Seam Squirrels and Graybacks
This is another excerpt from my great-grandfather’s autobiography. Based on his age, I think it takes place around 1903 or 1904 in Washington. I know everything in this world is relative, but I must admit I feel a little soft after reading this account of life at one of the logging camps where he worked. He would have had to work a couple years to pay for the Herman Miller chair I purchased recently to alleviate back pain while I type.
Granddad wrote:
“The next spring when I was 16, I went to work at Buck’s Camp, near Monroe, setting chokers. This was a hard place on men and one month saw 20 men killed. If 30 men were killed in one month, the company had to shut down for 90 days. I forgot to say in all the bunkhouses, fleas, lice (graybacks), and bedbugs (seam squirrels) were plentiful. My pay was $2.25 per day for 11 hours. Every morning the boss would kick open the door and yell, ‘Roll out, or roll up,’ and he meant just that. The bunkhouse was about 20 x 20 square. The bunks were just boards and made with one end against the wall on each side, and three bunks high. In the center of the room there was a ‘Sidney Stove’ sitting on a box filled with dirt. The stove pipe went up through the roof. The door opened in the middle of one side, a window in the opposite side. All men carried their own blankets. There were no mattresses on the bunks. The lighting system was a kerosene lantern hung on a hook in the ceiling. You washed in a wash basin outdoors--the ‘john’ was outback.”
(The photo above was taken in Blewett, Washington, in 1915. Granddad’s brother, Dean, is driving the team. Granddad is standing behind him. Here’s another picture from 1912 that shows “the first truck there is any record of hauling logs in Washington.” It was owned by Rucker Brothers in Everett.)
Snakes and Montana in My Family Tree
I sure wish I would have peeked inside the little book my great grandparents wrote about their lives before I left on the road trip with Jim. On the very first page, Grandpa Jack (whose given name was Rex Omega Crowe) tells how his grandfather, father, and uncle briefly settled around Helena in 1864. His father, Patrick, stayed about five years before returning home to Minnesota, which puts him in the same region of Montana at the same time as Henry Larrabee. (The photo above was taken just outside Sioux City, Iowa.)
I also found this story a few pages later, which happened in 1896 on the “Cooper Ranch” near White Sulphur Springs, Montana, when the family was making their way west for the second time:
“The next summer Julia [one of Great Granddad’s older sisters] and I were playing out in a field drowning gophers out of their holes and when their heads came out of the hole one of us would have our hands ready to grab them around their throats. I was all ready to make a grab when a head came up and I grabbed--only it was a rattlesnake instead of a gopher. Julia screamed, ‘Hang onto him. Don’t let him go,’ and kept screaming at the same time as she grabbed a good-sized rock, which she beat the snake’s head with until she killed it. I sure was glad when I could let go of it as it was wrapped around my arm. This stopped the gopher hunting.”
I guess back in those days catching gophers with your bare hands seemed like a safe thing to do? Someone should tell Joe Larrabee about that.
Day Nine: Oregon and California!
Despite Jim’s Cassady-esque efforts to ingest enough coffee to keep him awake until Portland, we decided to find a motel at The Dalles on the Columbia River. Throughout this trip, he has employed a technique for determining how much time we have left to drive before the sun goes down. It involves him holding out his hand and counting the number of fingers between the horizon and the middle of the sun. Each finger supposedly represents fifteen minutes. I thought it was some sort of surveyor’s trick, but he said he got it out of a cereal box when he was a boy. Apparently in the 1940s and ‘50s, Nabisco included tips it termed “Indian Secret Injunuities” (whoops) in boxes of Shredded Wheat, and from them you could learn new skills like how to make a belt, stalk wild game, or determine how much light was left in the day. Cereal box marketing ploy or not, the finger-counting trick really does work. We timed it, and Jim was only off by a few minutes.
Before leaving The Dalles, we took a look at a rock fort used by Lewis and Clark, and then drove over Mt. Hood to avoid the Portland area traffic. The terrain slowly changed as we motored closer to the California border. The rugged country and redwoods made me feel like I was already home, but they also interfered with the reception on my Treo, making it impossible to check email, post here, or AIM with Evany as I had been doing to kill time in the pickup on this trip. As we passed a mill somewhere around the state line and not too far from Ken Kesey country, Jim remarked how much he loved the smell of fir and then quickly made an exception for white fir, which smells like urine when it’s cut.
“You mean piss fir?” I said, even though I’d been making an effort to keep my potty mouth in check since we left Victorville. The truth is...I have never known the real name of that particular tree. That’s why I asked.
“You really are the daughter of a logger,” he laughed, and then told me how his grandfather claimed to have coined that term.
Not to be outdone, I told him how one of my great-great uncles in Washington claimed he had invented the term “gyppo,” which refers to independent contract loggers (like the Stamper family in Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion). We were both skeptical of our ancestors’ stories, but I enjoyed the brief celebration of our heritage nonetheless. (Another of my favorite logging slang terms is “pecker poles,” which is most often used in derision to describe a truckload of thin trees that have been harvested early.)
Jim dropped me off in Crescent City, where Pat was waiting. On the way home, we stopped at The Trees of Mystery, and by the time we got to Humboldt County I felt like I couldn’t possibly be any happier. As we drove along the coastline, I opened the sunroof and smelled the redwoods. The rhododendron and lupine are in bloom. The technicolor green hillsides around Orick always make me blush. It’s like Mother Nature’s paired a belt-sized mini skirt with a halter top and hooker heels to really strut her stuff right there along Highway 101.
We made it to Eureka just in time to get chili dogs and garlic fries at Mike’s, a burger joint my dad’s family has patronized for at least five generations (it’s that good). I saw a lot of beautiful country on this trip, but it just doesn’t get any better than Humboldt County in the springtime. All you nice folks I met in Kansas, Wyoming, and Montana need not worry: This is one Californian who is staying put. As Dorothy said way back there near the 100th meridian, there’s no place like home.
Day Eight: Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon
So it turned out that the senators couldn’t do much for us despite their willingness to try, but some staff members at the Montana Historical Society (more really nice, helpful people!) were able to locate new information about Henry Larrabee within a few minutes. This left me some time to check out the stuffed buffalo known as Big Medicine (scroll down) and the Montana Museum’s exhibit of Evelyn Cameron photographs before we left Helena. I first learned about Cameron several years ago when I was researching a woman named Emma O’ Connor, who worked as a photographer in Blocksburg in the late 1800s. Cameron was making captivating and sometimes sassy images of life on the Montana frontier around the same time as O’ Connor, and I especially fell in love with her photographs depicting women’s lives out West. After we said goodbye to Joetta and Bob (and Montana), Jim pointed the pickup west and we headed for home.
Day Seven: Montana Senators are Nice!
I just happened to meet Montana State Senator Jim Elliott while trying to find rooms for everyone at a motel in Helena (yikes...I originally wrote “I met a Montana state senator at a motel in Helena..."). He very kindly offered to help us in our search for Henry Larrabee, and also put me in touch with another senator named Mike Cooney, whose grandfather was a Montana governor in the 1930s. This trip just keeps getting better and better.
Day Seven: Virginia City and Helena
I had the first good night of sleep I’ve had on this whole trip at the Stonehouse Inn last night. I woke up at six, and slipped outside for a walk downtown. When I returned, everyone was up and John and Linda were fixing breakfast (John, a self-taught carpenter, remodeled their amazing kitchen and built some of the furniture in the house). Later, we met Evelyn and Joanne over at the library. With their help we were able to determine that Henry Larrabee wasn’t in fact the sheriff of Madison County, as we previously thought. He was, however, the first sheriff in Missoula, which meant this afternoon we had to drive to Helena where the records we need are stored (I made Jim listen to Paul Zarzyski’s poem Why I Like Butte on my iPod as we passed by Butte). We will do more research at the Montana Historical Society tomorrow, and then we’ll head home.
Evelyn and Joanne also arranged for us to meet with John Ellingson, a respected Montana historian and Mason. John very graciously allowed us to see the inside of the Virginia City Masonic lodge room (the oldest, he said, in the country). We looked through the relevant registers they had on site (there are apparently more in other locations), but we were unable to find Larrabee. Jim thought he might have been involved in the Virginia City vigilance committee that hung several “road agents” in 1864. Larrabee had helped found the first Masonic lodge in California while he was there and is the only person who essentially admitted his involvement with the vigilante group that perpetrated the massacre on Indian Island in Humboldt Bay. It seems unlikely now, though, that he had anything to do with what went on in Virginia City. We’ll see what we turn up tomorrow.
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My Projects
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The Blocksburg Book
