One summer when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, who knows, around 1950, there was a fire guard up at the Ranger Station. Two people I was googoo over were the fire guard and Nita Williams. The fire guard said he’d love to have some cow horns. I said, “Well, there’s bound to be some around here somewhere. I’ll keep an eye open.”
A little later Mom and I were over at the Kings and I was talking about how I would love to find some cow horns. Frank said he’d heard there was a dead bull up Chilson Creek a ways. Shouldn’t be much more than a mile or so.
So I walked up the canyon, up the creek, but I didn’t come to it. I went back to the cabin and said I couldn’t find it, so Mom said she’d walk up with me. She said maybe I didn’t go far enough. So we walked further up the canyon and, lo and behold, we came to a big bull lying there that had a nice set of horns. We looked at him and then we looked up and about two hundred feet further there was another bull lying there dead. There was blood on its nose, the eyes were still in it and the yellowjackets were just starting to come. There was a little tiny slit in the stomach skin where somebody had been pulling on it. Mother and I looked at each other. We didn’t say a word. We turned around and we took off at the run. Whoever shot that bull was still there. Later on we kidded that we needed to put a notice up at the Post Office. “Whoever shot the bull up in Chilson Canyon, we didn’t see you.”
For a while there was a Post Office at the saw mill when it was active. Anna Horne, Oakley’s wife, was the Post Mistress. Since they went back and forth all the time, it was the Post Office for a few years. And then there was the summer the vegetable truck came up. The guy would come up on one day of the week, say a Thursday. He’d bring the mail and he’d take orders for fresh vegetables. We’d order meat and buy vegetables whenever he came up, so it got to be a place where everybody met. I saw Louie the Indian after not having seen him for years and years down at the vegetable truck.
In fact, that’s where I got the letter that snared Ken Harris. Because Zoanne and I had been up there for a week and a letter came to me from Ken and he said, among other things, “I’m putting it in writing. Will you marry me?” After that he was caught. In those days they had, what did they call it when you begged off after asking someone to marry you? Breach of promise?
We hunted a lot. Most every day somebody went out hunting. Fritz and I used to hunt quail because if you went up to the Squaw Pocket Mine on the edge of the meadow during the day, especially in the morning. Quail would come down from high up in the hills where they nested down to the meadow where they could hide in the grass and get water. We knew enough about the mountain quail calls to know what they were talking about. As they moved down in a covey, you could hear one over here talking and anther over there talking, and you could tell that they were moving along. Now if something spooked them, you could immediately tell that, too. So what we’d do is we’d try to figure out where they were coming down and we’d hide in ambush. As soon as they came in sight, we’d try to shoot two or three, just whatever we needed.
I used to take the .22 and go up to the willows. They had “willow caves.” They’d go back four or five feet and I used to chase them into the caves. I never, ever got a quail that way.
Showing posts with label Nita Williams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nita Williams. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
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.
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.
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