Archie the Pig

One summer we didn’t have a dog, but we had a pig. In East LA Daddy was considered the person to go to when you had problems, legal or otherwise. He had done the income tax for somebody who had a litter of pigs, and they gave us a pig in exchange. The pig was weaned and we built him a little pen back by the chicken coop. We put the pig in it and started feeding him. I don’t suppose there was any law against a pig or a cow in the back yard in those days.

It was a boar piglet and we wanted to castrate it. Our next door neighbor, Bill Melford, half German-half Mexican and our good neighbor for years, knew how to castrate pigs and agreed to do it. We got the pig down and held him, and Bill did the job. You’ve heard the expression “scream like a stuck pig.” This pig screamed and screamed. About two days later somebody from the Health Department showed up and said, “We understand you’ve got a pig here. There’s been a complaint about dirt and things like that.”

Mom said, “Well, yeah, we’ve got a little weanling pig.” He went in the back yard and said, “Oh, it’s one little pig and things are very clean.” He looked over the fence. We knew who’d complained. And these people had family members living in old trailers and a shack. He said, “Do people actually live in that stuff back there?” So they may have brought something down on themselves. And Mother was very careful after that to keep the pig area clean.

We named him Archie and this time we took Archie the Pig to Paiute with us. We’d scratched him a lot and he was tame, so we took him up to the cabin and turned him loose. About the second or third night, the coyotes got him cornered on the porch. Lots of hullabaloo there. After that, we couldn’t drive him away from the cabin.

We fed him the day’s scraps, potato skins, bits of onion, things like that. We’d stew ‘em up. Then we had a big bag of mixed grain we’d cook in, and we’d feed it all to the pig. Well, this silly pig. Dinner was always boiling hot and we’d say, “Archie, it’s hot, it’s hot.” But he’d put his nose in there and start eating, screaming because it was burning him. He’d eat his dinner fast and sloppy. The food would go in his mouth and a stream of water would come out one side. It was amazing how he could handle food.

Once somebody gave him a piece of gum. He chewed the gum until it was time to feed him. We fed him and he went through the whole thing. When it was through, he walked by chewing the gum. The ability of a pig to handle food is amazing.

We had running water in the cabin when Archie was there because by that time we’d piped it in from the spring. The sink had about a 20-foot pipe that went out into the yard where the water ran out. Little bits of stuff would come out the pipe sometimes and form a little puddle. The pig would go through the puddle eating what was in it. Then, when he wanted water, he’d stick his snout up the pipe and grunt. It would echo in the deep sink, and somebody had to go give Archie some water. Of course, he had the creek to drink out of. And he loved the equisetum that grew by the creek, boy, he loved that.

Archie was our dog that summer and he would go for walks with us. If we went, he went. If we went to the sawmill, he would follow us. It didn’t matter where we went, Archie would go. And then he got older and heavier. What was amazing was the quickness and agility of that pig, as quick and agile as a cat. He’d play with things, a blanket or something, the way a dog or a cat would. It was just amazing watching him. Once he found a fruit jar lid, just the ring, and he used to carry that around on his nose.

If you sat on the porch, he’d come up and sit on your lap. That was fine when he was little. But he was growing up, and by the end of summer he was about 80 pounds. If you sat in this old chair, built low to the ground, he’d get in your lap. There would be the middle of the pig in your lap but a lot of the pig on both sides.

We had a dutch door going into the cabin which we kept locked. But he’d learned to jiggle it and open it. If we weren’t there he’d see what was around in food. One time he ate a berry pie. And then he got on the couch. This pig was spoiled.

Because he was afraid of the coyotes, you could not leave him home. Going for a ten-mile hike, wandering to this cabin and that cabin, would take all day. As he got bigger, it got hard on him because he was heavy and we weren’t anywhere near water. But he wouldn’t be left behind. If everybody left the cabin, you could not force him to stay there.

We figured he could count to nine or ten. Sometimes there would be four or five of us sitting at the cabin and a lot of company would come up. During the Second World War and at the end of the war my father worked for the Air Force as a civilian, but had lots of military friends. The cabin became the place to go. If you could get Sid to invite you to the cabin… . It was a wonderful place. It had a lot of magic for a lot of people. Anyway, we learned that if we were all going to go some place in the car, if we took off, the pig came galloping after the car. There was no leaving him. So we would have one person climb out the bay window on the east side of the cabin, sneak up the hill to the ditch, to the mine dump, walk along the ditch to the road and be picked up later. After this happened, everybody else left, maybe nine people, then the pig would stay. But if everybody went out that front door, you couldn’t make that pig stay. This happened all the time. If the pig thought that there was someone in the house, he would be content to stay at the cabin.

Archie was destined for the end of the year party. This was after the world war. We had a “closing of the mountain” party on Labor Day. This was the first one. The party was going to be at Art’s place at the Bowman Mine, and the Archie was going to be the guest of honor. The pig had been our pet all summer, so all three of us kids, Audrey, Fritz and I, refused to stay on the mountain. We left a week early. We weren’t going to be there for the barbecue. The pig was duly done in and, scraped, put in a pit and they had a big barbecue.

You know, when you spend your life eating game, shooting animals, having to clean them, things like that, you become a little bit inured, a little hardened to the realities of life. I don’t know if “hardened” is the right word, but you show a strong streak of practicality. So when friends are going down the tubes, being eaten, it’s not such a strange thing.

Even though we weren’t willing to eat part of Archie, we had all done all those things. And you know, the strange thing is, we all hunted all those years. Fritz and I would go out and ambush quail. We got very good at the calls of the quail. We never shot quail before the first of August because the coveys were too young. We wanted the young to be able to survive because that was part of next year’s food. Also, we did not tolerate any predators close to the cabin. If we saw a bobcat or something like that near the cabin, we shot them. So, where it sounds cold blooded, it’s kind of like a farm life. You have to accept the fact that there are different life styles and you learn some of these things.

First Years on Paiute

First Years on Paiute
Copyright Joanne Harris 2009

The year after Walker Basin, 1938, Mom went up on Paiute. We didn’t have any place on the mountain, but she found an old, abandoned cabin. The neighbors said, “Oh, boy, you better leave that alone.” That was the Gherenger Claim. I can’t remember his first name. But people said, “That’s his claim and he doesn’t want people messing with it, even though he hasn’t filed on it recently.”

So my folks talked to him and he said, “Naw, take it, I’m never going to use it again.”

The folks filed on it. It didn't have much of a cabin, fifteen feet by twenty. But we started living there. Daddy wasn’t around very much. Mama decided – you know, she was a natural engineer and I guess she knew what the rest of us didn’t – she decided that she was going to work on the cabin.

It wasn’t in very good shape. The bottom logs were rotting into the ground. I guess Daddy must have fallen the log sized trees, forty- or fifty-feet tall, so she could replace the rotted ones. She borrowed an old white mule and a rock sled from Nick Williams.

A rock sled is a little tiny sled with very heavy slides on it, runners made out of two-by material with tin on the bottoms so they’ll slide. They have a cross piece where you can chain the butt of a log, and then it doesn’t dig into the ground when you drag it. That's how she started dragging in logs.

I don’t suppose I was peeling logs then, because I was pretty young. But Fritz peeled logs. How they did it, I don’t know, but they jacked up the cabin and put new, peeled logs under it. Mama raised the roof, literally. This was her project for years.

When she was at Paiute, she didn’t have any problems she couldn’t handle. So we spent a lot of our time at Paiute.

We had a house in East L.A. and Fritz went to school. I was much younger, and I will always remember Audrey and Fritz being there, and my cousin, Beverly. My mother’s brother, Norwin, had two children, Beverly and Dana. He abandoned them completely. Well, their mother abandoned them too. Beverly lived with us off and on for years and years. Dana lived with us for almost five years. During those years Mom was always working on the cabin and we were playing around.

The cabin was in a place called French Gulch. It had no amenities like running water or electricity. In later years we had the first flush toilet on Paiute Mountain. It was an outhouse built up the hill by the mine tunnel. There was water running out of the mine tunnel, so we put a bucket there and the water ran into the bucket. You flushed the toilet with the water in the bucket because Mom had built a toilet with a 55-gallon septic and about 50 feet of leach line. We used it for years and years.

Mom was always working on the cabin. Mystical. In those years it wasn’t mythical or mystical. It was just where we lived. We played around and as we got older we took longer trips. We’d go walking, Audrey and Beverly and Fritz were older than I. How far we wandered! You know, I don’t ever remember being told to stay home.

Audrey and Fritz and Beverly built themselves a little log cabin down the creek a ways out of logs laid cross ways. It had a door and a roof on it and, of course, this was their play house. But I wanted to play there too. It was, “Oh, Joanne, go back, go back. You’re not welcome. Beat it.” And finally they said, “Look, if we build you a cabin out of boards and rock up on the mine dump, (across the creek and up the road three- or four-hundred yards, oh, maybe not that far, but a long ways away) you’ll stay away from ours.” Some place there’s a piece of paper. My cousin Beverly had a legal mind. She’s the one who wrote it up and we all signed it.

So they built me my cabin, and you can guess what happened. I didn’t want to be up there by myself.

We lived there for years and years and years. I had adventures with the horses. We had to shoot our own meat when we were there, so there was a lot of hunting done. Beverly wasn’t living with us then, but I think by the time I was ten years old I was carrying a gun. The rules were really, really rigid.

I remember one spring when I was around twelve (1946). Ammunition was expensive, but every spring we all got to shoot off two or three shots at some cans across the creek to warm up and sight the guns in. And sight ourselves in. I hit the can and I turned around and yelled, “I got it!” As I turned, the gun fanned across other people. I will never forget that because I was upstairs and in bed and I didn’t get to speak to anybody until next morning. Never, never forgot it. Wonderful lesson.

We had guns in the house. We had a 25.20, which my brother bought about the end of the Second World War with some money he’d saved from a paper route. And we had the 30.30 and we had a 4-10 shotgun. And the 22s came and went. My father had a Colt Woodsman .22 semi-automatic, which was the gun of choice for packing. Those guns always sat there loaded, and we all knew they were loaded. It was never a problem with any of us kids. Never a problem. And if we had an accident with a gun, we never told anybody about it, that’s for damn sure.

My First Days on Paiute

When I was little, two or three years old, around 1937, my mother Esther took my brother Fritz and me and went to live on a ranch that belonged to an old rancher named Nick Williams. I believe my mom did this for reasons of health or sanity. My sister Audrey stayed with friends in the Los Angeles area. Fritz was five years older than me and my sister was a year older than Fritz.

My mother, a capable rider, was supposed to help with Nick's cattle from time to time and we all lived in a small log cabin on a separate section of the main ranch. Our only domestic company in that section was Bubbles, a Hereford bull, and Muffin, our cat. We stayed there for a year. Memories of a child as young as I was are at best vague and sometimes it is difficult to separate what one actually remembers from what one was told. My memories are mostly like post cards, pictures in my mind.

Fritz and I walked to the main ranch most days. Nick had a bone yard there that had several old wagons and a few automobiles, a great place for kids to play. Fritz was responsible for me and I was his only company. I only remember Mom and home and Nick at the ranch. I understood that a man worked at the ranch, and Nick had ten daughters and a son.

Fritz and I wandered all over the place, having our little adventures. One day we came upon a nest of rattlesnakes and Fritz guarded them and made me run home to get Mom to do something about them. She didn't want to come as she was busy sewing on her treadle sewing machine. But I would not stop yelling, so she finally came. I don't remember what happened after that. What was important was that my "message to Garcia" got through.

Nick used to tease me by poking his finger at my face and daring me to bite it. Mom warned me not to bite, but one day when we were at the ranch for dinner (beans) I did bite him. For punishment Mom made me chew and eat three chili tepinas. that was a lesson I can never forget.

I remember once a hog was going to be killed. I guess Mom was going to help scrape it. Fritz and I sat on the top rail of the fence as they dragged the pig -- it looked huge -- into the corral with a rope tied to one hind leg. Have you heard the term "screamed like a stuck pig?" The screaming starts before the pig is killed. They ran a rope through a pulley and suspended the pig in the air. Then they cut its throat and the pig bled out and thus was dead. A large cauldron sat on a fire and they scalded the pig to make the hair come off easier. I guess we all ate pork for a while. 

We ate marrow gut when some animal was slaughtered. The animal is left to stand without food for 24 hours. After it is killed, the small intestine is removed and the liquid in it left to sort of coagulate. Then it is cut into pieces and fried. I can remember how good it tasted.

Joanne Heyser Harris

Introduction to Project

Long ago, well, not all that long ago, say seventy years ago, the Heyser family met Paiute Mountain, in the southern part of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. It lies south of the Kern River Valley. They also met an early rancher, Nick Williams. 

After a few years they filed on the old Gehringer Claim, which had an old cabin,  and renamed it High, Wide and Handsome. The Cabin began to take shape on that claim. Today all that remains of The Cabin is a stone chimney. People who camp at Camp Nick Williams (known as French Meadows in the good old days) call it the Stone House.

Throughout the years many people came to visit, friends of the Heysers, business associates, friends of their children, and The Cabin seemed to exert an almost mythic effect on the people who remembered it in later years. 

The purpose of this blog is to invite people still living who have memories of The Cabin to set them down on paper, well, electronically for now, before there are none to remember and it will be just an old chimney, the Stone House. 

Ken Harris (husband to Joanne Heyser)

(My wife made me write this!)