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.

Tommy Thomson's Cabin

Tommy Thomson's Cabin
Copyright Joanne Harris 2006

Most of the events described here happened around 1937-38, somewhere in there.

I’ve thinking about when we moved to the cabin and when Mother worked on it. The trees burning. There was quite a bit of burning done around the cabin, snags and downed logs, things like that. We couldn’t have been living there at the time.

Once Mother, Daddy, Fritz and I, maybe Audrey, but I don’t remember who else, were working on the cabin. They had been burning and there were places where stumps had been burned out. You know how you can walk on ashes and make patterns in them? I walked into an ash pile where a stump had been and my foot sank into this pile of embers and ashes. I was wearing high top tennis shoes without shoe laces and my foot came up full of coals. Fortunately I was very near the creek. I shrieked and made a mighty leap into the creek. Even so, I had blisters all around my ankle and the upper part of my foot.

We had brought with us a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and a roll of toilet paper that day. Mother smeared my burns with peanut butter and wrapped the foot with toilet paper. There were scars on my foot for a few years. It was not a life-threatening accident and my foot still functioned. The main problem with it was pain.

We must have been staying at Tommy Thomson’s cabin while we were working on ours. Tommy had a cabin over near Frank and Jenny King’s. We stayed there off and on for almost a year. At this stage, I remember this thing and that, but not in order, and now everybody’s dead except my sister Andrea and me. My brother, whom I used to refer to when I wanted to know what was going on, is gone, so I have to rely on my memory and the pictures we have of that era.

We had a few adventures at Tommy’s cabin. That’s where we met Louie Parenti, or “Louie the Indian.” My mother said he was a French-Canadian Indian. But we just called him Louie the Indian. There was no racism in that. He was just one of the mountaineers.

Louie lived straight up the mountain above Tommy’s cabin, about a mile with his pack of wild dogs. In fact, our German Shepherd dog that we had for several years, Mamie, was one of Louie’s pups. So we saw him from time to time.

Once Louie killed a mountain lion. He heard his pack of pups barking, and he went down to see what was what. The pups had treed a lion. The lion was sitting in the tree deciding which pup he was going to eat first, but Louie shot the lion and killed him.

We ate part of that lion. When you live in the mountains and shoot your own food, you don’t always get a deer with a rack of antlers. The trusty hunter doesn’t always come in with a month’s food over his shoulders. You get what you get.

We had a couple of goats when we lived there. Mother had them for milk for us kids, and I can see my uncle, my mother’s brother Norwin Austin, trying to catch them to milk them. In my mind’s eye I see him running and whirling a lasso over his head.

Mother said that if anybody left the door open the goats would run in and jump on the bed and piss. Once she was sitting outside reading a book when somebody drove up. She put the book down and went over to the car and when she turned around, the goat was eating the book. These goats were a lot of fun and a lot of mess. Audrey had to milk them. If I was five, she was eleven. She had to do quite a few things like that.

Once Audrey, Fritz, Beverly and I had been told to “clean up our area,” whatever that area was. Somebody had thrown sweepings into the stove that included a 30.30 cartridge. We were all standing around the stove when the cartridge exploded. It was a tin stove, not cast iron. Little pieces of shrapnel flew and mother got some in her leg. The stove lid flew into the air and lit on my sister’s head. It was exciting. I was the youngest one. I don’t remember if my cousin, Dana Austin, was there, but he would have been just my age.

More about life at Tommy's cabin next week.

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.

A good cowman never eats his own beef

Being as the Paiutes had no electricity we did not have any refrigeration so if you wanted meat you had to go out and kill it unless you brought a meat animal with you.

One such animal was Archy, a pig. Archy was an intelligent animal and he liked nothing better than sitting on the couch in front of the fire eating a pie or two. He was strong and difficult to control. Mother fed him in a dish pan which he would finish in ten seconds or less while easily spitting out the onions from one side of his mouth at the same time spitting out the seeds from the other side. Not one seed or onion landed in the dish pan. It was a thing of wonder to watch.

Wherever we went Archy would follow, it was impossible to sneak out or outrun him, Archy was always with us. Once someone saw us fooling around at the Bella Union flats and told the ranger. The ranger replied "Oh that's just the Heyser kids with the pig and hound." We were well known on the mountain.

One day we went to the sawmill and I was talking to someone when Joanne came running up to me while at the same time I heard some piercing screaming. She said that Archy was surrounded. I ran towards the screams and there was Archy in a corner surrounded by five of the biggest, meanest cats you ever saw. These cats said they were going to beat up Archy and they looked as though they could do it. Of course we saved him for the umpteenth time.

We usually walked over five miles and Archy was good for only about three. He had tiny little feet and after a while they would hurt upon which he would lie down in the middle of the road and start screaming, telling every lion in the area there was to be food tonight. We always had to carry Archy home and it was hard as he was heavy. We would take turns carrying him and were usually exhausted by the time we got home. If we had left him on the road mother would have been very unhappy and I think Archy knew it and so just waited to be carried.

Fritz, my bother, wanted to be a provider and he went out early every morning to find a deer to shoot. He had a good spot on a rock pile right above a deer trail and saw many deer, but each time he set his sights on the animal he would get buck fever just looking at those big brown eyes.

One day he came home frightened. While sitting on his rock he heard a fawn calling in fear and saw it running with a wolf right behind it. The wolf however was not having a good time as it was kayaying and looking behind, and there, slashing and leaping, was a doe, a very angry doe, striking out at the wolf with her cookie cutter hooves.

He said he was afraid the doe would return to take him on next. But not long after that, early in the morning we heard a rifle shot and later home comes Fritz, covered with blood, not his own and on his back was a deer. At last we had meat, if wrapped with the pink coverlet during the day, and hung at night it would have lasted us more than a month.

Alas, the law of the hills destroyed our dreams of steak for supper. In the Paiutes meat is very hard to come by, and every one needs meat up there. People depend on one another, except for the cowboys, and people share everything, even their meat, not out of love for others but because one cannot escape from sharing.

You see, when some one butchers an animal the coyotes come out of nowhere and all night long they howl near the site. Since the cabins are miles apart it does not take a genius to figure out who has meat. The next day the guests start arriving, one by one and two by two, "just to see how we are," they say. It does not take long for the conversation to turn to meat and one must share. To not share could be dangerous. Most of the people we shared with did not give us any meat, but still the law of the hills applies. By the end of the day all we had left was a front quarter, enough for stew for a few days.

Now the cowboys had much the same problem, except they tend to rustle one another's cows. When ever Nick butchered a steer he hung out a thirty year old hide with one leg missing to show the other cowmen he had butchered one of his own. But the hide did have his brand on it, a muleshoe L, so no body said anything, out loud at least.

My mother helped out Nick at times so Nick would give her a little meat from time to time, but mother said it always had worms on it. I asked Nick one time why he killed beef that were not his when he had so many of his own and he said "Youngun, a good cowman never eats his own beef."

With all these little problems people on the mountain still had to associate with one another during the day, but by night with stealth, problems were solved or perhaps exacerbated. No one could live on the mountain without neighbors who would help in an emergency and that included some one who might even be trying to kill you from time to time. Up on the mountain you could not choose your friends, you took what was available.

I recall Jerry, a little weasel like man, who lived in a tiny cabin with one room. It was black from smoke and smelled of urine. One day he showed me a coffee can full of gold. Now Jerry did not have a mine. Mother told me the gold was from our place which he took during the winter when we were gone, from surface ore we had here and there. He used his two dogs to pull the sled of ore until he got hungry and ate them. I guess he had to carry the ore himself after that.

One time I asked Jerry what he ate in the winter and he said he made bread from the cambium layer of pine trees. He would dry it and grind it up and make little cakes with it in a coffee can. I don't know how he lived so long, he got cold and hungry and he said some one tried to kill him by putting something white into his coffee can. I notice however that everyone up on the mountain lives a very long time. It's a place of life, no denying it.

Some idiot gave Jerry another dog but the last time I saw Jerry he told me that Glen had shot it. Jerry had killed Glen's dog accidentally he said. Jerry talked like they were going to kill one another. Both men were dangerous and in a place where they could get away with it. There were a number of feuds on the mountain you must be tired of reading about them. So I won't mention them any more.