Mended
The Martin place was at the mouth of the South Fork, where the two rivers come together, and there were always more Martins there than chairs.
Flomena Martin had come from the Azores and settled at the mouth of the South Fork when there was nobody there but the river, and her husband Frank had gone off White's cable in the January of 1899, and she had raised the rest of them herself, ten children, Joe and John and Maggie and Rosa and Belle and Anna and the others, and the ones who had married had brought their wives and husbands home, and the ones who had children brought them, and the house at the forks was full every day of the week and fuller on Sundays. That is where George and Anna Hennings went in November of 1913, with Grace, who was ten months old, and two trunks, and nothing else out of the bowl. The papers said they would move to the Martin ranch near the mouth of the South Fork. I said in my last telling that they went there to be mended. I want to tell you now how that was done, because I watched it, and it took eleven years, and it was the bowl that finished it.
The first thing I saw was the paper in the drawer.
The week after I drove the Hatfields' furniture down the lane, the Times printed the transfers from the courthouse, the way it always did, and one of them was this. "John Douglas to George W Hennings, Nov 14, 1913, $1475, mortgage of Sept 19, 1911, on lot 2, of sec 6, and W 1-2 of SW 1-4 of SW 1-4, sec 5." It was under Releases. Hennings had not paid John Douglas for the bowl in 1908. Not all of it. John had carried his paper, and carried it, and carried it again when it came due in 1911, and the week Hennings sold to the Hatfields the two of them had gone into Blue Lake together, and the Advocate had noticed them, "Messrs. John Douglas and George W. Hennings of the Willow Creek section attended to business matters in Blue Lake this week," and that was the business. Hennings paid off the last of the bowl to the man who had planted it, and John Douglas signed it away for good.
I asked John about it once. I said I hadn't known he was Hennings's banker. He said, "I wasn't his banker. I was his neighbor." Then he said, "A man buying a farm and a mine in the same year needs somebody to be patient with him, and the bank in Arcata wasn't going to be." And then he said the thing I have kept. "He wanted to owe nothing to that place when he left it. I understood that. I took the money."
He wanted to owe nothing to that place. I have thought about that more than about anything else Hennings ever did. A man whose boy died out of that kitchen in the spring, settling every last dollar on it in the fall, so that when he walked out of it the bowl would have no claim on him and he none on it. It did not work, of course. But I understood it, and so did John Douglas, who had buried nobody there and still could not let go of it for five years.
A house to live in or to leave from
George Hennings did not go far. He went to her people, and then a little way up the river from her people, which was as far as he could get.
In March of 1914 the Willow Creek correspondent had him as "Geo. W. Hennings of Martinsville," which was a joke, the Martins being so many at the mouth of the South Fork that the correspondents had taken to calling the place after them, and Hennings being one of them now by marriage. In the spring he bought ten acres from Moses Greenwald up on the flat near McNeill's, close to the Willow Creek bridge, with a right of way and a water right, and the Advocate said he had "commenced preparations for building himself a nice home."
I helped him lay the foundation. We laid it that summer, rock on rock, a rectangle on the flat, and Anna came up from the forks with Grace on her hip and stood and watched us, and did not say anything about where the kitchen ought to go or which way the porch should face, which was not like her. Then it sat. It sat two years, that rectangle of rock in the grass, with the weeds coming up inside it, because Hennings did not know yet whether he was building a house to live in or a house to leave from, and neither did Anna, and you cannot frame a house on a question.
He was not idle. Hennings was never idle in his life. He put up a shingle mill and a little sawmill on Willow Creek near the bridge, with a temporary roof on it by February of 1915, and he sawed lumber and lath and shingles for anybody who wanted them, and when the work was heavy John Martin came over from the forks and got out logs for him. I pulled the other end of that saw more winters than I can count, the way I had pulled one with Will Bussell at the Hemsted mill in eighty-nine, and I want to tell you that a man reveals himself on the far end of a crosscut.
Will Bussell talked. Hennings did not talk. But he hummed, low, the same few bars over and over, all day, and when the log was nearly through and the kerf began to pinch he would stop humming, and that was how you knew to ease off. The first winter he did not hum at all. The saw went back and forth between us and he looked at the kerf and said nothing and hummed nothing, and I thought that was how he was going to be now. Then one day in March, sawing a big fir in the rain, I heard it. Three or four notes, under his breath. I did not say anything. I did not want to scare it off.
I asked Anna about it later. She said it was a hymn his mother sang in Oregon, and that he did not know he hummed it, and that I was not to tell him. Then she said, "He stopped in May. You heard it come back?" I said I had, in March. She said, "So did I," and turned away to the stove, and that was the only time in all those years she ever spoke to me about that spring.
Anna went to Willow Creek on Sundays. Not to church; to the cemetery, where the boy was. She went by herself, and if she wanted company she took Grace, and nobody else went with her, and the Martins knew to leave her be. I saw her there twice, from the road, sitting on the ground with her back against the fence and the baby in the grass, and I went on by both times. Some things you do not walk up to.
The Martins mended her, I think, more than the time did. One evening that first winter I was at the long table at the forks, eating Flomena Martin's beans with eleven or twelve Martins, and Anna had not eaten, and had not said anything, and the old woman got up from the head of the table and went around behind Anna's chair and put both hands on her shoulders and said something to her in Portuguese, low, a few words, and went back and sat down. Anna put her face in her hands for a minute. Then she picked up her fork. I asked Maggie afterward what her mother had said. Maggie said, "She said: the river took my husband and in the morning I got up and milked. You will get up in the morning." Flomena Martin had been a widow fifteen years by then, since the January Frank went off White's cable, with ten children and a cow. She did not say it to be hard. She said it because it was the only thing she knew that was true. Anna got up in the morning. That was the first thing.
Up the river at Clover Flat that spring the new owner, L. B. Campton, a commission merchant from Eureka, "had just had planted on the Clover Flat property 200 Franquette walnut trees and 10 acres of alfalfa as an initiational step of making an ideal ranch on the property." Clover Flat. The mine that had run night and day under Olmstead's electric lights in 1910, where the clay had rolled the gold out over the dump like snowballs, was going to walnuts and alfalfa. I walked up and looked at it. Below the face in the old cut where the giants had stood there were little walnut whips in rows, staked and tied, each one about as high as my knee. It was the same thing that was happening to the whole river, only faster, and with a man from town paying for it. I did not know yet that the same man would come for the bowl.
Two wagonloads
The Hatfields were a Blue Lake family, and Blue Lake did not let them go quietly.
The week before they left, the lodge gave them a party. The Times had it. "A farewell party was given Mrs. Martha Hatfield and family at their home in Blue Lake Tuesday evening. A number of lodge members journeyed down about 8.30 and surprised them. The evening was spent in social conversation and music and at a late hour a nice lunch was served. The Hatfield family intend leaving for Willow Creek where they have purchased the Sugar Bowl property." I was not there, but Ted Griffith told me about it on the road. He said there had been a man with a cornet who knew one song, and played it eleven times, and by the eleventh time everybody was singing it, and the old man, S. D. Hatfield, cried. Ted said he had never seen the old man cry before and it frightened him more than anything that happened on the summit.
S. D. Hatfield was seventy-five. He had crossed the plains in 1852 as a boy, and gone up to Oregon, and come back down to Humboldt in 1875, and farmed at Bald Mountain and at Belmont, and now at the end of it he had bought into one more piece of ground, the farthest from town he had ever lived, in the bottom of a dish on the Trinity. His wife, Martha, was the one who bought it. The deed was in her name and Ted's. The old man rode in the first wagon with his hat pulled down and did not say much, and when we came over the rim and the girls stood up in the wagon bed to look down into the bowl, I saw him take his hat off, and hold it, the same as John Douglas had at the tunnel in ninety-six and at the top of the lane in 1908. I have seen a good many men take their hats off at the top of that lane. I have never seen one put it back on in a hurry.
Ted Griffith was the son-in-law, married to their daughter Anna. He was a big easy man from Iowa who had packed on the Blue Lake to Orleans run for years and knew every mule on the river by name and most of them by temper. In December he and Mrs. Hatfield came out to Blue Lake for their winter supplies, and the Times and the Advocate both put it in the paper, a few days apart, which Ted said was more attention than he had had in twenty years of packing.
I walked the ditch for them that spring the way I had for James and for Hennings. Ted came with me the first time. At the break where the hundred and fifty feet had gone out in 1909 he stood and looked down into the canyon a long time, at the cribbing we had built, and said, "And you do this every year?" I said every year. He said, "A mule at least you can sell."
Two Annas
On the eighteenth of April, 1915, Ted and Anna Griffith had a son, and he was born in the bowl.
"GRIFFITH—At the Sugar Bowl Ranch near Hoopa, Cal., April 18, 1915, to Mr. and Mrs. Ted Griffith, a son." I copied that out of the Advocate and kept it with the other one, the one from January of 1913 about the broad smile. Two babies born at the Sugar Bowl ranch in two years, under two different families, and the paper gave each of them one line.
Anna Hennings read it at the forks. I know because she sent for me, which she had never done, and asked if I would drive her down to the bowl on Sunday in John's buggy. Not George. Me. She said George was sawing, and he was, and that was not the reason, and we both knew it.
We went down the old road over the ridge, over the tunnel, and at the top of the lane where you first see down into it she did not stop. I had thought she would stop. She looked straight ahead between the horse's ears and we went down the lane at a walk, past the orchard and the woodpile, into the yard, and Anna Griffith came out on the porch with the baby in a shawl, and the two of them looked at each other. Two Annas. They had met once in Blue Lake and that was all.
Anna Griffith did not say anything about the kitchen, or the stove, or the room, or what had happened in it. She had been living in that house a year and a half, and she knew; everybody on the river knew. She came down off the porch and put the baby in Anna Hennings's arms, and said, "Would you hold him while I get the coffee," and went inside, and left the two of them there in the yard.
I stayed with the horse. Anna Hennings stood in the yard of her own house, that was not hers any more, and held another woman's boy, a big red loud boy two weeks old, nothing like Carl and nothing like Grace, and he yelled at her, and she jogged him the way you do and looked down at him, and after a while he stopped yelling and looked up at her, and she said something to him I did not hear. Then she went in, with him, into the kitchen, and I heard the two women talking, and later I heard one of them laugh, and I could not have told you which.
On the way home, at the top of the lane, she stopped. She asked me to stop, and I did, and she turned around on the seat and looked back down into the bowl for a long while, the house and the smoke and the orchard and the river white over the falls. Then she said, "All right," to nobody, and we went on. That is what babies are for, I think.
That was a good summer on the river. Hennings went fishing up Willow Creek one Saturday and came back with a fine buck instead, the Times said, and said it was the biggest trout he had ever caught. He helped Antone Koby shear his goats, which is a thing I would not wish on any man. And he got a shipment of citrus nursery stock from below, oranges and lemons, and Anna planted them on the town place around the foundation that was still only a foundation, on the Trinity, where everybody laughed at oranges. They did not die. I took that for a sign, and I think she did.
And down below the Red Porphyry, in the canyon under the Eslick bench, a man named Francis Berry was getting out timbers for a tunnel. "Francis Berry is working on his mining claim in the canyon below the Red Porophey Mine, getting out timbers for tunnel work." He was a lean gray quiet man of about fifty-five, and he worked alone, and I helped him set a set of timbers once when he could not lift the cap by himself, and he thanked me the way a man thanks you when he would rather not have needed to.
In August the China Flat man had him again. "Francis Berry has been making some new trail between the Red Porophey mine and his new tunnel along the river." I helped him a day on that trail too, grubbing manzanita, for coffee and no conversation. At noon we sat on a log and he took a letter out of his shirt and read it and put it back, and I saw the envelope. It was addressed to Charles Walker, Willow Creek. I knew that name. There had been letters for a Charles Walker on the shelf behind the counter at the store for a year, letters nobody I knew had ever asked for, and I had seen Berry pick them up, quietly, when the store was empty, and put them inside his shirt. I did not ask him about it. A man on that river who carries two names generally has a reason for each of them, and it was not my business to make him choose. But I thought about it every time I saw him. Remember him, and remember the trail. It ran down from the old Eslick ground to the river, across a piece of country that was not his.
Full blast
In September of 1915 a forest fire came over the mountain across the river from the Sugar Bowl and burned down toward the water, and the Hatfields stood in their yard at night and watched it, a red line along the ridge with the sparks going up, and the crew from Hoopa put it out before it got to the river. The same week John Douglas came into Willow Creek and told the correspondent that bean threshing was progressing nicely on his ranch near Bussell's. Beans. On the Brett place, across the river, where he had built the iron roof for the schooling. He was threshing beans in September with a fire on the mountain across from the bowl he had sold, and did not mention the fire to the paper. He mentioned the beans. I should have paid more attention to that than I did. Hennings did.
And in December the Times had a line that made me sit down on the bench in front of Brizard's store and read it twice. "Messrs. Hatfield and Sidelinger of Sugar Bowl are rigging up the Douglas Mine below Sugar Bowl in preparation to running full blast this winter."
The Douglas Mine. That was what the names had done in fifteen years. The Sugar Bowl mine, Curl and Fricker and Weltie's, that Humphreys had run and the Douglas brothers had bought, down on the bench below the farm, was the Douglas Mine now, the way a field gets named for whoever plowed it longest. And running full blast. The same two words Jesse had used in March of 1897, the spring the water first came through the tunnel and I stood at the giant from daylight to dark. Eighteen years. One of the Hatfield men and a man named Frank Sidelinger, who had come down to work for the family, went down to the old bench with the old pipe and the old giant and cleaned out the boxes and rigged it all up to run full blast.
And in the boxes they found gold. Not much. When Sidelinger pulled the old riffles out of the lower boxes, the ones nobody had cleaned since the Douglas brothers' last run, there was black sand packed in the corners under them, and in the black sand, when he panned it down, there was gold, fine and a few coarse colors, eleven dollars and some cents by the store scales. Ted brought it up to the house in a baking-powder can and set it on the table in front of the old man, and the old man looked at it a long time and then said, "Well, then." That was all he said. But the whole family went to bed that night believing in the Sugar Bowl, the way everybody does once, and I did not tell them that every owner of that bench had found eleven dollars in somebody else's boxes and called it a sign. I had found some myself, in ninety-eight. It is a sign. It is just not a sign of what you think.
In January the snow came.
Eight feet
It began snowing in the second week of January, 1916, and did not stop. Three feet on Berry's summit, the Times said, the wagon road almost impassable, and then one night: "About eight feet of snow fell in the valley last evening." I do not believe it was eight feet in the valley. I believe it was eight feet somewhere, and the correspondent was standing in it. But it was more snow than I had ever seen on the lower Trinity in twenty-seven years, and it stayed, and the mail stopped, and the stage stopped, and P. P. Hammer up at the South Fork was very ill, and Charles Ranney, the same Ranney who had leased the Sugar Bowl for all it was worth in 1906, was taking care of him in the snow because there was nobody else to.
George Hennings was below, in Eureka, on business, with Anna's sister Maggie Martin, who had gone down with him, and when they started home the Berry road was shut, so they went around by Hoopa, on horseback, and got as far as the Bair ranch on Redwood Creek, and could go no farther. The Bair Hotel column had them: "G. W. Hennings and Miss Maggie Martin of the Willow Creek section were at the Bair Hotel awaiting the opening of the Hoopa trail in order to proceed on their journey home." They waited there most of a week, playing cards, Maggie told me later, with a drummer from San Francisco who cheated and a forest guard who did not, and Hennings lost a dollar and a half to the drummer and won it all back from the forest guard and then gave it to the forest guard, because he said it was not fair.
And the same week, coming the other way, out of the snow, from the Sugar Bowl over the trail to Bair's and on to Blue Lake: "Ted Griffith with Mrs. S. D. Hatfield of the Sugar Bowl Ranch, near Hoopa . . . passed through here today en route to Blue Lake. Mrs. Hatfield and Ted Griffith had two head of cattle which they brought over yesterday from their ranch."
Two head of cattle. Through the snow, over the trail, to Blue Lake. That was the Hatfields leaving. The full blast had not come, and the snow had, and they were taking out what they could drive. I did not see them go. I was snowed in at Willow Creek with everybody else. I have always been sorry I did not see them go. I had driven them in. Somebody should have walked them out.
Maggie said that Hennings, at the Bair Hotel, sat up the night after Ted and Mrs. Hatfield came through with their two cows, and did not play cards, and in the morning he said to her, "They're done down there." And she said, "Then what?" And he did not answer. But when the trail opened he did not go home to the forks first. He went to the bowl, alone, on the horse, through the snow, and looked at it, and then went home and talked to Anna, and Maggie said they talked in the kitchen with the door shut until after midnight, which no Martin had ever been able to do in that house.
The old man, S. D. Hatfield, died in Blue Lake in August of that year, of paralysis, at seventy-eight. "He made this northern section his home, following farming and ranching, having resided in the Bald Mountain section, then at Belmont, also at Sugar Bowl near Hoopa and lately in Blue Lake." Also at Sugar Bowl. That is how the obituaries put it. The bowl was always also, for everybody except the ones who stayed.
Back down the lane
In February of 1916, when the snow went off, George Hennings took his family back down the lane to the Sugar Bowl.
The Advocate's correspondent said Miss Margaret Martin was visiting her sister, Mrs. George Hennings, "who has recently moved to 'Sugar Bowl,'" with the name in quotation marks, as if it were a strange place to move to, which I suppose it was. Two years and more after they left it. Nearly three years after the boy.
I drove the wagon. We went out of Willow Creek, and at the cemetery Anna said, "Stop here, please," and I stopped, and she got down and went in through the gate by herself and stood a while, and George sat on the seat beside me with Grace on his knee and did not look, and I did not either. When she came back she was not crying. She climbed up and took Grace from him and said, "He knows where we'll be." Then we went on over the ridge.
I do not know what made them go back, past what Maggie told me about the kitchen and the shut door. Anna never said and I never asked. But when we came to the top of the lane, where you first see down into it, Anna stopped me again, and I stopped, and she looked down into the bowl for a long while. Then she said, "Well, the beans won't plant themselves," and got down and walked the rest of the way, carrying Grace, who was three and wanted to walk and was not allowed. I have always thought that was the bravest thing I ever heard a woman say.
That was a good year in the bowl. Hennings sawed lumber at the mill in town all winter and went down to the bowl on the weekends, and in the summer he farmed it. The Martins came down in a stream, Joe and his wife and boy, Maggie, Rosa, John with the team, and the long table on the veranda had people at it again every Sunday, and Anna fed them the way Mrs. Douglas had, and the way Mrs. Hatfield had, which is to say all the women who ever ran that kitchen were the same woman in the end, and you did not leave until she was satisfied. I sat at the end of the table. I watched Anna. She laughed at Joe Martin that summer, a real laugh, the first I had heard from her since the boy, and George looked up from the other end of the table when he heard it and then looked down at his plate again quick, the way a man does when he has been given something and does not want anybody to see him take it.
In September the Trinity went lower than anybody had ever seen it. The Times correspondent said the water was the clearest it had been for many years, "and some old settlers say it is the clearest it has ever been since mining has been carried on in this region. The river is also eight inches lower now than any previous low water mark for several years." The clearest since mining. That was the year the river told us the mines were done. Thirty years of giants running brown water into it from every bench between New River and Hoopa, and in 1916 you could see the bottom of the Trinity at the Sugar Bowl bar, every stone, the gravel the Douglas brothers never could work lying there clean and gray and blue under eight inches less water than ever.
I went down and looked at it with Hennings. We stood at the edge of the bar a long time. He did not say anything about gold. He said, "You could irrigate a hundred acres out of that and never miss it." Then he said, "John's got beans on the Brett place." I said I knew. He said, "Eighteen acres of bottom here. Nobody's ever put the whole of it in one thing." And then he went and loaded two wagonloads of watermelons and hauled them up to the road camp, and the paper said so: "George Hennings hauled two loads of watermelons to the road camp last week." Mrs. Douglas's melons. Twenty-three years after she carried the first buckets up from the eddy.
It was a great year for bears, that fall. The acorns were falling fast, the correspondent said, "and the deer, bear and hogs are living high," and Bob Douglas, who had killed his first one at fourteen, said he could not go out to the woodpile without stepping on one.
In November the Henningses moved up to the town place to put a house on the foundation at last, "before returning to Sugar Bowl," the paper said. A house to live in, it turned out, and a farm to come back to. They were going to live in both places: the town house for the school and the winter and the mill, the bowl for the farm and the summer. John Douglas had tried it with the iron roof. It is the oldest answer on the river. Anna's oranges were knee high around the porch.
Money in beans
In 1917 the Sugar Bowl paid.
Not in gold. In beans. White beans, on the bottom land along the river, the same flat that had been under four feet of sand in 1890 and under John Douglas's corn after that and Mrs. Douglas's melons and James's bruises. Hennings put the whole eighteen acres of it in beans, all of it in one thing, the way he had said on the bar, and the ditch carried the forty-three inches down to it all summer and I walked the ditch twice a week to keep it carrying.
I want to tell you about the threshing, because nobody threshes beans on the Trinity now and somebody should know. You pull the vines when the pods are dry and rattle, and you pile them on a canvas on the hard ground by the barn, and you beat them, with flails if you have flails and with forks and boards if you do not, and the pods split and the beans run out under the vines like water, and then you lift off the straw and wait for a wind and pour the beans from one pan to another from as high as you can reach, and the wind takes the chaff and leaves the beans. We did it for three weeks in October, Hennings and John Martin and Joe and I, and Anna and Maggie sewed the sacks, and Grace, who was four, was given her own small pan and poured beans from it into the wind with tremendous seriousness, and the chaff blew all over her and stuck in her hair, and she was the happiest person on the river.
The Times correspondent went down in October and found the largest bean field in the whole lower Trinity, and in December the Advocate had the figures from Hennings himself. "The gentleman reports that this year he had good luck in raising beans on his place, getting about 400 sacks of white beans, for which he finds a ready market. With beans selling at 12c per pound, Mr. Hennings figures that this year he will clear in the neighborhood of $4,000."
Four thousand dollars. I did the arithmetic the way I had watched so many men do it on that river. Four thousand dollars clear, in one season, off eighteen acres of bottom land, with forty-three inches of water out of the ditch. I do not believe the Sugar Bowl mine ever cleared four thousand dollars in a season in its life, not in ninety-seven under Curl, not under Humphreys, not under the Douglas brothers with the No. 2 giant, not under Ranney and Clark for all it was worth. The gravel never paid like that. The beans paid like that the first year Hennings really tried.
And then the Advocate wrote the sentence that I have always thought should go on the gate of the Sugar Bowl, if it ever has a gate. "Mr. Hennings is one of the best farmers in that lower Trinity section, and he will make money where others on the same land would starve."
Where others on the same land would starve. Curl and Fricker and Weltie. Humphreys. The Douglas brothers. Ranney and Clark. The Hatfields. Everybody who had come into that bowl for the gravel had, in the paper's sense, starved. Hennings came in for the gravel too, in 1908, with a new giant tied on behind his wagon. And then he stood on the break in 1909 and said it is a farm, and he was the one who made money. It took him nine years and a dead boy and two moves to do it. But it was the bowl that paid him, not the river.
It was a war year, and beans were dear because the army was eating them. I knew that. Everybody knew that. That December he sold the machinery from his little sawmill in town to O. J. Westerburg of the South Fork, who was putting up a mill of his own, and I lost my winter's work on the far end of his crosscut, and I did not mind. A man who can make four thousand dollars in beans should not be sawing lath. The last day at the mill, while we were taking down the belts, he hummed the whole time. He had not stopped since the spring.
The Red Cross dance
The war came up the river first as a collection plate.
In July of 1917 the Advocate reported that Antone Koby of the Willow Creek section had subscribed six dollars to the Red Cross Fund. Six dollars. Antone Koby kept goats on a hillside above the river and had helped Hennings and me shear them, or we had helped him, and I do not believe he had ever given six dollars to anything in his life that did not eat. I asked him why. He said his sister's boy was in the army in the East and he wanted somebody to be kind to him if he got hurt, and the Red Cross was the only somebody he could send money to.
By Christmas A. W. Symmes, the commissioner at Willow Creek, was going to every house on the river with a membership book for the Red Cross. He came to the bowl. He came to my cabin. A dollar a year. Everybody joined. His own boy Earle was on his way over by then, drafted in October and in England by Christmas Eve, and Symmes did not mention it at any door I heard of, and everybody knew it, and nobody turned him down. The same week James Duskey made his final proof on his homestead near town before Commissioner Symmes, and the correspondent noted that Mr. Duskey had lived on the place some twenty-five years, and that only now had it become his. Twenty-five years on a piece of ground before the government would agree that it was his. I went down to the store and shook Duskey's hand, and Symmes, who had just signed his papers, signed him up for the Red Cross while he was standing there, and Duskey said it was the best day of his life and the most expensive.
And in February, on a Saturday night, there was the Red Cross benefit at Donahue's on the South Fork. "Everyone in and around Willow Creek who could get conveyance or who was able to go, attended the Red Cross benefit at Donahue's Saturday night, and all report the best time ever." Everyone who could get conveyance. Wagons and buggies and saddle horses and two Fords, the first two I ever saw at a dance on the river, and people who walked, and the road up the river from Willow Creek full of lanterns after dark like a procession.
I went. I was forty-eight. I rode up in the back of John Martin's wagon with Grace asleep on the hay, and Anna and Joe Martin's wife on the seat, and George Hennings walking alongside because he said a man who owned a tractor did not need to be carried. Donahue's was the summer resort at the South Fork, a big house with a long room, and they had taken the furniture out of it and hung flags on the walls, the first flags I had seen at a dance since the soldiers' ball at Fort Gaston in ninety-one, and the room was so full you could not have fallen down if you had tried.
They danced the old dances and some new ones I did not know. Somebody had a phonograph, and somebody else had a fiddle, and the fiddle won. There was a raffle and an auction. A cake that Mrs. Donahue had made went for eleven dollars. Joe Martin bid four dollars on a pair of knitted socks for the soldiers, and then Hennings bid five, and they went back and forth over those socks until the whole room was shouting, and Hennings got them for nine dollars and gave them back to be sold again, and Joe bought them the second time for six. Earle Symmes was in France. Leslie Swanson was in France. Every boy on the river who was of an age was gone or going, and the room was old men and women and girls and children, and they danced anyway, and laughed anyway, and gave their money, and at two in the morning everybody stood up and sang, and I stood against the wall where I always stood, and sang too.
Nobody asked me to dance until late. Then Anna Hennings came over and took my arm and said, "Mr. Thursby, you have been holding up that wall since 1890. Let it fall down for one tune." So I danced with her. It was a waltz. She danced the way her mother had danced at the Willow Creek hotel in 1907, light and certain, and I thought about her father on the cable at Springville and her boy in the cemetery at Willow Creek and the four thousand dollars in beans, and I did not say any of it, and neither did she. When the tune was done she said, "There. The wall is still standing." And it was.
Down at Hoopa that same month the Busy Bee Club gave a dance too. "A large crowd was in attendance and a good time was had by all. Quite a nice sum of money was taken in, which goes to the support of poor children in Hoopa valley." I thought it was the right way round: the Willow Creek people danced for the soldiers in France, and the Hoopa people danced for their own children at home, and both were right, and the river had room for both.
Sugar
The war came up the river in letters.
In March of 1918 the Willow Creek correspondent had a letter from Earle Symmes, dated "Somewhere in France, Jan. 24," which said that he and Leslie Swanson had just been transferred to the Regulars, Division 1, and "would be in the trenches within a day or two. He said all was well and they were feeling fine." Earle Symmes was a boy I had watched grow up in the Symmes house by the store. The correspondent printed it in among the rest, the Red Cross benefit at Donahue's, "and all report the best time ever," and a nine-pound boy born to the Carpenters, and Earle Symmes in the trenches. That was how the war was, on the river. You read it in among the babies.
They took the sugar. In November the government's General Order 8 was printed in every paper in the county. "No public eating-place shall use or permit the use of the sugar bowl on the table or lunch counter. Nor shall any public eating-place serve sugar or permit it to be served unless the guest so requests, and in no event shall the amount served to any one person at any one meal exceed one teaspoonful or its equivalent." No sugar bowl on the table. At the Willow Creek hotel they took them off the tables and put them on a shelf behind the counter, and hung a card on the shelf that said SUGAR BOWL, CLOSED FOR THE DURATION, and everybody who came in from the river laughed at it, and some of them did not. Anna did not. Sugar-coated, the Hoopa man had written in 1913. She took the card down off the shelf herself, one day when she was in the store, and turned it to the wall, and nobody said anything, and nobody turned it back.
That winter, before the order, Hennings had gone down to San Francisco and bought a tractor. "A New Tractor for Willow Creek," the Advocate said. "Geo. W. Hennings, the owner of the Sugar Bowl ranch . . . was driving a small 10-horse power tractor of the Avery make, which he will use on his ranch for plowing and harrowing purposes. . . . The tractor weighs 2,300 pounds and burns distillate and it travels at the rate of only three miles an hour. It is the first tractor of its kind in Humboldt county and Mr. Hennings has secured the agency for it. It costs in the neighborhood of $650." He bought an electric lighting plant in the city at the same time, for the house in the bowl. And he drove the tractor out of Blue Lake on a Saturday at three miles an hour, up the Berry road, and got as far as Bald Mountain, and the snow came down, and he had to leave it there in the snow by the side of the road, and walk.
The whole river laughed at that, and the whole river waited to see what would happen to the tractor. "Every rancher here is on his toes to see how this tractor of Mr. Henning's behaves on the job," the correspondent wrote, "as many of them have expressed their opinion as preferring a tractor to a Ford if the tractor will do the work that it is claimed to do." A tractor or a Ford. Nobody on the river had either, and they were already choosing. John Martin came out with his four-horse team over two feet of soft snow on Berry's summit, the Advocate said, to bring home his wife and Mrs. Hennings and the other women who had wintered in Eureka, and six children, and he brought them all back over the summit in the snow behind four horses, and when they passed Bald Mountain the children all stood up in the wagon and waved at the tractor, sitting there in the drift with snow on its seat.
In March Hennings and John Martin went back for it with the four-horse team, and dragged it out of the snow, and got it home. In April it plowed. "George Henning has finished plowing his thirty-acre field across the river and taken his tractor home to Sugar Bowl where he has considerable work et in that line to do." I watched it plow the bottom field in the bowl. It went three miles an hour and sounded like the end of the world, and the hogs ran up into the oaks, and the deer did not come into the corn for a week. The first tractor in Humboldt County, the paper said, in the bottom of the Sugar Bowl, plowing the flat where John Douglas had dug sand away from twelve peach trees with a shovel.
The electric plant went in that summer. The bowl had lights. I stood on the rim one night and looked down into it, a little cluster of yellow in the bottom of the black dish, and thought about Olmstead's lamps at Clover Flat in 1910, and how that light had been for gold and gone out, and this light was for a family to read by. Grace was five and learning her letters at that table, under that light, from her mother, because there was no school in the bowl and never would be.
Somewhere in France
The letter in March said they would be in the trenches within a day or two, and that all was well.
On Wednesday the twenty-ninth of May the notice came to the Symmes house by the store, from Washington, and the Advocate printed it that Saturday. "It becomes our sad duty this week to chronicle the untimely death of Earle Symmes of Willow Creek, which occurred on the battlefield 'somewhere' in France on May 28, from wounds received in action. His heart-broken parents, Mr. and Mrs. A. W. Symmes, received the official notice of his death from Washington, D. C., last Wednesday, May 29. It says: 'Private Earle Symmes died on May 28 from wounds received in action.' No other particulars were given." He was twenty-three. He had been born in Eureka and grown up at Willow Creek, and he had gone to Camp Lewis in October and to England for Christmas and to France after, and he had written home once, the paper said, that "he was with strangers," there being nobody in his company from the Pacific coast.
I went to the store that Saturday and did not buy anything. Nobody did. Men came in and stood around the stove and looked at the floor and went out again. The flag on the Symmes porch hung down in the rain. Symmes did not come out, and nobody knocked. On that river you do not knock on that kind of door the first day. You leave things on the porch. By evening there were three pies and a ham and a sack of flour and a jar of honey and somebody's good shawl folded on the step.
Anna Hennings did not leave anything on the porch. She walked up the steps and knocked, the first day, and Mrs. Symmes opened the door, and Anna went in, and the door shut, and she was in there until dark. When she came out she came down the steps slowly and stood a minute at the bottom with her hand on the rail. She saw me across the road and came over. She said, "Nobody should sit by herself the first day. Nobody sat by me. I wouldn't let them." I said I knew. She said, "Well. I know now that I should have." And she went home.
In June the captain's letter came, and the Symmeses let the Advocate print it, because, Symmes said, the river had a right to know how the boy died. It was written by a Captain McClure, from Eugene, Oregon, who commanded the company. "He was wounded severely by artillery fire at 6:30 a. m., May 18th, wounds being in right arm and both legs. He was evacuated to the hospital as soon as possible and died at 1:05 p. m. May 18th." The government said the twenty-eighth, and the captain said the eighteenth. I believe the captain. He was there. "In the short time your son was in my Company I found all the points of a good soldier in him. He was one of the best loved men in the Company and his loss is felt by all. While waiting for the ambulance your son suffered considerably but fought gamely. I held his hand till the ambulance left."
I held his hand till the ambulance left.
And then: "Not till yesterday did I know he was from California." A stranger. A captain from Oregon, in a field in France, who did not know where the boy was from, knelt down and held his hand. I have read a great many things in newspapers in my life and I have kept a great many of them, until the folds wore through. That one I did not need to keep. I could say it to you now with my eyes shut. Earle wrote home that he was with strangers. He was. And one of them held his hand.
He was buried at a place called Bonvillers, in France, grave number seventy-two. His mother kept the letter in her Bible, Anna told me, and the captain's postscript too, which said he would send Earle's things home as soon as they got out of the line.
Campbell Creek
I have to tell about June of 1918, and it is short.
On a Sunday evening a party of children from the Hoopa school went bathing in the Trinity near the mouth of Campbell Creek. The Times had it. "The child, Jimmie Griffin, was a lad about ten years of age. The body had not been recovered late Sunday evening although a large party of searchers were grappling for it."
The mouth of Campbell Creek. The creek the Sugar Bowl ditch came out of, a mile or so up, the creek every family in the bowl had lived on for twenty-two years. It runs into the Trinity at Hoopa, inside the reservation, a good swimming place in June when the creek is warm and the river is not, and the children had always swum there. Jimmie Griffin was a Hoopa school boy. The searchers were his people and the school's people and men from the agency, and they grappled for him in the river for days.
That was the week after the notice came to the Symmes house. Hennings heard it on the Monday morning, and he put down what he was doing and saddled the horse, and I went with him. Anna watched us go from the porch with Grace by the hand and did not say anything. She did not have to. It was the school at Hoopa he had ridden to in 1913, five years before, with Carl.
We did not help much. We stood on the bank and did what we were told, which was mostly to hold the ropes, and the Hupa men in the canoes worked the eddies they knew, and did not need us, and were kind about it. Hennings held his rope all day. He did not talk. Late in the afternoon a man came along the bank, an older Hoopa man, the boy's grandfather or uncle, I never knew, and stopped by Hennings and looked at him, and Hennings looked back, and the man nodded, once, as if he knew who Hennings was, and maybe he did. Everybody at Hoopa remembered the man on the horse. Then he went on down the bank.
I knew the water at the mouth of that creek. I had walked to the head of it every spring for twenty years. I had never once thought of it as anything but our water, the bowl's water, six hundred inches on paper and forty-three in the ditch. It was not ours. It was a creek that came down out of the mountains and went into the river at Hoopa where children swam, and it had been that before Curl ever filed on it, and it would be that after. They found him on the Saturday. The Times man at Willow Creek wrote it at the bottom of his column, after the beef deliveries and the new bridge and the visitors, the way the river always told its worst news, in among the rest: "Word was received here this morning that the body of little Jimmie Griffin who was accidentally drowned a week ago at Hoopa had been recovered Saturday morning." Recovered. They brought him home. I have thought of Jimmie Griffin every spring since, at the intake, when I turn the water in.
No such visitor
In August Clare Shore came to Willow Creek to enlist.
He was eighteen, and his father had to give consent before a justice, and the justice at Willow Creek was A. W. Symmes. "The enlistment of Mr. Shore's 18-year-old son Clare in the artillery, made it necessary for him to appear before Justice Symmes to give his consent." That was all the paper said. I was in the store when they went across. Two months after the captain's letter. I watched the Shores go up the steps of the house with the flag, the father and the tall boy, and the door open, and I thought, he will not do it, nobody could ask that man to do it. They were inside about a quarter of an hour. When they came out the boy had his papers, and Symmes came out on the porch behind them and shook the boy's hand, and held it a while, and said something to him I could not hear, and the boy nodded. Then Symmes went back in and shut the door. I do not know what he said. I know what I would have wanted to say, and I know I could not have said it, and I know that he did.
In September the Swansons in Blue Lake had a letter from their boy Leslie, the one who had gone over with Earle. "Mr. and Mrs. Peter Swanson of Blue Lake received a letter recently from their son, Leslie F. Swanson, announcing that he was fast recovering from a flesh wound he received while in the service in France." The paper said he had been "with the same company as the late Earl Symmes." The same company. One boy came home with a flesh wound and one boy was in grave seventy-two, and there was no reason for it that anybody on the river could see, and nobody tried to find one out loud.
Then in the fall the influenza came up the coast, and the papers were full of it, Eureka and Arcata and Blue Lake, masks and closed schools and lists of the sick and then lists of the dead, and the river waited for it. The Burnt Ranch correspondent wrote at the start of November, "As yet we have not had a single case of influenza. Every one in our hills understands what to do to guard against the disease and how to treat it. We have no expectations of such a visitor in our midst." No expectations of such a visitor. I read that and was afraid for her, because the river does not like being told what it expects. But she was right. Kate and Blanche Irving, Hawkins Bar girls training to be nurses in Eureka, caught it there, and got well, and came home over the mountain for a visit, and went back down on the mail stage to their nursing. And in December the same column could still say "A number of cases of colds are passing around but no 'flu' cases." The whole world was burying people that winter, and the lower Trinity buried nobody from it that I know of. I do not know why. Anna said it was the distance. Flomena Martin said it was God. I thought it was both, and that it was owed to us that year, and I knew better than to say so.
The war ended in November. It came up the river on the stage like everything else, a day late, and the Willow Creek people rang the school bell, and somebody fired off a shotgun, and that was the celebration. Symmes rang the bell himself.
In March Peter Swanson had a card from Leslie "stating that he will soon leave France on his return home." And in April, at the school election at Willow Creek, the paper said, "Mrs. A. W. Symmes being elected to take the place of D. F. Young, retiring." Earle's mother on the school board. She was going to look after other people's children now, since her own was in France. I went to the school the first day she sat with the trustees, on a pretext, to fix a window that did not need fixing. She was at the teacher's desk going through the attendance with her spectacles on, and a little Henderson boy came up and asked her something, and she bent down to him and answered, and put her hand on his head. I fixed the window. I did not look at her again. Some things you do not walk up to.
Five bullets
In January of 1920 Francis Berry shot Rudolph Meitz five times in the chest, and Meitz walked back to his cabin.
Meitz was one of the two men who had found the Bonnieville ledge in 1912, the eight hundred and forty dollars a ton, the mother lode of the Willow Creek district. He had stayed up there. Halliday came and went, married, came back, and went, but Meitz stayed, year after year, filing his proof of labor every January, four hundred dollars, five hundred dollars, on the Three H placer near Willow Creek, and he had built himself a dam on his ground for water. And Francis Berry, who had been tunneling under the Eslick bench in 1915, the lean gray man who would rather not have needed help with his timbers, was working on his trail below Meitz's dam, the same trail I had grubbed manzanita on for coffee in 1915, down from the old Eslick ground to his tunnel by the river, and the water from the dam had washed the trail out.
The Times printed Berry's side, because Berry was the one they had. "According to Berry he was repairing a trail Saturday which had been washed away by water from a dam owned and controlled by Meitz when Meitz came by. Berry called the need of repair to the attention of Meitz and Meitz at once began to use abusive language toward him. One thing led to another and finally Meitz made for Berry with a hatchet, according to Berry's story. He pulled his revolver and fired the five shots before he stopped Meitz who then walked back to his cabin." Berry walked to Hoopa to give himself up. He was sitting quietly when the sheriff came. "Berry is 60 years old and Meitz is said to be over 50." There had been another man there who saw it, the paper said, and nobody knew his name, and he had left those parts.
Meitz lived. Five bullets in his chest and he walked to his cabin and lived, and a week later the Hoopa correspondent said he was "doing nicely at the Government Hospital." The Advocate's first story had given Berry another name. "Francis S. Berry, also known as Charles Walker," it said. Five years of envelopes on the shelf behind the counter, and there it was in print, the two names on the same line, and I felt as if I had been caught reading a man's mail. I had not asked him in 1915. I did not ask him in 1920 either.
In May they had Berry up before Justice Fraser in Eureka for his examination, and the Advocate put it in a headline. "SHOOTING IN SELF-DEFENSE WINS OUT." The bullets were four by then, not five, "one through the shoulder, two through the chest near the heart and the other through his leg," and Meitz on the stand "seemed none the worse for his experience, at least not in appearance." In January the Advocate had said there were no witnesses, that Meitz's partner, Lucock, was in the cabin "not paying any attention to the shots." By May Lucock had seen the whole thing, and he was Berry's best witness, and he said he "endeavored to avoid witnessing the affray which he said he knew was coming." The charge was dismissed. In May it was not the dam at all, the paper said. It was a government trail across the Meitz place, the only way in and out of Berry's land, and Meitz had fenced it, and Berry had taken the fence down. And then the last sentence, which I have always liked better than anything else the Advocate ever printed about a shooting: "The two are now apparently as friendly as ever and propose to live as good neighbors should do."
As friendly as ever. On that river, I suppose, it was true.
I have told this because it was water, whatever the paper said in May. It is always water. A dam, a trail, and two old men past fifty who had both spent their lives going at the mountain from a different direction for gold that was there, every assayer said so, and could not get it out. Meitz found the mother lode and could not mine it. Berry went under the Eslick bench and came out with nothing. And on a Saturday in January the water from one man's dam washed out the other man's trail, and they met in the middle of it with a hatchet and a revolver. The Trinity has never needed gold to make men fight. It has only needed water to run the wrong way. In the bowl that same winter the water ran the right way, down the ditch to the beans, and nobody shot anybody, and I thought that was worth saying too.
Two hundred hogs
In 1920 John Douglas sold the Brett place across the river to James Patterson of Hawkins Bar, two hundred and eighty acres, "nearly all of which is cleared and ready for cultivation," with twenty-two head of cattle and two horses and the hay and all the farming implements, for about ten thousand dollars, and "one of the best ranches in the Willow Creek section," the Journal said. The iron-roofed house went with it. It would not burn, and it has not. Bob was grown and gone to his own work, and Alice kept house for her father and mother, and John Douglas was seventy-two and tired, and he had grown corn and peaches and melons and beans and two children with their letters on two farms on two sides of the Trinity, and that was enough. He told me it was enough. He did not say it the way a man says a thing he has to talk himself into.
That fall George Hennings and Robert Benson and Bemay Ziegler drove two hundred head of hogs from the Trinity river to Arcata. "About 200 head of hogs from the Trinity River were driven to Arcata Saturday," the Advocate said, in one line. Two hundred hogs, over Berry's summit, on foot, the old way, fifty miles. I went. I want to tell you what that is like, because nobody will drive hogs over a mountain again and somebody should know.
A hog does not want to go anywhere. A hog has decided where it is going to be, and that is where it is, and two hundred hogs have decided two hundred different things. You drive them with a sack of corn and a long pole and a great deal of patience and some language that I will not repeat, and the first day you make eight miles and the second day you make ten, and they lie down in every creek, and they eat every acorn on the road, and on the summit they all decide at once to go back down the way they came, and you stand in the road with your arms out like a fool and two hundred hogs go around you on both sides.
Hennings laughed. He stood in the road on the top of Berry's summit with two hundred hogs going around him on both sides and his hat gone and his pole broken, and he laughed until he had to sit down on a stump, and Robert Benson and Bemay Ziegler and I stood there and watched him, and nobody went after the hogs. I had not heard him laugh like that since Carl. Not once. Seven years. Robert Benson said Hennings was the only man he had ever seen who could drive hogs and be happy, and Hennings wiped his eyes and said that was because he was thinking of what they would sell for. It was not why. We all knew it was not why.
They were Sugar Bowl hogs, most of them, fattened on the acorns in the bowl the way T. G. Campbell's twenty-five hogs at a dollar and two cents had been fattened in 1884, and John Douglas's after him. That was the oldest crop the bowl had. Before the ditch, before the gravel, before any of us, the oaks dropped acorns on the bottom of that dish every fall, and something fattened on them. X saw it in 1896. "Tall oaks from spreading branches help fatten his hogs with their autumnal showers of acorns." We drove the last of that crop over the summit in 1920 with a sack of corn and a pole, and one of us laughing.
Grace
The next spring George Hennings deeded lot two of section six, the bottom of the bowl, the house and the bar, to Anna. "George W Hennings to Anna Hennings March 12 1921 IRS $1 Lot 2 of Sec 6 7 N 5 E." For a dollar.
He did not tell anybody why. I asked Anna, the only time I ever asked her anything about money. She said, "He came in from the field and put the paper on the table and said, 'It's yours. You paid for it.'" She said she asked him what he meant, and he said she knew what he meant, and went back out. She did know. So did I. She had paid for it in the spring of 1913, on the road to Hoopa, five miles, on foot, with the boy in her arms, and nothing George could do would ever make that even. But he could put her name on it. That was what a dollar could do.
Grace was nine in 1922, and the Trinity Journal put her in the paper for the first time on her own account. Some fair or show over on the Trinity side had given prizes for the best baby clothes, and the Journal listed them: "Best baby clothes—Mrs. H. J. Young, 1st; Violet Tinsley, 2nd; Grace Hennings, 3rd." Third, for the best baby clothes, against grown women. She showed me the ribbon. She said the baby clothes were for her doll. I said it was a fine ribbon, and it was. I said she was a fine hand with a needle. She said her mother had taught her, at the table, under the electric light, and that her mother had said the stitches had to be small enough that a baby would never feel them. I have thought about that since.
The school was the trouble, as it was always the trouble in the bowl. Grace was old enough for the upper grades and there was no school in the bowl and the Willow Creek school was eight miles, and the town place was not a place to winter with the farm below. In February of 1924 the Salyer correspondent had it. "Mrs. George Hennings and children, of Sugar Bowl, spent Sunday with his sister, Mrs. Wilmer Dartt. Grace Hennings will remain with Mrs. Dartt and attend school here." With her sister, Mrs. Wilmer Dartt, he meant. Rose Martin, who had married Wilmer Dartt and lived at Salyer. So Grace went to her aunt's to get her letters, eleven years old, up the river, the way the Douglas children had gone across it in 1903.
I drove Anna home from Salyer that Sunday, after they left Grace at the Dartts' with her trunk. It was cold and the river was high and brown. Anna did not say anything for six miles. Then she said, "I won't do this for six years, Mr. Thursby." I said no. She said, "One child went out of that house and didn't come back. I'm not sending another one out of it, not even to Rose." I did not say anything to that. There was nothing to say. She said, "George will sell. He's known since the snow. He was waiting for me." And she looked out at the river and said, "It's a good farm. It's the best farm on the river. Somebody else can have it now."
It is the same story every time in that bowl. The farm keeps the family and the school takes the children, and the mother decides.
In April Anna went up to keep house for her brother Joe at the South Fork, whose wife was ill, and the Advocate said she came from Hoopa by stage, which tells you the stage was running to Hoopa by then and the bowl was getting its mail from that side. The road was coming. You could feel it.
The road
The county had been talking about a road from Willow Creek to Hoopa along the river since before I came over the summit. The old road went up over the ridge, steep and rough, the one the ditch tunnel ran under, and every winter it slid and every summer somebody filled it, and everybody said the road ought to go along the river, and nobody built it. In 1923 Supervisor Anderson had a piece surveyed around the bluff at the Gallop place below town, and the Advocate said that later on "the balance of the county road to Hoopa, about ten miles, will be built along the river, via Sugar Bowl ranch, and thus avoid the steep climb."
Via Sugar Bowl ranch. Through the bowl. Along the river, across the bottom field, past the house, along the edge of the bar. In May of 1924 a surveyor named Frank Herrick ran lines in sections five and six and seven and eight for George Hennings. I carried the chain for him one day, for a dollar and dinner. He was a young man with a transit and good boots who had never been in the bowl, and when we came down the lane he stopped at the top and looked down, the way they all did, and said, "Who would put a road through that?" And I said, "The county," and he laughed, and we went down and put the stakes in. I drove a stake into Mrs. Douglas's melon patch. It went in easy. It was good ground. It was the bean field now.
In July Hennings sold. "A deal has just been consummated whereby George W. Hennings disposed of his ranch on the Trinity River, near the boundary line of the Hoopa Valley Indian reservation, to L. B. Campton, the well-known commission merchant of Eureka. The place is known as the Sugar Bowl Ranch, comprising 160 acres, and is an ideal spot for raising good fruits of all kinds. According to the revenue stamps on the document filed for record the consideration is about $10,000.00. The new road from Willow Creek to Hoopa will pass right through the ranch."
An ideal spot for raising good fruits of all kinds. Not some good mining ground. Not a low gravel bar where mining can be successfully prosecuted every winter. Fruits. The Advocate had stopped saying it. For twenty-eight years every time the bowl changed hands the paper had found a way to mention the gold, and in 1924 it did not. It said fruit, and it said the road. Campton was the Clover Flat man, the walnut man. I had watched him do this to one mine already.
Campton deeded the county its right of way for two hundred and fifty dollars, "on Hoopa-Willow Creek road at Sugar Bowl ranch," and that fall the county crew came in, and I was on it. I was fifty-four years old and I had worked on the first road over Berry's summit at nineteen, and now I was working on the last one, the one that would finally go along the river, through the bowl. We came down along the bench above the river with the grader and the teams, and we went right across the bottom field, through the old melon patch where my stake had been, and along the edge of the low bar, the eighty acres of gray and blue gravel that every owner of that bowl had come around to sooner or later and none of them could work. The road went right over the edge of it. We put the gravel from the bar into the road. I thought about that as I shoveled. It was the first gold-bearing gravel from the Sugar Bowl bar that ever left the bowl, and it left in a wagon to be a road.
The Henningses went out before we got there. I helped them load the trunks, and Anna's orange trees out of the town place in tubs, which I thought was foolish and did not say. I drove them to the stage in John Martin's wagon, and on the way, at the cemetery, Anna asked me to stop, and she went in by herself, and George sat on the seat beside me and did not look, and Grace sat in the back on the trunks with her hands in her lap. Anna was a long time. When she came out she climbed up and said, "All right," the way she had at the top of the lane in 1915, and I drove them on to the stage, and they went off up the river toward the summit, and I stood in the road and watched until I could not see the dust.
In October the Advocate had them settled, and it said the thing about them that the Advocate always said about people it was going to miss. "Mr. and Mrs. George W. Hennings of Willow Creek are now nicely located at San Diego, where they have ordered the Advocate to be sent."
Where they have ordered the Advocate to be sent. Eight hundred miles south, in the sun, and they wanted the Blue Lake paper, every week, with the Willow Creek column in it, and the Hoopa column, and the transfers from the courthouse. I understood that. I would have done the same. You can take a family out of the Sugar Bowl, and you can sell it, and you can put a county road across the bottom of it. But you will want to know, every week, for the rest of your life, what the river is doing.
They had owned it, on and off, sixteen years. They had buried a boy from it and raised a girl in it and plowed it with the first tractor in Humboldt County and made four thousand dollars in one year in beans off the bottom of it, more than the gravel had ever paid anybody. Hennings had come into the bowl in 1908 with a new giant tied on behind his wagon, a miner looking for gold. He left it in 1924 a farmer, the best on the lower Trinity, the paper said, who could make money where others would starve. And he left it humming. I heard him, loading the trunks. The giant was still down on the bench, I suppose. I never went to look.