The other side of the river
The house on the Brett place had an iron roof, and the first night it rained on it I lay awake in the loft over the kitchen and listened, and I thought it was the loneliest sound I had ever heard, and I had slept in a good many places by then.
That was the fall of 1903. John Douglas had bought John Brett's two hundred and eighty acres on the far side of the river two years before, and that September we raised the house on it, sixteen by thirty with an ell, a story and a half, and John told the Advocate the roof would be corrugated iron, "which is the safest way from fires." He did not have to say why. Every family on the river had heard about Fricker's cabin. The new place was much nearer the Willow Creek school, the paper said, "which Mr. Douglas' children will attend," and that was the whole reason, and everybody knew it. Alice was eighteen and nearly done with schooling, and Bob was fifteen and not nearly done, and Mrs. Douglas had decided some time ago that her boy was going to get his letters if she had to move the whole family across the Trinity to do it, and then she did.
So the bowl was left to James.
I want you to understand what that was like, because nobody wrote it down. For eighteen years there had been a long table on the veranda in the bottom of that dish, and smoke from the kitchen chimney, and Mrs. Douglas calling the hogs, and the girl reading out loud on the steps after supper. Now there was James, and whatever hired man would stay with him, and the giant on the bench, and the melons growing in the bottom field with nobody to sell them to but the Hupa, who came up the trail in August the way they always had and found a quiet old bachelor in the field instead of Mrs. Douglas, and bought from him anyway. He did not haggle. He never haggled in his life. He let them pick and took what they gave him and put it in the same pickle jar John had kept his gold in, and when John came back across the river in the fall James handed him the jar.
I was living mostly at Willow Creek then, taking whatever work there was, and every spring when the snow went off the ridge I walked the Sugar Bowl ditch for James. That was the arrangement. Nobody ever said it out loud. I would come down the lane some morning in March with a shovel on my shoulder and James would be on the veranda, and he would nod, and I would go up to the head of the ditch on Campbell Creek and walk it down, the whole three miles, cleaning out the winter's slides and the leaves and the rocks the deer had kicked in, and patching where the bank had gone soft, and I would come out through the tunnel under the road and down onto the bench by evening, and James would have supper on the table. Two old bachelors and a ditch. We did not talk much. We did not need to. The water came down behind me every spring like a dog following a man home.
The winter of 1904 it nearly did not. In February the Trinity came up higher than anybody had seen it since the flood of ninety, and the Willow Creek bridge went out, and the mail carrier, a man named McDonald, got across the creek at the town on a ladder and a rope and went on down the road and found Kirkham Creek "also on the rampage," and got across that too somehow, and made Hoopa, and came back the next day to find the creek at the town gone wild again. So he built himself a cage. Ropes and boards and pulleys. He hauled himself and the mail across in it, hand over hand, with the whole town on the bank watching him. "Mail Carrier McDonald," the Advocate's man wrote, "is a man of resources and was not to be balked by such an insignificant thing as a creek on the rampage." I was on the bench above the Bretts that week and I watched Kirkham Creek bring down whole trees, roots and all, end over end. Insignificant is not the word I would have used.
When I walked the Sugar Bowl ditch that March I found forty feet of it gone into Campbell Creek, and the tunnel half full of mud, and I spent eleven days on it with James, and James never said a word about the flood except one evening on the veranda, looking at the rim: "It always comes back down." I asked him whether he meant the water or the mountain. He said both.
Ninety days
In the spring of 1905 a man came down the river hiring everybody who could hold a drill, and I went, and for most of three years I was not at the Sugar Bowl at all. I want to tell about that, because it was the biggest thing that happened on the lower Trinity in those years, and because it was the same story as the bowl with the names changed.
"Digging a Tunnel," the Advocate said in May. "To Divert the Waters of Trinity River at Horse Shoe Bend." Up the river, about three miles above the mouth of the South Fork, the Trinity makes a loop around a ridge, a horseshoe, and the neck of the horseshoe is narrow enough that you could throw a stone across it. If you drive a tunnel through the neck and turn the river into it, the whole bed of the river inside the loop lies there dry, three-quarters of a mile of gravel that nobody had ever seen the bottom of, with every grain of gold the mountains had let go of for ten thousand years lying in the cracks of it. The McDonalds had tried it in ninety-one and walked out over Bald Mountain in three inches of snow. Now a man named Lindsay was going to do it. "The tunnel will measure 405 feet long, 16 feet wide, 6 feet on the side with an arch measuring 7½ feet in the center. The work is expected to be completed in about ninety days."
Ninety days. Write that down and then read the rest.
A. W. Lindsay was an easterner with Reno money behind him, a real engineer, not a promoter, a thin quiet man who wore a collar on the bar and never once got it dirty, and he hired me for the face because I could shoot powder. Here is what a tunnel through a Trinity ridge is. The rock is slate and greenstone, hard and tight and standing on end, and you do not dig it. You drill it and you shoot it. Two men to a drill, one holding the steel and one striking with the double jack, turn and strike, turn and strike, a round of holes in the face, and then you load them and light them and walk out and wait. The shots go one after another, deep in the hill, like a man knocking on a door he does not want opened. Then the smoke rolls out of the portal, and you wait for it to clear, and you go back in and muck out the shot rock in wheelbarrows and set the next round. On a good day you make four feet. On a bad day the rock is seamed and the roof wants to come in and you timber instead of drilling and make nothing. And every day the river goes by the mouth of your tunnel, twenty feet away and thirty feet down, loud enough that you cannot hear the man on the other end of the drill, saying the same thing it has said since before there were men.
We lived on the bar inside the bend. A cookhouse and tents and a powder magazine well back from the fire. Mr. and Mrs. Russell were on the crew, the Burnt Ranch correspondent wrote, "he working in the mine and she doing the cooking," and that was the best thing in the camp, Mrs. Russell's biscuits, and I am not the only man who said so. My partner on the drill was Amos Tolliver, a packer's son from Hawkins Bar, twenty-six that summer, who had carried water to the McDonald graders at this same bend in ninety-one when he was twelve years old and had been waiting fourteen years to see the job finished. He held the steel and I struck, and then we changed. He asked questions all day long the way Bob Douglas had on the pipe in ninety-six, and some of them I could answer. He told me once that I had a habit of whistling while I lit the fuses. I never knew that. I suppose I was not as calm as I thought.
The tunnel was not done in ninety days. I will come back to it.
To the neck
In July of 1905 a man came up the river from Willow Creek with the mail and the news, and the news was that James Douglas was dead, and then it was that he was not.
What had happened was this. James was working the bench alone, with the giant, the way he always did in the last of the season's water, and he went down to the bank to look at the face, which he never should have done with the water on. And the bank came down. A slab of gravel the size of a house, the way a hydraulic bank always comes down if you undercut it, all at once and without a sound you can hear over the giant. It buried him to his neck. To his neck. He was standing up in it, with nothing out but his head and the gravel packed around him like cement, and the giant still roaring a hundred feet away and nobody within two miles to shut it off.
He dug himself out. I do not know how. He told me later that he worked one hand loose and then the other, a little at a time, scraping with his fingers, and that it took most of the afternoon, and that he talked to himself the whole time so as to keep from listening to the bank above him, which was still moving. Then he walked out of the pit and shut off the water, which was the first thing he did, before anything else. Then he walked to Hoopa. Five miles, bruised from his neck to his feet, to the agency physician, Dr. Lindley. No bones broken, the Advocate said, but badly bruised, and it would be some little time before he would recover from the effects.
I came down from the tunnel as soon as I heard and found him on the veranda in a chair, black and blue from his collar to his shoes, and so stiff he could not turn his head to look at me, so he looked at me sideways, which was a thing I never saw James Douglas do before or since. He said, "You cut the water first. Always. Before you go near the face." I said I knew it. He said, "So did I." That was all he ever said about it.
By August the paper said he was improving nicely, and John and Bob came down to Korbel and Blue Lake that same week on business, and I suppose some of the business was a doctor. James walked with a hitch after that, a little catch in his left side on the uphill, for the rest of his life. He went back on the giant that winter. Of course he did.
China Creek
In February of 1906, before the smallpox, old Andrew Foote blew up a dam.
Foote was Venus Kidd's husband, the hardest-working miner at China Flat, the one Jesse had said made the original China Flat look holy. He had been a sergeant under General Grant when Grant was a captain at Fort Humboldt, and he had a scar on his cheek from the Indian wars, and he had held water on China Creek for his mine for thirty-five years. And that winter three men opened a new mine on the same creek, the Herbert H., and built a ditch and threw a dam across the creek to feed it, and the water stopped coming down to Foote's.
One of the three men was James Henderson of China Flat, the superintendent of the new mine. He was Foote's son-in-law.
The Advocate told it the way it happened. Foote "told several people in the neighborhood of his intention of blowing up the dam, and at the point of a rifle told the operators of the Herbert H. mine to stand clear and not interfere." Fred Lux stood by him "to see that fair play and a square deal was given the old man." Then Foote set his sticks of dynamite under the dam and blew it out, and the water came down China Creek to his mine the way it had for thirty-five years. "Foote also took a long shot at James Henderson, the superintendent of the mine, who is the son-in-law of the aged miner."
A long shot. I have always believed Foote missed on purpose. He had been shooting on that river since before any of us were born, and a man who has been a sergeant under Grant does not miss his own son-in-law at a long distance by accident. I think he wanted Henderson to hear it go by.
Judge Waterman held him to answer, and Tom Brett, who was constable by then, took the two of them out to the county jail at Eureka, the old man and Fred Lux, on the stage. The whole river was sick about it. Venus was sick about it. The Kidds took no side out loud, and every Sunday that spring Mrs. Douglas sent a pie to the Foote house and another to the Hendersons', and neither family ever mentioned the other's pie. Two weeks later the old man was out on bail, a thousand dollars, and the district attorney said he would not let the criminal courts be used to settle a water right, and it went to the civil courts, where water rights on the Trinity have always gone to die. It was still in court in November.
I tell it because it was water, and because it was family, and on the Trinity those were always the same quarrel. Foote filled his wife's grave with his own shovel three years later, and died at the soldiers' home at Napa in 1914, and I do not know that he and Henderson ever spoke again. I hope they did.
Smallpox
In April of 1906 the earth shook San Francisco down, and the fire burned what the shaking left, and Lindsay was there and came back to the tunnel in April with a gentleman friend from the East and "many tales of horror to recite," the Advocate said. He told them to us in the cookhouse. I will not repeat them. They were the kind of tales a man tells because he cannot stop telling them, and Mrs. Russell finally put a plate of biscuits in front of him and said, "Eat, Mr. Lindsay," and he ate.
Then the smallpox came up the river. It came in May. The Koon family at the South Fork had it, the whole family, and they were quarantined in their house, and Tim Donahue, who had had it as a young man and could not catch it again, went in and cared for them. That was Tim. The disease was in a light form, the China Flat correspondent said, "and all are rapidly recovering," and they did, every one of them, but for three weeks nobody on the lower Trinity knew that, and the lower Trinity school closed because the parents would not send their children, and every family on the river looked at every cough.
Bob Douglas came into Willow Creek that June to have the doctor vaccinate him. He was eighteen and running the bowl ranch for his father by then, and he rode in on purpose, and I saw him in the street afterward with his sleeve rolled up, looking at the scratch on his arm as if it might go off. He said his mother had made him. I said his mother was right. He said his mother was always right and it was very wearing.
The week before, at the Willow Creek school, there was Memorial Day. The teacher, Miss Mosely, had the children sing and recite, and then they all marched down to the cemetery, two by two, with flowers, and decorated the graves. "Great credit is due Miss Mosely for painstaking effort with her pupils," the correspondent said. The old soldiers stood at the gate with their hats off, John Douglas and Berryman Lack and Andrew Johnson and the rest, and I stood behind them. I had nobody in that cemetery yet. It was a strange thing to stand at a gate full of everybody else's dead and be glad of it and ashamed of being glad.
The same letter said that Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Brett were the proud possessors of a brand new baby girl, and that Joe Eslick and a man named Clark had gone down to the Sugar Bowl to prospect and mine on the Douglas place that season. That was the beginning of the lease.
For all it is worth
In October of 1906 Clark and a partner named Charles Ranney came out to Blue Lake and told the Advocate they had leased the Sugar Bowl placer mine from the Douglas brothers, and the paper wrote it up in a way that I have always thought should be carved over the door of every mine on the Trinity. They intend to work it this winter, it said, "for all it is worth, and judging from the amount of pay gravel there is in sight they have nothing to anticipate but a good successful season, just as long as the water supply lasts."
Just as long as the water supply lasts. The Advocate had been writing that sentence about the Sugar Bowl for ten years. I do not think it knew it.
They went down to the bowl in November with Charlie and Harry Waterman, the Judge's boys, and the four of them wintered there in the house with James. It was a cold winter, twenty-eight degrees at nine in the morning at China Flat, which is cold for the Trinity, and the ditch froze at the head on the bad nights, and they had to go up at daylight and break the ice out of the intake with a pick. Wm. Swanson came through from Hoopa that month with a load of turkeys for the market, and I remember that because he sold one to the Sugar Bowl boys on his way past, and they had it for Thanksgiving, and James carved it. He carved it the way he did everything, slowly and exactly, and they all said afterward it was the best Thanksgiving they had ever had, and I think it was because James was glad of the company and could not say so, and the turkey said it for him.
In February there was a dance at the Willow Creek hotel, and everybody came. The China Flat correspondent gave the whole list, the way he always did, because the list was the news. Miss Nellie Scott of Burnt Ranch, Mrs. and Miss Donahue, Mrs. Frank Martin and two of her daughters, Mrs. Quinn and Miss Ollie Quinn of the South Fork, the Thomas girls and Martha Noble from New River, Mrs. Koon and her two sons, recovered, "most of the men from the road camp," "and a number of strange men from New river, whose names the writer is not acquainted with." And from the other direction, the correspondent wrote, "Adhma Clark and Charlie Waterman of Sugar Bowl and Johnie Carpenter of Hoopa came up."
I was there. I was thirty-seven years old and I danced with Mrs. Frank Martin, who was a widow and danced better than anyone in the room, and with one of her daughters, the youngest, a girl named Anna, quiet and dark-eyed. She asked me whether I was the man who had been on the cable with her father at Springville. I said I was. She said, "Then you were the last one he talked to." I said I supposed I was. She said, "What did he say?" I told her he had asked me if the cable was sound, and I had said it was. I had not told anybody that in eight years. She was quiet for a minute and then she said, "You couldn't have known," and we finished the dance. I did not know then that she belonged to this story either.
The correspondent, as usual, had a wedding to predict, and as usual it was not mine. He had predicted that James Patterson of Hawkins Bar would come back from below with a bride, and in March he did, and the correspondent was very pleased with himself. "The lady is a writer of marked ability, an artist and a musician." Patterson had also brought back forty fruit trees from the Sonoma nurseries for Jerry Smith's orchard, and he told the correspondent that the finest peaches growing on Jerry's place were the orange clings, "some reaching the extreme size of fourteen and one-half inches in circumference." I went down to Hawkins Bar that summer to see one. It was true. I have never seen a peach like it before or since, and Jerry cut it into eight pieces on his counter so everybody in the store could have some, and it was still the biggest piece of peach I ever ate.
The same March letter had the bowl in it, one line. "The boys running the Sugar Bowl mine seems to be having an unusual amount of bad luck, the last particular piece being a landslide that demolished all there boxes but one."
All their boxes but one. I went down. The bank had come down in the night, the whole face of the bench where they had been cutting, and gone through the sluice line like a train through a fence, and the boxes were matchwood along the bar, and the one box that was left was standing by itself at the very end of the line with water still running through it, as if it had not heard. Ranney stood looking at it with his hands in his pockets. Clark said, "Well, we've got the one." James said nothing. He went and got a hammer.
The boat
That April John Douglas built a boat.
The paper had it in among the spring news, the Berry road open on the summit, J. A. Brent the first man over it after the big storm, Herman Haas over from Three Creeks, Moston with radishes and onions on his table already from his own garden: "Robert Douglas of Sugar Bowl was in town yesterday and reports a small slide in the mining ditch at that place." And then, two lines further down: "John Douglas has been building a new boat, to replace the one he recently lost by the freshet."
He had kept a boat on the river below the Brett place ever since he moved across, to get over to the road and the town side without going around by the bridge, and the February water had taken it off its rope one night and carried it to the sea or near it. So he built another. I helped him, the evenings of two weeks, in the barn under the iron roof, and I want to tell you about it because it was the only time I ever saw John Douglas make something that was not for the farm.
He built it out of Three Creeks sugar pine, clear, that he had been saving in the barn loft for something, and he planed every board by hand, and he steamed the ribs in a length of stovepipe over a fire in the yard and bent them over a form he had cut out of a stump. He did not have a plan. He had the old boat in his head. He would stand and look at a rib for a long time and then cut it, and it would be right. Mrs. Douglas came out to the barn every evening with coffee and stood in the door and watched, and once she said, "You're making it too pretty for the river, John," and he said, "The river can have it when I'm done with it," and kept planing.
When it was done we carried it down to the river on our shoulders, the two of us, and put it in below the house, and John rowed across to the bowl side and back, slowly, feeling how she sat in the water, with Mrs. Douglas and Alice on the bank. Then he pulled up on the gravel and got out and said, "She'll do," and that was the boat. He used her for ten years. He rowed across in her every Sunday he could and rode down the river road to the bowl to see Bob, and once, the winter Sarah died, I saw him sit in her in the middle of the river with the oars shipped and let the current turn him around, slowly, a full circle, before he picked the oars up again and went on across. I never asked him what that was.
Chug-chug-chug
While we were drilling at Horseshoe Bend, the other way of getting at the river was being tried at Willow Creek, and I came down in August of 1907 to see it, because everybody did.
Charles Hill of Arcata had a Boston man behind him named Watson, and another named Pastene, and he had built a dredger on the bar at the town out of Three Creeks lumber. It was not a dredger the way the boats on the upper Trinity were dredgers, four thousand tons of steel walking up the valley on a chain of buckets. It was a little boat with a little engine and a suction pipe. "They think they have a fine thing," the Times said, "and lots of gold can be seen in the gravel near the dredge." And on the last Saturday of August it moved out into the river to begin, and the Willow Creek correspondent wrote the sentence I have never forgotten. "The chug-chug-chug of the little engine is new and delightful music to the people here, for it speaks of a new business and more people to come."
Down by the creek there were camps, people from Arcata and Glendale and Dows Prairie who had come out to see it, and they sat on the bank in the evenings and listened to the engine as if it were a band. Bert Baldwin was there from Riverside, the bookkeeper, the one who had the comptometer, and the correspondent wrote that he was "fond of melons and says he is coming back later on when grapes are ripe," and I took him down to the bowl to meet James, who sold him four melons and would not take money for the fifth. Willow Creek had a thunderstorm that week, and up the river at New River the hail came down so big it knocked the peaches and apples off the trees, and the correspondent predicted a wedding again, "well known here," and again it was not mine.
The little boat ran seven weeks. In December the correspondent wrote that Hill and his Boston men, "who have been prospecting the Trinity river this summer with a view to building a large dredger, have discontinued work for this season. It is not known definitely what steps they will take but it is hoped that the dredger will be a realized fact during the coming year."
A view to building a large dredger. The little boat had been a prospect. The large dredger was the dream, and the dream needed the whole river, and that winter somebody went and got it. But that winter, first, Sarah Scott died.
Over the summit
Mrs. Douglas's eldest sister, Sarah, the one who had been born on the lower Trinity on New Year's Day of 1858, when there was nothing here but a few cabins and the Hupa, had lived in Blue Lake almost all her married life, at the place they called Scottsville. In December of 1907 word came over the summit that she was very ill. She had been sick for years, with her kidneys, and a few weeks before they had operated and taken one out, and now the other was failing.
The three of them went down on horseback. That is in the paper, in among the other Willow Creek news, Mrs. Wm. Bussell, Mrs. John Douglas and Buck Kidd, gone to Blue Lake by horseback "owing to the illness there of their sister." In December, over Berry's summit, on horseback. Buck had rheumatism so bad that winter he could hardly close his hand on the reins. Amelia was past forty. Mrs. Douglas was older. I went with them, leading the pack horse with their things, because John asked me to and because I would have gone anyway.
It snowed on the summit. Not much, but enough to cover the road and fill the ruts and make the horses careful, and we went over the top in the late afternoon with the light going, the three Kidds riding ahead of me single file, not talking, with their shawls over their heads, and I thought that I had never seen three people look so much alike from behind. At the top Mrs. Douglas stopped her horse and waited for me to come up, and when I did she said, without turning around, "Sarah never wanted to leave the river. She left it for the children's schooling." Then she rode on. I did not understand then that she was telling me about herself, about the bowl and the iron roof and the boy who had to have his letters. I understood it about twenty years later, which is about how long it takes me.
Sarah died on the Saturday, at half past twelve. She would have been fifty on New Year's Day. The Advocate said she had a kind and cheerful disposition and a host of friends, and it gave her family the way the paper always did, the living ones: "two sisters, Mrs. John Douglas and Mrs. William Bussell of China Flat, Cal., one brother, B. Kidd, also of China Flat, and two daughters, Mrs. Jack Fletcher of Glendale and Miss Emma Scott of this place." Her girl had married a Jack Fletcher, and if it was the Jack Fletcher who drove the stage later, I never asked him. The funeral was Monday morning from the Presbyterian church, and they buried her in the Blue Lake cemetery, and the pallbearers were men of Blue Lake whose names I did not know, and one whose name I did: Abner Douglas.
Al carried his brother's wife's sister to her grave, on the coast, a hundred miles of mountain from the river where she was born. The three Kidds stood together at the grave in the rain, holding on to one another. Then they rode home. They started back for China Flat on the Monday afternoon, the Advocate said. We were two days on the road. Nobody said much. On the far side of the summit, coming down Three Creeks in the dark, Buck began to sing, an old song, something his father used to sing, I think, about a ship. His sisters did not join in, and they did not ask him to stop.
In January Mrs. Douglas went down to the Sugar Bowl to stay a while with her son Robert, the paper said. I believe she went to sit on the old veranda in the bottom of the bowl, where she had fed all of us, and to remember that she had not left the river either. Not all the way.
The pool
In January of 1908 the county cut a new piece of road through the Brett place, Tom Brett's place on the bench below town, and I ran the scraper. We took the road off the top of the bluff where old Thomas Brett had put it and brought it down along the bench through Tom's orchard and across Kirkham Creek on a new bridge and up the other side. "A decided improvement," the Advocate's man said, "not only cutting off considerable distance, but quite a hill is done away with." It is the line the highway follows now, more or less, when it is not falling into the river. The same week a man came out on McPherson's four-horse rig, "a Mr. Crow, bound for the Eslick mine." Remember him.
Then on the first of February, 1908, everybody signed.
It was one deed. John R. McNeill, the Mortons, Maria Horton, A. T. White, the Ralstons, F. W. Hemsted, George Smith of the hotel, John Victor, old A. N. Foote, J. P. Garrett, W. B. Kidd, W. A. and Amelia Bussell, Thomas H. Brett, Z. Russell. To J. A. Brent, for one dollar. Their interest in the mining and dredging rights in the bed of the Trinity river between the South Fork and the Hoopa Reservation, from all the land they owned or held as mining claims.
Every farmer with a foot of river frontage from the South Fork to the line signed the bottom of the river under his farm over to one man for a dollar. Buck signed it. Will and Amelia signed it. I asked Will why. He said, "Because if there is gold in the bed of that river, Jud, I am never going to get it, and somebody might." That was the whole philosophy of the lower Trinity in 1908, and I have never heard it said better. Brent was the Quimby mine man from New River, a big careful man with good boots, and he had a crew of surveyors on the banks of the Trinity for weeks that winter, from the South Fork to Hoopa, and in March he took the same crew to the Klamath to do it there. The results of the examination have not been made public, the Advocate said, "but if satisfactory, we understand that extensive operations will be begun in the summer, as there is plenty of capital behind the enterprise."
Plenty of capital. In December two men named Fulton and Bacon of a San Francisco concern called the Yosemite Improvement Company spent four weeks at Willow Creek with mining tools, prospecting the bed of the river, and Charlie Newell drove them out to the stage. "Some work was done at several places but they abandoned it until next spring." If enough gold could be found to justify it, they would install a suction dredger. "They will then dredge the river from Willow Creek down as far as its mouth at Weitchpec."
Until next spring. From Willow Creek to Weitchpec. I was in Jerry Smith's store at Hawkins Bar the day that paper came, and Jerry read it out loud to the room, and nobody laughed. Nobody on the lower Trinity laughs at that sentence. They have all signed it.
The tunnel stopped that fall. In October the Reno men came through Blue Lake and said operations had been discontinued for the present and they expected to come back some time next spring and resume work. Three years, on a tunnel that was to take ninety days. They did not come back in the spring. Nobody ever does. I sat on the lower portal the last afternoon and listened to the river for a while, the same river, saying the same thing, and then I walked down to Willow Creek, and in December I heard that John Douglas had sold the bowl.
Sold
"Sugar Bowl Ranch Sold," the Advocate said, the first week of December, 1908. "Mr. John Douglas of the Willow Creek section and Mr. George W. Hennings, who recently arrived from Oregon, transacted business in Eureka this week. We are informed that Mr. Douglas has disposed of his property near the Hoopa reservation, known as the Sugar Bowl ranch, to Mr. Hennings and the latter has already taken possession of the place. There is some good mining ground on this place and we expect to hear some encouraging report from the development and working of this property."
Some good mining ground. Every time that bowl changed hands the Advocate found a way to say it again.
I asked John why. He was splitting kindling behind the iron-roofed house and he kept splitting it. He said Bob did not want to farm the bowl. He said James was getting old for a giant. He said the place needed a young man with a back on him and he was sixty-one years old. Then he put the hatchet down and said the true thing, which was, "She won't go back down there to live, Jud. She did it once for me. I'm not going to ask her twice." Then he picked the hatchet back up.
James came across the river to live in the iron-roofed house that winter, with his hitch and his one chair, and I helped him carry the chair. He did not look back at the bowl from the lane. John did. John stood at the top of the lane where you first see down into it, the place where X must have stopped his livery horse in ninety-six with his notebook, and he looked down at the house he had built and the orchard he had planted from Buck's twelve cuttings and the bench he had dug the ditch to and the bar he had never once been able to work, and he did not say anything, and then he took his hat off. The same way he had at the tunnel mouth when the first water came. Then he put it back on and we went.
George W. Hennings was about thirty, a big fair man from Oregon with a slow laugh and arms like a blacksmith's, and he had been a farmer in the Willamette valley and a miner nowhere, and he came down the lane that December with a wagon and a team and a plow and a box of seed, and a new giant tied on behind. He was a farmer first and a miner second, which in the Sugar Bowl is the right order. He asked around Willow Creek who knew the ditch, and somebody told him, and he came and found me and asked if I would walk it for him in the spring the way I had for James. I said I would. He said, "What does it pay?" I said James had always paid me in supper. He laughed his slow laugh and said he was a poor cook, and paid me in cash, and the supper too.
A hundred and fifty feet
He had the giant running in January of 1909, on the winter water, and he had water through the tunnel and down onto the bench, and for three weeks the Sugar Bowl ran again the way it had in ninety-seven. Then in February it rained for four days, and on the fifth morning a man named Jack Saum, who had been working the winter for Hennings, went up to look at the ditch and came running back down.
The ditch had gone. A hundred and fifty feet of it, the paper said later, off the face of the ridge where it crossed the steep ground above Campbell Creek, the whole bank slid out from under it, ditch and all, and the water was pouring off the end of the break into the air and falling into the canyon. I went up with Hennings and we stood on the edge of the break in the rain and looked at it. A hundred and fifty feet of nothing where the ditch had been, and the hillside below it raw and running mud, and the water arching out of the broken end and falling a long way and disappearing into the trees below with a sound like somebody pouring out a bucket that never emptied.
Hennings did the arithmetic. I watched him do it. I had watched a great many men do that arithmetic on the Trinity, and you can see it in the shoulders, and he did it faster than any of them. A hundred and fifty feet of new ditch on that face, or a flume hung on the rock, either way a summer's work and a summer's money, for a mine that had water four months of the year, on a bench that had paid wages and not much more for thirteen years under five owners. He stood there in the rain for a long time. Then he turned and looked down into the bowl, and you could see it from there, the house and the orchard and the fields green in February, and he said, "Jud, it is a farm."
Jack Saum went out to Blue Lake the next week and told the Advocate. "Mining operations at the Sugar Bowl mine have been discontinued on account of a slide damaging the ditch a distance of about 150 feet." Hennings did not discontinue the ditch. He built it back that summer, the whole hundred and fifty feet, with me and Saum and a crew of two, cribbed with logs on the steep face and cut back into the solid. But he built it for the orchard and the fields, not for the giant. Forty-three inches, one-fourteenth of six hundred, was enough for a farm. Six hundred inches was a miner's dream. He knew the difference the morning he saw the break.
That April Venus Foote died at China Flat. She was old Foote's wife, the Kidd girl from the second family, half-sister to Mrs. Douglas and Amelia and Buck. She had been ill a long time. They buried her in the Kidd cemetery on the old Kidd place across the river, where her father was, and where the Indian people from that side of the river had been buried too, because the Kidds had always let them, and the whole family came: Mrs. Douglas and John, and Amelia and Will, and Buck with his hands so bad that he could not take his hat off and Will took it off for him. Old Foote stood at the grave with his hands folded on the head of a shovel he had brought, as if he meant to do the work himself, and when the minister finished he did. He filled the grave alone, slowly, and nobody stopped him. He had been mining on that river since 1874, and I think it was the hardest ground he ever moved.
The same month Don Kirkham, who was Clara Bussell's boy and the best company in the valley for twenty years, lost three fingers of his right hand in the winch at the Clover Flat, and went out to Eureka to Dr. Gross, and that summer he and his wife went to the Seattle Fair and did not come back. And up at Lewiston the Trinity Journal reported that a tunnel sixteen hundred feet long, through a point a mile above the town, had been completed that week after three years' work, and the bed of the river in the horseshoe there could now be mined. Sixteen hundred feet, three years, done. Ours was five hundred and five feet, three years, not done. I read that in Jerry Smith's store too. I am afraid I said something Jerry did not let me forget.
Night and day
In October of 1909 a man named Olmstead came up from Los Angeles and bought the Clover Flat mine, and the old Dungan ground above town too, and for the first time in my life I worked at night.
W. E. Olmstead was a practical hydraulic miner and engineer, the Advocate said, and he had a young son with him and a lady from Los Angeles, a Miss Simmers, who was a member of the company "and is here to see what kind of property her capital is invested in." I liked Miss Simmers. She walked the whole Clover Flat ditch in a long skirt and a pair of man's boots, to the dam at the head on Willow Creek, and asked what every part of it cost, and wrote it down, and nobody on the river had ever seen a woman do that, and some of them did not like it. I did. She reminded me of J. W. Humphreys.
Olmstead built a big dam at the head of the ditch, and he bought a load of old rails from the Korbel railroad and laid them in the sluices for riffles, iron rails on edge, which was a thing nobody on the river had seen either, and he put in a small electric light plant, and when it was done he ran the Clover Flat night and day. I worked the night shift on the giant that winter, and I want to tell you what that was, because nobody on the lower Trinity had ever seen it before. You stood at the giant in the dark with the electric lamps hung on poles above the pit, a cold white light, and the stream went out of the nozzle into the light and turned to silver and hit the bank, and the bank came down in the light, and beyond the light there was nothing, the whole valley black, the river black, the mountains black against the stars. People came up from Willow Creek in the evenings just to look at it. The Hupa came up from the valley. The children stood at the edge of the light with their mouths open. Willow Creek had a giant running under electric light, and for one winter it felt like the future had come over the summit at last, on a wagon, with its own dynamo.
In March a slide took out seventy feet of the flume, and it took two days to put it back. Of course it did. Every ditch on that river slides. The electric light did not change that.
Mistaken for a deer
I have to tell about October of 1910, and I would rather not.
Down the river from the Bretts there was the Eslick bench, two hundred feet above the river, rich, with no water, and a man named Crowe had bought half of it, the Mr. Crow who came out on McPherson's rig, and that fall he leased the lower part of it, the Red Porphyry flat by the river, to two young men from Arbuckle in the Sacramento valley named Clasby and Black. Partners and friends. They had a new gold-saving machine that a man named Sherwood had brought up from Oakland, six hundred pounds with a gasoline engine, that was said to save all the finest gold that is usually lost in hydraulic mines and to need very little water. I helped haul it up from the road. And they hired a few of us to dig a ditch, a small one, a thousand feet from a little creek to the flat, to give the machine what water there was.
It was a good fall, warm and dry, the river low. On a Sunday evening late in October, after we had knocked off, the two of them took their rifles and went up the hill behind the mine after deer. They separated in the brush. It was dusk. Clasby saw something move and fired, and it was his partner.
The bullet went in at the shoulder and down into the chest. Black was dead almost before Clasby got to him. I was on the flat by the river with the others, and we heard the shot, and then we heard Clasby, and I will not tell you what that sounded like. I have never told anybody.
They telephoned the coroner in Eureka. The next morning a deputy named Dolson came out from Arcata in an automobile he had hired from a man named Harold Reed, the first automobile I ever saw on the Willow Creek road, and it came up the grade in the afternoon in a cloud of dust with every dog in the valley after it. The deputy held the inquest in the cabin. The verdict was accidental death, and Clasby was exonerated. The Times said a thing about Clasby that I have thought about ever since. His own father, years before, when he was the constable at Arbuckle, had been shot by a friend.
Black's body went to Arbuckle on the steamer from Eureka on the Thursday. He had a mother there, and a sister, and four half-sisters. The Advocate said the accident "has cast quite a gloom over that lower Trinity section," and it had. Clasby stayed on with the machine a while and then he did not. The machine sat on the flat by the river all that winter, and Crowe built his seven hundred feet of ditch, and the bench stayed where it was, two hundred feet up, dry.
I went deer hunting perhaps four times after that, in forty years. I never once went at dusk.
Sixteen miles
That December George Hennings got married, and the minister walked sixteen miles to do it.
The Reverend Gilman was the missionary at Hoopa then, a young man from the East, and he walked everywhere. He wrote about it twenty-seven years later, when he was the pastor at Blue Lake. "Cultivating a swinging gait and steady stride, often would I reel off an eighteen or twenty-mile walk to some point where a meeting might be held." Weitchpec and Orleans and back to Hoopa was sixty miles. He held services in the Willow Creek schoolhouse by a lantern from Landlord Smith's hotel and candles stuck in empty cans, for fifteen people, mostly Indians who had crossed the river by canoe in the dark to hear him. And he wrote: "One of the trails dropped into a pocket between Hoopa and Willow Creek called the Sugar Bowl. A young rancher named George Hennings was living in its depths. Once I walked 16 miles to marry this young man to a young lady from farther up the river."
The young lady from farther up the river was Anna Martin. The girl I had danced with at the Willow Creek hotel in 1907, who asked me what her father had said. They were married on the Sunday at her mother's house at the mouth of the South Fork, Mrs. Frank Martin's, with every Martin on the river there and half the Koons and Donahues and Ammons, and the Reverend Gilman came in out of the rain with his trousers wet to the knee and dried them at the stove and married them in his stocking feet, the second wedding on the Trinity I ever heard of performed that way, and he said it was the custom of the country and he would not change it.
"The newly-wedded couple will make their future home at the Sugar Bowl Ranch," the Advocate said, "which is the property of Mr. Hennings. May they live long and prosper is the wish of their numerous friends in that section."
I drove them down. Hennings had asked me to, because he wanted to sit in the back with his wife and not watch the road, and I took them down the river in the rain in Newell's spring wagon as far as the Willow Creek bridge, where Hennings's own team was waiting. They did not talk much, the two of them, sitting close under one oilcloth. Once Anna asked me to stop where the road comes out above the river opposite the place where the Springville cable used to be, and I stopped, and she looked down at the water for a while, and then she said, "All right, Mr. Thursby," and I drove on. She was going from the one house on the river where the water had taken her father to the one house where the water had never been enough. I thought about that the whole way back to town in the empty wagon.
The next summer her sister Rosa came home from school in Eureka and went straight down to the Sugar Bowl to visit, with Joe Martin and his wife and little girl, and in July a party from Oakland, the Walkers and a man named Vlaeff, spent several weeks there as the Henningses' guests, and the Martins came down in a stream all summer, one or two at a time, the way the Kidds had come to the Douglases. The bowl had a woman in it again, and a family coming and going, and smoke from the chimney, and the long table on the veranda had people at it. I ate there more Sundays than I did not. Anna fed people the way Mrs. Douglas had, which is to say you did not leave the table until she was satisfied.
An inch a day
The summer of 1911 Willow Creek got ready for the biggest Fourth of July it had ever had, games and races and dancing and refreshments and decorations and a fireworks display, "The 4th is the day and Willow Creek will be the place," the correspondent said. D. F. Young and Will Bussell each bought a new Deering mowing machine from Brizard's that June, and Will drove his up and down in front of the store twice so everybody could see it, and Amelia stood on the porch and pretended not to know him.
Landlord Smith of the hotel had a watermelon garden that year, and Adam Kemp, who kept a saloon at Blue Lake, came up to rest and took charge of it. The China Flat correspondent wrote him up with great seriousness. "Adam has several monsters growing under his measurement, which are fast ripening and growing in size to the average of an inch per day." Adam Kemp measured those melons with a tape every morning before breakfast, and wrote the figures in a book, and read them out at supper, and the whole hotel took sides. I took one of his figures down to the bowl and told Anna, and she laughed until she had to sit down, and said Mrs. Douglas's melons had been bigger than that before Adam Kemp was weaned, and that if he wanted to see a watermelon he could come down to the Sugar Bowl. He did. He brought his tape.
The same letter had a thing in it that I did not laugh at. "A few days ago a forest fire was discovered at the head of Campbell Creek, which empties into the Trinity river at Hoopa," and the forest ranger, Frank Graham, had gone up with a crew of ten to fight it. The head of Campbell Creek. The intake. I went up with Hennings the next morning, and we stood on the ridge above the ditch and watched the smoke go up out of the canyon where the water came from, and Hennings did not say anything for a long time. Then he said, "If that burns, the creek will come down black for ten years." The crew got it out. Very little damage, the paper said. But that is the thing about a ditch: it begins in a place you cannot see from the house, and everything you have depends on it, and every fire and every slide and every dry August on that far side of the ridge is your fire and your slide and your August. The people who live in the bowl now know that, or they should.
That winter they began to talk about a steel bridge across the South Fork, forty feet higher than the old mule bridge, and the supervisor came up and looked at the site. Everybody on the river was going to see a road up the Trinity at last, from Willow Creek to the South Fork and beyond, wagons where there had only been mules. It was always about to happen. It always is.
Bonnieville
In October of 1912 two prospectors named Halliday and Meitz came out of the mountains at the head of Willow Creek, at the foot of Horse Mountain, with a sack of rock, and took it to an assayer in Eureka named Gallagher, and Gallagher assayed it, and assayed it again because he did not believe it, and announced that some of it ran eight hundred and forty dollars and thirty cents to the ton.
"Ore which assays as high as $840.30 to the ton," the Times said, "has been discovered on Willow Creek at the foot of Horse Mountain." There was a six-foot ledge on one side of the creek and eight feet on the other, where the creek had cut through it, "and carried the small gold down stream, where it has been placer mined for years by prospectors." The men believed they had found the mother lode of the Willow Creek mining district. They put the ore in Ernest Mueller's window in Eureka, and men stood in the street looking at it, and the next day a dozen of them started for Willow Creek. They named the camp Bonnieville.
I watched them come through. They came up the road in twos and threes all that week with new picks and new boots and the look of men who have read a newspaper, and they bought everything Brizard's had and went on up Willow Creek. Harry Waterman stood on the porch of the store with me and watched them go, and he said, "Halliday didn't find gold, Jud. He found where it comes from." I asked him what the difference was. He said, "About forty years and a stamp mill."
Halliday went down to Eureka at Christmas and got married, and came back through Blue Lake with his bride, and she went to live with her aunt in Fortuna and he went back up to Bonnieville, on the West Fork of Willow Creek, where he was engaged in mining. He was still going up there in 1916. Four years is not a bubble. Four years is a man who kept going up there.
That December it did not rain and did not rain. The miners on the river waited, with their reservoirs empty and their giants dry, and the China Flat correspondent wrote the thing they were all saying. "Better fall weather than which we are now having cannot be asked for, but the rain is in sight and it may come for good this time. Let it pour down, say the miners along the Trinity river." The Gem mine up the river had bought the spare giant from the Clover Flat, and Joe and John Martin, Anna's brothers, hauled it up to the South Fork with their team and packed it five miles over the trail to the Gem. A man named Clifton was going up and down the bars with a pan and a magnet looking for platinum, which was worth twice what gold was, and which every miner on the river had been throwing away in his black sand for fifty years.
One night that week there was a fire behind the warehouse at Willow Creek, a fire some of the old men had built out of a broken wagon bed to wait for the stage, and they sat around it and told stories. Jerry Smith was there, and Harry Waterman, and Clifton with his magnet, and John Douglas, and me. Somebody asked John why he had sold the Sugar Bowl. He did not answer that. Instead he told them about the bowl. He said the rim of it was mountain ridges fifteen hundred feet high, and the river came in over the Horse Linto falls, leaping and foaming and roaring, and touched the ranch for a little way and went out again over the rapids, and that tall oaks fattened the hogs with their autumnal showers of acorns, and that the deer came into the fields to crop the young corn and did not always go out again. He said it slowly, looking at the fire. I knew what he was saying. He was saying X. He had read that paper so many times that it had become his. When he finished nobody said anything. Then somebody said it was going to rain. Somebody always says that.
It rained the next day. It poured down.
A broad smile
In January of 1913 it snowed in the mountains and then it rained on the snow, and the trail from Hoopa to Bair's ranch was almost impassable with drifts, and the mail was a day late, and there were slides everywhere, and a man from the Geological Survey named Lytle, who was gauging the Trinity between Hoopa and Willow Creek, reported a rise of twelve feet. And the Hoopa correspondent put in his letter, right after the twelve feet: "George W. Hennings of Sugar Bowl ranch wears a broad smile. He reports a baby girl, born on the 13th of this month."
A broad smile. He did. He came up to Willow Creek a week later on the muddy road to get things the baby needed, and he walked into Brizard's store with the smile on, and everybody in the store got up and shook his hand, and he could not stop smiling long enough to say what he wanted, and the clerk had to guess. They already had a boy, Carl, who was fifteen months old and into everything. Now they had a girl.
I went down the next Sunday. Anna was sitting up in the bed with the baby, and Carl was on the floor with a wooden horse Hennings had carved him, and the house was warm and smelled of bread and wet wool, and the river was roaring below the bar, twelve feet up, brown, carrying trees. Anna let me hold her. Grace. She was a week old, and I had never held a baby that small, and I have not since. I sat in the chair by the stove with her and did not move for half an hour for fear of doing something wrong, and Carl came and leaned on my knee and looked at her, and then looked at me, and said something nobody could understand, and went back to his horse.
In March Hennings had to go out to the hospital in Eureka with what they thought was appendicitis. They decided not to operate and sent him home. He came back down the lane looking gray and thin and said he would rather have the appendix than the doctors, and went out and plowed.
Sugar-coated
I have told this once and I will tell it once more, because it belongs here, and then I will not tell it again.
On the twenty-eighth of May, 1913, I was up on the Sugar Bowl ditch, cleaning out a slide above the tunnel, about nine in the morning. And I heard a horse go by on the road above me, flat out. Nobody ran a horse on that road. It was too steep and too rough, and it was a good way to kill a horse. I stood up and looked, and I could not see anything through the trees, only hear it going away toward Hoopa, and I thought, that is somebody from the bowl.
Here is what the Hoopa man wrote that afternoon, and I will give it to you the way he did, because I could not say it better and I will not try.
"George Hennings of Sugar Bowl ranch, brought his little boy Carl, nineteen months of age, to the school for immediate treatment. When he arrived the child was in convulsions, as a result of his eating sugar coated tablets, which he mistook for candy, his parents being absent at the time. Although Dr. Anderson and the father worked persistently to combat the effect of the poison, the child died about twenty minutes later. The mother, on discovering what the babe had done, started out with it in her arms for the reservation, a distance of five miles. The father mounted his horse and overtook her and hastened on. Mr. Murray, the industrial teacher, met Mr. Hennings with a team, who arrived a few minutes before little Carl passed away."
She started out on foot. Five miles. With him in her arms. That is what I heard on the road, George going after her on the horse.
I went down into the bowl. Somebody had to be with the baby. Grace was four months old, in her basket in the kitchen, with the hired girl, who was fifteen and could not stop crying, and I sent the girl out to the porch and sat with the baby. I sat there all that day. In the evening Anna came back down the lane on foot, alone, with nothing in her arms. George had stayed in Hoopa to bring the body to Willow Creek. She came in and took the baby out of my arms without a word and sat down in the chair by the stove with her, and I went out.
They buried Carl at Willow Creek. I do not have anything to say about that and I did not say anything then.
In June George Hennings was in Eureka again with the appendicitis, and that time they kept him. When he came home in July I walked the ditch with him one evening, the whole length of it, from the tunnel to the head on Campbell Creek and back, and he did not say a word the whole way, and neither did I, and when we came out at the tunnel at dark he stopped and put his hand flat on the rock over the portal and stood there a minute, the way a man puts his hand on a horse. Then we went down.
Every winter
In November of 1913 George Hennings sold the Sugar Bowl.
"Sugar Bowl Ranch Sold," the Advocate said, the same headline it had used for John Douglas five years before, word for word. Mrs. Martha J. Hatfield of Blue Lake had bought it. "The ranch comprises 240 acres, 50 of which is under high cultivation, the remainder being grazing land and timber, and a low gravel bar of 80 acres, where mining can be successfully prosecuted every winter. The place is irrigated by a ditch from Campbell creek. It is the intention of Mrs. Hatfield and family to move to the Sugar Bowl ranch as soon as possible. They will rent their residence in Blue Lake. Mr. Hennings and wife will move to the Martin ranch near the mouth of the South Fork of Trinity river."
A low gravel bar of eighty acres, where mining can be successfully prosecuted every winter.
I have read that sentence more times than X's piece, and I have thought about it more. It is the promise the river makes to everyone. James Douglas stood on that bar in 1890 with a gold pan he did not use and said the river does the work for nothing. Curl and Fricker and Weltie dug two and a half miles of ditch to the bench above it. Humphreys cut into it in the low water of ninety-eight and the first rise filled the cut with sand. The Douglas brothers ran the giant on the bench above it for six winters and cut at its edge every fall in the low water. Ranney and Clark worked it for all it was worth until the bank took their boxes. Hennings put a new giant on it and lost a hundred and fifty feet of ditch in a week. Every winter, the paper said. It was true. Every winter there was gold in that bar. Every winter there was not enough water and no place to put the tailings. Every winter somebody tried. And every spring somebody walked the ditch with a shovel, and the water came down through the tunnel to the orchard and the fields, and the farm grew, and the families lived.
The Henningses did not go because of the gravel. I have never needed anybody to tell me why they went. They went to her people, at the mouth of the South Fork, to be mended.
The Hatfields came down the lane at the end of November with two wagonloads of furniture, the old man and Mrs. Hatfield and their girls, and their son-in-law Ted Griffith, who had been a packer and said a mining ditch could not be harder than a mule, and was wrong, and was good company being wrong. I drove the second wagon. We came over the rim in the afternoon and stopped at the top of the lane, where you first see down into it, and the Hatfield girls stood up in the wagon bed to look.
It was a clear cold day, after rain. The bowl lay below us with the river going white over the falls at the far side, and the orchard bare and black, and the fields brown, and the house with no smoke yet, waiting. You could see the line of the ditch coming around the ridge from the tunnel, a thin dark thread on the hillside, and the water in it shining where the sun hit it, coming down to the farm the way it had every winter for seventeen years, through every owner, every slide, every death, because every spring somebody had walked it with a shovel. And down at the bottom, along the river, the low gravel bar, eighty acres, gray and blue and round, with the gold still in it.
One of the Hatfield girls said, "Is that ours? All of it?" And her mother said yes.
I sat on the wagon seat and looked at it. I had been coming down that lane for twenty-three years. I had dug the ditch and laid the pipe and run the giant and built the boat and held the baby and buried the boy. I was forty-three years old and I did not own a foot of it and never would. And I thought, the girl is right, and so is her mother. It is theirs. It is everybody's who ever walked the ditch.
Then I clucked to the team and we went down.