by Bill Barich
Although Modoc County was one of only two California counties where the population had declined in the last decade, the rancher still felt put upon. The deadbeat newcomers were not true Alturans and didn’t understand a single principle of ranching. They lived in low-income housing units and worked at service-related jobs or merely collected food stamps and welfare benefits.
Sometimes the sense of being put upon got so bad for the rancher that he considered selling his land and leaving California altogether to start fresh in a Nevada town near Winnemucca that was still western and wild, where the horses were broken properly, in the old style, and the cattle still had rights.
“Yes, sir, I might just move the whole operation to Denial,” I heard him say, but when I looked at my atlas later, I saw that he had meant Denio.
IN THE MORNING, I got my ass to Surprise Valley. It was a level expanse of ground shimmering with salt flats, lakes, streams, and some wavery sand dunes that leaped out and surprised you as you came down from the forested slopes of the Warner Mountains.
To the weary emigrants who had baptized it after a trek across the Nevada deserts, it had resembled an oasis. Their log cabins still stood in Cedarville, arranged in a semicircle like Conestoga wagons as a barrier against Indian attacks. The tillable land, a verdant strip about fifty miles wide, was all ranches and pastures now.
In a Cedarville park, I read an issue of the Modoc County Historical Society’s journal that was devoted to Surprise Valley. It carried excerpts from settlers’ writings and afforded a painfully honest account of nineteenth-century wilderness life that my rancher friend would have approved of.
Jan. 29, 1887—Last evening about 5 o’clock the wind was blowing a perfect gale. The chimney caught fire and if it had not been for Papa’s, Dan’s, and George’s hard working the house would have been burnt.
February 1, 1887—Papa would not let us attend school today. The boys heard yesterday that Mary Hickerson has scarlet fever.…
February 12, 1887—Mr. Fee was very unfortunate yesterday. His team of four nice horses got frightened and ran away and while they were jumping a fence one of the horses broke a leg and they had to kill it.
Diary of Dot Munroe
In October 1864 we moved to Surprise.… But we was happy until the Indians began to steal our stock and kill men. I could hardly bear to see any of our folks go out of sight and still they had to be gone. Many a time I could not work I would be so uneasy I would stand in the Door and look and look to see if I could see them and some times I expected to see the Indians coming too.…
Reminiscences of Amanda Boyd
It was good to remember that the Indians had some murder in them, that they hadn’t simply rolled over at the first approach of white men. So much harm was done to them collectively that histories sometimes glossed over the fury of certain tribes and how they had lashed out against settlers, even the innocents among them. They could put their fury to advantage, turning it into a psychological weapon that let them fight valiantly when they were outnumbered, as the Modoc did during the Modoc War of 1872–73.
The conflict had its origins in governmental stupidity. The United States had pushed the Modocs from their ancestral land in 1864 and forced them onto a reservation in Oregon, where they had to live next to their traditional enemies, the Klamaths. Trouble was bound to occur. A Modoc subchief, Kintpuash, killed a Klamath shaman and absconded from the reservation with fifty-three men and some women, children, and elders, fleeing to the lava beds by Tule Lake, northwest of Alturas.
Kintpuash was “Captain Jack” to the whites. He and his men used the rocks of the lava beds to build defensive walls. The ensuing battles were fierce and bloody. Although the Modocs had no real firepower, they held off more than a thousand federal soldiers for about six months before surrendering. Captain Jack was in hiding, but some of his men betrayed him, and he was caught and hanged.
The Modoc defeat came at a moment when the spiritual underpinnings of Indians everywhere in California were being destroyed. One Modoc would tell later about how the war had cost him his faith. A tribal doctor, a visionary, had drawn a boundary around Captain Jack’s camp with a long cord painted red and had insisted that if the soldiers tried to cross it they would all die, but the soldiers did cross it, and the Modocs had died.
“This is the last time we will believe in doctors,” John Sconchin, another Modoc, would say. “We’ll ask them no more.”
The Modoc tribe had unraveled after its losing battle, and some members went back to Oregon while others wandered obliviously into Oklahoma.
AFTER GETTING MY ASS TO SURPRISE VALLEY, viewing a Drinker-Collins Duplex Respirator iron lung at the town museum, and eating too much roast lamb and drinking too much raspy red wine with ranchers and Basques, there wasn’t a lot to do in Alturas, except to stand on a corner and watch the fleet of beleaguered automobiles that were sure to disassemble in the desert someday. The cars seemed to be held together by the will of their drivers, whose faces, passing on parade, had a lean and hungry look, both sad and threatened, a record of abuses given and abuses received.
The word was that Alturas got lively and even madcap when the goose and duck hunters were around, but hunting season was a long way off.
So many drifters, the flotsam of the frontier. At the California State Employment Development Corporation, three clerks were shuffling paper in an antiseptic environment at odds with the very fabric of Alturas while they waited for a client, any client, to walk in. It happened to be me. I asked what kind of jobs were available in the county.
The head clerk had a deadpan manner. “Well, let’s see,” he said, peering down at some index cards and rifling through them. “We got two yardwork jobs tomorrow, three and four hours apiece. We got a minimum-wage job pouring concrete for six hours. That’s about it.”
Another clerk yelled from his desk. “Hey, Ralph, you forgot about that construction job! Four to six months, putting back together an apartment building that collapsed.”
“So when somebody moves to Alturas, where do they work?” I asked.
“They don’t work,” Ralph said calmly. “They eat up their savings, and they go home or they go on welfare: We’ve never had any industry here but for a mill. It’s always been seasonal jobs, ranch jobs.”
“Nothing steady in the cattle business?”
He shook his head. “The ranchers are just starting to recoup from bad times. We had three big ranches go under last year. The banks wouldn’t carry them.”
The money budgeted for Modoc County’s general relief fund seldom lasted for an entire month, Ralph told me, but that wasn’t uncommon in rural California. Most counties were broke and couldn’t provide the public services that were mandated by the state. They were resentful about being held to account, too. People expected services, and when they brought their expectations to agencies where the door was locked, they sometimes got a little overheated and kicked at the door.
Every service in the county was stretched to its limits, from mental health to transportation, but Ralph seemed proud that at least the Alturas library was still open on occasion.
“Mount Shasta,” he said, “they just closed theirs.”
The other clerk yelled again, “Hey, Ralph! Tell him about Redding. Redding is booming!”
“That’s all subdivisions. Houses going up. Same thing in Anderson. All around there, north of Sacramento.”
I recalled the golf course in Fall River Mills and sketched a scenario for Ralph whereby second homes and golf links might transform the sagebrush. He rejected it with blithe disdain.
“Lot of miles between here and Fall River Mills,” he said and laughed. “But if it came to that, I guess we could build us a Modoc wall, like Captain Jack.”
Spoken like a true Alturan.
BIRDS. At the Modoc National Wildlife Refuge, a series of manmade sloughs, ponds, and canals outside Alturas, there were birds by the thousands, flocking, nesting, and flying about, creating with the flap of their wings the crackly so
und of a tarpaulin rippling in a gust of wind.
All alone in the refuge, I looked toward an overcast sky and watched Canada geese take to the air. They rose awkwardly at first and then, higher up, acquired a graceful symmetry as they shaped themselves into a V and became a pattern of dark spots against the clouds.
In the ponds, ducks floated and bobbed, red-breasted mergansers, blue-winged teal, and a pair of ruddy ducks in mating plumage. The male’s beak was an extraordinary blue, all the fibers of pigmentation boiled down and concentrated in a little piece of bone.
Coots were everywhere, plain-feathered and acting dumb, seemingly the most plodding of waterfowl but maybe the most cunning, always foraging inoffensively, their heads pumping like cartoon characters, too ugly and banal to ever attract a shotgun shell.
The distant hills were a blackish purple. There were lush pastures and wispy grasses in light-colored tufts. The birds sang and sang, a dissonant chorus of trills, honks, and arpeggios. In my solitude, I saw what it must have been like to stand on the Modoc plateau before the settlers and the railroads came, when the Far North was still a virgin wilderness, its amplitude undiminished in any way.
Elegiac feelings swept over me. The state had once been covered with 5 million acres of wetlands, but they were almost gone now, and with them would go the birds.
A spring shower in the desert. A mild fragrance of sagebrush, and the silver and gray-green of its leaves.
HIGHWAY 395 OUT OF ALTURAS ran aslong the spine of the Sierra Nevada down to Mojave town in the southern desert, hundreds of miles away. It ran through many different types of terrain, but the terrain it ran through on the way to Susanville was definitely out there, yet more dusty, tufted, sagebrushy, disconnected land, the sandy earth much whiter now and the snow banished from the mountains.
Far back from the road, almost far enough to be invisible, I saw solitary, tin-roofed houses that seemed not so much to have been constructed from the ground up as lowered intact from a spaceship. The owners put a premium on privacy and even secrecy. Their only neighbors were jackrabbits, grouse, and kangaroo rats, other critters surviving on the margin.
Termo was really out there. It had a gas pump, a general store that was for sale, probably in tandem with the Brooklyn Bridge, and a gaggle of rough-hewn cabins that appeared not to have been occupied since the Gold Rush. A hand-painted sign said, Johnston’s Video Rental and Indian Gift Shop, Cabin #3 Behind Store.
By Cabin #3, there was another sign, above a caked flowerbed where the droopy, frost-damaged stems of some dying plants were taking a nap. Caution, it said, Flowers Growing.
Through a screen door I heard some Texas swing on a radio, the hillbilly skitter of Bob Wills. Inside the cabin, a slender woman, her hair pulled back in a bun, was making some bead earrings at a table. The earrings were a jubilant yellow.
“Are you Mrs. Johnston?” I asked.
“No, I’m Jessie. A friend of the family.” She was minding the store while the Johnstons were in Reno. Mrs. Johnston was a Sioux medicine woman, who went by the name of Tears-in-the-Wind and had been on a vision quest for twenty years. Still another sign attested to it: Vision Quest, Twenty Years with No Drugs or Alcohol. It hung by a shelf of Bruce Lee kung-fu videos.
Jessie didn’t belong to the Sioux tribe herself. Instead, she was a member of a loosely knit fellowship of Indians whose tribal ancestries were murky. Although she didn’t look much older than fifty, she had six children and twenty grandchildren and lived with her husband in a double-wide mobile home in a location that she wouldn’t disclose, somewhere around Termo, way out there.
It was pleasant in the cabin. A warm, dry, desert wind was howling outside, but it didn’t penetrate through the well-chinked walls. While Jessie strung her beads, I listened to the radio and made a mental count of all the Indians that I’d met at random in the Far North. Again, I thought about the separate and hidden Indian universe, a skeletal world that only an Indian could know about intimately or could touch.
Jessie talked about her compound. She had a propane tank and a generator for electricity, but there was no phone and she didn’t want one. It was peaceful that way. Her adult children lived in other states and wrote letters and visited during the summer, lodging in other trailers on the property, and they all stayed up late at night to gossip about things.
“It’s not like in a city, where you live in a duplex and have to worry about waking up somebody,” she remarked, stringing beads.
In Oregon, Jessie’s husband had owned a backhoe business, but the stress of it had bothered him, so they came to California looking for an easier life. That hadn’t really worked out, she admitted. Jessie had done some stints as a waitress and had picked some crops as a fieldhand. Her attitude toward the state was mixed. She loved the physical beauty and particularly the serenity of the desert, but she thought that the taxes were too high.
Jessie said that she had learned for certain that the myth about California magically being able to solve a person’s problems was not true.
Tears-in-the-Wind did paintings on cow skulls, going Georgia O’Keeffe one better. Three skulls were on the floor, bright and colorful, and I would have bought one if she had charged a little less. You have to pay for inspiration.
“She never knows what she’s going to paint,” Jessie declared, with respect. “She has to wait for it to come to her. There’s no plan. That’s the way I do it with my earrings. It takes a little longer, of course, but I couldn’t do it any other way.”
SUSANVILLE, THE SISTER CITY TO FLORA, ILLINOIS, Was boiling hot, with late May doing an impersonation of mid-July, so I went right into the Susanville Hotel as soon as I hit town and ordered a tall glass of iced tea. I had a second glass and took my tab to the cash register, where the cashier was eating a late lunch, chewing studiously on a big chunk of charred cow that flopped over the edges of his plate.
He was a heavyset Basque in his forties and had the torpid capaciousness that Basques sometimes have, a slow-moving, in-gathering quality. They were prone to melancholy, too, and the shepherds among them sometimes sang of their woe as they roamed the womanless mountains with their sheep.
Susanville had once been Rooptown, after Isaac Roop, a timber baron from Maryland, but Roop had changed the name as an homage to his only daughter, Susan, in 1854. There was still a sawmill in town, but it was having no better luck than the other mills around. The Susan River had already been reduced to trickle by the heat, and the streambed was chalky and dry. Cattle ambled through the desert searching for bunchgrass.
On the surface, Susanville looked like another economically depressed place of the Far North, a town that had not yet broken with its past to invent a future, but if you stayed for a while, you felt a buzz in the air, the shock of something happening.
Old Susanville, Roop’s town, still existed, but it was confined to Main Street. Its spirit lingered in the Pioneer Saloon, a cavernous joint with the brands of cattlemen burned into a back wall. Old Susanville was a hair salon where two women were wondering what to do with the buffalo meat that their husbands had brought home from a hunt. It was E Clampus Vitus, a fraternal organization that had started in Sierra City in 1857 to parody all the other fraternal organizations in the state.
But while the Clampers were listening to their leader, the Noble Humbug, speak at their Hall of Comparative Ovations, a new Susanville was taking shape. Instantly identifiable California guys and gals formed its population, tanned and aerobicized and aglow with an odd conviction. They ate oat-bran muffins and drank smoothies made from organic bananas and had smart clothes and flashy cars and did the odd line of cocaine. They did not seem to be living in Susanville but rather in an idea about Susanville, in the California depicted on TV.
On a balmy Friday night, I watched Main Street turn into a boisterous cruising strip for kids of high-school age and a little older. Cars, trucks, and vans were strung along the avenue as far as the eye could see. The kids came from all over, from Termo, Big Valley, and
Fall River Mills, driving for hours past ranches and cows to be part of the action.
As they inched forward with their windows rolled down, I could feel their tremendous yearning for romance, excitement, and sex, for all the grand experiences that they assumed to be available in a real city, in Reno, just ninety miles away.
In the new Susanville, the once-great distances of the Far North were being eroded. The sprawl of Reno, where tract houses were going up in a frenzy, had crept closer. There were people moving into Susanville who didn’t know a band saw from a chain saw. They commuted to Reno for work and returned to such subdivisions as Susan Estates—an estate in ranch country!
Susanville was becoming a new kind of western suburb. Money was greasing the wheels, all the bucks being spent on real estate and new construction, but none of it fell into the hands of the mill workers, the wranglers, or the men who drove the lumber trucks. Money had torn a hole in the town’s dynamic, and now rancor and alienation were afoot.
Crime in Susanville was increasing, for instance. Drug-related arrests and violent offenses were way up. The jail could hold forty-one inmates, but the average daily count was fifty-five. According to the local paper, the Lassen County Municipal Utility District Board “was facing grand jury accusations of willful, corrupt misconduct.” The Salvation Army, short on donations and long on demand, had already shut down its grocery giveaway program for the month.
As part of its “Take Pride in America” campaign, the Bureau of Land Management had requested some civilian help in cleaning up Bass Hill, where residents were illegally dumping more and more junk—garbage, yard clippings, mattresses, old appliances, and the rotting corpses of deer, dogs, pigs, and cattle.
I gathered that the California prison system would be the ultimate beneficiary of the Susanville boom. The correctional center in town was currently oversubscribed and had recently been under a tight lockdown because of a war between two rival Hispanic gangs whose members would never have been in the Far North without the state springing for their fare. Almost 5,000 men were jammed into a facility that was supposed to contain 3,102 of them.