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.

Living at French Gulch

Living at French Gulch
Copyright Joanne Harris 2008

By the time I was about eight I begin to remember doing things by myself. We lived on French Gulch, at the bottom of French Meadow but on the other side of the fence. Through the meadow and across an old bridge out another gate of the meadow, you came to John Watkins’ claim. John and Anna Watkins had a cabin there. It was two-story and had three rooms downstairs.

They had an outhouse, a three-holer, and we girls used to have fun in there. We girls would go into there and lock the boys out. There was another boy around, besides my brother. We went in there to talk and you might as well do two things at once. That three-holer was really uptown.

The Watkins mine was called the Squaw Pocket, so they were miners, sort of. Most of the people up there were miners, sort of. I guess the Morlands took it pretty seriously. Art Griswold, who owned the Bowman, actually had another mine also.

Mining had pretty well slowed down. During the Second World War there was no money for mining. It was suspended in many places because of the necessity of taking the people and the money for the war.

Sometimes Dixie Lee Cassidy, Anna Watkins’ granddaughter was there. We’d go over there, my sister and I, and sometimes Beverly, to visit and play.

Anna had a quilting frame. When you weren’t using it you pulled on a pulley and it pulled it up into the ceiling. When you wanted to work on it, you dropped it down and the ladies sat around and quilted. I can remember seeing that. It was an actual quilting party the way they used to be. This would have been in the Forties.

Somehow they had a fawn. We’ve all seen Bambi, and isn’t he sweet. Let me tell you, fawns are vicious. This particular fawn attacked my brother regularly, right up to the time he was a yearling. It didn’t attack the rest of us, just him. It stood up and struck with those really razor sharp hooves. My brother carried a monkey wrench with a missing movable jaw whenever he went over there. When the deer came after him, Fritz hit it between the ears with it with all his might. Then the fawn would leave him alone for a while. People would say, “Well, stop it, deer, don’t do that,” but Fritz always carried his wrench.

The Watkins were neighbors. One of the problems with going to the cabin was you had to drive right by their house to go through the gate, into the meadow, across a bridge and out the other gate to where our cabin was. If you didn’t want them to know you were in – well-- there was no way of getting around it. So Mama set out to build a road that came in another way.

It came out of – what was it? – no, it wasn’t Claraville – Bella Union, that was it --anyhow, the road cut off from there and it followed a fairly natural path. The work was done with shovels. You cleared the brush and moved a few rocks, drove the car back and forth over it, and pretty soon it began to be a track. Then we came around a hill – I can picture the whole thing in my mind – and then went down through a low spot which was on a claim called Grey Squirrel which my father had filed on, besides our claim which was High, Wide and Handsome. Then it came along an old ditch left over from the Gold Rush days. This was a water ditch. The ditch systems were very extensive very quickly after the Gold Rush started. I really don’t remember where this ditch started, but it went along the hill above the cabin and across the mine dump that was there at that cabin. (We didn’t start that mine. We did some work in it because we had to do assessment work.) And then it went along the hill. The road came to the ditch and went along the hill, which was rather a steep hill. You couldn’t have built a road there without this ditch. It was sort of flat and filled, and then when the road got to the dump came down a very steep hill and you could park right at the cabin.