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.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
The wedding Night
Some who read this might have an expectation of a virtual night of debauchery, however as sad it is to dissapoint you certain realities must be observed.
Laurie, my daughter was married to a nice young man in a pleasant cermony in Woodland Hills, California. She was married under a canopy in a jewish ceramony where a small glass is stomped and then everyone cheers.
The ceramony screamed for a song called Sunrise, Sunset, but that was not to be. The young couple did not have much money as is true of most young couples so they decided to have their hoeymoon on the mountain. It was late in the summer and though at that time in the city the temperature is blessed, on the mountain it is more like the beginning of a small curse.
After the fun, the couple drive most of the night to the mountain and when they arrived on top of the Harris grade it was cold, dark and very windy, icey, cold, windy to be exact. While it is true that cities have road signs here and there, on the mountain there are no signs. There is only one road on the Paiutes, the rest is driveways varying from one thousand feet to five miles in length.
Naturally they passed the drive way to the High Wide and Handosme claim, our cabin, and became lost in the dark. As much in love as they were at this time, tempers were getting short, they were cold and hungry and wished they had stayed home.
Finaly they saw something they recognized at the side of the road, it was the ranger's station closed of course for the rest of the year. The small cabin was locked and the only thing they could get into was the two seater outhouse. Most outhouses are full of spaces to help them to smell better and this one was no exception. They discussed their situation thoughtfully but could not decide weather it was better to sit and cuddle or to walk back and forth, one on the floor, the other across the two seats.
They spent the entire night arguing as to which was the best idea, it was Laurie who wished to cuddle. The wind howling through the boards was cold, it was dark and smelly and each did his thing to keep warm, Lauire huddled in a corner while her new love paced back and forth mumbling unkind things about life in general.
As much as I and others love the mountain it can be cruel, especially to newcomers. Actually they were lucky to find any shelter at all and it made the rest of the marriage some what more tolerable.
A few years before I and my love arrived at the cabin at about ten oclock at night to spend a pleasant weekend. It was alright in the car but when we opened the car door to go inside the cabin the cold took our breath away. We only had to walk about twenty feet to get to the cabin door, but that is a long way when you are freezing to death. Bye the time we got to the door our hands were numb and getting the key out of my pocket was difficult because I could not feel anything, but getting the key into the lock was really difficult.
I could hold onto the door knob alright but getting the key into the lock took a long time, a period long enough to die of cold. The shaking became worse and worse and getting the key into the lock became more and more difficult. It was actually a race against time. But we did get in. To light a match to start a fire could not be done so we went straight to bed taking with us part of a turkey we had brough along.
We finaly got warm and munched on our turkey drum sticks and life got better as we drifted off to sleep.
At this time life stopped getting better for I woke up feeling something crawling on me, lots of somethings in fact. I reached for a flash light and saw the bed, sheets and our bodies covered with the largest ants I have ever seen, almost an inch long each. There were millions of them. I did a little screaming and my husband did a great deal of screaming as we leaped out of bed. But wwe did survive and that was that.
It is best to leave the mountain to the mountain lions and coyotes during the fall and winter months.
Laurie, my daughter was married to a nice young man in a pleasant cermony in Woodland Hills, California. She was married under a canopy in a jewish ceramony where a small glass is stomped and then everyone cheers.
The ceramony screamed for a song called Sunrise, Sunset, but that was not to be. The young couple did not have much money as is true of most young couples so they decided to have their hoeymoon on the mountain. It was late in the summer and though at that time in the city the temperature is blessed, on the mountain it is more like the beginning of a small curse.
After the fun, the couple drive most of the night to the mountain and when they arrived on top of the Harris grade it was cold, dark and very windy, icey, cold, windy to be exact. While it is true that cities have road signs here and there, on the mountain there are no signs. There is only one road on the Paiutes, the rest is driveways varying from one thousand feet to five miles in length.
Naturally they passed the drive way to the High Wide and Handosme claim, our cabin, and became lost in the dark. As much in love as they were at this time, tempers were getting short, they were cold and hungry and wished they had stayed home.
Finaly they saw something they recognized at the side of the road, it was the ranger's station closed of course for the rest of the year. The small cabin was locked and the only thing they could get into was the two seater outhouse. Most outhouses are full of spaces to help them to smell better and this one was no exception. They discussed their situation thoughtfully but could not decide weather it was better to sit and cuddle or to walk back and forth, one on the floor, the other across the two seats.
They spent the entire night arguing as to which was the best idea, it was Laurie who wished to cuddle. The wind howling through the boards was cold, it was dark and smelly and each did his thing to keep warm, Lauire huddled in a corner while her new love paced back and forth mumbling unkind things about life in general.
As much as I and others love the mountain it can be cruel, especially to newcomers. Actually they were lucky to find any shelter at all and it made the rest of the marriage some what more tolerable.
A few years before I and my love arrived at the cabin at about ten oclock at night to spend a pleasant weekend. It was alright in the car but when we opened the car door to go inside the cabin the cold took our breath away. We only had to walk about twenty feet to get to the cabin door, but that is a long way when you are freezing to death. Bye the time we got to the door our hands were numb and getting the key out of my pocket was difficult because I could not feel anything, but getting the key into the lock was really difficult.
I could hold onto the door knob alright but getting the key into the lock took a long time, a period long enough to die of cold. The shaking became worse and worse and getting the key into the lock became more and more difficult. It was actually a race against time. But we did get in. To light a match to start a fire could not be done so we went straight to bed taking with us part of a turkey we had brough along.
We finaly got warm and munched on our turkey drum sticks and life got better as we drifted off to sleep.
At this time life stopped getting better for I woke up feeling something crawling on me, lots of somethings in fact. I reached for a flash light and saw the bed, sheets and our bodies covered with the largest ants I have ever seen, almost an inch long each. There were millions of them. I did a little screaming and my husband did a great deal of screaming as we leaped out of bed. But wwe did survive and that was that.
It is best to leave the mountain to the mountain lions and coyotes during the fall and winter months.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
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.
© 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.
Monday, January 26, 2009
A Little Game of Poker, Mountainstyle
A Little Game of Poker, Mountainstyle
Copyright Andrea Heyser 2009
The evolution of life on this planet has been a wondrous thing, for some of the developments found in life forms, including people, appear to be miracles. For example, life on the mountain is at times very quiet and others extremely frightening. Sometimes one and sometimes the other. But nature has been very kind to us in that after a frightening period and a period of quiet five hundred new genes turn on and repair all the existing proteins in our cells leaving us healthier than before. This does not happen at anyother time.
This has been so ingrained into us for over four hundred million years that to not have stress-and-then-quiet at times is damaging to our minds and bodies.
As an interesting aside, this stress-and-then-quiet routine can make people and other animals fall in love. I used to know a test pilot who told me that he could make any woman go to bed with him in just an hour or two. He described it thus. " I take her for a ride in my little sports car, and at a certain spot I go very fast and scare her half to death, then I stop and we get out of the car and lie down and I hold her and tell her how sorry I am and then we rest. After that it is easy." Look also at the greatest love of all, that of one soldier for another during battle. Look at mating rituals where animals meet, play and rest and then mate.
So strong is this need for unrest and then rest that when we have too much of one and not enough of the other our bodies and minds are uncomfortable until we change our behavior and comply with nature.
That brings me to the mountain. There can be so much rest that we feel as though we will go mad with BOREDOM! Some times on the mountain it is so peaceful we think we will actually die of boredom. We walk for miles to trade cheap novels, cowboy novels, and it does not take long until you are reading them twice. We associate with people we would avoid down below and feel grateful for their company. We would give people unrest cures, you should see the cabin we T P ed. Not the outside, but the inside, a joy to behold, we would hold satanic rituals, but finally all is lost and we have to do something new.
Enter the poker game played Paiute style.
An ordinary poker game would not suffice, it had to be special. So we would pick up a deck of cards and a few other things and head up the dusty road to French Meadow. We would crawl under the fence and go onto the grass which is about a foot and a half deep and rolling in a gentle wind. We would pick a spot in the center, under a bright blue sky, surrounded by cattle and the whispering sound coming from the trees when the wind rubs the needles together, and sit in a tight circle.
Next we would prepare our space by each placing a weapon in front of us on the grass. I always used the colt woodsman, fully loaded, Kampe would have one of his old military rifles in front of him, Fritz had a Bowie knife unsheathed in front of him and I think some one had a hatchet or an ax. And we would sit under the summer sky with the cows about us, eyeing us suspiciously and we cheated outrageously. We threatened each other, accused one and all of various crimes, laughed and joked and in general played like children everywhere.
We, the Heyser gang, knew how to have fun. The adults also played poker, but in the house with a kerosene lamp in front of the fireplace.
I remember one game in particular. The adults were playing as we children sat in front of the fire.
Joanne was as usual planning to rustle one of Nick's cows. She spent the whole summer on this project. But when she finally got a steer down in the place where she planned to kill it and she also had the proper ropes to hang it, mother refused to let her do it. She bawled for the whole next day, saying over and over, "I want to rustle a cow." She was only twelve at that time.
Anyway, all was quiet, each with our own thoughts when I noticed one of the men reaching down to his ankle from time to time. Suddenly with a loud scream he jumped up from the table nearly knocking it down and shouted "My God, something is crawling up my leg!" At this he ran for the door while the rest of us watched with astonishment. I grabbed a flash light and we all ran out to see a huge beetle crawling on the ground. The men argued for some time on how to kill it, and finally my father got his colt woodsman out and shot it. This beetle was about three inches long and had big horns on it. I don't want to run into any of these again.
All in all, however if this story should be read by the man who had the beetle crawling up his leg I wish to thank him for the many chuckles I have had over the incident, as over the years he has made a Heyser girl very happy.
Copyright Andrea Heyser 2009
The evolution of life on this planet has been a wondrous thing, for some of the developments found in life forms, including people, appear to be miracles. For example, life on the mountain is at times very quiet and others extremely frightening. Sometimes one and sometimes the other. But nature has been very kind to us in that after a frightening period and a period of quiet five hundred new genes turn on and repair all the existing proteins in our cells leaving us healthier than before. This does not happen at anyother time.
This has been so ingrained into us for over four hundred million years that to not have stress-and-then-quiet at times is damaging to our minds and bodies.
As an interesting aside, this stress-and-then-quiet routine can make people and other animals fall in love. I used to know a test pilot who told me that he could make any woman go to bed with him in just an hour or two. He described it thus. " I take her for a ride in my little sports car, and at a certain spot I go very fast and scare her half to death, then I stop and we get out of the car and lie down and I hold her and tell her how sorry I am and then we rest. After that it is easy." Look also at the greatest love of all, that of one soldier for another during battle. Look at mating rituals where animals meet, play and rest and then mate.
So strong is this need for unrest and then rest that when we have too much of one and not enough of the other our bodies and minds are uncomfortable until we change our behavior and comply with nature.
That brings me to the mountain. There can be so much rest that we feel as though we will go mad with BOREDOM! Some times on the mountain it is so peaceful we think we will actually die of boredom. We walk for miles to trade cheap novels, cowboy novels, and it does not take long until you are reading them twice. We associate with people we would avoid down below and feel grateful for their company. We would give people unrest cures, you should see the cabin we T P ed. Not the outside, but the inside, a joy to behold, we would hold satanic rituals, but finally all is lost and we have to do something new.
Enter the poker game played Paiute style.
An ordinary poker game would not suffice, it had to be special. So we would pick up a deck of cards and a few other things and head up the dusty road to French Meadow. We would crawl under the fence and go onto the grass which is about a foot and a half deep and rolling in a gentle wind. We would pick a spot in the center, under a bright blue sky, surrounded by cattle and the whispering sound coming from the trees when the wind rubs the needles together, and sit in a tight circle.
Next we would prepare our space by each placing a weapon in front of us on the grass. I always used the colt woodsman, fully loaded, Kampe would have one of his old military rifles in front of him, Fritz had a Bowie knife unsheathed in front of him and I think some one had a hatchet or an ax. And we would sit under the summer sky with the cows about us, eyeing us suspiciously and we cheated outrageously. We threatened each other, accused one and all of various crimes, laughed and joked and in general played like children everywhere.
We, the Heyser gang, knew how to have fun. The adults also played poker, but in the house with a kerosene lamp in front of the fireplace.
I remember one game in particular. The adults were playing as we children sat in front of the fire.
Joanne was as usual planning to rustle one of Nick's cows. She spent the whole summer on this project. But when she finally got a steer down in the place where she planned to kill it and she also had the proper ropes to hang it, mother refused to let her do it. She bawled for the whole next day, saying over and over, "I want to rustle a cow." She was only twelve at that time.
Anyway, all was quiet, each with our own thoughts when I noticed one of the men reaching down to his ankle from time to time. Suddenly with a loud scream he jumped up from the table nearly knocking it down and shouted "My God, something is crawling up my leg!" At this he ran for the door while the rest of us watched with astonishment. I grabbed a flash light and we all ran out to see a huge beetle crawling on the ground. The men argued for some time on how to kill it, and finally my father got his colt woodsman out and shot it. This beetle was about three inches long and had big horns on it. I don't want to run into any of these again.
All in all, however if this story should be read by the man who had the beetle crawling up his leg I wish to thank him for the many chuckles I have had over the incident, as over the years he has made a Heyser girl very happy.
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