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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.
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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. 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. 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’ 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 . . . 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 . . . |
AuthorWith a degree in Anthropology and an avid interest in history, Tim Christensen has lived in the Sierra Nevada Mountains for many years. He has no cell phone or television, but manages, when not chopping firewood or shoveling snow, to keep himself entertained with a library of several thousand books. Archives
July 2017
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