The Real Grizzly Adams

“A ‘chawed up’ man is very much admired all over the world” Anonymous

“There are few who do not feel interested in…a good bear story.” The New York Weekly, 1860.

 

On the always interesting streets of San Francisco in the mid 1850’s, you might happen to see Mr. John Adams, a wiry man with gray hair and a white, bushy beard dressed in buckskin wearing a hat, in the shape of a fez, made of deerskin and decorated with various animal tails dangling from the top.  He was often followed by a couple of grizzly bears, large and unrestrained.

One of the greatest eccentrics of the gold rush era was born to about as ordinary life as could be imagined in 1812. The third of eight children, he was named John Adams in a state packed full of males named John Adams. Medford, Massachusetts, his hometown was over a hundred and fifty years old when he arrived and the men of that town were routinely employed by one of the factories in the area. At the age of fourteen he began an apprenticeship in shoemaking.

By twenty-one he had left that industry and was hired to be an animal collector for a traveling menagerie show. In the woods of Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire, he trapped wolves, foxes, catamounts, and smaller cats and they were shown with the first exotic animals then arriving in America—lions, camels, an elephant calf, and a pair of Bengal tiger cubs brought by a sea captain from India.

John Adams loved the woods. He had a natural gift with animals and with this job he could hone his backwoods skills. He settled in, married Cylena Drury, and had three children: Arabella, Arathusa, and Seymour.

One day the owners of the menagerie where he sold his animals asked him to calm an unruly tiger.  John had always shown a power over wild animals. He entered the cage several times and several times the animal was quieted. The last time he turned away, the tiger pounced and began mauling Adams. The show folk dragged him out of the cage but not before his back and spine were badly injured. It took him a year to recover enough mobility to go back to boot-making.

He worked at the hated task for fifteen long years and, being of good Yankee stock, he put aside about $7,000.  In 1848, he saw thousands of gold-seekers heading west to the mines and knew that they would need shoes. John hoped to double or triple his money by investing in boots and shipping them to St. Louis to sell to the miners. A wharf fire in St. Louis cost him everything, not long after that his father killed himself.

Feeling there was little else to lose, he abandoned his hammer and his lasts, left his wife and his children, and headed west down the Santa Fe Trail.  He arrived in Stockton in 1849. In California, his bad luck held. Between 1849 and 1853, he failed at farming, mining, and cattle ranching, and as a result found himself involved in many complicated lawsuits, most in and around Sonora.

Thus, in 1852, John Adams left civilization and began the life of Grizzly Adams. No one, not even Grizzly himself, claimed he was a truth-teller. His first biographer, a respected historian of early California, was perplexed by the number of things Adams lied about–things there was really no benefit in lying about. He claimed many first names and even birthdates. The man was a legendary grizzly bear hunter, trapper—and storyteller.

There are several sites thought to have been his home, but Bell Meadows is often suggested and would have been perfect for a real mountain man, a man in his forties already known as Old Grizzly.  The mile-long meadow, a little south of Pinecrest Lake and Dodge Ridge Ski Resort, is contained in a valley surrounded by granite ridges and pine forests.  The meadow itself is filled with wildflowers and a grove of aspens so large and old that it is being studied by botanists today.  At an elevation of six thousand feet, in winter the flowers have gone to seed and the golden aspens are barren white shafts.  During the summer gooseberries and currants thrive along Bell Creek and deer, bear, bobcats, and foxes enjoyed the abundance.

As soon as winter had given way, he was ready to explore an area he had heard about from a half-breed named Saxon. It was then called Washington Territory, but today is western Montana. He hired two young, local Indian men to go with him and Saxon. These men took off north through the Sierras, because taking the valley route would have been too boring.

He found a valley to his liking and began to pursue bear for later sale. These were not California grizzlies, but the grizzlies of the Yellowstone. He found a mother with two yearling cubs as a likely target. He shot the mother with a half-ounce ball in the chest. She fell, but immediately recovered and charged the startled hunter. He dropped the first rifle and picked up a second with only time to shoot from the hip. This shot went into her open mouth and lodged in her brain. She was finished. Now all he had to do was round up the cute little cubs.

He laid down the second rifle and picked up his reata to rope the cubs. They were cannier than he thought and he chased them until he was exhausted. Then the little devils turned on him and chased him up a tree. This was total humiliation. Grizzly Adams, the great bear hunter, had been treed by cubs. They tried to come up after him, but he pounded on their paws and eventually the impatience of youth saved the day. They wandered off and he was able to get down and back to camp.  He tracked the cubs for several nights and then had a plan that involved all four men on horseback. When the cubs went to play in the stream illuminated by moonlight they all rushed the cubs.  Old Adams chased one of the cubs four miles before he caught it and eventually tied it,  sharp teeth and claws and all, into a little bear ball and took it back to camp.  The other men caught the twin, a male.  Adams’s bear was a female he called Lady Washington.

The training of Lady Washington was not something you would see in an episode of “The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams,” the 70’s TV show. He first tried his pugnacious version of kind behavior that already trained a pair of black bear twins to be as gentle as dogs and sleep with him, but Lady Washington still jumped and lunged after him when he got close. So he took a stout stick and beat her with it. She was enraged, but after the spanking she became more docile.  He took her chain off and began leading her around camp with a leash, using the stick to rap her on the back once in a while to remind her who was boss. She was the first grizzly he tamed and probably the first anyone had ever trained.  His devoted pet, she actually learned to carry a pack and pull a cart.

The next summer he stayed in the Sierras and trained his second pet bear, Ben Franklin, who along with his greyhound named Rambler, saved his life.  Walking though shoulder-high bushes he was surprised by a grizzly that rose up, knocked the gun out of his hands with one paw and with the other struck his head and pulled his scalp over his eyes. Adams fell on his face, the bear put her paw on his back and attacked his shoulders and back.  Three things saved him. He had on a leather shirt and a leather coat, the bear was old and her teeth had blunted with age, and he was able to yell and sic his companions on the she-grizzly. With Rambler and Ben Franklin attacking the bear, Adams was able to stand up, push his scalp out of his eyes and wipe away enough blood so he could see.  She was attacking Ben and had him down.  Adams let out a “bear screech,” a sound so awful that the she rose up and he shot her in the heart

The Indian boys bandaged Ben. With their help Adams trimmed his scalp, washed his wound and applied a poultice of snake root and blood root to his head and stayed in his cabin till it healed.  Grizzly Adams survived, but after that walked around with a depression the size of a silver dollar near the top of his forehead, and that depression looked as though there was no skull beneath it.

By the winter of 1855, Adams had been gaining experience touring California with his menagerie.  He bought a house at 143 Clay St. in San Francisco.  In his basement he set up the Mountaineer Museum charging 25 cents admission.  He bolted five foot long logging chains to the middle of the floor and Ben and the Lady were attached. Seven other bears were exhibited along with a three-quarters-ton California Grizzly named Samson penned with iron bars. Two elk, cougar, an eagle, some South American Vultures, eventually a sea lion, and numberless small animals were advertised.

For three and a half years, where now the Embarcadero Center features boutique shops, Grizzly Adams held his show. Very early in its run, reporter, biographer Theodore Hittell found Adam’s small sign and went down the stairs into the basement. Large, dark, and dingy with a low ceiling, animal noises must have reverberated sounds and animal smells must have overwhelmed any breath of air, but Hittell loved it and its ringmaster.  He had found the most exciting story of his life and they worked together to promote the man he called, Mr. Adams.

Ben Franklin, his loyal friend, died of an unknown illness.  And Adams began to worry about his own health.  He went to the San Francisco medical school, took off his furry hat, and asked the greatest medical minds of the West if they could help him. He pointed out to the amazed doctors the original injury and then recounted how a bear at the museum had reopened the injury.  To top it all off, a monkey he was trying to train had jumped on his head and sunk his teeth into the vulnerable spot. Hence that area of his head had no scalp or bone covering and it looked like a fungus was beginning to grow there. The doctors admitted they had nothing to offer.

He took his show around the Horn to New York City where none other than P.T. Barnum was just getting his second wind after a bankruptcy and was looking for something to move him back to the top. Going around the Horn in a schooner was no mean task, but for a dying man with a huge menagerie of wild and dangerous animals it seems fool-hardy.  His real motivations are not recorded, but when he was interviewed by Barnum, he showed him his injuries and according to Barnum said, “I have been beaten to a jelly, torn almost limb from limb, and nearly chawed up and spit out by these treacherous grizzly bears.  However I am good for a few months yet, and by that time I hope we shall gain enough to make my old woman comfortable, for I have been absent from her some years.”

For six weeks Grizzly Adams starred in a show held in a tent on Broadway.  His wife came from Massachusetts to nurse him during this period.  The show’s doctor protested that Adams was essentially a dead man, but Adams got another contract from Barnum. He would get sixty dollars a week for exhibiting the bears for ten more weeks and if he could last those ten weeks Barnum would pay him a bonus of five hundred dollars. Barnum laughed at him and agreed.

Adams made one last squeeze on Barnum who plainly had a soft spot for the mountain man. Barnum had ordered a new costume made of beaver skins, a clean, high-end replica of the one Adams wore to be worn by his all-ready chosen successor.  Adams asked Barnum for the costume. Barnum declined, as it was for the new animal trainer. Adams wheedled Barnum into writing down that Adams could wear the costume until he was done with it.

Adams worked the ten weeks, got Barnum’s five hundred dollars, went home to Massachusetts with his wife and daughter, six days later died and was buried in the new hunting suit.

Alabama Hills

WHERE LEGENDS WERE MADE

The Alabama Hills

 

Have your heroes always been cowboys? I know a place where you seem to see Hopalong Cassidy’s big black hat peeking over every boulder and where Roy Rogers’ warbling and whistling still linger in the air. The Alabama Hills lie two hundred miles north of Hollywood just miles outside Lone Pine. It has been almost a hundred years since the first silent movies were filmed there and no one has an accurate count, but nearly five hundred movies were shot in the area. Most of them B Westerns.

B Westerns had a heavy influence on childhood in the fifties.  I remember.  Even girls had six-shooters and holsters, cowboy hats, and rolls and rolls of caps. Caps smelled so great. It seems to me a large portion of the population has a sentimental attachment to B Westerns. If you have, when you get to Lone Pine, go to the Museum of Lone Pine Film History, right there on South Main.  It’s worth it. Where else can you see the chuckwagon from John Wayne’s movie, The Cowboys. In a proud location sits a cherry blue 1941 Buick Roadmaster.  Gene Autry’s stuntman jumped Champion, Autry’s horse clean over that car to impress the heroine hunkered down on the floor of the front seat. Across the room fourteen latex-covered feet of a Graboid, a giant man-eating underground worm, explode gape-mouthed from the floor of the Tremors exhibit. Tremors was a 1990 Kevin Bacon horror film watched by my boys so often they know the lines by heart.

The museum’s exhibits are not only interesting, but they get you in the mood to drive out of Lone Pine a few miles down the Whitney Portal Road and visit the real thing, the actual location where these films were shot—the Alabama Hills.

You need, at a minimum, to pick up the “Movie Road Self-Guiding Tour” booklet, so you can locate the place where your favorite hero sat around a campfire on his haunches or where the bad guy did a somersault off a boulder when the good guy’s bullets struck home. Find the spot where a covered wagon went flying right off the road and down the arroyo in How the West Was Won.

How the West Was Won was no B Western.  B Movies are characterized by small budgets and modest lengths, and HTWWW cost $15 million (it grossed $50 million) and ran almost three hours. The B movie was the genre that helped Hollywood pay its bills during the Great Depression and make the transition in the mid 1920’s from silent film to the more expensive “talkies.”

William Boyd starred in the most films made in the Alabama Hills.  Originally a silent leading man, he starred in DeMille’s King of Kings playing Simon, who helped Jesus carry the cross.  Later he starred as Hopalong Cassidy in sixty-six movies and fifty-two TV shows. According to his fan site, fifty percent were filmed in the Alabama Hills. He was the most marketed cowboy star of all time and made a remarkable two thousand four hundred advertising endorsements during his career. Lunch boxes, bed spreads, milk cartons: his image was there. Pretty good for a refined cowboy star who loved bubble baths and hated country music.

Why are the Alabama Hills so often chosen as a backdrop for Hollywood’s stories?   Proximity, for one thing. Remember Lone Pine is only two hundred miles from the studios. But the local geology is the primary reason.  If you aim your camera west, the ruggedly handsome Sierras pose in a line, with Mount Whitney in the starring role.  To the east are the Inyo Mountains, less identifiable and less subject to snow.

But the Hills themselves–the foreground the actors hide behind for ambush, fall from in death, and drive wagons, stage coaches, and cars around in dusty peril–the Hills have an incredible, hidden origin. A quick look at the Alabama Hills might make you think some volcano vomited out a little granite on this seven mile by one mile piece of desert.  But that’s not what happened.

Mount Whitney, at an elevation of 14,000 feet, is the tallest mountain in the contiguous United States. The floor of the Owens Valley, in which the Alabama Hills lie, sits at 4,500 feet, making the Owens Valley one of the deepest in the United States.  A rift valley, it was formed between two faults, one at the eastern base of the Sierra Nevada and the other at the western base of the Inyo Mountains. Over the years, the centuries, the geological ages, the two ranges are being pulled apart. Fault breaks indicate that a mighty earthquake, centered in the area in 1872, by itself caused a displacement of fifteen feet. The rift they are leaving between them is now filled with 10,000 feet of unconsolidated sedimentary rock—loose materials like clay, silt, sand, and gravel.

But there is an escarpment, a mountain range hidden underground and its peaks make up the Alabama Hills that are at their highest 1,500 feet above the Owens Valley floor. The huge size of this anomaly was assumed when geologists found that there is a significant difference between the pull of gravity when you measure it on the Alabama Hills and when you measure it in the Owens Valley. You won’t bound into the sky when jumping in the valley or be flung to the ground when you are on the Hills, but there is enough difference to indicate that the Hills are the tip of a range of granite as high, or higher than the Sierras themselves. It is the mass or density of that huge escarpment that causes the gravity to be stronger there than over the loosely packed sediment of the valley.  Maybe that isn’t impressive to you, but it certainly pulls me in.

The movie that used to the fullest all of the Alabama Hills charms was Gunga Din. Made in 1939, an over-budget, over-the-top adventure film.  A buddy film with Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, and Victor McLaglen brawling and mugging their way through close call after close call. RKO Studios hauled in men, horses, mules, and elephants.  They built a village, an army encampment, a Thuggee Temple, a rope bridge, and a tent city for cast and crew to actually live in. Mount Whitney stood in so well for the Kyber Pass an Indian audience was fooled.  For months, in heat up to 110 degrees, extras as English soldiers, Indian soldiers, and fanatics climbed all over the hills like ants.  They fell from rocks, they fell from buildings, and Gunga Din himself fell from the temple’s “golden” cupola.

The climax of the film was shot west of the Hills in a canyon up in the Sierra Foothills. Our heroes stumbled upon a temple belonging to the Thuggee cult of Indians who, for Kali the goddess of death, strangled everyone who passed by. The guru, played by Eduardo Ciannelli, a character actor who usually played mob bosses, but began his career as a baritone at La Scala. In full voice he stirred his followers to execute an ambush on the soldiers of the Raj when he delivered this stirring soliloquy: “Rise and kill.  Kill, lest you be killed. Kill for the love of killing. Kill for the love of Kali. Kill! Kill! Kill!”

This roused into motion one of the greatest scenes of warfare in the pre-computer graphics age. Every soldier, every rifle, every sword had to actually be in the scene.  They ran short of swords and the prop people had to be fabricate the rest from cardboard at the last minute. Every poor fellow who fell from an insane height had to fall from an insane height.  As you can imagine now seventy-five years later pieces of props still lay around the boulders.

That’s why staying in one of the camp sites run by the Bureau of Land Management would be fun for the imaginative and their offspring. They could reenact their favorite scenes, scour the hills for little bits of props, and see how many of the over three hundred stone arches they can find.

They are small arches, but they are arches. The most notable, the Mobius Arch, is only six and a half feet high. It does twist like a Mobius strip and if you face the right way you can frame Mount Whitney with the arch.

John Wayne, the greatest cowboy icon of all, began making silent westerns in the Hills. And the last scene the big man filmed was an ad for Great Western Bank shot in the Alabama Hills. At the age of seventy-one, he rode up to his mark and said, “Beautiful country, You know I rode out here on a little dun horse and started a film career in a picture called The Big Trail.”

That movie was shot in a lot of locations, none of it was filmed in the Alabama Hills. There is a line from a John Wayne-John Ford movie that serves well here. “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

 

 

California Grizzly Bears

California Grizzly Bears

Ursus califonicus

 

You may think this will be a very short article, because there are no wild grizzly bears in California. But once there were.  Before European settlers arrived there were as many as ten thousand grizzlies in the Golden State.  Less than seventy-five years after the discovery of gold every California grizzly was dead.

Genetic testing has shown that we not only lost every grizzly living in California, but we lost a distinct subspecies of grizzlies—Ursus californicus—the largest of all the grizzly subspecies, the largest of all the bears.

Two thousand three hundred and thirty-five pounds.  That’s what they say the hugest, gnarliest, toughest old bear in California weighed, the one John Lang shot. I should state that statistics and stories about individual bears and their killers or keepers need to be taken with some skepticism as they are anecdotal and have been told and retold for over a hundred years.

In July 1873, John Lang, the postmaster in the Santa Clarita Valley just over the San Gabriel Mountains from Los Angeles, decided to rid the area of a notorious bear that had terrorized the area for four years. “This bear was for over thirty years the terror of California, as he roamed over the entire State and proved invincible against all the many plans invented to capture him. Many human beings fell before him, and by his cunning hundreds of cattle, sheep, hogs, etc., were mowed down in his wake,” according to An Illustrated History of Los Angeles County, California.

Postmaster Lang followed the monster for about twelve miles. When he found the bear, it charged him with a scream that “made the mountains ring for miles away.” With incredible cool, Lang waited until the bear was thirty feet away and plugged him in the chest. Only one shot is mentioned. The hide was sent to a museum at Liverpool.

The story of the Lang bear would seem totally implausible if it weren’t for another bear story from down near Escondido that has more verification.

In 1866, a grizzly weighing 2,200 pounds was killed near the Valley Center home of James Lovett.  Lovett and several other men weighed him on a neighbor’s cattle scale. When this bear was cut up and skinned, they found more than a pound of lead inside his head.

Today, the largest of the Kodiaks weigh slightly more than one thousand pounds which wouldn’t begin to measure up to the old California grizzly.

Grizzly bears were first sighted by Europeans in 1602. Sebastian Vizcaino sailed from Acapulco on the coast of what was then called New Spain searching for a place in Alta California, today’s California to colonize. Father Ascension, the diarist for the expedition, wrote of the favorability of what is now Monterey Bay. He wrote of the large bay, the fertile lands, friendly Indians, and the abundant game. He wrote of seeing from the ship at anchor the first grizzlies when the bears came down to the beach at night to feast on a dead whale that had washed ashore.

The Spaniards didn’t return for one hundred and sixty years. When they did there were still grizzlies in the golden land. Starving, scurvy-ridden sailors killed and ate the first bullet-killed California grizzly and went searching for more.

What else did California grizzlies eat besides whales? Like the old joke says: anything they wanted. Another favorite food was acorns which they gorged on until their bellies dragged the ground. Less fattening, but also a well-loved repast, was clover which grew luxuriantly in the valleys and foothills. The bears traveled in groups or herds as they mowed fields wild and cultivated. Searching through writing of the period, one historian found thirty-six different foods bears had been recorded eating—items as diverse as tule roots and yellow jacket nests.

What of the great carnivore slashing through the countryside killing and devouring as he went, leaving a bloody swath in his wake? The bear certainly had the potential for that kind of a life.  He could run as fast as a horse. One lightning swipe of his paw could remove a face or a shoulder. But he usually didn’t chase large agile herbivores; like elk, deer, or pronghorn, he preferred these animals as carrion with a little age on them.

Grizzlies had no trouble with the slower, more stupid long-horned cattle of the Spaniards. The longhorns of that day were not raised for their meat, but for their hides and tallow.  The Spanish explorers had brought Iberian cattle to the New World. When the missions were built in California, cattle brought from Mexico became an important commodity for the missions and the later rancheros.

The bears were bold, and attacked and ate cattle in full view of the herdsmen. Fifty bears were killed near a Monterey ranch including one that had distinguished himself by eating five mules and seven cows. Four hundred head of cattle on another ranch were eaten by bears. Traps and poison weren’t working, so the governor authorized a military campaign and the use of one thousand cartridges. Cartridges and guns were mentioned because the average vaquero didn’t carry a firearm. Guns belonged almost exclusively to the military.  The vaquero used his reata or lasso as his weapon. Using a lasso to hunt bears required an extraordinary degree of fearlessness. There are stories of bears that had been bravely roped, sitting down and pulling the rope hand over hand or paw over paw. Time for the vaquero to abandon his hapless horse and find a tall tree.  The grizzlies remained numerous.

The miners used most every part of the grizzly. The fat was used for frying oil and for an exotic-smelling hair dressing. The pelt made warm blankets and rugs. The meat provided protein.  Bear meat is supposed to taste like pork. The Spanish didn’t like it much. The miners seemed to like it fine. Roasted or dried, it was a staple. They baked bear heads in the oven and skinned the paws to be able to eat the mass of goo that rivaled the taste of the finest marrow. An early Sonoma gourmet made bear bacon.

Bears didn’t value human meat as much as miners liked eating the bears, but they didn’t mind “chawing” on men who annoyed them. The breadth of literature about bear attacks is endless, second only to miner’s stories of their astounding prowess hunting grizzlies.

The Indians had been defenseless against the big bears. The Spaniards who rarely left home except on horseback feared the bears less, but their livestock, being less alert and less wary than wild animals, provided easy prey and when they arrived the bear numbers increased.

The explosion of human population with the discovery of gold in 1849, the invention and use of the repeating rifle, and the drought of 1863-1864 that ended the reign of the Mexican rancheros with their vast herds, all contributed to the rapid decline in the population of bears.

They retreated from the valleys leaving the lush clover and the smelly whale carcasses behind and moved into the foothills and later up to the mountains. It was in the Sierras where one too many calves on the Agnew ranch had been killed. In August 1922, Jesse Agnew and his friends set a trap and a couple of days later their cattle killer was found with his paw well-held in the steel jaws. In pain the bear snarled sinisterly.  One shot from a heavy rifle ended his life. Consensus says that this was the last California grizzly killed.  As grass began to cover the well-worn paths through the berry patches and by the rivers, a huge print might be seen or a big bear spotted from afar. But the day of the California grizzly was over

In 1952, when things got so civilized that the legislature could turn its mind to something as tame as picking the state mammal, they chose the California grizzly even though the shot killing the last one had rung through the air some thirty years before. The bear was also chosen to be on the state seal.

It was a fitting choice, because back in June of 1846, the grizzly bear had been chosen by men who were afterwards known as “Bear Flaggers.” These men raised their flag in Sonoma and declared California an independent republic, the “Bear Flag Republic.” Someone had painted a bear on the flag.  Some say it looked more like a pig or a black bear.  According to a veteran of the rebellion, the grizzly symbolized strength and unyielding resistance.  A strip of red flannel from a petticoat that had been worn across the mountains made a stripe four inches wide at the bottom. The star was drawn using blackberry juice.  A month later in July of that year, the Bear Flag of the short-lived California Republic was lowered and a twenty-eight-star American flag was raised at Monterey. California became a territory of the United States.

On February 3, 1911, the Bear flag became the official state flag.  The bear this time had a proper hump on his back and the infamous scooped face. He is a real California grizzly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Glorious Floods of Light” Bierstadt Paints the Sierras

"Glorious Floods of Light" Bierstadt Paints the Sierras.

The Sierras as an Allegory for Life–The Art of Chiura Obata

In nature—or “Great Nature” as he called it—Chiura Obata found symbolism for his life. He found lessons in the serenity of the High Sierras. Not in Yosemite Valley, which when he arrived in 1927, was already bustling with the noise and congestion of cars and people. He found it in the high country. In the music of the streams, the whispers of the wind, the colors of wildflowers, the gentle loveliness of the mountains, Obata found tranquility. And In the tranquility he could learn “the teachings within this quietness.” His was not an unexamined life.

He always watched the moon, a universal presence. It appears in all his night pictures illuminating the silent night. By the campfire one evening he made a postcard for his son with sumi-e—brush and ink–and watercolor, sketching the meadow as it “quietly fell asleep.” He wrote this message to his little boy at home in the attic apartment in Berkeley, “Gyo-chan, the lovely moon is gone. It went to bed early to sleep. Grow big, and shine more.”

In the stamina of weathered mountain trees he felt a strong symbolism for his own life. He often expressed how a man endures like the mighty redwood that stands “more than three thousand and seven hundred years in rain, snow, storm, and even mountain fire” still keeping a thankful nature without tears. He was moved by a storm-weathered old pine he found at the top of Tioga Pass right where the worst of the Sierra winter freezes and blows: “A warrior at the end of his life, he embraces with his rough roots the young trees growing up and surrounding the fallen parent.”

When he made his first trip to Yosemite, Obata’s artistic skills were at their apex. In the wild nature of the Sierras he found his life’s focus. It directed and sustained him through harsh times ahead and gave meaning to trials he had already experienced in a life never made easy by his challenging choices.

Chiura Obata was born in the ancient Japanese city of Sendai in 1885. He descended from Samurai, but that class had been outlawed a decade earlier during the modernization of Japan. Born last of many children at five years old he began showing artistic talent, so he was adopted by his older brother, an artist and art teacher who had no sons. At the age of seven Chiura began art lessons after school. His first lesson was to master the sumi-e brush. He drew a symbol consisting of two lines and a circle, over and over for two hours each day without resting his arms. He did this for two years until his brother felt mastery was complete. When Chiura was fourteen, his brother decided he should go to military school instead of being an artist. At this point he rebelled and talked his stepmother into helping him escape to Tokyo.

Chiura apprenticed to a master painter there until he was seventeen. He was already winning awards and getting commissions, but he was not satisfied with Tokyo. “I felt the world was too small for me.”   He wanted a larger world, one with “Great Nature.” He first landed in Seattle, then went to the Bay Area in 1903, his ultimate destination being Europe. He never left California and began making a life for himself, found a job doing illustrations for Japanese-language newspapers and magazine, married a young Japanese woman, Haruko Kohashi, and had four children. Haruko assumed the traditional subservient role of the Japanese wife. If Chiura wanted to paint in the middle of the night, she arose too and assisted him. She also managed to find time to be a serious Ikebana artist. Ikebana is the ancient Japanese art of flower arranging.

Chiura was working hard to become a part of a country which was trying to stop immigration—particularly non-European immigration. It’s easy to forget that it wasn’t until 1853 that Admiral Perry opened Japan to diplomacy. By 1880, Japanese immigrants in the US only numbered in the thousands. In 1882, the white working class in the West demanded that the “filthy, yellow hordes” be barred from immigration and Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Law. Japanese workers were replacing Chinese as plantation laborers in Hawaii and were allowed in the U.S., but American anti-immigration feelings still grew. In 1908, President Teddy Roosevelt made what was called the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” with the Emperor of Japan. So that the Japanese would not have to face the embarrassment of being formally banned, the Emperor agreed to restrict passports to America. During this period, wives, children, and other relatives of Japanese already living in America were the primary immigrants. In 1924, Congress passed an immigration act that excluded all non-Europeans.

The gifted, confident artist with the soul of a samurai walked through a society where many despised his kind. As the five foot four artist made through San Francisco, he was met with slurs, spitting, and even physical attacks. Paradoxically, the rich of the city had a taste for all things Japanese in the decorative arts. Chiura painted murals at Gump’s and City of Paris department stores and designed sets for the opera Madam Butterfly. At the Pan Pacific Exposition, Haruko had a full room displaying her flower arrangements. Often a painting of Chiura’s would serve as a background for Haruko’s Ikebana arrangements.

But even the local artists didn’t reach out in friendship. So the force that was Chiura went around the snubs and founded the East West Art Society. It started with other Japanese artists, then other outsiders like Chinese and Russians, and finally some local Americans. That was when Worth Ryder, a professor from University of California at Berkeley, invited him on a summer camping trip to Yosemite and the High Sierras. In the three months he was there he produced over one hundred drawings in pencil, watercolor, and sumi ink. They became the foundation of his famous body of work and established the direction his art would travel.

Ryder then invited him to teach a summer class at Berkeley. It was so popular that Obata, with no college degree and sketchy English, progressed to instructor. When December 7, 1941, arrived he had a network of friends and admirers at Berkeley who worked to help him navigate the internment order that followed.

When it became clear that they would have to leave Berkeley, Chiura carried on with his teaching, leaving Haruko to pack and disperse or sell everything that wouldn’t fit in one suitcase per person. Obata’s collected works were stored by Berkeley’s President Robert Gordon Sproul at his home. One professor transplanted Obata’s prized Japanese pine to his own garden and it is still growing there.

The relocation center for eight thousand Bay Area Japanese was Tanforan Park Racetrack in San Bruno, where an injured Seabiscuit had just trained. The Obatas were first assigned a stable with three wooden beds. Later they were moved to hastily constructed barracks. During the five months they stayed in Tanforan, Obata established an art school and even managed to have a showing at Mills College of the students’ work. Each week 90 classes were conducted. The students used art supplies brought by devoted friends.

Chiura spilled his feelings onto paper. At the time of the first rumors of relocation he began a work entitled “Struggle,” a giant Sequoia thrashed by a blizzard. He finished that rather large work before leaving home and as they progressed through each indignity of the move he was continually painting. He sketched soldiers, Japanese crowding on a bus, a farewell picture of the Bay Bridge in the fog and rain, a mass of people talking to friends through a wire fence.

When the Obatas left for the “permanent” camp at Topaz Lake, Utah, he continued sketching. The guarded train they traveled on went up through his beloved Sierras, and beyond. They ended up south of Salt Lake City in a desert area where summers were blazing hot and winters could dip below zero. If it wasn’t blowing dust, it was blowing snow. But it was continually blowing. One of Obata’s sketches of a family huddled in blankets bore this poem—“No roof. No electricity. No stove./ The ground is frozen at this elevation./ The cold pierces the skin./ The rain has become sleet/ and not enough bedding./ Forced to travel./ Broken in mind and spirit/ are these people from Santa Ana.” This poem was dated October of his first year there.

Once again Obata threw his soul into teaching. By December an adult education program had 3,250 students. It was so cold his student’s watercolors froze on the paper before drying.

The older people were morose and the younger people were rebellious. Then upheaval over an impending loyalty oath began. Many of the questions were puzzling, as were the consequences of their answers. Question #28 of the loyalty questionnaire caused the most consternation, because it required all detainees 17 years old or older to swear unqualified allegiance to the United States forswearing their loyalty to the Emperor or any other foreign government. This placed the Issei, first generation born in Japan, who had never been allowed American citizenship in the position of choosing statelessness or disloyalty to the USA.

The Obatas chose the USA and there were rumors that Chiura collaborated with the FBI. Late in the night of April 4, 1943, Chiura was leaving the shower room when he was attacked by someone with a blunt metal object resulting in ten stitches on his forehead over his left eye and 19 days in the hospital. The sketches of the hospital were some of the last he made at Topaz Lake. The Obatas were removed from the camp for their safety.

The Obatas spent the rest of the war in St. Louis where their son Gyo lived and found work with a commercial art company. After the war Chiura and Haruko were able to return to teaching. Chiura taught nine more years at Berkeley before retiring. Three months after his return he was able to have an exhibition of one hundred of his sketches and paintings of Topaz at the College of the Pacific in Stockton. In June UC Berkeley hosted a showing of his images of the atomic devastation of Hiroshima. Though many said that life would never return to the site, but Obata’s paintings showed a belief that nature would triumph and survive the destruction and he was delighted when he read that grass was beginning to grow around the ruins.

The old redwood continued to live and live well. He and his wife led tours to Japan and whenever he could he went to see the “Great Nature” of the Sierras, the “Great Nature” from which he drew strength, resilience, acceptance, and ultimately peace. In 1975, he died at the age of ninety.

He left us with a body of work of the mountains that contrasts with the familiar grandiose Euro-American style. He shows us our Sierras in the quick, minimalist strokes of a master Japanese artist and we are richer.

“Glorious Floods of Light” Bierstadt Paints the Sierras

July of 1863. The nation’s armies engaged in the Battle of Gettysburg. By the end of the hottest day of the year the fighting had ceased. Some 165,000 Americans fought and 8,000 died. Thousands of wounded were left to the mercies of the civilians of Gettysburg. And the great Civil War moved on.

August of 1863. In Yosemite Valley, the California sun warmed a group of ten gentlemen and their staff of two. Three artists with full plein-air kit—including easels and umbrellas—were so deeply involved in making color studies for future masterpieces they didn’t break for a meal. Their man brought them light lunch in individual pails. The rest of the gentlemen fly-fished and hunted for supper or searched for specimens of nature to take back to civilization. Fitz Hugh Ludlow was “butterflying,” as he called it, on horseback. He wrote he was following the example of the knights of old who chased butterflies around the castle. Ludlow chronicled their trip in his own quirky, florid style in a book titled The Heart of the Continent.

With Ludlow was Albert Bierstadt, the highest paid and most acclaimed artist of the time—possibly the greatest landscape artist of all time. Bierstadt, upon returning to San Francisco, found his draft notice in the mail. He paid $300 to hire a substitute to fight for him. Quite legal, this sort of draft evasion happened so frequently that soldiers of both armies called it the “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.” This expedient allowed Bierstadt to continue doing what he did best and he and Ludlow continued their trip north through Oregon and Washington making more studies and collecting Western memorabilia, then turned east for home.

In 1866, Fitz Hugh Ludlow and his beautiful young wife, Rosalie, divorced. Within the year Bierstadt married Rosalie and began the construction of Malkasten, a grandiose chalet on the Hudson River, to house his latest acquisitions. In the newly completed studio he repainted some of his Yosemite studies as large panoramas known as his “Great Pictures.”

             One of the Great Pictures, Domes of the Yosemite, was painted and put on exhibition in New York in 1867. A heated discussion began among the art critics, some of whom objected to the excess drama and exaggerated scale of the painting. The argument, according to the New York Independent, approached a second Civil War. Certainly, no one argued over its greatness in size. It measured nine feet by fifteen feet. Bierstadt’s largest.

He took the time to plan the presentation of Domes of the Yosemite for its New York exhibition. Bear in mind that the painting itself has the dimensions of the floor of a medium-sized room. Bierstadt had a space draped in black fabric to absorb all the extraneous light and prepared an elevated platform to heighten the painting’s illusion of looking down on Yosemite Valley.

Mark Twain, after reading the bickering of art critics over this phenomenon, had to see for himself. “It is very well worth going to see,” he reported. “It is very beautiful—considerably more beautiful than the original.”

With that dry-as-dust comment Twain encapsulated the feeling Bierstadt was trying to capture. Not just nature, but nature wrought in perfection.

He painted in a popular style–now called Luminism—unabashedly romantic and melodramatic. Americans, bruised and battered by the Civil War, were ready for brazen beauty—the Edenic beauty the West was thought to offer. The artists who went west and then returned with their studies painted them oversized to portray the immensity they had seen. After all, just the granite eminence of Half Dome, stands 1,360 feet tall, about the size of the Empire State Building, and Yosemite Falls drops 2,425 feet, nearly the height of two Empire State buildings.

He worked compulsively for fifty years painting at least five hundred (possibly as many as four thousand) incredibly detailed canvases, many approaching the size of Domes. Even while taking Rosalie to meet the crowned heads of Europe or showing her California, he continued turning out paintings.

From the outset of his career Bierstadt was influenced by photography, in particular stereoscopic photography. He and his brothers became proficient in this art before he ever went west. Like the View-Master of the 1960’s, stereopticons superimposed two photos, one for each eye, taken by cameras placed at about the distance between two human eyes. Bierstadt, aware of the difference the visual dimension of depth makes, used various techniques to heighten this effect and to add realism to his oils.

He used atmospheric perspective to make far objects look distant. The color of objects fades as the distance from the viewer increases because it the light must pass through more moisture and dirt particles before it reaches us. So when he painted distance he used colors that were less vivid, almost pastel. This technique and a continual experimentation with vantage points gave Bierstadt the desired effect.

He was never subtle about using light to direct the viewer’s eye to the focal point of his paintings. Glowing colors pull your gaze exactly where he wanted your eye to go.

But as history shows, when a style reaches its zenith people tire of it and something new takes its place. When realism became so real you could count the leaves on the distant trees, the French began experimenting with Impressionism. They too were obsessed with the effects of light, but they took the lens that Bierstadt and his fellows used and turned it until the sharp focus that Bierstadt had mastered blurred into spots of light and color. Bierstadt went out of style. Way out of style.

It wasn’t until the 1960’s that the art world took another look at Bierstadt and his fellow luminists and decided these artists were worth looking at. Some impressionistic and abstract paintings had to go to the storeroom so museum curators could once again hang those big, lush landscapes. After all, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

The title quote is from John Muir, “After ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it seems above all others the Range of Light.”

Yokohl Valley and the Condors

Blue RiThe dowager empress sat magisterially in the boughs of the Ponderosa Pine, her accustomed spot, surrounded by several members of her court. It was midmorning, early summer of 1968 and the fire lookout in the foothills of Tulare County saw the group of a dozen California Condors close to his tower on the pinnacle of Blue Ridge. He logged their presence for they were some of the last of their species.
The lady spread out her nearly nine-foot wing span and basked in the sunlight, looked down her impressive beak at the Yokohl Valley spread out below, and quietly scanned the area for evidence of some other animal’s kill ready for her tasting. But she saw nothing, no smaller scavengers gathering in the valley. She folded her wings around her like a vampire’s cloak trimmed with an ebony feathered boa. The bald head—wrinkled and mottled—contrasted abruptly with her body’s solemn dark elegance. Her eyes, stern and imperious, forbade anyone from mentioning her tender, mottled pink pate or her bulbous neck.
Like many empresses her lineage arose from a vague distant past. She had lived in the Pleistocene epoch and grazed on the carcasses of its mega-fauna. At the end of the Pleistocene, ten thousand years ago, the mastodon, giant ground sloths, and saber-toothed tigers that roamed the California valleys became extinct–whether from climate change or the arrival of man from Asia is a subject for debate. Somehow the condors lived on past their fellows, adapting to smaller carrion from the kill of much smaller predators.
The fire lookout knew that the total population of the California Condor was estimated at 38 (at the beginning of the 1950s there were approximately 60). He had notified the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service about the location and number of his little flock. He couldn’t help feeling he had a very privileged view.
The dowager felt movement in the air. The central valley was heating up. Warm air was expanding up the valley towards the cold air in the Sierras behind them. Her domain needed to be investigated. She knew she could glide on those thermals forever. She reopened her mighty wings and jumped off the bough, flapping slowly until she felt the thermal of rising air lift her twenty-pound body and effortlessly support her. She glided so close to the tower, the lookout could hear the “whoosh” of her eighteen-inch wingtip feathers slicing through the air.
She headed west down the Yokohl Valley, her usual range. From Blue Ridge in the east the valley extends seventeen miles to the west and ends at Rocky Hill the edge of the San Joaquin Valley. Among the endless smooth, grassy foothills Rocky Hill is covered with boulders and oaks. The rolling soil of the Tulare County foothills contains a serpentine mélange formed of ancient oceanic sea bed. Poisonous to many plants and not deep enough for the roots of oaks, some flora—certain grasses and wildflowers—have adapted to it and they are responsible for the area’s excellent grazing and annual spring wildflower extravaganza.
Rocky Hill, the child of a different geological parent, began as a subduction of an ancient continental plate under the North American plate created a magna bulge that created granite and the anomaly of a hill covered with trees and boulders. The disarray of the boulders make little tunnels and caves and cracks that are covered with pictographs—a world-class rock art site preserved since 1992 by the Archaeological Conservancy. The paintings were done by the local Yokodos (Yokohl is the English version), a subgroup of the Yokuts, a major California tribe.
At the base of Rocky Hill lies a thirty-foot-long village mound. Flat boulders near the mound have mortar holes where acorns and seeds were ground into flour. Archeologists estimate that each family ate a ton of acorns per year. Before the California Gold Rush the valleys teemed with elk and pronghorns. The pronghorns ran like cheetahs, but wouldn’t jump over barriers as they ran. The Indians hunted them by building stone walls and chasing the herd toward them. When the pronghorn stopped and milled in confusion the Yokodo hunters clubbed and speared meat for supper. Remains of these rock walls are still found in the valley, but the hunter-gatherer life was about to end.
Before any Europeans, even the early Spanish, arrived in Yokohl Valley the signs of their coming preceded them. Early-germinating Mediterranean grasses brought to California by the Spanish missionaries invaded the prehistoric native grasslands. The Yokodos must have been shocked when the first wild horses wandered in or heard their first gasping hee-haws from lost burros wandering north or east from the early Spanish Missions of the late 1800s. Indian traders from the south introduced cloth to the Yokodo who had only worn animal skins and woven help or nettles. And convinced them to supplement their strings of seeds and feathers with trade beads, and shiny metal jewelry.
There were no Spanish land grants in the Central Valley. The Spanish, and later the Mexicans, favored the coast and the southern parts of California. They did explore the Yokohl Valley and left ruins of a device called an arrastre with a large, heavy stone used to crush gold-bearing quartz. The place was called Spanish Camp by the settlers who found the relics. It’s not the only ruined arrastre up the Yokohl Valley, and not the only lost gold mine. Everyone hoped for gold, but only small amounts were found in these rocks.
When they arrived the pioneers raised pigs, sheep, and magnificent horses. They suffered floods and droughts. Schools and post offices came and went, but no real towns. The Jordans tried to build a toll road across the Sierras. Strickland mined tungsten. Captain Thew hunted for sunshine and not satisfied with an abundance of that searched for oil. These and many others made good lives in the valley. And the Gills had a ranch.
Several different versions of this story have been told. This is the version told by Brent Gill, patriarch Levi Gill’s great-grandson. The hardy, fecund Gills came from Ohio. In 1873, Levi Gill headed west with his two older boys riding 2,500 miles in 135 days. They crossed Donner Pass and headed south until they arrived at the Yokohl Valley. The next spring Eliza Gill packed up their belongings along with the cow and the babies—four year old twins, a two year old and a seven month old baby—into a boxcar headed for Sacramento. There Levi and the boys graciously met her with a wagon. Before they reached their Yokohl Valley home Eliza was pregnant again. Brent also stated that it was the excellent grazing found on the Tulare County foothills that stopped his ancestors at Yokohl Valley.
Six generations of Gills have done extremely well in agribusiness. Each building their own business, they spread out independently all over the west. The Adolph Gill Ranch in Yokohl Valley was headquarters for one of the largest cattle ranches in California. In 1964, the Yokohl Valley Gills sold their 48,000 acre ranch to the J. G. Boswell Corporation, one of the largest landholders in the West, and the character of the operation immediately changed from one seeped in the cowboy way and old vaquero lore to a stream-lined business model, where the cattle are often rounded up with a corporate helicopter.
Before the second Adolph Gill died in1992, he saw to it that the 23 acres of Rocky Hill—the village mound and the exceptional pictographs–were preserved by the Archaeological Conservancy.
In September, 2005, the Department of Reclamation officially discarded a fifty year old plan to turn the Yokohl Valley into another California reservoir and immediately, in September, 2005, J.G.Boswell Company felt it was time to file a preliminary application for a planned city of 30,000 residents with an exclusive country club and golf course to be built on acres of the century-old Yokohl Valley Ranch.
Across Yokohl Valley Road in 1982, a wildlife refuge had been established to preserve the traditional habitat of the condors.
In the 1980s, the dowager’s vanishing species became the poster child for the burgeoning environmental movement and there were many conflicting plans for their survival. David Brower, the founder of the Sierra Club, called the Archdruid or High Priest of conservation, said, “A condor is 5% feathers, flesh, blood, and bone. All the rest is place.” He felt that the condors “place” had vanished and the actions planned to save them from extinction did not respect the dignity of a survivors from the Pleistocene.
Mr. Brower did not win the day and the conservation efforts for the California Condors were the most extensive and the most expensive for any species to date. Capturing the last California Condors and preserving them in zoos, bringing in Andean Condors to study, tricking breeding pairs to produce two eggs a season, using puppets to rear fledglings, and devoted efforts of all kinds have ruled the day.
Was the empress one of the condors captured to save her life and bred in captivity to continue the existing flock? Or was she shot and killed by some idiot who wasn’t up on his ornithology and just couldn’t resist so large a target? Did she eat something that was too toxic for even a scavenger? Or did she, romantically, as David Brower suggested, grieve herself to death over the loss of blue skies, empty hills and valleys, and good, clean rotten carcasses?
Her home, the Blue Ridge Wildlife Preserve, is waiting for her descendants, released into the wild and carefully tracked. A couple of condors have reportedly returned and snooped around, but returned south to where they were released–not ready yet to venture so far.
And so a modern day stand-off has developed. Yokohl Valley waits, an almost pristine Central California valley, home of wildflowers—some rare and hidden, some thriving in amazing quilts over the spring ground, with a rugged, curvy road beloved by bikers of both the motor and the pedaling kind, where historic relics are snooped out by the archeologists, amateur and professional, and plein-air artists brave the stickers and bugs to copy the curves and the tints of a place that still looks much the same as it did before it became California; to the north of the road, the valley has a wildlife refuge preserving the traditional nesting and foraging areas of the giant California Condor with none as yet moved in, and to the south the fields are already divided into home parcels and the plans are sitting on desks in the developer’s offices in La Mesa, California.
The curtain will soon go up and the drama will begin.

The Bridal Veil Mummies

Under the impassive granite giants of Yosemite passed a sad procession. From behind trees and boulder the squat Ahwahneechee Indians watched as the last of their predecessors, the noble prehistoric giants, bore the body of The Bridal Veil Mummies their princess to the tomb prepared for her. Under her cloak of furs she held, in a maternal embrace that would endure through centuries, the dead infant that had been their race’s last hope. Their bodies were grey with the ashes of her dead father, the king, killed only weeks earlier in an ambush of the lords by the Ahwahneechee pushing boulders down from a cliff as they walked underneath.
It was spring and the dogwoods were in bloom. Some of the women plucked blossom-laden branches. The waterfall, now at its fullest, dropped 600 feet to where they stood. But the prepared vault was accessible as the wind blew the spray, making it a lace curtain of water pushed aside for the lady of the royals. Most of the small group of survivors were stoic as they placed her on the dais and slowly replaced the vault’s stone wall, covering the access. But one of the women gasped in grief as the boughs were draped in front of the rock panel and they turned and left, diminished in their noble height by the hunch of grief.
When they were well and truly gone, the Ahwahneechee came out from behind their hiding places and together the men piled as many boulders in front of the vault as they could, crushing the white flowers of the dogwood.
In 1895, most of a millennium had passed and the dogwood had long been washed away before a group of miners eating lunch at the base of Bridal Veil Fall saw, when the wind blew the mist to the side, rocks that looked unnatural. The miners moved the rocks, saw the vault with its even 1/8” joints, and removed the door. The miners, having high hopes for jewels and riches, were sorely disappointed when they saw only the body of the princess, mummified by the dry air of the crypt, still cradling the infant.
The mining boss, a Mr. G.F. Martindale of Kansas, saw an opportunity and had the others sign over their rights to him. He took the 6’9” mummy to Los Angeles where it was authenticated by scientists as a relic of a lost Stone Age tribe of giants.
This is the origin story for the Martindale Mummy. The legend traveled with her and her baby across uncounted miles with many owners. The tale can be found on the internet today in support of various theories of unrecorded giant races that once walked the earth.
The nineteenth century was a time of great advances in reason and technology. Maybe because so much seemed so changed and bizarre it was also a time of great interest in the supernatural and otherworldly. Oddities abounded.
P.T. Barnum boasted of 15,000 visitors a day to his American Museum in New York which included an exhibit of a “Feejee Mermaid,” a mermaid made from a monkey torso sewed to a fish. Colonel Wood’s museums in Philadelphia and Chicago offered viewing of 500,000 oddities from all over the globe. If you were an oddity yourself or owned one, he offered a chance at a fortune if you turned yourself or your possession over to him.
With this kind of competition it is little wonder that Mr. Martindale, in his first commercial venture exhibiting his mummies, did poorly. He finally loaned the mummies to the Kansas Historical Society for several months in 1899. While on loan to the historical society the mummies were on display in the Kansas State Capital Building.
It was later assumed by members of the historical society that the Martindale Mummies were placed in their care to increase their aura of scientific authenticity. Shortly after he retrieved Martindale displayed them for an admission fee of five cents, with an advertising card that stated, “During its stay (with the Kansas State Historical Society) scientists from all over the U.S. visited it, some going so far as to say the mummy was the oldest human being in the world.”
Our princess disappeared into a hundred years of Midwest dust with only two notices of her being displayed in small towns of Oklahoma. Then in 1944, she reappeared as the property of Claude F. Smith and his wife, Hazel, of Lawton, Oklahoma. He subsequently leased them to an L. Fleming who traveled with a carnival and displayed the mummies as a sideshow around 1948. Fleming sold the mummies at a public auction and left town. Mr. Smith had lost his mummies.
In 1969, an unsuspecting entrepreneur, a Mr. Rollins, bought a warehouse in Harlingen, Texas, 680 miles south of Lawton. On inspecting his purchase he found that in addition to the warehouse he now owned 28,000 one-pound cans of saddle soap and the mummies. The newspaper reported him as joking that “If the army ever switches back from jeeps to horses, I’ll really have it made.” Claude Smith saw the story of the unusual warehouse items on the local TV news, dug up his sales slip, and drove down to Harlingen to reclaim, after 22 years, his mummies. There is no mention that Mr. Rollins protested the return of the mummies to Mr. Smith’s care.
For the next five years the “Nationally Famous Lost Mummies, believed to be the oldest form of life in existence! Over 7 feet 2 inches tall with baby in her arms!” traveled extensively throughout Texas and Oklahoma with the Smith family. The brochure states, “Smith’s on tour and enjoying it!!” But by 1974, the fun had faded, primarily due to a decline in Mr. Smith’s health, and the mummies came to rest in the Smith’s back yard.
Enter Dr. Larry Cartmell, a pathologist at Valley View Hospital in Ada, Oklahoma, just the man to shine some scientific light on this huge pile of mummy pucky. He grew up on an Oklahoma farm where the Indian artifacts he found turned up by the plowing started his interest in archeology. Into adulthood he continued that hobby until he went on a trip to Chile to study mummies. It was then that archeology blended with pathology and he had a vocation that dove tailed with his profession—paleopathology. His heart belonged to mummies.
He studied the traditional mummies of Egypt and the non-traditional desiccated bodies of the Atacama Desert, the driest of all deserts situated in Chile. His latest adventure is working for the Smithsonian Natural History Museum studying the bodies of Civil War soldiers preserved by being buried in iron coffins. He travels to D.C. and examines their bodies and the researchers from the American History Museum next door study the clothing and paraphernalia buried with them in hopes of giving us new insights into the soldiers of that war.
In 1992, one of the phlebotomists at Dr. Cartmell’s hospital mentioned that her great-uncle had mummies. He wasn’t too interested until she showed him one of the advertising cards from the exhibitions. Her great-uncle was Claude Smith and Dr. Cartmell made a trip to Lawton to see his mummies.
He was taken to the back of the Smith’s property where parked behind their other vehicles was an old milk truck-like van. It must have been in that spot unmoved for quite a while as trees were growing up through the trailer. There were hornets guarding the princess and her child. As he looked at the bodies in a wooden box with a glass cover, Dr. Cartmell experienced suspicion at first sight. He had seen a lot of dead people and, even more to the point, a lot of mummies. She had a major case of “just not looking right.” Being exposed to one hundred degree temperature swings and insect attacks had made very little inroads in the condition of the mummy. The protruding ribs that were protruding didn’t appear very human. Most telling of all was the fact that Great-Uncle Claude wouldn’t allow any physical examination of his specimens. The baby, now separated from mom and in its own box, was clearly the almost skeletonized remains of a newborn human. Clearly, to Dr. Cartmell, the Martindale giant mummies could join the ranks of other mummy frauds—the Cardiff Giant, the Hackensack “Egyptian Princess,” et al. He had in mind to continue to press Mr. Smith for access to the body.
As it happened, in 1996, Mr. Smith passed on and his wife contacted Dr. Cartmell to see if he wanted to purchase the mummies. He became one more owner of the princess and her baby. A forensic dentist (odontologist) studied the teeth. He found that the “Martindale mummy’s dentition was fabricated by a variety of dental spare parts, randomly placed for visual effect.” Only one tooth. A child’s primary tooth, appeared to be human. A couple could have been mammalian, but not human. All of them were artificially positioned in some sort of cementing medium.
The bones appearing artfully from what appeared to be a plaster-type matrix were probably from some unfortunate small cow. A buried framework of wire and nails provided structure for the hand, but the results were glaringly incorrect to professionals. There was tape covering where one wrist had come apart. A strap covered cracks where the neck was coming unhinged. When she started life as an exhibit, she reportedly had long black hair. The hair was gone. The animal skins that had covered her had been lost.
After a hundred years of amazing people and stirring their imaginations towards lost civilizations and vanished people, she lay exposed for the fraud she was in Dr. Cartmell’s garage. She did raise some questions in the minds of the garage opener repairman, but mostly she was bugging the doctor’s preteen daughter whose friends would rather peek at the mummy than play. She complained to her dad and since being the child of a pathologist can be a little weird at the best of times, he promised to get the mummies out of the garage.
So what do you do with a fake mummy you want to get rid of? He contacted Ripley’s Entertainment, Inc. They run thirty-two “Odditoriums” around the world. They bought the princess and installed her in their Orlando branch where they presented her as authentic–supposedly certified by Dr. Cartmell.
The lesson of this story is very plain. The world is stuffed full of fascinating, incredible things to explore and puzzle over, but you would be well advised to remember to “believe it or not.”

The Photographer

He flipped on the bathroom light and forced himself to look straight in the mirror. For a long time he had avoided doing this. It was worse than he thought. The image looked like his father. No, no, that wasn’t fair. His father had always been careful with his appearance. On the day he died his father hadn’t looked that bad. Paul had been there, he remembered. No, the image looked more like his Uncle Dave, the alcoholic–depressed, divorced, Uncle Dave. Puffy, grey. My God, look at the bags under those eyes.
What’s with you, man? The face that looked back at him wasn’t someone else, not the long gone Uncle Dave, not some anonymous derelict. It was him. This was how far he had allowed himself to sink. Six months to the day since she had died. It was time he evaluated what was left. What was left of what? Of him. Of his life.
Now. Do it now.
No turning off the light and crawling back to bed. It was time—Paul wavered, but he held.
Six months since she’d died, but the dying itself took six years. Six terrible years he had cared for her—and he regretted not a minute. But what was left? What was salvageable of the rest of the time allotted to him? Jeez. What a mess!
His hair, what was left of it, was stringy and a sick shade of grayish-yellow. It matched the color of his teeth. God, his teeth! He had forgotten the incisor he’d had pulled last year when he hadn’t had the time or energy to deal with the effects. With nothing in the vacated space his back teeth had just crowded forward. Crooked, ugly grayish-yellow teeth. He looked like a hill-billy. Cosmetic dentistry would cost a fortune.
Forget remarriage then. He didn’t have bucks enough left for that. He had used up the savings and was making monthly payments from his pension for all the caregivers it had taken to keep Louise at home.
See, this was good, he was making progress. First conclusion: I can’t afford teeth for a chance at remarriage.
His eyes fell from his face and down to his unfortunate belly. Standing there in his tee shirt with his unbelted pants gaping, he chided himself for not eating right and not exercising daily. OK, that was a laugh. The only thing that made life worthwhile was keeping Louise comfortable—and donuts. No leafy greens and runs through the park. It hadn’t been like that. It had been bleak and achingly tiring.
Stop. It was over and it was time to pick up the pieces and find a way. Find a way? Where?
He got dressed and went to Louise’s girl to cut his few hairs. He went to the store and bought some milk, oranges, asparagus, bananas, and donuts. When he got home he picked up the dirty clothes lying around and put the whites in the washing machine. The molecules of soap escaped the machine and tickled his nose to the sound of swishing and swirling as soil left his underwear, making him feel like he was accomplishing something. He turned on the TV, sat down, and had some donuts and milk followed with a banana chaser and figured he had accomplished enough for one day.
But half an hour found him on his feet again inspecting the house. The door to the bedroom where Louise had died was closed. He was pretty positive that none of the stuff had moved. The medical equipment guys had picked up the hospital bed, but the closet held her clothes, her shoes, her underwear, her nighties, her scarves…Paul backed away. Not today!
In the kitchen the sink was free of dishes, the counter clear of food, but everything was sticky and grimy. The linoleum was pretty well covered with—well, many things.
What did he like doing? He had forgotten. Watch TV? Eat donuts? Anything else? He was too old to get a job and he’d probably have to get his teeth fixed for that, too. He had been an accountant—yawn. He had been an accountant, and she had taught school, and they had lived for vacations when they could high-tail it for wild places, hike around and take pictures. Beautiful pictures that were now framed and hanging on the walls. He hadn’t noticed them for years, but he looked up and they were still there. Some of the best days of his life had been spent in some motel room or little cabin, waking Louise up before dawn. He remembered how she had complained when he woke her early enough for them to get out there and get the good light. She cussed at him, but she got up and once out there with him seemed to love the peace of the sunrise over some mountain reflected in some lake.
Was there anything to be salvaged of that? Not much. No wife and he couldn’t hike much with his back acting up, and his camera equipment was probably shit. Everything had gone digital and he doubted he could find a roll of film anywhere anymore. The mountains were still there, and the lakes.
The next day when he was balancing his checkbook on the computer he happened to find himself on a camera website. Things were expensive and you needed a real good one with a great lens if you were going to do the thing. What would he do with the pictures? Good question. Play with them on Photoshop and then sell them to National Geographic. Ha!
Start a blog and put up his pictures for people to follow his journeys. Yeah, right. Have them framed and give them to the kids and grandkids for Christmas. It cost too much to have them framed. Just give them the prints and let them frame them. That’s a reasonably good idea. He could give them to old friends and neighbors, too, if it was just the cost of printing.
Actually, he hardly knew the neighbors, none of his old friends were left. There was nothing really keeping him the house. Every inch of it reminded him of Louise. Louise, Louise, everywhere. He could sell it and buy some good camera equipment and an RV. Maybe a small RV. He certainly didn’t need much.
He smiled, an unusual sensation. If he had an RV he could park where he wanted to take a picture in the morning, get up and take it, and go back to bed. He was still smiling. Inside he felt something lift and lighten, something akin to freedom. He had no one to care for, no responsibilities. He could do what he wanted, if he knew what that was.
The phone rang. It was his daughter, Heather. She called once a week to check on him. She was continually worried about him, because he wasn’t “perking up.” He thought she would be pleased to hear of this lightening of his soul, so he told her. He told her he was examining his life and he might just sell the house, get a RV and go travel around taking pictures of the stuff he had previously missed and maybe better shots of the stuff he had already taken.
She seemed really surprised. She said she was pleased with the lightened heart, but he shouldn’t do anything as rash as selling the house and buying a lot of stuff while he was still grieving. She always discussed grief like it was some class you took, with homework and deadlines. Grief was organized in stages and evidently you had to do them in order or you would never graduate. He wanted to graduate. He said to her that he was just thinking and to have a good day and not worry about him.
After she hung up, he looked out the window and noticed it was spring, pretty and green. He could have sworn it was around November.
The phone rang again. He jumped a little because he was sitting so close, and he thought he had just hung up. His son, Roland. Roland called less frequently than Heather and usually on the weekends. Paul had no idea what day it was, but he didn’t think it was the weekend.
“Heather just called me. She said she was worried. You had said something about selling the house and just traveling around and buying a lot of expensive camera equipment. Mom just died, for heaven’s sake, you can’t go off selling things and buying things with all those medical bills you have.”
“I didn’t say anything about expensive camera equipment. I just said I was thinking about things. I thought you kids would be pleased I got out of bed.”
“I know you and camera equipment. It will be all that new digital stuff. You can’t afford that. You’re retired.”
It seemed to him what he could and couldn’t afford was his own business. He was a retired accountant. He could still add and subtract. So he said, “Great, son. Good to hear from you. Don’t worry about me. I was just doing some thinking.”
“Dreaming, it sounds like to me.”
“Dreaming then. Talk to you later.” He hung up. Whether he hung up on Roland or whether he hung up because the conversation had reached its natural closure, he wasn’t sure. Roland told him later, he felt strongly that he had been hung up on.
He didn’t like to be told what to do. So this gave him something to work on. He sharpened a pencil and got to work. He got another call about an hour later from Heather saying that she and her husband and Roland and his wife were coming to visit for the weekend. Don’t worry, she would bring food. Lucky him.
He picked up the pencil again and found a piece of paper that wasn’t totally covered and opened the newspaper to the real estate sales section. This would give Roland a stroke if he knew, but it was just a theoretical exercise. No harm.
He looked for something that looked like a comparable, ballpark, anyway. Wrote down that number. He called the loan department at the bank and asked Sue what the balance was on the mortgage. He subtracted the one number from the other number and said, “Hmm,” out loud. It was more than he had thought. There was the commission for the realtor and a million other costs getting it ready for market. But it was still a nice sum.
He went to the RV website and looked for that brand of RV Louise had always wanted. Holy Toledo, no wonder they had never bought it. Thinking on it, Louise was gone and Paul didn’t really care if it was clean and shiny new. He could get a used one and put a little work in on it customizing it to his needs. She had always complained about the quality of his carpentry, but again, he was on his own. This was fun, something he hadn’t felt for a long time—a table for his computer, storage for his donuts, and a big bed to flop on with a door that shut the bed off from the rest of the vehicle if someone came to visit. Making those beds had to be murder. Yep, he could do that. So by the time the kids showed up on the weekend he had already been to the big RV lot and kicked a couple tires.
He actually missed the grandkids being little instead of out on their own. His kids were boring and irritating. There were no games, no blocks, no shooting around corners with finger guns and playing dead—they just sat around and talked. He knew their political views, and they knew his. Heather and her husband were born again, so everyone gave that topic a wide berth. Yadda, yadda, yadda and then…
“You’re not really thinking of selling the house and living in an RV. That’s a real trap for the elderly,” said Roland.
“I haven’t listed the house.”
“If you sell your house, you have no base, no place for your things. And if you get sick or– there’s no place to live.” Heather, this time.
“RVs just are not the solid investment that a house is. They don’t hold their value. Just like cars, you drive them off the lot and they’re worth half what you paid,” Roland.
This was true, but what if he didn’t care?
“Where would you go?” asked Heather’s husband.
He told them. It was against his better judgment, but he just opened his mouth and out spilled his grandiose dreams and impractical plans. He never should have done it, just kept his mouth closed. They nattered at him even as they were on the driveway packing their trunks and heading for home.
He got a lot more calls from the kids after that. Even a grandkid called. His favorite. A pretty little thing, who was studying art much to her parents’ dismay, but on their dime.
“Wow, Grandpa, sounds cool. I’ve been experimenting with photography for this class I’m taking. I’m not doing scenery, of course, but I’ve made a collage of pictures of different colors of silk moving in the wind. So I totally get what you see in that medium.”
He wasn’t sure she would get what his dream seemed to be turning into as he allowed it to grow and develop. He thought more of grizzlies than pieces of silk. It would be something to see the wind ripple through their fur. He wanted to hear the elk bugle in the early dawn. He wanted his nose and fingers and bald head to get cold as he tracked wolves and then warm gently as he drank a cup of coffee in his cozy RV. His dreams, his plans. It had been a long time since he had felt any joy.
Well, there would be no unauthorized joy if Roland had his way.
When Paul purchased a camera body and a good mid-range lens, Roland came unhinged. His idea was to take his dad on a trip. Just the two of them exploring the wilds of the Yellowstone for a week. Roland said, he figured it was the only way his dad was going to realize what hiking around in the cold high country would do to his arthritis.
Paul saw no way to avoid it and soon he was putting his suitcase and new camera equipment in the trunk of Roland’s BMW. They were off. It took one whole day of both of them driving, and neither one talking, to reach West Yellowstone where they collapsed in a motel room. He was awake early the next morning, ready to go out and see the sights. Roland complained about the early hour and the still dark sky, but with none of the joking tone that his mother before him had.
Roland told his dad to go on over to the coffee shop and have breakfast and he would join him in time for a cup of coffee. An hour and a half later the sun had risen and the day had started to warm. He had been laughing with the waitress about the worthlessness of offspring when Roland slid into the booth with a churlish look on his face.
“Come on, Dad. There’s no reason to have a picture of every dawn, is there?”
“It’s part of the experience, kid,” Paul said.
“You can’t enjoy this. Rushing out into the cold. It wasn’t even light out there.”
“Well, it is now.”
They got in the car and headed into the park. Not far in there was a herd of buffalo in the meadow by the river.
He got out to take a picture, admiring what was left of the morning light warming the buffalo’s backs and giving the spring grass a wet sheen. He waited for a small cloud to move across the sun and for the buffalo to present more of their heads and less of their backsides. When he got back in the car, Roland was checking his cell phone which wasn’t getting a signal.
“Dad, those things are just like cows only dirtier. Their manes are matted and full of weeds and shit. This is demented.”
“Look, son,” Paul said, “I’m glad to have the chance to try out the equipment, but I don’t think you are really into this. You’re going to be bored while I get set up, wait for the light to change and the animal to pose. You don’t want to get up. I’m not real sure why you’re here.”
“I’m not either,” said Roland, the muscles in his cheek showing and the big vein in his temple throbbing. He made a u-turn right there and drove rapidly back to the motel. They threw the stuff in the back of the car and drove the rest of the day and night back home.
As Roland drove away from the house Paul thought to himself, there’s nothing like a little family bonding. He almost chuckled. He had won.
He got a loan and bought a great old RV he quickly fixed up as home. He took it on the road to work out the kinks, and there were plenty. He worked on them while the house was for sale. And when it was sold he paid off the loan and then had a field day picking camera equipment. Stuff he had only dreamed of before was possible.
Roland didn’t call again. Heather called often, but said pretty much the same thing every time. “Daaaddd!” It was the same way she had said it as a teenager when he had been embarrassing to her. “I’m just so worried about you. It’s not safe.”
“Heather, dear, old age isn’t safe. You can die at any time.”
“That’s what I mean, Dad. You could die out there and who would know?”
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll hear eventually.”
“Daaaddd!”
“It’s what I want to do, darling. I’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”
The last night after the garage sale and the house had closed escrow, he slept on the rug, she called and cried.
That hurt and he was sorry for her, but he really did know what he wanted and he was about to embark. He felt great.
He headed up to Alaska for the summer. Huge country, huge country and incredible animals. Heather worried about bears, but in reality he was only threatened by a mountain sheep and he didn’t tell her about that, because that old ram had knocked him flat on his ass.
Fall, he came back down and caught Yellowstone and the Tetons. Drove across Wyoming and it was high, wide and lonesome. Headed into Arizona and Utah for the winter.
Wherever he went he talked to other photographers. And there were photographers around every beautiful spot in America. He talked to couples in the RV camps when he stopped there. Great people, mostly older, they would tell him spots to visit he hadn’t thought of. He talked a lot, probably too much. He probably bored people to pieces, but they were polite and the next day everyone moved on, and he could start over boring someone else.
His arthritis did hurt a lot and climbing out of the RV was really rough on his old knees. He got tired of café cooking, but there were always donuts. He had a little light-headedness in Moab, he went to the ER in Flagstaff and the doctor told him he had an arrthymia and should see a cardiologist. He got some spectacular shots of moose in Idaho. And one night, a lucky man, he went to bed and never woke up. His daughter was distraught. His son inherited his camera equipment but has never taken a decent photograph.

Concentric Circles

CONCENTRIC CIRCLES

I’m lost, or I’ve lost him. Problem is I’ve invested my whole life with him. Not just my life savings, but my life. I’ve given him thirteen years of my youth. I have two of his children. I bet my happiness on him and crapped out.
Maybe he’s just in a mood. What did I do wrong? I really need to know. What happened?
He seemed to really love me. He really wanted to marry me. I thought my marriage would last forever. Did I change? I think he changed, and if he changed or at least changed in relation to me, where is he? He’s there, but not there. Where can I find him? I am walking on nothing but air, like Wile E. Coyote. Just waiting to fall.
I thought you married and then you were able to rely on your spouse. No more, “Is you is or is you ain’t my baby.” I thought that was the point of the vows. Then you helped him finish med school, made babies, and worked as a partnership till death did you part.
Waiting for my appointment at the marriage counselor’s office, I picked up the Adventure Magazine and read an article about a search and rescue attempt in Nevada.

No decision in missing-person work is more fundamental than the one that defines the search area. You start by taking a map and placing a pin at the person’s last 100 percent known location. From there you draw concentric circles outward, with the assumption that the POD—probability of detection –diminishes the farther out you go… The final ring constrains the search, and past it you write “ROW,” or rest of world. It is a quiet acknowledgement that no matter how exhaustive your efforts, the lost person may be somewhere else, unknowably beyond.

Apply that to a troubled marriage and it resonates like tapping on a rotten tooth.

When was he last one hundred percent with me? How do I know if he is “unknowably beyond?” I’m looking for answers here.
I knew him for five years before I married him. Was married to him for thirteen years.
Very charming guy. First time there was any irritation towards me was into the fourth year. I told him to slow down for a curve. He didn’t talk to me the rest of the evening. I should have known then he was a pouter. We weren’t engaged yet. We were driving back from a week-long pack hike. We were both really tired. No big deal.
I remember the first time he made me cry. The year we were married. I remember we were on our bed – that old set my folks got when they got married. I don’t remember what the difficulty was. I remember crying. And the thought came into my twenty year-old brain, “You’re in trouble now. When he’s mad at me, my whole world is messed up. This stinks.”
We got along pretty well back then. I remember our friends’ marriages being pretty rocky and ours seemed very stable. One marriage never made it past medical school. On graduation day they split and never had anything to do with each other again. So—we had a better marriage than that.
There were stresses and disagreements. I think the big thing was when he decided to move back to the city. I thought about it awhile. Well, it was the rest of my life, too. I didn’t like living in the city. He didn’t used to, but he got a big-time offer to go into this booming business, be a big man, and make lots of money. And I didn’t care. I wasn’t impressed with the offer, the country club, the season tickets to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, even the house on top of the hill.
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” That actually ran through my brain. He isn’t happy that I’m not ecstatic about this new life. He’s angry. Maybe I didn’t break him in by expressing my feelings often enough. Seems unlikely. But it’s been over a period of eighteen years.
I can’t tell my parents my problems, it will just make them hate him. Then if we stay together, there will always be that edge between them.

I talked to my old friend Tana at lunch in our favorite restaurant. I spilled a lot of secrets in that restaurant. I don’t think she spilled as many, but I respect her judgment.
Tana said,”Work it out.” Decision: opt to be the bird in the golden cage, learn to eat lobster at the country club. I’ll have to develop the requisite curl in my pinkie. He already has one.
We’ve moved back to the city. But there are more and more problems. Once I spoke my mind about moving, just acquiescing to the move didn’t seem to patch things up. Seems at this point he is headed for another circle.
OK, I thought, I have to figure it out. What makes him unhappy? I made a list. He absolutely hates coming home and finding the kids have left their Big Wheels sitting where he wants to park. I can fix that. Just go up before he comes home and put away the Big Wheels. No big thing. He hates it when he comes home and I have left the lights on around the house. Another easy fix. While I’m done checking the Big Wheels, I’ll go around and turn out the extra lights.
We took a weekend and went to San Diego without the kids. This was not a great weekend and coming home I asked him, point blank, “What is it that would make you happy?”
“Well, the dog pees on the carpet.”
“We can get rid of the dog.”
“No, no, don’t do that.”
“Well, what? What can I do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe you should go to a counselor and figure out why you’re unhappy.”
“Well, I’m not going to.”
Reading Steinbeck’s Winter of our Discontent years ago, I remember being disturbed when I read the passage: “Does anyone ever know the outer fringe of another? What are you like in there? Mary, do you hear? Who are you in there?”
Paul, do you hear? Who are you in there? I don’t think you want to share. I am in deep shit. I put everything into this relationship. You don’t seem to want to make it work as badly as I do. Is that what the marriage counselor meant when he said I had “neglected wife” printed on my forehead?

Ten years later:

I didn’t leave him. Probably never would have.
He left me. We had gone to Tahoe for the weekend with another doctor and his wife and I forgot to leave the key under the doorstep for his secretary to feed the dog.
That was it. He said he thought we should split and we did. It turned out that he was having an affair with that secretary. But that didn’t matter. He was just through.
We filed for divorce. “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” Dante and his concentric circles of hell. Did you know that the ninth circle of hell is reserved especially for those who are “treacherous to their kin?” Those in that ninth circle are buried in ice and are shown no warmth. Just as they showed no warmth. Seems fair.
It was bad at first, but I found I had friends and family that cared. It was very scary, but I finally got a good lawyer that scared him. I don’t think the settlement was that impressive, but according to the law, it was fair.
It took two years for the divorce to be final and two days after the divorce papers arrived, I remarried.
My love and I live out of the city on a mountaintop covered with evergreens. There are three kids now.
And I was right. The question “Is you is or is you ain’t my baby?” never comes up.