The Most Popular Man on the Mountain

How does a lumberjack entertain himself when he’s finished working his 
twelve hour a day shift, six days a week? And where does he find that
entertainment? Looking back from today’s perspective of a relatively
sedate 40 hour work week it would seem that after 72 hours of doing
the backbreaking labor of cutting, dragging, and milling tons of Giant
Sequoia trees that the men doing the labor would desire nothing more
than a hearty meal and a long nights’ sleep.  And they did want those
things. But for the most part these men were young, and healthy, and
full of energy, and like most young people they generally considered
themselves indestructible. So they also wanted more than just food and
sleep. They wanted fun.

Very few of the loggers were married, and fewer still actually brought
their wives and children to these mountains with them. Women were in a minority in the camps and were seen mostly in the cook houses
preparing meals and cleaning up after them, or in the camp hospitals
tending injuries. Children were also scarce, although the fact that
the base of the Centennial Tree was turned into the School Stump
testifies to their presence here.  But the vast majority of the men
did not go home to a wife and children after the work day was done.
They went instead to one of the numerous portable houses which lodged them, each measuring about ten by twenty feet, containing a wood stove for heat and narrow beds for eight to twelve men. Playing cards and gambling were popular pastimes, for wherever men go they will typically be willing to wager whatever meager possessions they may
have in the hope of winning someone else’s meager possessions.
Drinking was aggressively discouraged by logging company management and they did their best to keep alcohol out of the camps, for the last thing they wanted was hung-over men swinging axes and bandying about cross-cut saws, or walking along the edge of a flume perched hundreds of feet above a deep crevasse. But yet, mostly still in their twenties, these men were just barely more than boys. And boys, as they say, will be boys. So they not only had the energy for recreation, but
they actively sought it.  And conveniently, someone finally came along
to help provide it. That man was Gustav Anderson.

Gustav Anderson was a Swedish immigrant who came to the Sierra Nevada Mountains as a young man in the early 1880’s and filed a claim on 40 acres of land near what is now Redwood Canyon, and for a while he made a meager living there by cutting roofing shakes from Sequoia wood and selling them down in the valley. But he had bigger dreams, and after a few years he moved several miles to the north and filed another claim on 480 acres of land in a beautiful basin known as Long Meadow. The area contained thousands of Giant Sequoia trees, but Anderson had no pretense of having the wherewithal of starting his own lumber company. Instead he sold off the timber rights to 160 acres of prime Sequoia trees to the Kings River Lumber Company, operated by Austin Moore and Hiram Smith. They were at that time busy logging in the Millwood area and sending their wood by flume down to Sanger, and they anticipated expanding their operations to the Long Meadow area.

But that never happened. They soon fell prey to the financial problems
that plagued all of the lumber companies, and in 1894 that contract of
timber rights passed on to the Sanger Lumber Company. When they soon failed as well the timber rights then went to the Hume - Bennett
Lumber Company.

Gustav Anderson, meanwhile, was biding his time. He built a cabin
along the edge of Long Meadow and then added a few smaller buildings
which he rented to visitors to the mountains, and promoted the
enterprise under the somewhat grandiose name of Anderson’s Resort. The parties visiting the area by wagon were containing an increasing
number of ladies who did not wish to camp out and Anderson’s cabins,
although rustic in the extreme, at least offered the promise of four
walls a roof and a pot-bellied stove. In 1906 Anderson obtained a
legal license to sell alcohol and added a building specifically
devoted to that pass-time. This was probably the first official saloon
in the area, if one does not count the Gamlin brothers pouring drinks
for visitors in the more claustrophobic confines of the Fallen
Monarch.

Word of the saloon quickly spread, and even though there were still no
logging operations in the immediate area of Long Meadow many of the
more determined lumbermen from Converse Basin began to make the trek to the meadow and it wasn’t long before a well-beaten path marked the way to Anderson’s saloon door. A regular trade from trappers, hunters, and visitors also made the saloon Anderson’s most profitable
enterprise to date.

The Hume-Bennett Lumber Company, as had all the other logging
enterprises, frowned upon the purveyance of alcohol to their workmen,
but there was little they could do except threaten to discharge anyone
who showed up for work intoxicated. As the Hume-Bennett Company got ready to exercise their timber rights on that 160 acres of Anderson’s
land, Ira Bennett supposedly suggested to George Hume that it might be
a sound business idea to hurriedly buy up Anderson’s outstanding
mortgage and then foreclose, thereby getting rid of a potential
problem next to their camp and also obtaining the rest of Anderson’s
timber at the same time. But Hume vetoed that idea. It may have been a
sound business premise, but to Hume it wouldn’t have been playing
fair. Hume may have later come to reconsider that decision. Hume-Bennett began to move their logging operations to Long meadow in 1908, beginning construction on a dam and millworks, and at this
point, with the arrival of several crews of workmen, Anderson’s
business really took off. He added several wood frame and tent-topped
cabins to rent along with a general store which stocked a wide variety
of food and merchandise necessary to make mountain life more
comfortable. Anderson also let it be known that he would cash the
logger’s paychecks, and this brought a long line to his saloon every
payday, where much of the logger’s newly acquired cash would quickly
be spent at the bar that same day. This brought Anderson even more
business, which Hume and Bennett tried to stop by issuing their men
pay vouchers which could instead be redeemed only at the lumber
company cashier’s office. Yet this didn’t deter anyone, and the
cashier’s office turned out to be just one more stop on the way to the
bar. In 1909 the dam was finished and in June Long Meadow, virtually
overnight, became Hume Lake, covering about 90 acres of the meadow
with water and leaving Gustav Anderson with a lakefront resort, a boon
provided at no cost to him courtesy of Hume-Bennett.

With a store, saloon, and rental cabins now bringing a steady stream
of income and the lumber company providing a steady stream of
customers, Gustav Anderson now began to look around for other ways to add to his cash flow, and it didn’t take long for him to hit upon an
idea. It was an obvious idea, actually. Very obvious. After all, the lumber company was employing hundreds of young men – single, lonely, energetic young men. And these young men were already beating a steady path to his door. So, what else do young energetic men want? What do they need?

It wasn’t long before Anderson added to the variety of the
entertainments he offered, and a group of young ladies moved into his
cabins to tend to the needs of the lonely young men – with Gustav
Anderson providing assistance as their landlord, of course. Not
surprisingly, this proved to be just as popular as his saloon, perhaps
even more so, and for the next several years the cash seemed to flow
from the Hume-Bennett bank account to that of Gustav Anderson with the hard working young men barely touching it along the way, yet having a wonderful time in his establishments nonetheless. Prostitution was
still quite legal in California at the time, and it didn’t even require the basic minimum of a license as had the saloon. One can’t help but wonder if George Hume regretted his decision of not putting Anderson out of business when he’d had the chance.

Hard times hit both Anderson and the lumber company when the United
States entered the fighting of the First World War. By 1917 most of
the young lumberjacks had enlisted in the army, leaving Anderson with
a trickle of customers. That same year the biggest mill at Hume burned
to the ground, and the work force decreased again. A new worker’s
union was giving Hume-Bennett headaches with the employees that still
remained. In 1918 a storehouse containing company explosives was
broken into, and a bartender at Anderson’s Resort named Younger became the prime suspect. Younger had already been a major headache for Hume-Bennett as he was the ‘chef’ who produced homemade whiskey and applejack for the saloon and assisted in managing the other
entertainments on the menu. Hume had him arrested, but there wasn’t
sufficient evidence to hold him and the theft remained unresolved.

For the next several years a smaller mill continued to operate with
fewer men, but it was soon reduced to the sad lot of building drying
trays to sell to grape farmers to turn their grapes into raisins.
Anderson’s Resort continued to operate, but it, too, at a much smaller
and sadder level of activity until 1929 when the mill ceased to
operate. The resort then barely struggled on under the guidance of
Gustav Anderson’s nephew, Art Larsen. In those years the resort did
not offer quite the variety of entertainment which it had during its
heyday, as a significant portion of that entertainment had since been
deemed to be no longer legal. In 1946 the land and buildings which had
once been Anderson’s resort were purchased by the Hume Lake
Conference, an organization devoted to promoting Christian values and
lifestyle.

Gustav Anderson is now remembered by few, although he was once
probably the most popular man in this area of the Sierra Nevada
Mountains for bringing a regular supply of alcohol and women to the
camps, and providing much needed entertainment and relief from hard
work for the thousands of young men who came here to find jobs. It’s
ironic that, on the very same land where thousands of young men once
drank themselves into a stupor and woke up the next morning with a
stranger, now thousands of young people come instead to learn such
wholesome activities as camping, swimming, praying, and absorbing
Christian values.

Boys will be boys, so they say, but it would seem that the definition
of what is desirable and appropriate entertainment for those boys
changes somewhat with the years.