The Recollections of Ernest Everett "Sharkey" Rawles

Part I: 1897-1916
Transcribed by James W. Rawles from audio tapes recorded between 1977 and 1979

Transcriber's introductory notes:

Ernest E. Rawles was born January 27, 1897, at the Rawles Ranch, located in the Anderson Valley, just north of Boonville, in Mendocino County, California.

The Rawles family (with various spellings including Rawles, Rawls, Rawle, Rowle, Raule, Rawell, Raley, Rawley, Raleg, Ralegh, and Raleigh) has been traced to West Somerset, (with written references as early as 1267) and later St. Juliot, Cornwall, England. According to family historian and genealogist Henry W. Rawls of Montgomery, Alabama, the first members of the Rawle family to settle in America were most likely Francis Rawle and his son of the same name, who landed at Philadelphia, in the province of Pennsylvania, on the 23rd of June, 1686. They came on the ship Desire , which sailed from Plymouth, England. Franics Rawle, the elder, died in 1697. He was succeeded by Francis, Jr., and his descendants, who have been continuously located in Philadelphia ever since. One of the descendants of Francis Rawle later settled in South Carolina, thus establishing another major branch of the family. Yet another branch of the family settled in Pickaway County, Ohio, sometime before 1810. It is not clear whether this branch of the family originated with the Philadelphia or South Carolina Rawle contingents. At some point in time, most likely before 1800, the terminating letter "s" was added to the Rawle family name by members of the Ohio branch of the family.

Joseph Rawles (Ernest's grandfather) was born and raised in Pickaway County, Ohio, where he lived with his parents until age 20. (About 1828). He then moved to Indiana, where he raised livestock for 10 years (from about 1828 to about 1838). In 1830, while living in Indiana, he married Sintha Ann Bilderback. In about 1838, they moved to Missouri, where they ranched for 10 years (from about 1838 to about 1848). According to the book Grass Roots of Anderson Valley, they then moved to Iowa, then Nebraska, and then back to Iowa.

According to Ernest's account, Joseph and Sintha Rawles lived in Lebanon (Warren County), Ohio "before heading west" in about 1856. He said that they "left their land in someone else's charge." (One cousin, Joseph P. Rawles, who had a wife named Eloise, lived there as recently as 1916.) The town of Lebanon, Ohio was built up on the old Rawles home site.

According to Ernest's account, in about 1851, Joseph and Sintha Rawles moved to Springfield, (Sangamon County), Illinois. In about 1855 or 1856 they travelled to St. Joseph ("St. Joe"), Missouri, where their wagon joined an emigrant train that headed west (most likely in the spring) in either 1856 or 1857. (According to the book Grassroots of Anderson Valley, they left with a emigrant caravan from Mills County, Iowa.) According to oral history Ernest recounts hearing from his father, they crossed the Sierra Nevada mountains via the Donner Pass. The Rawles family settled in Boonville in 1857.

Ernest Everett Rawles was the second son of Robert Henry Rawles (born about 1845, died 1911) Robert Rawles was the seventh child of Joseph and Sintha (Bilderback) Rawles. Robert was about 14 year old when his family made their overland trip west. His first wife, Margaret (Brown) Rawles died in childbirth only a year after they were married.

On Sept. 27, 1885, Robert Rawles married Delcena McAbee (1857-1951) Robert and Delcena Rawles had six children: Vernon Robert Rawles 1886-1948), Vera Winona (Rawles) Babcock (she later remarried, to a man named James Galway) (1889-1961), Lois Elaine (Rawles) Clow (1892-1960), Ernest Everett Rawles (1897-1985), Zelpha (Rawles) Michelson (1895-1956), and Thelma (Rawles) Faught (1899-1984).

Ernest married Jane Eloise Wallach (born January 29, 1897, Boonville, Ca.) in 1919. Eloise was the daughter of John E. Wallach (1869-1951) and Martha "Mattie" T. (Burger) Wallach (1879-1953). John Wallach was the son of William Wallach and Gertrude (Priller) Wallach. William Wallach was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia).

Eloise had one brother and one sister: Kent Burger Wallach (1893-1959) and Ermine Gertrude (Wallach) Turner (1911- ). Eloise died on March 3, 1976, in Oakdale, California.

Together, Ernest and Eloise had three children: Doris Gayle (Rawles) Brower (born August 14, 1920, ), John William Rawles (born April 28, 1928, died May 5, 1982), and Donald Robert Rawles (born December 24, 1930, died September 2, 1985).

This installment of E.E.R.'s oral history details his life up to the end of 1916. A second installment covers 1917-1919, including his experiences living and working in Arizona. A third installment covers the later years of his life, including his lengthy career as a surveyor and resident engineer with the Hetch Hetchy Water and Power system. He retired in 1962. Ernest died on March 31, 1985 in Oakdale, California. He was buried in Boonville, California.

Part I:

"It was still wild country then."

I liked growing up on the ranch. We ran livestock on the land, and cut quite a bit of timber. We had horses, cattle, pigs, and Merino sheep. Lots of sheep. Two or three thousand at a time were run by the various members of the family. [To protect the sheep] we had to contend with the coyotes, mountain lions, and bear.

Anything left over from the dinner table went in a barrel for the pigs. We put barley in with it. We made hams and bacon. My dad died when I was 14 [November 9, 1911]. By the time I was 15, I was killing hogs and making hams and bacon. We put the hams down in brine, and cured 'em that way, and then we'd hang them and smoke them. We had a regular smoke house right back of the house. We made a smudge fire, using oak wood. We had one compartment [in the smoke house] for salmon, where we hung them up to dry, and we had another for venison. So we usually had ham, venison, and salmon in the smoke-house. Mother always took care of the chickens. I had a brother [Vernon] and four sisters [Vera, Zelpha, Lois, and Thelma.]

The lighting [at the ranch house] was all coal oil [kerosene] lamps. They were wick lamps. Later we got a lamp called the Alladin. It was a mantle lamp. That was a great improvement. They gave very good light. We had lanterns for light outside. One of my chores was to take care of the lamps. I kept them filled with coal oil, and I'd have to trim the wicks just a certain way, to make [the flame] a nice round flare. Another type of lamp used up there [in Anderson Valley] was carbide lamps. These burned carbide pellets. In our house, all we had was coal oil lamps. Hell, when I was trying to study at night, going to high school, a wonder we had any eyes[sight] left at all. You never had enough light to read by.

The original Rawles cabin was on the back side of the hill, just north of the Lone Tree. Just a couple of hundred yards. When I was a kid, I also saw what they called the Burnt Shanty, on the flat next to the road. That was part of the original homestead. That's all gone now.

We had a big ranch house with a veranda. Vernon was born in the 'Democrat' house. Later, the family moved to a bigger house, nearby. I was born in the big house [as was Lois, but Thelma was born in Ukiah]. It was built in about 1889. That was when my sister Vera was a baby. I remember mother telling me that there was a total eclipse of the sun on the day that my sister Vera was born [on January 1, 1888]. After he got the Denmark hotel, Dad also had a little place that was [later] called the Democrat house. It was called the Democrat house because he was always fixing it up for mother. Neighbors would kid him. They said that by the time he was done, it would look like a Democrat house, because father had married a Democrat. He was a Republican.

Now it is true that the Denmark place was won in a poker game, but the rest of the place was paid for in hard-earned cash. The Clow brothers, George and Henry, had a sawmill in the canyon directly across the valley [built in 1876, produced 12,000 board feet per day, it operated for 20 years], and they had to go through our property to get over to theirs. My dad deeded them the right-of-way across the fields in return for the lumber to build the big house. I came across the papers relating to that deal [and many other transactions] in an old metal box up at the ranch house. I wish that I had kept that box of papers. There were a lot of papers [and correspondence] dating back to the 1860s. I left it there at the ranch. There were a lot of old-time [tax and postage] stamps in it, too--way back in [18]60s and 70s.

You couldn't imagine the price of the lumber in those days. I saw the receipt for al that wood. It was nine dollars a thousand for rustic, eleven dollars a thousand for tongue and groove vertical grain flooring, and thirteen dollars a thousand for redwood siding.

[For the mill right across from the ranch], they had a gravity rail line that ran down from the mill. The tracks were made out of pine--about 1-by-6s. They'd load up a [rail] car with lumber and run it down the grade, with a guy settin' up on it to run the brake. They had a horse to bring the empty car back up the hill. The tracks were wooden, so they're gone now, but the grade is still there.

My mother had a big garden, and she grew lots of roses. The most beautiful roses you'd ever saw. It sat up on the hill, above the little bench above the road [now highway.] It was still wild country then. There was a lot more game.

Grandmother's [Delcena (McAbee) Rawles's] mother [Margaret (Pitcher) Weaver - Eliott] came out after grandmother [Susan (Weaver) McAbee and grandfather [John Wesley "Mack" McAbee] came out. The McAbee crossing is described in my grandmother [Susan] McAbee's oral history. One error in that is a description of crossing the Watkins River. It should have been the Walker River. That was an error in the shorthand that was transcribed. Also the Mono Lake she mentioned as the source of the Walker ["Watkins"] River was not the Mono Lake that we know [today]. It could have been any of several up in the Mono Pass area--any of those Emigrant Lakes or Fremont Lake could have been called Mono Lake at that time, because they were up on the Mono Pass. One item that was left out was that Delcena's mother preferred to ride sidesaddle on a horse while making the crossing, as she was pregnant, and preferred it over riding in the bumpy wagon.

They came out by the route established by the Clark-Skidmore party, just the year before [in 1852, possibly with the Duckwall or Trahern party]. The Bidwell party came across the year before that. They followed what was what they called the southern pass route of the Emigrant Trail. It went from the Carson River, by way of the Walker River over the Sierra several miles south of what is now the Sonora Pass. They nearly got trapped at Relief Valley by early snows, and had to send for help from Sonora. They [the relief party] charged them just about everything they had to get them out of there. Because of the trouble that the party had with the route, the southern route wasn't used much by the later emigrant parties. The same route was later used by miners' pack trains going to Bodie in the 1860s and 1870s.

Grandmother [Susan (Weaver) McAbee] told me that at one lake [presumably Fremont Lake], the men had to take the logs and driftwood out of the lower end of the lake to drop the lake's level, so that the wagons could go along the shore of the lake. This was just below the Emigrant Pass. She also told me that they went down to Emigrant Lake, and couldn't get out of [the] Emigrant Lake [valley.] They had to backtrack. They had to go clear back up a ways. They went down Summit Creek to through Lunch Meadows, and then to Relief, and then on to the top of Dodge Ridge, and then down Dodge Ridge, to Whiteside Meadow. Then they went to Birth Rock [Burst Rock], where George Nevada was born [actually, according to Susan (Weaver) McAbee's account he was born earlier, on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada], and then into Pinecrest, Long Barn, and Sonora. [The routes are all described in the book Ghost Trails to California by Thomas H. Hunt, published by American West Publishing Co., Palo Alto, Ca.]

I have traced the Emigrant trail route from Ragtown [Nevada, now on Highway 50], east of Carson City, through to Coalville. Now I've got to get the route from Coalville up over the hill, through Antelope Valley, up over Summit Meadows, through Leavitt Meadows. The rest of it, I know. I have it on paper [on maps]. I know that they didn't come up Mill Creek. I've been up there and decided that isn't the route. The route is a parallel creek, which is called Lost Cannon Creek.

The reason why they call it Lost Cannon Creek is because General Fremont dragged this damned cannon all over the state of California and part of Oregon. He'd shoot it off once in a while to scare the Indians. He was a topographer. that was his mission. Some of the men wanted to get rid of the thing. They didn't want to drag it along. They'd lose it, and then have to go back and get it. Somewhere, they lost the cannon completely. Everybody is of the opinion that its in Lost Cannon Creek. So people go up there and dig and all--still looking for it. But according to Fremont's story, its up in the Klamath lake country. [Fremont's adventures are described in several books, including Frontier Fremont and The Six Trails of General Fremont. ]

I don't know how many acres they [the McAbees] had [at Yorkville]--not too many. But of course in those days, you'd get a certain number of acres, and run everything [adjacent vacant land] whether they owned it or not. They later bought the hotel from either [W.W.] Boone or Bosick.

Delcena was born in 1857 at Two Rock [California]. She dictated her story [in 1950], when she was 93 years old. Her brother, George Nevada [McAbee] was born while they were on the trail. There's a place on the map in the Sierra Nevadas on the Emigrant Trail called Burst Rock was originally called Birth Rock. That could be were George Nevada was born, on October the 10th, 1853. [More likely he was born on the east side of the pass.]

Grandpa [John W. McAbee] first came to California in 1846 or 1847. He was in the Mexican[-American] War. He came out directly from Texas, with a group of soldiers, re-tracing Fremont's trail. This was because at that time [during the Mexican-American War] they thought that they were going to have to bring soldiers out and join Fremont. Fremont was already out here then. During the Mexican War, they sent general Kearny across to Southern California, with a bunch of soldiers. And then about the same time, they were going to send troops into northern California, but they didn't know what route to take. Grandfather was just a trooper in the group of four or five that came over, using some of Fremont's maps, re-marking the trail [to northern California.] California at that time belonged to Mexico. That was his first trip, in 1846 or 1847.

At the end of that trip he went back around the Horn [Cape Horn] on a boat out of San Francisco. Then when he got back to North Carolina, where they lived at that time. His first wife had passed away. So, after a while, he married grandmother [Susan Minerva (Weaver) McAbee]. They came to California. After they got to California and got settled, grandpa [John McAbee] and another man went back on horseback to North Carolina, and put grandmother's mother and grandmother's sister on a boat to New Orleans. They came back by way of the Isthmus of Panama. Meanwhile, grandpa and his partner came back by horseback to California. [So in all, he made three trips to California.]

Just before grandmother's mother and her sister's boat got to the Isthmus of Panama, the boat ran up on a reef. They lost all of their possessions, but they finally got across the Isthmus of Panama, and by boat got up to San Francisco [where John McAbee met them], and back to where grandmother and grandfather lived. After they got out to California, my great grandmother [Margaret (Pitcher) Weaver married Bill [William B.] Elliot.

Bill Elliot had come out with General Fremont. Later, he was an aide to General Fremont, in California. He lived down in Sonoma. My grandmother and grandfather lived at that time over by Bodega Bay [at Two Rock], so they got to know Bill Elliot. After Bill Elliot's first wife passed away, he married my great-grandmother [who was widowed]. It was Bill Elliot's first wife that furnished the some of the material used to make the first bear flag. She furnished the material, but the flag was actually made by a couple of men. You'll find a piece in the history of Mendocino County about that. When they got through with it, she said, 'It looks more like a pig than it does a bear!' That's the story of the bear flag.

When the Bear Flag Republic was started, the committee was a group of pioneers, around through Sonoma County, mostly, they waited on General Vallejo, at Sonoma. General Vallejo was the Mexican sub-governor that administered California. It was bloodless coup. This committee took California over from General Vallejo. Bill Elliot was one of the members of this committee. General Fremont was also in that outfit.

They met with General Vallejo in Sonoma for the coup. Vallejo treated the group--the Bear Flag Committee--to a reception afterwards. Bill Elliot ended up with the corkscrew--or gimlet--that pulled the plug out of the barrel that treated the members of the committee. That same gimlet now belongs to Marguerite McAbee. She lives down at Tucson, Arizona. [She later moved to Ukiah, Ca.]

Grandmother McAbee's maiden name was Weaver. She had either brothers or cousins--I can't remember which--and they later came out to California. They settled first in Humboldt County. I think that at that time Humboldt County included [what is now] Trinity County. The town of Weaverville was named after James [John?] Biffell Weaver and his brother.

Bill Elliot was the one that discovered the geysers where the PG&E now has the power plant. He had a 7,000 acre Spanish grant there, [near Geyserville, Calif.]. He operated a [health] spa there. I can remember my mother used to talk about working up there. She waited on tables. He later sold the grant some people by the name of Grant. They tried to make steam power there, but they had some [technical] difficulties. Finally, PG&E got a hold of it, and they have a big power development there now.

We didn't have any hot springs around Boonville, but we did have a place called Soda Springs, acrossed Indian Creek [in the northwest corner of Section 13, T. 14N. R 14W]. There's a place there we called Salradas [sp?] rock. There was another one at Wendling--there's nothing there now--it's just outside of Navarro. Eloise used to teach school there, in the schoolhouse up the hill.

At Soda Springs, its a natural spring, comes right out of the hillside. It deposits soda--bicarbonate of soda. The spring bubbles up, and you can clean it out. Its a good drink. You can put a little lemon in it and throw in a spoonful of sugar in it, and it fizzes right up.

There's also a sulfur spring up at the head of the canyon that takes off from the ranch house. It smells just like rotten eggs. I've also seen sulfur deposits on the Walker River, after you get on the other side of where the Sonora Pass Road comes in, clear down in the canyon.

My father was an old pioneer, so he understood horses. He was a bit of a horse doctor for all of the neighbors. He had some pet remedies. He acted just like an old family doctor would, in those days. He'd go and stay there [with the horse] until the problem was solved. Doctors were the same way, but that changed pretty suddenly after the war. Nowadays, you can't hardly get a doctor to more than stick his nose in the door and say hello [before he's gone.]

People had their jealousies, just like they do today, but for strangers passing through, people were a lot more hospitable. Visitors would often drop by unannounced and uninvited. People would come in from [or going to] the coast, sometimes they'd come into the house when no one was at home [expecting our return later in the day]. Of course my dad was a politician [so he knew a lot of people.] I can remember we'd come home after a trip in the buggy, and there'd be a barn full of horses, and the chores done, and dinner on the table. That was just the way they did things in those days. They generally brought their provisions with them. If they didn't, then on the way back they'd bring provisions. People were more cooperative [back then.]

On the other hand, there were some serious family feuds. I called them Tong wars. There was some tough people, and a lot of squabbles. The Finneys and the Wallachs had a feud over a gate. They got to fighting over leaving this gate open, and Frank [Wallach] and Charlie Finney got into a fight. Charlie Finney cut his [Frank's] belly open, and his entrails fell out into the dirt. He died.

There was another feud out on Signal Ridge. Old man Haines, he was an old Salvation Army Captain. We called him Captain Haines. He was a great big guy, about six feet and a half. He was a horse breaker, that's what his profession was. His neighbor was named Crispin. He was little guy, about 120 pounds, about five and half feet high. They got to warrin'. Crispin had to come out through Haines's place, up on the ridge. Sometimes Crispin would forget to close the gate. It made Haines furious, so they went to court over it. They decided that Haines had the right to keep the gate closed, but he could put bars up there, instead of a gate. Haines built the bars out of 6 or 8 inch [diameter] pine logs, so he could lift them, but old man Crispin couldn't lift them. One day they met out at the gate, and got into a fight about it, and Crispin killed him. Ward Haines still has the old Haines place out there.

There were a number or horse thieves near the Anderson Valley area. The were mainly out in the rockpile country out Rancheria [Creek?] They used to gather horses there and then bring them down and peddle them in this country [the San Francisco Bay Area.]

At one time [Jeremiah M.] "Doc" Standley was the Sheriff in Mendocino County [1882-1884 and again 1888-1890]. One time Standley and his deputy, named Starkey, were looking for a bandit, and head word that he was hiding in a wood pile back of someone's house. Standley and Starkey come around the wood pile, and the guy opened up on them--hit Standley in the arm. Old Starkey ran off. Later somebody asked Starkey why he had run. He said, 'By God, because I couldn't fly!'

I heard that Standley's wound [to his arm] never really healed--part of the bone showed. Standley's son Hal was appointed to [the U.S. Naval Academy at] Annapolis. My father, who was a supervisor, wrote him a letter of recommendation--he was on his petition [to the academy]. That was in 1906. Later, Hal Standley became secretary of the Navy, and was an ambassador to Russia [the Soviet Union.]

I had some pets when I was a kid. I had several dogs. My sister Thelma had a pet racoon. My mother had a pet bear. It got full grown. She had it on a chain back behind the hotel. One hot day, it jumped in a barrel of water, and killed it[self]. I had a pony, named Cricket. Later, I had a good saddle horse. His name was Prince.

Prince was a standard-bred horse. In high school, I had a girlfriend named Ella [Eten]. I wanted to take her to a dance they were having at Ornbaun Valley [roughly half-way to Cloverdale]. Prince had never been hooked up to a buggy. Vernon had broke him to a saddle horse. I was supposed to take old Laddie, but he was getting pretty old, and I thought that it would be better to hook Prince up. So I hooked Prince up to the buggy.

I went down and got Ella--I had to go down to Philo to get her. The drive all the way out to Ornbaun Valley is 15, maybe 18 miles. We went to the dance and stayed until 2 in the morning, and headed back home. We got down past the house, [back toward Philo], started down the hill, and the shaft, where it hooks on to the axle, broke loose on one side. The shaft came down and hit Prince across the hocks. [Prince took a jump], and then one more one jump, and turned the buggy upside down in the middle of the road. It broke Ella's collarbone. I landed on top of Ella.

He run on down the road about a mile and a half. Jake Harrison had a new white picket fence in front of his house. He [Prince] didn't make the turn--he went right on through the fence. He broke all four wheels off the buggy before it finally turned upside down and he stopped. There I was with Ella. Somebody come along, coming along from somewhere or other, and picked us up, and took her home. By that time it was about 5 o'clock in the morning.

Ella [Eten] had two brothers, Steve and Rudolf. Weighed about 250 pounds, each of them. I came back to see Ella a couple of times, after that, but Steve would sit on one side, and Rudolf on the other. They sure had me buffaloed. I finally gave up entirely. Ella later married Leland Farrer's uncle. [Ernest Farrer.]

We had another horse named Duke. Some guy advertised that he was looking for a horse. At that time, we had this extra saddle horse [Duke]. Dad never liked him in the first place--he was kind of a knot-head. Anyway, he was a pretty good horse. The guy came by, and Dad sold old Duke to him. He took him to around Round Valley someplace--at least 45 or fifty miles away. He came home three days later. He not only came home once, but he came home twice! The first time, we took him over by Ukiah and met the guy. The next time he wandered home, a month or more later, the guy came [to Boonville] and got him. We never saw old Duke after that. Not only did he [Duke] come all that way, but he had to come all that distance, but he had to come through Ukiah, which by then was a good-sized town. He must have come through in the middle of the night.

Boonville was a very isolated community until about the 1920s. One young fella wanted some adventure, so he got on a tan oak bark wagon, and went over to Largo, which is on the Northwestern Pacific Railroad. He went down as far as Cloverdale. Then he got on a train, and went back up to Ukiah. From there, he hitched a ride back home. That's a triangle of about 30 by 30 [miles.] When he got home, he said, 'By gosh if the world is as big the other way as the way I went, she's a whopper.' That's about as some of the people got in those days. They hardly got on the other side of the hill.

In those days, of course, all the travel was on foot, on horseback, or by stagecoach or wagon. The stage line ran up from Cloverdale. They changed horses at Yorkville. From Yorkville, they drove all the way to Philo. From there, the stagecoach went over to Greenwood. It was four-horse stage. Sometimes in the winter-time they had six [horses.] The stage had a boot on the back for hauling luggage. The roads were so bad in those days, it was not unusual for the axles to drag in the mud. They also had a corduroy road for one muddy stretch outside Boonville. They'd lay spilt redwood about ten feet wide across the road. The Ukiah road was just wide enough to take a wagon over.

The tan oak [bark] business was one of the main occupations in Anderson Valley. In the spring, they'd peel the bark off of those tan oaks, and then in the summer they swamped out on trails, after it dried. They had to build trails so the pack trains could get in to pack it out. They used a string of mules with pack saddles. They had U-shaped iron hooks or hoops that came over the top of the pack [on each side]. They strapped the tan bark [strips] to the hoop. They had maybe 250 pounds on each mule. They ran the pack strings to a loading dump, and then load up the big high bark wagons.

With those tan oak wagons, hauling tan oak bark, they had a six horse team, two abreast. I'm not exaggerating, the driver's seat was ten feet above the road. Tan oak is fairly light when its dry. They'd have it two rows wide, and hanging clear out over the sides of the wagon. It was stacked up higher than the seat. Eloise's father [John E. Wallach] used to run a bark wagon. He had a camp set up near the Finney place, up at the top of the hill. He'd haul tan oak bark out of there. They'd reload it onto his wagon there, and he'd haul it over [to Ukiah] to the railroad. They had sometimes six horses, sometimes eight horses out ahead [in the team]. They had mounted bells on their collars. You could hear them coming for a half mile or so. They also had a chain out to the lead horses. Whenever they went around a tight corner, the horses would have to step over the chain. They were well-trained horses.

That Ukiah road was so narrow that you would have to unhook your wagon or buggy or whatever you happened to be in, and pull off into a hole somewhere and let the bark wagons go by [when they came in the opposite direction.] The road was widened out in about 1907 or 1908.

As kids, we used to hide in the brush by the side of the road and when the stage come by, we'd run out and climb up on the boot. Of course the stage driver knew that we were on there, but he'd pretend that he didn't know. He had a [horse]whip. He'd bring it over the back and pop it over our heads! That's the way we use to come home from school, sometimes. The stage would come by just about the time school let out. It was about two miles from the school to the ranch house. As we got older, we ran that two miles.

We had baseball games with teams from over on the coast. They could get pretty good ball players. These fellows from the colleges would come up to on boats work on the sawmills for the summer. They supposedly worked in the mills, but mostly they played baseball. We had a our own little town team. We used to practice very often and got a pretty good team. My brother [Vernon] was a good player. I was pretty young. I was playing with men who were 25 or 30 years older. I was only about 13 or 14. I always had to keep up with men. That's the way I grew up. [In 1916 the team consisted of: Max Rawles, Ernest Rawles, Garth Rawles, Fred Rawles (team manager), Phocian MGimsey, Roy Clay, Dutch Windom, Woody Clay, Vernon Rawles, and Jim Hutsell.]

The baseball games were quite an event. Each team had a big banner out there, and people would be rootin' and hollerin' for the ball teams. People would come from miles around--from way back in the hills and other places--to see a ball game. There was nothing else for them to ever look at. There were no motion picture shows or no entertainment of any kind. Afterwards, we'd have a dance, and everybody would get drunk. During the game, all the players would stay pretty-well sober until after the game was over.

[Later,] There was also football team. The first game was played in 1906. I was about 9 years old, at the time. Let's see if I can remember some of their names. There was one of my cousins, Fred [Rawles], he was the quarterback. Tom McKay, he was a school teacher. Jack Kepple was the blacksmith. Charlie Murray, he was a sheep shearer. My brother, Vernon, he had just come back from business college down in Santa Rosa, there were also a couple of Indian fellows--Skip Billings was one of them.

My brother came back from business college, and he and some of his friends decided that they'd organize a football team there in Boonville. I don't know whether he had played football at college, or just seen it played. The Indians, over around Covelo or Redwood Valley, had a football team. There was also a team down at Geyserville.

So after the boys had put their football team together, they decided that they had better play the Indians first. Because, hell, they could beat the damned Indians. So the Indians came over, the old squaws, and the old bucks, and all of them. Well, most of them walked from over around Ukiah some place. They camped on the creek. That was a big holiday for 'em--they was going to play football.

Anyway, they had the football game, and the Indians beat Boonville 52-to-nothing. We come to find out that the Indians had been trained by Moose James. He was a Carlysle Indian. He played football at Carlysle [University] team back east. So he knew all about football. After that, they got old Moose James to come over and train them [the Boonville team.] Then, they had a pretty good football team. They used to go down and play Geyserville, and other places. I don't recall whether or not they went down to play at Santa Rosa.

We never had too many fireworks for the Fourth of July [in Anderson Valley]--you'd burn the whole country down. We used to go see the fireworks over on the coast. Over at Point Arena, they had a celebration that sometimes would last two or three days. They had horse races, and foot races, and baseball games, and picnics, and dances.

One year, we were having a 4th of July Celebration in Boonville. To attract people, they had a fellow come along who did hot-air balloon ascensions. They dug a little hole, and put a kerosene burner under it. All around the outside, they had sand bags to hold it [the balloon] down. Finally after it got more full, they let out more and more canvas until it was more than 30 feet in diameter. Underneath, they had ropes to a wicker gondola. Then they had fellows kick off the sand-bags. The balloon would take right off, and go up until the air began to cool, and then it would settle back down. It went up about 2,000 feet, and then he jumped out and came down by parachute.

The kid's name was Hugo Debine. He was also the snake charmer in the side-show. They had the ascension there [at Boonville], and then the next day they had an ascension down at Navarro, about ten miles further toward the coast. When he went up that time, it went out over the woods, with no safe place to land [the parachute]. So he decided to stay with it until it come down. It came down in the top of a big old redwood tree. I suppose they sent a team of lumberjacks up on springboards to get a rope up there to get him down. Hugo quit soon after that episode. He got a job as a blacksmith's helper. He did that for a long time. He was justa roustabout kid. I guess he was about 18 years old.

For fun, when I was growing up, we did a number of things. There was a steep, grassy bluff [on the ranch] that we called the Slidin' Hill. We'd slide down that hill. We'd take and old board, and put a little bevel on one end, and put cleats on it--just like a [snow] sled. When the grass was green in the spring time, you'd come down that hill 50 miles an hour, bouncing three feet high crossing over trails. You'd come clear down to the fence. We had whole parties of kids that came from all over to slide down that hill. Everybody knew the old Slidin' Hill. We didn't have too much time for fun and games, though. We kept workin' from the time we were big enough to work. They always found something for you to do.

The first radio broadcast I heard was of the Dempsey-Firpo fight [boxing match.] Shortly after that, I spent quite a bit of money, and I bought a radio called a Superheterodyne. It was battery powered, and had a loop antenna. You twisted the antenna this way and that way to bring the stations in. I found out that if you'd just take a coil of wire and throw it out on the floor, and hook that on, and it was better than the loop antenna.

We of course had plenty of rattlesnakes around Boonville. You'd encounter them in the strangest places. One time I was up in that steep opening country [near Cow Springs]. I was going up a sidehill that was almost straight up and down, using my rifle for a cane. I set the rifle down, and there was a big old [rattle]snake right above my nose. I dropped my gun and slid off down the hill maybe 30 feet before I could stop. I went back and got him, all right.

Another time, my brother and I were riding horseback, coming around a trail on a side-hill, and a big old snake was on the bank. I went by [not noticing it], and when my brother's horse came along, it struck at the horse, and went right through the bridle-reins. We got that one, too.

My father's people came across the plains in 1857. My grandmother McAbee's family had come out west earlier, in 1851 [actually 1853]. Grandmother McAbee came over Emigrant Pass, which is down near Yosemite. My grandfather came over the Donner Pass, which is comes by Reno.

When my dad and uncle was a youngster [before or after emigrating to California?], they had some other boys that came visiting who were pretty rough. They were white, but they dressed like Indians. The boys always went barefoot, so they had to wash their feet before they went to bed every night. Well, my grandmother came and saw that the other boys still had their buckskin pants on. She said, 'You boys have got to get undressed before you get into bed.' They said, 'But we haven't had out pants off all winter. These don't come off 'til spring.' With those buckskins, they get wet and draw-up. You can't hardly get them off.

My uncle Alec 'A.N.' [Alex Nathan Rawles] used to ride bucking horses all the time. He used to get great calluses on his heels from wearing spurs, barefooted. He'd take a pair of spurs, and bend them in, so they'd go over his heel--wore 'em barefooted.

Once, Dad [Robert Henry Rawles] had bought a Durrock Jersey boar. The red kind. He was a nice boar, he weighed about 150 pounds, I guess. He brought him back, and had him out in the barn yard. Right away, he started eating mother's chickens. Mother got mad and said [to father], 'If you don't get rid of that darned boar, and take him up in the hills, I'm going to shoot him.' I was out in the back yard a while later and hollered to mother, 'That darned boar has another one of your chickens again.!' He was going around the trail, about halfway up to the Slidin' Hill. A good 150 yards up there. He had this hen in his mouth. She said, 'Get the gun!' I went and got the old .44 [caliber, a Winchester Model 1873 lever-action .44-40]. She took it and laid it over the fence. I thought that she was just going to shoot and scare him--make him drop the old hen. She hit the pig, and it rolled end over end, down the hill. Killed him dead as a doornail.

My father was on the board of supervisors for the county. [Elected supervisor representing the 1st District of Mendocino County, November 6, 1900. He was succeded by D.H. Lawson November 8, 1904.] He had an apple orchard there on the old Denmark place--back of where the hotel used to be. It had been there for... I don't know... Some of the trees must have been fifty years old. They were planted back in the 1850s or 60s. They were good golden apples. Father had never done much with the old orchard because you'd never get much fruit out of it. In 1906 or 1907, they had found some coddling moths in the apples [in the county] so they passed an ordinance [requiring pesticide spraying.] So Dad got busy, and we spent a couple of weeks pruning these old trees up. We were getting the dead wood out, getting them ready to spray. He had gotten in a row about it [the orchard] over at the county seat in Ukiah. The first thing you know, they [the horticultural commission set up by the supervisors] said that he had to get the orchard ready to spray on a certain day. We didn't quite get it done [by that day.] So here come the darned [spraying] outfit down the valley. They stopped at somebody else's orchard first, and then they were going to come to our orchard next.

Dad said, 'Son, get an axe!' I brought up a double-bitted axe and asked what he was going to do. He said, 'We're going to cut that damned orchard down.' We went out there with Clancy [ ] and John [ ] and cut every cockeyed tree down. Pretty soon they came with the sprayer. Dad says, 'By God, you can spray 'em now if you want to. I got 'em down to where you can get at 'em.' He was stubborn, but he was right, usually.

There was one old apple tree on the Witherell place, over on Con Creek, over there. That thing had not ben sprayed or pruned for 40 or 50 years. Every year it was just loaded down with apples. One time I went down there with a couple of five gallon cans. I filled them up with apples and tied them on behind the back of the saddle, and brought them home. By God, those were the best apples I ever had in my life.

At one time, Joe Rawles [Joseph Rawles II, 1842-1872], my dad's older brother, was written up in the Oakland Tribune newspaper. He had gone back east for the Civil War. It was rumored that he was a Bushwacker. When he came back out west, he got off the ferry boat in San Francisco, carrying a carpet bag. A guy came up and grabbed the bag. In those days, you see, each hotel had its own conveyance, and they were and there was a lot of competition to pick up paying customers. The coach driver picked up the bag, and Joe says 'Put it down,' but the driver didn't want to take no for an answer. Finally, Joe pulled out his big Colt [Model 1860] Army .44 cap and ball revolver. He didn't point it at the guy, he just scratched his ear with it, [to show that he meant business]. The driver commenced to holler. A cop came across the street, to see what was happening, and the driver yelled, 'This man is carrying a concealed gun.' The cop looked at Joe and said, 'Hell, It's not concealed, I can see it,' and walked away.

That same Joseph Rawles was a stage coach driver after he settled in Anderson Valley. At one point [late 1871 or very early 1872], some fellas held the stage up, when it was on its way up from Cloverdale. The stage coaches, you see, carried cash boxes with the payrolls for the mill towns on the coast. [When the bandits stopped the stage] Old Joe dropped off from the opposite side of the stage from where the hold-up men were, and walked around the stage, and got the drop on them [with his guns]. He was a pretty good two-gun man himself. He had killed a man [named Tim Olden] up in Idaho. Anyway, he said, 'I know who you boys are, now go on home. If you don't, I'll blast ya.' They did just what he said--they went on home.

One of the hold-up men was some relation to his [Joe's] wife's people, named [ ] Gibbons. Old Joe was invited to dinner [with the Gibbons] by his brother-in-law one time, [soon] after this [hold-up attempt]. I guess this guy arrived there at the same time. I suppose that he thought that Joe was planning to turn him in. He came around the corner of the house and opened up on Joe, as he was coming up the walk, and knocked him down, then he turned and run. Joe was shot through the lung. By that time, Joe had got his revolver out. The guy ran around the corner of the house, and Joe fired. The bullet hit the corner of the house right about where his ear would be. It just [barely] missed him. I can remember seeing the splinters on the corner of the house.

He [Joseph] lived quite a little while after that. While he was recovering from the bullet wound, he was reading in bed one night. A breeze came up and blew the curtain over the coal-oil [kerosene] lamp, setting it on fire. Joe jumped up to try to put the fire out, and he had a hemorrhage, and died. Other than that, he was getting along all right. He probably would have lived. [He died in January, 1872, at age 29. His grave marker can be seen in the Boonville cemetery.]

After Gibbons had shot uncle Joe, he ran out in the woods. Everybody was looking for this guy--a big posse was formed. Later, after they caught him, he told my father that at one point he was hiding in a hollow log, and some members of the posse had sat on top of the log, taking a break, talking, while he was inside it.

Joseph was the main family name in the Rawles Family. My dad's father was named Joe, and Dad's brother was named Joe. That Joe had a son named Joe, and he had a [son named] Joe, too. The last Joe died about six or eight years ago [about 1970]. The first Joseph Rawles left Springfield, Illinois in about 1851. He had settled first in Circleville, Ohio. Later, he moved to Lebanon, Ohio, shortly before moving west. They left their land their in someone else's charge.

In 1916, just before I finished high school, Joseph P. Rawles came out west to visit. He asked all the family members to sign a 'quit claim' deed, since the town of Lebanon, Ohio, had grown up on the old farm site. His wife's name was Eloise. Because Joe and his wife had no children of their own, Joe asked me if I wanted to go back east to put me through college, and to help him run his chain of drug stores, but I didn't want to leave Eloise [Wallach].

Behind the ranch house was a plot of corn about 100 by 100 feet. At the time, mother was after me to go out and shuck the corn. Joseph said, 'Heck, I'll help ya, we'll have it done in no time.' He set in to shucking corn, keeping one ear in the air at all times. We formed a large pile in the center of the plot. In 'helping' me, he did more work than I did. He certainly did know how to shuck corn.

Once while Joe was visiting us, while we were having breakfast, a covey of six quail flew into one of the windows on the house, breaking their necks on the glass. Apparently, a hawk had scared them, an they thought that they would escape by diving through an 'open' window, but the window wasn't open. Joseph seemed pretty impressed with this turn of events. We picked the six birds up off the ground, plucked them, and had them for the second course of our breakfast. He said, 'This is the first place I ever came to where breakfast flew in the window.'

[Around 1915] Eloise [Wallach] was sent a necklace of gold nuggets by her boyfriend, Dick Fitch. He had been a blacksmith in Boonville. He and Gus [Wallach] went way into the back-country of Alaska, prospecting. They were gone a couple of years. Gus came back, but Dick stayed up there, and worked in construction. Dick went to Alaska before Eloise and I started going together. He operated a steam shovel. Someone [accidently] dropped the [shovel] dipper on him, and killed him. [Before he died], he sent that necklace with a little pendant attached to it, filled with gold dust.

When Gayle was a little girl, she used to take it and wear it around in the house. One time, when she was 6 or 7 years old, she run up to the pansy field with it on and she come back and the little pendant was split wide open, and all the gold dust had gone out of it. She was cryin'. Mother took Gayle back up to the pansy field trying to find the gold dust, but they didn't find the gold dust [apparently scattered.] Eloise scolded her about wearing the necklace before. After that, the necklace was put away, and I don't think mother ever wore it again more than once or twice. [Eloise gave the necklace to Don who in turn gave it to his daughter, Gayle Marie (Rawles) Wuchenich.]

Eloise also had two emerald rings with a story behind them. When she first taught school at Seaside, which is near Wallola, she knew and old one-eyed chinaman named Ah Ann [pronounced Ahh Awn.] He was about 75 years old. [Because he could not read or write English], the school missy had to make out his waybills for the kelp that he gathered, dried, baled, and sent to San Francisco. Chinamen use it for some purpose, or other. Once a year, he would take his seaweed down and get his money. For keeping his books for him and making out his billings and so forth, he came back with those emerald rings and gave them to her. The gold was so soft [24 karat] that they got bent out of shape whenever she wore them, so she didn't wear them very often.

When I was a kid, Boonville had about the same population as it has now. There were two hotels. Jeff Vestal owned one. The other at one time was owned by grandfather and grandmother [McAbee], after they came down from Yorkville. It was called the Denmark House, because it was previously owned by old man Denmark. Before that, it was owned by [W.W.] Boone [for whom Boonville is named]. [My] Mother used to tell me that Boone was a half-colored person.

The McAbee's hotel was a stopping place between the county seat in Ukiah, and the coast. People used to stop there. It was a big old two story building. He also had the saloon diagonally across from it, and then a big livery stable, which sat down on the flat, closer to the creek. The stage also changed horses there, at one time. They also had a race track field across the creek. They also played football and baseball there, too.

The hotel building was built from hewn timbers. The big timbers were mortised and put together with pegs. The siding was shiplapped siding--split out of logs. They shaved them down with broad-knives. Some of those pieces were six or eight inches wide. They were about 5/8ths or 3/4ths of an inch thick at the thick part and they lapped over each other like shingles. The thin part wouldn't be much over 3/8ths of an inch thick. Some of them were over 20 feet long! They must have picked out good redwood trees to do that. Inside, the redwood was all split as well, but finished--planed down with draw knives.

It sat just south right across from where the house is now. The original building was torn down just before the earthquake in 1906 [and a new hotel was built on the site.] They later sold the hotel. From 1915 on up, old J.E. Berry had that hotel. On Sundays, we used to go to aunt Liddy Vestal's [at the other hotel] for dinner. You could get a good dinner for 25 cents.

You've got to understand that we had a big ranch but we only got money once or twice a year out of it. The money wasn't very free. All the money you got was in gold coin. I remember I was nearly fifteen or sixteen years old before I saw much paper money. It was all gold and silver. They didn't have any greenbacks that I remember. My dad would take the wool and mutton to sell, and he'd come back with some tobacco sacks full of twenty-dollar gold pieces.

He used to drive three or four-hundred head of sheep down to Cloverdale. They only brought about $2 a head. A big four horse load of wool taken over to Ukiah would pay for the groceries and clothes for the next winter. That was the big trip of the year, when I was a boy. That was when the money came in. That was the way that we used to get paid for things. Gold and silver coins. As kids, they used to let us play with the gold coins now and again. That was quite a celebration.

We used to go work in the hop fields. We got paid one cent a pound for picking hops. You'd work your tail off to strip a hundred pounds. If you worked long, long hours--get out there at daylight, and head home at dark, you'd pick about 125 pounds. Finally, they paid us a cent and quarter. [$0.0125 per pound.]

We used to say that if you saved just ten percent of what you earned, you'd never go to the poor house. That's one of the first lessons I learned, and I've tried to do something along that line since. And I've never gone to the poor house.

There were some pretty strange remedies used in those days. We used poultices and bags of smelly stuff hung around our necks to ward off colds. The remedy for poison oak was to make a tea out of manzanita [leaves]. That was used to wash the skin that was affected. It worked pretty well. Sometimes it would discolor your skin, though. They also still used laudanum. That had opium in it.

The boundaries between the big family ranches in the old days were pretty casual. Before they made the land surveys, they had boundaries set to natural features like ravines and ridge lines. After the surveys, they tried to make the boundaries fit as well as they could to match the original boundaries. In the old days, boundaries just followed terrain rather than section lines. A lot of them were just 'from this creek to that ridge, and beyond that is your place.'

The land surveys were not made until the late [18]60s and early 70s. People were living up there a long time before that. They just claimed a certain parcel. Down there in the valley, where the streams come down, the dividing lines between family parcels were those creeks. That's how all the creeks got their name--like Donnelly Creek and Con Creek, and Ornbaun Creek.'

When the surveys did come through, they were not very accurate. A lot of places, they run three or four miles around and say [emphasis] that they ran in between. They'd say that they ran in these other section lines and they never did at all. A lot of them are off by five or six hundred feet in a half mile. Those surveys were done with transits and chains. A chain is made up of links about 8 inches long. A chain of 100 links is 66 feet. That's a unit of measure in an acre. An acre is ten square chains.

My dad bought the old Sherman homestead [adding it to the ranch]. I don't remember what happened to the bill of sale, but the property description on it ran something like this: 'Starting with a big redwood tree in the gulch 400 feet below my cabin, I run one-half mile south to a point on the top of the ridge near Alec's Cabin, from there I run east a half mile across my gulch past the top of the next ridge where Smalley shot the bear, and from there I run back north a quarter of a mile to where Tarwater lost his saddle, and from there back to the point of beginning.'

Sherman was a desperado. There were a lot of them like him, back in the hills. They were either on the run from the law, or a little bit funny in the head. There was another one named Marshall. He was a tough old guy. The Marshall place is just a couple of miles from the [Jake's Opening] Hunting Camp [at the headwaters of Indian Creek.] Vernon later took up that place for taxes. I think that's what Vernon did with that one. You see, when those old homesteads are abandoned like that, and if the title has been made clear on them, then you can buy them in with a tax sale. That's how Vernon got the Marshall place.

In order to homestead a piece of land, you had to prove up on a claim--that means making some improvements, to get title to it. You had to live on it, build a cabin, and develop a water supply--different things you had to do. A lot of these old guys didn't do a hell of a lot. They just built a cabin and lived in it.

The Crow family came across the Plains about the same time that my grandfather McAbee did. One of grandfather [McAbee]'s sisters, Jane, was married to one of the Crows [John L. Crow]. The Crows had a big cattle ranch in Lassen County. Later, they moved down to Berkeley.

There is a limited edition book, that can be found both in the library at Sacramento, [and at the Bancroft Library at U.C. Berkeley], called The Cattle Drives of David Shirk , based on David Shirk's original manuscript. It will tell you something about the Crow family and the Shirk family. He [David Lawson Shirk] drove cattle from Texas to Idaho. Then he established a cattle ranch there. Alice (McAbee) Shirk was grandpa McAbee's sister. It is an authentic California pioneer account. David Shirk married one of the Crows--Rankin Crow's daughter. So David Shirk's wife was also a cousin to my mother. Rankin Crow had a big ranch near Greenville, up in the Sierra Nevada mountains, right near the state line with Nevada.

Later, they settled in Berkeley. We called on the Shirks with my mother and father, just before he died. This was in about 1910. They had a house on Hearst Avenue in Berkeley. By the way, at that time they still had livestock in the town of Berkeley. One of David Shirk's sons [ ] was later one of the most wanted criminals in California, at one time. He was a "stocking bandit." He robbed banks. He wore a woman's stocking over his head for a mask, with eye-holes cut in it [during the robberies.] I think they finally sent him up [to prison]. There is still some of the Crow family living in the San Joaquin Valley. Some of them still live at Crow's Landing. It's an old pioneer family.

Leland Farrer's father [John Thomas Farrer Jr.] and grandfather [John Thomas Farrer Sr.] had a general store there in Boonville. They came from Green River, Utah [in about 1906]. It was Mormon settlement, although they weren't Mormon. There was also my uncle Sam McAbee's store there in town. The Farrer's store is still there. It's a two story building on the right hand side.

Mother once gave me $20 to pay on the grocery bill at Mr. Farrer's store. Instead of giving me a credit for it, he [accidently] charged me $20 [in the ledger]. Later, mother asked me, 'Did you borrow $20 from Mr. Farrer?' I said , 'No, I didn't borrow $20, I paid him $20.' [She replied,] 'Well, he's got us down as charging us $20 dollars.' So I went back to see John [Farrer] and he said, 'No, no, that's not right, I don't think so.' I said, 'Well look in your book.' Finally, [After consulting his ledger book] he said, 'Why gosh! That's right. I'll just knock it off.' [At that point] he still had $20 of my money! I had a hard time getting it from him. We finally got it straightened out.

The McAbee's store burned down. I remember Doc Caldwell had little house across the road from the store. The fire started in the back of the store building--they had a stove of some sort back there. It also burned Doc Caldwells' little cabin. I remember they had the thrashin' [threshing] machine down at the ranch. Old Doc ran the steam engine for the thrasher. There was had a wood heated steam engine that had a long belt that ran nearly 100 feet from the steam engine back to the thrashing machine. It took about six or eight horses to haul the thrashing machine, and it took about six horses to haul the [steam] engine. We had other horses besides that [for hauling]. So it took about eight or ten men for the thrashing team.

At lunch time [soon after], they [Doc and Sam] got into an argument. Doc Caldwell was a great big man weighed about 230. My uncle Sam was a small chunky guy. Doc says, 'You burnt your damned store down and you burnt my cabin too.' He no more than got the word out and Uncle Sam hit him right the mouth. Flattened him. The man was twice his size.

When I was a kid, I can remember an exhibition shooter passed through town. This was about 1910. He was travelling for the Remington Arms Company and UMC Cartridge Company, his name was Rush Razoo. He put on a shooting demonstration down on the creek, down near where the stables used to be. He could take an automatic shotgun, throw a tomato can out, and make it hop--just keep it hopping--hit it every time, until it was out of range. He called it "Rushin the can." He could throw a little washer up, and with a little .22 [rifle], and hit it every time. With a rifle, he could throw up a piece of brick and turn it into a cloud of dust. He'd hit it every time.

One of my uncles, [Sam McAbee] who had the store there, had just bought a new Remington rifle [for his own use.] [He sold guns, among other goods.] He had been crabbing about this gun. He walked up to Rush during his show, and handed it to him. [He had shown the gun to him before the start of the show.] Rush says, 'This man tells me that he missed a deer with this rifle.' Well, Rush started talking--spieling--about how good the gun actually was, saying that it was my uncle's aim that was at fault, not the gun. He ended up by saying 'It looks good enough to me!'

[At that point] some loud-mouth from the crowd says, 'Oh that's a bunch of hooey, that gun is no good.' Just then a blue jay lit up in the top of a pepperwood [tree] at least a hundred yards off, maybe a hundred and twenty-five. Rush shouldered my uncle's rifle in a flash and hit that blue jay--just turned it into a cloud of blue feathers. The fellow with the big mouth shut up after that. You can't tell me that he hadn't tried that gun out [before the show], but he pretended that he hadn't tried it out. Rush Razoo was the best shot I ever saw.

We are related to most of the old families in Boonville. My dad's sister [Margaret] Susan married an Ornbaun [William Francis Ornbaun, 1845-1887], one of my cousins [Pearl Gladys Ornbaun] married a Hutsell [James Hutsell], which has a tie to the Barnett family, one of the original Anderson valley families. One of my sisters [Lois] married Carl [Henry] Clow. My uncle [Sam McAbee] married Carl Carl [Clow]'s sister Maggie [Margaret]. So I was connected to the Clow family by marriage two ways. Some of the other early settlers were the Rector family, the [T.J.] McGimseys, the Witherell family, the Holgooden family, the Ball family, and the Connard family. Gradually the bigger ranches were split up and sold into little five acre, two acres, and lots.

The original Anderson place, which ran two and a half miles, for which the valley was named, was the ranch that my grandfather [Joseph] and [my] father [Robert] purchased from [Walter] Anderson [in 1858]. [According to the book Grass Roots of Anderson Valley, it the land was traded by Anderson to Joseph Rawles for eighty head of horses.] Its practically across from where the cemetery is, on the west side of the valley. My grandfather and his family came in 1857 [According to A History of Mendocino County by Auerlius O. Carpenter (1914 Historic Record Co., Los Angeles, 1977, Pacific Rim research, Mendocino) the family settled in 1858.] They settled first up on the mountain, near where that Lone Tree is, on the flat down below the Lone Tree. They stayed up there, and I can remember seeing where the old cabin was, what they used to call the Burnt Shanty. They came down off the mountain, and bought the Anderson place.

[Walter] Anderson was supposedly the first white man to come into the valley [in 1851]. As the story goes, he was following a herd of elk. He [later came back and] settled there, and the Beeson family, they were connected with the Anderson family, brother-in-law, I think, they were the second family to settle in the valley. The Beesons were up in the south end of the valley. The Anderson's place was from about where Boonville is down to about where the cemetery is. [Henry W. Beeson (1829-1914), was the last surviving member of the Bear Flag Party. Two of Beeson's daughters were indirectly related by marriage to the Rawles familiy. They were Mrs. H.N. (Beeson) Ornbaun, and Mrs. J.R.(Beeson) Burger. A third daughter, Mrs. G.T. (Beeson) Brown, may have married into the same family as Robert Rawles's first wife, Margaret Brown Rawles, the daughter of Dr. Brown.]

Later, after the old folks passed on, that Anderson place was split up among the different members of the family. My Dad [Robert] didn't get any of that because he had his own place [the Denmark place] farther down the valley [toward Philo, halfway between Boonville an Indian Creek]. Aunt Susan Ornbaun got a part of it. Mrs. Burger [Jane (Rawles) Burger, wife of George Burger] Dad's sister, had a part of it. Joe Rawles [Joe Rawles II or Joe Rawles III?] and his sister, who married Lawrence Singley got part of it. Tom Rawles had part of it--the Babcocks later bought that part. Where that ranch was is where the high school is and where the airfield is and the recreation area is [now]. It runs all the way back into Bear Wallow--there's a state park there now. Joe Rawles' portion of the ranch is where the high school is. Susan Ornbaun's part is where the old Indian rancheria was.

My dad ran the ranch with his brother [Alex N. Rawles]. Of course Dad [Robert] had two boys and four girls. His brother [Alex] had four boys. His [Alex's] son Austin was only about three months difference in age from me.

Over on the east side of the valley was the Ball place [a large fruit drying operation was established by J.D. Ball in 1890], and the Tarwater place, and the Weir place [which later belonged to the McAbees]. It first belonged to Boone.

The buildings in Indian camps were made out of bark. Not very substantial. For the sweat-house, the had a round tepee-type house, made out of wood and bark. That's where they had the dances at night. I remember when I was just a youngster, at my grandmother's place, where I used to stay, we'd go three-quarters of a mile over to Bill Ball's rancheria. I could hear them over there at times, 'Hoo-yah-yah, Hoo-yah-yah.' They'd be dancing.

When somebody died, they'd have a different chant. Grandmother could tell [from hearing the chants] whether somebody had died, or whether they were just having a party. They had these sweat houses, with steam. They'd go in them and get roaring hot, and then they'd run out and jump in the water. That's why a lot of them were so tubercular. They died off because that was too hard on their constitution. They'd take colds, afterward. They had the idea that was supposed to fend off the devil, or something. I don't know just what the idea of it was.

In grammar school, there were a few Indian children. One that I remember was named Urban Tule. There was also one of the Balls. He was from the other [Indian] rancheria in the valley, near Bill Ball's family. A lot of the Indians took the family name of the ranches where their headquarters were. There were two rancherias. One was on the Rawles [west] side of the Valley--aunt Susan's [Ornbaun] place, just north of where the airport is now, in that gulch. That was the original Anderson place. Then the Rawles's came and bought the Anderson claims out. The other rancheria was on the Ball side of the valley.

One of the Indians living at the Rawles rancheria [at Susan Ornbaun's place] was named Kalti [pronouned "Call-tie"]. He was pretty fat. He used to say, 'Oh, us Rawles boys all got big stomachs!' You see, both my dad and my uncle got stout like I am. The Indian rancherias were usually closes to the larger land-holdings. The Indians often took the name of the family where they had the rancheria.

The Indians came and went. There were just one or two families permanently there, but other Indian families came and went. They used to go through the valley to the coast to catch smelt. They smelt, all right! They stopped in the valley as they came through both ways. There were forty or fifty at a time. They sometimes had a cart or two, and a few pack horses, but most afoot. They'd dry the smelt. A lot of the Indians would stop and camp at our place, too. Dad always let them feed their horses--if they had horses--and stay there. Most of them were afoot. A few had horses. They'd be gone two or three weeks before they came back through.

We used go on trips to the coast, to pick raspberries. They were a very dark red. There were blackberries, too. I can remember some trips as far back as when I was six years old. On the newly cut-over or burned land, the berries would come in thick. You'd get gallons of them. We packed them in five gallon cans. We put them down with sugar. After we'd get home we'd cook them [into preserves] and seal them up. The berry-picking trips were quite a production, because of the transportation. We'd take a four-horse team and wagon. Usually two or three families would go. We'd stretch a tarpaulin over the top of a wagon. It took two days to get over to the coast--about thirty miles.

In those days, there wasn't a store on the corner, that brought provisions in. You either raised it, or rustled it. We ate wild strawberries. They grew along the fence-rows. The were small. A big one was about the size of the end of your thumb. We'd pick strawberries all the way to school. When we got to school, we'd have to go wash our faces because we'd be all covered with strawberries.

We used to have a camp down by the river, near the Hendy grove, and pick hops for the Gowen family. We'd usually stay there two weeks. That was usually how we got enough money to buy our school clothes.

They also had camp meetings--religious services--there too. The Gowens bought the Irish family place. There was a feud there. Ed Irish killed Jim Clow. Those families used to fight. That was long before my time.

Before Prohibition days, there were four or five saloons in town. At one time, my grandfather had a saloon. That's what all the mill towns were like in those days--all saloons. At one time Fort Bragg had 32 saloons. A lot of the lumber companies had a store, a boarding house, and a saloon. The guys would work all month back in the hills, and get paid and then 'blow in' to town. Some of those companies made the better part of the payroll back, that way.

Grandfather [McAbee] had a livery stable, saloon, and hotel. The boys [Marques ("Mark") and John McAbee] had a race track. They trained race horses--they had some pretty good horses. Later, they went to Canada. They went up there before the Klondike rush. They were up there during the Klondike rush, as well. They used to run races with the Indians up there. The Indians always thought that they had the best horses, and they did have good horses, but they were only just for short [distances.] They'd get matched up with the boys' blooded horses in a longer race, and they'd get beat out. They accumulated quite a little stock up there. They stayed up there for a number of years. Mark McAbee married into an Indian family [a woman named Katherine], and some of them are still up there, in the Cache Creek area.

Even though I'm now 81, I remember a lot of my early schooling. Did you ever read Evangeline by Longfellow? [It goes like this]:

'This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,

Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

This is the forest primeval, but where are the hearts that beneath it, leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman? Where is the thatch-roofed village, the home of Acadian farmers? Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands, darkened by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of heaven? Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers forever departed. Scattered like dust and leaves, when the mighty blast of October seize them, and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them far over the ocean. Naught but tradition remains of the beautiful village of Grand-Pre.

Ye who believe in affection that hopes and endures, and is patient, Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of woman's devotion, List to the mournful tradition, still sung by the pines of the forest, List to the tale of love in Acadie, home of the happy.' I still recall the words after all these years.

I had an English teacher. Her name was Miss Burns. At that time, I was a little bit poetically inclined. She tried to teach me the different meters. In doing that she had me memorize poems like that one by Longfellow.

I shot my first deer when I was 12. I got it down in the hay field, right in front of the house. I was going to try to go hunting with a .22. I knew there was a deer there. My dad said, 'You're not going to start shootin' deer with a .22' and he got the old .44-40 out. I remember I had to sit down and put it acrost my knees. I was that small. The .44 was pretty heavy, anyway.

My father had a muzzle-loading rifle that he hunted with for quite a while. That's where he got the nickname 'Muz.' He kept using the muzzle-loading rifle while other people had more modern [metallic cartridge] rifles. He had other guns, of course, too.

Most [ranchers] carried a revolver, out in the hills, out on the range, to shoot snakes and varmints. I don't remember Dad ever carrying a revolver--he was strictly a rifle man--but Vernon carried a Colt single-action .44-40 revolver almost all the time. Vernon usually carried his revolver on his saddle horn, or on his chaps belt. (in the summer we wore leather half-chaps, in the winter we wore angora full chaps, with wooly side out.)

One time, when I was a kid, Vernon was coming back in from the back range, and he kicked off his chaps, and went to hang them on the gate post. The gun fell out of its holster, and landed on the ground, next to the gate post. The gun went off when it hit. There was a cartridge under the hammer, and the hammer fell from the quarter-cock position. That was enough to fire the cartridge. I was standing in the gate when the bullet went right by me and hit the gate post [on the other side]. Missed me by about 6 inches. You see, a single-action revolver should never be loaded with a full six rounds. It isn't safe. You should always leave an empty chamber under the hammer.

At the time that I was growing up, most men hunted deer with a lever-action Winchester, either the rifle or the carbine, depending on their preference, usually chambered in .32 Winchester Special, or the .30-30 cartridge. .32-40 was also popular. It was the same bore diameter as the .32 Special, but it was a straight taper case, rather than a bottleneck shaped case. You could fire the .32 special cartridge in a .32-40 rifle, but not vice versa. The shells would split, but you could still fire them. The .32 Special was the best deer gun I ever had. Later, a lot of the fellows in Anderson Valley switched over to the Remington Model 8, a semi-automatic. These guns shot the .30 Remington cartridge. It was ballistically the same as the .30-30, but it was a rimless case.

We had a number of other guns on the ranch, including a Winchester .38-40 and a .44-40, both lever actions [Model 1873]. They both used the short pistol cartridges, so they held about 12 cartridges in the magazine. They had both had a trajectory like a rainbow, but the bullets were heavy enough to kill a deer. If you were shooting at a deer acrost a canyon, you'd just watch for the dust of the first bullet falling, and correct from there. At long range, you might have to hold [point of aim] 30 or 40 feet above the deer, to hit it.

I should have taken all of those old guns with me when I left the ranch. I would have liked to have those guns. They were sitting in a bathroom when I left, un-used, and just starting to rust. When I look back on it, it was a shame to leave them behind. They would have cleaned up pretty well.

We also had a number of shotguns, including a double barrel Ithaca 12 gauge with damascus steel barrels--which dad got by saving up labels from packages of Star [brand] plug chewing tobacco--and 12 gauge a Winchester Model 1897 with a long full choke barrel. I got that gun when I was 9 years old. Dad got that gun for me. That would have been about 1906. It had a bad habit of going off when you were unloading it. The hammer would tend to follow the action. We had a number of accidents with that gun. I [accidently] put several holes in the house--two in the ceiling, and one through the window casing. That one nearly hit Eloise while she was ironing. Only missed her by a couple of feet. I also put a hole in the back gate at the house in Oakdale, unloading that gun.

On my trap line, as a boy, I used a single-shot Stevens .22 rifle. That was the first gun I ever had. I used to shoot gray squirrels out of redwood trees with that gun. I sold the pelts from my trap line to George B. Vestal. He taught me the finer points of trapping.

George B. Vestal worked as a roustabout for the Singley ranch. He was a ranch hand who did trapping on the side. He worked for many years for a dollar a day. Later on, he was offered a raise to $1.25, but he turned it down. He said that it would confuse his accounting. $30 a month is easier to figure. When he died, it turned out that he had $8,000 dollars on deposit at the bank.

George was a real character. He had a drinking problem. Sometimes the folks at the [Singley] ranch would see his horse going by [saddled], and they'd know that he had gotten drunk and fallen off. They'd hitch up the buggy and go find him to bring him home.

I heard that one time George was in a poker game at the [Jake's Opening] hunting camp, and he ran out of money--he had been losing. He disappeared down the creek for a while, and then came back with five or six $20 gold pieces. He threw them on the table and said, 'Now Gunny's Christ! [his favorite expression], now match that.' He had a lot of money buried out there. There's probably some still there. There or at Sam Casabone's old camp out at Shoemake Opening. He'd get drunk and bury his money.

George Bee was later accidently killed. He shot himself with the .22 he used on his trap line. He had stopped to shoot an animal in a trap, and when he went to pull the rifle off the horse, something caught in the trigger guard, and it went off. He had a piece of string that he used for a sling to loop over the saddle horn. Perhaps it caught on that. Hit him in the chest. A little .22 can kill a man, all right.

I ran my trap line in the winter-time. I ran it from the time I was in grammar school all the way through high school. The [grammar] school was about two miles up the valley. I had certain places up along the creeks along the way top school where I'd set traps. I'd catch coons, skunks, and a bobcat once in a while. I caught one fisher. Once in a while, I'd catch someone's old tomcat, too. I sold that one to George Bee. I could tan everything but the tails. I found out later that you had to split that tail out. I carried a little Stevens .22. I'd check the traps on the way to school. If there was anything in the trap, I'd shoot it. Then, on the way home, I'd take it out and skin it. Sometimes I'd get a little too close to a skunk. By the time I got to school, I didn't smell too good. I wasn't too popular, at times.

We used to have a place at Cow Springs--a kind of temporary camp. We built one big bed to sleep in, with eight compartments in it. It could sleep 16 people. [To make the bed] we put down small bows cut off of fir trees, and then a layer of chicken wire, and then a thick layer of hay grass. It made pretty good mattress. It would last a year or two.

I used to have a favorite place to hunt deer, out along North Ridge. I used to go out there the first of the season, and I usually got myself a buck. I caught sight of one buck on the side of the hill, and he saw me as I come over the ridge, and he started over the top of the hill. I just got one shot at him, and he went over the top of the hill. You know, with the back end of them, with their tail up in the air, you have a white spot to shoot at. I noticed when I shot that the [deer's] tail dropped down.

Well, he just went over the top of the ridge, and I had to go around the head of the gulch to get on the other ridge. And when I went over there, I knew right where he went across, over the hill. I kept looking, down the hill, on the ground and all the way around. I kept going around the hill a little farther, and there was a little fork-ed Madrone tree. And when he went over the ridge, he just turned a somerset, and when he came down, his horns were hung up in that fork. His front feet were clear up off the ground. [That's how I found him,] hung up in that Madrone tree.

Another time I was coming down the road and I saw a wildcat [bobcat] right in the middle of the road. I got out and killed it. I stuck him up on a log, just up above the road, just like he was still alive, crouching there. I went on down the road, and the road switched back. There were some guys coming down the road behind me. God damn, they started shooting up a storm at a wildcat that was already dead!

One time my brother [Vernon] was out and came across a party of greenhorn hunters from San Francisco. They were camped out on Indian Creek. He asked what they were doing. They said, 'We're bear hunting.' He said, 'Well there's no bears around here, we haven't seen a bear around here for years.' They said, 'Oh yes there is, we saw a track.' Thinking he'd have some fun with these city slickers, he said, 'Well, if you saw a track, you've got to build a barricade!' They asked what he meant by a barricade. He said, 'You've got to get some logs and put along side that trail, or that bears liable to come a long and eat ya up.' Well they built up some logs into a barricade, all right. That night an old sow bear and a cub came a long, and they shot the old bear.

Near Boonville is a little settlement called Peachland. Old 'Peanut' [ ] Wallace had a homestead there. He thought that he could graft peaches into Manzanitas. They called it Peachland after that.

I can't remember much of the old Boonville language. They had a language all their own up there. Its been so modified and changed so much that I hardly recognize it myself. When I was a youngster, most of the folks and myself could carry on a pretty good conversation in the Boonville language [Boontling], and nobody would know what you were talking about. What made it bad for me, after I got away from Boonville, every once in a while I'd lapse into the Boonville lingo--some word that nobody else could understand--and they'd think I was nuts. So I pretty much tried to forget it.

The sheep shearers were the ones that really got Boontling started. They'd make it up while they were working in the shearing corrals. They'd make up some new word to try to make the other fellow figure out what it meant. Boontling was very popular about the time my brother was coming [growing] up. Vernon was 12 years older than I.

Vernon's nickname in Boontling was 'Monk.' I think he picked up the name because he was left-handed, and there was an old left-handed guy named Monk Jeeter. You see there were two guys that come up to work in the sawmills. One of them's name was Tike Tyler, and the other was Monk Jeeter. The two boys that worked with them--one of them was Jim Hutsall, and the other was Vernon. So [as their assistants] they picked up the Boontling names Tike and Monk.

I used to get into fights, so my name in Boontling was Sharkey. The shearers used to get me and my cousin on my father's side, Austin--we were both the same age--and they'd get us in a fight. They liked to see us fight. That's how I got my name. I used to scrap quite a bit. [There was a prizefighter named Max Sharkey who was well-known at the time. Fist fights or verbal disagreements are now called "Sharkin' matches" in Boontling.] Later, Austin was the head of the Highway Patrol in Mendocino County.

The Boontling word for coffee, "Zeese" comes from the name of Z.C. [Zachariah Clifton] Blevins. On hunting trips, old man Blevins made coffee so strong, he said 'I'll make it so strong it'll pop your eyes open so wide as if there was two sticks in 'em.'

Old Fairbanks and his wife lived up on top of the hill just before you turned down into Anderson Valley. They were old-timers there. They had a homestead there--I think it was a homestead. They lived there for as long as I could remember. She was a music teacher. She used to have an old horse, and she'd get on that horse and ride side-saddle up and down the valley, and teach music. [The farm and ranch houses] mostly had organs. They didn't have many pianos. If I remember, we had a piano, and Eloise [Wallach's] folks had a piano. We had the only two pianos in the area. I know Mrs. Fairbanks taught Eloise, and I think that she taught Erma [Wallach-Turner], as well. Eloise used to play the organ in church.

Mr. Fairbanks had a sheep ranch. Also, if you'd bring your gun there, he'd sight your gun in. He was a gunsmith, after a fashion. If you had a gun that wasn't shootin' straight, sometimes he'd even try to straighten the barrel. Some of those old guns would get so they'd [figuratively] shoot in a circle. He'd try to fix them. He had the biggest gun collection in the valley. It was mostly old rifles, and a few pistols. He had some old timers--a lot of muzzle-loaders. A few dated back to the Revolutionary War. He had a [British] Brown Bess musket, for example.

When the valley was still sparsely settled, directly after the Civil War in the late [18]60s or early 70s, sometime, my people [the Rawles family] were already established there in the valley. They had seen the war [Civil War] coming, and got out of there. My grandfather and grandmother [Rawles] were southerners. They came from South Carolina. And then my [other] grandmother and grandfather [McAbee] came. They came in [to Anderson valley] about 1863 or 1864. [According to Delcena McAbee's account, it was actually in 1859, when she was 14 months old.] They [The McAbees] first settled near Petaluma--out by Two Rock--in 1853, and then for health reasons [the helath of John McAbee] moved up to Mendocino County--to Yorkville.

Some of the people that moved in after the war were pretty lawless. My family, who were all northerners, used to call them [collectively] "The Bushwackers." They were displaced people that came in after the Civil War, in the 1870s. Some of them, they say, played both sides--they were from border states, right along the Mason-Dixon Line. There was quite a group of them that settled [in Anderson Valley.] They used to wrangle amongst themselves. There was old Jeff Clement, and Zachariah Clifton Blevins, and Ebenezer ["Eb"] Duff, Jeff Vestal, George Bee Vestal--he was either brother or cousin to Jeff Vestal... and I can't remember all of them.

I heard my dad say several times that when the Wells Fargo [and Pinkerton] people were looking for Frank James, [Jesse James' brother] in the mid-1870s, he spent fifteen months in Boonville. He lived with Jeff Clement. My father told me about the several times he met Frank James [brother of the celebrated Jesse James.] Jeff Clement was pious old guy. I remember him well. He was always at church. I read that later the railroad company pensioned him and Cole Younger off so that they would stop robbing their trains.

Dad said that he had heard that Jeff Clement and Z.C. Blevins were part of the old James gang back in the middle west. A lot of the bushwackers moved out to California after the war. Both my father's family [the Rawles] and my mother's family [the McAbees] came out to California in the 1850s, well before the Civil War. [McAbees: 1853, Rawles: 1857] Joe Rawles was rumored to be a Bushwacker, too, but not part of the same group. Dad [Robert Rawles and his father, Joseph Rawles's emigrant wagon train] was out of St. Joe [St. Joseph], Missouri.

When I was a kid they were still [figuratively] fighting the Civil War. They were still talking about it, and I remember it well. They even had a line between Boonville and Philo that was [only half-jokingly] called the Mason-Dixon line.

My grandmother on my mother's side [Susan (Weaver) McAbee] was a very religious person. My grandfather owned most of the property on the west side of [what is now] the highway in Boonville. He gave the land for the church. Most of all of the people from that group starting the church were from the south, so they called it the South Methodist Church.

Dad's older sister, Jane Burger, she was a contrary person, so she says,'To hell with the South Methodist Church, I'm going to build a church across the road.' So that had a church across the road, and the called it the North Methodist Church. They were practically facing each other across the road. Sometimes they'd have a preacher in one, and sometimes they'd have a preacher in the other. Sometimes they'd have a preacher in both. When this happened, there was usually a row over it.

When I was a kid, I used to go first to one church, and then the other. We had to go to both churches to keep the family satisfied that we were neutral. The North Methodist Church was moved later. They moved it closer into town, and they used it for a motion picture show and also as lodge hall. The building is still there.

A preacher used to be well cared-for by a community in those days. One week he'd have dinner with one family, and the next week with another family. In between, he'd get out in the woods and work. That's the way preacher lived in those days. Nobody had enough money to pay in those days so he wouldn't have to work. He worked and also preached.

In the spring of the year, we would have to go out and have to find the little bummer lambs. Their mothers died or run off and left them. We'd gather those up, and bring them in. Sometimes you'd have 10 or 15 lambs. You'd have bottles and fill them up with milk and a little extra food in the bottles, sometimes. You'd have little places along the fence where you stuck the bottles in. They'd come up and suck on the bottles until it was all gone. You had to anchor them pretty well, because they tore 'em loose. Every spring we'd get them big enough where we could leave them in grass. We'd give them extra meal until they got a little bigger. Eventually, we'd turn 'em loose up on the hill.

We didn't have many soil erosion problems when I was young, not like you see now. We didn't feed the grass down. The ground was sodded up. In the spring the old ewes like to pull the grass by the roots. This goes on year after year, and eventually it doesn't re-seed. Finally there's not enough sod to hold the soil, and on those steep hillsides pretty soon you have a big slice down the hillsides. When we saw a gully starting, we'd cut brush and throw it into the gullies and stomp it in to stop the erosion. They don't take the time to do that any more.

We had some salmon fishing in the valley in the early days, as well, all though it wasn't quite legal. We used to go out to the streams after a big rain and the salmon would be working beds in the riffles-spawning. In the daytime, they'd see you coming, so they'd get away before you could spear them. At night time we'd go out at night with a lantern. We had half a dozen in no time.

We had two kinds of spears. We had spears with barbs on them. We'd take an old pitch fork and bend the points back and make regular barbs of them. The prongs were bent to within about an inch apart. The other kind was made from an ordinary piece of iron pipe. Inside the pipe was inserted a single large barb, attached to the pipe with a heavy piece of wire. You'd spear the fish, and the barb would come off inside of it. He be flopping around, but still connected by the wire.

There was one panther [mountain lion] that we knew was back at Cow Springs, but that we could never get to see him. He killed dozens of lambs and even full-grown ewes. The dogs would get on his trail, and pretty soon the dogs would get to barking, like they had him up a tree. You'd get to the tree, and look up, and there'd be nothing in it. We used to call him "The Boomerang" because we couldn't see him [he was always doubling back]. We thought that the dogs were running on the back trails, or something. Finally, we had start dog that we called Rube. He was getting old, and he couldn't go very fast, but you'd turn him loose and he'd come to the tree--and he was pretty smart--he'd make a circle, and pick up the scent again where the panther had jumped out, usually on the uphill side.

We started one morning, and I run him [Boomerang] for an hour or two. He had circled and come back up the canyon. Just down below me, about 150 yards, there they were, barking up the tree. I took old Prince down through the brush towards the commotion. I got there, and he was just ready to jump, out on a limb. His old tail was just poppin'.

I pulled down on him and shot, just as he jumped out of the tree. I thought that I had missed him. There was a big hole of water down in the creek, just below. When I got down there, he was in the water, with the dogs all over the top of him. He was dead. I had hit him just behind the shoulder. I tied its body on crosswise behind the saddle, but I had to tie his tail back up, because it was dragging on the ground. His skin measured 9-1/2 feet from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail.

I only killed three mountain lions, and just a couple of bears. The main problem [with the sheep] was the coyotes. There were always lots of coyotes to chase. The dogs would corner them in rock dens or shallow holes. We'd shoot them there, and then the dogs would go in and drag them out. Vernon did much more coyote hunting than I did.

I saw a automobile for the first time in about 1905. I was about 8 years old. Dr. Diddle bought a little Rio. Instead of a steering wheel, it had a tiller. It had one seat, and a box in the back. He used to give us kids a ride once in a while, [sitting] on that box. I saw an airplane for the first time at the World's Fair [Pan-Pacific Exposition?] in 1915, down in San Francisco. You could pay for a ride out over the bay.

When I was 15, I went over to high school in Ukiah, for my freshman year. They didn't have a high school in Boonville. I didn't know anything more about a high school than a jack-rabbit. Mother moved Thelma and I over to Ukiah, and we rented a little house there. Zelpha had already had one year of high school. I remember that we had pretty good instructors. We had a good English teacher, and the old principal of the high school taught Latin. His name was O.K. Bauer. I took English, Latin, American History, and Algebra. We started school about the first of September, and my father passed away in the first part of November [4], 1911. We went home then.

Dad came over on a Friday, because he was not feeling well. He had old Babe hooked to a cart. I wanted to go home and go quail hunting so he said, 'Okay, you take the mare and the cart, and go on over and stay with Joe's family, and you can go quail hunting. Then you come back Sunday evening, and I'll [take the cart and] go on home. Berle [Rawles] and I were hunting, and we came on down the creek to where Grace Fry--she was later Kent [Wallach, brother or Eloise (Wallach) Rawles]'s wife--lived. She was a telephone operator, and she had just gotten word that Dad was dead.

Before I was in High School, I used to get myself in pretty good shape because I used to run quite a bit. That was about two miles. So even when we starting to train, in the fall, I was in good shape. As a freshman I was able to do very well against the seniors. They were four or five years older. The [track and field] meets were in the spring.

Each class had their own colors and of course their class number--the year in which they graduated. They were all painting numbers and such, so another kid and I got a wooden barrel, and painted our number ('16) [upside down] on it, and we put on the top of the flag-pole. We took the vaulting pole, and tied the flag-pole rope. we took a hitch just below the barrel, and another one down on the lower end of the vaulting pole. That put the barrel on the end of the pole. We run it up on the flag pole until the end of the vaulting pole and the barrel was on top of the flag pole, and then let it down. This pole was 60 feet high. The other kids were throwing rocks at it. They tried to climb the flag pole, but it was limber, and wiggling back and forth. The trustees got after the principal for putting the barrel on top of the flag pole. So we went out late one night again, and took it down. No one ever knew how we put it up or how we got it down.

There were 12 kids in my high school class. [They were: Edith Gschwend, Pearl Witherell, Pauline Whiting, Winnie Estes, Ruth Ingram, Ella Eten, Blanche Stevens, Eloise Wallach, Grace Whiting, Enerst Rawles, Autin Rawles, and Roy Clay. Their graduation ceremony was held on Wednesday, June 28, 1916.] That was the first full four year class to graduate from Anderson Valley Union High school.

In my senior class, there were three boys, and nine girls. I couldn't make up my mind which of the girls that I wanted to have my picture taken with. So they got kind of mad at me. When we had our picture taken, I had my picture taken with a broom. I put a dress on a broom. That went in the yearbook. There were three or four different girls in school that I had gone with, different times. I thought that it would be better if I had my picture taken with a broom.

My sister Zelpha had gone two years in Ukiah, but she took her last two in Boonville. I took algebra, plane and solid geometry, and trigonometry. That was considered pretty advanced stuff. They were the basis for most of my surveying work, in later years. I never very good at spelling, in grammar school, but I finally got so I could write a decent composition in English. The thing that really messed me up a lot in high school was foreign languages. Unless you're going on to advanced work, or are going to travel extensively, I don't see much use for foreign languages, with the exception of Spanish. I would have been very happy down in Arizona if I had known more Spanish.

The next year I tried to learn German. I got so mixed up between German and English that I couldn't speak either one. Well you taken German--you sputter around and then you finally come to the verb in the last word in a sentence. That was just before the war, and everybody thought that it would be patriotic for people to learn German. [Thought to be a useful skill in war-time.]

There were several horses for the girls at the ranch. Zelpha got pretty independent after high school. She had jobs various places around the [San Francisco] Bay. She eventually got a job as a stenographer in an attorney's office. She first married a minister, a guy by the name of Raymond Brunk then separated [and divorced] and after two or three years she married Albert Michelson. Her first child, Marjorie Dell Michelson, was by her first husband. [Marjorie married several times, so her last name was variously Levins, Stevenson, Peters, Lampson and Redd.] That's how Marjorie is Mike [Albert junior]'s half-sister.

[My sister] Vera got married to Sam Babcock. He worked [as a surveyor] for the Northwestern Pacific Railroad. I took her horse up to her there. She rode it while he was working up there.

Mother took the girls [Zelpha and Lois] down to Oakland and put them in school. While they were down there, Lois married Carl Clow, one of our neighbors. She wasn't home much after she was pretty well grown.

We had a sorrel horse, named Laddie. He was a standard-bred trotter. Mother trained him to be a buggy horse. He was always afraid of automobiles. When you'd hear a car coming, you'd have to stop, get out, and tie him to a fence. If he got a chance, he try to run off, or try to buck out of the harness. Vernon used to drive him up the valley to see his girlfriend. Old Laddie would stay there until about midnight, and then he'd take a notion to come on home. Vernon used to swear that someone was turning him loose. He actually learned to undo most any kind of knot that you could put on him. He'd keep nibbling at that knot til he got it undone. He'd come home with the buggy [all alone]. He get free of the hitching post, and get straightened out, and come on home, all by himself. He never once turned the buggy over. Vernon used to have to come home 'shank's mare.'

Laddie was a good horse. He lived to be 32. He didn't do anything the last five years. We had him up in the pasture. His teeth got long, and he couldn't eat too well.

The high school was built on land that belonged to Eloise's grandfather. I don't know whether it was donated or sold. They built one room, at first. It was about 20 by 24 feet, maybe a little bigger--maybe 20 by 30. It had widows on the north side. In the middle there was a big old stove with an iron frame around it. It would get so cold in there that everybody would come and stand around that stove. That was the only heat in there. After the second year, they added another [connecting] room at the west end of it. Then the third year, they built another room, north of it, that wasn't connected with the other two. That was the commercial room, for teaching commercial classes.

The first principal was fellow by the name of [Professor] Watkins. [The school building was joking referred to as the "Watkins Bull Moose Academy" by some of the boys.] He had one assistant the first year, name of Emily Pinkney Gray. The second year, after they added the room in the back, they got a third teacher. She taught languages. She taught German. I tried to learn German so hard that, so I got that I couldn't speak English. Her name was Miss Fith. They later hired another teacher, Miss Endicott.

We wanted to put a track and playing field in the back. They cut the trees down, and they had a lot of stumps, out there. One of the guys found out that by mixing salt-peter and sulfur and charcoal that he could make gun powder. So we made our own gun powder to blast these stumps out.

One of the later settlers is Mannix. His family isn't one of the old families [in the valley] at all. He ran the volunteer fire department, and was the editor of the paper, and the photographer for the paper. At one time, he was all of Boonville. He used to say that he regretted that he couldn't fight fires and take pictures of them at the same time. There are a still a lot of characters up there.

I did one [spring] season shearing sheep, just after I finished high school. Gosh, that was hard work! You were standing [bent over] right on your head, and you had to have a sheep between your legs. You'd start [shearing] up the side of the neck and then you come around on down to the tail, and flop the sheep around, and you go around to the other side, and back to the belly. Some of those people could do about four of them to my one. Once they were off, the tags were thrown in and tied into bundles, wrong side out. My brother could, anyway. It was the hardest work I ever did in my life. It was all done with hand clippers in those days, of course. The muscle in forearm ached something awful. At times, my wrist would swell up twice its normal size.

After the shearing, you'd pack the wool in wool sacks. They were sacks about three feet in diameter, and about eight feet long. They held about 400 pounds of wool. They were hung in a rack when they were stuffed. The sack was supported by a hoop, with the sack doubled back around it. One guy threw in [the fleeces] while another one got into the sack and stomped it down. It wasn't so bad tossing the bundles up, but inside the sack, it was a miserable job. I sacked wool from the time I was old enough to throw [fleece] bundles up. But I only spent one season shearing. That was plenty. When the sacks were filled up, a lever was used to raise the sack, and release the hoop. Then the sacks were sewed shut with a big sacking needle. Then the sacks were thrown onto a pile.

In those days, kids went to school in the winter-time, when it was raining, and worked in the summer. One of the best jobs I had as a kid was $2.14 a day slumping ties. That was big pay. On weekends, I'd take a couple of horses and go up the canyon to where they were logging. They were makin' fence posts and railroad ties and grape stakes and shingle bolts, and shakes. I worked mostly sledding [railroad] ties. They'd fall the tree, and make the ties [with wedges and a broad axe], but that would quite a ways from where the landing is--where they loaded them on trucks. I'd hook [the team of horses] onto three, maybe four at a time.

Many of the trees were too big [in diameter] to cross-cut at the base. The falling crews would use spring-boards. These [narrow, thin boards] were put in notches that they cut [with an axe]. The spring boards would go in a spiral, maybe up to 20 feet, where the tree is smaller. The timber jacks would stand on these little spring-boards when they cut their undercut, and then start their main crosscuts. By using wedges, they could make the tree fall exactly [in the direction] where they wanted.

I've [crosscut] a ten foot [diameter] log with an eight foot saw. You'd saw from three different angles until you get down under the half circle. You talk about pull, boy those saws pull hard!

On some of the biggest trees up the canyon, they were too big to cross-cut, so they would climb up them, before they ever felled them, and put in holes with an augur, and fill them with black powder, to [blast and] split them in half. On some of the bigger ones, they'd do it again, and split them in quarters before they tried to saw them. They used a big jack screw to separate them far enough so that you could get in and cross-cut saw them.

That [slumping ties and shearing sheep] was the only pay jobs that we had in those days, excepting in the springtime we could get a job peelin' tan bark.

To peel a tan oak, you ring it about four feet up, and down near the bottom. You split it down the side. In the early spring of the year, when the sap has just come up. You take the axe and go around it, and strip the bark off it. It usually come off in a couple of slabs. As it dried, it curled up into curls. After you'd go through peelin the bark, then you'd get a job swampin'. You'd go through and pick this bark up, and throw it down the hill, [sometimes several times] to where you got a trail. You stack it there, in bunches. Then you come along with a pack train of five or six mules with hoops on the pack-saddles, on each side. Some of the mules were okay, and some were pretty ornery. Some would lay right down in the trail--just deliberately. You'd almost have to build a fire under them, to get them up. I'd light matches and stick them under their tails--sometimes you couldn't get them up, otherwise.

My first regular job after graduating from high school, in June of 1916, was punching stakes on a survey party for the Northwestern Pacific Railroad. I got paid thirty five bucks a month, and my board. In the survey party, there was always a stake puncher. He was the guy that put the stakes in the ground. After the transit-men had run over the area, as they went on, they'd put a pin in the ground, every fifty feet. The stake puncher would have a hook on his belt. As you pulled each pin out, You'd punch a [wooden] stake in its place, and hang the pin on the [belt] hook. They'd be little sharpened pins about eight inches long, with a strip of red cloth flagging tied on.

They had axe-men out ahead, and a stake-puncher trailing behind. On my party, they had fast chain-men, going like hell. Every time I'd be back 300 to 500 feet, they'd come to a transit point at the hub. (They only carried about 20 pins, enough for each 1,000 feet.) They'd holler 'Hub!' I'd have to run up the mountain to them. I had a eight. pound hammer, a four pound gad, and an axe, and a sack with a bundle of stakes. We called the gad 'the bull prick.'

The hubs were marked with a special [permanent] pin. Sometimes the hub would be right on top of a rock pile. I'd have to drive that steel pin in the ground--open up a place in the solid rock--and put that pin in.

We'd be going in a certain direction, and I'd put three bundles, and sometimes four bundles of stakes in a big coal sack. It [the sack] had straps made out of other coal sacks. With four bundles of stakes, it would weigh a hundred or a hundred and fifty pounds. I'd go out ahead of the party, along where the railroad grade was going to go, and I'd cache these bundles of stakes. Then I'd run back and start punching stakes. Sometimes when they weren't going to work on a sunday, that was another chance I had to go out and cache bundles of stakes.

I started out working for my brother-in-law, Sam Babcock [Vera's husband], who was an engineer for the Northwestern Pacific Railroad. I later got a job through another brother-in-law, Carl Clow. He also had been with the Northwestern Pacific--he worked with them when they built the railroad between Ukiah and Eureka. He was also a surveyor. When I finished punching stakes on that survey, me and another fellow from the party named Chantillis got jobs down at Ajo, Arizona.

Sam Babcock made me do about three times as much work as anybody else. I guess he figured that I might be accused of getting a little favoritism [so he worked me harder to make up for it.] Some of those guys never progressed any farther than [the position of] rear chainman, or maybe rear flagman. The rear flagman was the guy that stayed back behind, and gathered up the coats and gave back-sights for the transit. He also carried extra items like the lunches.

As the stake puncher, I had more to pack. You go out through virgin country where there's no roads, and its tough. We went right down Kaminsky Creek. You go up that road from Hopland up to the Mountain House, and where it crossed Kaminsky Creek. They did this survey down Kaminsky Creek and hit the old railroad, below Largo quite a ways. There's a sign there that says 'Kaminsky Creek.' That's where we came in. We hit the old survey that they had previously done up Dry Creek. You remember where they had a resort where you turn off at Yorkville, called The Oaks? That's where we joined in to the other survey. I think it [the survey] must have been 13 or 14 miles long. We were there six weeks, all together.

When I got through with that, it was getting to be the middle of July. A couple of guys headed back down to the city [San Francisco.] We asked what the hell they were doing. They said, 'We'll make it all right. We spent last winter down there. Sometimes we ate every day.' Those were the kind of guys that I worked with [on the survey party.]

We of course followed the maps and notes from the original land survey. In the notes it would say that at a certain place they made a pile of rocks 'four feet in diameter, and two feet high,'

and you'd get there, and there'd be maybe three rocks in the pile. They also made blazes on trees. A big chunk of bark was cut away. They'd use a scribe--it would cut into the side of the tree. All the figures [numbers] were [inscribed] circular--by making half circles and putting them together. The blazes would heal over. Years later, you'd go in and knock the healed-over part off, and there was the scribe, just as plain as anything. It was also imprinted on the part of the bark that you peeled off. Sometimes you'd have cut into those big trees a foot before you'd get into where the old scribe was. Its against the law now to cut into them, though, nowadays.

The railroad never went in, along the full length of the survey. Originally, the railroad was [planned] to connect Albion with Healdsburg. They put in the north end of it first--from Casper back over to Navarro, and from Navarro, (or Christine) across to Albion. They had the survey all made from Healdsburg, up Dry Creek through Anderson Valley, to the coast. That part was never built. When I was about 16 years old, they decided to make another survey that would shorten the line. It would [instead] come up Kaminsky Creek, which comes into the Russian River between Hopland and Cloverdale.

The head surveyor on the party was named Pauley. He could make letters and figures the size of ordinary [nine pt.] print. That small. You didn't get a job like that until you could do that kind of work. The old profiles are just masterpieces.

Add: Proper spelling for Salradas Rock
Add: Mannix's first name

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