could use. But of course, frozen dynamite is exceedingly dangerous. Normally, the way Daddy would do it with proper dynamite, good dynamite, he’d take a cap, which was like a cartridge without a lead pellet in it, he’d cut a piece of fuse and he’d put it into the cap and crimp it so it wouldn’t come out, and then he’d take his knife and bore a hole into the end of the stick of dynamite and push the cap in. That’s how dynamite was armed. Then you would drill a hole in the mine tunnel some place and put the dynamite in. Usually you armed more than one stick at a time, but you kept track of how many you set, maybe five or six. And you lit ‘em and ran out of the tunnel and you called out, “Fire in the hole!” and then you’d count each blast very carefully, all of the blasts. They were timed to go off differently so they didn’t go off in one big blast but boom, boom, boom, boom. You’d know whether they’d all gone off. You didn’t want any hangfires in there. You couldn’t go back in the tunnel. There was no ventilation in there, and the fumes from the tunnel could cause quite a headache. It was twenty-four hours before you could go back into the tunnel.
To make a long story short, they were going to donate these two cases of dynamite. That was a good thing to do with frozen dynamite. But you didn’t cut one of these sticks and put a cap in it. When it's frozen, something in it crystallizes and it's a bomb. You don't necessarily need a cap to set it off. Dropping it might do the job.
What you do is take the fuse, you cap it, and delicately lay it inside the box. Well, here came Frank King and Art Griswold, each with a case of frozen dynamite on his shoulder. They were drunk! They staggered. There was a small crowd, there were probably six of seven people there, and they ran. The men got the dynamite off their shoulders and carefully laid it in among the rocks. The tree was right by the rock pile, because I remember they put one by the tree. They put a long fuse on it and everybody went off a good long distance. But I remember the tree shot straight into the air so fast it left most of its bark behind. It went up, up, up, up, did a cartwheel and came down on the other side of the canyon, probably a sixteenth of a mile away. There were rocks all over the place. The rocks and tree were moved, but there was this big hole in the ground. It took a lot of shoveling, but it was filled up and we had the road into the cabin and didn’t have to go by the Watkins’ and my mother was very happy.
People who live alone in the mountains very often get a thing called Cabin Fever. It’s rarely the men who get the Cabin Fever because they’re usually outside, hunting. They were doing the hunting, they were doing the mining. The women were staying in the cabin cooking, keeping the fire going, stuff like that. So you became desperate for company. Anna Watkins would walk over fairly often and Mother really got tired of seeing her, so we built a little tree house which up by the spring and took turns when it was about the time of day when Anna would show up. One of us would be put up in that tree in a little seat. It wasn’t like a playhouse. It was just seats. We could see up into the meadow, the part of the meadow after it crossed the bridge. We’d see Anna coming and then we’d race down to the house and tell Mama Anna was coming and Mama would pick up a gun and go hunting. And Anna would come and we’d say, “Oh, Mama went hunting and won’t be back.” Mama wanted solitude. She had the kids, the cabin, and she had a lot of hunting to do. That’s the only way we got meat. She kept very busy, and she didn’t want company. That’s one of the things she didn’t want. That was difficult for her. For Anna. Difficult for her, too.
The building of the cabin was my mother’s Life Project, she said. I know now it gave her interest and focus on a project when she was having problems with Daddy, and things – she had had a nervous breakdown. The cabin was her solace and her interest, and she was quite an engineer. She could always figure things out. So the building of the cabin, well, that went on all the years we were there. In the early years they jacked up the cabin and put new logs under it. I guess the first thing that was done after the cabin was functional and we’d moved in, was the Annex. That was a little room to the side that went around part of the front and part of the side. It was kind of like a sloping roof off the other roof.
And this was the summer of ’41, I guess, when my sister came down with typhoid fever. We had a spring. The spring was a good producing spring, but it wasn’t rocked in at all. It was just a hole in the ground. The adults decided that we were going to make a proper spring, that is, dig it out, rock it in. That way we’d keep the cattle out of it. Mom had five kids that summer. Beverly and Dana were there. And we all drank out of the creek for the two weeks that they were doing the spring. What’s amazing is that only my sister got typhoid fever with all of us kids there.
I didn’t know any of this. My mother was afraid that it might be typhoid fever. Audrey was very ill. She had a high fever. Mother kept her in the annex away from us kids and took care of her there. I guess that was the summer we also replaced the roof of the cabin because it was in August and all of the mountaineers said, “take the roof off in August, it never rains in August.” At that particular time Beverly was there and the Paul and Bernie LaGue were there. Audrey was in the back room, because Mom said the only person who was dry was Audrey. She was in the back room in the annex and it didn’t rain in there. Beverly was dry because there was an old piano box she crawled into. Everybody else was just drenched. It just poured that night.
Mother wanted to get a doctor. There was a doctor on the mountain. I can’t remember his name. She asked him to come down and look at Audrey. He didn’t think it was typhoid fever. But Audrey was in bed for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. I remember one time when Daddy came up and she was able to get out of bed and get across the little bridge across the creek by the cabin. And I can see her doing that and running into Daddy’s arms. So she was getting better by then. But when we actually came down from the mountain – she had actually been too sick to move until then – we take our medicines so much for granted nowadays – of course there were no antibiotics – when we got back to town, East L.A., in the fall, Mother took Audrey to the doctor and, yes, she had typhoid fever. And she had to be tested for a year to see if she was a carrier.
© Joanne Heyser Harris 2008
I recall however one problem building the road over that ditch. There was a tree and a large rock pile in the middle of the ditch. We couldn’t move these rocks. Nobody had a bulldozer, my goodness. So we had to dynamite it. Now Daddy had done a lot of dynamiting. I don’t know where he learned all this stuff, but, you know, at certain things he was really good. As a kid you never think your father’s a very intelligent person, but Father had to be very intelligent in many ways, as I found out in later years.
Howsomever, we needed some dynamite. Who had some dynamite? Art Griswold said that he had two cases of frozen dynamite we could use. But of course, frozen dynamite is exceedingly dangerous. Normally, the way Daddy would do it with proper dynamite, good dynamite, he’d take a cap, which was like a cartridge without a lead pellet in it, he’d cut a piece of fuse and he’d put it into the cap and crimp it so it wouldn’t come out, and then he’d take his knife and bore a hole into the end of the stick of dynamite and push the cap in. That’s how dynamite was armed. Then you would drill a hole in the mine tunnel some place and put the dynamite in. Usually you armed more than one stick at a time, but you kept track of how many you set, maybe five or six. And you lit ‘em and ran out of the tunnel and you called out, “Fire in the hole!” and then you’d count each blast very carefully, all of the blasts. They were timed to go off differently so they didn’t go off in one big blast but boom, boom, boom, boom. You’d know whether they’d all gone off. You didn’t want any hangfires in there. You couldn’t go back in the tunnel. There was no ventilation in there, and the fumes from the tunnel could cause quite a headache. It was twenty-four hours before you could go back into the tunnel.
To make a long story short, they were going to donate these two cases of dynamite. That was a good thing to do with frozen dynamite. But you didn’t cut one of these sticks and put a cap in it. When it's frozen, something in it crystallizes and it's a bomb. You don't necessarily need a cap to set it off. Dropping it might do the job.
What you do is take the fuse, you cap it, and delicately lay it inside the box. Well, here came Frank King and Art Griswold, each with a case of frozen dynamite on his shoulder. They were drunk! They staggered. There was a small crowd, there were probably six of seven people there, and they ran. The men got the dynamite off their shoulders and carefully laid it in among the rocks. The tree was right by the rock pile, because I remember they put one by the tree. They put a long fuse on it and everybody went off a good long distance. But I remember the tree shot straight into the air so fast it left most of its bark behind. It went up, up, up, up, did a cartwheel and came down on the other side of the canyon, probably a sixteenth of a mile away. There were rocks all over the place. The rocks and tree were moved, but there was this big hole in the ground. It took a lot of shoveling, but it was filled up and we had the road into the cabin and didn’t have to go by the Watkins’ and my mother was very happy.
People who live alone in the mountains very often get a thing called Cabin Fever. It’s rarely the men who get the Cabin Fever because they’re usually outside, hunting. They were doing the hunting, they were doing the mining. The women were staying in the cabin cooking, keeping the fire going, stuff like that. So you became desperate for company. Anna Watkins would walk over fairly often and Mother really got tired of seeing her, so we built a little tree house which up by the spring and took turns when it was about the time of day when Anna would show up. One of us would be put up in that tree in a little seat. It wasn’t like a playhouse. It was just seats. We could see up into the meadow, the part of the meadow after it crossed the bridge. We’d see Anna coming and then we’d race down to the house and tell Mama Anna was coming and Mama would pick up a gun and go hunting. And Anna would come and we’d say, “Oh, Mama went hunting and won’t be back.” Mama wanted solitude. She had the kids, the cabin, and she had a lot of hunting to do. That’s the only way we got meat. She kept very busy, and she didn’t want company. That’s one of the things she didn’t want. That was difficult for her. For Anna. Difficult for her, too.
The building of the cabin was my mother’s Life Project, she said. I know now it gave her interest and focus on a project when she was having problems with Daddy, and things – she had had a nervous breakdown. The cabin was her solace and her interest, and she was quite an engineer. She could always figure things out. So the building of the cabin, well, that went on all the years we were there. In the early years they jacked up the cabin and put new logs under it. I guess the first thing that was done after the cabin was functional and we’d moved in, was the Annex. That was a little room to the side that went around part of the front and part of the side. It was kind of like a sloping roof off the other roof.
And this was the summer of ’41, I guess, when my sister came down with typhoid fever. We had a spring. The spring was a good producing spring, but it wasn’t rocked in at all. It was just a hole in the ground. The adults decided that we were going to make a proper spring, that is, dig it out, rock it in. That way we’d keep the cattle out of it. Mom had five kids that summer. Beverly and Dana were there. And we all drank out of the creek for the two weeks that they were doing the spring. What’s amazing is that only my sister got typhoid fever with all of us kids there.
I didn’t know any of this. My mother was afraid that it might be typhoid fever. Audrey was very ill. She had a high fever. Mother kept her in the annex away from us kids and took care of her there. I guess that was the summer we also replaced the roof of the cabin because it was in August and all of the mountaineers said, “take the roof off in August, it never rains in August.” At that particular time Beverly was there and the Paul and Bernie LaGue were there. Audrey was in the back room, because Mom said the only person who was dry was Audrey. She was in the back room in the annex and it didn’t rain in there. Beverly was dry because there was an old piano box she crawled into. Everybody else was just drenched. It just poured that night.
Mother wanted to get a doctor. There was a doctor on the mountain. I can’t remember his name. She asked him to come down and look at Audrey. He didn’t think it was typhoid fever. But Audrey was in bed for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. I remember one time when Daddy came up and she was able to get out of bed and get across the little bridge across the creek by the cabin. And I can see her doing that and running into Daddy’s arms. So she was getting better by then. But when we actually came down from the mountain – she had actually been too sick to move until then – we take our medicines so much for granted nowadays – of course there were no antibiotics – when we got back to town, East L.A., in the fall, Mother took Audrey to the doctor and, yes, she had typhoid fever. And she had to be tested for a year to see if she was a carrier.
Monday, January 26, 2009
More Memories at Tommy's Cabin
More Memories at Tommy's Cabin
Copyright Joanne H. Harris, 2008
We lived at Tommy’s cabin for at least a year, as best I remember. Daddy went into partners with Rollie and Oakley Horne at a sawmill on top of the mountain. He’d stay up there for a few days, and then he’d come down and be at the cabin for a few days, and then he’d go back up. That’s right – the sawmill and the girl who ran away! That was around 1939.
I remember very little of this story. We were at that sawmill. My cousin Beverly Austin, was there, too. There was a girl there cooking for the men. She couldn’t have been much older than Audrey and Beverly, and they were eleven or twelve. She decided to run away and took Audrey and Beverly with her. They went down off the side of the mountain, down and down, and nobody could find them. There was a great hue and cry, but they couldn’t be found.
Mother went to Nick’s ranch in Walker Basin because the mountain went down there. My mother told Nick that the girls were lost. She didn’t know at the time that one of them was running away, but she knew when they had left the sawmill. Nick took a look and said, “O.K., we need to leave about 1:00 o’clock.” Mother threw a fit but Nick said, “No, we don’t leave before 1:00 o’clock.”
About 1:00 o’clock they got into his car and he drove up into a canyon at the bottom of the mountain. He got out and said, “Now, you call.” My mother yelled for Audrey and Beverly and they answered. Nick really knew the mountain. Apparently, canyons being what they are and uphill being very steep, people funneled into this area. So that’s how Nick found them. The girl had been running away and took Audrey and Beverly with her. It was a very primitive place, a very primitive place.
Beverly had to have been with us when we were living at Tommy’s cabin. I remember Audrey and Beverly made me a dollhouse out of a box a foot-and-a-half square and about ten inches high. They took the box lids, the parts that folded down, and slotted them into the box to make rooms. Then they took sticks and made a closet. (I’ve never forgotten this because I always figured I was going to make something like this for a kid.) They cut out clothes and stuck them to the coat hangers and cut out paper dolls and put them in the doll house. It was an amazing little thing.
We thought we were having fun. We didn’t know we were poor. I never in my life thought we were poor folks.
Copyright Joanne H. Harris, 2008
We lived at Tommy’s cabin for at least a year, as best I remember. Daddy went into partners with Rollie and Oakley Horne at a sawmill on top of the mountain. He’d stay up there for a few days, and then he’d come down and be at the cabin for a few days, and then he’d go back up. That’s right – the sawmill and the girl who ran away! That was around 1939.
I remember very little of this story. We were at that sawmill. My cousin Beverly Austin, was there, too. There was a girl there cooking for the men. She couldn’t have been much older than Audrey and Beverly, and they were eleven or twelve. She decided to run away and took Audrey and Beverly with her. They went down off the side of the mountain, down and down, and nobody could find them. There was a great hue and cry, but they couldn’t be found.
Mother went to Nick’s ranch in Walker Basin because the mountain went down there. My mother told Nick that the girls were lost. She didn’t know at the time that one of them was running away, but she knew when they had left the sawmill. Nick took a look and said, “O.K., we need to leave about 1:00 o’clock.” Mother threw a fit but Nick said, “No, we don’t leave before 1:00 o’clock.”
About 1:00 o’clock they got into his car and he drove up into a canyon at the bottom of the mountain. He got out and said, “Now, you call.” My mother yelled for Audrey and Beverly and they answered. Nick really knew the mountain. Apparently, canyons being what they are and uphill being very steep, people funneled into this area. So that’s how Nick found them. The girl had been running away and took Audrey and Beverly with her. It was a very primitive place, a very primitive place.
Beverly had to have been with us when we were living at Tommy’s cabin. I remember Audrey and Beverly made me a dollhouse out of a box a foot-and-a-half square and about ten inches high. They took the box lids, the parts that folded down, and slotted them into the box to make rooms. Then they took sticks and made a closet. (I’ve never forgotten this because I always figured I was going to make something like this for a kid.) They cut out clothes and stuck them to the coat hangers and cut out paper dolls and put them in the doll house. It was an amazing little thing.
We thought we were having fun. We didn’t know we were poor. I never in my life thought we were poor folks.
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