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.

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.