Highway In The Sky

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.