# The Loveliest Spot in California

*The Sugar Bowl, part one, 1878–1897. Told by Judson Thursby, who came over the summit in 1889, sawed lumber with a Bussell, danced at a Kidd's, dug the Sugar Bowl ditch, and boarded at the Douglas table.*

## The man with the notebook

In the late summer of 1896 a man came down the lane into the Sugar Bowl on a livery horse from Hoopa, with a notebook in his coat, and sat on John Douglas's veranda for most of an afternoon, and asked questions, and wrote. I was there because I was boarding there. We had finished the Sugar Bowl ditch in July, and I was still on the pipe, and Mrs. Douglas fed the doctor's crew at a long table on that veranda twice a day, so whoever came down the lane ate with us whether he meant to or not.

He was a pleasant man. He did not give his name, or if he did I have lost it. He asked John Douglas how many acres he had in, and how high the ridges were, and what the hogs ate, and whether the deer were a nuisance, and John Douglas said the hogs ate acorns and the deer ate corn and he ate the deer, and the man wrote that down. He asked Mrs. Douglas what grew, and she walked him through the orchard and the garden and down to the melon patch by the river, and he came back with his hands full of figs. Then he rode out the way he came, and about three weeks later it was in the Blue Lake Advocate, signed with one letter. X.

*"An Ideal Location Near Hoopa. The Little Valley Known as 'The Sugar Bowl' Near the Reservation. Mr. John Douglas Can Truly Say That He Owns the Loveliest Spot in California."*

I have that paper still. I have read it so many times that the fold has gone through. *"It is rather curious,"* X wrote, *"that nature would pause long enough in her terrific work of world building to make an ideal farm in these mountains for one family."* He gave the ridges at fifteen hundred feet. He gave the river coming over the Horse Linto falls and touching the ranch on the side where it enters and rushing away again over the rapids below. He gave the oaks and the acorns and the smokehouse, and he said there was *"always plenty of good lard and cured meat in his smokehouse to supply a large contingent of Coxey's army. It is doubtful, however, about them getting it without the cash."* That was the one that made John Douglas laugh. He read it out at supper twice.

And X said that John Douglas, sitting on his veranda in the long summer twilight, could say with Alexander Selkirk, *"I am Monarch of all I Survey."* He said that he was not as lonely as Selkirk, *"for he has a wife and two bright children and a brother who makes this his home."*

That is the sentence I want to talk about. A wife and two bright children and a brother. X sat on the veranda one afternoon and saw a family, and he was right, but he did not see how much of the river was sitting at that table with him. He did not know that the woman who handed him the figs was a Kidd, and what that meant. He did not know that her sister was a Bussell and her other sister was a Scott and her half-sister was married to the hardest-working miner at China Flat, and that her brother had the biggest peach orchard on the lower Trinity, and that her father had dug a ditch on that river before there was a road to it. He saw a monarch on a veranda. I saw a man who had married into the oldest family on the river and had been careful about it for eighteen years.

So if you are going to understand the Sugar Bowl, and what the ditch did to it, and what the families paid and got back, you have to start before the ditch. You have to start with the Kidds.

## The Kidd place

I was not there for this part. I came over the summit in 1889. What I know of the years before, I had from Mrs. Douglas at that long table, and from her brother Buck under his peach trees, and from old men at the Willow Creek store who had nothing to do in the rain but remember. Some of it the newspapers kept and most of it they did not.

James Allen Kidd was a Kentuckian, and he came to the river by way of Hoopa. He had farmed in Hoopa Valley in the early days, before the government set the valley apart for the Hupa, and when it did, about 1866, it paid the settlers there for their improvements and their land and sent them out, and Kidd took two thousand seven hundred and nineteen dollars and went up the Trinity. Mrs. Douglas told me once that her father never talked about Hoopa, and that she did not know whether that was because he was sorry to leave it or sorry he had been there at all. He was one of the first white settlers on the lower Trinity above the line. He had a ranch on the east side of the river, across from where the town of Willow Creek grew up later, and the men who knew it said it was one of the finest ranches on the Trinity. He had a mining claim on that side too, just opposite Willow Creek. And about the time the Boyce and Reddington company went to work turning the river at the Horseshoe Bend, back in the seventies, Kidd took up water on a creek above his claim and built a ditch and flume from the creek to his mine, something over two miles long.

Think about that. Two miles of ditch, by hand, on the lower Trinity, in the seventies, with no road to bring a pick in on but the trail. When the Sugar Bowl company dug two and a half miles in 1896, the Advocate made a headline of it. James Kidd did nearly the same twenty years before, and nobody wrote it down until he was long dead, and then they got the name of his creek wrong.

He did not work the claim himself for long. He leased the water and the ground to Chinese miners, and they worked that claim for years, patiently, the way they worked everything the white men had given up on, and paid him his rent, and raised vegetables beside the cut. Buck Kidd told me that when he was a boy the Chinese garden on the claim was the best garden on the river, and that the old men there would give a white child a turnip for carrying a message, and that he carried a great many messages.

James Kidd's children came in two families. In the first there was Sarah, who was born on the lower Trinity on New Year's Day of 1858, when there was nothing here but a few cabins and the Hupa, and then the girl who became Mrs. Douglas, and then Amelia, and then a boy they called Buck. In the second there was a girl named Venus and a boy they called Saxy, and their mother, Mrs. Nancy Kidd, outlived the old man by better than twenty-five years. She was still alive, and the paper called her aged, when Venus died.

The old man died at China Flat on the twenty-sixth of May, 1883, at sixty-three. The Humboldt Times had a letter from China Flat that May that said Mr. William M. Scott of Mad River had gone up to look after the interests of the children of James A. Kidd, deceased. William Scott was Sarah's husband. Sarah had married out to the coast, to Mad River, to the place they came to call Scottsville and then Blue Lake, and when her father died her husband rode over the summit to see that the young ones were not cheated. The mine and the water passed into Scott's hands after that, and the Chinese went on working it on his lease.

There is a little cemetery on the Kidd place. The old man is in it. Later on Venus was buried there, and other Kidds, and some of the Indian people who lived on that side of the river, because the Kidds had always let them.

## Weitchpec

John Douglas came into that country about 1878. He was thirty or near it, born in the state of New York in October of 1847, moved to Wisconsin as a boy, a soldier in the Union army when he was old enough to be one, and come west after the war the way so many of them did, looking for a place that had not been fought over. He worked for whoever paid. He packed. He split rails. He hired on with the Kidds.

I asked Mrs. Douglas once how she came to marry him, and she said, "He fixed the flume," and went back to her bread. I got the rest of it from Buck. The Kidd flume was always leaking, Buck said, and the Chinese would patch it and the patches would leak, and a quiet soldier from Wisconsin came along one summer and took the whole worst section apart and put it back so it held, and did not ask for more than his wages, and the second Kidd girl watched him do it from the trail for most of a week. "That's how Kidds marry," Buck said. "We watch a man work. Then we decide."

I never learned the year they married. The paper did not have it, or I have not found it. Their girl Alice was born about 1885 and their boy Robert in 1888.

But I can tell you to the day when Amelia married, because it was in the Times. On the fourth of June, 1884, at Weitchpec, before Giles Hunt, justice of the peace, William Bussell married Amelia Kidd, both of Trinity River. They went all the way down to Weitchpec to be married because that was where the justice was, a long day on horseback down the river trail and a long day back, and Mrs. Douglas went with them. She told me it rained the whole way down and was fine the whole way back, and that Giles Hunt had his boots off when they came in, and married them in his stocking feet so as not to keep them waiting.

So now there were two Kidd girls married, one to a Douglas and one to a Bussell, and the Bussells were the other old family at China Flat. Old P. F. Bussell, Pinder Bussell, was the man the county called on when it needed somebody at Willow Creek it could trust. When the supervisors set the election boards in 1886, the Willow Creek precinct had P. F. Bussell for inspector and Thomas Brett and George Hemsted for judges, with the polls at Brizard's store. When old David Currier died at Willow Creek that January, of dropsy of the heart, it was P. F. Bussell who wrote to the Trinity Journal at Weaverville so the old-timers over there would know. Born in Clinton County, New York, in 1813, Bussell wrote. Came from Humboldt Bay to Big Bar on the Trinity in June of 1854. Has lived on the lower Trinity ever since. A man who would take the trouble to write that down for a neighbor is the kind of man I mean.

There is another paper from those years that I like better than any of them. In December of 1884 the last will and testament of William Gwinn of China Flat was filed for record at Eureka. Gwinn left six hundred dollars to Mrs. Mary J. Hemsted, who had nursed him, I suppose, or fed him. He left three hundred and twenty dollars to Robert Hardy. And he left to Frank Bussell, who was a boy then, his horse, saddle and bridle.

That is the whole estate of a China Flat miner in 1884. Money to the women who were good to him, money to a young man who was starting out, and his horse to a boy. Frank Bussell rode that horse for twelve years. When I came over the summit it was an old horse with a gray face that would not cross water without being argued with, and Frank argued with it every time, and it never once threw him.

## Ordered off

In the winter of 1885 two things happened in the same month that did not seem to have anything to do with each other, and I have always thought they did.

The first was in Eureka. In February of 1885 a city councilman was killed by a stray bullet in a quarrel between two Chinese, and that night a crowd met at the hall and voted that every Chinese person in Eureka must go, and the next day they were put on two steamers with what they could carry and sent to San Francisco. Then the word went up the rivers that it was to be the whole county. Nobody had to vote on it on the Trinity. Men just rode up to the Chinese claims and said it.

Buck Kidd was about nineteen. He told me he rode down to the claim with his brother-in-law William Bussell to tell the old men on the lease, because it was the Kidd claim and it ought to be a Kidd who told them, and he said it was the worst thing he ever had to do. The old men already knew. They had their bedding rolled and their gold scales packed, and the garden was half pulled, and they asked only which was the shortest way to the county line. Buck showed them. They went up the river over the line into Trinity County, where nobody had voted anything, and some of them were working gravel at the mouth of the New River ten years later.

The ditch on the Kidd claim went to pieces after that. A ditch is a thing that has to be walked every day, and there was nobody to walk it.

The second thing happened on the twenty-eighth of February, 1885, at the courthouse in Eureka. The ranch known as Sugar Bowl, on the Trinity river below Willow Creek, was sold to the state because its taxes were delinquent. It had been assessed the year before to a man named T. G. Campbell, two horses at twenty-five dollars and two cows at thirty-one fifty and twenty-five hogs at a dollar and two cents apiece. That was all Campbell had in the bowl, and he could not pay the tax on it, and he went away.

John Douglas had been looking at that bowl for seven years. It was the first ground above the Hoopa reservation line on the river, nearly round, with the ridges standing up all around it like the sides of a dish and the river running across one side of the bottom. It had grass and oaks and a flat of black soil by the river and a bench of gravel above the flat. It had no water but what fell on it and what ran down the little gulches in the winter, and that was why Campbell had failed: you could not raise anything there in August but hogs. John Douglas thought you could. He thought that a man who could fix a flume could get water onto that flat somehow, sometime.

He went in that spring, with the second Kidd girl and the baby Alice, and his brother James, who had come out from Wisconsin to join him, and they built a cabin by the big oak where the house stands now, and fenced the flat, and put in corn, and planted the first twelve peach trees from Buck's cuttings. Twelve years later the government gave him his patent, the west half of the southwest quarter and the southeast quarter of the southwest quarter of section five, and lot two of section six. It was in the paper with the transfers in October of 1897, right after John Fricker sold his third of the Sugar Bowl mine. Two lines in the Advocate. Twelve years of work.

So the same month that the Kidd claim lost its Chinese and went dry, the Sugar Bowl lost its Campbell and got its Douglas. I have never been able to make up my mind what that means, if it means anything. Mrs. Douglas said it meant the Kidds were done with ditches and had better grow peaches. Then she grew peaches. And then, eleven years later, a doctor came up from Hoopa with a ditch in his head, and she fed his whole crew.

## Sarah Jane

There is one more thing from before my time, and it is the saddest.

Old P. F. Bussell had a daughter named Sarah Jane, who married Robert Hardy, the same Robert Hardy that old Gwinn had left three hundred and twenty dollars to. They had two little children. On the twenty-first of November, 1887, Sarah Jane Hardy died at Willow Creek, aged twenty-six years, ten months and eighteen days. That is how the notice in the Times gave it, to the day. Somebody in that family counted the days.

Mrs. Douglas was carrying Robert that winter. She went up from the bowl to China Flat when Sarah Jane was sick, and stayed, and was there when she died, and she told me once that she held the Hardy baby the whole night after so that Robert Hardy could sit with his wife. She did not say anything else about it. She did not have to. When her own boy was born the next year she would not let anybody but Amelia Bussell come near her, and she said that was why.

The two little Hardy children were raised among the Bussells after that. They were still minors when the old man died eight years later, and they are named in his estate that way, the two minor children of Sarah Hardy, a deceased daughter, right after all the living ones. I always liked the court for that. It did not leave them out.

## Over the summit

Before there was a road there was a letter, and before the letter there was a mule.

In October of 1887 the Times printed a letter from the Trinity river to the Society of Humboldt County Pioneers in Eureka, and I have a copy of it still, gone brown at the folds. Sixteen men signed it, and after each name they put the year they had come into Humboldt county, the way other men put a rank. Henry Carpenter, 1849. B. Lack, 1849. C. G. Ammon, 1849. A. N. Foote, 1852. Spencer White, 1858. R. K. Anderson, August the eighteenth, 1859, because he remembered the day. John Victor, 1870. George Hemsted and his son Will, 1873. Robert Hardy, 1876, the same Robert Hardy whose wife Sarah Jane, old Bussell's girl, would die that November. They were old men writing to old men, and they asked for one thing. They had several times petitioned the supervisors *"to connect us with the outside world by a wagon road but without avail,"* and from Berry's to the mouth of Willow creek, they said, *"is only eighteen miles, and will not be a very expensive road to build."* Their fruit was rotting on the ground for want of a way out. And they told the Pioneers that *"an ancient river bed has recently been discovered along the Trinity river, about 400 feet above its present level, which is destined to be the richest and most extensive placer diggings in the State."* Then they said the thing I have never forgotten, because it was the truest line in the letter. *"With a wagon road to the Trinity we are satisfied that capitalists can be induced to visit and examine our mining as well as agricultural resources, but few can be induced to make the trip on the 'hurricane deck of a mule,' our present mode of travel."*

The Times had been saying the same thing since October of 1884, when it begged the businessmen of Eureka and Arcata to finish the sixteen miles between Charley Berry's and Willow Creek before the New River trade went the other way by Weaverville. *"Think about it, business men of Humboldt,"* it said, *"and think fast."* They thought about it for five years, and then the supervisors let a contract to a man named Thomas, and in April of 1889 I hired on to his crew at Blue Lake at a dollar and a quarter a day and found, nineteen years old, and walked up Redwood creek to Berry's with a pick on my shoulder.

You do not build a mountain road. You persuade it. Thomas had thirty men that spring, Swedes and Portuguese and Humboldt boys like me, and two powder men who did not speak to anyone, and I watched the powder men until I knew what they knew, and by June I was one of them. We went at the ridge above Berry's with drills and giant powder and horse scrapers, a hundred yards a day when the rock was soft and thirty when it was not. It snowed on us in May. The Advocate's man at China Flat, who signed himself "34" and wrote as if he were talking to you across a fence, said the old saying about March coming in like a lamb and going out like a lion could be applied to May that year, only the other way round, and that fresh snow could be seen on the mountain-tops. And then, because "34" never wrote a paragraph without a needle in it, he said the second section of the Willow Creek wagon road was nearly completed and that everybody on the river hoped the contractor would make a better wagon road than he had a trail to that place some years before, *"but, to judge from present appearances, we shall be sadly disappointed."* Thomas read that at the camp on the summit and swore for a quarter of an hour and then put us on the grade an hour earlier every morning. By August "34" could hear us. Thomas was pushing the road through at a good pace, he wrote, judging from the sound of blasting, and expected to be done about the first of October. *"Blessed, long-looked-for, moment!—haste thy arrival!"* The same letter said that a man named Ammon had killed a white panther, *"measuring a little over four feet from tip to tip, the first ever killed or heard of in this section,"* and I went down to Brizard's store when I got the chance and saw the skin, and it was white, or nearly, and the old men stood around it and said it was a sign, and could not agree of what. In October the Times said a good job was being done, which was the first kind word anybody had printed about Thomas, and the first freight wagon came down Three Creeks into the valley in the rain, and I had been paid off and had decided not to go home.

I had come over the summit for the road. I stayed for the valley. You come down out of the redwoods and the fog and the mud onto a bench above a green river with the sun on it, and there are peach trees, real peach trees, bearing, in a country where the rest of us had lived on dried apples all our lives. Will Hemsted gave me a bed in the loft over the tool room at his father's place a mile above the creek, the farm the letter had bragged on, and work on the farm and at the mill, and I thought I had found the end of the world and that it was warm.

That fall I went to work sawing at the Hemsted mill, and the man on the other end of the saw was William Bussell. The Advocate's correspondent who signed himself "34" put it in his letter that November among the other news, that Wm. Bussell was working at the mill. That is how I came to the Kidds: through a crosscut saw. Will Bussell was a big slow-spoken man who could pull a saw all day and talk about his wife's sisters the whole time without being out of breath. By Christmas I knew every Kidd and every Bussell from Hay Fork to Weitchpec without having met half of them.

I had missed one wedding already. In July of 1889, while I was still on the road, Will's sister Diana Bussell of Willow Creek was married at the house of J. T. Hailstone in Hay Fork to John McKay of Hyampom. The Hailstone at Hay Fork was married to another Bussell sister, Nancy, so Diana went over the mountains to her sister's house to be married and then over another mountain to Hyampom to live. The Trinity Journal said the couple were born in Trinity County and enjoyed the friendship and esteem of the community. They were Bussells. Of course they did.

I did not miss the next dance. On New Year's night of 1890 there was a dance at Bussell's hall at China Flat. It had rained or snowed for two months straight, and the miners were happy and the farmers were not, and everybody came. The Advocate's man said that all who attended enjoyed it *"as the Willowcreekers only know how,"* which was true. I danced with Amelia Bussell because Will told me to, and with Mrs. Douglas because Amelia told me to, and I stood against the wall the rest of the night because I had danced with two married women and every girl in the room had seen it.

That was where I first met John Douglas. He did not dance. He stood by the stove with James and old P. F. Bussell and talked about rain, the way men did that winter, and when Will brought me over and said I was the one who could shoot powder, John Douglas looked me up and down and said, "Can you fix a flume?" I said I could build one. He said, "That's not what I asked." That was all he said to me all night. It took me six years to find out what he meant by it.

The winter before I came, the Trinity Journal had printed a story about a deer hunt, and by the time I came over the summit everyone on the river was telling it. Two old Trinity hunters, Morse and Byron, had come on five fat bucks in a clearing in 1874 and both fired at the same moment from opposite sides without seeing each other, and all five bucks dropped, and the two men stood across the carcasses and argued over whose they were. *"Joe,"* Morse said, *"I never called you a liar, nor I never will—but those deer are mine."* John Douglas laughed at that until he had to sit down. When his boy Robert got big enough to shoot, he used to say it to him when Robert came in with a deer. "I never called you a liar, Bob. But that deer is mine."

## High water

At the end of February 1890 the rain came down for three days and the Trinity came up and up, and then dropped ten feet in a few hours, and everybody thought it was over. It was not over. A mountain had slid into the river up at Collins' Bar, in Trinity County, and dammed it, and for about six hours the river behind the slide filled up like a tub. Then the dam broke. The river at Willow Creek rose fifteen feet in an hour and a half. The Advocate's man said that ten feet more and it would have been running down the main street of Willow Creek city, which was one street and a store.

Thomas Dungan lost his ferry boat. George Hemsted lost his apple orchard to a slide from the mountain. Bussell and Brett lost considerable fencing. C. B. Newell's canoe hit a snag and split crossing the river and dumped him in, and he was near enough the bank to catch the brush, and lived. And in the same letter, because the Advocate's correspondents were never too busy with a flood to mention a wedding, Spencer White was married to Miss Molly Saply on the first of the month, Judge Waterman tying the knot. The correspondent asked who would be next, and guessed Victor or Adams.

I went down to the bowl a week later with Will Bussell to see how the Douglases had come through. The river had come up over the whole flat. It had taken the lower fence and the corn stubble and laid a skin of gray sand over the bottom field, and the twelve peach trees from Buck's cuttings were standing in it up to their knees. John Douglas was out there with a shovel digging the sand away from the trunks one tree at a time. He had done eight of them.

And down on the low bar below the flat, where the flood had scoured off the top, there was clean gravel showing that had not been showing before, gray and blue and round, the kind of gravel that every man on the Trinity knew the look of. James Douglas was standing on it. He had a gold pan in his hand that he had not used in five years, and he was not panning. He was just looking. He said to me, "The river does the work for nothing." He said it the way another man might have said a prayer. Then he set the pan down and went to help his brother with the peach trees.

That bar is the one they called the Horseshoe later. Every owner of the Sugar Bowl came around to it sooner or later. James Douglas was the first, and he got there in 1890, with a pan, and did not use it.

## The soldiers' ball

There were still soldiers at Fort Gaston then, in Hoopa Valley, four miles below the bowl. Company F of the First Infantry. They were not there for anything much by that time. They drilled, and they built roads for the agency, and they played baseball with the young men at Willow Creek, and they were bored.

In October of 1891 Company F gave a ball. The Advocate's Willow Creek man said it was a success, being well attended and a general good time had. I went. Will Bussell and Amelia went, and the Douglases, and half of Willow Creek, and a good many Hupa families came to watch from the edge of the parade ground, and the soldiers had borrowed every lantern in the valley. There was a sergeant from Ohio who could play the fiddle and the cornet both, not at the same time, and a lieutenant's wife who taught the Willow Creek girls a dance from Washington that nobody could do by the end of the night. John Douglas stood by the wall with the officers and talked about the war. I had never heard him talk about the war before. He did not again.

The same letter had the Lost Cabin in it. Mr. Loveland and the Pugh boys had found five old cabins up in the mountains and come out talking about nuggets and a lost mine. The correspondent had been to see them. *"There are five cabins in all,"* he wrote, *"and they look as much like white men's work as a grizzly bear resembles a gray squirrel."* Mrs. Douglas laughed at that harder than at anything I ever read her. "They were Hupa summer houses," she said. "My father knew them. Every Kidd child knew them." She was right, I think, and nobody asked her.

The soldiers left the next year, in 1892, and the fort went over to the Indian agency, and when the man called X came through in 1896 he wrote of the site of old Fort Gaston, as if it had been there a hundred years.

That same winter there had been the other wedding. On Christmas night of 1890 at Brown's Hall in Willow Creek, at the Christmas ball, John Brett married Miss Daisy Zigler, and nobody knew a thing about it until Judge Waterman stood up smiling and married them. I have told that story elsewhere too. What I did not tell is that the correspondent ended that letter with a guess about the next one. *"If the writer is not badly mistaken,"* he wrote, *"there is going to be another wedding in this valley before the summer comes again, and 'He' spells his name 'John,' and it ain't 'Victor' either."* John Victor took that as a personal insult for a year. He was still a bachelor in 1896. On the Trinity a joke in the Advocate lasted longer than a marriage.

## Peaches and melons

In September of 1893 the Advocate sent a man up the river to write about fruit, because the hard times had come and gold was not selling stock and somebody in Blue Lake had the idea that peaches might. He counted orchards. Frank Martin had the oldest and one of the biggest, eight acres of apples and pears and plums and vineyard at the mouth of the South Fork. Thomas Dungan was second, and A. N. Foote third, and Foote had built himself a dryhouse for twenty-five dollars that the man called *"a symphony and a success. Two days' stay in the house will make fresh fruit so dry that it will rattle."* George Hemsted was fourth. And then he came to the families I knew. *"Messrs. P. F. Bussell and Thomas Brett sr. have small orchards of apples and peaches. Buck Kidd on the opposite side of the river has a big orchard of apples and peaches."*

A big orchard. Buck's father had dug a ditch for gold, and the Chinese had worked it out and been sent away, and the son had put the water from the end of that ditch on peach trees. I walked through Buck's orchard that August with him and he showed me the trees by the old cut, where the gravel had been washed down to bedrock and then filled with river silt from the floods, and the trees there were the best he had. "The Chinamen did the digging," he said. "I just plant."

The bowl's peaches were coming too. The twelve trees John Douglas had dug out of the sand in 1890 had become forty, and there were apples and figs and grapes, and Mrs. Douglas had begun the melons.

The melons were hers. Not many on the river grew watermelons in those years, because they need hot nights and a lot of water, and the bowl had the hot nights. In the bottom of that dish, with the ridges all around holding the heat, the August nights never cooled. She put the patch on the flat closest to the river, where she could carry water up in buckets from the eddy, and she and Alice carried it, every evening, all summer, two buckets each, until the vines took.

The first good year of melons was the year of the fruit man, 1893. Mrs. Douglas had more than the family could eat in a month, and no way to get them to market, because a watermelon does not pack on a mule. So she did what the Kidds had always done with too much of anything. She told the Hupa.

The Hupa women came up the trail from the valley that August, three or four families, and their children, with burden baskets, and stood at the edge of the patch, and Mrs. Douglas walked them through it and they picked. That first year she took salmon and acorn meal and a basket she kept till she died. After that it was money, a few bits a melon, taken right there in the field, and the children ate the first one sitting in the rows with the juice to their elbows. By the time I was boarding there in 1896 there was a Hupa woman who came every August with her two girls and her burden basket and went straight to the end row because she knew that was where the biggest ones were, and Mrs. Douglas always left that row for her. They did not have much language in common. They did not need it. They both knew melons.

Two years after that, in the summer of 1895, Thomas Dungan went out to Blue Lake with forty-one boxes of the finest peaches ever grown on the lower Trinity, out of the Hemsted orchard, and the Advocate said so, and printed the story of his deer hunt at the head of Campbell Creek, which I have told elsewhere. And the next summer Jesse, the Willow Creek correspondent, wrote to the Advocate that the fruit had come through a bad spring better than expected, and *"you Blue Lakers can prepare yourselves for some A No. 1 Willow Creek peaches this year."* He was right about that, too. That was the summer of the ditch.

## Old Bussell

In July of 1895 old P. F. Bussell had a stroke. The Advocate called it an attack of apoplexy, causing a partial paralysis of the upper part of his right side. He could not hold a pen after that, the man who had written to the Journal about David Currier and kept the poll book at Brizard's store. Amelia went down from Will's place every day to sit with him. By October the paper said his condition seemed to be getting worse gradually. In the same paragraph, the same week, it said that A. N. Foote, an old resident of Willow Creek, was reported in very poor health.

A. N. Foote was married to Venus Kidd. So that October both of the old men that the Kidd girls had married into were sick at once, one at Bussell's and one at Foote's, and the Kidd sisters took turns going between the houses, and John Douglas did the chores at the bowl alone for three weeks with James and the children. Foote got better. He was a hard man to kill. Jesse had written of him the winter before that he had done more mining and prospecting than any other man in the valley, *"in fact he has made the original China Flat look rather 'holy',"* and I always thought that was the best thing anybody ever said about a miner.

Old Bussell did not get better. He died at China Flat on the eighth of October, 1895. His son Zachariah applied to the court to administer the estate, and the paper printed what there was. A three-fourths interest in the Clover Flat placer mine on the Trinity river, valued at about three thousand dollars. A possessory interest and homestead entry in section twenty-nine, of nominal value. Personal property to the value of about two hundred and fifty dollars. And the heirs, all of them by name: the widow Nancy Bussell of China Flat, Zachariah and William A. of China Flat, Nancy Hailstone of Hay Fork, Dian McKay of Hyampom, Josephine Norton of Blue Lake, and the two minor children of Sarah Hardy, a deceased daughter.

That is a whole family on one page of a newspaper, spread over three counties, the living and the dead. Will Bussell read it standing in the Willow Creek store and folded it up and put it in his shirt and did not say anything, and I bought him a can of peaches, which was what you did.

That week Zachariah went out to Eureka with Major William Toms on the estate business. The Clover Flat mine that old Bussell had held three-quarters of was rumored sold to a Eureka company within the year, and it went on through the Camptons and the Heinricis and others after them, and I never heard that it paid any of them better than it paid the old man. That is another story.

## The English engineers

The same October that old Bussell died, two men in city overcoats came over the summit representing English capitalists, and for two weeks the whole river held its breath.

Their names were Mason and Luttrel, and they were mining engineers, and they walked Thomas Dungan's hundred and sixty acres on the river, and then went across the South Fork and walked J. J. Moston's. Dungan had been saying it in the Advocate since spring, the thing every miner on the Trinity believed: *"whenever capital takes hold of the South fork water and puts it on the gravel beds of Trinity, or even when Campbell creek and Willow creek are placed on gravel beds and properly managed, then the mines will be on a solid paying basis."* Now capital had come to look. Dungan told the paper the engineers *"are convinced that that section of country is richer than it had been represented to them in San Francisco,"* and that he had made them a proposition which, if accepted, *"would mean a great deal for the benefit of that country."* He said it was very liberal. He said it would probably be accepted. Moston said the chances were very bright.

Nobody walked them down to the Sugar Bowl. Nobody thought of it. The bowl was a farm then, John Douglas's farm, with a bar of gravel nobody had ever worked and a bench nobody had ever thought of as a mine, and the engineers went past the top of the lane on the Hoopa road without stopping. John Douglas told me afterward he had watched them go by from the orchard. He said, "I could have told them where the water wasn't."

I drove them back to Korbel. They sat behind me on the wagon seat and talked to each other in a language I understood one word in three of, and the word was always water. At the summit the younger one turned around to look back down at the valley, at the bend of the river and the flat and the smoke from the mill, and said to the other one, not to me, "It is a pretty place. It will want a great deal of money."

The proposition went to San Francisco and did not come back. But that was the turn of the river, that October. The road had done what the old pioneers' letter of 1887 said it would, and brought the capitalists in off the hurricane deck of a mule, and once they had looked, everybody on the river began to look at his own gravel the way the engineers had. That is how a doctor from Hoopa came to stand at Buck Kidd's stove four months later with a paper in his coat.

## The jag cure

The winter after old Bussell died was the winter Willow Creek got its first Christmas tree, and I want to tell about it because it was the happiest thing that happened that year, and because the Douglas children were there.

Jesse announced it in December. *"Willow creek is going to have a Christmas tree,"* he wrote, *"something new for the 'kids' of this section."* In the same letter there had been a Thanksgiving social at John Brett's, at which everyone expressed themselves as duly thankful, and a surprise party on B. Lack, who was woken from a deep slumber to find himself surrounded. *"The surprisers were joyously welcomed, and royally entertained. They all danced till daylight. Where will they descend next?"* And then, because Jesse could never leave a thing alone: *"We are informed (we say we, because our amanuensis said so) that there will be a wedding in the valley in the near future. We won't say just who the contracting parties are but we expect a nice piece of cake."*

Jesse's amanuensis. Jesse always claimed somebody else held the pencil. Nobody on the river would admit to knowing who Jesse was, and everybody wrote to him anyway, and I had my own idea and kept it, and I am keeping it now.

Mrs. Douglas brought Alice and Robert up from the bowl for the tree, two days ahead because of the road, and they stayed at Amelia's. It was a fir from the hill behind the store, and every woman on the river had made something for it, and there were candles on it that the men stood guard over with buckets. Robert was seven. He got a jackknife. Alice was ten and got a book, and read it out loud to the Bussell children in the wagon all the way back to China Flat, by lantern, and was hoarse for two days. Mrs. Douglas said it was the first time since her father died that the whole family was in one room on Christmas and nobody was sick. That counted the Footes and the Bussells, the Hardy children and the Kidds, and the two old Nancys, Mrs. Kidd and Mrs. Bussell, the new widow, side by side in chairs by the stove.

In January a third correspondent turned up in the Advocate, one who signed himself A Tramp on Wheels, and said he would take the liberty of dropping in a few items during the armistice between Jesse and Clover. *"A few of our heaviest drinkers,"* he wrote, *"have taken the Willow Creek 'jag cure' and are now leading a sober life."* The jag cure was being snowed in at Willow Creek with no saloon open, and it worked about as long as the snow did. The Tramp on Wheels said that Mr. Grant Warren had passed through the valley on his return from Taylor's Flat, *"where he has been prospecting a heart. I would infer that the prospects are good from the smile he wore through Willow Creek. I would advise Blue Lake girls not to cast any more 'sheep's eyes' at him."* He said the school had sixteen pupils. He said Dame Rumor reported a wedding ere spring. *"Our young people will soon all be married off."* And he closed by saying that if Jesse or Clover objected to his corresponding, *"I will fold my tent like the Arab and as silently steal away."*

That was the river that winter: a dead man's estate in the paper, a Christmas tree, three correspondents, two weddings that might or might not happen, a heart being prospected at Taylor's Flat, and the jag cure. You could not get a reply to a letter in less than a week. You did not need to. Everything you needed to know about your neighbors was in the Advocate, and what was not in the Advocate was at the store.

## Washington's Birthday

On the twenty-second of February, 1896, Washington's Birthday, there were two dances on the river. One was at William Campbell's at the South Fork. The other was at Buck Kidd's.

Buck had a big house by then, and the orchard, and the floor of the front room was the best floor on that side of the river because he had laid it himself out of Hemsted lumber that I had sawed. A good time was had at both places, the Advocate's correspondent said. At Buck's it was every Kidd and every Bussell and the Footes and the Douglases, and the young people from Willow Creek who could get across the river, and Joe Martin from the South Fork and Walter Judd, who had just been down to file on their homesteads. Joe Martin danced with every girl in the room and was told by Buck to go home at three. He did not go home at three.

And two men were at Buck's that night that nobody on our side of the river knew well. One was Dr. C. A. Curl, the agency physician at Hoopa, a young man for a doctor, who had come the year before and was liked. The other was a miner named John Fricker. They sat with John Douglas by the stove most of the night, and Fricker had a paper in his coat that he took out twice, and John Douglas looked at it both times and gave it back without saying anything.

Two days later, on Monday, the twenty-fourth, the notice of location for the Sugar Bowl mining claims on the Trinity river was filed for record by John Fricker, Fred Weltie and C. A. Curl, and the same persons also filed their notice of location for six hundred inches of the waters of Camel creek for use on the claims. Camel creek. The Advocate meant Campbell Creek, the one on the other side of the divide from the bowl, which ran eight months of the year when the bowl ran none. The doctor meant to bring it over the mountain.

I asked John Douglas once, much later, why he had let them locate on the bench above his flat instead of locating it himself. He said, "I didn't have a doctor." Then he said, "And I didn't have six hundred inches." Then he said, "And they asked me to dinner first," and I understood that was the real reason.

## The back of a bill

The week after the dance at Buck's, Dr. Curl sent word up the river that he wanted to see me, and I went down to Hoopa and found him in the hotel with his arm in a sling from the horse. He had heard from somebody at the store that I had shot powder for Thomas on the Berry road and could hold a grade with a level and a string, and he said he wanted a man who could do both, and asked what I would want a day. I told him. He did not argue. Then he took a bill out of his coat, a feed bill from Brizard's, and turned it over on the table and drew on the back of it with a pencil.

Here is the river, he said. Here is the Sugar Bowl, a valley like a dish with a rim fifteen hundred feet high all round, and a bar along the water, and a bench above the bar, and no water on any of it that would run a giant. Here is the ridge west of it, with the Hoopa wagon road running along the top. And here, on the far side of that ridge, running down its own canyon to the Trinity, is Campbell Creek, which has water eight months of the year. Six hundred inches of it, if we can get it over.

I asked him how he meant to get it over.

He said that was what he was paying me for.

I kept that bill. I have it still, in the same drawer with X's paper. The pencil has gone faint and you have to hold it to the window, but you can see the dish, and the river, and the ridge, and a little wavy line for the creek, and an arrow over the top of the ridge that the doctor drew with a flourish, as if an arrow were a ditch.

Before I went down to the bowl to begin, I sat two nights in Moston's bar at Willow Creek, because that is where you go on the Trinity to find out what a thing is going to cost you, and I heard two things there that I carried for seventeen years.

The first was about a man named Luffkin. In 1879 or 1880, some Pennsylvania money and some San Francisco money had decided to bring the whole of New River nine miles down to Hawkins Bar in a ditch and flume, and they had let the contract, sixty thousand dollars, to a man nobody on the river knew. He built a steam sawmill at the head of the line and threw a dam across New River and cut about a mile of ditch, and there was a town at the head of it, Hoboken Flat, two stores, three hotels, five or six saloons, and twelve or fifteen hundred people. And one pay day Luffkin did not appear. Several hundred men kept working two months on the belief that he would. He never did. And in February of 1880 the river came up and cut around the end of his dam, and in ten minutes the mill was, as the Advocate put it when it told the story again in 1897, *"a drifting wreck on the bosom of the angry waters,"* and the men tramped out in the dead of winter holding time checks that were worth nothing. Now it is a dreary waste, the paper said. Every man in that bar had known somebody who held one of those time checks, and every man in that bar, when he heard that a doctor from Hoopa was going to bring six hundred inches over a mountain, thought of Luffkin. I could see them think it.

The second thing was older. There was a Swede in the corner named Andrew Johnson who had been on the river since the year it was settled. He had come into Humboldt Bay in 1852 on the brig Colorado, Captain Buhne commanding, and felt her bottom take hold on the bar, and gone to the Trinity that May, and nearly drowned at Swede's Bar the next winter, and he had a snug bachelor's home on the bank of the Trinity three miles below the town, on the road to the bowl. I bought him a drink. He told me about December of 1861, when the Trinity rose seventy feet where the canyon pinched it, and the Journal at Weaverville wrote that the river became an ocean, spreading from mountain to mountain. Every mining improvement on a hundred miles of river went with it, and the new bridge at Hoopa Valley went with it, six hundred feet long and the finest in northern California, and the editor at Weaverville, watching a neighbor's house go by, wrote that *"Raab's dwelling-house is dancing a polka back of his store."*

I asked Johnson where a man should not build on the Campbell Creek side. He told me. He was seventy years old and he had seen the water, and Fricker and I put the ditch where he said and not where the doctor's arrow went, and the doctor never knew.

## Bacillus scribere

The ditch went to work in March. But before I tell about the ditch I have to tell about the war in the newspaper, because the ditch was in the middle of it.

The Hoopa correspondent signed himself Now and Then. He had taken over from one called Clover, who had either died or been threatened into silence by Jesse, depending on who told it. And in March of 1896, by way of explaining why he had not written for a while, Now and Then set out to settle the Willow Creek correspondents once and for all.

*"The absence of a correspondent from this place,"* he wrote, *"is however of very little consequence, as between 'Joebuck' 'Jesse' and 'Tramp On Wheels' the adjoining district is so much represented (or misrepresented) that they cover the entire Willow Creek district and some of their virtues even run over the sides and cover part of this community as well. Possibly the germ theory explains the superabundance of embryo journalists at that point, the bacillus scribere has found a natural field for increase and has multiplied his kind to an alarming extent."*

The Willow Creek men had been accusing each other of having wheels in their heads. Now and Then said the prevailing impression at Hoopa was that *"a thorough investigation by the Roentgen system of photography would disclose enough wheels buzzing in their several heads to fit out a fair-sized machine, even after discarding those which are evidently badly geared."* The X-ray had been in the papers that winter for the first time. It took him about two months to use it on Jesse.

In the middle of all that, the same letter had the news. Olaf Svendsen and G. W. Torgeson and John Magorgen passing through for the Klamath mines, and Magorgen giving out in the snow on top of the mountain and being brought in by his companions late at night, and Svendsen then falling down a flight of stairs in the Hoopa Valley hotel, *"sustaining several severe bruises, but fortunately escaping without broken bones."* Mr. Binckley, manager of the Mill Creek Gold Placer Mining company, *"operating his claim with a force of two boys and three hounds. After working three weeks they cleaned up three panther and two wild cat skins."* And then one line, the first that ever went into a newspaper about the work:

*"The proprietors of the Sugar Bowl Mining company have a large force of men at work on their ditch. They expect to commence mining about May 15th. Their claim prospects well and will no doubt prove a bonanza."*

I was the large force of men, or one of them. And the same letter had the doctor and the horse.

*"The other day Dr. Curl narrowly escaped serious injury from a vicious horse. While he was in a stooping position the horse seized him by the shoulder and lifted him off the ground. When the coat gave away the horse chased him until the doctor secured a club and knocked down the horse and then proceeded to teach him the way in which a good horse should go. My advice to the doctor is to carry a pop for the next encounter, as even if clubs happen to be trumps he may not be so fortunate as to hold one."*

That was our doctor. The horse was a gray gelding the doctor had bought from a Redwood man who did not mention its habits, and it bit him at the head of the ditch in front of the whole crew, and lifted him clean off the ground by his coat. The coat tore and he dropped and ran, and the horse ran after him, and the doctor came up out of the brush with a piece of oak limb and hit the horse between the ears, and it sat down like a dog. Then the doctor stood over it and explained to it, at length, in a medical vocabulary, the way a good horse should go. The crew laughed for a week. The doctor laughed too. He rode that horse for two more years and it never bit him again, and when he left Hoopa he sold it back to the same Redwood man and did not mention its habits either.

Now and Then signed off: *"If the wheels continue to go round you will hear from me."*

Jesse let it sit until July. Then he answered from Willow Creek, at the end of a long letter about the Fourth and the crops and the mines, and I think it is the finest thing he ever wrote. *"The poor misguided wretches who have been predicting the speedy death of Jesse, together with the unknown and unimportant scribbler from Hoopa, had better take their poor weak little headlets out to some convenient pond of water and soak some of the freshness out of them, soak them till they are reduced to somewhere near the size the Lord in his wisdom intended they should be, and not expand them in 'spirits' till they resemble an overgrown pumpkin with a latin name. No, Jesse will not shake off this mortal coil as long as his amanuensis can wield the pencil."*

The same letter began: *"the same little valley with its unshaken monotony of gossip and everlasting endless variety of current news. For size and population Willow Creek beats the world for news of all kinds."* It did. It had three correspondents, two dances, a ditch, and a doctor who hit a horse. Hoopa had a correspondent who used Latin. I know which one I would rather have read.

## The ditch

Here is how you lay a ditch on a mountain, because nobody will ever do it this way again and somebody should know.

You go to where the water is, high on the creek, as high as you dare, because every foot of height at the intake is a foot of pressure at the giant. You set your level and you walk the contour, and every rod you let the line fall an eighth of an inch, and you drive a stake, and a man behind you cuts to the stake. Too flat and the water stands and the ditch silts and the bank goes soft and slides. Too steep and the water cuts the bottom out and takes the bank with it. An eighth of an inch. You cannot see it fall. The water knows. Fricker carried the level and I drove the stakes, and the two of us walked that mountain from the creek to the saddle in eleven days, and behind us the crew cut to the stakes, and when I look at that ditch today, a thin dark line on the hillside, it still holds the grade we gave it. That is the only monument either of us ever had.

When we came around the face of the ridge on the Campbell Creek side to the place where it narrows to a saddle and the road runs along the top, there was no way around. So we went under. We put the tunnel a short distance above where John Douglas's lane comes up out of his valley to join the road, because that was where the saddle was thinnest, and I shot it, and we drove it through in three weeks, a round of holes every morning and the smoke rolling out of the portal at noon and the muck going out in wheelbarrows all afternoon. It was the first tunnel I ever drove. When you drive that road today you drive over it and never know.

It was the doctor's money, Fricker's eye for a grade, and Weltie's mules, and a crew of eight or ten that changed every few weeks as men came and went. John Douglas worked on it every day it crossed his ground, and James worked on it every day whether it crossed his ground or not. We took the water out of Campbell Creek high up and carried it around the face of the ridge, holding our grade with a level and a string, and where the ridge narrowed to a saddle under the Hoopa road we drove a tunnel under the road, and came out on the bowl side, and ran on around to the top of the bench. Two miles and a half. Twenty inches deep, thirty at the top, twenty at the bottom. The Advocate had the figures to the inch in July, from a gentleman who came down from Hoopa that week, and said the water would be brought from Campbell creek and *"it is thought that an abundance of water will be had nearly the year around."* It is thought. Nobody on the crew thought that. We had seen Campbell Creek in August.

Mrs. Douglas fed us. I have said that already, and I will say it every time, because it was the biggest thing anybody did for that ditch. She fed ten men twice a day at the long table on the veranda for four months, and Alice carried the plates, and Robert, who was eight, sat at the end and asked every man what he did and then went out and watched him do it. The doctor paid her for the board. She took it. She also gave him a melon every day in August, and did not take anything for that.

In the middle of the summer the Fourth of July came. It was quietly observed at Hoopa that year, the paper said, because the Indian boarding school had closed for vacation on the twenty-sixth of June and the new superintendent had not come yet. But Willow Creek had a picnic at Brett's place during the day and a ball at night, and there was another ball over the line at Campbell's in Trinity County, and all the lower Trinity people went to one or both, and Jesse said that as usual all enjoyed themselves. The ditch crew walked up to Brett's for the picnic and on to Campbell's for the ball and back to the bowl by daylight, which is better than twenty miles, and went to work at seven. James Marshall in Hoopa was building a new barn that summer, forty feet by twenty with a fourteen-foot shed on each side, and two of our crew went over to help him raise it on a Sunday for a dollar and supper, and came back saying Marshall's wife could not cook like Mrs. Douglas, and were sorry they went.

The water came through the tunnel at the end of June. I have told how John Douglas took off his hat. I have told how Mrs. Douglas came up the lane with the children and put her hand on the boy's head. What I did not tell is what James did. James went down the bench ahead of the water, to where the ditch ended over the gravel, and when the water came around the last bend and fell off the end of the ditch onto the bench, James was standing under it. He let it come down on him like a rain, with his hat in his hand, until he was soaked. Then he walked back up to the house and changed his shirt and came back to work. He never said a word about it, and nobody ever asked him.

## Forty-three inches

In August the doctor's company paid John Douglas for his work in water. The agreement was dated at Hoopa on the twenty-eighth of August, and it was in the paper in September, *"whereby in consideration of work done on the ditch conveying water to the Sugar Bowl mine C. A. Curl, Jno Fricker and Fred Welli, owners of the ditch, give John Douglass, an interest in the ditch amounting to 1-14 of the water running it."* Fricker told me later that it was my idea, and I suppose it was. I had said to the doctor in June that you do not want a man like Douglas as a hired hand. You want him as a man who needs the ditch to hold. One fourteenth of six hundred inches is about forty-three inches. That is enough to irrigate every tree and every melon in the bowl, in a year when there is water in the ditch at all. And in the same column, the same week, John and James Douglass filed for record their notice of location for forty acres of ground in section five, township seven north, range five east, to be known as the Horseshoe placer mine.

The Horseshoe. That was the low bar James had stood on with a pan in 1890 and not panned. Now there were two mines in the bowl. The doctor's on the bench, and the brothers' on the bar, and one ditch to serve them both, and forty-three inches of it for Mrs. Douglas's melons.

All that summer there were bigger men than us moving on the river. J. J. Moston, who held about eighteen hundred acres of gravel near China Flat and the South Fork, had a San Francisco man named Cowles looking at it for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and an engineer figuring a twenty-two-mile ditch to bring the South Fork onto it, and a mining agent named Amos Welty of Willow Creek, who was to have fifteen per cent if he sold it. Welty. Fred Weltie, the doctor's partner, spelled it the other way. I asked Weltie once if Amos was his kin, and he said everybody named Welty on the Pacific coast was his kin as far as fifteen per cent was concerned. Moston did not sell. Nobody sold that year. And up the river toward China Flat, Thomas Dungan had found Ferndale money to bring Campbell Creek, the other Campbell Creek, two and a half miles to his own mine, and Jesse wrote that the company meant business and there would be no unnecessary delay. There was a good deal of unnecessary delay. That is another story too.

And that was when X came down the lane in his coat, at the end of the summer, and sat on the veranda and saw a monarch with a wife and two bright children and a brother.

He wrote one thing I have never been able to read without laughing, and it was not about the Coxey's army. *"Mr. Douglas has no trouble or expensive litigation about water rights,"* he wrote. *"Nature furnishes an abundance for all purposes within his own circle of hills."* It was printed on the fifth of September, 1896, about a farm that had just paid for forty-three inches of water with four months of a man's labor and his brother's and his wife's cooking, through a tunnel under the county road from a creek on the other side of a mountain. Nature furnished nothing in that bowl after the first of June but heat. The water was bought. It was dug. It was carried two and a half miles around a mountain by a doctor, two miners, an old soldier and his brother and a crew of drifters, and it was paid for with a woman's cooking.

But the next line is true, and it is the reason I keep the paper. *"Indeed, one might roam over half the continent without finding a more suitable location for a happy independent life with sport, comfort and contentment, waiting at the very door of moderate labor."* Moderate labor. That was X's only mistake. The rest of it was the loveliest spot in California, and it was.

## Ashes

The first winter on the ditch, John Fricker lived in a cabin above the bench, and on the sixth of January, 1897, the cabin burned. He had his money in it, in coin, because the nearest bank was Arcata and no miner on the river trusted one. He shoveled the ashes of his house into the head of the sluice and turned on the doctor's water, and the ash went down the boxes gray and out the end, and the coins stayed in the riffles, black and whole.

The Hoopa man, Now and Then, put it in his letter at the end of the month. He had a great deal else in that letter. The Reverend Mr. Armstrong's new church at Hoopa was nearly done, with an interior arranged *"such that it will meet with the views of both high and low church followers,"* and, he said, *"Rumor has it that soon after this event a wedding will take place in the edifice."* The Indian school was full to its utmost capacity, and the government was putting in a steam laundry, with a new flume to bring it water. Nobody on the Trinity could build anything without a flume. And the new mail schedule was a scandal: it took from Monday morning until midnight Friday to get an answer to a letter sent to Arcata. Then:

*"Dr. Curl is operating his mine at Sugar Bowl. The returns are apparently satisfactory."*

And then: *"Mr. John Fricker, a miner at Sugar Bowl, had his cabin destroyed by fire on the 6th instant. All his clothing and effects were destroyed. Loss not known, no insurance. He had a considerable sum of money in the cabin, which he recovered by running the ashes through a sluice box."*

Mrs. Douglas took Fricker in. Of course she did. He slept in the bunk room off the kitchen with me for the rest of that winter, a big quiet man who snored like a sawmill, and she found him two of John's shirts and a pair of James's boots and a coat that had been her father's. Fricker cried when she gave him the coat. I had never seen a grown man cry over a coat. She told him to stop it and eat, and he stopped it and ate.

One night that January, after the others had gone to bed, I sat up with John Douglas on the veranda in our coats, with the river going below the bar and the stars all around the rim of the bowl so thick it looked as if somebody had sifted them, and I asked him the thing I had been wanting to ask since the dance at Bussell's hall six years before. I asked him why he had asked me if I could fix a flume.

He thought about it a long time. Then he said, "Because building one is easy, Jud. Any fool with a saw can build one. The question is whether you'll come back and fix it when it leaks. And it always leaks." He said, "Her father built one. He didn't come back. The Chinamen came back, every day for ten years, and then they weren't allowed to." He said, "I married her because I came back." Then he said, "That ditch is going to leak. You know that." I said I knew it. He said, "Well, then," and went in to bed.

It snowed in February. It snowed on the summit and on the ridges all around the bowl, and it rained after, and by the first of March the creek on the other side of the mountain was running bank to bank, and the ditch carried it through the tunnel under the road and around to the bench. And the doctor sent word up from Hoopa that he would be up on Monday to see the giant run, and Mrs. Douglas killed two chickens, and I went up to the head of the pipe at daylight and stood there with my hand on the swivel waiting for the water.

That is where the next part begins.