History
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Grandpa Would Have Loved the Web
My granddad was an early adopter way before that term ever entered the lexicon. As soon as a new tech product landed on the shelves, he had to have it. We’ve got all sorts of 8mm and Super8 films as well as audio recordings dating back more than sixty years. My mom recently gave me a cassette tape with an audio recording from a family reunion in Washington that Grandpa made back in the summer of 1946 using a phonograph that could record sound on blank discs. It’s so fascinating to hear the voices of long-departed relatives like my great grandparents and also how young my grandparents sound--not to mention my mom reciting Little Bo Peep at four years old. It is such a treasure. I tear up every time I listen to it, and it makes me wonder now that capturing memories like this is so easy if we’ll treasure them as much in another sixty years.
Sunday, May 07, 2006
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.
Monday, May 01, 2006
Day Six: Club-Foot George
John, our host at the Stonehouse Inn, entertained us with some fantastic stories about Virginia City, but the best was the tale of how George Lane’s club foot ended up on a shelf at the local museum. Lane was among the “road agents” who terrorized Virginia City in the winter months of 1863 and 1864, and who were consequently hanged by a group of vigilantes with ties to the local Masonic Lodge. In the 1930s, as John said the story goes, some fellas down at the local bar got in an argument over where in fact Lane was buried. The original grave markers had been made of wood and over the years they had deteriorated and fallen over, making it difficult to determine who was buried where. As the drink-infused discussion continued down at the saloon, some of the men decided they were going to find out once in for all which grave belonged to Club Foot George. They headed up to Boot Hill and started digging until they found a skeleton that resembled him. They took the foot back to the bar “to show the rest of ‘em,” and that’s where it stayed until it was finally moved to the museum. John said they are planning to make a plaster cast of the foot for their exhibit and rebury the actual appendage under George Lane’s marker.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
Oral History
A few years ago, I went with my mom and Veltha Coleman to videotape an interview with Irene Stapp out in Hettenshaw Valley (that’s in the southwestern part of Trinity County). One of Irene’s great-grandfathers opened the first store in Blocksburg, while another, as legend has it, battled a grizzly bear with a knife by shoving his arm down the animal’s throat and stabbing it from the inside. Grizzly Mountain is named for the incident, although Irene says that isn’t where it happened. Anyway, I just got around to putting up this Quicktime clip, where Irene talks about her Wailaki heritage and Lucy Young, who lived through the massacres of the 1860s and provided anthropologists with much of what is known about Wailaki life before the arrival of white settlers in that region.
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
1950s Footage of San Francisco
A couple years ago, my aunt gave me a bunch of 8mm film that my granddad shot in the late 1940s and ‘50s. I was going to transfer it all myself, but after researching the process, I decided it looked like too much work. Last week, Pat took three reels to Digital Pickle. They cleaned it all up and transferred it to MiniDV and DVD for me. This is a short Quicktime clip taken, according to my mom, at a ranch “in San Francisco.” She is pictured on the horse. I don’t know who the little boy is.
Added April 7, 2006: My mom says the little boy’s name is Herbie Brenjolson. Are you out there, Herbie?
