It’s June and I can see trees falling on the steep slope south of the Albion River, part of a Mendocino Redwood Co. timber harvest. Fir and redwood crash to the ground in McKay Gulch…
Posts published by “Malcolm Macdonald”
As if the sound of chainsaws in the six a.m. hour wasn’t bracing enough, bare feet on the kitchen floor stepped nearly toe to pincer with a scorpion. There are dozens of species of scorpions; ours are forest scorpions, Uroctonus mordax.
Your average Mendocino County shopper probably wouldn’t think twice about purchasing naturally flavored incense. The key words are “naturally flavored.” The natural flavor in some incense is castoreum, made from the secretions of the sacs between the anus and the external genitals of beavers.
Recent River Views recounted the feud between the Frost and Coates families of Little Lake, the 1867 gunfight that killed Elisha Frost and five Coates men, and the subsequent violence of Frost family members. Mart…
The last two River Views columns recounted the feud between the Frost and Coates families of Little Lake (think southern Willits and you’re there), seemingly culminating in an 1867 gun battle that left five of…
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That line from John Ford’s film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance proves apt for tales of the Old West time and again. The shootout between feuding…
If it bleeds it leads. Mendocino County has never been a stranger to senseless bloodletting. In the broader spectrum of history the tragic deaths of Jere Melo and Matthew Coleman last summer were merely another…
The January 26th edition of The Mendocino Beacon ran a story headlined “Fort Bragg ax attacker convicted.” What readers may have missed is that the story was not written by a Beacon reporter or by…
The main office of Mendocino Redwood Company in Calpella contains a concrete enclosed room referred to as “the vault.” Along the wall opposite the vault’s doorway sit a long line of filing cabinets, each several…