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Isabel's Mirror

2/17/2017

1 Comment

 

A mirror can be a fickle friend, sometimes making you feel good or
sometimes bad; sometimes illuminating every corner around you while at
other times leaving you wrapped in shadow; and sometimes showing
something behind you which you didn’t know was there – behind you in
the room, or – if you have the right mirror -  behind you in Time.

There is just such a mirror here in the Sierra Nevada Mountains; a
real mirror made of glass and framed in wood; and, if it approves of
your curious gaze and senses a sympathetic soul, it will perhaps open
for a moment and let you glimpse back in time.

To get into the mood for this story, let’s say that you just got home
from work. You’re worn out, and wonder what that job is all about as
the first thing to greet your arrival home is a pile of junk mail and
bills. You remove your coat and shoes, and pause to look in the hall
mirror as you pass, then wonder why you even have that mirror there
because it only makes you look as bad as you feel, while that sheaf of
bills in your hand somehow appears much larger than it should. You
toss the bills into a pile on the table and begin to wonder which form
of alcohol might best suit your mood of frustration.

Mirrors are strange that way – they sometimes bend what we think is real.

You are, perhaps, one of those slightly dissatisfied individuals who
finds yourself feeling unsettled by modern society; the crowds of
people, the babble of electronic noise, the never-ending hamster wheel
of income and debt which has become the cycle of modern life, and it’s
leaving you running on empty. You feel increasingly left out of
society and all it has to offer because you’ve paused for a moment on
that hamster wheel and had the audacity to question how you got there.
You’re one of those fringe-types who feels that maybe you would have
been more comfortable had you been born a century or two in the past,
into a time when life and all its cares were of a simpler nature.
You’re thinking that maybe you should just get off that hamster wheel
for good and move to the mountains to get away from it all. So you
turn off all the lights in the house save one for reading, light a
fire in the fireplace, and settle into your favorite comfortable chair
with a bottle and a glass at hand. After some time of staring into the
mesmerizing flames you begin to relax. Your most loyal friend has
settled down nearby and stretched his four furry legs in pleasure
before the fire. Then you open up a book to lose yourself in a story
of people who did decide to chuck away their former lives and move to
these mountains to make that change.

The mirror in the hall is forgotten by you for the time being; perhaps
it holds some memory of a reflection, or perhaps it’s watching you as
you read.

Coloma, in 1830’s, was a sleepy mountain town, one of many quiet
places in the Sierra Nevada Mountains where life was slow and
pleasant. Hunters and trappers were in large supply, and they mixed
easily and peacefully with the Miwok who had lived for generations in
that part of the mountains. As the 1840’s dawned, Gringos were coming
in from the West and Spaniards from the south, while the Russians were
getting more active farther away along the coast. But everybody was
getting along with each other, more or less. Trees were plentiful
around Coloma, and that’s what drew a Swiss immigrant by the name of
John Sutter there to build a lumber mill, also because Coloma also had
lots of swiftly running water to power that mill. But the mill wasn’t
even finished when Sutter’s workers found gold and shouted the
discovery across the mountains. By 1848 Coloma had quadrupled in
population with gold seekers. By 1849 it had grown so much that people
stopped counting the thousands of people – all they wanted to count
were nuggets of gold.

By the early 1850’s miners and their equipment covered the hillsides.
Most lived in makeshift cabins or tents. The majority of buildings in
town were devoted to the business of separating the miners from their
newly acquired wealth – saloons, gambling halls, supply stores, and
brothels sprang up all over town, on every crooked street where an
empty space begged to be filled. And they all did quite well in
catering to the needs of the thousands of lonely, thirsty, hard
working men.

And in one of these buildings in the town of Coloma - not one of those
old, leaning, ramshackle structures so hastily built to serve the
needs of the eager young miners - but instead in a carefully crafted
hotel meant to stand the rigors of time; in one room of this forgotten
hotel there stands a mirror; a sheet of antique glass bound in a
wooden frame which will not only show your reflection, but also which
sometimes opens as a window; a window through which someone from the
past has been observed peering out at the viuewer.

It’s a unique hotel, and a very unique mirror.

The Sierra Nevada House was a fine place indeed. Built around 1850, it
was conveniently situated near both Sutter’s Mill and the brand new
Wells Fargo office in the heart of the bustling Sierra mining town of
Coloma. Two stories tall, the ground floor held a bar, kitchen, and
dining room, while the upstairs floor contained bedrooms situated all
around the outside walls with a board walkway circling an open space
above the eating area. It was light, spacious, and clean.

And it was advertised for respectable women residents only - no
prostitutes, please.

This was an entirely new concept for a gold rush mining town.
Certainly there were women in town, but most had come to work in the
bars or in the brothels, and in such places a bed was usually provided
as part of the job. But the Sierra Nevada House was setting itself up
for a different type of tenant; for women who had either accompanied
or followed their men to California but who didn’t wish to live in the
shabby accommodations which their men had put together out on their
claims. The Sierra Nevada House desired to cater to the cares of
respectable wives.

(The mirror, at this time, had not yet arrived. It was on board a ship
bound from Boston, making its way around the Horn on its way to San
Francisco.)

Not surprisingly, the Sierra Nevada House didn’t manage to make a go
of it as a boarding house for respectable women. There just weren’t
enough respectable women in town. So women of a somewhat less socially
respectable character soon came to occupy the Sierra Nevada House, and
it quickly reincarnated itself as one of the more popular of the bars,
brothels, and gambling halls dotting the streets of Coloma. The
numerous rooms lining the walls of the second story became more
populated that they ever had been – albeit for short periods of time -
and the boardwalk leading to them constantly resounded with the noise
of the tramping boots of the eager miners. The Sierra Nevada House had
seemingly found its purpose.

(By now the mirror had reached San Francisco, been unloaded from the
ship and repacked onto a wagon, and was on its way up to the
mountains.)

Isabel (or Isabella) was a popular lady in this new incarnation of the
Sierra Nevada House. Short, slender, with dark hair, she always liked
to dress in blue. She was a favorite companion of every miner, either
while keeping him company drinking in the bar, or standing behind him
with one hand on a shoulder giving him luck while he gambled at cards,
or – if he could afford it – accompanying him upstairs to her personal
room where he could appreciate her beauty and affection in a more
private setting, and then take home a happy memory to keep him warm on
those cold dark nights alone beneath a blanket in his shanty. Isabel,
it was generally agreed, shone brightly from an inner radiance as well
as from her lovely outer beauty, and she was always dressed in blue.

And so it was that when the mirror which had traveled so far finally
came to Coloma, its original purpose was immediately forgotten and it
was given as a gift to Isabel; a token of admiration and gratitude
from a lonely gentleman whose nights had been made brighter by her
company. Already an antique when it arrived at the Sierra Nevada
House, no one knew its exact age. It was old, and beautiful, and very,
very special.

Isabel placed the mirror in her room and gazed into it often. Several
times every day she would check her appearance and perhaps also admire
her beauty, the gold filigree on the wooden border framing her lovely
self just as it framed the mirror. Sometimes her gentlemen companions
would also pause there, although it was Isabel’s reflection which
caught them, not their own. But one of those men caught Isabel’s
heart, and left it forever empty. It was the very man who had given
her the mirror, a man who had brought the antique mirror and a wagon
load of other furnishings around the Horn to furnish a fine home he
had intended to build for the anticipated arrival of his wife, but who
instead chose to delay the wife, postpone the home, and abandon
Isabel, and disappeared back into the mountains in his search for
gold. From that moment on Isabel was often observed standing alone on
the porch gazing up into the high Sierra. If approached by men at
those times she would always decline an invitation for company, and
then retire to her room alone. And sometimes there in her room she
would be seen gazing into the mirror, staring, as if she was dreaming
of finding something within the antique glass. Men still sought her
out, but the one man whom she desired had gone and she could never
recover from that loss. So one day she quite suddenly disappeared from
Coloma, never to be seen again. It was rumored amongst the ladies of
the Sierra Nevada House and their patrons that she had gone in search
of the man who still held her heart. Isabel left all of her
possessions behind, including the mirror.

After her disappearance Isabel’s mirror was moved downstairs into the
parlor, then into other rooms variously used as a dance hall and a
dining room. Always it stood regally against one wall, and always its
antique elegance was appreciated by the patrons of the house when they
stopped before it. It wasn’t until a few decades had passed that some
who paused to admire themselves in the glass now instead saw the face
of a strange woman staring back out at them; a lady with dark hair and
sad eyes; a lady in blue. And she would hang suspended in the glass
before them as they gawked, the murky furnishings of an old bedroom in
the shadows behind her, her eyes meeting those of the one who gazed in
disbelief before she slowly faded away.

Isabel had returned.

Soon other strange occurrences began to manifest – a glass or a bottle
would slide by itself off the bar and crash to the floor; footsteps
could be heard pacing the catwalk that ran along to the rooms above
when no one could be seen on the walkway. When it was quiet there were
now times when a voice could be heard, perhaps loudly or sometimes
just a whisper; a voice where there was no person to be seen. And
sometimes when a lady or a guest walked into that bedroom which had
belonged to Isabel things were seen to have been moved, as if Isabel
had come to check the décor and then rearranged the furnishings to
suit her own taste. And then there would be that soft whisper as the
current occupant of the room slowly backed out.

The Sierra Nevada House burned down in 1902; it burned to the ground
and was completely destroyed. All except for the mirror. The mirror
survived intact, its antique glass and beautiful frame unmarred by the
roaring flames which had consumed everything around it. The Sierra
Nevada House was quickly rebuilt, mostly on the original floor plan,
and soon reopened as a fine hotel. The mirror was placed in the dining
hall and was again used for the next two decades for guests to admire
themselves.

It wasn’t long before the lady in blue soon began to appear once
again; the lady with the dark hair and sad eyes who stared back out of
the mirror as if she was searching for something. Or someone. And then
she would fade away. And, as before, there were phantom footsteps and
soft whispers heard, and things moved all by themselves. The hotel had
an unseen guest as well as the paying ones.

The Sierra Nevada House burned to the ground again in 1925. Again, it
was completely destroyed – except for the antique mirror which eerily
survived unscathed. The House was again rebuilt and soon reopened to
the public, again as a hotel built on the original floor plan from the
1850’s, with a bar and dining room downstairs and rooms to rent above.
It also now came into occasional use as a town meeting hall and
community theater. The antique mirror was placed in a position of
honor in the banquet room. And it wasn’t long before the beautiful
Lady in Blue returned to visit the patrons, gazing out at them sadly
from its glassy depths.

Three appears to be a lucky number for the Sierra Nevada House, as
this third incarnation of the hotel and bar has now survived for
almost a century. And although, like the original hotel, the original
crowds of paying guests have long ago passed into the mists of time,
the spirits of the rough miners and the painted ladies eager to
entertain them still walk the mountains seeking gold and haunt the
rooms of the Sierra Nevada House searching for that brief reprieve
from lonliness. On the floor boards you can still sometimes hear
phantom footsteps; in the bar you might catch a quietly whispered word
in your ear, sending an unexpected thrill down your spine.

And if you gaze into the old wood framed mirror standing in the
banquet room you can still sometimes see a sad, beautiful lady in blue
swim upward out of its hidden depths to look back at you, searching
for something; for someone. Whether charmed or cursed the antique
mirror has survived the centuries and the infernos to offer itself as
a window to the past; Isabel’s mirror, the mirror of her dreams.
1 Comment

Highway In The Sky

1/31/2017

2 Comments

 
You are strolling casually through a grove of Giant Sequoia trees,
high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California on a summer
afternoon in the year 1856. Your pace is slow, both because the rocky
soil beneath your feet is rough and uneven, but also because you have
never seen anything like this splendid landscape in your entire life;
never could you even have imagined it – thousands and thousands of
Giant Sequoias standing thick and tall, covering the mountainsides in
waves as far as your eyes can see. It is late afternoon on an August
day, and your walk is leading you more or less northward along the
peak of a steep ridge line. To your right the Sequoias fall off in an
endless sea – later to be known as the Converse Basin - while to your
left you can see a small part of the depths of Kings Canyon far below.
You are the only person here on this ridge; indeed, you feel so
overwhelmed by the lonely beauty surrounding you that the thought
briefly flits through your mind that you might be the only person in
the entire world; perhaps it is even a wish.

Then a flash of light catches your eye, vaporizing that brief wish,
drawing your gaze away from the canyon and the trees. It flashes
again, and you look up, shading your eyes from the bright glare of the
descending sun to your left – and then you see it. There, up in the
sky where there should be only birds and clouds there now also seems
to be something else; something strange and out of place. Whatever it
is appears to be in motion, and that movement has caught a shaft of
sunlight and reflected down it into your eyes. You squint and look
harder, not certain of what you are actually seeing. It’s descending
toward you slowly from the north, flying at you as if it has taken
aim. You can’t identify it because you’ve never seen anything like it
before in your entire life. Very few people have seen anything like
it, because what you are looking at is an aircraft, and such
mechanical contrivances as this were not expected to be a part of
Sierra Nevada scenery in 1856, nor indeed in any part of California
scenery at that time.

You’re staring upward in awe now, caught up in the fascination of the
impossible unfolding right before your very eyes. And those eyes are
now beginning to make out some detail of the approaching craft – there
are at least two whirling blades on the back of the – well, the thing,
because that’s the first word that comes to mind - and some metal
constructs visible within the cabin of the craft, which must have been
what initially reflected that flash of light into your eyes. And
there’s a man there as well – and he’s waving to you! Could this
possibly get any more wondrous? And then it does indeed become more
wondrous, because you suddenly realize that the man above you has a
frightened expression on his face, and that his agitated wave is not
out of greeting for you but instead reflects abject fear. And then you
see why – the aircraft’s line of descent is taking it directly toward
the top of one of the tallest Sequoia trees on the ridge, and the
fright in the face of the man above seems to be because that, despite
all his energetic movement of some levers and wheels, his course
remains unchanged and will bring him into contact with that huge
monolith within seconds.

Time slows down for you now, and you watch those last few seconds of
the craft’s flight with extended detail. The aircraft plunges into the
upper branches of the Giant Sequoia tree and shudders to a stop as it
begins to crumple. The man who was waving so excitedly just seconds
ago is thrown out of the craft with the force of the impact. His body
arcs forward, limbs spread wide, and in horror you watch helplessly as
his chest becomes impaled on a stout, sharply pointed snag of a branch
while his head whacks forcefully against the trunk. He hangs there,
motionless, his eyes fixed and looking down at you, neck broken and
head hanging at an impossible angle, as the craft continues to fold
and crumple around him, slowly falling and getting caught in the tree,
hanging on the branches like the scattered decorations for some
unexpected holiday. Very little of the debris, you notice, actually
makes it to the ground. Your mind is virtually in some other dimension
by now, not knowing how to cope with all this, or even if you can
accept the information overload which your eyes have just fed into
your brain. But then there’s suddenly more for you to process, because
another glint of light catches your eye and you look up again. And
there, gliding down toward you from the north, is yet another aircraft
following in the flight path of its no longer existent companion,
heading for the ridge line which had been so peaceful just moments
before; heading for the tree which holds the remains of its flying
companion; heading for you. Your mind, at this point, has had enough.
Too much, in fact. It directs you to turn away and get the hell out of
there before the second aircraft arrives, which you obediently do.
When you try to make sense of all this and return with a friend a week
later, there is no sign of either of the aircraft; no sign of the
wreckage; no sign of that man with a broken neck who had been impaled
on that rough snag of a branch three hundred feet above. After all,
this is the year 1856, and machine-driven aircraft just don’t exist,
so you shake your head and laugh uneasily and conclude that it must
all have been a dream. Then you and your friend make camp and get
drunk.

But it wasn’t a dream. The aircraft did indeed exist; that frantic
pilot did indeed die a painful yet unique death. But the entire scene
was cleaned up and sanitized by the crew of the second ship before you
could return. And what you just happened by chance to witness was a
glimpse into a strange chapter of Sierra Nevada past; a chapter which
hasn’t found its way into most, or any, history books. It’s a chapter
that tells the story of a unique group of adventurous Sierra men who
flew through the sky and who went by the name of the Sonora Aero Club.

Sonora, California, was a booming gold mining town in the 1850’s.
Along with its prosperous neighbors, such as Columbia, it had drawn
thousands of men into the mountains in the hunt for wealth. One of
those men was an adventurer by the name of Peter Mennis, and it was
this man who unwittingly inspired this relatively unknown chapter of
early California life. Little is known about Mennis other than that he
came to California in the early 1850’s because, like those thousands
of others, the magnetic draw of gold had pulled him here. Yet that
desire for wealth soon withered when another discovery captured his
imagination – the discovery of what he would name, Suppe.

Suppe was a discovery which Mennis quickly saw could free men from the
bonds of gravity, and it was a discovery the details of which he
jealously guarded. Until this time the only means of sustained flight
available to humans was in hot air balloons, but the discovery upon
which Mennis had stumbled was radically different. Suppe consisted of
a unique way in which to defy the shackles of earth; an anti-gravity
formula which Mennis accidently discovered and which was apparently
easy enough to develop with the basic materials available within a
California gold rush mining camp. With the means of rising into the
air thus established, Mennis went on to construct some simple
machinery for propulsion. He developed at least two different such
methods – one set of machines which turned bladed screws – or
propellers – and another machine which acted as a compressor, using
air shot out of a nozzle as a force of propellant. Both of these were
also powered by Suppe.

Mennis quickly left the lust for gold behind and now focused on his
new love of flying. Although he kept the secret of Suppe solely to
himself, he did share the love of flight with a handful of like-minded
adventurers, and it was they who formed the Sonora Aero Club. And on
an uninhabited level plain outside of town they began to build a
variety of aircraft, filling them with the necessary machinery
designed by Mennis for lift and propulsion, and then going on flying
outings all over the Sierra. That uninhabited level plain of land
outside of town from where all of this fantastic activity was staged a
century and a half ago is now the Columbia Municipal Airport.

The club built dozens of different aircraft of all shapes and sizes.
The lift provided by Suppe could apparently bring even large craft
into the air, while the shape of the craft wasn’t required to be
aerodynamic since the speeds attained weren’t all that great. All of
the aircraft were christened with names such as Aero Mary, Aero
Schnabel, or Aero Goeit, named after individuals who were either
friends of or admired by Mennis. One eerily prescient christening even
gave birth to an aircraft with the name of Aero Trump. Whimsy was
often employed in the aircraft design, with the shapes designed as
familiar objects on the ground or something one might expect to see on
a road, such as a large wagon. This proved to be of benefit in another
way, as the Club wished to keep their activities secret and not draw
unwanted attention, an event which Peter Mennis felt might threaten
his ability to keep for himself the closely-guarded secret of Suppe.
The Aero Goeit, for instance, was designed as a covered wagon, which
club members could openly drive on local roads and then, when they
found themselves alone, unhitch the horses, activate the Suppe, and
fly off on an adventure. Such trips often lasted for days, so food was
provisioned aboard and many ships were outfitted with a stove and
sleeping platforms.

When in town the members of the club soon decided that it would be
best if they all lived together, so they took over all the rooms in a
boarding house where they had their own kitchen, bar, and workroom in
which to design aircraft. Mennis continued to insist upon complete
secrecy, and at least one member was kicked out of the club for
talking a little too much to an outsider. Another member, a man by the
name of Jacob Mischer, soon became the focus of a serious lesson for
other club members when he crashed his craft and burned to a cinder.
It was rumored within the club that he had tried to make some extra
money by offering to haul some cargo by air, and that he had paid the
ultimate penalty when this dalliance was discovered. It was the Aero
Goeit which got tangled in the Giant Sequoia tree, hijacked by a
novice member of the club, an unskilled pilot who, on a reckless or a
drunken impulse, had decided to take off and fly by himself with
little training. Other club members quickly gave chase in another
aircraft but were unable to bring a halt to his flight. It was left to
them to clean up the debris after the Sequoia had effectively halted
the runaway pilot. And the tree that he hit and upon which he killed
himself most likely stood on the high point of Hoist Ridge, the most
elevated part of what was once the Converse Basin Grove just a few
miles from what is now Kings Canyon National Park. The Grove is gone,
cut down decades later, with the Boole Tree now the only Giant Sequoia
still standing there to have possibly witnessed this tale.

Most of what is known about the Sonora Aero Club was recorded by
Charles Dellschau, an immigrant from Prussia who made his way to
California and, by happy circumstance, found himself invited to join
that group of adventurers. When the club disbanded in the 1860’s,
Dellshau moved to Texas where, in the 1890’s, he began to paint. In
hundreds of pictures he drew over the next three decades he portrayed
the dozens of aircraft designed and flown by the Sonora Aero Club as
well as the adventures of the members in their many flights, often
noting the names of the aircraft, club trivia, or names of the club
members in the picture margins.

With the frantic search for wealth being the primary concern for all
who came to California in those days, it’s not surprising that strange
practices such as those indulged in by Mennis, Dellschau, and the
other members of the Sonora Aero Club would pass largely unnoticed by
those recording the story of the time because that story, after all,
centered around gold. A group of eccentrics living in their own
private boarding house on the edge of town would have been lost in the
historical noise of thousands and thousands of boisterous miners.

The Sonora Aero Club ceased to exist in the 1860’s with the death of
its founder, Peter Mennis. Mennis had succeeded in keeping the secret
of Suppe to himself, and with his passing that secret died with him.
Left with a collection of aircraft that would no longer fly because
they lacked the power source, the club members honored Mennis’s wish
for secrecy one last time and destroyed all of the aircraft before
going their separate ways. And the secret was thus forever buried.

Or was it?

In November of 1896 a strange, slow flying craft was spotted in the
sky above Sacramento, California, flying eastward. This was the first
in a rash of sightings of strange crafts in the sky; sightings which
would continue through various states for almost a year. In April of
1897 the object was spotted by a pastor as it flew over his church in
Texas, and a few days later the Houston Daily Post reported several
other sightings. In other newspaper reports over subsequent weeks it
was said that the craft actually landed on the ground in Texas, and
that the occupants chatted freely with locals as they made repairs and
then flew off again.

On April 28th, the Galveston Daily News ran a story about one of these
airship occupants – one ‘Airship Inventor Wilson’. When doing his
artwork Dellshau would often make notes in the margins, sometimes
identifying a club member who was being portrayed in that picture, and
on one of Dellshau’s many drawings he wrote in the margin, ‘Tosh
Wilson’.

Mennis’s secret may have died with him, but it may not have stayed
buried after all. Perhaps it was discovered again years later by
Wilson, another avid member of the club. And then, for a brief period,
the Sonora Aero Club took to the sky one more time before it died
forever. Now, a century and a half later, a lone Giant Sequoia
standing along a ridge above Kings Canyon is left as the only
surviving witness to this fantastic tale; to the story of a handful of
men who paved a highway in the sky.
2 Comments

The Revenge Of Three Fingered Jack

1/18/2017

4 Comments

 
Picture, if you will, a man standing in a shallow hole, slightly bent,
a shovel held in his hands with which he is slowly scooping dirt out
of the hole and adding it to a growing pile alongside. The man is
someone who might best be described as swarthy; a man of dark facial
complexion through which scars of varied length and depth crisscross
the leathery facade, his face made even darker by the compounded
layers of dirt caked upon his skin, dirt through which several days’
worth of black stubble can be seen poking through like a young crop in
a freshly fertilized field. His black hair hangs loosely all around
his face, for it has been many months since he has indulged in the
luxury of a haircut, and a comb is not an item counted amongst his few
possessions. The old blue cotton shirt hangs loosely upon him,
billowing about his chest and waist. The brown cotton pants, which
long ago were cut trimly about his figure, now also hang in folds;
over-used, under-laundered, and held in place only by the remnants of
a still beautiful silver-studded leather belt. From that belt once
hung a very long and very sharp knife; a weapon which is no longer
with him on this day of digging, but a weapon whose proficient use has
made him famous throughout the Sierra Nevada. The man stops and sighs,
straightening his back and flexing the fingers of his hands, five on
one hand and three on the other, and glances over his shoulder to see
if his guard is still attentive and, even more important, if the guard
has let the point of his rifle relax. Even just a little slack in
attentiveness would be enough. But even a slight glance that way is
enough to cause his hope to sink. The guard is still standing there
staring at him, one foot perched upon a rotten log, the rifle leveled
at him across that raised knee, and eyes staring at him unblinkingly.
The guard gestures with his rifle, waving it slightly just an inch or
two, enough to indicate that he wants the digging to resume. With a
sigh the man in the hole wraps his eight fingers around the worn
wooden handle of the shovel and raises another scoop of dry earth to
the edge of the pit. He is in no haste whatsoever to complete the job
which has been assigned to him; no hurry at all, because he has been
handed the slightly distasteful task of creating a hole which he is
destined to fill.

The year is 1853, the man we are watching is called Three Fingered
Jack, and he is digging his own grave.

Born and christened with the rather generic Mexican name of Manuel
Garcia, it might be thought that the most notable part of this man’s
life would be the no doubt colorful tale of how he had permanently
mangled a hand and achieved the more memorable sobriquet of Three
Fingered Jack, and yet that part of the tale has unfortunately been
lost on the cutting floor of history. Jack, instead, is now remembered
– when indeed he is recalled even at all – for the fact that he hated
the Chinese immigrants in California with a vociferous passion, and
that whenever he found himself in a Sierra Nevada mining camp which
counted such Asian oddities amongst their population he often went
into a rage over the fact that strange men from the other side of the
world had invaded his homeland to take its wealth, and he would then
proceed to  hang several of them from a tree by their long, braided
queues. There was more than a small element of irony in this because,
just a few years before, the United States had fought a war with
Mexico. In claiming victory the United States had also claimed a large
portion of Mexico’s territory as its own, and the Bear Flag Revolt had
then made California’s separation from Mexico permanent. Manuel
Garcia, a man of Mexican descent, had thus become a foreigner in his
own land.

But it is probable that this irony was lost upon him.

The result following the act of hanging the unfortunate Chinese from
the tree by their queues would vary according to the mood Jack
happened to be in – or the state of inebriation. If he was feeling
generous, he would let them hang for a while, laughing as he watched
them struggle, then he would take that long knife which hung from his
belt and slice the queue off at the base of the neck, letting the men
fall to the ground and run away, leaving the lifetime of hair hanging
from the tree, swinging like a macabre decoration used in
acknowledging some strange holiday which only Jack knew and
celebrated. If, however, Jack found himself in a somewhat darker mood
then, after letting the men hang by their hair for some indeterminate
time, he would draw his long-bladed knife and walk around the tree,
slitting the throats of every man whom he had therein hung. And then
he would laugh.

Three Fingered Jack was not a nice man.

And yet, it wasn’t this colorful hobby of Jack’s which landed him in
trouble with the law. Killing Chinese for sport was indeed distasteful
to most, but nobody in the mining camps was going to get too upset
about it. Chinese, like other immigrants, were on the fringe of mining
camp life, and, as immigrants were ranked, they were on the very
bottom of any concept of a social hierarchy. And there was always the
added bonus that the dead men’s diggings would quickly pass into the
hands of others, so although Jack’s actions were far from typical,
they were also not enough to get him into any serious trouble. Serious
Trouble would have been if he had tried to practice this on Gringos,
and although Jack hated those Gringos as well, he was smart enough to
know where the line was drawn. No, Jack had quickly decided that he
would not hang and slice the Americanos. He would rob and shoot them
instead.

The early 1850’s saw California play host to a number of notorious
bandits, but the most colorful of them all was another man of Mexican
descent by the name of Joaquin Murietta. One of the most famous
outlaws in all of California history, Murietta was considered by most
to be a scourge on the land, while at the same time he was held by
many to be a folk hero who embodied the frustrations of California’s
Mexican population and who symbolized their need for resistance to the
influx of greedy white men. Murietta was a legend, like Zorro and
Robin Hood, nebulous and unreal, yet nevertheless he was a very
tangible reality to all those Gringos who felt that, real or not, he
epitomized the embodiment of the continuing threat of the Mexican
presence in California. So when it was rumored that Three Fingered
Jack had joined Murietta’s band of outlaws, the political pressure in
the California state capitol reached a boiling point and the
legislature voted to offer a reward for the capture of Murietta and
his gang of outlaws. However, a member of the California Committee on
Military Affairs pointed out that perhaps it wasn’t entirely ethical
to put a price on the head of someone who had never been convicted of
a crime.  He also wisely warned the California legislature that there
was actually no real proof that any such person as Murietta really
existed and that a large reward just might encourage bounty hunters to
randomly kill people of Mexican descent and present the body to claim
the reward. So instead the legislature grudgingly voted to authorize a
band of self-styled rangers under the direction of a man named Harry
Love to hunt down Murietta and his gang and bring an end to the public
outcry.

The confusion over whether or not Joaquin Murietta was in fact a real
individual or instead a myth – a myth which had so often been repeated
that it came to be believed - was now relegated to a peripheral
argument, for it was an irrefutable fact that Three Fingered Jack had
elevated himself from what had been a sideshow act to mainstream
crime, that he and a gang of other Mexican desperados were robbing
miners in the Sierra Nevada, making off with untold amounts of gold,
and occasionally shooting the victims in the process. The legislature
authorized the formation of the ranger patrol and the governor signed
it, and that is how a newly-arrived Texan by the name of Harry Love
came to lead a party of twenty newly-arrived volunteer Gringos on a
chase throughout the state for a notorious outlaw of Mexican descent
and his supposed gang of  thieves, the only one of whom could be
identified with certainty was Three Fingered Jack, a man whose claim
to California being his rightful home was more legitimate than any of
these others. Three Fingered Jack, though vicious, was far from
stupid. He could see trouble when it was coming his way, and
immediately headed south through the Sierra, away from most of the
mining camps where he was both well-known and easily recognized.

At this point the Jack’s tale becomes a little more nebulous, with
history divided on which version, if any, holds the higher level of
authenticity. There is here a divergence in the possible paths of
Three Fingered Jack, and his tale turns into one of those adventure
stories where you can choose your own ending.

The first version was the one most often told in California later in
1853. Harry Love and his troupe of rangers ranged the length and
breadth of California for two months, investigating any incident in
which Murietta and his gang had been said to take part; following even
the most phantom lead in the hope of finding the outlaw and his
followers. On July 25th of 1853 Love and his men rode into a clearing
in the Sierra Nevada foothills near Tulare Lake and came upon a group
of Mexicans encamped there. The rangers, after two long months on the
trail, were tired and frustrated, and any group of Mexicans camped in
the hills were, as far as they were concerned, highly suspicious and
candidates for a noose. The rangers headed directly for the camp and
accosted the men, asking questions about who they were, what they were
doing, and which one of them was Joaquin Murietta, even though they
had no tangible evidence that these men were even outlaws, much less
the stuff of legend which they sought. The Mexicans, understandably,
did not take kindly to the intrusion and gruff accusations leveled at
them and basically told Love and his rangers to piss off. Weapons were
drawn and shots were fired. The Mexican who had been the most verbal
was the first to fall dead, and at that all the rest of the men fled
in different directions, some on foot and others on horseback. The
rangers took off after one mounted man who was still firing at them
over his shoulder.

As is often the case when history is recorded, the truth becomes lost
in the tangle of stories told, often changing and sometimes
disappearing entirely, and the legends that remain are all that we
have left to glimpse a snapshot of the past. One version of the tale
which branches off at this point has the man on horseback quickly
being shot in the back, falling off his horse, and pronounced as being
dead by the time the rangers caught up with him. They threw his body
over the back of his horse and returned to the Mexicans' camp, where
the only person remaining was the deceased man who had been the first
to fall in the fray. The rangers buried the two men and did not bother
to pursue the others. But before burying them they cut off the head of
the first victim, christening him as the famous yet ephemeral bandit,
Joaquin Murietta. Then they cut off the hand of the second man – and
perhaps a couple of fingers as well – and deemed him to be the evil
Three Fingered Jack. The hand and the head returned to Sacramento with
Harry Love and his rangers. They were given a triumphal welcome when
they displayed their trophies, and no one thought to ask for proof of
identification. The outlaws were dead; the rangers were heroes– End of
Story.

A second version of the tale has Love and his self-styled rangers
getting tired of the chase and deciding to give up. On their way home,
near Tulare Lake, they came upon a group of Mexicans peacefully
encamped. Not wishing to return to Sacramento as the pathetic losers
which they apparently were, Love and his men saw their chance to
redeem themselves from the laughter and derision which surely awaited
them. They decided to attack the Mexicans, and succeeded in killing
two of them before the rest disappeared into the trees. These two
conveniently became the two most notorious outlaws in California, and
the gratitude of a relieved population was heaped upon the victorious
men – as well as a generous cash reward from the personal coffers of
the governor. The outlaws were dead; the rangers were heroes – End of
Story.

A third version of the tale had Murietta and his gang heading south
and crossing the border into the safety of Mexico as soon as they
heard about the group of innocent men killed in their name near Tulare
Lake. They knew when to cut their losses and were wise enough to do
so, making it well south of the border into safety, where they lived
quite comfortably for the remainder of their lives on the spoils they
had taken from the Gringos to the north. Successful both in their
illegal endeavors as well as in their wise and hasty retirement, they
faded into history, never to be heard from again. End of Story.

A fourth version of the tale – the one with which this story began –
has the vocally vociferous Mexican at the encampment near Tulare Lake
immediately shot dead and the most rebellious of the others shot and
wounded after a long chase on horseback. The wounded man was taken
back to the encampment and sat on a log beside the body which waited
there. He protested his innocence, but of course the shooting of two
innocent men wasn’t quite the end to the tale which could be tolerated
by the rangers; not even one which could be considered. So the wounded
man was handed a shovel and told to dig. He asked the rangers why he
should have to dig his friend’s grave; why they just couldn’t bring
the body of the dead man back with them to Sacramento, where it could
probably be identified and this whole mess cleared up. After a bit of
polite coughing and delay, it was explained to him that the whole
thing was already quite clear; that he was, in fact, the notorious
outlaw known as Three Fingered Jack and the dead man on the ground
next to him was the even more notorious outlaw, Joaquin Murietta.

“No”, he protested, “that can not be! The man on the ground is my
friend, not an outlaw! And it’s obvious that I’m not Three Fingered
Jack!” He held up his hands to show them. “I still have all my
fingers!”

His short speech was received with more nervous coughing and
uncomfortable murmuring, as well as some laughter from some of the
more insensitive of the rangers. Then it was politely explained to him
that as soon as he finished digging, his hand would be modified to
meet the necessary requirements.

And, by the way, he wasn’t digging one grave – he was digging two.

And so this man from Mexico who had, just a few hours before, been
peacefully camping along the shores of a beautiful lake with his
friends, now found himself standing in a hole which was growing slowly
yet inexorably deeper, lowering him to his fate. And when the rangers
felt that it was deep enough – or perhaps they had just grown
impatient – they nodded to the guard with the rifle and a single
bullet found its way into the back of the man who had found himself in
the wrong place at the wrong time. A head and a hand were severed and
the two bodies were buried in an unmarked grave, where they rest
quietly to this day. The head and the hand, after returning to
Sacramento with the victorious rangers, toured California for several
years as a demonstration of the inevitable victory of Good over Evil,
drawing paying crowds wherever they went until they both disappeared
forever in the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of April, 1906.
End of Story.

Unless, of course, Murietta and Jack lived on in Mexico, in which case
they would have enjoyed this absurd Gringo circus from a long and safe
distance as they eventually laughed themselves to death at a ripe old
age.

Three Fingered Jack cut off the long braided queues of the Chinese
invaders of his homeland. Harry Love cut off the head of a man who was
never proven to even exist. And Harry Love, just a few years later,
went crazy, losing his own head in a different way. He barricaded
himself in his house and died in a shootout with a posse of lawmen
whom he saw in his deranged mind as a band of enemy Mexican bandits.

Karma, so they say, can be a real bitch.
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Where Strange Roads Go Down

12/31/2016

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We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town;
We yearned beyond the skyline, where the strange roads go down.


The days grow shorter and colder, darker and icy, and as the wind
whips across the sides of the mountains, blowing stinging snow into
the eyes and a vacuum of cold air is sucked into the lungs, the year
draws to a close high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California,
and in these mountains it can sometimes feel as if not just the year
is ending but the entire steep white world around us is frozen in
time; that  the Earth has spun an icy white cocoon in which it has
fallen asleep forever, neglectfully leaving us uninvited to its
hibernation and left shivering on the outside. In most of present day
California on New Year’s Eve the bars and nightclubs are filled with
drinkers and drunkards drowning themselves in the celebration of
another year lived and passed. On the following morning most will
awaken to make resolutions they will never keep, and with a sigh of
resignation go through another year just like the one ended. For they
have never yearned beyond the skyline.

But many in the mountains are here because of those very yearnings,
and so it was in the past. And when those years past drew to their
close there were indeed some who did drink to get drunk; some, but not
most. There were also those who drank to forget; some, but not many.
And there were some who also drank to ponder: How did I get here? How
did I start down this road? And so as this year draws to its close
perhaps you might offer yourself for a brief experiment. As you open
the door to the neighborhood bar for your New Year’s Eve drink, pause
for a moment on the threshold and close your eyes, take a deep breath,
then open them and step inside. If magic happens, which it sometimes
can, then you will open your eyes to find yourself in a ramshackle
Sierra Nevada saloon of a century and a half ago. You’re in a frozen
mountain town and the wind is pushing you through the door to find
relief in the relatively warm air inside.  For our purposes it doesn’t
matter which town, because on this night they are all the same. You
won’t see anyone you know in this saloon, nor anyone of whom you might
have even remotely heard. These people are all quite real, yet all
merely forgotten footnotes in the lives of someone else passing
through. They have all passed on many decades ago; but they have all
agreed to come here tonight solely for your edification, so try not to
stare. As you walk into the saloon you see a few tables gathered near
the cast iron wood-burning stove at the far end of the room which are
all filled with men playing poker. The heat from this stove doesn’t
spread very far, so they are all huddled close to gather what heat
they can. Those not warming themselves from the stove are mostly at
the bar, pouring liquid warmth down their throats with a steady
regularity. You decide to join them, and you walk slowly across the
buckled plank floor where clumps of scattered dirty sawdust cling to
your boots; you lean on the bar, nudge aside the spitoon on the floor,
and hook one foot on the scarred rail which runs the base of the bar’s
length. The bartender pours you a whiskey. You thank him, fish deep
into your pocket for some money, and drop a coin on the counter top.
He nods with a cursory acknowledgement and moves on. As your eyes
follow him you see a woman with long dark hair sitting by herself all
the way down at the end of the bar to your left. You stop your head
from turning because you don’t want her to think you are staring.
Instead you continue to examine her out of the edge of you eye. Her
skin is dark brown, but what you can see from her profile tells you
that she is probably of Mexican descent, not Indian. She’s wearing a
colorful dress, but even the edge of your eye can note that it’s worn
thin and frayed at the edges. It’s not much, but it’s probably the
best she has. And you wonder; why is she here?

She, too, holds that same thought in her mind. Her name is Maria
Aquila, and as she slowly twirls the shot glass in her fingers you
acknowledge that the remnants of youth’s beauty are still to be found
in her features if one looks closely. Indeed, she had probably been
very beautiful when she was young. It’s not that she’s old on this
night – maybe about forty. Maria did indeed come from Mexico, making
her way north to end up here in this bar in the Sierra Nevada, but
that journey had been twenty years or more in her past. Maria was only
a young teenager when her parents arranged a marriage for her.
Actually the arrangement had been mostly her father’s doing, and her
mother had quietly acquiesced. Her father, steeped in Spanish
tradition, had picked out a man whom he felt would be a profitable
match for her; a man to whom Maria felt not the slightest attraction
even though he had been entranced by her beauty. After expressing her
displeasure at the arrangement and receiving only harsh words from her
father in response, Maria ran away one night from the only home she
had known in faraway Sonora, Mexico. After several days alone of
walking a dusty road leading north she joined a group of men who had
heard of the wealth of gold to be found in California and were heading
north to the mines. She stayed with them for the next few months,
doing what was necessary along the way to ensure her safe passage with
these men across the border, through the desert, and into the
mountains, where she finally parted from her fellow travelers. At
China Camp she continued earning her living in the only way she knew,
closing her eyes and dreaming of the future and saving what little she
earned from the men who purchased her favors. Years passed. When she’d
had enough she moved to another mining camp and opened a saloon. It
was then the charm and personality which had lain dormant within her
for so long reasserted itself. Her establishment became a showplace,
all decorated in her favorite colors, blue and white. Even all the
beer mugs and shot glasses had decorations on them. She often tended
bar herself, with her beauty and charm more easily parting men from
their money than had her lovely and desirable body managed even in its
best years. But sometimes the memories just got to be too much for
Maria; the memories of home in Mexico; the longing for her family; the
touch of all those hundreds of groping hands on her body. And when
those memories overwhelmed her Maria instead became her own best
customer, sitting alone at the end of the bar, trying to drown
memories which would always float back up to haunt her. And she would
think of going back to Mexico, or at least of leaving the mountains
for someplace civilized like San Francisco; of finding a good man and
marrying; of living a happy and respectable life. For a time she could
believe this might really happen, but not anymore; not that now her
beauty had faded to a memory which only she could see. So now all she
had left was the dream and the drink to keep it afloat. One night
Maria left the bar blissfully drunk, stumbling down the street to her
room. The sheriff saw her and, as he had always had more than a little
bit of a frustrated lover’s crush on Maria, he went to her aid to help
her get home. Maria turned on him and cursed him, calling him a
variety of colorful names in fluent Mexican and Chinese. When the
sheriff protested that he was only trying to help; that he cared;
Maria drew a long knife from beneath her skirt and lunged at him,
aiming the blade for his heart. The sheriff caught her arm and they
struggled for control of the knife. In that struggle the blade turned
and sliced through Maria’s wrist, severing muscle and tendon all the
way down to the bone. As the blood flowed the sheriff was distraught
with guilt and carried her to the doctor’s office, where the doctor
bandaged the wound but could not repair the damage. Over the next few
weeks Maria’s fingers curled and then froze into a claw. It was the
end of her dream of finding and enchanting a man. She walked down the
road to the edge of town, gave up, and died.

You find that you have been staring at Maria without wanting to, so
you let your gaze continue past the tired woman at the end of the bar
and continue beyond her. At a table near the door through which you
just entered sits a woman all by herself. The bartender has just
finished refilling her glass and she has thanked him with a soft
‘Merci’. Her eyes catch yours as she raises her glass, and she gives
you a sad smile. You turn away, embarrassed, and empty your own glass,
wondering why she is so sad.

She’s sad because she’s lost the man she loved.

Her name is Madame Louie. No last name; just Madame Louie. She’s old
now, and most of her life was spent earning a meager living by taking
in the laundry of miners; scrubbing their filthy clothes in a tub
perched on a makeshift wooden platform in back of her run down shack.
She also grew flowers in her garden and sold bouquets to the bartender
at a saloon in Columbia; a man who felt pity for her. Some of the
miners in Columbia had begun to notice that gold dust was disappearing
from their cabins and their diggings when they weren’t around, and it
was happening frequently enough for them to begin to look upon each
other with suspicion. Finally that suspicion settled upon an old
French man who had a claim on the outskirts of town. So the mostly
Irish-American-British-German miners of the town descended upon the
poor lone Frenchman, trussed him up, and prepared to hang him from a
tree which had grown a conveniently placed sturdy branch. As a polite
formality they asked him if he had any last words, but this courtesy
was lost upon the old man as he neither spoke nor understood English.
So, with a collective shrug, they bound his hands behind his back,
tightened the noose around his neck, and prepared to kick the stump
out from beneath his feet. At this point Madame Louie burst into the
crowd shouting that the man was innocent. However, as Madame Louie was
known to be sweet on her fellow French ex-patriot, her protests were
not taken seriously and they proceeded to kick the stump out from
under the Frenchman’s feet, leaving him to swing in the breeze. Madame
Louie screamed and grabbed an axe and began swinging it in wide
circles, sending the men scattering. When she reached the hanging man
she swung again, slicing through the rope and sending him tumbling to
the ground, but still breathing. With a laugh and a curse from the
crowd a new rope promptly appeared and the Frenchman was hung again,
and again Madame Louie appeared with her axe, swinging wildly and
shouting at the top of her lungs, claiming his innocence. Again the
crowd scattered, and again the frightening French woman swung and
sliced through the hangman’s rope, saving his life. Again Madame Louie
was driven away. Again another rope was produced. Again the Frenchman
was hung. And then again, like a specter from Hell which could not be
banished, the persistent French woman appeared with her axe to save
his life. And again. And again. Though the Frenchman seemed to have
more lives than the proverbial cat, his neck by now was raw and bloody
from the repeated caresses of the hemp rope. But Madame Louie had
managed to keep the score somewhat even, and each of her attacks with
the axe had drawn blood from at least one man in this crowd with the
hanging lust. Finally, the mob gave up. To a man they acquiesced to
Madame Louie’s insistence that the old Frenchman was innocent and let
him go. Madame Louie was exhausted, but exultant. She had saved the
life of the man she loved. There was no medical assistance to be had
in Columbia, so she sent her love off to the nearest doctor, who was
to be found in Angel’s Camp. The doctor treated his wounds and he
lived, but he never returned to the town where he had cheated death.
Madame Louie had lost the love of her life; not to the hangman, but to
the ghost of fear; a thing Madame Louie could never wave off with her
axe. Her heart was broken.

There’s a kink in your neck; you’ve been tilting your head to the left
for much too long. So you angle your nose forward like a rudder
steering its course to find the bartender staring at you. This is
disconcerting; does he suspect you have dropped in to his
establishment from another time? Abruptly you point at your glass, not
remembering having emptied it, and he refills it. Again you roll a
coin his way and he wanders back to Maria to offer comfort. Now you
gaze to the right, and you’re surprised to see a man you hadn’t
noticed before; a black man sitting all alone at a table in the far
corner, away from the stove and the heat; as isolated as he can be
from all the other men in the bar. There’s a drink on the table in
front of him, but you can easily see that the amber liquid rises all
the way to the rim and it sits untouched. Instead the man is holding a
rope curled loosely in his left hand. In his right he holds the end of
that rope, hanging in a loop. He moves that loop slowly, as if he
wants to let it fly but is afraid to do so. Instead it just sways
gently back and forth; back and forth, and he thinks of what road
brought him here.

The black man’s name is Charley. Charley was a slave in Texas. When
the Emancipation Proclamation – enforced by the Civil War – freed him,
Charley chose to stay with the man who had owned him. The owner’s name
was McGee. When the Civil War ended, McGee decided that a change was
in order so he packed up his few remaining belongings along with what
family remained and headed to California. McGee wasn’t married, and
his family was comprised by his mother, his sister and sister’s
husband, and their baby. When they arrived they staked out a ranch and
began acquiring a herd of cattle. One day on the eastern side of the
Sierra Nevada Charley was helping McGee and his family move some
cattle and horses down the mountain and in to Owens Valley. McGee and
Charley were on horseback - Charley was a good drover and a capable
man on a horse, as well as having a reputation for being deadly
accurate when throwing a rope. McGee’s mother, sister, and the child
were riding in a wagon. When they came to a river the wagon couldn’t
make it all the way across and got stuck in mud. It tilted to one side
and then tipped over, spilling mother and baby into the rushing water.
Unbeknownst to them, a group of Paiutes had been watching the party,
coveting the livestock and looking for an opportunity to make off with
the cattle and horses. When the wagon tipped the natives saw their
chance. As McGee and Charley were intent on saving the family from
drowning the Paiutes charged, shouting and firing a volley of arrows
at the two men. Luckily the act of firing an arrow from the back of a
running horse was not one which was conducive to accuracy, so all of
the arrows missed their targets. McGee rode his horse into the river
and picked his mother up out of the water. Charley was close at hand.
He jumped off of his horse into the rushing water and lifted McGee’s
sister into the saddle, then handed her the baby. Then he gave the
horse a hard slap on the rump and sent it galloping through the water
to the far side, and safety. McGee turned and went back for Charley.
There wasn’t room left in the saddle with him and his mother already
there, so McGee shouted to Charlie to grab the horse’s tail and hang
on. But Charley just shook his head, and McGee now saw that the black
man had his rope coiled in his hand. Charley pointed to the horses
they had been herding, then waved McGee on. McGee nodded and dug his
heels into the horse’s flanks, wheeling him away from the empty wagon
and the faithful man who, he now believed, would rope one of the
milling horses and quickly follow. But then something went wrong.
Charley, the man who never missed when throwing a lassoo, missed. His
sailing rope fell into empty water, missing the necks of the nearby
horses which had offered the promise of escape from the rapidly
approaching Paiutes. There was no second chance. The horses were
quickly across the river and out of reach, and the Paiutes were upon
him. The Paiutes took Charley and left the others; they took him back
to their camp and they gave him a very slow, very painful death. Until
the very end Charley pondered on how his skill with a rope had failed
him on his very last toss.

Charley’s rope is still gently swinging, back and forth, back and
forth, and you look away, back at your drink, wondering: What really
brought these people here?

What brought these people here to the Sierra Nevada was the yearning
to go beyond the skyline where the strange roads go down. None of them
had ever read Kipling, but they were kindred spirits nonetheless. All
were tired of what they had, and the hope of what the unknown road
might offer was just fine with them. For most men who came to
California the road seemed somewhat clearer; for most of them, in
their minds, saw it paved with gold. But for women, blacks, Chinese,
French - these all found themselves isolated in a lonesome minority
and pushed to the fringe of mountain society. They had followed a
strange road because they yearned for something better that lay beyond
the familiar skyline, and they ended up in the Sierra Nevada
Mountains; thousands and thousands of them, unknown and unremembered
except, perhaps, as a brief footnote in the history of some place now
long gone. Yet it is those few who yearn, who follow their dreams
beyond the horizon; it is they who make history worth remembering,
even if they as individuals have long been forgotten.

We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town,
We yearned beyond the skyline, where the strange roads go down;
Came the whisper, came the vision, came the power with the need;
Till the soul that was not man’s soul was lent to us to lead.


Rudyard Kipling – excerpt from: ‘Song of the Dead’
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Rolling Down The Mountain

12/15/2016

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​Is Holiday Insanity a modern development?
Perchance you may have reflected upon that deeply philosophical question as you have some Quiet Time while waiting in line at the store; while waiting for your stomach to settle from the avalanche of food which you recently poured into it; while waiting for your head to cease from the throbbing brought on by an excess of alcohol consumed at all those holiday parties; drink which is now coming back to bite your brain cells.

Have the hardy souls, you ask yourself, who lived here in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in centuries past always, as they do in modern times, displayed a marked increase in the degree of stupidity of their activities as the calendar year approaches its end? The activities in question being such things as, say, ingesting huge quantities of food in celebration of pilgrims of centuries ago who had almost no food (Thanksgiving}; spending more money on useless things in the span of a few days than most people in the world earn or spend all year {Christmas}; happily drinking enough alcoholic beverages to keep a Scottish distillery on maximum output for most of the next year (New Year’s Eve). And certainly not to be forgotten are the numerous Stupid Things we say and do whilst under the influence of alcohol and sugar levels approaching the stratosphere.

Have Sierra Nevada inhabitants always behaved thusly, you ponder?

Well, the answer would be a resounding No for the most part, with perhaps a small Yes in the area of New Year’s Eve.

The Holiday Season begins at the end of October with Halloween, and this was most definitely an event which was celebrated differently in the Sierra Nevada of Times Past. In most areas it wasn’t marked at all, and it was never observed with children dressing in costumes and running around the neighborhood in boisterous groups panhandling for sweet-laden. When it was celebrated it was done so on what could only be described as a spiritual level. The date of Halloween - October 31st - was held by many (and still is) to be a night when the veils between the worlds might part and we might peer briefly through to the Other Side. It was widely believed that ghosts were more apt to appear on this night, and places felt to be haunted were often visited by those hoping to glimpse such an apparition. Seances were also often held on this eve of All Hallows with the hope that this particular night would bring the increased chance of communicating with a deceased Loved One. But if those participating in the séance were rewarded with the appearance of any Parted Soul at all, be it friend or stranger, it was considered to be a success. This was a night which offered the possibility of reaching beyond the Life and Death which we know; of glimpsing into the Fantastic and the Unknown which lay beyond. Rather than a mere excuse for overindulgence it was a celebration of the hope for a life other, and after, the one which we experience.
Thanksgiving was a day which might have been marked within the confines of rural and agricultural communities, but it usually passed unnoticed within the mining and logging camps of the Sierra. This was a holiday which originated in Europe centuries ago to celebrate and give thanks for a good harvest. Immigrants to America in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds brought that tradition with them. However, many of the Pilgrims and Puritans who came to this country – the very same people whom we often credit with the origin of cooking a large specimen of poultry and sharing it with the local natives – these very same Puritans had already years before gone on record for completely eliminating all church holidays, even Christmas and Easter, and replacing them with days of Fasting and Giving Thanks, and avoiding all food on those days. So if the Pilgrims actually did catch and cook a large bird and share it with the local indigenous community, they would actually have been acting in direct opposition to their religious beliefs. Or, they may well have just confused the natives as they first partook of the feast and then went off into the bushes to purge in guilt.

Mixed Messages – we’ve been sending them to Native Americans for centuries.

When George Washington officially proclaimed the first nationally observed Thanksgiving in 1789, he designated it as a National Day of Prayer to give thanks for the many favors granted to this country by God Almighty. So when, your philosophical mind now asks, when did a day which had been originally devoted to prayer and fasting become transformed into one of eating Big Bird along with countless side dishes and desserts while watching dozens of overpaid guys on steroids carry an inflated pig bladder up and down a field of plastic grass? God knows, perhaps, but it remains to us mortals one of life’s deepest mysteries. This Holiday of Gluttony seems to be a modern invention. The Thanksgiving in the Sierra of a century or two ago was a much more peaceful one, and totally without the need for the shelf of antacids.
Christmas -Another Holiday of Thanks and Giving. Well, it used to be - Son of God comes down from Heaven for a brief visit, reprieves our miserable souls from Eternal Damnation, and now we can all go to Heaven if we want. So, thanks a lot. And oh, by the way, I’m also thankful for this person in my life, so I’m going to give her a gift to express that appreciation too. Then we can all go to church and pray and say thanks again. Sounds like a pretty peaceful holiday, doesn’t it? So what the hell happened?

Christmas in the Sierra was usually observed, and the rough miners and loggers, trappers and hunters, thieves and rogues who roamed these hills were all actually much more in keeping with this original concept of celebrating Man’s Salvation than are most of us today. True, churches were a bit hard to come by in the mountains, so prayer wasn’t too common – at least not in public. Trees were often decorated, usually with handmade ornaments and candles. Gifts were often exchanged, and even if the gift was a small thing - such as a replacement shovel or pick for someone who had broken his; a bit of scarce tobacco; a new pair of fur mittens; even if the gift was just a small thing it was still given with a true spirit of Thanks; thanks for being a friend. And perhaps because it was a small thing that really was hard to come by; something which took effort and thought; it was a thing which was more appreciated. The gift really meant something – the shovel kept you working, the mittens warmed your hands while the tobacco warmed you within – and since it meant so much, it showed that the giver, when parting with it, really cared. To say that Christmas in those days long past was indeed a better time would be a value judgment. But, what the hell, when do we ever pass a day without making a value judgment?

Of course, on second thought, hanging a bunch of lit candles on a tree doesn’t really qualify as one of the most intelligent holiday innovations, and lighting the Christmas Tree meant that a lot of wooden shacks ended up burning down on Christmas Day and taking their occupants along for the roast. So perhaps the previous value judgment should be withheld. But at least their hearts were in the right place, as long as they survived.

As you have now been deeply pondering the philosophical meaning of holidays for the past few minutes, you may have come to the sudden realization that New Year’s Day is probably the most artificial holiday ever created. At least most holidays have some basis for observance either in history, tradition, or folklore, but January the First is a completely arbitrary point on the calendar which, one must admit, has no significance whatsoever. It doesn’t mark either a memorable death or birth; neither a solstice nor an equinox; neither thanks nor giving. It’s as if someone who probably had too much to drink put on a blindfold and randomly stuck a pin in a calendar and proclaimed that point to be the beginning of the year and a reason for everyone else to join him in getting drunk. And everyone else said, hmmm – good idea. And so a holiday was born.

New Year’s was probably the one holiday of the Holiday Season which, centuries ago in the Sierra Nevada, was most like it still is today. But that’s only because all of the men in the Sierra - the miners and trappers, the loggers and hunters, the rogues and scoundrels - they all already liked to drink. They didn’t need a holiday to get drunk, but they were more than willing to welcome one if it happened to come along. So, if anyone in the vicinity happened to have a calendar and had been keeping track of the days and actually knew what date it was, then New Year’s was celebrated. And it was celebrated in just about the same way it is today – getting drunk, shooting firearms into the air, and doing a plethora of other stupid things. It’s comforting to have some constants in life; nice to know that some things just don’t change.

But the next morning, when the drinking was done and the hangover was starting to hit, things were a bit different than they are today. There weren’t the variety of remedies to tap for relief, and what remedies there were usually didn’t help even a little. Plus, the effects of alcohol at high altitude can be exaggerated. So the discomfort was significant, often even fatal. The term ‘dead drunk’ found its origins back then, and not just because of the possibility of alcohol poisoning, but also because one’s fellow drinkers could often be just as deadly as the drink itself when expressing their sense of humor.

A man who couldn’t handle his liquor was fair game back in the early-and-mid-eighteen-hundreds. If you passed out your senseless pile of skin and bones could instantly become a target for whatever joke might spring into the minds of your inebriated companions. You might wake up hanging upside down from a tree or dropped into a narrow hole in the ground. Or they might roll you down a mountain, just to see how far you’d go. If more than one celebrant passed out then there might be a race held to see which one rolled down the mountain the fastest. Your clothing could have disappeared and been replaced by some imaginative creation sprung from minds now functioning on a different level. Or, if you were lucky, they might just wake you by pouring buckets of melted snow on your head and then pour more whiskey down your throat. So a hangover might well have been the least of your worries.

If, however, you survived a night of revelry and were lucky enough to wake up, then the hangover, or brain fever as it was also called, needed to be addressed. The symptoms of Brain Fever were, according to one medical manual of the time: pain in the head, sensitivity to light and sound, staring of the eyes, rapid pulse, parched tongue, and wildness of talk. But we’ve all been there, haven’t we? The most immediate treatment, according to said manual, was to drain one to two pints of blood from the sufferer, make him swallow a purgative, and repeatedly apply cold water to his head. If the symptoms were to worsen, then brandy should be substituted for the purgative. One can’t help but wonder how often the first three steps were skipped and they went straight for the brandy.

So if you are still in a philosophical mood and hope to derive some insight from this brief history of the holiday season, then you are probably doomed to disappointment. While the mysteries of human behavior remain a constant, insights into its meaning are much more elusive. Of the four holidays which we celebrate toward year’s end, three had their origins in the expression of gratitude, generosity, and the thirst for spiritual satisfaction, while the fourth just kind of landed in our laps holding a bottle of booze. Of the first three, none remain the same. They have all been transformed into addictions of eating, drinking, and spending; things they were never meant to be until relatively recently; things they indeed never were in a time when a rougher breed of men and women walked these mountains. Theirs was a life devoid of twenty pound turkeys, bags of candy, and shop-till-you-drop hysteria. These people of the Sierra of a century and more ago were indeed a different species from the frightening Ama-Zombies and Wal-Martians of today. They might have had their cabins burn down around them as they lit up the holidays, or awakened hanging upside down from a tree when they celebrated too hard, but they knew that they had real friends who cared about them, and they knew the real meaning of what the holidays were supposed to be.

So, was it a better time back then?
​
Damn right it was.
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The Princess And The Caballero

12/1/2016

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This is the story of a princess in distress and of the knight who came
to her rescue. It is the story of why, in the mid-1800’s, the Russians
suddenly packed up and left California. It is also the story of how a
name in the Russian language took root on an obscure body of water
high up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The body of water isn’t really
all that significant; nor, I suppose, is this story of how this all
happened. But it’s a story from a time long past; a time the like of
which we will never see again. This was a time when a different breed
of men and women walked the mountains and valleys of California; an
era in which being a man on the frontier was intricately interwoven
with a time-honored code which often demanded that gentlemanly
behavior shine forth from a gruff exterior; a time when being a lady
on the frontier meant accepting the dangers offered by both the
untamed land as well as the men attempting to tame it, and facing both
of these dangers with bravery and equanimity. This was also a time
when a princess once walked the mountains of California; the daughter
of a Russian Tsar; a young woman who came to California to see for
herself the wonders of which she had heard so much while sitting at
the side of her father at the Russian court– and, it was rumored, to
perhaps set herself on a throne as Tsarina of California. This was a
time when both men and women Dreamed of Large Things, and it was a
time when California offered the possibility of such dreams coming
true. The princess’s connection with the Sierra Nevada Mountains is a
tenuous one, but because it involves a story of courage, chivalry, and
unrequited love; and most of all because it is a story which history
has largely forgotten, it is a tale which should be retold.

At the time of the Princess’s arrival in California, the Russian
presence here was reaching its peak. Russia had first begun its
explorations by ship along the coast of North America in the year of
1552, but hesitantly restricted its explorations to those of the
nautical kind for almost two centuries. It wasn’t until the 1760’s
that Russian settlers first established their permanent presence in
North America, as those two centuries of surveys had disclosed a
wealth of animal life to be had for the taking – for the very
profitable taking. They began by settling onto a group of islands off
the coast of Alaska, and then soon went on to the mainland where,
under orders from Catherine the Great in 1784, the first permanent
Russian settlement was founded at Three Saints Bay. They continued
spreading eastward, claiming more lands as they went. The natives were
not at all pleased with the Russian invaders and offered frequent
resistance to the intrusions. In response the Russians employed the
time-honored method of Conquering through Conversion; baptizing the
natives into a submissive acceptance of God’s Will; God’s Will, in
this case, being the uninterrupted flow of profits of the
Russian-American trading company.

The Russians began to establish a presence in California in 1803 when
American maritime merchants proposed a partnership to Alexandre
Baranov, the head official of the Russian American Company, for seal
hunting along the California coast, all the way south to Baja. The
Russians eagerly accepted and began to send ships as well as overland
parties to scout the possibilities in California. The reports sent
back to Baranov were encouraging, painting the picture of a temperate
climate, natives which could offer no serious resistance, and millions
of acres of available land. So Baranov began to make plans for
establishing a foothold in California to complement the one they
already had in Alaska.

The year 1805 saw a new hand take the helm of the Russian American
Company – Count Nicholas Petrovich Rezanov, a man who, through
marriage, manipulation, skill, and a lot of luck, had become a major
shareholder in the company. He first went to tour the colonies in
Alaska where he was surprised to see his fellow Russians dying of
scurvy and starvation. He immediately outfitted a ship and set sail
for California because he hoped, from the stories he’d heard, that
food would be found in abundance there. Since they as yet had no
settlement in California which was producing food, Rezanov pinned his
hopes on the Spanish settlers showing pity and selling the Russians
some badly needed supplies. They arrived in San Francisco Bay in late
March of 1806, where they found their small ship massively outgunned
by the Spanish. Rezanov met with the Commandante of the bastion, Jose
Arguello, to flex his diplomatic skills and talk the Spanish out of
some badly needed supplies. Arguello wavered. He felt sorry for the
starving Russians, so he didn’t sink the one pitiful ship they had
sent for help. Yet he also knew of their expansionist intentions, so
he really didn’t want to encourage them by feeding them. Almost a
month of unsuccessful negotiations passed with no result, during which
time Rezanov knew that more of his people were dying every day in
Alaska. Still, Rezanov wasn’t going to return home with nothing to
show for it. So while he negotiated with Arguello he also secretly
sent his ship’s captain out with a party of sailors to explore the
area and gather as much information as they could. Then he hit upon a
new – or actually, a centuries old – negotiating strategy, and offered
to marry Arguello’s daughter, Concepcion. She was said to be strong
willed, yet she was also beautiful. And, if union with her was the
price that must be paid for food, Rezanov was willing to pay it.

True, Concepcion was only fifteen years old, but that didn’t bother
Rezanov. His first wife back in Russia had been only fourteen years
old, and her early death had led to the inheritance which had moved
Rezanov into a controlling position within the Russian American
Company. Rezanov’s proposal of marriage was promptly accepted by both
the young lady as well as her father, the Commandante. The wedding was
held with all the pomp and ceremony that the 1806 village of Yuerba
Buena could summon, and then the supplies were quickly loaded on
Rezanov’s ship. The basic items of flour, beans, salt, and other
staples soon filled every hold, and they only regretted that fresh
fruit to alleviate the scurvy would not survive the month long voyage
which lay ahead. Rezanov kissed his fifteen year old bride goodbye
and, after six weeks in California, set sail back to Alaska, calling
out to her from the ship’s deck that he would soon return.

He never did return, of course. Nor did he ever have any such
intention. But the telling of lies is often a necessary part of every
diplomatic negotiation. Yet Concepcion waited patiently for his
return. One year later, when word of his death in Siberia reached her,
she adopted wearing black in mourning for the husband she barely
remembered. The cause of his demise was officially recorded as Death
from Exhaustion.  One can only wonder if his predilection for marrying
young teen girls had anything to do with this.

Yet this sad story is not the romantic tale mentioned above; not the
promised love story which has hopefully kept you reading this far, and
for which you are perhaps now getting impatient. For that you must
read just a bit further.

Rezanov, meanwhile, managed to save all the remaining Russian
colonists in Alaska from starvation, so he became a hero. And, based
upon the reports of the secretive surveys of California he had
undertaken while he was stuck there, he recommended to the Russian
emperor that a permanent colony immediately be established in
California to halt the northward advance of the Spanish. The emperor
agreed and sent out two ships to the California coast with
instructions to lay claim and to bury metal plaques on the land they
claimed as proof of the legality of their activities, should the need
of such proof arise. One such plaque was buried in the year 1809 at
Bodega Bay. Three years later, in 1812, the Russians returned to start
a permanent colony, the final location of which was settled upon about
fifteen miles north of Bodega Bay, and it became known as Fort Ross.
(The words ‘Ros’ and ‘Rus’ are root words in the Russian language
meaning ‘Russia’.)

Fort Ross quickly became a hub for Russian activity in California.
Russian ships used the nearby bay as a home port to exploit the
hunting grounds for seal and otter. Smaller settlements were
established to the north and east to grow food with the help of native
labor. The village of Russian River was one of those communities which
soon sprang up, lending its name both to the river and the community.
Hunting parties were sent out not only for food but also to search for
availability of fur bearing animals to increase the trade. Some of
these exploration parties went as far eastward as the Sierra Nevada
Mountains, climbing into them and even over onto the eastern slopes.
And this is how a Russian name became applied to a location high in
the Sierra – perhaps the only Russian name in all of the Sierra Nevada
Mountains; Rush Creek. Originally it was named Rus Creek – ‘Rus’ for
the Russian connection mentioned above, and ‘Creek’ because the name
Russian River had already been applied to that rapidly flowing body of
water near Fort Ross. The name later got Anglicized to Rush Creek, and
later appeared on maps with that name. But it was first Rus Creek,
first named by the Russian explorers who found it, who marked its
name, and who probably never returned.

In the meantime Fort Ross grew in size. The redwood forests of
northern California grew all the way to border of the settlement, so
there was plenty of wood available for construction. A wooden palisade
was erected to enclose the main parts of the settlement. Within this
enclosure were two military blockhouses, complete with cannon. A well
was dug in the center. Management housing was arranged along the walls
along with barracks, storerooms, and a chapel. Native laborers lived
outside. A few of the men involved in the management of the Russian
American Company had brought their wives over to California to keep
them company in this strange land, but for the rest of the all-male
population of company employees, Russian women were not to be found,
so many of the colonists took native brides. They lived with them
outside of the compound in a village which, over the years, saw the
growth of a large population of part Russian, part native children.

The Spanish, for their part, were shocked to discover that they
suddenly had neighbors just a short distance away from their
northernmost outpost of Yuerba Buena. The Commandante of Yuerba Buena
was rightfully cautious, even suspicious. But the Russians, on the
other hand, were friendly and issued invitations for the Spaniards to
visit Fort Ross any time they wished. Social contacts on the frontier
were scarce, and any representative of the civilized life they had all
left behind were welcome friends as far as the Russians were
concerned. When the Commandante and his officers finally did get
around to paying Fort Ross a grudging visit, they were amazed. Unlike
the Spanish, who had brought only the necessities of life north from
Mexico with them, the Russians had made the effort to make life a bit
more cultured in their remote outpost. There was at least one grand
piano in the fort, and many of the Russian officers and company
officials were proficient upon its keys. They melodies of Mozart and
Beethoven filled the air. A sumptuous meal full of European delicacies
was proudly presented to the visiting Spanish, which they washed down
with fine French wines.  After the meal there were cigars and brandy
in the library – a library full of hundreds of works of literature and
history. But the Russians were not out to impress their neighbors;
they were merely intent on making life as intellectually stimulating
and as comfortable as possible for themselves. And so the Spanish and
the Russians became friends – if only on the local level – and
tenuously remained so for many years.

The amount of furs being sent back to Russia grew constantly, and the
fame of California grew in the Russian Court. Life at Fort Ross was
good. The senoritas from the south side of the bay came north to flirt
with the Russian officers in their impressive uniforms on the north
side of the bay. Dances were held on both sides. There was much good
food; plenty of fine wine; many opportunities to hold someone close as
the music played.

As the fame of California and Fort Ross grew back home in Russia, it
came to the attention of the Princess Helena de Gagarin, and she told
her new husband that she wished to visit this fascinating place on
their honeymoon. Being of royal blood, she also apparently saw the
opportunity for staying in California as its new Tsarina. She arrived
in California not only with her new husband, but also accompanied by
two of Russia’s finest navy vessels. She quickly became the center of
attention at the fort, and all activity seemed to focus around her.
She excelled in horsemanship and went riding frequently through the
hills and valleys, and once went all the way to the top of a mountain
where she affixed a plaque naming it after herself. On the way back to
Fort Ross the Princess and her party were accosted by a band of
natives. Her guard of officers were pulled from their horses and tied
up, and the Princess was taken to the leader of the native party who
pondered what to do with her. The Princess got the distinct impression
that she was about to have a new husband.

At about this time a lone Spanish calvalry officer came riding up the
road and introduced himself as the brother of General Mariano
Guadalupe Vallejo, the Commandante of Yuerba Buena. Looking at the
trussed-up Russians and the frightened Princess – the very beautiful
frightened Princess – he asked the native leader about his intentions.
The native began to dither. It seemed that he knew and respected
Commandante Vallejo, and he didn’t want a bad report of his activities
to get back to him. So the officer asked the chief to wait for him to
return with his brother, the Commandante. Then, with a warm smile for
the Princess, he rode off. When he was out of sight of the natives he
whipped his horse into a lather and rode like hell as fast as he could
to Yuerba Buena. There he explained the situation to his brother and
the officers serving under him and then they all rode like hell back
to rescue the Princess. Her rescue was easily accomplished, as the
natives did not wish to incur Vallejo’s wrath. After a brief stopover
in Yuerba Buena to allow the Princess to freshen up, Vallejo
personally escorted her back to Fort Ross. The Lady in Distress had
been rescued, and Vallejo received a hero’s welcome. But from the
Princess he received much more. The Princess, it seemed, was much more
grateful to the Spanish soldier than a newlywed wife on her honeymoon
should have been – with any man other than her husband, that is. She
was smitten by the gallant officer and, even though they both knew it
was a hopeless situation, Princess Helena managed to give her rescuer
a parting gift when she and her husband soon left California forever.
Helena whispered into Vallejo’s ear that he, the Spanish, and the
Mexicans would soon be relieved of the presence of the Russians on
California soil; that upon returning home she would persuade the Tsar
that the California colonies should be abandoned.  This was to be her
gift to her Knight In Shining Armor; her Caballero. She was good to
her word. Shortly thereafter the Russian government sold Fort Ross to
John Sutter and left California forever.

Most historians would tell you that the Russians left California
because the fur trade, by this time, was dying; that the pelts both at
sea and on land were just getting too difficult to find. The
historians would also tell you that Mexico was pressing Fort Ross from
the south, Americans from the east, and there was a mad collection of
mountain men in their own back yard forming something called the Bear
Flag Revolt. They would tell you that these things were all too much
for the Russian settlers; that it was easier for them to just pack up
and leave, so they did just that. They would cite this litany of facts
with the confidence born from thoughtless repetition.

But isn’t it enticing to think that perhaps, between two people whom
history barely remembers; between those two whom fate brought together
in a chance encounter; chivalry, gentlemanly behavior, a code of
frontier honor, and unrequited love all played an unremembered role in
the chess game of history as empires from around the world moved their
pieces across the chess board of North America; that just two small
people made such a big difference, and a small body of water in the
Sierra Nevada Mountains got named in the process.
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Fallen Starr

11/15/2016

1 Comment

 
A star fell from the sky into the mountains on a warm summer day in
1933. No one was there to witness the descent; nor to see or hear the
small form arc through the air and land in a crevice between rocks
just below the summit of Michael Minaret, one of the highest peaks in
an angling arm of the Sierra Nevada, a group of steep rocky crags in a
line of mountains to the northeast of Kings Canyon known as the Ritter
Range. Yet even though the eyes of men were not present to record the
incident, word of the possibility of the passing spread quickly all
the way to San Francisco, and then just as quickly to a party of men
who set out to discover the landing place. These men were not
scientists, nor was what they were seeking a cold rock from a distant
part of the universe. They were mountain climbers, and the fallen star
they set out to find was Peter Starr, a San Francisco attorney who had
set out to climb a steep mountain named after a Yosemite postal
worker. Starr was one of the best mountain climbers in the country; a
fellow mountaineer who had suddenly disappeared without a trace.

Peter Starr was in his thirtieth year that summer. He was known by his
friends and family to be a man who had always been strong and fit; a
man who had excelled in athletic as well as academic accomplishments;
an attorney who spent much of his time gazing east from his office
windows to the distant Sierra, the mountains he loved so strongly. By
the summer of 1933 Peter had ascended more than three dozen of the
highest Sierra peaks, as well as several more in Europe, and was
developing an international reputation for his high mountain exploits.
He was a fast climber who brought little or no equipment with him, and
reminded many of his fellow mountaineers of the legendary John Muir in
his younger years.  Yet as famous as he already was within the
relatively small mountain climbing community, his was a name which was
as yet unknown to the rest of the world. Yet that was soon to change.

On July 29th of 1933 Peter Starr began the day by attending the
wedding of a friend; a fraternity brother from his years at Stanford
University. But Starr left the wedding party early to set out for the
Sierra; he was impatient to get started on a two week adventure of
climbing in an area known as the Minarets. Leaving San Francisco he
drove to Yosemite, then across the mountains via Tioga Pass to his
entry point. This much he had told to his parents and friends, but he
had made the mistake of not mapping out an exact route beyond that
point; the spot from which he was setting out on foot. Or, if he had,
he did not choose to leave a copy with anyone. This was a classic
mistake; one which has brought death to many mountain climbers. He
should have known better. It would be almost a month before Peter was
seen again, although that wasn’t the plan. The plan – such as it was –
was for Peter to take a break from his climbing on August 7th and meet
his father, Walter, and some friends for a mid-vacation lunch
together. Peter wasn’t even going to have to leave the mountains to do
this, because the meeting place was high up at just under eight
thousand feet in elevation.

But Peter never showed up.

Although disconcerted, Walter Starr decided that searching for Peter
at that time was unnecessary; that Peter’s exit date from the
mountains of August thirteenth was still almost a week away and that
his experienced son was probably fine; most likely having lost track
of the dates while immersed in the euphoria of climbing. So he and his
party returned home, and waited. The thirteenth of August passed, and
there was no sign of Peter. So on the morning of the fourteenth Walter
Starr sounded the alarm, calling on the cadre of family friends who
were mountain climbers to begin the search. And those friends
answered. Francis Farquhar, who was a close family friend and at that
time president of the Sierra Club, quickly took charge to organize the
search efforts. He retained a plane and pilot and spent the next two
days flying low over the mountains in a small open cockpit aircraft,
over the area believed to be hiding Peter. Even in August the wind in
their faces was bitterly cold, and after braving it for two long days
Farquhar returned to San Francisco to hurry preparations for the
ground search, little noting at the time that he had just performed
the very first search and rescue operation over the Sierra to be
carried out from the air.

Even while searching by air Farquhar was simultaneously organizing a
ground search party. He immediately contacted two men whom he knew to
be amongst the best mountain climbers in the country – Glen Dawson and
Jules Eichorn, both barely in their twenties. He wanted to add a third
to that experienced group, a relatively old man by the name of Norman
Clyde who, in his forties, was more than the combined age of the two
others. But Farquhar couldn’t find Clyde no matter how hard he looked,
until a friend told him that Clyde was out climbing a mountain, which
was the only place he really liked to be – away from the things of
man.

Norman Clyde really didn’t like to be around other people. He was a
quick-tempered loner, content only with his own company, irritable and
impatient when he found it necessary to be in the company of others.
At the same time he was strong, tireless, and his energy knew no
bounds. And if you were his friend, then you had a loyal friend. He
had once given civilization a chance and, in his younger days, had
gotten a job as a school teacher. But his patience ran thin even then,
and one day he pulled a pistol in school and fired shots into the air
to quiet a group of rowdy pupils. For some inexplicable reason a
number of parents became upset with him and banded together to have
him discharged. His argument that he had fired the shots into the air
and not into the students fell on deaf ears. From that point on Norman
Clyde left behind the things of men and found happiness in the Sierra
Nevada Mountains. In the ensuing decades Clyde ascended hundreds of
peaks, and likely surpassed even the total set by John Muir. He always
carried copies of classic literature in his pack to read by the
campfire at night. Of all the people Farquhar could have chosen for a
search party, none was more capable or qualified than Norman Clyde. In
fact Farquhar could have shortened his list of search party members to
only one – Norman Clyde – and the job would have been accomplished.

Luckily, for Farquhar, the mountain which Clyde was said to be
ascending that day was near to the intended search area. So Farquhar
sent a messenger to Clyde asking for his help, and within hours of
receiving that message Clyde was at the base camp with the rest of the
search party – which by now had actually grown quite large. In
addition to the mountain climbers and Peter Starr’s friends, there
were now law enforcement officers, forest service personnel, and
members of the Conservation Corps all eager to lend a hand. And on the
first day of the search – August fifteenth – they were lucky and found
Peter Starr’s base camp. His ice axe and crampons were there next to a
creek, as was his pack which still held several days’ worth of food.
His camera was also there in camp, and they immediately sent a
messenger to take it down the mountain to have the film inside
developed, hoping it would offer a clue as to what had happened.

Before the sun had fully climbed above the mountains on the morning of
August sixteenth the men had finished breakfast, formed teams, and
spread out in all directions from Peter’s base camp. The professional
climbers went up, everyone else spread sideways or down. That day
brought also some luck – one party ascended to the top of Mount Ritter
and, there in the climber’s register on top, was written an entry by
Peter Starr, dated July thirtieth. That same day Norman Clyde came
across a bloodstained piece of embroidered linen, which Walter Starr
identified as being from one of his son’s handkerchiefs. It wasn’t
much blood – just enough to make everyone’s heart sink with the fear
of what it might represent. At the same time, less than a mile away,
Dawson and Eichorn were climbing a peak called Michael Minaret, named
after Charles Michael, the first person to have climbed it – a postal
worker from Yosemite. In the register at the top of the 12, 240 foot
peak they were disappointed to not find Starr’s name registered. In
fact, upon opening the register the first names they saw were their
own. Dawson and Eichorn had climbed this peak two years before, and no
one had ascended it since. But on the way down, just a few hundred
feet below the summit, on a ledge which hung out over a vast emptiness
– the kind of ledge where a mountain climber might pause to rest
before tackling that final ascent – there on that narrow strip of rock
rested the remains of a partially smoked cigarette. Carefully picking
it up, they examined it and noted the brand name near the unfinished
end – Chesterfield. Peter Starr’s favorite brand, which Walter Starr
later confirmed. They looked out over the edge of the level rock,
carefully scanning the terrain below. Although they persisted in this
visual search long after they felt they should, they saw nothing else
that indicated any human presence and returned to camp. On the
seventeenth and eighteenth the mountain climbers continued their
ascent of all nearby peaks, but no further traces of Peter Starr were
found. With only the enigma of a half-smoked cigarette and the
foreboding of a blood-stained handkerchief to show for their efforts,
the high expectations of the initial search had now faded to gloom. As
the men filed back into camp late on the eighteenth, Walter gathered
them around the fire and told them that he was bringing the search to
an end. He no longer had any hope that his son would be found alive,
or that he would be found at all. The next day they all packed up
Peter’s gear along with their own and began the disappointing trip
back to San Francisco.

All of them, that is, except for Norman Clyde.

Clyde’s reasons for staying were mixed. The mountains were his home,
and there was no reason for him to follow the others out just because
they were all city dwellers who, from his perspective, were often just
weekend warriors who couldn’t spend more than a couple of weeks in
high altitude without getting homesick. But he also had another
reason, which was that he had agreed to do a job. He had agreed to
search for Peter Starr, and just because the others were giving up
didn’t mean that he was going to give up as well. Clyde and Starr had
never met, although Clyde had heard of him and held a grudging respect
for his reputation as a mountaineer. So, as a point of honor – both to
himself and to this fellow Lover of High Places – Clyde decided to
stay and proceed with the search on his own. And he probably wasn’t
all that sad when the others filed down the mountain in defeat. He
didn’t need them or their attitude. Solitude was always best.

So he picked up his gear, picked a mountain, and climbed it. No luck.
Another day, another mountain. Still no luck. Five days and five
mountains. Still no luck; still no further sign of Peter Starr.
Perhaps Starr had wandered far from his base camp. Perhaps he had been
eaten. Perhaps he had fallen down a hole and lay within a mountain. It
seemed inconceivable, but the object of his search had simply and
completely disappeared. Clyde returned to camp and, instead of reading
a book that evening, studied the mountains around him all night long.

On August twenty-fourth the others of the search party were back in
San Francisco, meeting that evening at the home of Francis Farquhar to
go over the search and perhaps determine if they could have done
things more effectively. The Photographer of the Sierra, Ansel Adams,
was in attendance, but he had little to offer in the way of counsel.
As they sat gathered around the fireplace in that warm San Francisco
home, wondering what they could have done, Norman Clyde sat next to
his campfire, high in the Sierra, deciding what he was going to do.
His eyes were fixed on a peak high above, a peak which shone bright in
the moonlight, a peak near to whose summit the remains of a partially
smoked cigarette had been found by Dawson and Eichorn.  That mountain
– Michael Minaret - he felt deserved another look.

Clyde started out from camp early on the morning of August
twenty-fifth and, climbing quickly, reached the summit by mid-day. He
paused often to examine each crack and crevice, but found nothing.
After resting for a while at the top and entering his name in the
register Clyde started back down, still carefully scanning around him
in every direction. When he came to a ledge which he thought might be
the one described by Dawson and Eichorn, the one on which they had
found the cigarette butt, he stopped. Instead of continuing his
descent he thought he would instead follow the ledge sideways for as
far as it would take him.

It didn’t take him far. It didn’t have to. Within a few minutes he
found himself looking down at a body. It was Peter Starr. He was lying
on his back with his arms spread wide, face pointed at the sky. He was
obviously quite dead. Norman Clyde walked out of the mountains,
leaving the body where it lay. When he reached Mammoth Lakes he sent a
telegram to the Starr family. That Sunday a memorial service was held
for Peter at the Starr family home. On the wall was an enlargement of
a picture developed from that last roll of film in Peter’s camera; a
photo of Lake Eliza with Michael Minaret in the background, and
beneath the photo was a poem Peter had written about the mountain’s
beckoning call. A few days later Walter Starr returned to the
mountains with some friends. Guided by Norman Clyde they found Peter’s
body and buried him beneath a cairn of rocks where he lay; a grave
twelve thousand feet high; the highest known resting place in all of
the Sierra; a grave which forever marks the Fallen Starr.
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The Hand Of Glory- Part Three

10/31/2016

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You are dreaming a dream; trying to imagine living another man’s life.
In this dream you are a man named Chris Evans. You were a father and a
husband.  Now you are a running man; an outlaw; a killer. You still
think of yourself as the same man you’ve always been, but the Hand of
Fate has pushed you into being perceived by others as all three of
these different shady and dubious men; character sketches artfully
drawn and forced upon you by the artists at the Southern Pacific
Railroad. You were once known as a farmer, but those gentle days have
passed. You were then labeled a train robber, although that was never
proven and never would be proven. So you became an outlaw; a running
man; a killer. Well, perhaps you’re a killer. Probably. Almost
certainly, as those two men on the ground at Young’s Cabin could just
as easily have died from your shotgun blasts as from the revolver of
your fellow outlaw – John Sontag. But it was most likely from your
shotgun, you admit to yourself, as it had a wide spread pattern and
you were firing off shells pretty quickly. So now people are saying
that you are a killer as well as a train robber, and even if neither
of those charges can ever be proven with certainty you know damn well
that it doesn’t matter; that the Southern Pacific Railroad and their
minions will catch you if they can and kill you with pleasure when
they do and brag about both deeds loud and far to frighten and deter
any others who contemplate crossing them in any way. You have become
symbolic, and the railroad needs to shape that symbolism to their own
ends. So the best thing you can do – the only thing that makes sense –
is to get out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and California for good;
out of the reach of the railroad and their army of detectives and get
on a boat to some far away country where you can lose yourself  high
up on the peaks of some other mountain range. But to do that you first
need tickets to get on that boat, and for that you need money. And
that is why you are walking along this mountainside this first day of
June in 1893; you are on your way to Stone Corral; on your way to meet
your wonderful wife Molly who has somehow found a way to get that
money for you and has written a note telling you to meet her at that
place so that she can give it to you. You love Molly dearly; you’re
immensely grateful that you have a partner who is willing to take such
risks and who is capable of doing such amazing things. What you don’t
know as you walk along that mountainside in blissful unawareness is
that your dear Molly did not write that note to you, but that it was
written by those eager minions of the Southern Pacific Railroad at the
direction of their bosses. And they are waiting for you now, Chris;
guns in hand as they crouch low in hiding behind the stone walls of
Stone Corral.

When you walk into Stone Corral that morning you walk into an ambush.
The hidden men of the posse; the men so eager to put a bullet in your
brain for that railroad reward of ten thousand dollars; those greedy
want-to-be killers open fire on you and John as soon as you step into
view. John gets hurt badly right away, with bullet wounds through both
arms and the chest. You take a bullet in the back and another in that
same eye which suffered at Young’s Cabin. Only this time the bullet
goes all the way into your right eye and stays there, blinding you on
that side. John is obviously in pain from his wounds and looks
confused, so you push him down behind a tall stack of hay and quickly
dive to the ground alongside him. A pile of hay isn’t much cover from
bullets, but it’s all you’ve got. Then you begin firing back, poking
your weapon around and through the hay and blasting off shots, except
you’re not really sure of just where your attackers are or how many of
them oppose you. But the shotgun keeps them at bay. A lucky shot from
one of the ambushers sends another bullet through the hay and into
your left arm; your gun arm. Blood pours from the open wound onto the
stock of your shotgun, and for what seems an eternity you have to
pause in your firing to tear off a piece of your shirt and wrap the
arm tightly. It still hurts like hell, but now you can at least resume
loading and firing, keeping the railroad men at bay. But you know in
your sinking heart that this is going to be a very, very long day for
you.

When night falls and the shooting dies down, you and John start to
whisper about the possibility of sneaking off into the nearby trees
and escaping under cover of darkness. But by now John has lost so much
blood from his multiple wounds that he hasn’t the strength to even
lift his gun arm any more, much less raise his body for a dash to the
trees. So he tells you to go ahead, but he asks you to do him a favor
before you leave. He asks you to put a bullet in his head, to finish
him off so he won’t be captured by a gang of the railroad’s hired
hands and imprisoned for the crime of train robbery, a crime he never
committed. You hesitate. You take his revolver from his hand, from
fingers covered with blood and which can no longer move, then you
hesitate again. You check the load in the pale light of the moon,
turning the cylinder, playing for time. Two unfired rounds are still
in their chambers, but you hesitate still more. Thus begins a night of
angst which is destined to seem even longer than the day of gunplay
which has just wound down. You try to talk John out of it, but he
won’t budge. You try to reason with him, but you have no argument
which sounds reasonable. You tell John that you will help him get
away; that you’ll carry him if necessary, but he just gives you a
tired shake of his head as if you both already know that won’t work.
The night gets late and the moon makes its way across the sky. You
understand why John wants you to do what he wants you to do, but you
just can’t make yourself put the gun to his head and pull the trigger.
You love John like a brother, more than a brother, and even though you
sympathize – hell, you’d probably want the same in his place – you
just can’t do what he asks. You may indeed be a killer, but you’re a
killer in self-defense. You’re not a killer of your brother, your
fellow fugitive. So when dawn begins to show its early light over the
mountains John sighs in understanding, in resignation, and tells you
to get out while you can, and you do. You crawl off into the brush
because by now you’re too weak and in too much pain to rise to your
feet. You don’t find out until later what happens to John. It seems
those lawmen, those railroad detectives; what they wanted more than
anything else was to be famous. So when the sun rose and no shots were
coming at them they went and dragged John out from behind the hay and
laid him on a pile of horse manure in the hot sun and sent for
newspaper reporters instead of a doctor. And when those reporters
finally arrived they had their pictures taken out there with John, as
if his trembling and bleeding body was some sort of hunting trophy.
And then they put him on a wagon and sent him back to town where he
died from blood poisoning he got from laying on that horse manure in
the hot sun. But that was the railroad for you. And one of these men;
one of these high and mighty railroad detectives; one of them wanted
to marry your daughter. But you already knew they were all bastards.
You continue to crawl through the woods for a couple of miles until
you come to a cabin owned by a family named Perkins. Mrs. Perkins
takes you in and treats your wounds but tells you with a sad shake of
her head that it doesn’t look good and that she doesn’t think you’re
going to make it. But you manage a smile and tell her you’re pretty
sure you’ll die of old age. A couple of days pass before the posse
tracks you down and when they find you you’re not in any shape to
either run or to fight, so they put you in handcuffs and drag you back
down to jail. They hold you there for over a week, all that time
refusing entry to Molly and the children, telling her that they are
under orders to allow no visitors, just the sheriff and his deputies
and certain railroad detectives, all looking for a confession to make
the whole process easier; a confession so impossible that its mere
mention only elicits laughter from you. The only man they will
publicly let in to the jail is a doctor, ostensibly to treat your
wounds. But the treatment of those wounds is only cursory – he puts a
bandage on your back; he leaves the bullet in your eye; he looks at
your left arm and gives you a broad smile. Then he cuts your hand off.

If you are still putting yourself into the life of Chris Evans; if you
are still dreaming this dream trying to imagine his life; it would be
best for you if you wake up now. You can’t? Then continue on, dreaming
what is now a nightmare.

The hand of Fate is pretty much finished with Chris now, having made
him a fugitive, riddled him with bullet holes, and dumped him behind
bars. The Hand of Glory is now rattling the cage door. After more than
a week passes the sheriff finally lets Molly in to see him. He gives
no reason for the delay, nor does he tell Molly ahead of the visit
that part of her husband’s body is now missing. He and the deputies
let Molly see that for herself; they smile as they see the shock on
her face as she first sees that her husband’s left hand and part of
his arm are missing. When she turns and demands an explanation the
sheriff merely shrugs and mutters that it was the doctor’s decision.
When Molly later gets to see the doctor he explains that it was a
medical necessity; that sepsis had set in and that amputation was the
only way to save her husband’s life. His explanation is carefully
worded and is obviously a prepared statement. He elaborates to
describe the swelling, the white pus, and the foul odor reeking from
the arm, and dismisses Molly’s questions as merely the rantings of an
angry woman. But when Molly and Chris talk during their meetings over
the next days, Chris tells her that in fact the wound in his arm was
healing cleanly and quickly thanks to the ministrations of Mrs.
Perkins; that there was no sepsis, no foul smell or extrusion of
infectious pus; not even any swelling or pain. The wound was clean and
the arm was healthy. This was borne out by the fact that Chris was not
even the slightest bit ill, and such would have been the case if the
lingering symptoms of blood poisoning had indeed set in, spreading
from his arm to his heart, liver, and kidneys. No, the doctor had
simply cut off his hand while the deputies had held him down. A darker
purpose was whispered then amongst Chris’s friends in the mountains,
and is still whispered today.

The whispers assert that it was not medical necessity, as the doctor
had so blandly asserted, which severed the left hand of Chris Evans.
These whispers spoke of a darker purpose; of an intent partially
glimpsed by Chris and Molly but which went much deeper than even they
could see. Chris and Molly reasoned that his hand had been sawed off
another reason. By mutual assent, almost as if they didn’t even need
to give voice to the words, Chris and Molly felt they knew what that
purpose was. It was a message; a message from the Southern Pacific
Railroad; a message which was plain in its meaning to anyone with the
intelligence to see and hear; a message which stated in no uncertain
terms that the Southern Pacific was an entity not to be trifled with.
It was a message which they both understood; which Chris would ponder
darkly during his days in the cell and which no doubt sent shivers of
ice down Molly’s spine; a message they would not want to share with
their children. So the doctor’s official explanation wasn’t publicly
questioned, even though they both were certain they knew better. And
Chris’s left hand was never produced for examination. It disappeared.
Yet perhaps Chris and Molly only glimpsed a small part of the deeper
truth. There was indeed a message being sent, but there are
indications that a trophy was also being collected. And not just any
trophy – a Hand of Glory.

A Hand of Glory is the hand of a murderer which is cut from his body,
usually immediately following his death or execution. If prepared
properly it is reputed to have talismanic, even magical, powers.
Preferably the hand cut from the body is the one which did the actual
killing. If that is in doubt then the left hand is taken, as the left
hand has held long-term religious and cultural associations with what
is sinister and dark in men’s souls. The fact that Chris Evans was
left-handed and that he fired his weapon with that hand left no doubt
as to which hand would be harvested. The fact that the hand was
harvested before his actual death was the only deviation from the
ritual. That was probably because the man who ordered the amputation
saw a window of opportunity which he did not want to waste; an
opportunity which might never appear again. That opportunity was open
during those few days when Chris Evans was alone in a cell and at the
mercy of the railroad. He might never be so totally removed from the
public eye again. He would be tried for murder and he would be
convicted. Of that there was no doubt, as the Southern Pacific could
buy a jury as easily as an acre of land. He was already a convicted
murderer in the eyes of his accusers and the gullible public, so
harvesting the hand early was only a slight technical deviation in the
ritual.

The ritual is a dark one, going back through several centuries of
European tradition; a tradition which held that a hand which takes a
life has Power, and that power need not die with its owner. The darker
the crime, the stronger the power. After the hand was harvested the
blood was drained from the flesh, it was wrapped in a corpse sheet,
and then soaked in a preparation of salt, urine, and herbs. After
soaking for several weeks the hand was set out to dry in the sun. At
this point the hand was now physically preserved, mummified, and might
then be used as a weapon to weaken enemies, but its power could be
made yet stronger still if the fat from the body of a convicted
criminal was used to make a candle which would then be held by that
hand. It needn’t be a large candle. A small candle would suffice –
say, perhaps, a candle made from the fat of the arm taken with the
hand.  This hand, when wielded by the man or woman who had shaped it,
could then be used to extend power over an intended victim;
supernatural power to dissolve their will and take hold of their
possessions.

The Hand of Glory and the power with which it emboldened its owner was
a tradition for several centuries throughout such countries and
England, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the cultures of
Scandinavia – all of which had heavily influenced the population of
California in the 1890’s. The ranks of the Southern Pacific Railroad
in particular, especially at the higher levels, were more than a
little filled with those from Irish and British descent, and the
traditions of the Old Countries told by parents and grandparents made
the Hand of Glory an object of not uncommon knowledge to those who sat
in board rooms and silently pulled the strings of their politician
puppets.

And as you still find yourself imprisoned in that nightmare which was
Chris Evans’ life; find yourself imprisoned in a tiny cell with no
room to move and nothing to do but think, you come to realize that
perhaps this was also not uncommon knowledge to one who wore the badge
of a Southern Pacific Railroad detective; a detective shamed three
times at the hand of Chris Evans; a detective who fumed and sought
revenge against Evans; a detective who longed to possess the outlaw’s
daughter and who quietly may have stepped in to seize the hand of
opportunity.

Revenge is a dish best served cold; and the Hand of Glory would have
been the ideal vessel with which to serve it.
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The Hand Of Glory- Part Two

10/15/2016

0 Comments

 
The Hand of Fate is the guide to our lives; the Hand of Glory is
sometimes, in rare instances, the result of it. So lay back, close
your eyes, and try to dream this scenario as suddenly having become
your life; try to imagine it – you won’t be able to, but try:

In this dream you’re a man named Chris Evans, an energetic and healthy
man in your mid-forties; a farmer married to the woman of your dreams
and with eight wonderful children. You rise out of bed just as the sun
is rising over the Sierra to the east; your day of working the fields
on your farm in the San Joaquin Valley near Visalia begins early, just
as it always has and, with the comforting assurance that life is good
and will always remain so, you just know that the days, weeks, and
years to come will always bring you the same peaceful routine and that
same glow of contented happiness. You have breakfast with your family,
talking with your wife – her name is Molly – about what each of you
plans for the day. You’re going to work out in the fields with John –
John Sontag, the man who helps out around the farm – and Molly tells
you that she’s going to run some errands and then visit her mother –
Granny Byrd, the kids call her – who lives nearby. After the breakfast
dishes have been cleared the children start off for school and you and
Molly head your separate ways after sharing a goodbye hug and kiss.
It’s a normal morning; life is good.

Morning slides into early afternoon. You’ve paused in your chores to
share a leisurely lunch with John and with your eldest girl, Eva.
After the meal is finished your mind and your full stomach are telling
you that all they want is a quiet nap in the bedroom, but you lever
yourself up off the chair and turn away from the inviting door that
leads to the bed and instead return to the fields for an afternoon of
work with John. Normal days for you rarely have room for the leisurely
satisfaction of a nap. But afternoons in the field can bring a
different kind of satisfaction, and John is a good friend with which
to share that time. He moves a little slow because of that lame foot –
the one that got injured when he worked for the Southern Pacific
Railroad; the injury that got him fired because he could no longer
move fast enough for his railroad bosses with his new and permanent
limp – but John’s a hard worker who’s reliable and gets the job done,
and that’s all any farmer can ask.

Early afternoon passes over into late afternoon, and suddenly you hear
a voice that captures your attention and you look up to see your
daughter Eva running out the back door of the house and shouting
something. You’re too far away to hear the words, but the frightened
tone of her voice is enough to send a chill down your spine and to
make your hands unconsciously drop the tools they hold. Eva is
running, and you also start running to meet her; anxious to hear what
makes her so excited. Eva takes you by the arms as she comes up to
you, panting to catch her breath. Then with frightened gasps she tells
you that there are two men in the parlor; two men with guns drawn. The
sheriff is there along with that noxious railroad detective, Will
Smith, They pointed their guns at her and demanded to know where her
father is. They said that they have come to arrest you, but Eva adds
that what she really thinks is that they’ve come to kill you. You draw
Eva to you and hold her, but only briefly. As Eva’s head snuggles
safely against your shoulder you look over her head and find John
staring at you. Each of you know what the other is thinking; it shows
like fire in the eyes. Then, telling Eva to stay where she is, to stay
away from the house and not come back into it until you tell her, you
head there yourself, taking quick, long strides and keeping your eyes
on the door and silently praying that no sheriff or railroad detective
emerges until you can reach what you need. Your prayer is answered as
you arrive at the stoop and reach out to retrieve your shotgun which
leans there against the railing. You pick it up, check the load and
fit the weapon loosely into the crook of your arm. Then you take the
steps in one leap and open the door, ready to confront the two men who
accosted your daughter; two thugs with badges who invaded your home
and threatened your daughter with the assurance that the shield of The
Law would protect them. But you know it will not. You know that you
will never tolerate threats to your family, especially not in your own
home. You know that these two intruders are either going to apologize
and leave or you’re going to put a bullet into each of them. But of
course the intruders offer to do neither of those two things, so shots
are exchanged. With the courage and determination of a man defending
home and family you stand firmly at one end of the parlor while they,
barely a dozen feet away, open fire. You level your weapon and return
fire. Their bullets fly near you, but they all miss. Your shots fly
toward them, and one finds its mark in the sheriff’s arm.  They turn
and run. You are unscathed and have won the battle, but the war is
just beginning.

Late afternoon shades into evening, and you are a fugitive. Molly
returns home and finds you packing. She passed John out in the yard as
he was preparing the horses for travel. You give Molly a succinct
explanation of what has happened – of what is happening – with Eva
occasionally interjecting more details, but you don’t pause in your
packing as time is now the one thing of which you do not have nearly
enough. What else will you need? You try to think, but the pressure is
building and you’ve got to leave now. You know that the sheriff and
the railroad detective will be returning very, very soon with
reinforcements. And most of those approaching men now so eager to
capture you will be railroad detectives hastily recruited by Will
Smith, for Smith is a man who has now been twice shamed by the Evans
family; once humiliatingly rejected as a suitor by Eva and now driven
from the Evans’ farm at gunpoint by you. He wants revenge. You kiss
Molly goodbye and hold her close; hold her not nearly long enough, but
could any amount of time in her arms be enough? You give Eva a goodbye
kiss on the cheek and caution her to look after her mother and the
younger children and then you are gone, outside to where John waits
with the horses; off the farm and into the foothills, always looking
over your shoulder; then higher up and higher still where the trees
shelter you from sight and the mountains welcome you back.

Evening fades to dark, and you are an outlaw. Your woke early that
morning next to the warm body of the woman you love just as you have
for years; the woman you still love more than anything in this world.
You said goodbye to your children just as you always do and spent most
of the day working the land as you always do. Then the Hand of Fate,
the hand of the Southern Pacific Railroad came to open your door
without invitation and changed your day to something completely
unanticipated. Between the sunrise and the sunset of one brief day
your life has changed from being a farmer to being a Wanted Man. Try
to dream this as suddenly becoming your life; try to imagine it – you
won’t be able to, but try.

Yet you are caught up in this dream now; it won’t stop. The mountains
have called you, offering sanctuary, and you’ve come to take refuge in
their embrace. The Redwood Ranch which you and Molly called home
offers only brief sanctuary – too many people know about it so you can
only stop here for a short rest, gathering what few supplies lie in
the cupboards for your continuing journey. For that’s what the future
holds for you as far ahead as you can see – a journey; back and forth,
around in circles, up and down. But always within that same small part
of the Sierra you once called home; Redwood Ranch to the South, which
you shared with Molly; Sampson’s Flat to the North, where you mined
with John; and the logging camps of Millwood, Converse, and Big Stump
where you spent years as a logger cutting trees and forming lifelong
friendships with men who will now help to shelter you and misdirect
the posse coming after you. And the posse is coming; many of them are
coming. The Southern Pacific has put a reward on your head of ten
thousand dollars. And then they added those Three Little Words – Dead
or Alive. You’re now just basically a walking dead man with a price on
your head for a crime you never committed; a crime for which you’ve
never even been charged, waiting for the bullet which will make some
lucky man wealthy.

Your dream has become a nightmare, but you’re not done yet. You have
friends here in the mountains, and those friends are keeping you
informed as to the movements of those bounty hunters, enough so that
you can avoid them. It’s as if it’s all a random dance with you and
John on one part of the stage and groups of changing partners moving
around you, yet mostly blindly. Days and then weeks pass without you
ever seeing each other. But then one day you finally do inadvertently
run into a posse at a place called Young’s Cabin. Later accounts of
how it begins will differ – details will get twisted with time, as
they often do - some swearing that you are hiding inside the cabin
while others say that you walk into the clearing from one side while
the posse rides in from the other. As luck will have it, this is a
posse which counts that Southern Pacific Railroad detective, Will
Smith, as one of its members. They see you and their eyes light up.
They draw their guns and open fire. You raise the shotgun in your
hands – the same shotgun which you wielded against the men who invaded
your home – and return their fire, letting loose with both barrels in
quick succession and then reloading rapidly. John is next to you,
firing his revolver at the moving targets across from you as their
horses rear and buck with the sudden onslaught of noise. As you lift
the reloaded shotgun a bullet from across the clearing hits you near
the outside of your right eye and you feel blood run down the side of
your face. But that doesn’t deter you as you fire two more blasts and
then drop two new shells into the barrels. Now you see that there is
more confusion within the posse; one man lays motionless on the
ground, another is bent double in pain, the sheriff is holding one
arm, and another man has wheeled his horse and is riding off into the
trees. You and John begin to back away, still firing, and when the
trees begin to close around you, you turn and run into their thick
cover. You’ve made it back to safety. For now.

The winter is a hard one in this part of the Sierra. The snow is heavy
and the temperatures remain below freezing for months. You and John
spend most of the winter living in a cave. Running – for the time
being – is no longer a necessity as the heavy snow is keeping any
potential bounty hunters at home next to their warm fires. Which is
just as well, because John is spending most of this winter as a sick
man and you as his care giver. You sneak down to the valley several
times to get medicine for John and whatever meager supplies can be
had. While there you drop in to the farm near Visalia to see Molly and
the children but never stay too long, always feeling the urgency to
get back up into the safety of the  mountains before the sheriff or
the railroad detectives find out you are there. And that railroad
detective – the one who you chased out of your home – your friends
tell you that he is the man who wheeled his horse and ran away from
the fight at Young’s Cabin, leading to yet even more scorn being
heaped upon him by his fellow enforcers. Thrice cursed now at Evans’
hand, he wants blood.

The winter is long. There’s not much to do except talk to each other,
and even that gets tedious. Living in a cave with a sick man for
months on end with little news of the outside world gets boring, and
rationing your small amounts of food leaves you wondering just how
much more gaunt your body can become without disappearing completely.
But still you and John talk, because that’s all you have to do. You
talk and eventually you reason that the best thing you can do is to
just get out completely; out of the country to escape your pursuers
and away from your family so the Southern Pacific can give up and
leave them alone. Perhaps somewhere in South America; maybe Molly can
join you at some time in the future. Perhaps the children as well. So
when Spring comes and the sun begins to shine warm once again and you
know that the bounty hunters will again soon be making their way into
the mountains eager to gain instant wealth through the simple act of
putting a bullet through your brain, you decide to send word to Molly
about your plan of getting out of the country to someplace safe where
she can join you later, and you ask if she can somehow beg or borrow
the money for two boat tickets, perhaps from a friend or relative. And
when the answer comes it raises your outlook for the future, because
Molly tells you that she has managed to raise the money and wants to
meet with you right away to give it to you. So you and John leave your
hideout and with hope for the future lifting your heart you begin to
make your way to a place called Stone Corral; the place where Molly in
her note has said that she will meet with you. Except that what you
don’t know is that the note you wrote to Molly was intercepted by the
detectives at the Southern Pacific; and that the note you supposedly
received from Molly was in fact written by those very same Southern
Pacific detectives who are now lying in ambush for you at Stone
Corral.

The Hand of Fate has carefully excluded all other options from your
future, and the Hand of Glory will now rise within days.

                                         To be concluded in Part Three . . .
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The Hand of Glory- Part One

10/1/2016

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Fate. Destiny. Kismet. Karma. The belief that Something Else controls
our future; the fear that the future is in reality totally out of
control. Within us all there is the uncertainty of what lies awaiting
us in the years ahead; while at the same time we are plagued by the
unsettling fear that something from the past may come back to haunt
us.  For some people there is the comfort of spiritual belief; and yet
for all of us at some time during our tenuous lives there lies the
suspicion that those spiritual beliefs to which we so desperately
cling  may only scratch the surface of the reality of whatever puppet
master is really out there tugging our strings and controlling our
dance through life. So girdled with false courage we reach out to
grasp the Hand of Fate, and while that hand in turn reaches out to
touch all of us, the more elusive Hand of Glory is known to only a
few. And when it reaches out it is completely and frighteningly
different than its name would let on. Just ask Chris Evans – Outlaw; a
man in whose life both the Hand of Fate as well as the Hand of Glory
took active roles; a man whose life can certainly be described as
fateful, yet a life to which the term of glorious would never be
applied. But to understand why the Hand of Glory became a frightening
part of his life, we must first go back several years to understand
how the Hands of Fate and Glory steered his journey to that painful
crossroad.

Chris Evans was born back East in the year 1847. He decided to take
his destiny into his own hands at the scary age of just fourteen years
and ran away from home, making his way West, pausing in his travels
occasionally to take on add jobs at farms and ranches but never
tarrying for too long in any one place, always desiring to make his
way closer to his goal – California. It took him many long years and
more than a few detours to finally arrive in the Golden State. But
although he had heard about the legends regarding those endless piles
of gold just lying around waiting to be picked up, Chris had decided
long before his arrival that he didn’t want to spend his life chasing
dreams; panning for gold in the freezing mountain streams or digging
endlessly in the pitch black darkness of some bottomless hole in a
mountainside, chasing phantom riches. He knew instead that he wanted
to be on top of those mountains; high up in the Sierra Nevada; as
close to heaven as he could get with the world at his feet. So he made
his way up to that very place; to an area which is now part of Kings
Canyon National Park. The Hand of Fate had only to gently brush him at
this point, and the Hand of Glory was still far, far away.

Evans soon got a job falling trees – Big Trees, Giant Sequoias – and
he was good at it, too. As the years went by – it was the 1870’s now –
he taught the trade of tree falling to a lot of the younger men making
their way into the mountains in search of employment.  Falling trees
was hard, even backbreaking work. The loggers worked ten to twelve
hours a day, six days per week. It would often take two men working
each end of a saw a week or more to fall a single giant tree. But
Evans had the strength, the patience, and the stamina to stick with it
for many years before he left the mountains and made his way down to
the San Joaquin Valley to try his hand at a different kind of work.
But when Evans left these hills he also left behind many friends; men
who would remember him and come to his aid when Fate would later
demand his return to the High Country
.
Down in the San Joaquin Valley Chris got a job as a teamster and met a
wonderful woman named Molly. Molly – quite young by more modern
standards at the mere age of fifteen  – was considered a woman and
eligible for marriage according to the social mores of the time. At
twenty-seven Chris was several years her senior, but the two fell in
love and entered into a brief yet intense courtship. Molly’s parents
gave their blessing and in 1874 she and Chris were married at
Rattlesnake Ranch, the Byrd family home which was located about
fifteen miles north of Visalia. Chris owned a piece of property near
Dry Creek, but instead of moving there with his new bride he worked
out a trade for land higher up in the mountains; one hundred and sixty
acres in what is now known as Redwood Canyon in Kings Canyon National
Park. He and Molly named the place their Redwood Ranch. They moved up
there to what they felt was going to be their own personal Garden of
Eden to make it their home, and Molly became pregnant with the first
of what would eventually be nine children. But after a riding accident
the baby was born prematurely and died within a day. Baby Eugene was
buried there at Redwood Ranch, beneath a giant Cedar tree next to a
small spring of running water, and rests in that grove of Sequoias to
this day next to a cousin who also died as an infant.  The marker on
that grave has long since disappeared, but the remains of their first
child still lie somewhere in Redwood Canyon even after Time has erased
all physical memories. The search for work soon led Chris to cross the
Sierra on foot to Inyo County, while Molly remained at Rattlesnake
Ranch and gave birth to their second child several months later. When
he returned from the eastern side of the Sierra Chris, Molly and the
baby moved back to the valley, then to San Francisco, Seattle, and
back again to California to start a farm near a place called Mussel
Slough. Although it went unnoticed at this time, this nudge from the
Hand of Fate which led them to Mussel Slough was anything but gentle.
It was the touch which changed the course of his entire life.

Mussel Slough was land which was owned by the Southern Pacific
Railroad. But the Southern Pacific invited farmers onto the land to
start farms, telling them the railroad would sell them the land after
they had improved it. Many families, including the Evans, did just
that. Yet the dire events of the near future would soon prove that
this may not really have been the best career decision any of them had
ever made, and perhaps Chris had a foreboding of those events, and
that may have been why he moved his family away from Mussel Slough
before it turned into a deadly quagmire.

So Chris moved west to Adelaide, and the children kept coming, eight
more in all after the passing of baby Eugene – Eva, Carl, Elmer, John,
Joseph, Louis, Winifred, and Ynez. Around the year 1880, while Chris
and Molly were peacefully ranching and making babies over at Adelaide,
trouble erupted at their former home of Mussel Slough between the
farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad, and although they weren’t
involved in that fighting the Southern Pacific branded Chris as a
troublemaker because he had friends at Mussel Slough who had taken up
arms against the railroad.  Six of those friends – six farmers – were
killed in the battle that followed between them and the squad of
Southern Pacific railroad detectives who had been sent out by the
railroad to clear the farmers off the land; to free the land up for
sale to other investors at a much higher price than could be gotten
from the farmers. The Southern Pacific was a powerful force in
California in 1880. They had their own private army of railroad
detectives, and they were ruthless in using them. The Battle of Mussel
Slough was a massacre.

When Molly, Chris and the children moved back near Visalia in 1882 to
start a farm, Chris was still on the railroad’s Hit List. So the
Southern Pacific began stationing some of their railroad detectives
near the Evans’ farm to keep a close watch on Chris and his family, a
vigil which persisted for years, day and night. In fact one of those
detectives, a man by the name of Will Smith, got to watching them so
closely that he decided that he had fallen in love with Chris and
Molly’s eldest daughter, Eva, and that he wanted to marry her. But
Eva, even though she was only a young lady of fourteen years, was a
young lady who knew her own mind. She told Smith that she wanted no
part of Southern Pacific men in general and no part of him in
particular. She used language that was quite colorful and descriptive,
and Smith immediately became the butt of rude jokes from his fellow
detectives as well as from the local sheriff and his deputies. Smith
fumed, and quietly vowed revenge for this repudiation by this arrogant
farm girl.  Again, Fate’s persistent movement of Chris’s life
generated ripples which would later wash back upon him as an angry
tide.

When the train robberies started happening in the San Joaquin Valley
in the late 1880’s, the Southern Pacific decided that they would point
the finger of blame at Chris and his friend John Sontag, even though
they didn’t have a shred of evidence that either of them had ever been
involved; even though they knew for a fact that the Dalton Gang had
committed at least some of those train robberies. Typically a gang of
masked men would board a train at a water stop, hold the train’s crew
at gunpoint, blow open the baggage car with dynamite, and then ride
off into the night with whatever spoils they could get and disappear
before the train could make it to the nearest town to raise the alarm.
This was the typical method of operation of the Dalton Gang, and one
of the Dalton boys had already been arrested and charged with train
robbery. Chris’s friend John Sontag had once worked for the Southern
Pacific but had lost his job when one foot had been badly injured in
an accident at work and as a result he could no longer move fast
enough for his bosses at the railroad, so he was fired. He then went
to work on the Evans’ farm doing odd jobs for Chris and Molly. The
Southern Pacific apparently thought they made the perfect pair of Fall
Guys – the Evans and Sontag Gang, they labeled them - and they told
the sheriff that they wanted them arrested. That’s how powerful the
Southern Pacific was in the late 1880’s – they could order a man’s
arrest without that man having ever been charged or convicted of a
crime. And the sheriff was in a situation where he either had to obey
or face losing his job, so he rode out to the Evans’ farm with that
railroad detective, Will Smith, to carry out his orders.

On a fateful day when Molly wasn’t home a railroad detective with a
festering grudge accompanied by a sheriff who did not have the courage
to question his orders rode up to the family farm, dismounted, and
walked into their living room with their guns drawn. No knock; no
warrant; no evidence. The oldest daughter, Eva, ran out the back door
to tell her father that two men were in the house threatening to
either arrest him or shoot him. Unable to tolerate this threat to his
family in his own home Chris picked up his own gun and went into the
house to confront the two men who were no better than intruders in his
eyes. Shots were exchanged and the railroad detective and sheriff took
off back to town at full speed. In fact, they ran out so fast that
they ran right by the horses they had left tied up in front of the
farm and ran all the way back to town. Chris and John had a good laugh
at this, but they knew the sheriff and detective would be back, and
that they would bring a posse with them. So they packed up some
supplies and took off for the mountains, back to the security of the
Redwood Ranch, but leaving Molly and the children behind for their own
safety should gunfire erupt around them once again.

Molly Byrd was now thirty years old and deeply in love with her
husband, the mother of eight more children after little Eugene had
died, and she was no fool. She knew that the railroad would never give
up on trying to destroy her family and kill her husband. She was
right. The railroad posted a team of spies on Molly’s farm and posted
a reward of ten thousand dollars on her husband’s head – Dead or
Alive. The railroad had basically issued a Death Warrant on a man who
had never been convicted of a crime; on a man for whom they had not
the slightest evidence had ever been near one of their trains, much
less had actually robbed one.

After Chris’s hasty yet necessary departure Molly took on the tasks of
running the family farm and raising eight children, while at the same
time fending off frequent visits from the sheriff and suffering
constant threats and intrusions from the railroad. Chris would
sometimes sneak down to the farm and pay a visit to Molly at night and
then leave before morning light. The railroad detectives also
suspected Molly - and Eva - of sneaking food up to her husband in the
mountains, and although they were very vocal in their accusations they
could never prove anything.  Molly found comfort in the continuous
support of her mother – Grannie Byrd to the children – who lived
nearby in Visalia.

The High Country had called to Chris, offering safety. The Hand of
Fate had steered his return to this High Country; and he and John
Sontag were back up in these mountains that Chris loved so much; back
amongst Chris’s friends who would now move to protect him from those
who pursued him for a chance at quick wealth; back into temporary
safety, but one huge step closer to the cold touch of the Hand of
Glory which would forever scar him. For the Hand of Glory had no
friends; but only victims, and he was now destined to be one.

                                                To be continued in
Part Two . . .
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    Author

    With 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. 

    Tim has worked for Sequoia Parks Conservancy since 2010 in the Kings Canyon Visitor Center and also as a naturalist for the Sequoia Field Institute.  COPYRIGHT 2016 T.E. CHRISTENSEN

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