Wayne McGimsey takes a quick but wistful look out the large picture window of his Boonville house, strategically located between Anderson Valley Market and Lauren’s Restaurant, before he begins to talk about times past. If he were of a mind to, this Valley old timer could climb up on his roof and see the site of the old homestead south of town where he grew up. It’s not more than two miles away, just about where the California Department of Forestry’s station sits now.
The front room where we sit is warm and comfortable and looks out onto the busy comings and goings from the market next door and Rossi’s Hardware and the Boonville Post Office across highway 128. Strewn about the room are Indian grinding stones and pictures of deer and eagles, the kind of artifacts an outdoorsman places indoors, reverentially, like a Catholic displays crosses. Wayne McGimsey is widely considered an authority on the flora and fauna of Anderson Valley, a status he modestly redefines as “this end,” meaning from Boonville out to Yorkville territory. To be sure his knowledge of his home country is wide and closely observed.
“Mind if I smoke?” he asks, and I wonder if some previous visitor had dared deny this most gracious host a small pleasure in his own house. Rolling one the old fashioned way with a pair of hands the size of catcher’s mitts, hands that have functioned as all-purpose tools in more kinds of manual labor than many of us can remember, we settle in for a talk.
Wayne McGimsey is one of only a few Valley residents who was not only born here but whose roots extend to the first handful of immigrants to settle Anderson Valley in the middle of the 19th century. McGimsey were preceded only by Walter Anderson in 1851, J.D. Ball and family in 1852, John Gschwend and William Prather in 1855 and, in 1858, Rawles, McSpadden and one J. McGimsey.
Walter Anderson, so far as anybody knows, was the first white settler. Predictably, he applied that now exhausted but still apposite phrase, “the Garden of Eden” to his discovery of a fertile and unexploited valley all his for the taking. Once past his Edenic first impressions, Anderson quickly named his discovery after himself, and it’s been Anderson Valley ever since.
“I was born December 3rd, 1918, right down the road,” Wayne begins. “I was delivered by a midwife, Mrs. Tarwater. “She delivered most of the babies in those days. Before her, Grandma Stubblefield was the midwife. Mrs. Stubblefield lived at the other end of The Valley near the old Reiser place. There was never a steady doctor here until quite a bit later.”
Safely delivered into life not much more than a mile from where we’re sitting in mid-Boonville, Wayne recalls the specific place of his birth.
“Where the CDF station is now, and right about where we lived, Henry Beeson had his saddle shop. Made saddles right there. He was the last survivor of the Bear Flag Revolt. (A small band of Americans, fired up by Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, but unfired upon themselves, raised a hand-sewn flag featuring a grizzly bear over the Sonoma plaza on June 14th, 1846 as one of the events of America’s expansion into California, then part of Mexico.) I can remember as a kid playing in his saddle shop. He made them the old fashioned way, right there on the trail from Cloverdale. The old Beeson place was our place. My father was a sheep rancher and we grew hay and vegetables. My father hauled freight from Cloverdale with horse teams, and he hauled bark and hay. He did anything in those days that he could do to make a dollar. Those were the times that a dollar would buy you something, but they were awful hard to get.”
As a boy, Wayne either walked to the school where the Veteran’s Building is now or rode his horse from family ranch into town to master the three-R’s. He also attended school out in Ornbaun Valley, now the Mailliard Ranch. One of his teachers was the legendary local botanist, Blanche Brown.
“I went to work full time when I was fourteen. I was running a ranch — the old Hobson Ranch — with two thousand head of sheep on it. It’s all cut up now into little pieces. I rode a horse every day to keep an eye on the sheep. We used poison to control coyotes and bear. Old Newt Ornbaun, told me about the time he was running hogs out in Ornbaun Valley and he saw a bear come in there, grab a hog, knock it down, hold it with his paw and eat a ham off it and turn it loose, Whether that’s the truth or not I don’t know, but they claimed it happened. In the early days, I remember the last two drives they made on hogs out of this country. They had dogs that would gather them hogs up and keep them in a bunch. If they didn’t stay in that bunch, they lost an ear or they lost part of their nose, or they lost something else that hurt more. But the dogs would drive the hogs fifty to a hundred in a pack, right to Cloverdale where they were loaded onto train cars. I remember when they used to drive cattle from the Piper Ranch out here on Greenwood Ridge to Cloverdale. My dad used to always be in on that drive.”
It’s difficult to imagine a time when cattle and hogs were driven down highway 128 to waiting stock cars at the Cloverdale train depot. What’s striking about listening to Wayne McGimsey reminisce about a way of life seemingly more of the 19th century, is that the cattle and hog drives he remembers took place through the 1930s, only 70 years ago.
Growing up, Wayne did a little bit of everything. He left school at 14 to run a sheep ranch. He also harvested some tan bark.
“In my life, maybe I’ve peeled two wagonloads of tan bark,” Wayne concedes. “I kind of liked it. “
But he liked logging a lot better, and this is a man who, modest as he is, has clearly forgotten more about logging than probably all of Mendocino County’s registered professional foresters put together. “Encyclopedic,” is the adjective that applies. Wayne started logging when there were still big trees that were taken down the old-fashioned way — by hand saw, a man on either end. (The first motorized chainsaws — two-man devices — didn’t appear until after World War Two.)
“After the sheep ranch I went into lumber. Pretty much stuck with that. Except for six years with the Forest Service. I was a foreman with them for six years. Worked in Lake, Mendocino and Humboldt. But any job that anyone else could do in the woods, I’d try. I owned the first chain saw that came into Anderson Valley.”
Wayne groans at the memory. “Oh my god, they was man killers! Big and heavy.”
Logging, then and now was a peripatetic business. Wayne remembers his own days on the road. “I worked at Rockport. I worked as far north as Big Lagoon. It didn’t take them long to wipe it out. Now they are wiping out what they wiped out,” Wayne, his voice sad and fading a little.
“I can remember,” Wayne continues with a gesture towards the big livingroom window, “that old ridge over there, where’s she’s nothing but cut into. The first time around the old timers cut it like a park; that’s the way it would all look now if they had kept cutting it the way the old timers cut it. I still have my old tools I used to do that with. One of the axes on a board over there at the Fair (the Mendocino County Fairgrounds directly across from the McGimsey home) has a bow in the handle. I came in one day and my boy was knocking that handle out to put a new handle he got for it. It took me two weeks to put that bow in it because on the big trees, when we was chopping the undercut out, the reason for the bow was you could reach way out and hit way out in them trees without hitting your knuckles on the top of the undercut. That bow was put in that axe for a purpose. Them undercuts, you would swear they had been sawed. They were that even.”
With a half-woeful shake of his head, Wayne moves from his memories of the big trees to lost timber business opportunities.
“Along the Garcia around 1948, I could have bought that timber for two bits a thousand — nothing scaled under a thirty-inch tree. As long as I lived you could always make a living in timber, even in the depression.”
And the wildlife and fish?
“You know it’s funny. I only saw two mountain lions up until the forties. I’ll bet since the forties I’ve seen fifty of them. There’s one right in this country. Lives pretty close to you. I haven’t seen him this year because I haven’t been out. But last summer, cutting wood I’ve had him come and lay on a log, like from here to the store over there, and sun himself. When I’d see where he was, I’d take a handful of hamburger and lay it down there. He got to where he wouldn’t pay any attention to me at all. I have a kitten coming right here in the back yard. A little fellow. Somebody killed him outside of town. Why I don’t know, but he never hurt anybody.”
As a person who has always worked outdoors, and of necessity has had to pay close attention to natural phenomena in all its variousness, Wayne says the fishing went bad “when we had late rains and not enough rain. As a kid, we’d go up the Rancheria creek there and I’ve seen as many as fifty and sixty steelhead and salmon on one ribbon. Back then, water ran year round in the Rancheria, now it dries up, just like this little creek over here, the Robinson Creek. It dries up now. It used to have fish in it. I personally don’t think that logging had anything to do with killing the fish. It could come back but not until we get those big rains again. We used to call them brush movers. The biggest one I ever saw was in 1937. That took out every bridge from the head of Rancheria Creek to the mouth of the Navarro River. That field out at Pronsolino’s, that big field out there was completely covered with water that year. The Yorkville Post Office was nearby then but it floated away. The water went down so fast, it stranded all the trout and other fish that was out in the water in the fields. Us kids would go and swim across and get a bucket of trout for supper. That all happened in a matter of twelve hours.”
His eye lighting on what appears to me to be a tan brick, Wayne asks me if I know that highway 128 from the outskirts of Boonville down to the CDF station sits on adobe so naturally perfect it used to be mined for bricks. “I’ve got old handmade bricks here with the names of the people who made them on ‘em. A lot of people are collecting them now. You take each place, you could tell where it come from by the way it was made. Same thing with the old timber jack that they used to turn logs with, the old hand timber jacks. You could tell what mill they came from by the way they were made. They were all hand made.’
Just after World War Two, Boonville became a mini-boom town. There were more than twenty mills in The Valley, and a sleepy hamlet so somnolent that cattle could be driven down the main street without complaint, mill workers and loggers from Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana poured into Mendocino County and into Anderson Valley to make their fortunes in redwood and fir.
“Boonville got pretty lively after the war. Let’s see. I know there were four bars. Can’t figure out who the fifth one was. We had the ‘Septic Tank’ up here, and this one over there was the ‘Cesspool.’
That’s what we called them at the time. It wasn’t too bad. Usually wound up with two or three fisters. Had a good Joe Mack. Fist fight. He used to fight at the drop of a hat. That was my dad. Settled right there and that was the end of it.”
Wayne doesn’t know if the James Brothers “came out here or were ever here, but the Earps were both here,” a piece of Valley history I’d never heard mention of before. “The reason I can say this clearly,” Wayne says, honing in on a name synonymous with the American frontier, “is because I can prove it. I’ve got Virgil Earp’s icebox. They stayed in a place out at Yorkville and left a trunk there. And all that information is in that trunk, but I didn’t have sense enough to pick up the trunk. There were four Earp brothers. The two that were here were Virgil and Wyatt, and they lived out in this valley for a long time. But you were talking about the James boys; where you get the connection there is that the Earps and the James’ knew each other, and I can prove this too because I have the pictures of it. The Earp brothers were very well behaved. Everybody liked them. Caused no trouble. They were just ranchers.”
Indians?
“There are artifacts anywhere you want to look. One big burial ground is out on Guido Pronsolino’s place. I understand that many local Indians died from diphtheria. There were large Indian settlements in Yorkville, a big one in the Ornbaun Valley, there’s one right here where the Fairgrounds is, a big one at Philo where the Christmas tree farm is now, and a big one up at the headwaters of the Rancheria.”
Much of the old logging equipment on display at the Boonville Fairgrounds once belonged to Wayne McGimsey. His memories are vivid of days when work was mostly muscle, sweat and a few ingenious tools — a couple of them mill innovations invented by Mr. McGimsey himself.
Wayne still laments the loss of many irreplaceable relics lost in a fast-moving Yorkville fire many years ago that destroyed his stored up treasures. Wayne pauses often when he speaks of these losses, and you can tell he’s seeing everything just the way it was.
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