Through the Ranch

The gas shovel

The shovel ran on gasoline, and you could smell it from the bar before you could hear it, a sweet hot smell that did not belong to that country and got into the oak shade and stayed there all summer.

In August of 1924 the Advocate said the contractor was "getting along nicely with the work there." That was A. J. Fairbanks of Willits, who had the contract from the county to build six miles of road from Willow Creek down the Trinity to the reservation line, for forty-eight thousand two hundred and fifty dollars. He had put a crew in to clear the right of way ahead of the shovel, and in two or three weeks they had about two miles of it cleared. I was on that crew. I was fifty-four years old. I had worked on the first road over Berry's summit at nineteen, for a dollar and a quarter a day and found, and now I was working on the last one, the one that would finally go along the river instead of over the top, and it went through the Sugar Bowl.

"The new road from Willow Creek to Hoopa will pass right through the ranch." That was the last line of the item in July when George Hennings sold to L. B. Campton. The paper put the road in the same paragraph as the sale, as if the one explained the other, and maybe it did.

Our foreman was Harry Waterman. The Advocate called him "the ex-Justice of the Peace and the present road foreman for Supervisor Rasmus Anderson in that district," and everybody on the river called him the Judge, and had for twenty years. He had come to the Trinity in 1879, before most of us, and located the Raccoon Bar placer, and wintered at the Sugar Bowl mine with Clark in 1906, and married Mary Brett, old John Brett's sister, in 1888, and he knew where every spring came out of that mountain and which ones would slide. He was sixty-some and he walked the grade ahead of the shovel every morning with a stick, poking the bank. He did not trust a cut until he had poked it.

In October he went down to Eureka on business and stopped in Blue Lake and told the Advocate how we were doing. Two miles and a half built. "The contractor going ahead at the rate of from 250 to 600 feet a day." Two hundred and fifty feet on a bad day, in rock, and six hundred when the shovel could get its teeth in the bench gravel and swing it over the bank. "It will do away with the high grade on the old road between Willow Creek and Hoopa and as it follows the Trinity river it is placed on an excellent grade, not exceeding six per cent. It is twelve feet wide." About fifteen men, the Judge said, "including the gasoline shovel which does some fast work."

Including the shovel. The Judge counted it as a man. I thought that was about right. It did the work of thirty of us and it never once asked what was for dinner, and when it broke down it sat on the grade like a mule with its feet planted and nothing on God's earth would move it until the fellow from Willits came with a part.

Six per cent. I had held grade on the summit road in 1889 with a level and a pole and Thomas swearing at me from the top of the cut, and we had been glad to get it under twelve. Six per cent is a grade a loaded truck can climb in second. It is a grade a horse would not notice. We cut it along the bench above the river, where John Douglas's peach trees had been, where Hennings's beans had been, past the bottom field and the old house and along the edge of the bar, and the gravel we took out of the cut went over the bank toward the river, and I stood at the top of the dump one afternoon and watched it go and thought, there is the Sugar Bowl's dump. Thirty years every mining man who came into the bowl had said the same thing: good ground, plenty of gold, and no place to put the tailings. And here was the county putting them in the river, a yard at a time, at the county's expense, and not one ounce of gold coming out of it, because nobody was looking. I said that to the Judge. He said the county was not in the mining business. I said nobody was, in the Sugar Bowl, that was the trouble with it.

Corkscrews

The road was not done in two months. Roads are never done in two months. The winter came down on it, and the slides came down on the winter, and in the spring the stages were going over the old road again when the new one was buried.

By August of 1925 a foreman named E. R. Ellis had cleared the last slides and widened the turns, and he told the Arcata paper, and the Advocate took it from them, that the highway was "now open for travel and much appreciated by everybody." Then he said the thing about the old road that everybody had been saying for forty years and nobody had printed. "It has at least six 'corkscrew' turns on each side of the mountain which it climbed and was steep and narrow."

Six corkscrews on each side. I counted them once, going over with the mail in 1890. There were seven on the Hoopa side if you counted the one by the spring, which Ellis did not, and I do not blame him. That road went up the ridge from the Willow Creek side and over the saddle and down into the bowl and up again and over to Hoopa, and the Sugar Bowl ditch went under it in a tunnel that I helped drive in the spring of 1896, and I had driven a team over that tunnel a hundred times since and felt it under the wheels every time, the way you feel a bridge. Now nobody would drive over it at all. The new road went along the river, below the ditch, below the tunnel, below everything. The water would go on running in the dark under the old saddle, and the cars would go by underneath it and never know.

There was one bad pitch left, twenty-two per cent at the lower end, on the reservation side of the line, which the county could not build out of county money. Supervisor Anderson promised a bridge over Campbell Creek whenever the Indian Department built the road to it. The bridge across the Trinity at Hoopa was still to come, when Congressman Lea got an appropriation. And the Advocate said it would surely bear fruit, which was an Advocate way of saying not yet.

That same month the Camptons came up. "Mr. and Mrs. L. B. Campton and son, Donald, of Eureka, spent Saturday night and Sunday at Willow Creek and at their ranch at Sugar Bowl on the Trinity river. The new road from Willow Creek to Hoopa passes through their ranch."

Will pass, it had said in July of 1924. Passes, it said in August of 1925. A year of my life was in the difference between those two words. Bert Campton drove his automobile down the new grade on a Saturday afternoon with his wife beside him and the boy in the back, at six per cent, through the bowl, and stopped where the lane came down from the house, and got out, and stood looking up at the rim the way everybody does the first time. He was a commission merchant. He bought fruit and sold it. He had come to the Sugar Bowl because it was the most beautiful place in the county and the paper said you could raise good fruits of all kinds in it, and both were true. He did not ask about the gold. Nobody asked about the gold any more. I was on the bank with a shovel, clearing a ditch, and he nodded to me and said it was a fine road, and I said it was.

Answers the last call

I did not know John Douglas was dying until the Advocate told me, which is a hard way to learn a thing about a man you have known thirty-five years, but that is how it was on the river. You learned things from the paper.

"Abner Douglas left Blue Lake yesterday on the stage for Willow Creek, where he will visit his brother, John Douglas, who is reported quite ill." That was in the Breezy Brevities on the twenty-second of August, between a man back from Calistoga for his rheumatism and an optician home from Vancouver. Quite ill. By the time the paper was printed John had been dead two days. The news ran behind the man, the way it always did.

He died at home, at the iron-roofed house on the Brett place, on the twentieth of August, 1925. He would have been seventy-eight in October. The Advocate gave him a headline and a whole paragraph and called him a civil war veteran, which he was, though I never once heard him talk about it, and said he had "answered the last call at his home there," which is what the Advocate always said about old men, as if they had been waiting with their boots on for somebody to call the roll. And then it said a thing I was glad of. "He was surrounded by his wife and two children and his two brothers when he passed away."

All of them. Mrs. Douglas, and Alice, who was still at home, and Bob, who had come down from the Oregon woods, and Jim and Al from Blue Lake, Al having come up on the stage in time after all, whatever the Brevities said. The two brothers who had come out from Wisconsin with him, or after him, and ridden into the county by the Blocksburg trail, and stayed. He had been in ill health for some months, the paper said, and his demise was not unexpected. That is true. He had been going down since the spring. He sat on the porch in the afternoons with a blanket over his knees in July, which is a thing I never thought I would see John Douglas do in July, and he looked down across the river toward the bowl, which he could not see from there, and talked about the peaches.

I went over the week before. He knew me. He said, "The road's through?" and I said it was, and he said, "Through the bottom field?" and I said along the edge of it, below the house, and he said, "That's where I had the melons." Then he said, "Did they keep the ditch?" and I said the ditch was still running, the Camptons had put in fruit trees and they would want the water, and he nodded and did not say anything else for a while. When I got up to go he said, "Forty-three inches." That was the water he took for his peaches in 1896, out of the doctor's ditch, in exchange for the right of way. I said, "Forty-three inches, John." He said, "It was enough." That was the last thing he said to me.

The funeral was on the Saturday, "from the family residence," Reverend Jennings of Hoopa officiating. The paper said "It was largely attended," which it was. They came from Hoopa and Salyer and the South Fork and from Blue Lake on the stage, men who had bought melons off his bar in the nineties and men who had worked for him on the ranch and men who had only heard of him, and the women brought food, and the house that was nearer to the school than the bowl was full to the porch rail and out into the yard. He was buried at Willow Creek.

I stood in the yard with the Judge. We did not say much. After a while the Judge said, "He fenced the whole thing in wire," and I said I remembered, fifteen hundred pounds of it from San Francisco, and the Judge said, "Living in the middle of all that timber," and shook his head, and I understood that he meant it as the highest thing he could say about a man. John Douglas had looked at a country where every fool split rails because the trees were free, and he had sent to San Francisco for wire, because wire was right, and he did not care what it cost him or what anybody said.

In the presence of a few friends

Alice Douglas was married that December, four months after her father died, in Eureka, at the Presbyterian church, to Merton Sinclair Shore, the son of the postmaster at Salyer. The Advocate put it under "WILLOW CREEK GIRL MARRIED" and called her "Miss Alice Douglass a popular young lady of Willow Creek," with two esses, and said they were married "in the presence of a few friends."

A few friends. Not the family residence. Not largely attended. I understood that too. You do not have a big wedding in the same winter as a big funeral, not if you were raised by Mrs. Douglas. They went to Eureka quietly and came back married, and after a brief honeymoon trip they were at home to their many friends at Willow Creek, where they would reside in the future, the paper said, and they did. Alice lived at Willow Creek the rest of her life that I know of. Her mother's estate came to her, and her name turned up in the paper every year after that, at the Grange and the Home Economics club and as a clerk at the elections, and when her uncle Al died in 1935 they held the funeral at her house.

You will want to know whether anybody guessed it. Nobody did. For thirty years the Willow Creek correspondent had been guessing every wedding on the river, "Next?" and "Who is the lucky one?" and "Rumor has it," and getting about half of them right, and they never once guessed Alice's, and they never once guessed mine either, though in my case there was nothing to guess. Merton Shore came up from Salyer on the mail stage two or three times that fall, and Alice walked down to the store to meet the stage, and the correspondent was right there in the store, and saw nothing. I saw it. I did not say anything. It is not my business to tell the Advocate what it ought to have noticed.

Nancy

The Camptons put in fruit trees. In February of 1926 a lot of them were hauled into the Willow Creek section and "a quantity was shipped to Bert Campton's ranch, known as the 'Sugar Bowl' ranch," and some went across the river to Frank Graham's place opposite the post office, and the paper said "Willow Creek and the lower Trinity river section cannot be beat for an ideal fruit country." John Douglas had proved that thirty years before, and planted the first ones, and lived just long enough to hear that the new owners were planting again.

In May the Henningses came back. "George Hennings and family who spent the past 18 months in San Diego returned to the Willow Creek section last week." And then, after the name of a young man who came with them, "They are glad to be back in Humboldt county."

I could have told the Advocate that. Eighteen months in the sun with the Blue Lake paper sent down every week, reading the Willow Creek column at a kitchen table eight hundred miles off, and the transfers, and the Sugar Bowl in the transfers with somebody else's name on it. They did not go back into the bowl. They took a place in the section and George did what work there was, and in July the paper said "Grace Hennings, who has been visiting relatives in Arcata, returned to her home at Willow Creek Sunday." Her home at Willow Creek. She was thirteen. That is the last time I ever saw her name in a newspaper, and I have looked.

They did not stay. The next May they moved to Eureka, "where they are located at 2419 Spring street," and that was the end of the Henningses on the river. A year later, when Anna's mother died, the paper had her at Port Townsend, in Washington. After that I lost them. I heard once, from Joe Martin, that Anna was in San Diego again, and once that she was in Oregon. I did not hear about George. I do not know when he died, or where, or whether he ever got that new giant off his mind. I hope he did. I hope Grace grew up and married somebody kind and had children and told them about the bowl. I do not know. The paper stopped following them when they left the county, and I am a man who has learned most of what he knows from the paper.

The winter of 1927 was a hard one on the new road. There were slides from Redwood Creek to Cedar Flat, and between Hoopa and Willow Creek the stages could not make it until the Tuesday after the storm, and then "they had to go over the old road above Sugar Bowl ranch, which is quite steep and rough in some places." Quite steep and rough in some places. I would have liked to see Ellis's face when he read that. Two years after the new road opened the mail went back over the corkscrews, over the tunnel, over the saddle, the way it had gone in 1890, and the stage drivers swore all the way, and the water went on running under their wheels.

Mrs. Douglas was ill all that year. She had been failing since the fall of 1926, a year after John died, and by the summer she was partly paralyzed, and Alice nursed her, and Bob came down from Oregon when he could, and in the summer of 1927 they took her to the hospital in Eureka, and brought her home again. In October she had another stroke and died. The Advocate said, "Funeral services for Mrs. Nancy Douglas, aged 63, pioneer resident of Willow Creek, who died here last Tuesday, were held Thursday, interment being made at Willow Creek." "She had been ill over a year, death finally coming after a paralytic stroke." And of Bob: "He was at her bedside when she passed away."

Nancy.

I had eaten at her table for thirty-one years. I had sat on her porch, and slept in her barn, and carried her boy home from the creek with a cut foot, and been fed by her through two winters on the giant when I had no other place to be fed. I had heard her tell the doctor that his ditch would never carry water and then hand him a second piece of pie when it did. And I had never once, in thirty-one years, called her anything but Mrs. Douglas, and I had never once heard her husband call her anything at all in front of me, and I did not know her first name until I read it in her obituary. Nancy. Her mother's name. It suited her. I wish I had known it while she was alive, though I do not think I would have used it. Some people you do not.

She was sixty-three. She had come into the bowl as a young wife and made a farm in a gold mine, and raised two children eight miles from a school, and then moved them out to the school and kept the farm going from the other side of the river, and buried her husband and her sister Amelia in the same two years, and she had been tired for a long time. The paper said the funeral was largely attended. It was.

There was one more thing in the paper about her, a week later, in the column from the courthouse. Alice had filed her mother's will for probate. "The estate consists of personal property amounting to $5,130. The devisees are the petitioner, as trustee for Nellie Douglas Smith, and John Edward Shore." John Edward Shore was Alice's baby boy, born the September after the wedding, named for his grandfather. Nellie Douglas Smith I had never heard of. Not at the table, not on the porch, not in thirty-one years. When John died the paper said one daughter and one son, and I would have said the same. When Bob died, in 1952, the paper gave him two sisters, Alice and Nellie Smith of Oroville. I asked Alice about it once, years afterward, carefully, and she looked at me and said, "Nellie is my sister," in a voice that closed the door, and I let it close. Every family has a room you are not shown. I was shown more of that house than most men are shown of their own.

Roast bear and brown gravy

There was laughing that fall too. The river always laughed in the fall, after the fruit was in.

Jim Patterson had the Brett place now, where the Douglases had lived. He had bought it in 1920 and he was the best cook on the Trinity, and in November of 1927 the Blue Lake volunteer fire department came up to his ranch for what they called a bear feed, and the Advocate gave it a headline. "BLUE LAKE FIREMEN LIKE BEAR MEAT, THEY SAY." And below it, "A 240-lb. Cub Devoured In Short Order."

I was there. I had no business being there, not being a Blue Lake fireman or any kind of fireman, but Jim needed somebody to turn the meat, and I was handy. The tables were set in the picnic ground with "light being supplied by means of gas mantle lanterns," and it was cold, and the lanterns hissed, and the fire had been going since morning. Here is what the firemen ate, and the Advocate printed it as the firemen reported it upon their return home, as though it were the minutes of a meeting: "Roast bear meat and brown gravy, baked potatoes, vegetable salad, baked beans, olives, relishes, apple sauce, apple and pumpkin pie and cake and coffee." Olives. I do not know where Jim got olives in November at Willow Creek. He would not say.

They played cards and sang and told stories until some time in the early Sunday morning hours, and then they "sought their blankets," and in the morning Jim fed them "Excellent bachelors' flapjacks." I made those. I want that on the record. Jim made the bear and I made the flapjacks, and the Advocate called them bachelors' flapjacks, and I was the bachelor.

But the reason it got a headline was the bear, and the way Jim told it to them at the table, by lantern light, with his sleeves rolled up. He had gone out for the meat and shot a big bear and loaded it on the pack animal, and then his hunting partner asked to borrow his rifle to try his own luck, and Jim let him have it, and started home with nothing in his hands but an axe. And his dogs jumped a young bear, two hundred and forty pounds, and it started up a tree, and here I will give it to you exactly as the Advocate gave it, because I could not improve on it if I tried. "With his axe in one hand, Paterson grabbed bruin with the other, while he administered a killing blow with the short-handled axe."

Grabbed bruin with the other. I asked him afterward, privately, which part of the bear he grabbed. He said, "The part that was nearest." I asked whether the bear had anything to say about it. He said, "Not much, after."

I have never killed a bear. I have said so before. I am not a good shot, and I would not have grabbed one with my hand if it had been hanging by its tail from a clothesline. But I believed Jim. He had the scratches. And the firemen wanted it understood, the paper said, "that their second annual bear feed will be held at the same place under the same auspices and under the supervision of the same chef just one year from now." Jim Patterson cooked for that river for the next thirty years. Every fiesta, every barbecue, every Fourth. It started with a bear and a short-handled axe.

The wheelbarrow

In February of 1928 Flomena Martin died in Eureka, at her daughter's house. She was Anna Hennings's mother. She had come from the Azores more than fifty years before and settled at the mouth of the South Fork, and lived there until she died, and the paper listed her ten children down to the last one, and one of them was "Mrs. Anna Hennings of Port Townsend, Washington." They buried her at the Martin ranch, five miles above Willow Creek, on the river she had lived beside for half a century. Her husband Frank had drowned off White's cable in January of 1899, the winter I was on that job. She had been a widow twenty-nine years.

In July of 1928 somebody robbed the store.

The store at Willow Creek was Brizard's then, and Frank Graham was the manager, the same Frank Graham who had the place across the river where the Camptons' fruit trees went. At three o'clock in the morning on a Friday four men came into the store and took the safe. They did not blow it. They did not open it. They took it, the whole thing, out the door and down the road to the bridge, a few hundred feet, where they had their car, and loaded it in. And the Advocate, which had very little to go on at press time, said this: "It appears that the safe was moved by means of a wheelbarrow."

Graham heard the noise. He got up and got to the door in time to see one of them going toward the bridge, and the car went off up the river road toward Weaverville at a terrific speed, and Graham "immediately telephoned the neighbors up the road to look out for the bandits." That was the telephone. I remember when there was no telephone on the river at all, when the news went up and down on horseback, and now Frank Graham stood in his nightshirt in the store at three in the morning and rang the line, and it went up the river ahead of the car, the way the news had never once gone ahead of anything in all the years I had known it.

At Burnt Ranch, Bud Carpenter, the postmaster, and Oscar Hayward were waiting in the road. They ordered the car to stop. The men in the car opened fire, and in the exchange of shots Bud Carpenter was killed, and one of the robbers was killed and fell out of the car, and the others went on.

I knew Bud Carpenter. Everybody did. He was born on that river and raised on it, and he was about forty, and he left a wife, who had been Isabelle Irving, and six children. The paper said "his untimely death has cast a gloom over the entire community," and it had. And it said one more thing that I did not know until I read it: "He was a brother of Mrs. Joseph Martin of Arcata." Joe Martin's wife. Anna Hennings's brother's wife. Five months after Joe's mother was buried at the ranch, his wife's brother was shot dead on the road for a store safe. That is how it was on that river. Everybody was somebody's brother. You could not hurt one family without it going up and down the whole river like the telephone.

Charley Beaver, the deputy at Hoopa, went out after the one who was supposed to be loose in the hills around Willow Creek. They caught them, in time, the ones who were left. I do not want to say more about it than that. It was the only time in my life that I was afraid of a car coming up the road at night, and I have thought since that it was the end of something on the river, the time when you left the store unlocked because there was nowhere for a thief to go. The road went two ways now, and fast.

Brood sows

The Camptons came up on weekends and holidays. The rest of the time they kept a man on the place, and from 1928 that man was Byron McCombs, whom everybody called Mac. He had been the financial clerk at the Hoopa agency and his wife Pearl taught at the Weitchpec school, and he wanted to farm. That spring the Hoopa column said "Byron McCombs of Sugar Bowl ranch was a business visitor to Hoopa this week. While here he purchased several fine brood sows from Chas. Beaver."

Hogs, in the bowl, again. I was glad to see it. The oldest crop that bowl ever grew was acorns, and the oldest thing anybody ever did with acorns there was fatten hogs on them, T. G. Campbell's twenty-five head at a dollar and two cents in 1884, and John Douglas's after him, and now Mac McCombs's. The same oaks. Some of them the same trees.

Mac was a lion hunter. He had one good dog when he came and he bought another from Jay Brace, the state hunter, and he hunted with Charley Beaver of Hoopa, whose dogs had a reputation more than county wide, and in January of 1933 the two of them spent three days on a cold trail after two mountain lions that had been killing deer and hogs on the reservation. The Advocate gave it a column. They loaded the dogs in a truck on Friday morning and drove as close as they could get and turned them loose, and the dogs picked up the trail at noon and followed it till dark. That night it rained and snowed. Saturday the trail was gone, and they cast around all day in the snow, and picked it up again at five in the evening and followed it till midnight. Sunday they put the dogs back on where they had left off, and lost it again where the hogs had been feeding, and then the dogs struck a hot trail, and in a few minutes there was a lot of barking, and Charley's tree dog sounded the tree bark, and there was the first lion in the fork of a tree.

And then the second one, and this is the part Mac told me about at the store, and the part the Advocate liked best too. The dogs jumped it, and it ran. "Mr. Beaver witnessed an unusal sight," the paper said, spelling it the way the compositor felt that day, "a lion running from the dogs."

"Running," Mac said. "Like a cat off a porch." He was delighted with it. He said Charley Beaver had been hunting lions since he could walk and he had never seen one run from dogs in his life, and Charley stood there in the rain and laughed out loud. Then the lion went up a tree and hid so well that the dogs could not see it, only smell it, and they would not leave, and the men found it and that was the end. The last five miles along Pine Creek near the Klamath were the worst, Mac said, and the dogs did all of it, and the men gave the dogs the credit.

In June Mac and his brother Hugh, who came over from Covelo, killed three more in ten days near the Mill Creek divide on the old Orleans trail. "Cold trailing tree hounds were used and each lion was killed at a different time and place." And in July, coming home at night from the Berry ranch on Redwood Creek to the Sugar Bowl, Mac and Pearl "came upon a large female mountain lion on the road," and Mac happened to have a rifle and one of his best hounds in the car, and that made six for Mac that year. Pearl told me afterward that she had sat in the car with the door shut and the lamp on and did not care in the least whether anybody thought she was brave.

That same summer there was a boy in the bowl. His name was Bert Mostyn and he was twelve, the son of Charles Mostyn, who was working on the place, and he was raising Chinese ring-necked pheasants for his 4-H project. The assistant county farm advisor came out to see them in August and help him with the breeding, and the Advocate said the pheasants were his official 4-H program for the year, "representing one of the most difficult of all 4-H tests," and that the fish and game commission had taken a great deal of interest.

I went down to see the birds. They were in a pen behind the old Douglas house, the middle one of the three, and Bert showed them to me one at a time and told me which was which and what each one ate. He was very serious about it. I thought about Bob Douglas at fourteen, in the same bowl, shooting the bear that was eating his father's hog, and the Advocate saying "Bob is a good shot for a boy of his age," and I thought, that is the difference thirty years makes. In 1902 a boy in the Sugar Bowl got into the paper for killing something. In 1933 a boy got into the paper for keeping something alive. I told Bert that. He did not know who Bob Douglas was. I told him about the bear. He said, "Did he eat it?" and I said I expected so, and he went back to his pheasants.

Miners on every bar

The hard times came up the river like high water, slowly, and then all at once.

By the summer of 1931 there was nothing for a man to do in Eureka or Arcata or Blue Lake, the mills were down and the woods were shut, and the men came up the river with gold pans, the way men had come up it in 1850. The Denny correspondent wrote the headline for all of us. "Hard Times Brings Big Boom To The New River Section," and under it, "MINERS ON EVERY BAR." Every bar. The old bars that had been worked out in the fifties and worked out again by the Chinese and worked out again by us in the nineties had men on them again, crouched at the edge of the water with a pan and a shovel, getting a dollar a day if they were lucky and seventy-five cents if they were not, and glad of it.

In the spring of 1932 the recorder's office filled up with locations. "In these days of depression and lowered wages men are seeking in mining an opportunity to make good wages in taking out gold from the rich creeks of the northeastern part of Humboldt county," the Advocate said. They filed on the creeks around Willow Creek by the ten and the twenty and the hundred and sixty acres, men I knew and men I didn't, and Frank Graham's name was on one of them, and so was a man named Bergin, who had a scheme on Willow Creek for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars' worth of water and could not meet his payroll.

And in May of 1932 three men located five claims in the Sugar Bowl. "D. R. Morrison, W. J. Cooley and John Brett, May 2, 1932, locate Umpqua claims Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, covering 100 acres in sec. 6, 7N 5E, Hoopa mining district." Section six is the bowl. Lot two of section six is the bar.

That was not old John Brett. Old John Brett was dead. He had died two years before, in February of 1930, suddenly, at Hoopa, at sixty-nine, and the Advocate had said "The grim reaper claimed another Humboldt pioneer this week." He was the one who carried the mail between Willow Creek and Hoopa when I first came on the river, over the corkscrews, and I hauled for the store with him in 1890 and he told me everything worth knowing about mules in one afternoon and nothing else for a month. He went down to Blue Lake about 1912 and was the first city marshal there, when the town was incorporated, and then he was a night clerk in a hotel in Eureka, which I could not picture, and at the end he went back to Hoopa, "where he has a son," and died there. The John Brett on the Umpqua claims was that son, Johnny Brett, who carried the mail himself from 1926 until 1934, the same road his father had carried it over, only along the river now.

I asked Johnny what he wanted with a hundred acres in the Sugar Bowl. He said gold. I said everybody had wanted gold in the Sugar Bowl since 1884 and the gravel was under the fields and there was no place to put the tailings. He said times were different. I said the river was the same. He laughed and said I was the last man alive who remembered why the Sugar Bowl didn't pay, and I said that was probably so, and that it was not a distinction I had wanted. I never saw a shovel go into the bar under those claims. I do not know what Morrison and Cooley and Johnny had in mind, or whether they ever did a day's work on them. The paper did not say again.

The next fall Francis Berry applied to the land office for a patent. He was the Berry who had shot Meitz in 1920, past seventy now, and the claim was the Walker Placer, which was the name the Advocate said he also went by. "Notice is hereby given that Francis S. Berry of Willow Creek, California, has made application for patent to the Walker Placer Mining Claim," twenty acres in section five, the bowl's own section, in the southeast corner of it. "There are no adjoining or conflicting claims. The land to the east has been patented." He had been going at that mountain for thirty years, and at the end he wanted a paper from the government that said some piece of it was his. I hope he got it. He died in 1940, and I never heard.

By 1936 the mining was bad enough on the main river that the Lower Trinity Chamber of Commerce met at Willow Creek and voted to protest to the fish and game commission against the miners muddying the water. They said a mine was still running at the mouth of New River after the closing date, and two companies near Junction City were using stored water for their monitors, and "The main stream of the Trinity river is still muddy and full of muck, whereas the South Fork is in perfect condition, with many salmon and steelhead."

I sat at the back of that meeting. There were forty-some people. William Gallop was in the chair, who had the old Kirkham place, and they talked about tourists, and steelhead, and advertising the lower Trinity as a vacation country. Forty years before, at that same end of the river, I had stood on a pipe and run a giant into a bank of gravel and turned the Trinity the color of coffee with cream every winter for four winters, and nobody had protested anything, and the Advocate had printed every clean-up as if it were a victory in a war. Now the miners were the trouble and the fish were the point. I did not say anything at the meeting. I did not know which side I was on. I think I was on both.

Three hundred in the mess hall

In 1933 the government put the young men in the woods. The Civilian Conservation Corps had a camp at Hawkins Bar, up the river, and another on the reservation, and the boys came in by the truckload from the cities, from Oakland and Los Angeles and farther, boys who had never seen a mountain, and they built trails and roads and lookouts and guard stations and strung telephone wire, and they ate like loggers, and every store on the river did business again for the first time in three years.

That Christmas the camp at Hawkins Bar invited the whole country to dinner. The Advocate said the celebration was "both for the boys at the Hawkins Bar camp and for the civilian population in the surrounding country from Willow Creek to Burnt Ranch," and that the mess hall, which held two hundred men, was crowded to the doors with nearly three hundred people. It had snowed all day. "Despite the inclement weather with heavy snows falling all day, a large number of residents of Trinity valley brought their families to attend this happy Christmas celebration." I went up in Gallop's truck with the chains on.

There was a chaplain, and the old hymns, and then the camp commander welcomed us, and he was a lieutenant named Foote, which made me think of old A. N. Foote, who had gone up China Creek with dynamite in 1906 and died in 1914, though this one was no relation that I know of. And then there was music by the camp talent. "Don Carr conducted the orchestra and Wilho Lahti presided over the grand accordion." I have thought about that sentence for twenty years. Presided over. A Finnish boy from somewhere in the city, in a government coat, sitting on a bench in a mess hall in the snow on the Trinity with an accordion bigger than his chest, presiding. He played everything. He played the waltzes we used to dance at Bussell's hall, which I would not have thought a boy from the city would know, and the women got up and danced with the boys from the camp, and the boys from the camp danced with the women's daughters, and the mothers watched.

"Every child present received a Christmas gift and everyone took home with him a sack of nuts and candy." Everyone. I took mine home. I was sixty-three. I ate the candy on the porch on Christmas night and looked at the snow on the ridge across the river and thought it had been a long time since anybody had given me a sack of anything.

The next spring the CCC built a guard station near the Sugar Bowl. "Foreman Frank Waterman is at present busily engaged with the erection of the new guard station near the Sugar Bowl Ranch on the Trinity River." Frank was the Judge's boy. He had been on the road crew with us in 1924, carrying water and then driving a truck, and here he was a foreman with the government, building a station with a crew of city boys. Bert Leech was the carpenter on the CCC crews that year, the same Bert Leech I worked under in 1918 and 1919, still at it, still swearing at a crooked board as though it had done it on purpose. He took fourteen of the boys to Bee Tree Springs up the South Fork that spring, to lay water lines and brush out and pour the concrete for another station, and the lumber went in from Grouse Mountain on a tractor and sled and then three miles on the government mule train, two round trips a day. No breakage reported. Bert was proud of that. "Fourteen boys from Los Angeles," he said to me, "and not one board split." He said it as though the boards had been the hard part.

Fire in the safe

Fire is the other thing that country does to you. The river comes in the winter and the fire comes in the summer, and between the two of them they have had most of what anybody ever built on the Trinity, sooner or later.

In April of 1931 William Gallop's house at Willow Creek burned to the ground on a Wednesday afternoon. "The home was one of the finest in that section and the loss will be keenly felt by Mr. and Mrs. Gallop as there was only a small insurance on the place." Mrs. Gallop was Mrs. Campton's sister, which made it the Sugar Bowl's own family, more or less, and her brother-in-law came up from Eureka the same day with clothes and supplies for the three of them. I helped Gallop clear the ashes. He found the cookstove standing in the middle of it, black and whole, like the coins in the riffles, and he said he would build the next house around it, and he did.

The worst fire I ever heard of in that country was one of the smallest. On a Saturday night in January of 1934 the Luther Salyer house at Salyer burned, up the river, with the children in it, while their mother had gone a short way to the Harvey house to use the telephone. The Advocate had it the next week. "Marshall, a boy of nine and crippled in one foot, tried to extinguish the flames by carrying water from a nearby well. When the lad realized, however, that it was impossible to put out the fire, he told the other children to get outside and ran to notify his mother." His sister Helen, who was seven, had been locked in another building in play by a younger brother, and she screamed until he let her out. "Helen then rushed into the burning house just in time to rescue the seven-months old baby and to drag Katherine, her little two-year-old sister, outside." The neighbors got up a petition for Carnegie medals for the two of them. I never heard whether they got the medals. They got everybody out. "When help arrived it was too late to save anything in the house." Anything in the house. Everybody who mattered was in the yard.

In July the fire took Burnt Ranch, which had been named for a fire long before any of us and I suppose felt it was owed. A gasoline drum under the ground blew up on a Tuesday morning and the fire went through the town: Beerbower's store with the post office in it, the cabins, twenty drums of gasoline and a truck of beer. The store had just been remodeled. And there was a payroll in the safe, twenty-two hundred dollars in checks and currency for the road contractor's men, and the paper said this: "The money was in an open safe but no one thought to grab the money before making their hurried exits as the flames broke out."

No one thought to grab the money. In 1928 four men drove up the river in the middle of the night and wheeled a safe down the road in a wheelbarrow and killed a man for what was in it, and six years later twenty-two hundred dollars sat in an open safe in a burning store and nobody so much as turned his head. People are like that in a fire. I think it is to their credit. The CCC boys came down from Hawkins Bar and Big Bar and could not stop it, and Carl Beerbower said he would have it all built back within a month.

In September the big one came, on Grouse Mountain, up toward the South Fork, set in four places a little before noon on a Wednesday. "The worst fire of the season in the Trinity national forest was raging out of control today on Grouse Mountain, with approximately 300 men already on the fire lines and 150 more en route." Fifty of the Hawkins Bar boys had been sent to the Mendocino forest the night before, two hundred and eighty miles by truck, and they had to turn around and come home, and while they were coming the fire jumped Cow Creek and Mosquito Creek, which every deer hunter on the river knew. Wesley Hotelling, the ranger at Salyer, was in charge, and for the rest of my life every fire on the lower Trinity was his fire. I was too old for the lines. I carried water for the cook at the Hawkins Bar camp for two days, which is what they let old men do, and watched the smoke stand up over the South Fork like a thunderhead that would not rain.

Very few of the bodies

The Camptons did not have the bowl long. Bert Campton died early in 1935. The Eureka chamber of commerce filled "the unexpired term of L. B. Campton, who recently died," and that is all the paper gave him that I saw, a vacancy on a board. Mac McCombs had gone to be justice of the peace at Hoopa the year before. Mrs. Campton held the ranch, and she put a new man on it, Owen Handy, from Orange County, with his wife Sara and four small children.

I did not know Owen Handy well. He had been on the river two years. He was young, thirty or forty depending on which paper you read, and I would have said thirty, and he was cheerful and worked hard and did not know the river. That is not a criticism. Nobody knows that river who has not been on it twenty years, and the ones who have been on it twenty years know enough to be afraid of it.

On Monday the twenty-fifth of May, 1936, Handy and Thomas Burns set out to cross the Trinity in a canvas canoe, to hunt on the east bank. Burns was a young Indian man from Lewiston, over in Trinity County, who had been in the Hoopa country about three years and on the Campton ranch only a short time. He had helped Fred Tye with his cattle on the Big Bar side and hunted cougars, and the people up there knew him. Handy had a rifle and a pistol with him. He said he would be back Monday evening.

The Advocate's first story told it better than I can. "He had intended to return Monday evening, but his wife and four small children were not greatly alarmed until Tuesday passed without his return. Then Mrs. Handy notified a few neighbors, and they located the overturned boat several miles down the river."

Not greatly alarmed. I have thought about that. A woman from Orange County, two years on the Trinity, with four little children in the old house in the bowl, and her husband gone hunting across the river with a gun, and he does not come home that night, and she is not greatly alarmed. Why would she be? Men stayed out. Hunting took longer than you thought. The east bank was a big country. And all day Tuesday she waited, and fed the children, and looked at the river, and the river looked the way it always looked, and Tuesday night she went to the neighbors.

They found the canoe nearly three miles downstream. On Wednesday the sheriff came, and the Indian Service from Hoopa, and they organized searching parties, and found no footprints at the landing place on the east bank where the men had meant to come ashore. The sheriff's reading was that the canoe struck the rocks and threw the men into a swift eddy, and there were marks on the rocks that supported him.

Then they dragged the river. I went down. I was sixty-six and no use in a boat, but you go. Everybody went. Men came from Willow Creek and Hoopa and Salyer, Indian men and white men, and they worked the eddies with poles and grappling hooks from boats and from the bank, and the women brought coffee down to the bar, and Sara Handy stood on the bar, John Douglas's bar, the Horseshoe, the eighty acres of gravel that nobody ever mined, with the four children behind her in the door of the house. She stood there most of every day. I do not know what I said to her. I do not think I said anything useful. There is nothing useful to say.

The Big Bar correspondent wrote about it in the column in June, between the news that the school had closed with a picnic and the news that the CCC boys were going out to the spike camps for the summer, and she called Handy "Bill Hardy," because that is how the name came up the river to her, and then she wrote two sentences that I cut out and kept until the fold wore through. "The Trinity river is very treacherous stream as many people who are good swimmers have been drowned. Very few of the bodies were found."

Very few of the bodies were found. She was right, as far as she knew. I could have named her twenty. The river had taken men off the cable at Springville and out of the boats at the ferries and off the rocks at the falls, and men swimming in August, and children, and more than one of them it had never given back.

This time it gave them back. On a Friday afternoon in early June two special deputies, Hugh Moon and Jack Scott, found Owen Handy's body lodged only a short distance from where the shattered canoe had been found, and near it a broken paddle. Sara Handy and the Indian Service had both asked for an inquest, fearing foul play, two men gone across the river with guns, and there was one, in Eureka, and "The examination showed no bullet holes or any other evidence of violence, however." They buried him in Eureka, at Ocean View, with a Christian Science service. His parents were at Laguna Beach, and his brothers.

And on a Sunday near the end of June, Faustin Matildon of Hoopa found Thomas Burns on a sandbar. The paper said "The body was believed to have been exposed on a sandbar for a day or two." The Indian Service had him taken to Eureka too, and a doctor examined him with an X-ray, and found nothing but drowning. "Relatives of both victims agreed after the autopsy that there was no reason to suspect foul play."

I want Faustin Matildon's name in this. Four weeks after the canoe went over, when most of the searchers had gone home, he found Tommy Burns and brought word in, and the paper gave him one line. For a long time I told this story wrong. I said Burns was never found, because I had gone home by then myself and I did not see the second notice. He was found. A Hoopa man found him. That ought to be remembered as long as the rest of it.

Sara Handy took the four children south. Mrs. Campton did not put another man on the place for a while. That summer the bowl was empty for the first time since John Douglas came into it, and the fruit trees dropped their fruit in the grass, and the hogs, if there were any hogs, went back to the oaks.

The old ones go

In December of 1937 the river came up higher than I had seen it in thirty years. There had been no cold, and the rain came warm on the snow, and the Trinity went over everything it could reach. "During the big flood it washed everything possible in its reach," the Burnt Ranch correspondent wrote. Cabins went down the river. One man lost everything he had. Tony Smith's house at Burnt Ranch had water to the eaves and was washed twelve feet off its foundation and "was prevented from a longer trip by being tied fast," and Tony and his wife and their three guests worked all through the midnight hours carrying out the furniture. At Willow Creek the highway men built a diving board the next summer over the hole the flood had scoured out. That is the Trinity. It takes your house and gives you a swimming hole, and you are supposed to say thank you.

The Judge died in October of 1938, at Eureka, after a short illness. The Advocate gave it a headline. "He first located the Raccoon Bar Placer, now known as the Garrett place." That is how they began it. Not the road, not the bench, not the forty years of marrying people and settling fence lines and sending boys home to their mothers with a lecture. The placer. The first thing he did on the river, in 1879, was look for gold, and the paper remembered that, and so do I. He was married to Mary Brett Shanesy, John Brett's sister, a widow, in 1888, and in 1893 they moved to the house he lived in until he died, and the paper said he "numbered his friends by the score," and they had the funeral at the house. Mary lived six years more.

Jimmy Henderson died in September of 1941, at seventy-seven, at his home at Willow Creek, where he had lived forty-seven years. Jimmy cooked for the Trophy when they moved the sluice boxes in 1899, and the Times man said he was not so long as some men but appeared to have increased in stature lately, the cause being a fifteen-pound boy. He gave the masquerade ball at Christmas of 1901 with Don Kirkham. He married A. N. Foote's daughter. And when he died the Advocate said this, which I think is the most remarkable sentence I have ever read in an obituary: "He is survived by ten of his 14 children."

Fourteen. I knew most of them. I did not know there were fourteen until I counted the paper. Five years later one of the ten, Edward, drowned eeling at night at the mouth of the South Fork. "Companions saw him swimming in mid-stream but he soon disappeared from sight." He was thirty-five. The river again.

And Jim Douglas. John's brother, the one who came into the county on horseback with him by the Blocksburg trail. In August of 1943 the Advocate wrote him up because the eleventh of the month had come round and he had walked into the office to pay his subscription, "which he has never failed to pay in advance since August, 1888." Fifty-five years. He was in his ninety-first year. He did his own housework and cooking in his little house in Blue Lake, and the paper said he "says he is almost old enough to get an old age pension, which he has never applied for."

Almost old enough. That was a Douglas joke. John would have said it the same way, with the same face. Jim died the next January, peacefully, at the house of friends who had been looking after him, and the paper said he "managed to walk up town and visit his friends until a few months ago when he became too feeble to do so." They buried him at Willow Creek with the family. The last of the three brothers. Al had gone in 1935, and they had held his funeral at Alice's house.

I was seventy-four. I was older than John Douglas had been when I met him at Bussell's hall on New Year's night of 1890 and he asked me whether I could fix a flume. I had not thought about that until Jim died. Then I could not stop thinking about it.

For reasons well known

The war came up the river the way the hard times had, slowly and then all at once, and it took the young men out of it the way the hard times had brought them in.

In December of 1942 the Salyer correspondent wrote her Christmas column, and I will give you three sentences of it, because they say everything. "The annual New Year's Home Coming party will be temporarily discontinued for reasons well known to all of us." And: "Lippincott and Norton are the new owners and operators of the Sugar Bowl ranch. A good grade of domestic range stock will be their speciality." And: "In spite of the domestic meat shortage, local people are finding a good substitute in bear meat, the supply of which seems to be unlimited provided one has the hunting spirit and the strength to follow a pack of hounds."

So the Campton estate had sold, and the bowl was a cattle ranch, and the Home Coming party was off, and we were eating bear. Jim Patterson was happy. He had been telling people bear was good eating for fifteen years. And that same column said the Trinity was running clear that winter, "A real contrast to the familar muddy Trinity is its blue-green color," because the miners had all gone to the war or the shipyards, and the river went back to the color it had been before any of us came, blue-green, the color X saw in 1896. It took a war to do what the chamber of commerce could not.

In June of 1945 a family named Hardester came up from the Star Lodging House in Blue Lake to take charge of the Sugar Bowl ranch. Their boy David was in the service, and the Salyer people had a supper for the servicemen that summer and he was there. The Hardesters were good people. They kept the ditch open, which is the one thing I asked of anybody who lived in the bowl.

But I want to tell you about Johnny Martin.

John Dayton Martin was the son of John Martin of Willow Creek, who was Anna Hennings's brother, which makes him Anna's nephew and Flomena's grandson, and he was born at Willow Creek in July of 1922, and went to the county school and to Hoopa and graduated from the high school at Arcata in June of 1942, and enlisted right afterward. He trained at Farragut and was stationed at Treasure Island and then he went to the war. He came home in May of 1944 on a thirty-day leave. "He was home on a 30-day leave last May," the paper said, afterward. I saw him at the store. He was a big good-looking boy in a sailor's uniform and he bought a bottle of soda pop and drank it standing in the door looking up the river, and I said, "Your aunt Anna raised beans in the Sugar Bowl, you know, the best crop that bowl ever had," and he said he knew, his father had told him, and he laughed.

He was killed at Okinawa on the sixth of April, 1945, aboard the destroyer Bush, which the Japanese sank with airplanes. He was twenty-two. The paper said he was gunner's mate third class, and that he had a brother Lincoln in the navy in Oklahoma and a sister Doris in San Francisco.

They brought him home in 1949. In March of that year the Veterans of Foreign Wars had a military funeral for him at the Willow Creek Community church, and then at the cemetery, and the paper said "assigned to the Destroyer USS Bush at the time of his death," and it got his age wrong, it said thirty-two, which it was not, he was twenty-two and would have been twenty-six. I stood at the back with my hat in my hand. They fired the rifles over him. The sound went up the river and came back off the far ridge the way the giant used to come back, and I have never in my life wished so hard that a sound would stop.

Light and power

The Hardesters did not stay. Nobody stayed. In April of 1947 the Orleans column said a man named John Butler from Red Cap Creek had sold his bulldozer, and then, as if it were the same piece of news, "Butler is now living at the Sugar Bowl Ranch near Willow Creek." In June the paper said he had bought it, through Adolph Coffee of Eureka, to make a dude ranch, presumably as a mecca for movie stars, and I went down and told him about it on the veranda of the old Douglas house, the whole thing, all afternoon. I have told that elsewhere and I will not tell it again here. He listened. That is all you can ask of a man.

At New Year's of 1949 the Hoopa column said "Tiny Ryan of Eureka recently purchased an interest in the Sugar Bowl ranch from John Butler. Ryan is District American Legion Commander. He owns and operates the Cottage Court at Talmage, Calif." A cottage court at Talmage. I did not know where Talmage was. I looked it up on a map at the store. It is in Mendocino County, and it is a long way from the Sugar Bowl, and I thought, the bowl has had a doctor and a minister and a mining company and a merchant and a farmer with a tractor, and now it has a motel man. It can stand it. It has stood everything else.

That August the lights came on. "A 'Light and Power Fiesta' was held last Saturday afternoon at Willow Creek, heralding the arrival of electricity in the Lower Trinity River area. Some six hundred persons attended, partaking of a sumptuous barbecued beef dinner prepared under the direction of James B. Patterson." Jim again, with the beef. It was held in a grove a half mile east of the junction, and there were games, and William Gallop was on the committee, and the ranger, and that night when I got home I went in and turned the switch on the wall and the bulb came on over the kitchen table, and I stood there and looked at it.

I want to tell you what that means to a man of seventy-nine. In 1896 we lit the tool house at the head of the ditch with a candle in a can. In 1900 I read the Advocate by a coal-oil lamp in the bunkhouse with the wick turned down to save the oil. Every night of my life on the river I had either gone to bed with the sun or paid for the light I sat up by, and the light had always been yellow and had always smoked. And now it was white, and it did not smoke, and it did not run out, and it came over the mountain on a wire from somewhere I had never been. I left it on all night the first night. I did not need it. I wanted to see it in the morning still on.

The river filled up after that. In March of 1950 the Advocate sent a man up for a weekend, and he wrote that the section was "enjoying an expansion program that amazes one," and that "Housing is scarce and new homes are being constructed all along the river." The mills were running day and night, and the logging trucks came down the river road I had helped to build so heavy and fast that a man was not safe on it in a car, and the old hotel at Willow Creek was being remodeled, and the Advocate's man wrote this about it: "The old kitchen, in use for nearly a century, is being torn down."

I ate in that kitchen in the fall of 1889, the week I came over Berry's summit. It was the first hot meal I had on the river.

In November of 1951 the Hoopa column had it. "A Mr. Barrett has purchased the Sugar Bowl ranch from John Butler for a sawmill site." A sawmill site. In the same paragraph the paper said who had bought the Grenz mill and the Willow Creek mill and the Bean mill, and that the Trinity River Lumber Company men had formed the first union local on the reservation. The bowl was going the way of the river. Gold, and then fruit, and then beans, and then cattle, and now timber. Each one the thing the country wanted at the time, and each one the paper's idea of what the bowl was for. "For a sawmill site." I thought about Jesse, in the paper all those years ago, saying a mine needed three things, capital and water and a place to dump, and every mine on that river was short at least one. A sawmill needs none of them. A sawmill needs trees, and a road, and the county gave it the road in 1924.

In those years the Advocate had a column called "Blue Lake In Years Gone By," by Mrs. Eugene Fountain, which reprinted old items from fifty years back, and I read it on my porch at Willow Creek every week, with the light on, because I was in some of it. In April of 1950 she reprinted X's piece from September of 1896, the one that started all of this, "The little valley is nearly circular," and the line about the cattle, that "all the swearing is done at the cattle and not at each other." In July of 1952 she had Bob Douglas at fourteen, killing the bear that was eating his father's hog, "Bob is a good shot for a boy of his age," four months after Bob died in Portland. In December of 1952 she had John Douglas coming down to Blue Lake for his fifteen hundred pounds of fence wire, "while living in the midst of timber he has to have his land fenced in with wire," the thing the Judge had said at his funeral. And in January of 1953 she had John buying the Brett ranch and building the new house nearer the school, "The roof will be covered with corrigated iron, which is the safest covering from fires."

It was a strange thing, reading those. The people in them were all dead but me, and they were all young again in the paper, and the paper spelled corrugated wrong, fifty years later, which I took as loyalty. I cut them out. I have them in the drawer with the others. The folds have not worn through yet. Give them time.

Every man to the fire lines

Fire followed the mills. That is what I learned in my old age. A sawmill is a fire that has not happened yet, sawdust and diesel and a burner going day and night, and men in a hurry.

In March of 1949 the Cal-Fir mill, two and a half miles east of Willow Creek, burned on a Tuesday. Sparks from a welder fell where the ground was soaked with diesel, and "A barrel of diesel oil exploded just after the fire started, scattering the flames over the area and creating an oil and wood fire." Hotelling radioed for crews, and by the time they got there it was "a huge inferno of flames." Afterward he went through what was left and reported that "many of the fire extinguishers and the water pump were not in working condition," which the forest service said would have made no difference to a fire that size and might make all the difference to a small one. Fifty thousand dollars. They saved the houses near it. The next spring they were clearing the ground for a new mill.

In August of 1951 the woods themselves went. That was a dry year, the driest I remember, three months without a cloud, and the lightning came and the fires came behind it, and the one that came nearest the bowl was the Three Creeks fire, on the Willow Creek watershed and the reservation, going up the slopes of Telescope Mountain. "A third fire camp is now being established at the Pine Ridge summit on the old Hoopa road."

The old Hoopa road. The corkscrews. The saddle above the Sugar Bowl, where the tunnel runs under, where nobody had driven a wagon since 1927. They put a fire camp on it, with cooks and bedrolls and trucks grinding up the old grade, and I stood on the highway in the bowl at night and looked up and saw their lights on the ridge where the stage used to come over, and smoke across the stars. I thought about the water in the tunnel under their feet, still running, going to the farm, and the fire on the mountain over it, and which one would win. The water won. It generally does, on that river, in the end.

Every mill and every logging show from Weaverville to Willow Creek shut down for three weeks that August, and every man went to the fire lines. The Burnt Ranch correspondent, Mrs. McDaniel, wrote that a cook named Gene Harvey came home from the Three Creeks fire for one night and was called out to the Jim Jam fire up in the high country, and she said he was "an old experienced cook for crews of men where the facilities are often a couple of frying pans and some cans." I knew men like that. I was nearly one, at Grouse Mountain. And she wrote, "Rain is the only hope of fire extermination." Somebody always says that.

Two weeks later the old Hoopa hotel burned, at a quarter to two on a Sunday morning, with twelve men asleep in it who ran out with nothing. "The hotel, built in the early years of the century, was owned by Charles Beaver, but was under lease to Mr. and Mrs. Evan McWilliams. Beaver was sleeping in a nearby house and awoke to see the flames consuming the structure." Charley Beaver, who had stood in the rain in 1933 and laughed at a lion running from his dogs. I went over to Hoopa a week later and found him standing in front of the chimney. He did not say anything for a while and neither did I. Then I told him about Gallop's cookstove, and he laughed, which was more than I had any right to expect.

In August of 1954 the Hawkins Bar suspension bridge, the one the CCC boys built, burned, nobody knew how, fifty thousand dollars' worth of it, and four days later there was a bridge across the river again. They built it out of logs. "Huge logs were cut and brought down to the river gravel bar, where they were anchored in the river, then very long smaller logs were placed on top of these logs, all being tied together with sturdy cables." And here is the part I liked. "The entire unit is well anchored to each bank, but in such a manner that as soon as winter rains cause the Trinity river to rise one end of the bridge will be released to float toward the opposite bank." A bridge that knew it would lose to the river and had planned for it. A man named James Hall ran the machinery, and the paper said "Without a doubt Hall can be considered a 'wizard of the cats.'" I got a ride up to see it, and I walked across it and back. It moved under me like a boat. I never felt safer on a bridge in my life, because it was the first one I ever stood on that did not pretend.

Sufficient beans

Bob Douglas died at Portland on the last day of March, 1952. He was sixty-four. He had been in the first war and worked for the lumber companies most of his life, in Oregon mostly, and he had a sister Alice at Willow Creek, and a sister Nellie at Oroville. I had not seen him in ten years. I remember him best at fourteen, with the rifle, standing over the bear in the hog pen, and his mother on the porch with her hand over her mouth, and his father coming across the yard at a run, and then stopping, and taking off his hat.

That summer the Hoopa business men put on a big Fourth, three days of it, with a parade and a princess and a barbecue, Jim Patterson cooking, and boxing and baseball and a marathon twelve miles from Willow Creek to Hoopa. And a boat race. The first notice in June said "a thrilling five mile boat race from Sugar Bowl to Hoopa." The second notice, the week of the Fourth, said a canoe race "from Campbell Creek to Hoopa. The distance is three miles." Both of them are right, depending on where you stand on the bar, and I will not argue with the Advocate about the length of a piece of the Trinity that I have known for sixty years. It was the same water.

I sat on the highway bank above the bar, on the road I helped to cut, with a good many Hupa families who had come up to watch, and when the boats came down out of the bend above the bowl, past the rocks where Handy and Burns went over, the young men digging hard and the river carrying them faster than they could dig, everybody on the bank stood up and shouted, and I stood up too. I did not know whose boat was whose. I did not care. They came down through the white water at the bottom of the bowl, where the river goes out over the rapids, and nobody went over, and they were gone around the bend toward Hoopa in less time than it takes to tell it. And I sat back down and thought that John Douglas had sold melons off that bar to the grandfathers of the boys in those boats, and that Anna Hennings had walked that road, and that the river did not care about any of it, and the people did. There were dances at night at Hoopa, the old dances, and those are not mine to tell. I went home.

In August of 1953 the Advocate had a notice from Crescent City. "'Ted' Griffiths, Former Resident, Dies In Del Norte." He was born in 1874. He packed between Blue Lake and Orleans when he was young, and worked in the woods, "later operating the present Graham ranch and the Sugar Bowl ranch on the Lower Trinity River." Five children, fourteen grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, four sisters. He was four years younger than me. He was the last man besides me who had worked the bowl before the road.

And in September the Health Center committee put on a barbecue at Willow Creek to raise money for a doctor. "About 600 people enjoyed the delicious meat and bean dinner." After the dinner, before the open-air dance, the committee got up on the dance floor and made speeches about the need for medical services on the river, and said the population in the immediate area was now two thousand two hundred. Two thousand two hundred. When I came over Berry's summit there were not two hundred white people between the summit and Hoopa, and the Hupa people were not counted at all.

And Jim Patterson, the paper said, "prepared and cooked 750 pounds of beef, and sufficient beans to go with it."

Sufficient beans. I laughed out loud when I read that, sitting on the porch, by myself. Thirty years before, George Hennings had made four thousand dollars off the bottom of the Sugar Bowl in one year in beans, more than the gravel ever paid anybody, and the Advocate had said so, and here was the Advocate in 1953, sufficient beans. Not too many and not too few. Enough to go with the beef. I think that is the best thing the paper ever said about that country, and it was not even talking about it. And then it said this about the committee, the young people who had come up the river after the war and built the houses all along it: "We did not see any shirking or bossing, just a bunch of earnest workers, doing their part."

I was there. I sat at the end of a table under the oaks with a plate of Jim's beef and Jim's beans and watched them dance, the young people, the ones from the mills and the forest service and the new houses, and their children running between the tables, and I did not know most of them, and they did not know me. Why would they? I was an old man at the end of the table. Somebody's grandfather. Somebody asked me if I had been on the river long and I said a while.

Whoever lives in the bowl now: the road you drive to get there runs through John Douglas's melon patch, and I cut it. The ditch above you still has water in it, or did when I last looked. The gravel is still under the fields. And the river that took Owen Handy and Tommy Burns and Frank Martin and Ed Henderson, and gave back some of them and not the others, is the same river that ran clear in the war and muddy in the boom and came up to Tony Smith's eaves, and it will come up again. Somebody always says that.

Ted Griffith died last month. Jim Douglas is gone, and Al, and John, and Nancy. The Judge is gone, and Mary. Jimmy Henderson, and old John Brett, and Bob. The Henningses went south and I lost them. That leaves me.

So I will tell it. All of it, from the beginning, from the ditch. Sit down.

The year of the river

I said that leaves me. It still does, three years on, and I am eighty-six. But the river was not done with that country when I sat down to tell it, and I have to add this, because a story about the Trinity that stops before the water comes up is not a true one.

In February of 1955 four young men from Hoopa were looking for a friend who had been missing a month, and they hauled their boat to Willow Creek and put it in the river there to search, and came down with the current. At the Sugar Bowl the boat turned over in the rapids. One paper put it at the mouth of Tish Tang Creek and the other at the Sugar Bowl Ranch, which is the same rough water, near enough, depending on where you stand. They held onto the boat about five minutes. "McClellan had climed on top of the upside down boat and was last seen when he leaped into the swift current and was carried downstream." The other three swam ashore. Richard McClellan was twenty-nine. He had been in the Navy in the war, and the paper said he was "an expert swimmer and diver." He left a wife, Patricia, and three children. His friends and relatives gave her nine hundred dollars, and the Hoopa tribe bought a twenty-five horsepower motor for the boat that dragged the river for him. And the Hoopa column said one thing more, which I have thought about every day since. "At the place McClellan drowned, the old-time Indians said boats had always been let through the rough rapids by rope in early days."

By rope. The old people knew. They knew it before John Douglas, before any of us. You did not run that water at the bottom of the bowl. You let your boat down through it on a line from the bank, the way you would let a loaded horse down a bad grade. Everything the river ever took out of the Sugar Bowl it took in that water, and the people who had lived there longest had known it all along, and had said so, and it took until 1955 for somebody to write it in the paper where the rest of us could read it. They found him in March. I will not say more than that. It is not my story. It belongs to his people, and they have their own ways of keeping it.

In June a fire on the Willow Creek grade burned three hundred acres and "closed down every mill in the Lower Trinity area, and all of the employees were taken to fight the fire." There were five lookouts on the high peaks of the lower Trinity that summer, and the paper said only two of them had anybody in them, for want of government money. Two out of five. Somebody in Washington had saved some money.

In August John Martin died at his home at the mouth of the South Fork, seventy-seven years old, born at China Flat, Frank and Flomena Martin's boy and Anna Hennings's brother. Mrs. McDaniel wrote him up in the Burnt Ranch column, and she had known him. "Johnny Martin was a wonderful character, and always saw the best in everybody and everything. His face was always wreathed in a large smile at all times." His house had burned in 1947, sparks from the kitchen chimney in the roof, and the neighbors burned their hands trying to stop it and could not. His boy Johnny was the one on the Bush. The pallbearers were all Ammons but one. And in the list of the survivors, at the head of the four sisters, it said "Mrs. Anna Hennings, San Diego."

Anna was alive. Twenty-eight years I had lost her, since the house on Spring Street, and there she was in the Advocate, still Anna Hennings, still in San Diego, still taking the paper or somebody was reading it to her. I wrote her a letter in care of the San Diego post office and told her the ditch was still running. Nothing came back, and nothing came back undelivered either, so I have decided it reached her.

On the fourteenth of December, at twenty minutes past nine in the morning, the butane tanks at Hoopa blew up. Gas had leaked from a pipe into a storage building and the pilot light of a water heater found it. Forty people were hurt. "Miraculously no one was killed," the paper said, which was the right word. Houses a hundred yards off were "pierced by two-by-fours," and one woman felt it at Weitchpec, twelve miles away. Leon Allen, who owned the plant, ran back into it after the first blast to shut off a valve, and got his eardrums broken and his face burned for it. That was a week before the flood. Hoopa had a hard Christmas.

It had been raining for a month. On Wednesday the twenty-first of December, about seven in the evening, the Trinity started to rise. I was at home. I heard it before I saw it, a change in the sound, the way you hear a crowd change when something has happened that you cannot see yet. By ten it was at flood stage. By midnight it was taking houses. All night and all the next day it came up, and the logs came down on it. A man named Paul Miller, who was building the Catholic church at Hoopa, walked and hitchhiked out to Eureka afterward and told the paper what he saw. "The Trinity had swollen some 30 feet to level with the Hoopa bridge at 8 p. m. Thursday, Miller said. At the same time huge logs were being washed down the river some 30 to 40 miles an hour, battering the bridge until it finally gave way. Later the huge concrete abutments also were carried downstream."

The Mount Vernon mill went. The Willow Creek suspension bridge went. I watched them string the cables on that bridge in the summer of 1926, and I walked across it the week it opened, and on the Thursday I stood on the bank and saw the river take it, the deck first and then the rest, and it went away down toward the bowl with the logs, and that was the last of it.

The people down the Klamath said it was the worst since 1890. I was on the river in 1890. I helped George Hemsted look at what was left of his orchard. This was worse. Up at Weaverville they figured the flow at Lewiston at eighty to a hundred thousand cubic feet a second, twice the record of 1941. I do not know what a cubic foot a second is, not really. I know what forty-three inches is. I know the Sugar Bowl ditch was six hundred inches on paper and never once ran it. And I know that on that Thursday the river at the bottom of the bowl ran higher than any man had seen it, and that nobody wrote down what it did there, because nobody could get there to look.

Nobody could get anywhere. There was no bridge open between Willow Creek and Hoopa and Happy Camp, and the highway to the coast was shut with slides. The power was out at Salyer and Weitchpec and Orleans, and the company said "the river crossing wires were lost and that with the bridge out at Willow Creek repairs cannot be made right away." They flew the mail into Hoopa in a private airplane. And on the far side of the river at Willow Creek, the east side, about a hundred and seventy-five people were cut off from everything, Christmas or no Christmas, with the river between them and the store.

On the Friday, the twenty-third, a baby boy was born at Burnt Ranch, at Arabella Beerbower's house, to the Philip Boyers. The doctor from Hoopa came to deliver it, and the Trinity County paper said he "worked his way from his home over derbris, water and stones, taking him almost three hours to arrive at the Beerbower home." Three hours over the wreck of the river to bring one boy into the world, two days before Christmas. I have thought of that doctor every time I have thought of that flood. The river took the bridges. It did not take that.

The far side

All that winter and spring the people on the far side of the river at Willow Creek lived by boat. The county hired a man with a boat and an outboard motor, forty-nine dollars and seventy cents a day for boat, motor and man, and it ran only by daylight, so the men were late to work and there was no getting across at night "even in an emergency," Supervisor Merryman told the board. At Hoopa the school opened again in January split in two by the river, two hundred and forty of the five hundred children there the first day, and the children on the east side were taught in the two churches on their side. In February the county borrowed pontoons from the city of Eureka and floated the stranded automobiles out, and carried orchard spraying machinery across to the far side, because the trees did not know there had been a flood and would want spraying in the spring.

At Hoopa they built a temporary bridge, and twelve days after it opened the river came up again in February and took the middle out of it. "Tonight worried citizens of Hoopa, still shaky from the last flood, are watching the rising waters with great concern and silent prayer," Mrs. Ricklefs reported from Hoopa.

The ferryman at Willow Creek was James McCart. On the sixteenth of March he was taking George Hathaway and his wife across in the county's boat, and "His 16 foot boat sank after hitting a rock while he was piloting Mr. and Mrs. George Hathaway of Willow Creek. They managed to swim to shore, but McCart was not seen again." He left a wife, Laura, and two daughters, at Willow Creek. They found him a month later, near the mouth of Beaver Creek below Hoopa or at the mouth of Campbell Creek, depending on which column you read, and they buried him at Willow Creek. He was the last man the Trinity took in my story, and he was taking people across it for wages, because the bridge was gone. In May the next ferryman quit by telephone at ten minutes past ten on a Tuesday night, and the supervisor said "the people on the far side of the Trinity river are again marooned," and had a bigger boat on the river the next day.

In April Jim Patterson wrote to the board of supervisors. He was seventy-eight that year, and he wrote the way he cooked, everything at once and plenty of it. "This comunity recently experienced a disaster leaving approximately 175 people isolated from the outside world." He said the bridge "had served this area for thirty-eight years," which it had not. It had served twenty-nine. I watched them build it. But Jim was never a man to undercount anything, beef or beans or years. The county meant to hang a footbridge from the old piers with steps up to it, and Jim was against it, and here is why: "Innumerable steps from ground level making it impossible to use a vehicle of any type such as a wheel barrow, baby buggy, cart, bicycle."

A wheelbarrow. Twenty-eight years before, four men had wheeled the store safe down the road to the bridge at Willow Creek in a wheelbarrow, and now Jim Patterson wanted a bridge a man could push a wheelbarrow across, and a woman a baby buggy, and a boy a bicycle. That is the whole history of that town between two wheelbarrows. The county did not build the footbridge. "If we build a foot bridge," Merryman said, "It will just be hanging there useless when we get the permanent bridge constructed." They cut a road around instead, from Salyer, on the old McIntosh road, fourteen feet wide with turnouts, and it opened in June, and the far side could drive out the long way.

Jim Patterson died in September, in the Hoopa hospital. The paper called him the Barbecue King. He cooked the bear in 1927 and the power fiesta in 1949 and the Health Center barbecue in 1953 and every Fourth in between, and the Elks came to his funeral at the Willow Creek church. Earlier the same month the county let the contract for the new Willow Creek bridge, three hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars. He did not live to drive across it.

That summer the people on the far side built a bridge themselves, a low one, for the summer water, and the first storm in October took it. A family named Smith moved across it on a Monday evening, and the Hoopa column said "They said they were very fortunate to get moved across the Trinity river at Willow Creek on the bridge as it was washed away the following morning by high water." The following morning. The river had waited for them.

And up the river, above Lewiston, the government was building a dam. The first charge had gone off in the fall of 1955, before the flood. In April of 1956 the contractors bid on the dam at Papoose Creek, and in May the tunnel was let, a million three hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars for a hole through the mountain, to take the Trinity's water out of the Trinity and send it over the divide to the Sacramento valley. The Humboldt people had been fighting it for years. I never gave my opinion in the paper. I will give it here.

For sixty years and more on that river I watched men try to bring water to the gold, the doctor and Humphreys and the Trophy and the Douglases and Hennings, a ditch three miles long and six hundred inches on paper and forty-three for the peaches, and the whole time the river ran past the bottom of the bowl with more water in it in a minute than any of us ever got through a ditch in a year. And now the government was going to take the river itself and send it over a mountain, the way the doctor took Campbell Creek around the ridge, only bigger. The water over the divide. It was always going to come to that. Jim Patterson said it in his letter: "As the pages of history unfold, and they are turning rapidly, control of water will become more and more a reality." He was right. I do not have to like it.

The new Hoopa bridge was finished at Christmas, a year after the flood, and the cars went across it after the holidays. I have not been across it. I do not go to Hoopa much now. But in the summer a neighbor's boy drove me down the highway to the bowl, and I got out at the lane and walked in, the way I always do. The river had been over the whole bottom and gone back. The bar was where it was, the gravel the same gravel, washed. Most of the orchard was gone, and there were somebody's logs decked where the bottom field had been, and the old Douglas house was standing. I walked up the old lane to the saddle where the tunnel runs under and stood on the fill and listened. It was a still evening.

It was still running.