by Fremont Older, Editor of the San Francisco Call Bulletin, 1931
It happened at the moment of my deepest depression that A.E. Sherwood, my stepfather's brother, suggested to me that I could preempt 160 acres of redwood timberland adjoining his large ranch in Sherwood Valley, Mendocino County. He gave me a pleasant mental picture of what I would have to do to acquire the land, and how I could subsist.
In order to conform to the federal law, I must establish residence on the land and live there for six months. I could easily build a little cabin, clear a place for a garden, which would provide me with vegetables. I would have no difficulty in finding sufficient work in the neighborhood to piece out a livelihood.
The prospect appealed to me strongly, and while the idea was still fresh in my mind Sherwood and I left for the valley. The railroad at that time ended at Cloverdale. On his way down to the city, Sherwood had left his saddle horses at this point, and we finished the 65 mile journey on horseback. It took us two days.
Sherwood and another white man had settled in this valley in 1852. They had gone bravely in among 800 Mendocino Indians, who were under the leadership of a chief that Sherwood later named “Captain Jack.”
As we rode along over the mountain road, Sherwood told me the story of the conquest. He and his partner had taken with them some gaudy trinkets, as presents, that they thought might capture the fancy of the chief and make him friendly. He did give them a cordial reception, but when he discovered that these two white men had designs on the valley he became suspicious and eventually hostile. Sherwood and his partner used strategy. Captain Jack had two daughters who at once became interested in the white men. Without their aid Sherwood and his partner would have been killed. Captain Jack's conspiracies and plottings were all revealed by the young women to the white men that they admired.
After establishing a camp, Sherwood and his partner hollowed out a big fallen redwood tree, built a strong door at the opening and used it as a jail. The “braves” who planned to kill the white men were thrown into the redwood log jail and fed on raw acorns and water until they promised to be good.
According to Sherwood's story, which was more exciting to me than any dime novel I had ever read, they had many hair's breadth escapes from death. Each one slept with a cocked rifle by his side, and their hearing soon became as acute as the Indians'. The young princesses, daughters of the chief, kept them informed of every contemplated move of the enemy. The Indians succeeded in killing the partner, but Sherwood went on with the fight alone.
In time he gained complete control of the tribe, took possession by preemption and outright purchase of several hundred acres of excellent cattle land. He finally compromised with Captain Jack, who agreed to take for his people a small area at the head of the valley as a reservation. There they lived for many years as Sherwood's neighbors, and under his kind protection.
When I arrived in the valley in May, 1878, disease had reduced the tribe to 50 or 60, and Captain Jack was dead. But the old jail in the hollow log that did such effective service during the conquest was still there. Jails have always been useful to conquerors.
The 160 acre claim that I had preempted bordered Sherwood Valley on the west. It was a beautiful virgin forest of large redwood trees, so close together and rising so high that they shaded the earth from the sun at midday. I found a small cleared space not far from the open land and began at once to build my cabin.
It was great fun splitting boards off a big fallen redwood tree that contained enough lumber to build a dozen cabins. It had evidently been blown over in a storm. Sherwood's boys helped me with the heavy pieces for the frame. I built four walls and roofed them, using the soft, mossy ground as a floor. When it was finished I made a crude bedstead in a corner, using a thick layer of green boughs instead of a mattress. The perfume of those boughs was delicious and with two pairs of blankets I slept like a lord.
I planted a small vegetable garden in front of the cabin, and watered it from a beautiful stream nearby that sang a woodsy song as it leisurely rippled its way to the valley.
I felt like a king in my new home. But even kings need food and I set out to find myself a job. At a sawmill, a few miles away, I was employed to pile lumber. My pay was in orders on a general store in Willits. These orders served my purpose as well as money. Several weeks' work gave me sufficient food and clothing orders to last some time. Life then became easy.
My mother sent me newspapers and books, and I soon knew all of the neighbors. Sherwood's ranch house was only two miles away and the path leading to it from my cabin passed directly alongside the rancheria where the Indians lived. I soon became acquainted with those who could speak a few words of English. They were a simple, friendly people, with no more of our kind of morals than a jackrabbit. They were kind to each other, sharing everything they had as if they were one family. The younger ones knew nothing of their tribal history, but there was a very old man, no one knew how old, living at the rancheria. From him I learned that this group belonged to the Shebalne Pomos, meaning as nearly as I could learn “Neighbor People.”
The old man remembered the tribe in the days of its glory before the white man came. All of their old activities had been abandoned and forgotten, and this little remnant of the tribe, now leaderless, had settled down into a calm, listless despair. Their creed was “never do today what can be put off until tomorrow.” They had a deep seated aversion to work and as a result there was very little to eat, except acorns, huckleberries and blackberries. They dried the berries and they made a rather tasteless bread of the acorns.
Occasionally an old steer would die in the hills. When it has been dead a few days the wind would blow the odor over to the rancheria, and the Indians would fetch the carrion into camp and have a feast. The odor was so unpleasant that I had to hold my nose as I passed by, which brought laughter and derisive hoots from the happy banqueters.
I didn't realize it then, but I was really seeing the last of a race serenely passing from the face of the earth, and like ourselves, not knowing what it was all about.
The two daughters of old Captain Jack were living at the rancheria. One of them, Fanny, had a handsome little daughter nine years old. She also was named Fanny and was half white. She was the granddaughter of Captain Jack, the last ruler of the tribe. The gossips of the valley named as her father a hermit trapper, who lived alone in a cabin in the mountains six miles from the valley.
The trapper and I had become very good friends. I visited him often and occasionally spent the night with him enjoying his wonderful venison steaks, hot cakes, wild honey and huckleberry shortcake.
Something had happened in this trapper's early life that turned him against people and the world in general. I was the only one he would have at his cabin, or that he would speak with, except on business. He was very handsome with dark brown eyes. He had a long drooping brown mustache which he chewed at times to keep from laughing. He had evidently taken an oath never to laugh. When he forgot himself, he checked the laugh suddenly and bit the ends of his mustache violently.
In our many conversions the trapper never mentioned either the girl or her mother. One morning word came to the ranch house that little Fanny was badly burned. While asleep beside the fire in the wickiup she had rolled into a bed of live coals.
Several of us hurried to the rancheria and found the girl wrapped in a blanket and shrieking violently. Her mother was trying to calm her. One of the Sherwood boys and I took turns in carrying her to the ranch house a mile away. Her entire body was terribly burned. While we were applying such remedies as we had, the trapper suddenly appeared, the tears streaming down his cheeks. One of the Indians had told him what had happened. He was greatly agitated. “Get a doctor, quick,” he said. “For God's sake, save her life.”
A doctor came on horseback from Willits. Fanny was dying in great agony. The flesh on her poor little body was literally cooked. She lay writhing on a couch on the front porch. Her mother, and the other squaws, were grouped around her. All were moaning and swaying their bodies. One or two were shedding real tears. I saw her mother run into the wash room and dash water on her face so that she would seem to be weeping.
The trapper stood close by the bedside, grim, rigid and silent. After the doctor pronounced her dead, we laid her body out in the dining room. Then the trapper called me out, took me by the arm, and walked me into the orchard where no one could hear him. “I want you, and no one else, to sit with her body tonight,” he said. “Please do this for me. And I want you and no one else to dig her grave.”
I promised him. I would do as he asked. I kept my word so far as watching the body was concerned, but when it came to digging the grave on the hard hillside I had to have help. It was arranged that the burial was to be a three o'clock the following afternoon. At dark the trapper set out on foot for his cabin in the hills seven miles away. On the following morning a plain little unpainted coffin was brought from Willits by one of the boys.
A woman at the ranch house had made her a shroud out of cheese cloth. When this had been slipped over her ragged little dress, the trapper suddenly appeared, as if he had dropped from the clouds, grabbed me by the arm and pinched me hard. “You put her in the coffin,” he said. “Don't let anyone else touch her.”
I lifted the poor tortured body tenderly and placed it in the crude box and nailed on the cover. We put it in a spring wagon and drove up to the open grave on the hillside, the entire tribe following. The trapper walked alone just ahead of the horses. When we were lowering the coffin into the grave my eyes sought the trapper. He stood a little distance away from the moaning and swaying Indians. He looked like a bronze statue. He never moved a muscle. His face was turned toward the mountains, and he was gazing at the sky. Without moving he seemed to sense when the grave was filled. Just on that instant, with a great sob that seemed to tear him to pieces, he struck out for his cabin in the mountains. I never saw him again.
Did the Indian mother, whose daughter was burned to death, love her child as we whites love our children? And did she suffer the same grief at her death that we suffer when our loved ones pass away? Fanny, unable to shed tears, had deliberately thrown water in her face so that she would seem to be weeping as the whites weep, and during the entire night that I sat by the dead body of her child, she did not once enter the room. In fact, I discovered that she was carrying on a flirtation with a white man in the next room.
I plied my old Indian friend with questions, hoping he might drop a thoughtless remark that would give me a clue to the emotional lives of these strange people. Indirectly, he did try to answer all of my questions by relating the story of the death of Captain Jack, the chief of the tribe and the father of Fanny.
Captain Jack must have had amazing strength. Many years before he died he shot a huge grizzly. Thinking the bear was dead, he walked toward him. Without warning, the animal sprang upon him and began tearing at his body. The chief never lost his presence of mind and with a superhuman effort drew his knife and cut the bear's throat.
Then he crawled three miles to the rancheria. He was covered with blood and mutilated almost beyond recognition. But his daughters, Fanny and Jenny, nursed him night and day until his wounds healed, and although both his eyes had been destroyed in his struggle with the grizzly, he was able to go about over the old familiar trails. His body was twisted and hideous but his spirit still survived.
One day news came to the sisters that their father, who was visiting a coast tribe, was dying. Those two sturdy young women set out at once to bring him home to die. It was 30 miles to the coast, but Fanny and Jenny walked it in a day, and took turns carrying their dying father on their backs on the trip home.
Those were long, weary miles. Two summits lay between the valley and the coast. The canyons were deep and the grades, a mile long, were very steep. But these plucky young princesses never faltered. They were two days on the return trip and when they dropped the body of their father on his blankets in the royal wickiup at the rancheria, they both fell to the ground utterly exhausted.
There was a fortitude and a devotion in this heroic act equal, if not superior, to the whites. But these sisters helped dig their father's grave while he was still alive. And when he stubbornly clung to life after his grave was dug, they carried him out and laid him alongside of the hole in the ground with his sightless eyes focused on his eternal home.
They moaned and swayed and chanted around the old chief but shed no tears. Did they hope he would take the hint and obligingly die? Or was this some fading remnant of a tribal religious rite? No one knew, not even those who performed it. Captain Jack drew his last breath with his head hanging over the side of his grave and when he died, the last hope of his orphaned tribe died with him.
It was autumn and there was a noticeable chill in the air. This was the important season for the Indians at the rancheria. It was the time of the acorn harvest when every squaw was expected to visit every oak tree in that vast forest and gather the winter's food for the tribe. As a rule the “braves” expected the women to do all of the hard work. But while the women were gathering the acorns, the men, aroused to sudden activity, were building a “sweat house” for the annual harvest festival.
The members of the Pomo tribe that lived on the coast were to be the honored guests. For many years this annual ceremony had been held by the coast Indians with the Sherwood Valley tribe as guests. This year the valley Indians had decided to return this hospitality and be the hosts for their coast neighbors.
I watched with great interest the erection of this structure. The name “sweat house” had been given it by the Americans. The Franciscan Fathers had named it “temiscal.” The Indians called it something like “pahcaba.”
The “sweat house” was always built close to a stream. The one I saw constructed was built conical shaped, with long poles leaning toward the center. A hole was dug in the ground for a fire, and the place was made as airtight as possible. The smoke from the fire passed out through an opening in the top. A small hatchery afforded an entrance.
Two selected groups of “braves” were chosen, one from the coast and one from the Valley, to test their endurance. A hot fire was built, every air hole was carefully stopped up. The contestants crawled in and each took a side of the fire. First one group would use their blankets to fan the fire over the contestants. Then the opposing group would return the compliment in similar fashion. This was kept up until they were all nearly exhausted. One by one they crawled out more dead than alive and tumbled into the cold stream. The last one to leave the “sweat house” was declared the winner and the hero of the festival.
This was an old tribal custom and I doubt if any of those then living knew its significance. If they did they kept it a secret as they did all their racial customs. The endurance contest was the closing feature of the two weeks' festival. On the day following its close, the visitors prepared to leave for the coast. I was amazed to see the valley Indians bestowing upon their visitors the entire acorn harvest that I had believed they had gathered to keep themselves alive during the winter. When the guests left, their hosts, stripped of every ounce of food, waved them a carefree, affectionate farewell.
I asked my old Indian friend how his people expected to get through the winter. “Oh,” he said: “Some cattle die, maybe. We get some rabbits, some birds, some snakes, maybe. All heap good.”
When I left them early in December, they were all sitting around their fires with the same serenity they had always displayed. They were facing months of famine with no more apparent realization of it than their neighbors, the birds, the squirrels and the jackrabbits.
In contrast here was I, my preemption time finished and the owner of 160 acres of land, setting out for the city to renew the old struggle with its worries and failures.
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