There is a ghost in these mountains, and she hasn’t rested in peace
since she left this world behind a hundred and twenty-one years ago. And, if the few sketchy details which we know of her life contain any truth, then neither did she walk peacefully through much of her brief time here in this realm. Her name was Ruby, and she left life behind in the year 1894 at the tender age of twenty-two years. That much is fact – it’s the details of her brief life which remain a mystery. Ruby’s early life is unknown; were she came from and who she left behind when she moved to the Sierra Nevada are hidden in the past just as securely as her bones now rest in a shallow grave on a shaded hillside. When she arrived at the logging town of Millwood in the high Sierras just west of what is now Kings Canyon National Park she was barely out of her teens; a young lady most likely seeking a style of life much different from whatever she’d left behind; a life which by all accounts she briefly found before tragically losing. A popular belief was that Ruby’s real name was in fact Lou Young, and that she was a wild woman who left her husband and two children behind in Southern California to become a prostitute, and that she came to the Millwood logging camp to make a living tending to the needs of the lumberjacks and mill workers through the long hours of the mountain nights. It’s said that she plied her trade in a small cabin on the outskirts of town where she lived with a dozen or so other ladies of the same profession. Growing disillusioned and depressed, she soon took her own life with poison and was interred just outside of town, where she rests to this day. These, according to what scant local history remained after the town of Millwood burned to the ground shortly thereafter, are the facts. Or are they? I grew up in this section of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, splitting my youth between here and San Francisco before making the mountains my permanent home. One of my neighbors here back in the 1950’s was an elderly woman who, along with her brother and two sisters, owned an old log home in Wilsonia near Grant Grove. In my youth this elderly lady took it upon herself to share much of the local history with me, and we would often climb into her old Dodge and drive out to the scene of some place lost in the shadows of history while she would relate stories which few others remembered. She was in her seventies then, and was a youth back when the town of Millwood was still part of the landscape and its citizens worked these mountains. One of the stories which she shared with me was that of Ruby Ellington, and as we stood by her grave one evening I heard a story quite different from the official one which dismissed the poor woman as just another lady of the evening. It seems that Ruby was in reality the wife of a teamster who drove a wagon for the lumber company. Ruby’s husband had a regular route – a two day trip down to Sanger for equipment and supplies, one day in town while his wagon was loaded, and three days back up the mountain to Millwood, where he would rest on the seventh day and then start all over again. For a young, energetic, and perhaps restless twenty-two year old young bride this must have been a very sedate life, spending six out of seven days waiting for the company of a husband who then turned around and left. Ruby would have been bored and restless. And lonely. As Fate would have it, one week Ruby’s husband had a light load in his wagon and made it back to Millwood in just two days instead of the usual three, and left his wagon at the mill to walk up the hill to their cabin to surprise his wife. Opening the door to their home he was the one who was surprised, as he found himself gazing upon the classic scene of a husband who arrives home early to find his wife in bed with another man. All of the actors in the tableau froze for a long moment before the amorous couple jumped out of bed while the husband drew his pistol and, in what he felt was righteous anger, opened fire. The lover jumped out of a window without bothering to claim his pants and all shots fired in his direction missed their mark. But one of them found Ruby, and she fell dead on the floor next to the bed while her unknown lover escaped. In this story Ruby was not a lady of ill repute but instead just an ignored and lonely wife who fell victim to bad luck and worse timing. And then my neighbor added an interesting postscript to the story. It seemed that, every year since Ruby’s death, a bouquet of fresh flowers appeared on her grave. They appeared on August first, the anniversary of her violent end. The wooden pickets which outlined her grave were straightened, and sometimes a fresh coat of paint was applied. Was it Ruby’s teamster husband coming back, perhaps feeling remorse for his somewhat hasty reaction? Or was it the unknown lover, who perhaps had deeper feelings for Ruby than merely physical desire and felt remorse for his abandonment of her? We will never know. In the early 1970’s a newspaper down in the San Joaquin Valley got wind of the story about the bouquet of flowers which mysteriously appeared on the lost grave on the same date every year and published a story about it. After that, the flowers never appeared again. Perhaps the husband, or the lover, did not want to risk being found out. Or perhaps he, too, passed on from old age. For a few years after the flowers stopped appearing I got into the habit of riding my motorcycle down that old dirt road in the forest and spending part of the night of August first on that hillside near Ruby’s grave, but no mysterious man ever appeared to decorate the grave or repair its century-old fence. On one of those nights, though, as I sat with my back against a tree and listened to the sounds of the night, and as the moonlight suddenly appeared after being hidden behind a row of scuttling clouds; that one night I did briefly see a figure standing alongside the grave just a few yards from me. She turned and looked right at me, and I saw that it was a young woman. Then the clouds blocked the light again, just for a few seconds, and when it returned she was gone. I prefer the version of the story told to me by my neighbor so many years ago; told to me by a woman who knew these mountains and who herself was a youth while Millwood was still here. But, whichever story may hold true, I know that the spirit of a troubled young woman still sometimes walks the hills around Millwood; that there is a ghost here in these mountains.
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AuthorWith a degree in Anthropology and an avid interest in history, Tim Christensen has lived in the Sierra Nevada Mountains for many years. He has no cell phone or television, but manages, when not chopping firewood or shoveling snow, to keep himself entertained with a library of several thousand books. Archives
July 2017
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Sequoia Parks Conservancy, the official 501(c)(3) nonprofit partner of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (National Park Service) and Lake Kaweah (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), uses tax-deductible contributions to support these parks.
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Sequoia Parks Conservancy
47050 Generals Hwy Unit 10 Three Rivers, CA 93271 |