Coast Range

by Nick Neely

  Fishing the Rogue below our home creek one afternoon, I spotted a plastic bottle wedged between boulders. But when I lifted this trash, it had two incisors stained golden with tannin: a beaver skull. We had not seen a beaver or its pond, though I knew they existed along the Rogue. “You see beaver now and then,” Red Keller said. “They don’t seem to stay all winter. They’re in there in the pond at Horseshoe Bend. They chew willow.”

  We knew beaver had been nearly eliminated in Oregon, as in many places. Even those early trappers seemed to know it was a matter of time. In 1827, Peter Skene Ogden himself wrote of trapping in the Rogue country: “We have this day, eleven Beaver. It is almost a sin to see the number of Small Beaver we destroy and to no purpose. Some of the Females taken have no less than five young and on an average three each. In a month hence their young would be sent in to the world. This is the affect of Traps. It spares neither Male or Female. Almost equal to death, all are distroyed.” This is not to say he felt for beaver, though maybe he did: Many trappers develop an unrivaled respect for their quarry. But just as likely he regretted the loss of those coats, or “plews.”

  I carried this beaver skull up the trail with my finger curled through a socket and placed it on the porch table. With shadow eyes, it stared at the meadow over my shoulder as I rocked. All summer, it sat beside the ruffled dictionary. I imagined its teeth lusting after the timber.

  When we headed to Horseshoe Bend, we would take the Corral Trail. Downhill to the creek, to ferns and pools, then uphill, following the contour of the hillside as it dried to another, larger meadow: the Corral. The oldest trees held by this route and, inevitably, we would reach out and brush them with our fingertips. Passing one of these giants, you slow purposely or unconsciously. There were Doug fir wider than my six-foot arm span, some fire- or lightning-touched; and one barrel of a ponderosa, hard by the trail, that seemed marooned in the Rogue Canyon since the tree is mainly found farther east, the puzzle of its bark forever being disassembled and left in a pile.

  Before the Corral, a pallid madrone leaned over the trail and, at eye level, there were the claw marks of a bear again, scars in the chilly tree. Bradley had showed us, letting us in on the scattered secrets of the place. We would pause here also, run our fingers through these lacquered grooves, these healed lacerations, and imagine the bear in our shoes, raised on its haunches and marking its territory. We would imagine it imagining us. Contemplating our scent. There the trail filled with leathery madrone leaves that unavoidably stirred and crunched underfoot, and I would cringe, thinking I’d just spooked a bear or mountain lion up ahead. The first lobe of the meadow swept downhill on the right, and I always had a premonition that something might be waiting there. It was one of those margins that just seems to cry out for good action.

  At the center of the Corral Meadow was a spring-fed grove that really might have attracted a lion. Whorls of matted grass in the shade were the beds of deer. In a snag, tree swallows nested: their plumage evergreen above, right through the eye, and cloud-white below; the inverse of the world, they are camouflaged in flight no matter the perspective. Near the grove, a round metal trough was nestled in reeds and sometimes partially filled with water as if the pack animals might soon arrive, Dutch Henry’s or the Forest Service’s: The government had grazed this meadow for years. Or it was as if the volunteer cavalry had just left in pursuit of the Takelma during the Rogue Indian Wars. Someone had slanted a board with rungs into the trough, a ladder for the mice and voles. So they wouldn’t poison the water.

  Walking through the Corral, we avoided the obvious poison oak but not the burrs. Several corral posts still stood, bleached and aslant. There was a honeysuckle tangle we watched come into leaf and eventually simmer with hundreds of berries that looked like salmon eggs, only more blood-filled. Then we wandered down the slope of oaks that hid the Corral from the Rogue River Trail, where another landmark madrone grew, a behemoth Bradley called the Octopus Tree. Like most of us, the Boydens have many mythologies to help them find their way. Long ago, this octopus had swallowed, grown around, an iron stave that someone had forgotten or placed in a crutch.

  It was the Donation Land Law that made the Rogue Indian Wars of 1855–1856 inevitable. The Rogue Wars, they should be called, since by no means were only Indians involved. Just before the act was passed, Congress also set in motion the end of Indian title in the Northwest, hurrying the negotiation of unimaginably lopsided treaties, as usual. In Oregon, as everywhere, the land was already, and eloquently, spoken for, but settlers poured into the Willamette and Umpqua Valleys, and into the fertile Rogue Valley upstream and east of our canyon, where the discovery of gold in 1851 further stoked pioneers.

  They claimed the choicest riverine land and drove the Takelma from their villages. Farmers cleared trees and erected split-rail fences to declare private property on the oak savannah the Takelma had foraged across and periodically burned to rekindle growth. The settlers culled deer and elk herds, and their hogs snuffled under oaks and scarfed up the acorns that the Rogue people had pounded, leached, and stored as flour. Miners ruined salmon and steelhead spawning gravels as they muddied the river with tailings. The only time we could properly imagine the color of that water was when, one day, Sarah and I arrived at the cove to find the Rogue completely “blown out” with silt, all brown. A dam had been removed upstream.

  After skirmishes, the Takelma were cornered into a treaty that ceded the Rogue Valley for a postage-stamp reservation on Little Butte Creek, near the iconic Table Rocks: two tall mesas that are the only remnants of an ancient Rogue River’s lava-filled meanders. But the winter of 1854 was severe, ravenous, diseased. When, the next year, one group of Takelma returned to the site of its former village, believing they couldn’t withstand more banishment in the cold hills, settlers came down on them, while the men were away. They killed fifteen Takelma women and children.

  The Takelma did what seems natural: They fled and took their revenge, heading west for the more inaccessible Rogue Canyon, ours, hoping to find solidarity with other bands. They killed several settlers they encountered before attacking the mining outpost at Galice with flaming arrows. Then into the canyon, likely on the same route later improved by the Forest Service to create the Rogue River Trail that we walked daily. They trailed past Whiskey Creek, before it was Whiskey Creek, and arrived at Black Bar, before a Mr. William Black gave it his name. There, just a few miles upstream of the homestead’s location, the volunteer militia caught up with the Takelma and planned a stealthy attack. But their axes gave them away as they fell trees to rope up as rafts and drift across, and the Takelma escaped downstream for the winter.

  Below our cabin was a hidden back trail to Kelsey Creek that, in places, seemed to have been carved from the hillside by pick or dynamite. But it had the feel of an old Indian trail, and maybe it was. We were in the footsteps of not only Dutch Henry. All these trails ebbed and flowed, it was clear. They were deer trails to begin with, and when humans forgot them for a time, the deer would keep their memory until they could be rediscovered, “improved” once more. It was our stead to keep them for a season. Several days, I wandered down the trail with brush cutters, but it was the act of walking them, of treading, that was most important.

  Kelsey Creek was named for Colonel John Kelsey, who, in the spring of 1856, led the militia’s cavalry in renewed pursuit of the Takelma. Two hundred volunteers rode into the canyon at Grave Creek to the vicinity of our Little Meadows. Probably they rested their horses at the Corral while scouting farther. A few miles downstream, the fugitive Takelma, winter-weary again, were camped along the Rogue. Kelsey led his men across the creek that would bear his name and, as the Takelma swam across the Rogue, launched volleys from higher ground, killing about thirty braves on what is now Battle Bar. It was the Takelma’s first loss since Table Rocks and, in this second, short year of the Rogue Wars, it would spell the end of their resistance. One more skirmish at Big Bend, then a trail of rain to the Siletz Reservation north on
the coast.

  We swam naked in the cold of Kelsey Creek the first time we took that old, hidden trail from our meadow, not knowing this history, nor that the main, well-trafficked Rogue River Trail was in plain sight. The stream was an avenue of alder littered with sun. Ferns cradled the boulders. Bradley had told us that sometimes you could see salmon below Kelsey’s sculpted mouth if you crept up on your belly. In all the Rogue’s streams, there were rainbow trout, striders, others we couldn’t imagine. Probably there were Pacific giant salamanders, though we never found them. They grow to more than a foot long and, as juveniles, have feathery gills to trap the air as it tumbles. For the rest of their life, they go terrestrial, a mottled, breathing log under a log. They’re known to bark like a canine. They breed in underground springs.

  My brother and his girlfriend visited in August, and we hiked to Kelsey Creek to camp, sleeping on a tarp in the open air. Just in case, we set our food at a distance. The night was cold, dewy, and I remember reeling in and out of half sleep’s gray, sensing or imagining that something was near, that the gray was condensing. On the hike, we had seen bear shit the violet of lupines.

  Back at the homestead, I slung my pack down and went into the garden to start the sprinkler across the wilting beds. The chit, chit, chit and shimmering arc always made us feel we had carved out a pastoral niche from the Rogue, when really it had fallen to us like this artificial rain. After the sweaty hike, I paused in the sifting water, let it coat my dusty skin. But when I climbed the cabin’s steps and joined the others on the porch, something was amiss. Everyone was grim.

  They had found a hummingbird hanging limp from the feeder, its bill lodged in the small plastic corolla. They had left it hanging there. It was a female Ru, with only a speckling of iridescence on her throat. I took her down and held her nickel-weight in my palm. Maybe another hummer had winged in, and she had darted too abruptly, instead of withdrawing her bill. The more awful possibility was that she had struggled in the yellow flower, a blur, until she wrenched or exhausted herself.

  Why had this occurred while we were away, we wondered. Would it have happened if we’d been at the cabin? Would we have heard? Sarah and I felt guilty that our best intentions had trapped this bird, light and insignificant as it was. We unhooked the feeder and returned it to the cupboard with a note: Warning: In 2009, a hummer’s bill got stuck in the feeder, and it broke its neck. Use at your own karmic risk. I probably should have buried the hummingbird or flung it into the woods, but instead I placed it—the shell of it, lighter than ever—on the table behind the rocker, thinking that others might study it, that something could be salvaged.

  Dutch Henry was one of those men who swept into the Rogue country after the Takelma’s removal. He wasn’t Dutch, in fact, but a bow-legged German named Henry Rosenbrook who wandered into the canyon in the 1860s to scratch out gold, which is rarely a living. Then he turned Rogue, in the modern sense of the word. In 1875, he was mining with a partner near Kelsey Creek, when a series of arguments erupted. They ended when Dutch Henry raised his rifle butt and bashed his partner in the head, three times, killing him. There were eyewitnesses; one testified. Incredibly, Henry got off.

  Then, in the early winter of 1881, a hairless body washed out of the Rogue’s mouth: a tall man with a bloodless gash on his throat—a severe knife wound—as well as two missing fingers on his right hand, the pinkie and the ring. The Port Orford Post reported that this “drowned or murdered” man was a Mr. William Black, Dutch Henry’s mule-packing partner. It soon came to light: While Dutch Henry was off with the mules, Black had absconded with Henry’s “Indian woman.” But not for long. Dutch Henry was tied and taken to Gold Beach to stand trial, where Black’s lacerated head was presented as evidence. But again wily Dutch Henry walked free up the Rogue, successfully claiming self-defense. Black had rushed him with an ax, he said. Then he had the gumption to file for Black’s mining claim, just above Horseshoe Bend: Black Bar.

  Later in life, Dutch Henry moved upslope to the homestead’s meadow with a modest herd of longhorns that, by legend, were more cantankerous than the bears. Bush cattle. They were the mowers once, circulating among the apples and staring, like me, from the shade at the meadow’s edge. Dutch Henry must have settled down and turned generous, because the community seems to have remembered him fondly. In his dotage, he was cared for by an Austrian immigrant, Bill Graiff, who had left his wife and family for the Rogue.

  Graiff remained at the homestead when Henry died in 1920, and he earned official title. After one of the great floods—before the river was dammed—Graiff collected doors, windows, and other essentials wrecked on the banks and built a proper house, wallpaper and all, in the middle of the meadow, as if to see every edge. A house, you might say, is the center of an eddy. In fact, Graiff’s domicile was rather fancy. Red Keller described the typical residence in the canyon: “Most people down in there just built their own cabins. One person could build the pole-and-shake cabin. You stand your poles up and then you put your poles crossways to put your shakes on, and your roof too. Nothing real heavy, but it’ll stand up for a long time. Most cabins had dirt floors because no air will come in when it’s dirt. Sometimes you cooked outside. One place they just took tin cans and sleeved them together and that was the chimney.”

  Graiff went so far as to feed his home electricity: two bulbs, from a miniature turbine in the stream that flowed more intensely through the meadow before its spring was diverted into the reservoir pond that fed our garden. He planted walnut trees that now blaze yellow in October and are the territory of lazuli buntings and black-headed grosbeaks. Beside those trees, the foundation of Bill Graiff’s cabin was still visible, but we seldom visited, as if it were a grave with strange undercurrents. Whenever I walked past, I would pause and stare. It was simply a hole of grass and bramble, with evidence of his rock-and-clay cellar, of stones held. I imagined him, tall and lean, ducking under the beams to retrieve a jug of homemade applejack. The orchard was bait. Graiff jarred bear meat and shelved it in his cellar, hibernating the whole animal in pieces.

  In the end, this hole was all homesteads, all homesteaders. At the age of eighty-two, Bill Graiff fell out of an apple tree and broke his hip and pelvis. He managed to crawl back into his house and find a white sheet to signal to the bush pilot that flew groceries into the canyon, but he couldn’t make it back outside. The pilot found him anyway, still alive, on his regular delivery. Likely he had lain there for days suffering from exposure. He shortly died of pneumonia in town. Dutch Henry’s bones, meanwhile, were said to be planted somewhere in the meadow. Undoubtedly we walked over him.

  When the Boydens bought the homestead, the timber around the meadow was sold separately and selectively logged. In and of itself, in 1968, it was worth about a million dollars. The true gold, we now know, towered over those early miners. During and after the rush, trees along the coast became San Francisco. Along the Rogue, it wasn’t only this modest acreage that had been harvested. To reach the homestead, you circumvented steep recovering clear-cuts, a uniformity of waist-high trees, and from the upper cabin’s porch you could see patches on the rumpled blanket thrown to the horizon of the Siskiyous.

  From the meadow, ghost logging spurs ran into the forest like veins from a central stem. These were the Caterpillar tracks where fir had been loaded and hauled out. Some were indistinct now, overgrown with saplings, but others were nearly drivable. We explored them at a stroll, brushing the spiders’ silk away from our faces. In the fall, some of these dead ends harbored chanterelle mushrooms, which so often thrive on disturbance. Which means, I suppose, that they weren’t dead ends, but temporary and fertile earthworks.

  That the woods were recovering was a necessary dose of reality for us residents. Here was a haven, a retreat, though once it had been exploited, once it had been worked. Now the forest was working. More than eighty feet tall, as if in retaliation the trees had sawed into the vista of Big Windy from the upper cabin. Time was, said Bradley, from the porch
you could see the Rogue pouring like molten iron into Horseshoe Bend, with a gin and tonic in your hand. In another generation, however, a human generation, this one unhinged jaw would clamp down on the mountains entirely. The Boydens weren’t allowed to cut trees anymore. They could only hope for a selective wind.

  Of all the chores, the largest and most meditative was pulling saplings. This most definitely was allowed and encouraged. We were to pull them along the road’s shoulders from the upper gate to the cabins, along the meadow, along the trails—miles of forest edge. We were in the opposite image of Johnny Appleseed. We were reapers of young fir. The Boydens had enlisted us to delay inevitable regrowth and, in this way, we acted like flame.

  Most of the saplings were fir, but we pulled tan oak, too—anything that looked as if it might chase the light and soon surpass us. Most came up easy. Sarah prowled one side, I the other. We’d walk slowly, focused, each of us carrying a rusted shovel for the sizable ones that some other, most-negligent and -lazy resident had overlooked. Mainly, though, we used our shovels as walking sticks; I can still hear the stifled clang of our metal tips as we plodded uphill toward the locked gates.

  Like mushrooms, saplings begin to “pop out” at you after a while and become a pattern that’s easily recognizable. Soon I could spot the jagged ovals of oak and those coniferous bottlebrushes from twenty feet off. Aside from a few excursions for berries or chanterelle in the fall, this chore felt the closest we came to serious foraging. We were picking up acorns, a year too late. Then we’d cast them into the woods like rubbish.

  Pulling fir, sometimes I would imagine my hand wrapping around a full-grown tree. I was reaching across the meadow from the porch, tinkering with view. You could feel the rootlets relinquish and hear, or at least imagine, the subtle pop. The carrots in the garden made a louder protest. I uprooted thousands of trees, and now wish I’d thought to collect them all in one place to see the volume, the aspiring forest we held.