On the Trail of the Truth

by Michael Phillips

  I can’t say that anything I wrote was any good compared to real authors like Thoreau or Hawthorne or Cooper or Irving or Walter Scott. But I wasn’t trying to be a real author, only to write for a newspaper, and it didn’t seem to me that you’d have to be as good to do that. Besides, I figured maybe writing was one of those things you had to learn how to do just by doing it a lot. So that’s what I did—I wrote about a lot of different things, and practiced trying to make my writing more interesting. Like this one:

  Mr. Jack Lame Pony, a full-blooded Nisenan Indian, has turned his skill in training horses into a livelihood. “When white men come to California in search of gold,” says Lame Pony, “many of my people went farther north, and to mountains and hills. But I had son, cabin, land. I not want to leave.”

  After two or three years trying to scrape food out of the soil and sell furs trapped in the high Sierras, Lame Pony began to acquire a stock of riding horses. He was very bitter against the intrusion of gold-seekers into what he considered the land of his people. But when men began coming to him one by one in search of sturdy and dependable horses, he found that most were reasonable and not as different from himself as he imagined.

  Slowly, word about his horses spread throughout the region north of Sacramento, and he had more requests than he had horses. He also found that doing business with ranchers and farmers, and even some gold miners, was not as difficult as he had thought.

  “As my anger left my heart,” he says, “I sold more horses. Soon had no time to trap. Had to find more horses—always more horses, then break them, train them, teach them white man’s ways.”

  Perhaps even Lame Pony’s name might have helped his reputation as the best horse trainer in the region. Wherever one goes in the foothills north and east of Sacramento, the mention of the name Lame Pony always brings a chuckle and the words, “Whatever his name says, his horses are the best.” A rancher from Yuba City, who has purchased eight different horses from Lame Pony for his hands, was quoted as saying, “None of my men ever been throwed by one of his horses yet!”

  Recently Lame Pony and his son Little Wolf, with the help of neighbors, enlarged their corrals and added another stable. With the continued growth of California, they foresee an even greater need for well-trained horses in the future and want to be prepared for it.

  Of course I asked Little Wolf’s father if I could write about him first, and Little Wolf talked him into agreeing. Mr. Singleton printed this article just as I’d written it—after he had signed up a small advertisement for the Lame Pony Stables to appear on the same page. The neighbors I mentioned were Pa and Uncle Nick and Zack. I didn’t really talk to the man from Yuba City, but Marcus Weber knew him and heard him say those words.

  I wrote a short article about Patrick Shaw, our neighbor from over the ridge, who in his spare time was getting to be a pretty well-known banjo-picker and was often invited to hoe-downs from as far away as Coloma and Placerville. I drew a picture of him playing, too, to go along with the written part. But that was one of my articles that never actually made it to a paper. Mr. Shaw did ask me, though, to do a drawing of him and his banjo for him to use on a sign if he was going to be playing somewhere.

  Another article I wrote was about a new church that was getting started down at Colfax. They didn’t have a building yet and were meeting in a great big house. Rev. Rutledge went down there every two weeks and was more or less in charge of it, though he had people in Colfax helping a lot too, like Almeda had done when he first came to Miracle Springs.

  Both the minister and Almeda were excited about the opportunity for new churches starting throughout this part of California, something I know they’d been wanting to see happen from the very first. Of course, as interested as we all were—and he would tell us what was happening in other areas on Sunday—Almeda didn’t actually participate in his plans as she did at first. But at least he didn’t have to make that long ride back and forth to Colfax alone every time ’cause every once in a while Miss Stansberry would go along with him to keep him company.

  Religious news didn’t seem to be something most folks were interested in, because that was another one of my articles that never got into a paper.

  One that did, however—and I admit it surprised me, because I wrote it just for fun—was an article I called “Virginian Finds New Home After Unusual Beginning.”

  When Miss Kathryn Hubbard Morgan stepped off the steamer in Sacramento in May of 1854 as a mail-order bride, she could little have foretold the strange turn of events that would make her future so different from what she had planned.

  Miss Morgan carried with her that day a handful of apple seeds, a seashell, a rock, a tuft of grass, some Virginia moss, and a piece of dried bark—all as remembrances of her past in Virginia and as symbols of the new life she was starting in California the moment she set foot upon the bank of the Sacramento River.

  As it turned out, Miss Morgan, now Mrs. Nick Belle of Miracle Springs, did not marry the man who had paid half her passage to the west, but his brother-in-law instead.

  “You cannot imagine the thoughts that were racing through my mind as I stood there in my wedding dress,” Mrs. Belle said, “only to have the ceremony so suddenly interrupted and thrown upside-down.”

  I then went on to tell a little about the wedding and what Uncle Nick had done and the story leading up to that day, including quotes from Pa and Uncle Nick, and another one or two from Katie. When I was asking them questions, Uncle Nick got to laughing and talking and said this, which people who read the article liked best of all: “When I lit outta here on the Thursday before the wedding, I figured I might never come back. I was so mad at Drum I coulda knocked his head off. But I didn’t know whether to be mad at Katie and just say good riddance to the both of them, or if I oughta come back and just grab her away from him and tell her she was gonna marry me. I tell ya, I didn’t know what to do. I was just all mixed up inside! And so when I rode up and saw that the wedding was going on, I don’t even remember what I said or did!”

  Then I finished the article like this:

  So now Mrs. Belle, still known to all her friends simply as “Katie,” has found a new life as a full-fledged Californian. Like all Californians, she came from someplace else, but now calls this her home. Her seven-month-old son will be a Californian born and bred, one of the first in a new generation of Californians who will carry the hardy breed of pioneers—from Virginia and every other state of the union—into the future of this western region of these United States.

  When Katie looks out her window, if she lets her eyes go to the edge of the pine wood, she will see a thin apple tree, still too young to bear fruit, but a growing reminder of where she has come from. At its base, a different variety of grass and moss than can be seen anywhere in the surrounding woods is growing—also a reminder that this is a big land, and that its people have roots that stretch far away.

  One day Katie’s young son will eat apples from that very tree, Virginia apples, and Katie will be able to tell him the story of how its seeds ventured to a new and strange place called California, and put down roots and began to grow, in the same way that his own mother did.

  The “hardy breed of pioneers” and the “venturing to a new and strange place called California” and “roots that stretch far away” were all Mr. Kemble’s words. But the ideas, even at the end were my ideas, and he just helped me to say it better.

  Having this article published surprised me, especially since most of the things I’d written had been sent right back to me. But Mr. Kemble was real interested in this one. He sent me $3.00 for it—the first time since the blizzard article that I’d gotten any money. And afterward, about a week after the story had come out in the paper (we sent for ten copies! Katie had lots of folks back east she wanted to send them to), a letter came to me from the Alta. I hadn’t sent anything else to them and couldn’t imagine what it was. But when I read the letter, the tears that came to my eyes were not tears of disappointment like the
last time the editor had written to me.

  Mr. C.B. Hollister

  Miracle Springs, California

  Dear Mr. Hollister,

  Your recent article “Virginian Finds New Home,” etc., has been very well received, both by the staff and the readership of the Alta. I must say, your writing has improved very much since your first story with us, “Blizzard Rescue on Buck Mountain.”

  As I read those words I couldn’t help thinking of what he’d said when he sent back the Alkali Jones story about finding gold in the creek. I wondered if he remembered. I read on—

  I would be interested in seeing other such pieces in the future. There have already been two inquiries as to when the next piece by C.B. Hollister is going to appear. I hope to hear from you soon.

  Sincerely,

  Edward Kemble,

  Editor, California Alta

  I sat down and handed the letter to Almeda. She read it.

  “There, you see,” she said. “You never know what can happen if you believe in yourself and just keep moving in the direction you think God wants you to go.”

  And if you practice your writing a lot, I thought, and don’t mind getting most of your things sent back to you!

  But in an instant this one brief letter seemed to make the earlier disappointments all forgotten.

  Chapter 14

  I Write to Mr. Kemble

  I took the letter from Mr. Kemble not just as an encouragement but also as an opportunity.

  There was that determination in my Belle blood coming out again! But I figured I ought to make the most of the fact that he’d written and seemed interested.

  So I decided to write back and ask him some questions so I’d be able to know what to do differently in the future. I had thought the story about Alkali Jones was good, and hadn’t expected anybody to pay much attention to what I’d written about Katie. As it turned out, my figuring was exactly opposite from Mr. Kemble’s. Not only that, two months after his letter, another letter came, telling me that a paper from Raleigh, Virginia, had written to ask permission from the Alta to reprint the Katie story! The name C.B. Hollister was going to be read clear back on the East Coast!

  I wrote to Mr. Kemble and asked him just what it was about the “Virginian” article that his paper liked and wanted more of.

  About three weeks later I got a reply.

  “There’re two kinds of stories,” he told me. “First, there’s straight news reporting. That’s when you’ve got to tell your who, what, where, when, and why. Those are your w’s, and no reporter better forget them for a second.

  “But then you’ve got your human interest kind of stories. They’re more personal. The who and the why are still important, but you’re telling about people instead of just facts, so the other things aren’t quite so important.

  “Now, you take your ‘Virginian’ story. That was human interest if ever I saw such a thing. Once you got folks interested in your Katie Morgan, they kept reading. They weren’t trying to find out news or facts; they were reading because you were telling a story about a person.

  “I’ve got lots of reporters who can give me the five w’s. One rambunctious kid on my staff chases around this city night and day and is the first person on the scene of anything that happens. Now he’s a newshound!

  “I’m not saying that if you brought me some noteworthy news like that I wouldn’t print it. Maybe I would. But from the two stories of yours we’ve run so far, something tells me your talent tends more toward the human interest side. You seem to see interesting things in people. And if you can keep doing that, keep finding interesting people and keep finding interesting ways to tell folks about them, then I don’t doubt you might just have a future in this business. Leave the five w’s to the newshounds like that Irish kid on my staff I was telling you about. Stick to the personal angles, Hollister, and let me see anything you come up with.”

  He didn’t say it in that same letter, but much later when he and I were talking about similar things, he said some other things along this line.

  “Women and men are different in how they read a paper,” he told me. “Now we’ve got more men than women in California, but we still have thousands of women readers, and we’ve got to please them, too.

  “Men want to know news and not much else. They’re your five w’s readers. Give them what happened, where, when, and why and they’ll put the paper down and get on with what they got to do. Men want to know whether it’s likely to rain, what kind of damage the flood caused, what price gold is fetching, whether there’ve been any new strikes, and how much a new pick or a fifty-pound sack of beans is going to cost.

  “But a woman’ll look through the paper while she’s drinking her tea, and she’ll want to read about Polly Pinswiggle’s garden that the rain washed out. That woman reading about Polly doesn’t care a hoot about how many inches it rained or about what the seed is going to cost to plant a new garden. All she’s thinking about is poor Polly!

  “The women are your people readers. And that’s why we’ve got people like you writing human interest stuff. You’ve got to go out and find interesting people who are involved in interesting things and then write about them, mixing in a little news too, and getting three or four of the w’s in there to please your traditional men-editors like me.

  “In other words, you’ve got to sort of pretend to be a reporter, a newsperson. But really you’re not. What you are is a journalist, a writer about people, not facts. And as long as you keep writing about people, you can count on having readers, whether you ever dig up any hard news or not.”

  All this he didn’t tell me, as I said, until later. But even now, without realizing it, I think this was the way my interest in writing was heading. I’d been keeping a journal all this time, not just to record the facts of my life, like where I went and what I did and what the weather was like—what Mr. Kemble would have called the five w’s. I kept a journal to write about a person—a person who happened to be me—and what she was thinking and feeling inside.

  In a way, the other writing that I was starting to do now—about Mr. Jones and Katie and the Wards and Jack Lame Pony—was kind of like the writing I did in my journal, but about other people instead of me.

  Having Mr. Kemble tell me about the two different kinds of writing helped me understand it a lot better. But besides the five w’s and the human interest kind of story, there was one other ingredient that I came to see was an important part of any writing that anybody did. Maybe it was the most important ingredient of all.

  And I have Rev. Rutledge to thank for putting this other factor in focus for me.

  Chapter 15

  A Sermon About Truth

  One Sunday morning Rev. Rutledge preached about truth. Nothing he said had that much to do with writing, I suppose, but I found myself listening carefully, trying to understand everything and applying it to my own life.

  “Truth means different things to different people,” he was saying. “To some people truth means a set of ideas. Therefore, if we were talking about five statements, we might ask which of them were true:

  “The sky is blue and the sun is shining today.

  “California is smaller in size than New York.

  “It is raining outside.

  “There is no gold in Miracle Springs Creek.

  “This building is used for a church and a school.”

  He paused a minute and let the words sink in, and then repeated the five statements.

  “Now then,” he went on, “which of those are true and which are false? We can look outside and see the sunshine and the blue above, so we know that it is not raining. How about New York and California—which is larger? Any of you youngsters of Miss Stansberry’s school know the answer?”

  Someone piped up that California was the second biggest state behind Texas.

  “Right,” said the minister. “So saying California is smaller than New York is a false statement. How about the gold? Is there gold in the creek?”
/>   Some laughter spread through the room.

  “Depends on who you ask, Reverend!” called out one of the miners whose claim was known not to be doing so well.

  More laughter followed.

  Rev. Rutledge joined in the laughter. “However, I think we would all agree that there is some gold still around,” he said, then added, “even though it might be unevenly distributed!”

  He let the chuckling gradually die away before he went on. “Then, finally, is this building used for both a church and a school?”

  “Yes!” went up a chorus of young voices, enjoying being able to participate during the sermon time for a change.

  “Right you are again!” said Rev. Rutledge. “Now, think back to the five statements. How many were true, and how many were false? Let me repeat them for you.”

  He did so. Then he waited a minute.

  “All right, now—how many statements were true?”

  “Two,” answered someone.

  “Are you all agreed? Two true, three false?” said Rev. Rutledge.

  A nodding of heads and general murmur went around.

  Again he waited until everyone had quieted down. When he finally started speaking again his tone was different and he was more serious.

  “I must confess that I tried to trick you,” he said finally. “I hope you will forgive me, but I wanted to get across a point that many people misunderstand. Now—let me answer my own question. How many true statements were there? My answer is . . . none.”

  He waited to let the word sink in. I don’t think anyone in the whole church understood what he meant, but we were all listening for what would come next.

  “Two statements were correct—two statements of fact; three statements were incorrect—three statements of error. But my point this morning is that truth is a very different thing from correct ‘facts.’ That’s why I said in the beginning that to most people truth has to do with the factual correctness of a set of ideas. But in reality, as the word truth is used in the Bible, it means something very different.”