Full blast
The first winter after the ditch came through, the Sugar Bowl ran the way a mine is supposed to run, and for about ten weeks of it everybody in the bowl believed what the newspapers said about it.
It had snowed in February and rained after, and by the first of March of 1897 there was water in Campbell Creek to spare, and the ditch carried it around the mountain and through the tunnel under the road and down onto the bench, and I stood at the giant from daylight to dark with the stream going into the bank like a fire hose into a sand pile. You do not hear anything else when a giant is running. You feel it in your hands and in your teeth, and the bank comes down in slabs, and the gravel goes roaring down the boxes, and when you shut it off at night the silence in the bowl is so large that you can hear the river talking to itself below the bar.
Jesse put it in the paper. Jesse was the Willow Creek correspondent for the Blue Lake Advocate, and nobody would say who he was, and everybody wrote to him anyway. His letter of the eighth of March complained about the weather and the snow on the summit and the farmers who could not get their grain in, and then it had one line for us, set off by itself the way he set off things he wanted you to notice:
"The Sugar Bowl mine is now running in full blast."
Right under it he had another line that I have always liked better. "An occasional traveler passes through this section, notwithstanding the bad shape of the roads and trails. Most of them are seeking 'prosperity' and 'confidence.'" That was the spring after McKinley's election, and the Eureka papers that were for the gold standard were full of prosperity and confidence, and Jesse, who was for silver, did not believe a word of it. He finished that same letter by asking the editor of one of the gold papers why it kept printing the same boiler-plate articles week after week. "In the name of Mark Hanna and the new administration," Jesse wrote, "give us something new." That was Jesse. He could make fun of a man in Eureka and a man in Washington in the same sentence and still find room for the Sugar Bowl.
He also wrote out, in that letter, the arithmetic of gold gravel, and since you will want to understand what the bowl was worth, I will give it to you the way he did. Some camps, he said, consider four cents of gold to the cubic yard a good prospect, if there are sixty or eighty feet of it and a good place to dump the tailings. Other camps want ten cents. A bank only twenty feet deep has to run twelve to twenty cents a yard to pay. The gravel from the New River down to Hoopa ran about forty feet deep, he reckoned, and on one claim they had measured it at seventy-two cents a yard, and thirty-one, and forty-one, and forty-nine. "With gravel beds as extensive as these are and an abundant supply of water," he wrote, "it would seem that it would only be a matter of time until capital to develop them will be forthcoming."
Capital. Water. A place to dump. Those are the three things every mine on the lower Trinity was always short of at least one of, and the Sugar Bowl had water that March, and it had a dump on the bench, and it was short of capital by about a hundred thousand dollars, and for ten weeks none of that mattered.
The same letter said that Frank Hemsted, who managed the government sawmill at Hoopa, had a new double circular saw coming in, and that old George Hemsted, a veteran of the late war, had been granted a pension of twelve dollars a month. I had sawed for the Hemsteds when I first came over the summit, and I went up to Hoopa the next Sunday to congratulate the old man, and he said twelve dollars a month was a fair price for a leg he had not been using anyway. That was the Hemsteds.
In the last week of April, in the middle of all that water, I left the giant for two days to drive a wagon to Arcata.
Old Thomas Brett had died. He was John and Tom Brett's father, an Irishman from County Clare, and he had come to the Trinity in 1865 as a private soldier, the way the soldiers I had danced beside at Fort Gaston in ninety-one had come, only thirty years earlier and when the country was not settled. "He first came to this county in 1865 as a soldier in Company B, California Volunteers, stationed at Fort Gaston, where he stayed 13 months," the Advocate said. "He was a native of County Clare, Ireland, aged 69 years, and leaves to mourn his loss three children, Mrs. H. B. Waterman, John and Thomas Brett, and seven grand children." He had been sick all winter, and he died at home at one in the afternoon, and the family wanted him buried at Arcata, where his wife's people were. So the Bretts loaded him in the first wagon, and I drove the second with the family, two days over the summit on the road I had helped build, with the snow still in the shade on top.
I thought on that drive about what the old man had seen. He had come up a trail to a valley that was the Hupa's and the soldiers', with nothing on the river but Bussell's and Foote's and the Kidds, and he had lived to see a road, and a store, and his son married in Brown's Hall, and now a doctor's ditch running through a tunnel under the county road to a giant on the Sugar Bowl bench. He went out of it just as it stopped being his. When I got back to the bowl on the third day the giant was still running, John Douglas was on the nozzle in my place, and the bank had come down in a slab the size of a house while I was gone, and he said it had not needed me at all.
Dry
It did not last. By June the creek was dropping, and by August there was not enough water in the ditch to wet the boxes, and the giant sat on its swivel with a gunny sack tied over the nozzle to keep the wasps out.
In September John Douglas went out to Blue Lake for the winter's supplies, and the Advocate took down what he said, and it is the best thing anybody ever wrote about him in three lines:
"Mr. John Douglas, who has the distinction of possessing one of the prettiest little farms in Humboldt county, known as Sugar Bowl near Hoopa, came down to Blue Lake this week after a load of supplies and provisions for the coming winter. The gentleman reports everything in his section running along smoothly. The Sugar Bowl mine, the property of Dr. C. A. Curl and several others, is not being operated just now for lack of water. Mr. Douglas, who is a close observer, does not remember having seen the Trinity river so low as it is at present."
A close observer. He was. He had been on that river nineteen years, and he went down to the bar every evening of that summer and looked at it, the way some men look at a sick horse, and the river kept going down. You could walk out on rock that summer that had not been dry since before the Hupa had names for it. John Douglas walked out on it and looked at the gravel in the cracks and did not say anything, and came back up to the house, and Mrs. Douglas asked him what the river was doing, and he said, "Going to Hoopa."
That fall the bowl changed hands the first time. In October Dr. Curl bought out Fred Weltie, and a man named J. W. Humphreys bought out John Fricker, the one whose cabin had burned in January and who had run his own ashes through the sluice to get his money back. Fricker went over the divide to the New River and I never saw him again. Humphreys came down the river with his family to take charge.
And across the Trinity, up toward China Flat, all that fall the other company was finishing its ditch. That was the Trophy, which until that spring had been called the Dungan company, after Thomas Dungan who had held the ground for years and finally found Ferndale money to work it. Dungan was the best storyteller on the river. Two summers before, he had come into Blue Lake with forty-one boxes of the finest peaches ever grown on the lower Trinity, out of the Hemsted orchard, and had told the Advocate about the deer hunt that he and Henry Carpenter and Charlie Beebe and a man named Brown had made at the head of Campbell Creek. They killed one deer the first morning and went out after dinner in four directions to scout for more, and one of them looked back from a hill and saw a great deal of smoke where the camp had been. A burning tree had fallen on it. Blankets, grub, everything but the saddles. "They claim to be good Christians," Dungan said, "but a whole lot of cursing was done." And the lesson he drew from it was printed in the paper for the whole county to admire: that if a man wants to be sure of getting a deer, he should go "all alone by himself."
So it did not surprise anybody on the river when, in October of 1897, Thomas Dungan came home from Eureka and Ferndale with a new rifle and told the Advocate what it was for:
"The gentleman had a brand-new rifle along, which he says will be used to protect the gold that is soon to be realized from the Trophy mine at Willow Creek."
I saw that rifle. It was a beautiful thing. Dungan showed it to everybody at the Willow Creek store and let the boys work the lever, and when somebody asked him who he expected to shoot, he said, "The first man who doubts me." The Trophy was to turn two giants loose that November. What became of the Trophy's gold, and the rifle had not much to protect, I had from Wick Kessel, a Ferndale boy who came up with the Dungans that summer and dug on their ditch and washed the prospect pans, and who told it to me on the hotel porch at Willow Creek more times than I can count.
The Trophy ditch was the best ditch ever cut on the lower Trinity, and I say that as a man who dug the Sugar Bowl's. Four and a half feet on the bottom and two feet deep, cut through bench land that never once caved, on a grade of an eighth of an inch to the rod. Its head was a dam twelve feet high on the other Campbell Creek, the one that comes down to the Trinity below the South Fork, and from there a thousand feet of flume ran to a penstock, and from the penstock seven hundred feet of twenty-two-inch double-riveted steel pipe dropped a hundred feet into the canyon, crossed the creek on a truss bridge and climbed the other side with fourteen feet of pressure to spare. Dungan filed on three thousand inches of Campbell Creek and six hundred of Four Mile and more besides. Three thousand five hundred inches of water on a mountainside where nobody had ever had any. We had six hundred on paper and forty-three for the farm.
The ground was good. That was never the question. Wick washed the pans himself and got eight to fifteen cents a yard all over the bench. And the first winter the Ferndale men voted the clean-up highly satisfactory and raised everybody's wages. But the giant stripped the gravel to the bedrock and moved on, because the company wanted yardage, and the bedrock was never creviced, and there were no under-currents to catch the fine gold, so the fine gold went over the riffles and down the flume into the Trinity. "The condition of the bedrock, after an imaginary clean-up was made, is ominous," a Times man wrote when he walked the Trophy in 1900, "and I am satisfied that a little patient 'crevicing' would be well rewarded. A wretchedly bad oversight was the failure to use under-currents." Wick said he told the foreman about the under-currents in the spring of ninety-eight and was told to mind his boxes. "Ominous," Wick said. "That's a Times word for it. I'd have said 'thrown in the river.'"
Jack Adams had the controlling interest by the spring of ninety-nine, and he did not run the Trophy that season. He put five or six men to moving the sluice boxes about a quarter of a mile further north, where the company understood "some good paying gravel is known to exist," and he meant to move the building after them and extend the ditch over the summer, to be fixed up in good shape for the next season's run. Jimmy Henderson did the cooking and the carpenter work for that crew. The China Flat man wrote that in both lines Jimmy was "up-to date," and that he was not so long as some men but appeared to have increased in stature lately, the cause being a fifteen-pound boy arrived at his house. Wick said a quarter of a mile was a long way to carry the same mistake. Jimmy said it was no distance at all to carry a baby.
So the Trophy had the water we never had and threw the gold away, and the Sugar Bowl had the gold and never had the water, and between us we proved what Jesse had said in the spring: capital, water and a place to dump, and every mine on that river was short at least one.
The in-laws
The Humphreyses were a family, and that changed the bowl more than the water ever did.
J. W. Humphreys was past sixty, a placer man from Coffee Creek, careful and plain, the kind who wrote everything down. His wife was a good woman who sat on the Douglas veranda in the evenings with Mrs. Douglas, and the two of them could talk for an hour about nothing I could follow and both get up satisfied. Their daughter Helen was grown and came and went. And there was George, G. W. Humphreys, J. W.'s son or nephew, I was never sure which, who did the mine's business in town. It was George who went into Blue Lake in the spring of 1898 and told the Advocate who owned the Sugar Bowl:
"At present the company, composed of Dr. C. A. Curl, J. W. and G. W. Humphreys, own three claims and the water is brought there from Campbell creek. A giant No. 1 is used there."
And it was George, that July, who went out to take the steamer Orizaba to San Francisco, to spend two or three months at Benicia "visiting with his sister and brother-in-law, Dr. C. C. Curl and wife, formerly of Hoopa."
I read that in the Advocate at the Willow Creek store and I laughed out loud, because nobody in the bowl had ever said it. The doctor who had dreamed the ditch was married to a Humphreys. When Curl bought out Weltie and Humphreys bought out Fricker the year before, it had not been two strangers buying into a mine. It had been a family closing ranks around its doctor's idea. I asked J. W. about it the next time he came down to the bench. He said, "Well, you didn't think I'd buy into a mine I'd only read about," and went on down the boxes.
George told the paper something else that spring that I have thought about for fifty years. Water was short again, he said, and the run would not be as long as usual. "They intend to extend their water right and will soon commence opening a new cut in the low bar where the gravel is supposed to contain considerable gold."
The low bar. John Douglas's bar, the Horseshoe. Every owner of that mine came around to the low bar sooner or later, and every one of them found the same thing: a bar at river level has no place to put what you wash off it. We cut into the edge of it that summer, in the low water, and the tailings ran straight back into the river, and the first rise of the winter came up over the cut and filled it with sand. I said something about it to J. W., and he said, "Supposed to contain. That's what George said. Supposed to." He did not blame George. He did not blame anybody. He wrote it down.
That same May the Advocate printed a paragraph about the whole river, and the bowl was in it, and I have always thought it was the proudest the Sugar Bowl ever got in print. "From Hoopa Valley to the mouth of New River is one extensive and continuous bed of gold bearing gravel. The Sugar Bowl mining company, just above the reservation line, has been successfully worked now for two years, thus proving that the pay gravel does not deminish as the river nears the Klamath." Thus proving. We were the proof. The farthest mine down the river, the last one before the reservation line, and the paper held us up to the whole county as the evidence that the gravel was as good at the bottom of the Trinity as at the top. "Prosperity is coming to the residents of the Trinity sections via the gold dust route at last." J. W. cut it out and pinned it on the wall of the tool house, and it stayed there, going yellow, until the Humphreyses left, and he took it down and folded it and put it in his coat. The same column said May Day had been celebrated by a ball at Moston's Hall at China Flat, with supper at the hotel and an unusually good time. I was there too. Being the proof did not get you out of dancing.
Watermelons
That was the summer of the watermelons.
John Douglas had always grown melons on the flat below the house, where the forty-three inches of ditch water reached, but that year he planted half an acre of them, and they came on in August like cannonballs. In September he told the Advocate about it, and it is the only time in thirty years I ever knew him to brag:
"He raised a patch of watermelons, which are beauties, and for which he finds a ready market right at home. He sells them to the Indians at 25 cents a piece taken in the field."
Taken in the field. People came over the hill from Hoopa in the evenings, Hupa families, the men and the women and a great many children, and went down the rows with Mrs. Douglas or with Alice, and thumped them, and argued about them, and picked the ones they wanted, and paid their quarters, and carried them home up the trail in their arms or two at a time in a blanket between two boys. John Douglas stood at the end of the patch with a tin can for the quarters and talked with the men about the river and the salmon run and who was sick at the agency, and the children ate the ripest ones right there in the furrows and spat the seeds at each other. Robert, who was ten that year, was in the middle of it. He learned to count money in that melon patch, and he learned some words that his mother did not teach him, and he had friends on the other side of the line all his life.
The Hupa had fished below the bowl and gathered acorns on its rim long before any Campbell ran hogs there or any Douglas planted a melon. The bowl sat right on the line, and the line was an argument that the government had made and the Hupa had not, and there were men on the river who never let you forget which side of it they were on. John Douglas was not one of them. He sold melons. Twenty-five cents, taken in the field.
The white cable
I was not in the bowl that whole year of 1898 and into ninety-nine, and I should tell you where I was, because it bears on everything after.
In December of 1897 a company of Fortuna and Ferndale men organized to work a hundred and sixty acres of gravel across the Trinity from the mouth of the South Fork, ten miles up the river from the bowl, and called it the Springville. Their superintendent was a Fortuna man named Clarence White, a careful, kind, worried man, and he came up over the summit that December with two hundred pounds of blasting powder under the wagon seat and a boy from Fortuna named Ansel Vasko beside him. Ben Sears packed in a No. 1 giant for them, four hundred pounds of it, and the Advocate said they meant to bring water four miles in a ditch from Horse Linto creek, "one-half mile of which is already built." White needed a man who could hold a grade and shoot powder, and the Sugar Bowl had no water that winter to speak of, and J. W. said go, so I went.
There was no bridge over the Trinity anywhere between Willow Creek and Burnt Ranch, so White strung a steel cable across the river from a big fir on the claim side to a dead pine on the road side, sixty feet above the winter water, and hung a box on it with an iron sheave at each corner and a rope to pull yourself across. Ansel Vasko ran it, because he was the lightest and the most afraid of it, which White said was the right combination. The boy crossed it four hundred times that year and never once without looking at the fastenings at both ends. I crossed it as seldom as I could.
It did not rain that winter. "The past winter has been one of the dryest ever known here in 20 years," the Advocate's man at China Flat wrote in April, and said that the Fortuna company would finish its ditch to the Horse Linto creek that summer: "It will be quite a distance and will afford employment to quite a number of men should operations start." Should operations start. That was the whole trouble in four words. We dug on the Horse Linto line all summer, along the face of a mountain that stood up out of the river like the side of a church, with a slide of loose blue rock a quarter of a mile wide in the middle of it, and White walked the line with his hat off and said, "It will be quite a distance," and we went on digging.
The winter of ninety-eight and nine was the other kind. By the middle of January the snow on Berry's summit was so deep it was all an animal or a man could do to wallow through it, and the river came up and stayed up, and every miner on the Trinity was jubilant except us, whose ditch was still half a mile long. On the twentieth of January, a Friday, old Frank Martin came up the road from his place at the mouth of the South Fork to cross on the cable. He was sixty-seven and straight as a mast, an old sailor who had seen every port in the world, and he used the cable because he liked it. He would sit on our side of the river on a Sunday and tell Ansel and me about Valparaiso.
That Friday I was on the claim side, at the bench, and he hailed me from the road side and asked how the river was, and I said high, and he asked was the cable sound, and I said it was. I had looked at the fir end that morning. I had not looked at the pine.
"The fastenings which held the cable gave way at one end," the Advocate's man wrote, "allowing the carriage with its precious burden to drop into the river, which was very high and swift at the time. Mr. Martin clung to the cab but was dead before he could be got out of the water." I will not tell you more of it than that. We got him out. It did not matter. "It seems but another example of fate," the paper said, "that a man, who had followed the sea for years and visited nearly every country and sea-port of any importance on the globe, should be drowned at last when he had given up the sea forever."
They buried him at the Martin place at the mouth of the South Fork. His widow stood at the grave with her children around her, and the youngest girl, dark-eyed and about eight or nine, held her mother's hand and looked at the river the whole time and not at the grave. Her name was Anna. Keep her in mind. I did not know then that she belonged to this story.
White took the cable down himself the next week. He did not ask any of us. Which clamp gave, on which end, I never learned, and I do not think he did either. In April he went home to Fortuna on the same stage as Ansel, and the Springville lay idle with its long line of pipe rusting in the weather, and the papers said a year later that "White and shortage of water caused cessation of operations," and put his name first.
The birthday
I came back down from the Springville job in February with no wages to speak of and no stomach for cables, and J. W. Humphreys put me back on the giant, and Al Douglas, John's younger brother, was in the bowl that winter too, five months of it, helping John start a little mine of his own on the bar. Al told the Advocate in March that the Sugar Bowl, "under the direction of Mr. J. W. Humphreys is paying fairly well," and that John had "also started mining on his place and he seems to meet with encouraging success." Encouraging success was a pickle jar on the kitchen shelf with about two ounces of fine gold in it. John showed it to me more than once. It was the first thing the bowl had ever given him that he had not planted.
And on a Sunday in the middle of March, which was J. W. Humphreys's birthday, I was coming down the trail from the road with the mail when I met a parade.
There were ten of them, seven ladies and three gentlemen, all from the Indian school at Hoopa, the teachers and the matrons and the clerk, and every one of them was carrying something. Baskets with cloths over them. A ham wrapped in a flour sack. A cake in a hatbox. One of the gentlemen had a demijohn on his shoulder and was walking very carefully. They had come over the hill on the reservation trail and down into the bowl, and they asked me if this was the way to Mr. Humphreys's, and they made me promise not to run ahead and tell him. I walked behind them the rest of the way down so I would not be tempted.
The Hoopa correspondent of the Advocate, who signed himself UNO, was one of them, and he wrote it up the next week, and his first sentence is the best description of a mining camp surprise party ever printed in this county:
"A jolly party was seen last Sunday on the trail leading to the Sugar Bowl mine. It consisted of seven ladies and three gentlemen, all employees of the Hoopa school, and each was carrying a basket or a big bundle, and it looked as if they were starting for the Klondike."
The Klondike was in every paper that winter. Every man on the Trinity who could raise the passage money had gone north or wanted to, and here were ten schoolteachers loaded like packers, going the other way, to a mine nobody outside the county had heard of, for a birthday.
J. W. was in the yard in his shirtsleeves when they came around the corner of the house, and I will tell you I had never seen that careful old man surprised, and I never saw it again. He took his hat off. He put it back on. He said, "Well, now," three or four times, and Mrs. Humphreys came out with her hands in her apron and her face as red as the ham, and it came out that she had known all along. They spread the dinner on the long table on the veranda where Mrs. Douglas had fed our ditch crew three years before, and the Douglases came over, all of them, and John Douglas brought a melon he had kept in the cellar since October, which nobody believed until he cut it.
After dinner, UNO wrote, "Mr. Humphreys passed the cigars around to the gentlemen, while the ladies swapped stories." That is true. The ladies' stories were mostly about the agency, and the inspector who was coming, and the new teachers who were expected, a boys' matron from Kansas City and a baker from Dakota. And there was a young man among them I had not met, George Hazlett, who had come that winter as the assistant industrial teacher, a graduate of the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. He sat a little apart and smoked his cigar and listened to everything. When the talk turned to the mine he asked me more good questions about the ditch in ten minutes than the San Francisco experts had asked in two years.
Then J. W. took them down to the bench.
"Later on everybody was shown to the mine," UNO wrote, "and each one armed with a pan and a shovel had lots of fun washing out some fine specimens of the yellow metal."
That part was mine. J. W. said, "Thursby, show them how," and I showed them. Ten pans in the tail of the ditch, ten people in their Sunday clothes crouched at the edge of the water with their skirts and their trouser cuffs getting wet. I showed them how you fill the pan and get it under water and shake it so the heavy settles, and tip it, and wash the light off the lip, and shake it again, and tip it, and how at the end there is a little curve of black sand in the bottom and in the black sand, if you are honest and patient, a few flakes of gold. Most of them got color. The ladies who got color shrieked, and the gentlemen who got color pretended they had expected it. The gentleman with the demijohn got none at all and said it was a swindle. Mr. Hazlett got the best pan of the day, four or five flakes the size of a fingernail paring, and turned it in the light for a long time, and then washed it carefully into a twist of paper and put it in his vest pocket.
I am not going to tell you that I salted that tail race. I am also not going to tell you that I didn't. J. W. Humphreys never knew about it, and the cleanup from the boxes was sitting in a pickle jar of its own in the tool house, where a man walking back from the trail with the mail could have reached it. Read UNO's sentence again. "Fine specimens of the yellow metal." Every word of it is true.
"The participants," UNO finished, "report having had a fine time." They walked back over the hill to Hoopa in the dusk with their empty baskets, singing, and J. W. Humphreys stood in his yard and watched them out of sight and then went in and wrote something in his book. I always wished I knew what.
Sold
That June Mrs. Humphreys and Helen went over to Hoopa to stay with Mrs. Freer for the school's closing exercises, which lasted from half past ten in the morning until late in the evening, with several hundred people come from all over to watch the children recite. Mrs. Humphreys came back and told Mrs. Douglas about it for a week. Hoopa was the bowl's town, more than Willow Creek was. It was closer, and it had a doctor and a store and a church and a post office and a school full of children, and people. A family in the bowl lived facing Hoopa and paid taxes to Willow Creek.
A month before the sale a man came walking up the river from the Hoopa line toward Willow Creek with a notebook, the way X had come in ninety-six, only on foot, and wrote it all up for the Times. He was an old miner himself, fifteen years at it before he came to Humboldt, and he walked the whole river that June and stopped at every house, and at the top of our lane he stopped for a long while and looked down. "The first riverside location after leaving the Hoopa Valley boundary line is that of Mr. Humphries, who owns the Sugar Bowl mine. It is a good property but would be a much greater producer if water for mining could be had in abundance, for the mine is known to be a good one." He found the ditch, which nobody ever finds unless somebody tells them, and followed it along the road to the tunnel, and wrote that it "passes under it through a tunnel a short distance from the point of junction with it of the road to the John Douglas place next above." And then he wrote the sentence that I have kept in my head for fifty years, about the gravel he could see in the road cuts all along the ridge above us. "The time will come when a ditch of fitting capacity will traverse this ridge, for a continued deposit of auriferous gravel is in evidence along miles of the elevated roadway." It was all the way from Willow Creek to the Trophy, he said, at almost the same height, "and it is hardly possible that it will be permitted to remain." I walked him along the ditch that afternoon, as far as the intake, and he looked at our twenty inches of water in a ditch that would have needed two hundred to do what he meant, and he did not say anything, the way a miner does not say anything. He wrote that John Douglas "lays claim to some good mining property, but his chief delight is in looking after the field and market garden products," and that the road out of the bowl, "built in a great measure by himself, winds up the mountain on a graceful grade." A graceful grade. John Douglas was prouder of that than of anything else the papers ever said about him. He said it was the first time anybody had noticed the road.
The Humphreys years ended the next summer, in 1900, when J. W. sold the mine to the Douglas brothers and told the Times that John Douglas could mine for twenty years without disturbing his farm, and in his declining years "lie down and dream that he has a fortune at his very doors, and dream only the solemn truth." It was a notable party that went down to Eureka that July: John Douglas, J. W. and Mrs. Humphreys, Helen, her uncle C. C. Flora, and Al Douglas from Blue Lake. On the twenty-first Humphreys and Charles A. Curl deeded the Sugar Bowl placer claim and the water right to James Henry Douglas and Abner Douglass, and the valuable ditch from Campbell creek, on the other side of the divide that the Hoopa wagon road follows, went with it. I read J. W.'s words to John Douglas on the veranda when the paper came. He said, well, and went out to the melons. The Humphreyses and Flora took the steamer for Dunsmuir, and that was the last I saw of them. What I have never told anybody is that the night before the Humphreyses left, J. W. walked down to the bench alone in the dark, and I was in the tool house, and I heard him out there by the giant for a long time, and then I heard him laugh, just once, the way a man laughs at a joke he has finally understood.
Al Douglas and James Douglas took the mine, and I stayed with them. That winter there was snow on the mountains, and in January of 1901 Al carried a broken piece of the giant out over the summit on his saddle to J. B. Hamilton's shop in Blue Lake to be repaired, and the Advocate printed it under a headline, "A Good Season Ahead," because Al, like everybody who ever ran that mine, "predicts an excellent mining season, there being considerable snow on the mountains." There always was, in January.
The school
By then the bowl had a problem that no ditch could fix. Robert was twelve, and Alice was growing, and the nearest school was at Willow Creek, eight miles of road and river away.
Robert boarded in town through the week and came home Sundays when the weather let him. The Times correspondent at Willow Creek put it in his column as if it were news, and to the boy it was: "Robert Douglas spent Sunday at his home in Sugar Bowl." Some Sundays I walked him back up to the road on Monday morning at first light, with his lunch in a lard pail and his schoolbooks in a strap, and he talked the whole way about the river, and the mine, and the Hupa boys he knew, and the bears. Everybody that year was talking about bears. A man named Ray Freeman, working on the Three Cabins ranch above Redwood, had told the Advocate that twelve bears had been taken on that range in two or three months, five of them by himself, and Robert could not get over it. Five bears. He asked me how many I had killed, and I said none, and he looked at me with real pity.
In May of 1901 John Douglas bought John Brett's ranch on the other side of the river near Willow Creek, two hundred and eighty acres, and I knew why before anybody said it. He had sold a span of fine draught horses that spring to two Arcata men who had come all the way to the bowl for them, and the paper had called him "proprietor of the Sugar Bowl ranch," and I think he liked that, and I think it cost him something to begin to stop being it. The family spent that August at the mouth of the Mad River, camped on the beach, the way they had begun to do every summer, and in the bowl it was ninety-eight degrees every day for weeks, and James and I lay in the shade of the oaks at noon and listened to the river and did not mine anything.
The family began to go places in those years, the way a family does when a mine is paying fairly well. In the summer of 1902 Al got a letter from Fort Worth, Texas, inviting him to the wedding of a nephew named John Douglas Walker, whom he had last seen at six or seven years old, twenty years before, and Al read it out at the Douglas table and everybody understood at once that there was a Douglas sister somewhere in Texas who had named a boy for John. John did not say anything. He got up and went out on the veranda for a while. When he came back he said he supposed the boy was grown, and Mrs. Douglas said that was generally how it went. And that August John Douglas went down to Ferndale as a delegate from the Willow Creek precinct to the Republican county convention, in a new collar, the first time in his life he had been a delegate to anything, and came back and said Ferndale was a fine place full of people who had never seen a mountain, and that he had voted the way the precinct told him, and that the convention dinner had been cold. He kept the delegate's ribbon in the same drawer as Hennings's mortgage, years later. I saw it there.
That Christmas Don Kirkham and Jim Henderson gave a grand masquerade ball at the hall at Willow Creek, with six prizes, and on Christmas Day prize shooting and running and jumping, and posters put up all down the river, the Advocate said. Don was Clara Bussell's boy by her first marriage, the best company in the valley for twenty years, and he went at that ball the way other men went at a ditch. Bob was thirteen and went as a bear, in a buffalo robe with a paper face, and won nothing and did not care. Alice went as Mary, Queen of Scots, in a dress Mrs. Douglas made out of a curtain, and danced every dance. John Douglas went as John Douglas and stood by the stove. I went as a miner, which Don said was not a costume, and took third prize for the shooting the next morning, which was the only prize I ever won with a rifle, against men who had been drinking. The river was booming that week after rain, and the old men said the masquerade was the finest thing Willow Creek had seen since the soldiers' ball, and maybe it was.
In April of 1902 Al Douglas came out of the bowl after a visit and told the Advocate the thing about his brother that the whole family believed, the creed of the Douglases, and I was standing next to John on the low bar the day before, with the giant roaring on the bench above us and James on the nozzle, when John said it to Al almost word for word. The mine, Al said, was being operated by his brother James "on a small scale and is paying fairly well," with ample water from the ditch most of the time. "John Douglas has also some good auriferous gravel on his place and at times, when he has water to work with, he manages to get considerable of the yellow metal. The gravel is on a low and flat bar with no dumping facilities, and his brother tells us that had he a good dumping ground with plenty of water he would soon become a rich man."
Had he a good dumping ground with plenty of water. Every man on the Trinity could have said that sentence about his own claim, and most of them did. John Douglas said it standing on a bar of gold-bearing gravel with his boots wet and two children to school and a farm to run, and then he went up to see about the melons.
The timber people
The fall of 1902 the strangers came through.
They were not miners. They had good boots and new canvas, and some of them were ladies, and they came over the road to Hoopa by the dozen and went on down to the Klamath, and the Hoopa letter to the Advocate that September tried to explain them:
"A number of people, both ladies and gentlemen, have been passing through the valley during the past month hunting for timber land. A majority of them were headed for the Klamath where they expected to find the object of their search. We understand that every foot of land that has any timber value whatever has been taken, and a great deal that is worthless."
That was the timber-claim rush. A man or a woman could take up a hundred and sixty acres of timber land from the government for very little, and the lumber companies would buy it from them the day after the patent came through, and everybody knew it, and everybody did it. Some of them stopped at the bowl to ask the way, and one of them, a schoolteacher from Oakland, asked John Douglas how many acres of timber he had. He said, "Enough to fence." She did not understand him, and he did not explain.
Bob's bear
And in the last week of September of 1902, with the acorns coming down and the hogs fattening on them in the oaks under the rim, a bear came down out of the timber and began killing hogs.
We heard it the first night, a hog screaming up the slope in the dark and then not screaming, and in the morning there was one hog fewer and a mess in the leaves under the big oak at the top of the hog pasture. John Douglas looked at it and said it was a black bear and a big one, and that it would be back, because a bear that has found hogs fattening on acorns has found heaven. The second night it took another. John was fifty-four that fall and his eyes were not what they had been, and James was never a hunter. So it came down to who would sit up.
Robert was home that week. He was fourteen. He asked his father for the rifle.
I want to tell this right, because the paper told it in two sentences and the paper was right about everything it said. John Douglas looked at his son for a long time, and then he went in the house and took the rifle down from over the door and handed it to him, and he handed him three cartridges, not the box, and he said, "If you miss, you come in. You don't follow him." And Mrs. Douglas stood in the kitchen door and did not say one word, and I have thought since that it was the bravest thing I saw anybody do in that bowl.
I sat up with him. Not to shoot. His father asked me to be there, and Bob let me come on the condition that I did not bring a gun, and I didn't. We sat in the dark at the bottom of the hog pasture with our backs against a fence post, about forty yards below the big oak, with the hogs grunting and rooting all around us in the leaves, and it was cold, and the stars were very bright over the rim, and Bob did not say a word for four hours, which for that boy was the hardest part.
It came a little before moonrise. You smell a bear before you hear him, if the air is right, and the air was right, and then the hogs knew, and the whole pasture went quiet, and then it came out of the dark under the oak, bigger than any animal I had seen in the bowl except a horse, and took a hog by the back as easy as you would take a sack of meal, and the hog began to scream.
Bob shot once. I felt him take his breath and let half of it out, the way his father had taught him on cans on the fence, and then the rifle went off, and the bear dropped the hog and stood up on its hind legs, black against the first of the moon coming over the rim, and then it went down, and it did not get up.
He did not go to it. His father had said not to follow, and he did not follow. He sat there with the rifle across his knees and shook, all over, his teeth going, and I put my coat around him, and in a little while his father came down from the house with a lantern, walking very slowly, and stood over the bear for a while and then came back to us and took the rifle from Bob and looked at it, and said, "Two cartridges left. That's good." That was all he said. Then he put his hand on the boy's head the way his mother had on the day the water came through the tunnel, and we all went up to the house, and Mrs. Douglas had coffee on, and Bob drank his first cup of coffee that night, and I do not think he slept.
The hog lived, by the way. It had a set of scars down its back like a ladder, and they kept it two more years, and nobody would eat it.
We skinned the bear in the morning, and it was a big boar with a good fall coat, and the hide went on the side of the smokehouse to dry where everybody coming down the lane would see it first, which Bob arranged. Then John Douglas went out to Blue Lake on business, and he could not help himself, and the Advocate printed it on the first page on the fourth of October, 1902:
"Robert Douglas, the 14-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. John Douglas of Sugar Bowl Valley, is now boasting of his good marksmanship, having the other day killed a big black bear which was engaged in eating up one of his father's hogs on the ranch. Bob is a good shot for a boy of his age."
That was his prize. Not a bounty and not a medal. A line on the front page of the Advocate in the same column with the Indian Bureau's inspector, Supervisor Holland, who was making his official visit to the reservation that week, and with Albert Wilder, who had lost a good part of his flume by fire at his mine on Boyce Creek near Orleans, and with the new owners of the Grand Hotel in Eureka, who were going to call it the Hotel Burnside. The whole county went on about its business on that page, and in the middle of it a boy at the Sugar Bowl had shot a bear.
Bob cut it out and carried it in his pocket until it fell apart. Fifty years later, in 1952, the Advocate ran a column called "Blue Lake in Years Gone By," and somebody there found that line and printed it again, word for word, and I read it on the porch at Willow Creek, and I was the only man alive who had been sitting against that fence post. "Bob is a good shot for a boy of his age." He was. He was a better shot at twenty than I ever was, and I have said so before.
Wire
The next summer John Douglas went out to Blue Lake and came back with fifteen hundred pounds of fence wire, which had come up from San Francisco on the steamer, and the Advocate asked him what a man who lived in the middle of the woods wanted with that much wire, and he told them:
"While living in the midst of a timber belt he has to have his land fenced in with wire."
He fenced the hog pasture with it, three strands on posts I split, all the way around under the oaks. It did not keep out bears. Nothing keeps out bears. It kept the hogs where a boy with a rifle could watch them, and it kept the timber people from walking across the melon patch, and it said to everybody coming down the lane that somebody owned this and meant to stay.
He did not stay. That same September he was building a new house on the Brett place across the river, a story and a half with an ell and a roof of corrugated iron, so that Bob and Alice could walk to the Willow Creek school, and I helped him raise it. I have told that already. But I have not told that on the day the family loaded the wagon to go, Bob went back down to the smokehouse by himself and took the bear hide down off the wall and rolled it up and tied it with a piece of the new fence wire, and put it in the wagon on top of everything else, where his mother could see it, and climbed up and sat on it.
That is the part I would want you to know, if you live in the bowl now and walk down to the bottom of the hog pasture under the big oaks on a cold night in the fall when the acorns are coming down. A family fenced that bowl with wire because it meant to stay, and left it because it loved something more. A boy sat against a fence post there with three cartridges and did exactly what his father told him. And on the trail over the hill from Hoopa, on a Sunday in March, ten schoolteachers came down loaded like packers for the Klondike to tell an old man happy birthday, and every one of them went home with gold.