General Topic: Historic Ranching
Date of Interview: 9/9/91 Place: Straus' cabin, Fish Creek Rd.
Personal Data:

RC: Albert, I thought we could start with your biographical background to start. When were you born and where?

AS: I was born in the state of Iowa, Buena Vista County, in 1905, March the 18th. I've been in the ranching business ever since I was a minor, boy. I started in milking cows, when I was about seven years old. And then went into livestock business and dairying, up until 1954. Then we went into beef altogether, sold the dairy and went into beef. I've been into beef ever since. But, we were in beef from 1921 to 1930, before we went into dairy business. We also carried a bunch of beef cows as long as we were going through the milking cycle--dairy. 

RC: Did your family reside also in Iowa?

AS: Yes, yes; my family, we all came here in 1916 in the state of Iowa and we lived in Oregon ever since. We were in the farming business, back there, but we milked a few cows, but mainly, it was strictly farming. And my dad decided to, we all boys and you know, most of us were boys, and we wanted to come and be cowboys. That was biggest thing to live to look at, or look ahead to anyway. But he finally decided O.K., to come out and he come out and made the deal and we moved here in February of 1916. We lived on the ranch in Sams Valley from 1916 to 1964. And we sold the ranch. We've accumulated quite a lot of extra land besides what we bought that time. We had 240 acres to start with and we ended up with 960 acres, when we sold out. So we had quite a big spread at that time.

RC: Your family was interested in the outdoors also?

AS: Oh, yes, my dad was quite a outdoor man, and all the family were boys anyway. We were all outdoor people, but they all lived at home until they, they were quite young, you know, until they got out of school and they left and I stayed with the ranch. I guess I was the only one, I guess, dumb enough to stay on the farm. I tell ya, that time during the depression days, I had to skimp along pretty, pretty slim, for a number of years. And my wife and I were first married in 1928, we just had to live on $15.00 or $20.00 a month. That's all the money we could scrape up. We had a good garden and that's how we survived. It was tough, tough going.

RC: What were some of your pastimes and interest while growing up?

AS: Well, at that time, you know, you didn't have T.V. or anything that way. Some of us had radios, but they had organized a grange out there in Sams Valley where we lived. And I was only, I think I was only 23 years old and I was elected as a assistant steward in the grange the first year. And the master wouldn't come to grange, that was elected, so the next year, I was elected as master and I served as 12 years as master of the Sams Valley Grange. Then I was elected as master of another grange and I served on the county grange for four years. And I finally got into dairying so heavy, I just couldn't take care of the job, so I just got out of it. But that was mainly our recreation, was the grange. Because we put on programs, you know, and we put on real good programs and we put on real good lectures. We put on plays and all kinds of things to entertain people. And we had 125-150 people come out to every one of our meetings. And them people, at that time, that was the only recreation they had. Today, the granges are mostly old people, but the young people are not interested in those things. Nowadays, they have other things to entertain themselves. It's quite a change back from the early 1900s up till now.

RC: 150 people! That's quite the congregation at that time.

AS: Oh yes, yes, just for one little grange. Today, they are so small, they are just barely existing and that's all. We built a nice grange out there. People themselves, people who belonged to the grange built it and didn't hire any outside help at all. They all got together and poured the cement for the foundation, put up the building, the whole works. And they also, that year, we gave dances. My wife and I, and a couple of other couples there, took dances on every Saturday night. 'Cause we had the grange on one Saturday night and dance on one Saturday night. And sometimes we raise as high as 400 dollars a night in one dance. In them days, we'd charge a dollar for a person to get in, for your admission fees. But we did real good, until we moved away in 1964. And I don't know, maybe we had something to do with keeping the grange open, but it's been going downhill ever since we left there. But I don't attend, because it's just too far for me to go back and forth. I live in Central Point; I attend the grange there once in awhile, but mainly I just kinda dropped out of it altogether. But I figured I served my time. I was a member of the State Grange and a member of the National Grange. So I have a pretty good background of the grange work. And at one time, I was the youngest master in the state. 'Cause I figured I had a pretty good record for me, because when I took over there, I had no experience in my life, because I just graduated from high school. And I had to get up there before the crowd and I had quite a time in the first year getting, you know, you had to understand Robert's Rules and Orders, in order to carry your programs through. And a lady, that was from Eagle Point, that was an ex-school teacher, and she taught me more about Robert's Rules and Orders than any other person that I was around. That helped me and advanced me in my work and that's what my background is.

RC: You mentioned that everyone pitched in to build the grange. It seems like people used to really pitch in, in those days.

AS: Oh yeah! Everybody helped, you know. Everybody wanted to get their hand into it, to know they were part of it. They felt like it was part of their building. Everybody helped and we put on a dinner or lunch for the people, you know, and you'd have 25, 30, or 40 people working. We couldn't have too many, because they get in the way of the ones that were working. We'd have a nice crowd. But that's as far as me and my life, you know, the grange work did, because after that, I got out in a lot of different committees. I served on the A.S.C. Committee for 27 years, served on the Federal Land Bank for about 24 years, and I was director on it. And also I was school director, school board director and I was on the Farmer's Home Committee; a lot of different ones. I was quite in demand in those days and I was capable of handling it, because I had the experience. That was the only reason I think I was hunted on those different things. And I never regretted it, cause it taught me a lot. I'll tell you right now, being able to serve on all those things. I served 27 years straight on the A.S.C. Committee, so I finally had to retire. I got 70 years old and I had to get off. I got too old.

RC: Where did you go to school again, Albert?

AS: I went to school in Sams Valley. Back where we lived in Sams Valley, they had grade school. Went to grade school right in the place where we lived. It was only about an eighth mile from where our home was, to the school. And when I graduated from 8th grade, they built a new school in 1920. And I started school in the fall of '20 and went through and graduated in '24, I went one year to Gold Hill High School and we didn't have any high school out there yet, after I graduated. My dad kept me home one year from school. He didn't want me to go to school. He said he needed me more at home. So I was determined I was going to have a high school education, and I did, I got it. So I'm glad of that anyway. I never did get a chance to go to college. Maybe that was better in the long run after all, in the kind of life I lived. I farmed all my life.

RC: Did you have much of a walk to school?

AS: No, not when we were going to grade school. We just had to cross the field; it was just less than an eighth of a mile. But when we went to high school, we had two miles to walk each way, because they didn't have no school buses in those days. We walked early in the morning and back at night, which was good exercise for us; kept us in good shape. In them days, we didn't think anything about walking to school. Today, they won't walk 100 yards to meet the bus. The bus comes to pick 'em up, quite a difference.

RC; What brought you to the Diamond Lake area?

AS: Well, we were in the beef cattle business and we knew some of the people that were running cattle at that time, in 1920. They ran in here from about 1918 on. And we came in here in 1921 and we run of here from 1921 to 1930. And then we sold our beef herd and went into dairy business. But I still kept coming up here, cause I liked the country so well. And a fellow, by the name of Earl Day, was running cows up here and he had it made up here, so his brother left and went away from home. So, he had to have somebody help him and he wanted somebody that knew the country. So, I helped him for about 5 or 6 years. And then finally, one of the boys came back and helped him out. So, I didn't come up and just now and then, when they needed some help, I'd come up for just a day or so. Otherwise, I was just too busy at home. But, I come up here one day, and I remember John Day wanted to get some increase in his range permit. And I said, no, I couldn't come up, I was just too busy. And he says, "Will 100 dollars a day antagonize you to go?" And I says "Yeah," well I couldn't turn that down. So, I come up and rode for him for two days and took the assistant ranger out of the Rogue River National Forest and the ranger out of Union Creek. Long and John went along, John Day went along and we showed the whole country and showed him every meadow up here. And John got his increase in his range permit; he looked at all the grass there was. So, that was where I got my education. Of course, when we were running cattle up here, it was our third year, about 1924, why, some of the older fellas quit. I went out of the range and within a year I had to learn the range all by myself. And that's how I really learned the country, as well as I do. I know about every inch of this whole area. You might say, from Dog Prairie, to clear down to here. Well, clear down to Prospect. But we'd run Prospect area for 4 or 5 years down there, you know. That's as long as we'd been up here, but we had a 450-head permit up until last year and then we sold out 250 head of it. I guess I figured I was getting too old to handle it anymore.

RC: Can you tell me about some of your early cattle drives where most of them were at?

AS: Well, most of them started at Sams Valley. Took us 4 days to come up. Of course, in them days, when we were driving the cattle, we only had the lower country. We didn't have this high area, because the sheep, all the time, had all the high country.

RC: Up in the Skookum area?

AS: Yes, up in the Skookum, Dog Prairie, and Fish Creek and Fish Mountain. And all that area was sheep--sheep range, and all we had was this low country here. We had Beaver Meadows and Hamaker and all this area down in here. And all the way down up in these creeks. 'Cause, in them days, you had beaver up in here and you had nice grass all up and down these meadows up here. And now, there is nothing but "ripgut." We call it "ripgut," 'cause, the cows it's that old coarse water grass and boy, the cows don't care much for it, plus frosted. We start out on the drive one day and we had to go about 10 miles and then we'd stay all night. Then, it take us 3 more days to come on in. So, a 4-day drive to come in. Then, when we come on up to look after our cattle, we'd have to ride our horses up, cause you didn't have anything to haul your horses on. So, it took up 2 days to ride in and 2 days to ride back out again, in the summer. And, in the fall, why, we'd went to round up, why, we'd gather our cattle here and we'd have 'em corralled at Hamaker and we'd lock 'em up there all night. Then, we'd drive 'em to Barbi Creek, in the Barbi Creek Basin at night and we'd hold 'em over there for about 10 days. And we kept going, then we'd gather a whole bunch together. And at that time we were running, we must have been running about 1000 head of cattle in here. Or more maybe, I don't know for sure what. And we'd start the drive down and it would take 4 days to drive down from up here. We'd have a different places to stop on the way. It was quite a drive. I know, between Prospect and Union Creek, in those straight stretches, you'd look ahead and you'd think you was never going to get to the next curve. Slow-moving cattle, you know, they don't move very fast, when they get tired.

RC: How did you get your provisions in? Your food and supplies?

AS: Well, we had to bring 'em in on a pickup, you know, I mean, not a pickup, but a car. We hauled it in on a car. You know, we had a Model T Ford and brought the things in on that. Then, they finally got an old Model T Ford truck and we used that. And we had quite a time sometimes, getting out of here in fall, because in those days, you didn't have anything but chains. And old Diamond Lake road, the new highway wasn't here and you had to come in on that and you had those steep grades to climb. It was a problem. Except we tried to get our cattle out before fall time, because we got caught in here clear after Thanksgiving even then. But we had a heavier loss in those days, than you have today, because you just couldn't find all of them. Some of them would get back on the sheep range and you'd never be able to find them, you know. And them sheep had all gone out and you wouldn't know where to look. But today, why, all the low country done away with now and hardly any pasturing is done on the low range now. Now it's all in the high country.

RC: That's something you definitely have to take into account, for the wintertime.

AS: Oh, you bet! You got to get 'em out of here. You have to to be out by the 5th of November, usually, if you're going to play it safe. We got caught in here with 4 feet of snow. That's too much for a cow to travel through, you know, when you get that deep.

RC: During WW2, you were granted a priority exemption. Can you tell me about that?

AS: Well, yes. I was just the right age to go to the Army at that time, but we were in the dairy business and they needed the milk, you know. My folks weren't always able to hire anybody, any milkers. So, they gave me a rating 4H, which they said disqualified as a soldier, you know, and I was more important at home than I was there. So, that's where I stayed. Some people called me "draft dodger" and everything else, but I told 'em it wasn't my fault. I would have gone into the Army, if they rated me that, but they said I was more essential at home. And we were producing whole milk, at the time, and hauled it to Camp White, which was close to it right there. And our permit jumped from 4 dollars and something, to 7 dollars and something, which was quite a hike in those days. And we appreciated that extra money during the war. So, that's how we, how I stayed out of the Army. I never asked for, to be exempted or nothing else, I just took my rating. And we had to have special permits to, you know, for, you'd have to have a thing written out so you could get, so you could buy gasoline. Before you could buy tires or anything like that, we had to go to the draft board to get that. It was a tough time, but we made more money during the war than we made any other time in the decade. Prices were good.

RC: Was gasoline and things like that rationed out?

AS: Oh, yes. They were all rationed out at the time. Nobody could buy 'em at all, unless you were in the business, where you needed it. We had a fellow, he was a tire man in Medford, Sam Jennings Tire Company. And he kept us in tires. We had old tires that would wear out and we'd fill out applications for a new tire, then it would take a couple of weeks to get it through, you know. He'd put a new tire on for us, to get us by until we'd get a new tire. He was really an outstanding man to dairymen, you know. And people needed them, because we had to haul our milk in every day to Medford. We were in the whole milk business from 1930 to 1964. In the last 10 years, why, we had a milk tank at the time and the truck would come around and would pick it up at that time. It was all hauled in cans, every day. And for a long time, we had to haul milk twice a day. In the morning to Medford and in the evening. As soon as you got through milking, you'd be heading for town again. It was just tough going. I know I wouldn't want to go through that cycle again, like I went through in my young days. People today would never, would never do it. I don't think you could get any young man to do what we had to go through.

RC: Things were a lot tougher back then.

AS: Oh you bet! Of course, they were tougher people. You were brought up to work, you know. You knew what work was and you didn't think anything about it, because that's what you were cut out for. You know today, most of the people you hire come from school and places like that and they only work half a day and quit. They say, "Oh my muscles are too tired or sore and I can't do anymore." That's because they were never broke into it, you know. You got to have yourself broke into something like that or you'd never make a go of it. That's what our daily chore is, every day, we worked every day. We knew how to work. that's one thing my dad was always very strict on us. He taught us all how to work, you know. And every one of us in my family, and there was 11 of us, you know. And they all knew how to work and make a go of it with our lives.

RC: Can you tell me about your early encounters with Charley Neal?

AS: Well, the first time I met Charley Neal was…I don't know how many years ago, but he was a State Policeman in the Medford area. And I met him 2 or 3 different times and he was on the game commission as a game warden. I had a chance to meet him 2 or 3 times back then, but I never got a chance personally to get as well acquainted with him as well as I did the last 8 or 10 years. When he come up here, the first thing he did was look me up to see where I was at, because he heard I was running cattle up here, you know. Because I hadn't seen him in years since. After he left Medford, he went into the lumber--logging business. He bought a ranch up by Eugene, somewhere out of Eugene. And in the logging, he got hurt and had to get out of that. Then he went into another business and then he finally came back to the Forest Service. But he was on here, he says he can remember me way back when I was, when he was on the trail crew. But I can't remember him at all. It was Fish Creek, I think, is where he said of the time he knew of me. That's been years ago. But Charley was an outstanding man.

RC: Can you tell me about the old Skookum Prairie Lookout?

AS: Well, it sit right out in the open up there. The first year we went in, the range was open, you know. John Day had made a application for it and then he said he couldn't fulfill it all. So, we said we'd take half of it. So, we put in 50 head the first year and John never came in with his head, with his amount of cattle on the range. And the lookout was sitting in and they had a little shelter and the Forest Service had built a corral. A wire corral around there, and we was able to corral our cattle in places and bring 'em down to the main camp, where we had to load 'em out. And the lookout was there for, I don't know, probably 4 years, something like that, or 5 years, and they burned it down. For no unknown reason. I don't know why. I think they said they were afraid people was going to stay in it. So, they tore it all down. It's better to have people live in it, than have it burned down like it is now. There ain't nothing there now. Right now. They had a nice shelter. People could get in under and it wasn't hurting anybody. Out of the way, you know, and out of sight too, and they burned it down also. So, it was the same thing with Skookum. They had a nice lookout up there and burned it down and threw everything on the ground and left it lay. We went up there and gathered up a whole bunch of stuff. And I don't remember, one young lady that was along with us, she gathered up an old washboard, an old-style washboard they had up there to wash clothes with, and washtub and dishes, plates, cups and everything. We brought a whole bunch of stuff, we still have quite a lot of it in the cabin yet. It was all laying there on the ground, just laying for somebody to pick up. So, we figured well, we just as well have it as someone else. So we made use of it.

RC: And it was burned in the mid-sixties, wasn't it?

AS: Yes, about along the early sixties, somewhere along there, but they burned it down. So, it was there about 10 years. We came in here in '54, in the high range and it was burned down 6-8 years after that. I stayed all night in that thing a couple of times myself, you know. We got caught in bad weather up there, so we stayed out there until the next day and then came on down. We were afoot, we weren't riding horses in those days. I hiked a lot of that country, but not anymore.

RC: The big rock cairn that is on the edge of the meadow, that you can see from the L.O. [lookout] was built by Forest Service personnel. Is that correct?

AS: That is correct. That was built probably, I'd say somewhere in the '30s. Probably in the early '30s. Somewhere along there. They had a trail crew that camped there and I had the opportunity of being up there at the time, you know. And I went over and talked to the fella and there was a possibility of little deals being up there, I don't know. But, they built the fort. But, I was watching them work on it there and I went back and seen what they put up. I don't know what year it was for sure it was built. But, I know it was back there back in the early sixties, but, it was definitely was built by the Forest Service trail crew.

RC: Do you know of any other rock cairns that were built by Forest Service personnel or white men?

AS: No, I don't know of any other ones. I found one up here on Fish Mountain that was built by somebody, but, we don't know who. We dug into it. We thought an old legend went around, there was some Spaniards that captured the Indians. Either the Indians captured them or they captured the Indians and they stole their gold. And they had it buried there. That had been passed around the schools here at the time and we found that place up there, because the description kind of fell in line with what the legend was. So, John Day and I went up and dug into it and went down to about four feet and we never could find anything. And we looked around for other spots, you know, because usually you always have markers around it and we never could find anything. And I've tried to go back and find it again and I can't now. I can't find where it's at. It's grown up so much with brush and stuff. It's much different than it was at the time. At the spot, that was the only one I had a chance to dig into.

RC: Can you tell me about any of the local homesteaders?

AS: You mean up here?

RC: In this area?

AS: I don't know of any homesteaders up here, at all that I can recall anybody, but, a lot of homesteaders down where we lived. In the place in Sams Valley where we lived, there were some homesteaders by the name of McClendons. Right back in 1952 or '53, someplace back in there. And that's the place he still owned when we bought it. He had a mortgage on it though. Another fellow bought it, but he did not pay out on it until we bought it from him. And I stayed with him one full year, the old folks and their daughter. I went to school in Gold Hill and worked in a grocery store and helped 'em out, you know, because the old fellow passed away a couple years later. And there was about 2 or 3 homesteads right there in Sams Valley that was done in the early fifties. A couple of houses are still standing today. Big, old, 2-story homes, you know, and square built and the boards were just upright. Didn't have any siding in. Had the siding on the outside and just the boards on the inside with paper. Wallpapers got stood up and that's the way the house was built. We had to remodel the whole thing when we moved to Oregon, to make it livable.

RC: Did you build this cabin here?

AS: John Day built this cabin, 1938. He had it built. We had a cabin over at Hamaker. A log cabin, and we used it all the time and the Forest Service wanted to get rid of it. And so John, he made a deal with Carl Young, which was the Forest Supervisor at that time. And he called and asked Carl why he wanted to tear it down. He said, "You give me a spot where I can build a cabin," he says, "I'll build a big one and you can burn that one down. So, they come in here and looked this one over and agreed to give him the go-ahead on it. So, John built this in 1938. I stayed in it the first night anybody ever slept in this cabin. We had 6 of us come up here to hunt for cattle. And the fireplace hadn't even got dry enough yet. We had to put a small fire in it--snow about 2 feet deep. Quite an experience through riding up. Then, John owned this cabin all these years, until we bought him out. In those days, he gave us access to use it for half interest, kind of like half interest of it. Then we bought it then, from that date, we bought out half interest and then from John, we bought out the other half interest. But now, the Forest Service told us we don't have any equity in it, no right to it. That the cabin must be torn down and the permit orders given up. The Forest Service also has a different idea on it and and according to the Forest [Service], they told us well, if you ever quit and want to get out of the forest altogether and want to let your cabin go and to permit, why the Forest Service will take it over. And the officer on the Prospect says now, we got to move off because we give up our permit. So I don't know who's right. And sometime along the line there was a contract written up, but nobody can find it. Of course John Day is gone and we don't know what happened to his copy. And the Forest Service says they don't have a copy of it, so we're just sitting on a nail here just waiting to see what's going to happen. We got a lot of money in this cabin. We probably got 20 to 30 thousand dollars tied up in this cabin alone. But the snow caved it in about 10 years ago and it had a shingle roof. The snow would freeze on the roof and it was too much weight for half a year and it broke down next to the fireplace and broke the top off the chimney. Knocked out the whole side of the cabin. So we come back and rebuilt the whole thing and fixed it up nice inside. And we've had a nice cabin out of it ever since. We probably got $15,000 in ourselves. And I know John put more than $15,000 in when he built it. He had to clear all this ground off, because it was all covered with timber. This was all solid timber here until the '62 wind, when it blew it in here down. But now, it's all pretty well opened in here. All this is cool and nice all summer. Now, we get the hot sun sometimes in the summertime. It's comfortable at least. It's close to water, that makes a lot of difference.

RC: This historic Rough Creek Trail that went through Skookum Prairie down along Skookum Lake; did you used to use that trail quite often?

AS: Well, the only time we'd ever use it is whenever we'd cross--go down into Rough Creek Canyon in through Devil's Canyon and up the other side to Dog Creek. Then we'd use the trail, otherwise we'd never use it, because it was too steep to drive cattle over. And the cows would come in from Dog Creek side and the Dog Creek Canyon and over the top and go down into Devil's Canyon but, it was impossible to go down from Skookum down on that side. But I traveled the ridge on Rough Creek above on top several times and went through the canyon several times on the old trail. It was quite a chore. We just went around hanging bluffs hanging straight down below you. It was worse than the one they have there now, going to Skookum Lake. Yeah, I've been down to Skookum Lake several times and anybody who enjoys outdoor life, should go in and see Skookum Lake. I certainly would recommend they do, because it is quite an obstacle out there.

RC: You bet! Can you tell me about the outlaw named [George Baker] Dunkin, that was hiding in the Skookum area?

AS: Yes, he went up here. I don't know what year it was. It was way back, undoubtedly, it was probably… it was early in the fifties, somewhere along there when he was here. He was here close in the thirties on through. He stayed up here for a number of years. He had 2 outlying cabins and then he used the old ranger cabin. The old ranger station cabin at Hamaker. He had one on Buck Canyon and he also had one on Sherwood. And he was a short, stocky fellow. He had beady eyes. He could almost look a hole through you, and he was a man that didn't make friends with hardly anybody at all. And we were just lucky enough we treated him nice and told him about a cougar that we seen and caught it in a trap. And also the old man, Day, had darned him some socks, his wife had darned 'em, you know, and he decided he didn't want them anymore and gave them to the old man and he finally got friendly with us, you know. But he still gave us a warning: Stay away from his cabin, he didn't want anybody fooling around. Those cabins were just little huts about, well, you know, you had to bend over to get in 'em. They had a little door cut in the front end and you crawled through that to get in the inside. He had a stove in each one of them and a little bed. And a place for you to sit and that's all the room there was in 'em. They weren't more than about 8 feet wide and 8 foot long, or 10 foot long maybe. Long enough anyway, for a stove to sit ahead of his bed. That's the way both of his cabins were built that way. But, they're both gone now, they, one of 'em rotted away on up. Sherwood and the other one, people burned up for wood when they camped there. The campers burned it up. But he was a man, that when he got in trouble on Elk Creek and shot Phil Lowd, why, he took off and they tried to capture him and nobody could get him. He was just too sly for 'em. And he finally, and his nephew came over from Tiller. He had come in there and he had turned him in, because he was afraid he was going to freeze to death through the winter months. And he made a deal with a head officer down the line, they'd give him life imprisonment, if he turned him in. So, that's what he got. He went up to the penitentiary, up in Salem and he was a guard or something outside. I don't know what he, or, not a guard, but whatever they had for him to look after the ground anyway. Till he died. He's been dead now for probably 10 or 15 years.

RC: Phil Lowd was a Oregon State Policeman?

AS: Yeah, he was a Oregon State Policeman. Yeah, he got shot on Elk Creek. Yeah, he went into his cabin there and they had arraigned him once before. The two of 'em did, so Dunkin had warned him: Stay away from there because if he didn't he was going to shoot him. He went right back and did it over again. The next tine he, he got it. Then he took off. Because that's where he spent his summers was on Elk Creek. You know, because he couldn't trap up here by then, so he was down there. Then he, during the winter months, usually he'd come up here about, oh, somewhere along the latter part of September or the 1st of October. He'd move into his cabin and he make his run, one cabin to the next and back to the starting point. We met him a lot of times on the trail and he was always very friendly to us. He was one loner. But, he certainly wasn't to a lot of people. He was one loner. I think he lived too many years by himself. I think he turned him that way. I certainly couldn't say nothing against him, because he always treated us fair.

RC: Didn't he steal somebody's lunch one time, when some folks were looking for him?

AS: Yeah, they had a half-breed Indian and another fellow looking for him up there, you know. And they were sitting on a log somewhere in this country. I don't know just where, because they had tore all the cabins down to keep him from staying in them. And while they was eating the lunch, he sneaked in and stole the lunch, sitting right down beside of them and got away with it. And they didn't even know until they went to reach for their lunch. And the old Indian, the half-breed Indian said, "If anyone can do that, I'm through hunting him." And he quit, got out of it. Hell, that's been years ago.

RC: Do you recall that Indian's name?

AS: No, I don't. I don't know what his name was. He came from Klamath. He was a half-breed.

RC: Charley knew him, didn't he?

AS: Yeah, Charley knew him. Yeah, he was well acquainted with him.

RC: How about mining in this area? Can you tell me if you know anything about mining in this area?

AS: We mostly had a lot of talk on it, you know, hearsays and so forth. I've still got my first mine yet to have anything show up in it. They had a big mine over on the Fish Creek side. Two old fellows mined on it for 3 or 4 years. They claimed they hit it good and they went out that fall and never showed up again. Then another old claim jumper came in and we filed a claim on it. And he also had other claims on it down on Hunter Creek in two different places, but there was nothing ever come of it. But, they had a rumor, that there was a some, I guess he was a kind of a half-breed or Spaniard, I don't know what he was, had a cabin way on Fish Creek and he had a mine that was real rich. And somewhere or another, he got killed and nobody knows where the mine is. I know, Charley Neal, he always had his truck coming on in here and he always wanted me to go with him sometime, when he had a day off, see if we could find it. But, both of us weren't good enough on our feet anymore, to hunt for it. So, we never got up there, because it was too hard of going for horses, you know, to get back up there where it was supposed to be. But, there has been several mining claims; rumors about different spots of gold, but we never found 'em. Because I never got too interested in it. Because I just figured they were just rumors.

RC: Modern technology has made your job easier over the years. Can you tell me how? Describe how?

AS: Mining?

RC: Not mining, but modern technology.

AS: Oh, yeah, well, of course everything has changed, you know, when we started out years ago. We started with horses, that was the beginning of the farming of it on. And it was walk, walk, walk, plowing and everything else. Then you came out with the old Ford tractor. Then you pull the one plow behind it, then you got bigger tractors and kept coming up on it. You had to cut your grain with a binder and go out and shock it. Then you haul it in with a wagon to the station, with the threshing machine, then you thresh it. It took about 15 men to thresh. Where nowadays, it takes one man to thresh with a combine. And we just gradually came up from that to a small combine to a 6-foot cut and then finally a 12-foot cut. And we just until now today, we have a big cabover, air-conditioned combine. So, it's quite a change. But, we raised alfalfa seeds for about 10 years and it was about the worse job I've ever had, because that alfalfa dust, you know, is such a fine dust and you just looked as black as coal, when you'd come in, in the evening. But today, you can just sit up in that cab up there and have your air conditioning on and it blows all the dust away. So, the changes have been tremendous. Everything. We went away from the horse and buggy days to the car and truck days today.

RC: Can you tell me about any changes that you've seen up in this area, that you don't like?

AS: Well, yeah, there are quite a few of them. One thing is the way they raped our forest, you know. Went in here and and just taken out these clearcuts one after another and got nothing back for a price. A few of 'em, they done fairly good on, but so many of them are just an eyesore on the forest. And I don't blame the environmentalist at all for hollering about it. I'm halfway a environmentalist myself, but I'm not a extreme environmentalist. I believe in seeing the country look nice and keep it nice. But I'm not in favor in going around like they're talking about the spotted owl. I'm pretty much opposed to that end of it. I think our forest needs to be harvested, but going in and taking out the old growth and have the young growth come. The way they've been doing it, they've been going in clearcutting it and all the young trees that have been 15 or 20 years growing, they cut 'em down and let 'em lay and burn 'em. And I think that is a very poor practice, myself. Because I'm not a forester and that's my own opinion. But, I certainly don't agree with their practices. And they know about it, because I told 'em several times myself, what I thought about it. Also, my son has told 'em about it. He told 'em about it. But, it don't do any good. They have their own ideas about it and I suppose it comes from headquarters. I don't know where it comes from, but, anyway, it comes from somewhere.

RC: If you had to do everything all over again, what would you change?

AS: You mean in my lifestyle? Or what?

RC: Lifestyle, ranching…

AS: Well, I've loved ranching all my life, that's just in my blood, I guess. I liked it, I like, I didn't mind working, you know, and I've worked hard all my life. And I don't think I would ever qualify for another job, because I just couldn't stand sitting that long, you know, in an office job, you know, I just couldn't do it. I served on all these different committees, where you'll serve for one day and then you were off for a month or two and it worked fine. But, if I had done it every day… One time I ran for county commissioner, but, thank god, I didn't get it, because I don't think I could have taken it and done it. Because, it would have drove me wild, you know, because I was always a little nervous, when I was younger. I'd have to go sit all day and you can never agree, everybody don't agree. That's one thing, the whole time I sat on the Federal Land Bank Board on the A.S.C., we got into some good arguments. but I never, ever held a grudge in my life and we were just as good of friends as we were when we started. And I think that's the way it should be, myself. But, I'd never want to go and take a office job or anything. If I had to do it over again, I might change my lifestyle in the farming end of it. But, I'd still go into the livestock business, because that's something I like and I love this country up here. Because I've been here so many years and every time when I go out, I see something new there I never seen before. A lot of people can ride through a area and see nothing. Every time I ride through a area I see something different. That shows the difference, I suppose, in how some people think. I don't know, but I've covered I think about as many miles in this forest, more than any other man has ever did. I still enjoy it. Every time I make a ride. I made that ride yesterday on Rattlesnake Mtn. I seen things I didn't realize they was up there before. You know--I see something new all the time. That is, I think the difference in people. One person can ride through and see nothing, and the other person can see all kinds of things. But, as far as the spotted owl is concerned, I rode these woods and I've rode 'em and rode 'em and I still have yet to see my first spotted owl. I've seen owls, but I don't think they were spotted owls. I don't know why they're so wild about that at all. I don't think they are ever going to be extinct. They live anyplace anything else does. That's the way I feel about it anyway.

RC: Lastly, but not least, what are your future plans, Albert?

AS: Well, I'm going to keep on going as long as I can. I am 86 years old now and I'm going on 87, pretty close, and I hope to do this as long as I can then I'm going to retire. My son still has a farm. I can go out there and enjoy myself and work with livestock a little bit as when I can. I can keep on riding a horse as long as I'm able to climb up on the saddle, because that was most of the enjoyment I'll ever have was riding a horse. And milking. I can get up on a horse and keep up with anybody else at my age. So I feel that's one thing I am going to continue as long as I'm able to get up on a horse. Course, I may not be able to do it for many more years. Nobody knows when your lifespan ends because it could end any time or it could last 10 years. Never know, I hope I have a few more years. My wife she wants me to retire but she says I've been at it long enough and it's time for you to quit.

RC: You said it was in your blood.

AS: It's in my blood--I guess it was born in me. Because that's all I've ever done except for a few odd jobs I tried. I worked for a grocery store for one year, you know, went to school and worked at a store, grocery store, on Saturdays from 5 to 8 in the evenings, but otherwise the only thing I ever did was ranching, livestock, dairying. I pulled cows for many many years. When we started out, we started by milking by hand then we got milking machines then you had to get down for a number of years had to get down and had to stoop by the cows as you milked her. That's the reason my knees are bad like they are because I got so hobbled I couldn't hardly get up and down anymore because I started down so many times. When you milk 200 cows and when you have to go along and skip about half of them because two of us are milking so that's a lot of times to get up and down, twice a day. But I still enjoyed it. I wouldn't want to get back into it today. If I had to go back into it today, I'd never get into dairying again but I would get into livestock. But that's where we made most of our money in the dairy business. Last few years we've done real good in the beef business but up until about 3 or 4 years ago, you know, beef prices were clear down to 50-52 cents a pound for a steer you know. You couldn't produce them for that. That was costing you more to produce them than what you got out of them. We're back in a slump right now but we think we're going to come back. That why we cut it down. We had a pretty good herd. We sold, we sold 150 head of cow last year at $900 a head. That was an exceptionally good price. Each one had a calf, a young calf with it. When you can get that much out of a cow, why you're doing all right. We cut our head down now to 200 head. Well, we probably got 300 head of cows but we keep about 100 head down in the valley there in the pastures we have to keep them down through summer months. We'll keep this range as long as my son wants to keep it. If he decides he wants to get out of it why I'll suppose we'll pull out and get out of it. As long as I'm able to come up here we'll stay in the cattle business. But it's hard to get anybody who knows this country, you know, to look after cattle. It's just like when we sold the range to the Rogue River Ranch last year I spent quite a bit of my time showing them around and showing them the range and everything. The fellow did real well at learning it and he's getting around real good now. He knows this country pretty well from one end to the other.

RC: This concludes my questions, Albert. Do you have any further comments you would like to make?

AS: Well I don't know just exactly what I want to say. I'm not out here to kind of brag myself up, being a special man or anything like that because I'm just an ordinary person just like everybody else is and I'm not out for any notoriety or anything like that. Several times I've got some pretty good writeups on it because I suppose the way I did things, you know, come out in front. I've come out in the paper a few times. Quite a writeup. Mail Tribune a few years ago. I had quite a writeup in the Central Point American, come out how the Capital Press comes out with another item again. And I was named Jackson County Cattleman of the Year which I considered quite an honor for me and all these years. I'm probably the oldest cattleman in the valley. So I figured maybe I was entitled to it I don't know. But I didn't look for it. I wasn't out to campaign for it. But it was a surprise for me. My son wanted me to come on down, he wanted me to the picnic with him and I said I don't know if I can or not. I said I'm kind of tied down and he says You come on out you can leave the horses out and turn 'em out and leave 'em until the morning and leave 'em and come on down to the picnic. I was just kind of suspicious of something in the wind, but I just didn't know what it was. I got a nice branding iron and a $25 gift certificate for 2 free lunches at Kim's Restaurant in Medford. I thought [it] was very nice of them, you know, the cattlemen of Jackson County. I appreciated that. Well, that's all I can tell you on that.

RC: I want to thank you very much, Albert, for sharing with me.

AS: You're very welcome, what little good I could do ya. I tried my best. Some things I probably forgot I considered that should have been brought up. But anyways it don't make any difference you know. Because you know you're talking like this and it seems to come to your mind later on. You should have said things when you were talking but at the time it wasn't there. Glad to give you what little information I have. Anyway, you're certainly welcome to that.

RC: This concludes our interview with Albert Straus, historic rancher. The location of this interview was at Albert Straus' cabin on Fish Creek Road. This is Randy Charon, Cultural Resource Technician with USDA Forest Service, Toketee Ranger Station, Umpqua National Forest.


Jeff LaLande: Tape 1 of a tape-recorded interview. Interview is with/about Albert Straus; long-time ranchers on the Prospect Ranger District, on the Rogue River and his son Dalton Straus, National Forest. The interview is taking place in the afternoon of April 16, 1996, at Dalton Straus' ranch near Central Point; on Upton Road in Central Point.
    Mr. [Albert] Straus, if we just start out with some of your personal background about yourself; about your family; starting out maybe with your mother and father. Where they were from…

Albert Straus: My father was from Germany, Hanover, Germany. He came here when he was 14 years old, I think about 1888, or something like that. His brother and his sister were already here, and they bought his ticket over because he wanted to get away from the military training. Compulsory, there in Germany. And then--he married, I think in 19, in 1898, I think. He was married to Louise [Searge?]. She was born in the state of Iowa, but her folks, her parents both came from Germany. So we're full-fledged Germans. Both sides.

JL: And so, your father came to Iowa direct?

AS: Yes, he did come direct to Iowa.

JL: Did his family happen to know your mothers family back in Germany? Or was it…

AS: No, he got acquainted with them after he came here. He was only 14 years old when he got here. And his brother come when he was quite a bit older. He was about 10 years older. And his sister, I think, was about 6 years older than he was. They were already here, so they wanted him to come on over. So he did.

JL: What was your father's name?

AS: Deidrich.… He went by the name of Dick.

JL: And your mother's name again?

AS: Louise… She passed away, I guess, what, in 1913.… My youngest brother was born. She passed away right after childbirth. There's seven of us boys and one girl by my first, by Father's first marriage, and two boys and a girl by his second marriage.

JL: You were from the first marriage?

AS: Yes.

JL: What "order" were you?

AS: Two older sons were boys, and then there was a girl. And then myself. Then there was three more boys.

JL: Were you born in Iowa?

AS: Yeah. I was born in Iowa, Buena Vista County. We was born in a German settlement around there. There's Albert City on one side, Truesdale on one side, Storm Lake on one, another corner, and Newell on another. We were sitting right in the middle of it. And we had Norwegians on--Swedes on the north, and Norwegians on the east. Then the rest of them were mixed, around the other side. Pretty much of a foreign settlement in there.

JL: Was this in the northwest part of the state?

AS: Yes, north.…northwestern part.

JL: So, your family farmed there. What were the main crops that they grew?

AS: [inaudible word], corn, oats. We didn't ever grow any wheat. And then ryegrass, clover and timothy for hay. That was our main pasture… Corn was the main crop. Is today yet. They didn't, at that time they didn't grow many soybeans yet. Now, it's soybeans…one of the main crops in the state of Iowa.

JL: As far as livestock goes, you had your own livestock for your equipment of course, but did you raise any for sale?

AS: Cattle was all. We didn't ever raise any horses. We had two colts. Raised them ourselves. We did all our farming with horse in them days. We didn't have any sign of a vehicle.

JL: No pigs out there in the corn?

AS: Oh yeah! We had pigs. We had a hog house. Raised hogs. Had a lightning strike one end of it. Was full of hogs and never killed a hog! Went right through the end of it…right straight down through it…

JL: How about twisters?

AS: Never had one right there where we lived. We had 'em coming in about a mile from where we were.

JL: So you saw them?

AS: Yeah. Saw the dark clouds come through, but never… We had one come pretty close one time. But it never… it was a strong wind… I thought everything was gonna blow away. We were just kids. We were out playing in the granary, the corn-crib deal. Folks were at the house and they couldn't get out to come see where we were! They thought sure we'd blowed away! It was a terrible storm.

JL: How about big blizzards?

AS: Oh yeah! We had 30 below zero. Was nothing! We never had real severe ones often. Just maybe once every four or five years we'd get a bad one. But we used to have to walk home from school and get our cheeks froze coming home from school. Half a mile walk. Get home and the folks have to put snow on our cheeks and thaw 'em out!

JL: Well, being out in that northwest part of the state, I don't imagine you had the big problem with floods that the eastern part did?

AS: No, we don't, we never did have any big floods there at all. The creeks are pretty small. There's one river, the big river that's quite a bit east of us. And north also of where we were.

JL: You mentioned school just a minute ago. Can you tell me just a little bit about the school that you went to and what was it like?

AS: We had a grade school within a half-mile of where we were. We started there, and then I went to German school for about two years I think. See I was ten, I guess, when I come here--1916.

JL: To the Rogue Valley?

AS: Twelve--or eleven…

Dalton Straus: Yeah, Feb. 1916 was when it was…

JL: Was this German school, was this where you went to learn how to speak and read German?

AS: Yeah, well, how to read German. That's all we ever spoke, was German, in Iowa. We lived in a German settlement. We come to Oregon, of course, we could speak English, us older ones. But, my two younger brothers, they couldn't speak English at all. All they could do was speak German. They had an awful time! Some of the other kids get the biggest kick out of them--listening to them talk to each other!

JL: Was your family Lutheran?

AS: Yes. Yes, they were Lutheran, my folks.

JL: And, was there a Lutheran church right there in the community?

AS: Yes, about two miles from where we lived… They went most every Sunday, to church. My brother, my youngest brother and his wife, they were great church attenders! And my next-to-the-oldest brother was also a very close church attender. They went most every Sunday. The rest of them, they didn't "have much Christianity in 'em"!..

JL: Now, so you came out to Jackson County, obviously at a very young age, so you must have come with your mother and father?

AS: Yeah, my folks.

JL: Actually, that--that deserves a little more exploration!… The trade for the two farms. How did that come about?

AS: We owned 160 acres in Iowa. We traded that to a fellow by the name of Vogel, Henry Vogel. He was a banker in Newell, Iowa. He owned a place in Sams Valley that we traded for.

JL: My grandfather was named Henry Vogel [Seivers]!

AS: Oh? Really?

JL:  On my mother's side. Henry George Vogel. He was German and…

AS: Maybe it was him!

JL: No, it wasn't him. He definitely wasn't a banker. He was a telegraph operator for Western Union… But that's amazing!

AS: Well, he got a $10,000 note which he finally lost!.… Vogel went broke. Back then, lost the place we traded him, our place, we had 160 acres and we got 240 here. When we come here.

JL: Was that out in Sams Valley?

AS: Yes.

JL: What would have made your parents think that Jackson County looked good? As opposed to staying in Iowa at that time?

AS: Well, we were young kids, you know and always talking cowboys. And, we all loved to ride anyway! That's one reason we got my parents to come to Oregon, so we could play cowboys!

JL: [laughing] And you have! But was there… Do you know if there was something going on in the farm economy in Iowa at that time that would have made things look better here in Oregon?

AS: No, it was worse here than it was there. We come to a run-down farm when we come here. Never been plowed over about 6 inches deep, ever, I don't think. It had a hardpan there! We finally had to get a Ford, an old Fordson tractor and 16-bottom plow and rig it up before we could ever raise anything.

JL: And this--where abouts in Sams Valley?

AS: It's [right by] Vilas, southwest corner.

DS: [That would] Be the southwest corner… It was on the old Sams Valley Highway, which is now the junction of 234 and Ramsey Road. Ramsey Road is where it starts, from 234. Was the Sams Valley Highway, Highway 234.

JL: You're well within sight of Table Rock?

AS: Oh yeah. We were around behind Table Rock, north of Table Rock.

JL: North of Lower Table Rock?

DS: Yes, we were way west of Antioch Road.

AS: Right on your route to Gold Hill.

JL: Arriving here in 1916…

DS: Now, your dad came out first?

AS: Yeah, he came out and looked it over.

DS: And then your stepmother and the family came out. How did they get here?

AS: He came back to Iowa again… And then we all got together and decided to come to Oregon and make the trade. So then we come here by rail.

JL: Do you remember what line?

AS: Southern Pacific. On the Hood River, we got snowbound for four days and five nights at Hood River. Big slide. Them days, ya know, they couldn't clear it out with any big equipment 'cause they didn't have it. We just about ate 'em out of house and home, in Hood River, before we ever got away from there!

JL: And then from Portland, did you stay on the train to Medford?

AS: We stayed on the train all the way down to Gold Hill. We had the fellow, our neighbor there after we moved there, a fellow by the name of O. T. Wilson. Came with one of those little… two-seated hacks and two horses, and hauled us out to Sams Valley. And, the house was run down, you know, real old. Looked like an old, old house. Porch was all fell in and the ceilings in the house had… what do ya call it? Some kind of netting for ceilings!

JL: Cheesecloth?

AS: Yeah, cheesecloth filled with bags of dirt was hanging down. They had to go in and take all that down and put a whole new ceiling in and put a new roof on, build new porches, put a new foundation under the house. In fact, we rebuilt the whole house!… This is soon after we arrived…We was pretty discouraged for a little while! 'Cause we left a nice home back there.

JL: What did your mother, your stepmother think of it?

AS: Well, she was all right. She was--didn't particularly like it, but she got by with it all right. She was very good.

DS: What about O. T.Wilson? (His son was Steve Wilson. They were raised just like a quarter of a mile apart. Part of the Nealon family.)

JL: Coming here in 1916, as a German family, did you, or your family, experience any unpleasantness during the war? I've read about a lot of anti-German things being said by people in the West and so on…

AS: No, they never did. They were real nice people. They treated us just 100 percent!… Just fell right in with the rest of the crowd. There was one or two other German families that lived there. One of them came from Poland. Fellow by the name of Max Schultz. He raised his family right there pretty close to us. My folks and Schultz were very close friends all the time they were alive.

JL: I understand there was a good-sized German community out in the Lake Creek country, too. Did you have any connection with them?

AS: No, we didn't have any connection with those at all… We went to school, we went strictly English in school and everybody learned English. I used to be able to read German and write it, and talk it, and everything. Now, I can't do any of it! It just got away from me!

JL: What school did you attend?

AS: I attended the [Sams] Valley school first, the grade school [till] I got out of the eighth grade. It was just right [near] the home place where we lived. Within an eighth mile of where our home was. All we had to do was walk across a field to school. That's where I built my house when I got married. In the same spot because the acre of property reverted back to the land it came from, because of people by the name of [McClendon?] deeded it to the school district. Any time it was discontinued, it was supposed to go back to the owner. That's what it did.

JL: So that school was consolidated with some other school?

AS: It went back in--Chaparral School consolidated all into one. Called it the Sams Valley. They had a high school and a grade school, both. I went to my first years of high school in Gold Hill, 1920 and '21. Then, the fall of '21 I started in Sams Valley and graduated from there in '24. Just the two of us. Two boys in our graduation class!

DS: Who was the other boy?

AS: Ray Holtz.

DS: The old Sams Valley School is still there, too… The Grange Hall is just across, down the road from it.

JL: How about if you were to tell me a little bit about your family's farming and ranching operations there in Sams Valley while you were growing up. What you grew. If you raised cattle, where you grazed them in the summer.

AS: We raised beef cattle. Had a few dairy cows, probably usually about five or six cows we had to milk. We made our own butter and always had a little bit of cream to sell. Then I think it was about, oh, there must have been about '24 or '25. We went into beef a little heavier. We run beef up until, well, we started in '21 really. We kept beef until '29. Then we sold all our beef and went into the dairy business. We bought a bunch of dairy cows. We was milking thirty cows by hand for awhile! Finally got one of the old type of blue ribbon milkers and we extended operations on up until we [had] finally two hundred cows. My brother and I did most all the milking. My oldest brother, he was there at that time.

JL: This is around 1929-30.

AS: Yeah. Thirty to '35, I'd say--'36. Somewhere along there.

JL: Now why in 1929? Was it the Depression? The bottom fell out of beef prices, that you went from beef to dairy?

AS: Yeah, seven cents a pound for steer. Fat steer brought seven cents a pound.

JL: What had it been during, say, the high prices of World War I, or in the '20s?

AS: Most were around the twenty-cent mark during World War I. My older brother was drafted, but he never was sent overseas. He was in Army camp for awhile. That was as far as he got.

DS: The beef cattle. Where did you run them?

AS: We run 'em up in the forest near Diamond Lake, from 1921 to '29.

DS: What were your turn-off dates during that period of time? Were you able to go in earlier than you can now?

AS: Well, sometimes we went in a little earlier, but most generally, it was around the first of July. We had the lowest range. We didn't have the high mountain range, the big meadows, at that time. They were running 800 to 900 head of cattle…

JL: On the higher range?

AS: On the lower range.

JL: What about on the higher elevation range during that time?

AS: That was all sheep. Sheep went out of there in 1940-'41. Lewises come in from the Central Point area, out in Beagle area was where they really spent their winter. Later took all of Fish Mountain range and part of Buck Canyon. Kohlhagen come in from Roseburg and he took Fish Creek and Skookum. Then a fellow from Prineville came in and took Dog Prairie, which is another part of our big meadows.

JL: Is that how Prineville Camp got its name, do you think?

AS: I don't know if it did or not. He never did run in Beaver Meadows. I don't know where… Gordon Walker told me there was a bunch of fellows went in and cut jack pine. If where the name Prineville, or where they come from or not, I don't know. Forest Service paid. They piled up huge piles of logs, you know. I asked him about Prineville Camp; how it ever got its name and he probably told me. But I've forgotten it. I don't remember.

JL: What would be the earliest that you ever turned cattle out?

AS: About the 15th of June is probably the earliest we've ever got in there. One or two years, we had some mild winters. One year we had five head of cattle in there all winter. We got them out the next fall.

JL: What did they look like?

AS: Good! They were all young cattle. 'Course we had a heifer winter up there two years ago in the snow--around Beaver Meadows.

DS: Made it all through the winter… In a winter like we had that year, we didn't have that much snow, and they were probably able to get into the swamps and creek bottoms. And the brush and stuff would kinda bridge that snow and there'd be enough grass and stuff underneath. Brush to hold 'em.

AS: That's, I'm sure, where they made their livin', feeding along the streams. We went in on the 26th of December and got five head out back up Brown's Cabin. Old man Mayfield and myself. I was just a kid in them days. In my teens yet. We rode in there. Left here the day after Christmas and went up there and got five head. Took us two days to ride in and three days to come out.

JL: And that's from here to there?

AS: Yeah. Yeah, we went up and found 'em right away. We got word from somebody. Had phoned out and said there was some cattle up there. They were missing some and we were missing one. Another fellow was missing one. I think there was five different outfits had one critter each in the bunch.

JL: Well, all during this period that you were running cattle, or even during the Depression when you weren't, on the higher portions of that allotment it was sheep until about 1940?

AS: 1940.

JL: What was it that changed that?

AS: The war. Kohlhagen had to go out because he had a foreign sheepherder. They wouldn't let him in the National Forest 'cause he was a foreigner. So, he couldn't find anyone else to take his sheep in, so he quit. Of course Lewis, they crowded him out then anyway. They were forcing them all off the range. But the sheep kept the jack pine down. You know, those ranges in the 1920s and '30s were just open range. No jack pine, no nothin' on 'em. Now, it's all taken over by jack pine. Every one of those big ranges.

JL: Going back to the '20s again. With the cattle that you were running, was this part of the Straus family, or was this yourself and a brother as partners?

AS: Family.

JL: It was the whole family?

AS: Yeah, it was the family. My dad, he helped gather in the fall a little bit and he helped drive 'em up, too

JL: Were the cattle driven on foot all the way?

AS: All the way in.

JL: Right from Sams Valley, all the way up?

AS: We had a fellow by the name of Albert Glass. We called him Buck Glass. We used to go over to his place and stay all night for the first day. Then we'd go from there up to the Obstinate J Ranch or Gus [Ditsworth's] place, one or the other, and stay all night. Then we went to the Mill Creek Ranch, which was halfway between Prospect and Union Creek, on your right. There's a big meadow down in the bottom… Then the next day, we'd go on to Crater Creek. We'd turn 'em loose there for a couple days and then we'd shove them around to different places. Them days, Beaver Meadows and also Muir Creek was all just beautiful grass. Green. And now, it's nothing but ripgut! 'Cause they let the beaver come in there. At that time, there was no brush in there. It was just clear. You could take care of 50 head of cattle like nothin'!

JL: Now, where are you talking about?

AS: Muir Creek bottom. That's where the east fork of Muir Creek. We call it Sherwood Creek. That's what it used to be called. From there on down to where it hits the highway down there. And the same way with Engels Meadows, which is "River Meadows" now. Before the highway went in there, another beautiful meadow.

JL: What is the name of the meadow you just mentioned?

AS: Engels Meadows.

JL: Where was that located?

DS: Probably about the ten-mile marker on the highway, where they had a big slide in about the early '60s. It covered the highway. They hauled a lot of that away and covered some of the low spots.

JL: These were meadows right along the river? Those glades that you pass right along?

DS: Yeah, before you get to Muir Creek.

AS: It cut right through the upper corner of it. The river divided it up on both sides of it. Grass on both sides of the creek of the river.

DS: See, the old highway used to be across the river. The old Diamond Lake Highway; the Highway 230 now, was put in there in the '30s, in '34. And so all this was untouched, it was all grass. The highway goes through there now.

AS: Grasshopper Meadows, on the old Diamond Lake Road. There's a huge meadow in there. Heck, it would take care of 25 to 30 head of cattle all summer! A lot of those meadows now, they disappeared. The timber and brush take over.

JL: Fire suppression and so on…

AS: The brush is the worst that we got. Take like on the Umpqua Range, Skookum. We went in and cut all the jack pine out. Again, the Forest Service don't do anything about taking care of it. They say they don't have any funds. Maybe they don't, I don't know what.

DS: Well, we'd take care of it if we knew we were gonna have it next year or the year after, but shoot, they keep threatening to take down the numbers [of cattle], and there's no way that we can go in there and invest any money in the range they're gonna take away from us. We've already invested thousands and thousands of dollars on developing these ranges, and building roads, and drift fences, and campground enclosures, and everything else!

AS: 'Fifty-four is when we first went in with a big bunch. That's when we bought Ben Day out. In '55 and '56, we… developed a lot of springs on Fish Mountain. We developed three of them. Took a horse and pulled a water trough all the way up there, from the bottom to the springs. Developed them, and the same way over on the Umpqua side. Dog Prairie, or Trap Mountain rather. There was two seep holes there with no water. I don't know if sheep ever got water out. We went in there and developed both springs, put troughs there and had water. You could water a hundred head of cattle there…

DS: Originally, we hollowed out some logs. The one there at Dog Prairie we hauled that. My cousin and I went down and hooked on to the old log that had fallen down, drug it off there. We hollowed it out first, and drug it up to the spring, and put it in there. And then we did the same thing over on Trap Mountain on the Umpqua Forest. Sure made for good water troughs! But then, for some reason, the Forest Service came in and on the one at Dog Prairie, they decided they'd develop it. They took our wooden tank out of there and put in a metal one.

AS: They left the wooden tank there but put the metal one below it and then run the water right on through.

JL: Overall, just kind of an estimate--in your years since the 1920s… the meadows, the range up there, about how much, in area, would you say they've shrunk in size. Due to the brush and timber growing up. In that seventy years or so…

AS: Well, the big meadows haven't shrunk too much. Alkali, up on Fish Mountain, probably shrunk. And Lewis Camp. All that whole area in there is now nothing but brush. It used to be wide open. You could ride clear from right around the mountain, from Bear Camp right straight through to Lewis Camp, without getting any brush at all. Now it's nothin' but that doggone wild cherry. Just solid!

JL: And it was open meadow?

AS: It was all open meadow. And the sheep were in there. And we always said they ought to put about a couple hundred head of goats in there for about two or three years. They'd kill it out!

JL: Get the cherry out?

AS: Yeah! They'd get that out of there. They eat it. But, there's gobs and gobs of [cattle] feed up there. You can't get to it, a lot of it, now.

JL: How about the name "Alkali Meadow?" Do you know how that came about?

AS: I couldn't tell you. I don't know where the name come from. That's what it was called on the map when we first went in there. Some of our cattle would drift in there, when we was running on the lower range. And that was still sheep range. We'd have to go in there in the fall and drive them out. Not very many, maybe half a dozen--eight or ten head. But, they'd work their way up the side of the mountain. In them days it was all open. There was no timber like it is now. You could ride anywhere through those woods, horseback, and not have problems. Now you couldn't get fifty feet! There's down timber everywhere!

JL: And you're talking about not just the lodgepole, but all over?

AS: All over. Big timber. Take the upper end of Buck Canyon. There's just trees laying every direction. We got stalled in there one time. Two different times. We used to drive our cattle up Buck Canyon, then take them over the top into Alkali. Didn't have the trail cut out and we had to lock our cattle up in the meadow. We called it… "What the heck did they call that? We call it Paradise [pause] [Rims] Camp [Rims] Camp. Anyway, we held them there and come back down to Union Creek. and finally get the Forest Service to come up and cut the trail out. There was no way you could get through! We tried to go up the hill, down the hill. There was just trees everywhere! And yet, to this day, the trail's blocked. You're done. You can't get through.

JL: When was this you first noticed all of the downed timber?

AS: Oh, that was after '54. Since that time, even the early '30s was when we had open going in there. When we run cattle in there, from '21 to '29, we used to gather all through that bottom country. You could ride everywhere. You can't do it today. 'Course now, they got a lot of clearcuts in there. It's opened up a lot of that country. But we tried to even come up on the trail there about four or five years ago and had to give it up. We couldn't even get through on the trail that used to go through there.… I guess you'd call it Muir Creek area. I guess that's part of Sherwood. Yeah, it would be from Sherwood, 'cause that's where we come through on. Tried to get through there and we had to back up and go back around to get out. Couldn't get through. Just riding horseback, you know.

JL: You're mentioning the Day family. How long were they around?

AS: They run on there from about '31 or '32 till '54. But Earl Day run the cattle from, I think, probably about that time on, and Ben Day, his son, took over in 1928 or '29. Because I didn't help anymore after that. We went into the dairy business and I couldn't help him. But, I helped Earl Day gather his cattle every fall up until then.…

JL: Now Earl had quite a political career!

AS: Oh yes! He only had one lung. He couldn't go very good. He had to ride horseback. He couldn't get off and walk at all hardly. But he was a pretty good old guy. He was pretty tight, but he was good! Yeah. He was County Judge [county commissioner]. He was a banker before he come down here.…

JL: So, the Days were running cattle up there on into the '50s and then you bought them out?

AS: Yeah, we bought Ben out in 1954. Then we bought John out in 1958…

DS: No, John was still running in there till Columbus Day windstorm. Remember? That was '62. We bought him out in '65. We got the Dog Prairie allotment in '59.

JL: You had your dairy cattle from '29 until the mid-'30s, late '30s?

AS: No, we had 'em till '64. We sold 'em when we sold the ranch in Sams Valley. I didn't do any milking after about the last six years. We hired milkers to do the milking for us. I got so I couldn't get up and down under a cow anymore! My knees give out! That's the reason I had to have my knees replaced. Too many times squatting down under a cow.

DS: His brother had gone to California. The one that came back, the stepbrother, came back and joined partners with him when his father died. That was when? 1938?

AS: Yeah, '38.

DS: And so, he came back and joined with him in partners on the dairy and they still had a few beef cattle. And then during the Second World War, they developed Camp White out here. Then we ran our cattle on the cantonment area, the artillery range for Camp White. We did that until my cousin, who was a year younger than me, his brother's son, who grew up on the ranch of course. We both went into the service. We went in in '51, right at the start of the Korean War. He went in a year later. We both got off active duty in '54. Just a couple-three months later is when Day decided he wanted to go back to school and became an attorney, and he wanted to sell his cattle. And I'd already told him at that point, my dad, that I wasn't going to stay on the ranch if we were gonna be dairy. I didn't want to be there. It was like him coming from Iowa! I wanted to be a cowboy too! And so, that's how we got started on it. The land bank was willing to loan us the money to buy Mr. Day out. They claimed anyway, because of the young kids coming along, they were willing to be part of the partnership. It worked out pretty good. When he sold, getting ahead of your game here, but when my uncle (his brother) got so he couldn't work on the dairy anymore either, he just decided he wanted to go in the real estate business. So we subsidized him to get started in the real estate business. He just started doing really good in that, and when he asked his son to come with him in the real estate business, we decided we couldn't run the cattle and the dairy at the same time. So they sold the dairy. He and I went in partnership in '64.

JL: I see. So there was a period there from about '29 until the mid-'50s that the Straus family was out of the beef cattle business?

DS: No, not totally.

AS: We always had a bunch. We was running about twenty-five head of beef cows all the time. We run 'em on the cantonment after the Army.…

JL: Between the late '20s and mid-'50s there's some fairly major changes, I would guess, up in that country. I wonder if you could just think back and in your mind, picture what the major changes you would point out to someone between the late '20s and say, the late '50s up in that country. It could be anything, from what the meadows looked like, to how many roads were there. The kind of--the amount of logging, as well as, especially, I'd like to hear of any changes in your operation. In the way you did things. In trucking cattle up there and the kind of cattle that you did range up there, and any problems with them.

AS: Well, we didn't truck in until 1954, when we first went back in there--again. I think Day trucked in for a couple years. I think he quit driving [the cattle] about 1952. Somewhere along '51 or '52. When he trucked the cattle in. Then we started trucking ours in '54. And of course in '55 we got Dog Prairie and there was just an old cow trail going down there. We had to go up there and build a road. We built a two-mile road down to Old Man Camp so we could get our trucks down there. We had to make our corrals up, corral up on top, just in below the…

DS: Three Lakes Road.

AS: Three Lakes… Yeah, right in below Three Lakes Road, we had our camp, our corrals set up there. We had to drive two miles down to Old Man Camp, and then go four miles from there back to Dog Prairie. And so we built this road down. We first set up just an ordinary corral and then we went in there and drug in a bunch of logs and made a log corral. Worked there about a week one time, building a log corral.

DS: Could you go back just a little further though, and remember when you used to go up there in the 1920s? Where you stayed, how you got up there, how you got back. And how many people were--how many ranchers were involved.

AS: Oh, there was about a half a dozen of them. There was Nate Hills, Sam Houston, Ditsworth; Harry Tresham, Bigham, Deidrich Straus. I don't think Day came in until the '30s. He--come in in the '30s, after some of the others went out.

JL: These were all Central Point, Sams Valley?

AS: Sams Valley, Central Point…and Eagle Point area. Albert Glass, he was in there also. Albert Glass and Ditsworth was the last ones that stayed. They stayed there until about 1929, I think. Something like that. They went out and I had to learn that range all by myself! I was just a kid when we first went in there, ya know. The first year or two I didn't do much riding. Just kinda drove cows back and forth. [At roundup] we'd gather the cows at Hamaker. Had a corral back of the old cabin. Gather them in there in the daytime. Then the next day, we had to drive 'em down to Bybee Creek and put 'em in the basin to hold them there. We held them there for nearly ten days. Then we'd go down and gather 'em all up, take them down and hold 'em in the bottom. Right above Bybee Creek there's a basin right in below the road there.

JL: Below the Diamond Lake Highway?

AS: On the Diamond Lake Highway. You can still see the old road where it turned off, right across the road there.

JL: Yes, I know. Right next to the river then.

AS: Yes. We held the cattle there all night, and then the next day we'd start the drive down. Come down with 'em. We'd go to Mill Creek. Then the next day, we'd go down to near the Obstinate J, or Ditsworth's, depending on how long it took us, how late we were getting in. Then the next day, we'd go down to the Albert Glass place and stay all night there.

JL: Where was that, the Albert Glass place?

AS: It was up on Glass Lane, off of Antioch Road.

JL: So, you put on a good number of miles between the Obstinate J and the Glass place.

AS: Yeah. You go about twenty, usually about twenty miles a day. Like on that Diamond Lake Road, you come around one corner and you look up there and it looked like it was ten miles to the next curve!

JL: In the '20s, this would have been on the old road, on the south, or east side of the river. The old dusty, pummy dust?

AS: Yes. The highway to Crater Lake was already built. But the Diamond Lake Road never was until '32 or '33.

JL: You mentioned Hamaker and a cabin at Hamaker. Was this a stockman's cabin?

AS: Yeah… They built it there out of logs. There was one log on top of the other, and then they put shakes along the side to cover up the cracks, you know. Just a one-room cabin. It had beds around the side of it. It had a cookstove on one end and a little Forest Service Sibley [stove] down on the other end of the cabin.

JL: And this cabin, did it sit fairly close to where the campground is now? Or was it more out in the meadow?

AS: Across the river from the campground. We had to ford the river right through the campground, where the campground is now we forded the river. We had a pen. We penned 'em up at night. Held our cattle there at night and the next day we'd drive them to Bybee Creek and dump 'em down in the basin. Then we'd hold them there until we got ready to go out and then we'd…go back up into Hamaker, into that area to round up some more. Every day we stayed at Hamaker. But two of us drove the cattle down. My job the first year was driving cattle down every day. Got tiresome! Boy, we got into some snowstorms. Couldn't see nothin'!

JL: So, some of you'd be up rounding them up in the higher country, bringing them down to Hamaker. And then another group of you'd be driving those that had been rounded up down to Bybee?

AS: Two of us usually took the cattle down to Bybee Creek. The rest of them would go back out and gather again.

JL: And there was a corral there at Bybee?

AS: No, just open.

JL: They just stayed down in there because there was a lot of grass?

AS: There was a lot of grass in there and they held them right in there. If you left them there too long, some of 'em come out, you know, and you'd find 'em out in the Bybee Creek burn. But, you could gather 'em up and get 'em all in the basin, that basin below the road, at night. And the next day we'd go out. After you got back down, you'd get your count on how many cattle you're out yet. Then you'd go back and try for the second trip.

JL: Driving them, coming or going, what did you do when [when you got to] Union Creek Resort or the town of Prospect? Did you go right through?

AS: Oh yeah! Go right through!

JL: Right through the resort! Now, I know that in the '30s they built a stock driveway around Union Creek. There's still some of the old log fencing, the barrier, left.

AS: We went right through Union Creek. Becklelhymer was the only one there at that time. He had a little restaurant, a little store there. That's all that was there.

JL: Do you remember anything about him? I want to get back to the driving, but since you bring up Ed Beckelhymer. We don't know a heck of a lot about him. Anything that you could recollect about him…

AS: All that I know is, he wore a mustache. He was a…rather slender fellow. He was a bachelor. A lady come up there to do his cooking for him and she had just one eye. She had a glass eye. And she looked crosseyed all the time. When she'd look at you, look straight at you, she had her head turned sideways. But, she was the best old lady you ever saw in your life. Several times we went in there. I went in with John Day and also with John Hanscom. She had closed up shop already. That was after Beckelhymer died. She took over the restaurant. Went in there and she come out there and fixed us a dinner.

JL: This was at Beckie's Cafe?

AS: Yeah. Beckie's Cafe. We called her Beckie.

DS: Cecil was her name. Did they ever marry?

JL: I think so, because I've seen Cecil Beckelhymer on… But, was he known as Beckie at one point? Was that how it got its name?

AS: No, they named it after her.… She cooked good huckleberry pies! She was a good cook. She could be ornery, I'll tell you! I seen her bawl some of those people out something terrible!.… Some of the customers. If they tried to get smart with her or anything like that. But, she was just as pleasant to us as anybody you ever saw. I couldn't say a bad word against her. But I saw her really chew some other people out a couple times!

JL: Back to the '20s and driving the cattle. So, Hamaker was kind of your central gathering spot for the whole allotment up there?

AS: Yeah. That's where our cabin was. Our headquarters. We'd gather them all in there 'cause you'd split your bunch up. We had about eight or nine riders, you know, in there then. Because there were so many different people running in there, you'd break up your riders in two or three bunches. They'd bring in two or three bunches of cattle that day. They all [were] put in the corral and held overnight, and the next day we'd take 'em out. There was just a fence, wire fence corral right in below the cabin there, it's still there yet, the open spot is… It's right across the river from the campground. The Forest Service burnt the cabin down when John built the [Muir Creek] cabin in 1938.

JL: Do you recollect a Forest Service cabin on the other side of the river, ever? Right near where the campground is?

AS: No, that cabin was out in the flats, over by the old bridge. You know, where the old bridge is across Hamaker?

JL: Across the Rogue River?

AS: Yeah, across the Rogue River. The Forest Service cabin was just a little ways on up there. That's the cabin that [the "outlaw" trapper] Dunkin used after the Forest Service quit maintaining it. He stayed in it some of the summertime. Dunkin used it as one of his [trapping] cabins in the winter.…

JL: And didn't Dunkin also have a cabin up on Buck Canyon?

AS: He had one in Buck Canyon. He had one on Sherwood Creek. They burnt that one up on Buck Canyon. On Sherwood Creek, the shell of it is still there yet. It's all caved in, ya know, and all rotted away now.

JL: Now, the one on Buck Canyon, if it's the one I'm thinking about, it's on the north side of the creek?

AS: Right in back of a meadow.

JL: Right in back of a meadow, right on the edge of a meadow, in some timber. And you can still see some rotted [cabin] logs in there.

AS: Stuff in there… They pretty well got it burned up now.…

JL: You mentioned Old Man Camp. I'm not familiar with that. About where was that located?

AS: That's down there, from Three Lakes on down. Take the road on down the hill.

JL: On the Umpqua side?

AS: Yeah, up on Bear Creek. Sits right on Bear Creek, a flat down in there. Real nice little meadow. Swampy on one side, dry on the other. We built our--put our corral there. And had to go back and rebuild it 'cause the snow kept breaking out panels down all the time. So we built a log corral and then, of course, Rogue River Ranch didn't maintain it. They let it [go to pot]. I think it's all fallen down now. Gates are broke down and everything else. Anybody ever use it now, they'd have to rebuild part of the corral to hold their cattle in.

JL: The group of you, Central Point, Sams Valley people that ran cattle up in that area in the '20s; did you have an "Upper Rogue Stockmen's Association?"

AS: They had a Upper Rogue Cattlemen's Association. And they all belonged to it. The Mayfields were the biggest. They had the biggest allotment. They run, I think, somewhere around three hundred head of cattle in there. We run one hundred head. I think Bighams had about sixty head, Tresham had about sixty head, and Huston had about somewhere around that. But anyway, it all run up to about eight or nine hundred head of cattle in there.… They all went out of there after that except Day. And then the Days stayed in there. But they didn't get ahold of the upper end until the '40s. I think about '41 or '42, before they got the sheep range.

JL: Where was the Mayfields' family from? Were they Sams Valley people?

AS: No, they were Central Point. Old man Mayfield lived in Central Point. He and one of his sons, well, both of them I guess. Frank and Jumbo. Howard was his real name but they called him Jumbo. He had a big lantern jaw! Big man!.… He just looked like a great big ol' black bear sitting on a horse! He always had a big long slicker and black hat. He was really a cowboy, I'll tell ya!

JL: Now, in the 1920s, what was it? All Herefords? Whiteface?

AS: Yeah. Mostly all Herefords. Cross-cattle. You had a lot of shorthorn, Durham cattle. You very seldom saw an Angus. Mostly Hereford.

JL: What about predators back in the '20s?

AS: Well, we didn't have much trouble with any predators. We found where one cow was killed by a cougar. Ben Day's cow. Ate about half of it and covered it all over with brush and stuff. Been done the day before and it never did come back. Next time we came by, it was still there yet. It had never come back to it. But, we lost a couple of cows up there and the Forest Service thought bear killed 'em. But I don't think they did. I think they got poisoned. Larkspur killed 'em.

JL: So, larkspur was a real problem up there?

AS: Used to be. It is yet, unless your cows got used to it once. We haven't had much of a loss. We lost five head one year right in one spot. I went in there next year and grubbed it all out. I spent two days grubbing larkspur. That short larkspur. Grows up about [a foot tall].… It was sure dynamite!

JL: But they can build up an immunity to the poison?

AS: Yeah, after you run 'em in there a few years. 'Cause you never see 'em. After cattle [are] in there a few years, you never lose any. They can feed on a certain amount. It takes thirty pounds or more of it to kill an animal. But if they can hit water, soon as they hit the water, it [kills] 'em. These cows were just laying right along the creek. All five of 'em.

DS: I think part of the secret, though, is to not overgraze forage. If ya got plenty of grass, they won't eat the larkspur.

AS: In Fish Creek, they worked their way down the creek and then you went over a little hump, and there was a pocket in there. About an acre, I suppose, in size, and practically solid larkspur. They couldn't get any further down than that, so they just filled up on larkspur in there. And they never did get out. They just died right there.

JL: Did you have big…"larkspur-grubbing days," where a bunch of you go out?

AS: The Forest Service did. I grubbed quite a bit of it myself. I grubbed in Fish Creek more than anyplace else. The Forest Service grubbed a lot, but on Buck Canyon they didn't come far enough was the only trouble! They quit!

JL: When was this going on?

AS: Oh, that was probably about ten years ago.

DS: No, it was more than that. It was at least thirty years ago when you were grubbing that in Fish Creek Valley.

AS: Well, I guess it was. But Doreen was with me.

JL: So, back in the '60s sometime?

AS: Time goes too fast for me! I can't keep up with it!

DS: What always puzzled me was when you ran up there, moved the cattle back and forth, driving 'em up and driving 'em back, was the logistics of keeping up with the grub and the clothes, and the rain gear, and did you have boots to keep your feet dry. Those kinds of things back then.

JL: And, your clothes would get all wet and that's all you had…

AS: Yeah, you couldn't use your hands.

DS: What about the food? Did they bring that in a wagon? Or did they have cars?

AS: They had a car they usually got in with. An old Model T Ford. And they had to push it out usually, 'cause if you had a little bit of snow, you couldn't make the grade. Especially on Hurryon [Creek]. You couldn't make that grade. National Creek, you had a downhill run at it. You'd do pretty good getting out of there.…

JL: Did you ever camp at Hurryon?

AS: I never did, no.

JL: I've been curious how that got its name. There's so many names up there I can't figure it out.

AS: That used to be "Park Creek" when we knew it. Then they changed it to Hurryon. I don't know where the name came from.

JL: The Model T, kind of like a chuck wagon I guess?

AS: A two-seater.

JL: How far up did it get?

AS: It got to Hamaker. That's as far as you could get in them days. You could go on through in the summertime on the old Diamond Lake Road. In the fall, you couldn't get any further. Especially if you got a little bit of snow, you were stalled. Mazama Creek grade stalled you. Or even the Rogue River grade would stall you.

JL: What about going up in June or July? Did that Model T come with you?

AS: Yeah, it hauled all our food and stuff.

JL: And still only got about to Hamaker? That's about as far as it would go?

AS: That's as far as we ever went, yeah. Well, we usually went to Crater Creek. That's where we usually stopped in the spring of the year. Then we'd move our cattle from there and we'd make camp at Crater Creek. Then we'd move our cattle from there and split 'em up in different bunches. Move 'em back, 'cause you didn't go on to the high country. You wasn't allowed up there. You had to go up and get 'em off every time.

JL: 'Cause the sheepmen would holler at you?

AS: Oh yeah! They'd raise the dickens! Especially out of Roseburg. They'd get into Fish Creek, boy, he'd holler like bloody murder!

JL: With the sheep/cattle difference in the range, you were down low and the sheep were up high. Did the sheep ever come down low when you'd.…

AS: No, they kept them herded out. They just come so far. They were only allowed so far. They had to have a herder with them. Lewises come down Buck Canyon, down as far as Hummingbird Meadow, and then they'd stop. That was as far as they'd come. Kohlhagen had a big herd though. He was running about 4,000 sheep in there.

JL: Four thousand sheep in the Fish Lake range?

AS: Yeah, on the Fish Creek range. But, he come in all the way from Roseburg. He followed, come through by Black Rock and all that area, on his way through White Horse. Grazed his way in and grazed his way back out again. He had a corral there. He'd set up and he'd take out his lambs early. Corralled his lambs and separated them from the ewes. He'd keep the ewes back in there for another two or three weeks after he took his lambs out.
    Hummingbird Meadows was as far down as they were allowed. They couldn't come any further than that. But a few of our cattle'd get on Buck Canyon once in awhile. But shoot, they had that range trailed! You take Skookum, and the same way with Dog Prairie. There'd be trails around the hill up about so far and there'd be another trail around. There'd be grass in between [the trails]. That's all the grass there was. Today, that's all solid now. You don't see any of them trails anymore at all. Same way with Dog Prairie. It was a mess. Just a bunch here, a bunch there, a bunch there, and a bunch here. And they say we're overgrazing it and it's better grass than they've ever had!

JL: And this is when the sheep were still there?

AS: Yeah, when the sheep were in there yet. They had it all trailed up. But, that's the way sheep graze. I went to Australia, New Zealand here a few years ago and that's the way the hills there are. They've just got trails around 'em. The sheep reach above, you know, and another bunch comes along on the trail lower and another bunch along on the trail lower than that. Half the grass is tromped out because of the trails.

JL: So it's like a terrace?

AS: Yeah, all the way around the hill. Miles and miles of it.

DS: In 1959, I think that was the year, there was a ranger at Toketee, Umpqua Forest now. But, there was a Ranger at Toketee named Bob Leavenworth. He actually came to see him, my dad here, and asked us if we could take some cattle in on Dog Prairie. Because it had the symptoms just like he described. He said we're never gonna get it any better than that until we get some cattle in there to tromp those clumps down. And to tear up the ground so the grass seed would take hold. He was very prophetic because that's exactly what happened. Exactly what he said would happen happened! We put those cattle in there. I guess their hooves were big enough opposed to sheep. They kinda tend to break those grass clumps down and spread 'em out a little bit, and tear up the open spots and let the grass seed get in. Now you go up there and look at those meadows compared to what they were in '59, when I first saw them, and there's just no comparison! Now they're beautiful. Almost like a lawn out there! Then, it really was not a very pretty sight. I know I was not very impressed when I went in there first and saw that…rode in there and saw that and said, "There ain't much feed here."

JL: There's another place that reminds me of, Hole-in-the-Ground. I keep coming back to place names because it's an interest of mine. Do you know how that place got its name "Hole-in-the-Ground"?

AS: Not unless it was at one time a lake in there and it washed itself out. But I think it's where it got its name from.

JL: Do you remember any stories about the sulfur mine up there, right nearby?

AS: Zimmerlee's. I knew both of 'em.

JL: Emil.

AS: Yeah. They had that big… I remember when they built the road in there. They had to get a permit from the Forest Service before they could do it. Then they let it go [to pot]. They had a pretty good mine too.

JL: When was that road punched in?

AS: Oh boy…

DS: The road wasn't punched in there until after the other roads were put in there. After the Columbus Day windstorms.

JL: I didn't think so.

AS: Billy Biden logged that out. And after he stopped at Rocky Point, then he pushed the road in from there.

DS: So much of that country wasn't even, there wasn't even a road in it. It was pure heaven to ride up there prior to the Columbus Day windstorm. We could go back there and lose ourselves. Never see anybody.

JL: The Columbus Day windstorm was in '62, October. Would you say, that's really what stimulated the initial road building into that upper Rogue country? Away from the highway corridor?

DS: They had plans to do it anyway. Not to the extent that they did it, or in the time frame that they did it. They just upped the time frame ten or fifteen years. But they actually had plans…
    Up there in Meadow Creek, that whole mountain [of timber] was flattened! Every tree either uprooted or broken off. It was that bad. And the whole bottom, Muir Creek bottom.

JL: So we're talking about hundreds of acres, timber down?

DS: Just collapsed. The whole upper end of Fish Creek Valley. There was just a whole big area in there. Just took everything down.

JL: How about the other side of the Rogue River? For the Columbus Day storm. The pummy country?

AS: Didn't hurt that very much at all. It come right up Muir Creek Canyon and turned and went up Sherwood Creek, whatever they call it, Muir Creek, east Muir Creek now. Still Sherwood Creek to me. But it comes right out of Sherwood Creek, the main source of the water. There's a lot of tributaries to it. It laid down a big area. Two different places it laid it flat. Then it went right on up to Skookum and laid another big area flat up there. [The wind] went up and down. Come up, you know, and drop down and break timber off everywhere. Same was just at the cabin. Come right up the canyon till it hit the hill across the creek from the cabin. That shoved it up in the air, I guess. Then went quite a ways before it dropped again.

JL: So, over on those flats on the east side of the river…Bybee, Crater Creek, on those flats between the pummy canyons, it didn't seem to knock down near as much.

AS: No, it didn't hurt that too bad at all. They didn't get the winds there…

DS: That was an experience in itself! They were, he and a neighbor of mine were rounding up and I was hauling. And I met them at the corral at about one o'clock in the afternoon… And they were saying, "Boy, the trees are sure falling down!" They'd just brought some cattle down Muir Creek, then up to the corral. They said, "Boy, the trees are sure falling down along the creek down there! It was pretty scary coming down!"

JL: So you could hear them snapping?

AS: Oh yeah! You could hear 'em banging down all the time.

DS: So I loaded up as many as I could get on the truck. At that time we just had the bobtail. We didn't have the trailer. Then I started on down and the wind was blowing like crazy. Just above the Prospect Ranger Station, a great big old sugar pine went down right behind me. I saw it in the rearview mirror.

JL: Right across the highway?

DS: Right across the highway. I mean, it was like that! [spreading arms out] Huge!

JL: About four- to five-foot diameter?

DS: Four- to five-foot. And I got on down before the new road went from Prospect to Cascade Gorge, you know. Down there around Mill Creek Drive, there was kind of a curve come around, drop down in a little dip, then a little hill up here. I got down there and traffic was stopped. A logging truck had come down there and just started to make the turn to go up that little rise and a tree come down right in front of him. He ran right underneath it! Just took and sheared his cab right off! Didn't hurt the guy at all. He saw it coming, I guess, and laid down on his seat. Knocked down the power lines, and the fire, sparks were going in every which direction! So I sat there for a little while and waited till the power company got there and shut the power off and they were able to [open] the road so we could get around. I got on down and I was gonna go back that night and get another load of cows. By that time…it was too late and I said, "Well, I'll wait till morning to go back up." So I went back the next morning and I couldn't believe the devastation from Prospect to Union Creek! Man, there was trees! And the loggers, of course, had to come out after that and they cut their way out. Sometimes they just cut an end off a tree and you had to go clear down in the ditch.

JL: This is on the highway? You're just weaving around?

DS: Yes, just weaving around to get up there. So, I couldn't wait to get up to the cabin and tell those guys they had to get out and see that. They'd never see anything like that again in their lives! I got up there and they'd seen right there! He and the neighbor had got back to the cabin and they just got in and were gonna fix 'em some lunch and a big ol' tree went right down. You can tell it if you want to. A tree went right down along the cabin. So they jumped into the fireplace, 'cause that was the only thing they felt was strong enough to protect them. Then they decided they'd better go out and see what happened to the horses, and about that time, what did we have? About five horses in the barn?

AS: We had seven horses in the barn.

DS: We had seven horses in the barn and a tree went down across that barn!

JL: With the horses in it?

DS: With the horses in it!

AS: All went behind 'em. One of 'em was penned in is all though. The others I could get out. But, you didn't dare take them out. You didn't know what to do with 'em. Trees were falling every direction!

DS: They run up on the hill then, above the horse barn there and got behind a big ol' tree, trying to decide which way to run. And just watched 'em go. I mean, every direction. Didn't know what to expect! Didn't know whether the cabin survived. Couldn't see where they were at.

JL: Did you see the trailer get hit?

AS: No, we saw a tree go down, but we couldn't tell. We [saw] one tree go down, we said there goes the cabin! But they took just the corner of it off. The biggest tree of all fell just about ten feet from the cabin. On the lower side, I guess you'd call it. Great big ol' fir! It was at least five feet in diameter.

DS: But that was probably the most terrible thing that ever happened to us up there. When I been up there anyway!

JL: Speaking of the cabin, it survived the Columbus Day storm, and I guess about fifty, almost going on sixty winters now. It was built in 1938? Was that right?

AS: Yeah, that's right.

DS: By John Day.

AS: John Day. Yeah, he built it. He got a permit from the [Forest] Supervisor 'cause they wanted him to tear that cabin down at Hamaker. And he told them he wouldn't do it unless they give him a place to build another one. He said he'd build a good cabin if they'd give him a spot. So then the Forest Supervisor give him a permit to go ahead and build a cabin there. That was all solid timber! They had to go in and cut trees out of that spot.

JL: Do you know why John Day picked that particular spot?

AS: Well, he liked the falls. It was close to the falls, close to the creek and everything. Secluded, out of the way so nobody could get to you, you know. It was real nice! I stayed in the cabin the first night anybody slept in it. Seven of us stayed there. Couldn't build a very big fire in the fireplace yet, 'cause the mortar hadn't hardened yet. So we had just a small fire in there. You saw the snow--the picture of that snow in one of those pictures with that cow out in the road? Well, that was the same day we got in there. That cow was out in the road looking at us when we got there.

JL: You helped build the cabin?

AS: No, I had nothing to do with [building] the cabin at all. I just helped John [with cattle].

DS: Day actually came and asked him because he knew that he knew the range, and they were missing quite a number of cattle yet. He figured that if anybody could find them, Dad could! He came down and offered him fifty dollars a day to go up there and look for those cows. If you can imagine, in 1938, fifty dollars a day was a whole bunch of money!

AS: I got one hundred dollars a day for the two days I rode up there with the Supervisor and Assistant Supervisor, and the Ranger out of Union Creek and Whitney, out of Medford office. They come up there and I rode two days with him and he paid me one hundred dollars a day!

JL: What was that for?

AS: [John Day] he wanted to get more…get his permit increased. He wanted to find all the grass there was! I showed him every meadow that was up there.… That's the most money I ever made in them days! I thought, boy, I couldn't get away from home. It was right in the haying season, but I said, "I can't afford to turn down one hundred dollars a day!" I spent two days up there with them.

JL: The cabin; it's a lumber cabin? I would imagine John Day bought everything locally and trucked it up there.

AS: Of course, at that time it just had plywood inside and had a shingle roof. What year was that when it caved in?

DS: You know, I'm trying to think about that. It had to be in the late '60s, early '70s sometime.…

JL: The roof had caved in from snow?

DS: …was nice and flat. The joists that held the walls together, they just gave way and the walls went this way and the roof went this way.

AS: The big fireplace was right in the center. Fell in on both sides of the fireplace. The ends were still standing. Both ends of the cabin were still standing.

JL: When you fixed it, did you…just push the walls back up and then put in new joists?

AS: We replaced the ceiling altogether. We had to put new siding in on the west side 'cause it broke it all out. But the ends and the east side were all good. We had to replace a few of the windows.

JL: Did you just buy salvaged windows from old homes and take them up there?

AS: Yeah. We used the frames. Put the frames back in again. Just the glass broke out. Then we put tile ceiling in it. Made it "modern." We put in a septic tank, hot water, a refrigerator. Made it modern inside.

DS: We had a cousin that was a contractor. Worked for a contractor. Right now he's got his own business. Action West. He worked weekends putting it back together.…

AS: We were always out [of the cabin] by the time the elk season come on.

JL: Speaking of elk. Back as far as you can remember, '20s… Were there elk up in there? Remnant elk from…

AS: Very few. The first elk sign I found was in '54. We'd lost two head of cow. They got out on the highway and took off up towards Diamond Lake and they turned off south and went down towards the river up there. So I went up after the storm quit. We got 34 inches of snow and you couldn't get in, 'cause the road was blocked. So after they opened the road up, I went up there and we rode in there on horseback. I found the two tracks. I thought they were the two cows and I tracked 'em and tracked 'em and track 'em. Finally got dark on me and I got lost out there in the sticks. Never got home till midnight that night!

DS: Had everybody worried sick!

AS: The next day, two days later, I went back up again. Tracked 'em on down as far as Mazama Creek. Then Dalton and I went up on horseback and tracked 'em clear on down to National Creek, and they finally come to a place--the bank was just like that, and they went right straight up that bank! We decided then that it wasn't no cow! We gave up!

JL: Would these have been from the elk that were [released] there by Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife?

AS: I think they come in from Klamath some way. That's the first time I ever saw 'em. From then on, they started building up.

DS: It was a number of years before we actually saw anything. The first ones I ever saw. I mean, maybe we saw a track or two and didn't know what it was, but, when we went in to… One time we…went in to Trap Mountain. It's off the Dog Prairie allotment. We dropped down into Bear Trap. And we got down to the bottom. We were going around the Trap Mountain and we had to go through Bear Trap. We got down there and here's these two great big "beds" down there! I said, "Good night! Did the rest of the cattle winter over here or something?" I thought they maybe bedded there the night before. So we didn't think too much more of it, and we went on through the meadow and out into the woods. We got out in the woods a little bit and all of a sudden there's these two huge branch elk bulls out  there! The first elk that I'd ever seen! I kept trying to sneak around and get up close enough to them where I could take a picture, but I never did get a good picture of them. But that was in 1959. That had to be after we took the Dog Prairie range over, so it probably was early '60s, '61, '60, '61, somewhere in there.

JL: Now they're all over out there!

AS: They're everywhere now!

JL: I know they weren't still there in the '20s, but, in being up there as a young man in that country, did you hear any stories about the original elk that were up in the upper Rogue?

AS: Not much anyway. Nobody seemed to know much about them. The people that we knew, anyway, we met up there wouldn't know anything about it. You never saw much elk at all. Seen lots of deer. I've seen as high as seven bull elk, er…seven bucks [at the] salt ground at one time. I had a picture of them. I lost it someplace. I tried to find that thing and couldn't. [inaudible] was with me.…

JL: That cabin of Estremado's, up on Bybee Creek, did he build that, or did…

AS: He built it himself.

JL: So that dates to the '60s or so?

AS: Yeah… It's been there ever since I can remember. After we [came] back in '54. It was built some time after that. But he wasn't in there at that time yet. They didn't come in until seven years later.

JL: Talking about wildlife again, some of the game and varmints up there. I've read something that was written back in the early '30s, or mid-'30s, and it talked about the last wolves in Jackson County being shot up in the Rogue-Umpqua Divide country. Sometime around 1930. I wondered if you recollect anything about wolves up in there?

AS: Oh yes. We seen several of them. Heard 'em howl, too! I was down in Bear Trap. I went down on one side of--it's a kind of a long meadow goes down--and I went down on one side of it. I had my dog with me and I started back up on the other side and I heard the awfullest howling you ever saw! I thought it was someone hollering, you know. I was gonna answer at first and I thought well I'll wait and see if he hollers again. Pretty quick he howls again and the dog, he bristles all up and got right up close to me. I knew then it was a wolf! He followed me all the way up that canyon!…

DS: But we also saw one. When was that when we saw that one on Alkali?

AS: …on Alkali. That was when we was going into Alkali.

DS: When was that though? It had to be in the late '50s, early '60s, or somewhere in there.

JL: Really? You saw a wolf that late?

AS: We were up on Fish Mountain and we came around through Paradise. My brother was riding one horse and I was on the other. I said "Here, you take my horse. I'm gonna go down this draw and make a circle down here and see if there's any tracks down in there." Any cattle. I came around the hill and here was two young wolves following me! About 50 feet behind me. We watched 'em all the way around the hill. They never did get any closer. They stayed right up. I didn't ever see 'em. They were black. Just almost black.

DS: My cousin and I saw two. It was probably in 1950. We'd gone into Buck Canyon to go fishing. That was before we started running cattle up there. We'd gone in there and hiked up Buck Creek. We were fishing, and he was a little bit above me on the creek. All of a sudden, we heard this howling up on the ridge, on a real steep bank along side of the creek there.… But it's an entirely different thing than a coyote. I tell you, the hair, for some reason, the hair on the back of your neck just stands up! Can't help it! It's just like a dog. It affects you the same way! And so, we looked up and here, right up on the ridge, it was just kinda silhouetted against the sky. There was two of 'em standing up there. Sitting up there. They were actually sitting up there. Put their heads up. Both of 'em stuck their heads up in the air and howled like that! My cousin, he come running back down and he said, "Let's get out of here!" I was probably eighteen years old then. But, we tracked coyotes. Everybody said, "Aw, it's just a coyote! It wasn't a wolf!" But I tell you, we've tracked coyotes, shot coyotes, and did everything else in my life, and never any coyote I saw looked like those two! They were definitely wolves!

JL: About what year would that have been?

DS: That would have been 1949 or '50.

AS: They had wolves near everywhere. I seen their tracks in the snow, where they traveled. They're not coyote tracks. Too big for coyote. Same way with cougar. I was within fifty feet of a cougar one time. I was coming to Fish Creek and going down through to my salt ground and I come out on the edge of the meadows and I got off my horse. Had the pack horse with me 'cause I was packing salt in. I was sitting on the ground. Pretty quick, I noticed the horse kept turning his head and looking back towards the hillside. So I looked over to see what he was looking at. There was a great big ol' cougar standing right on the edge of the jack pine, looking right at me! Not fifty feet from me! I didn't know what to do! I didn't know if I should run and jump on my horse or what to do. I just sat there.… Pretty quick he turned around and went back in the jack pine again.…

JL:  Well, here's a real remote kind of question about wildlife. I've read accounts, way back in the 1880s, about pronghorn up in the northern part of Crater Lake Park. You know, that Pumice Desert they call it up there. That was originally called Antelope Prairie. And they apparently used to see pronghorns come all the way up there from the Klamath side. I wonder if you ever heard any stories like that? About pronghorn.

AS: I never did that I know of.

JL: Then, the beaver. You mentioned a little bit about beaver on Muir Creek and Buck Canyon.…

AS: Up Buck Canyon, they had a dam across there. They had about four or five dams. Where Dunkin's cabin is, that meadow there was completely blocked off. But, Muir Creek was where they built. All those streams that come in from the side, they built dams in, then they just flood the ground. Killed out the grass, the good grass. All that came back was that old ripgut. Cattle would eat it in the fall. That's about the only time. Or real early in the spring they'd eat it pretty good.

JL: Ripgut? Like a sedge?

AS: Yes. Like a sedge. Only it's big and tall.

JL: So, did those beaver in Buck Canyon get trapped out in the '50s?

AS: No, they got washed out, I think, in the '64 flood, cause they never showed up again after that. I think the water was too big and just took the dams and everything right with it.

DS: Must have left them high and dry and good prey for the predators or something to get rid of them. Or they washed down the creek with it!

AS: I don't know where they went, but they went down the creek. But they wouldn't drown. They'd get out. They can swim.…

DS: They haven't built back there. I'm really surprised that they haven't built those dams back up there.… And the same with Muir Creek. You know, when we first started running up there, there were some dams down there, but not too many. But all of a sudden, the whole bottom was flooded! You couldn't even ride where the trail comes down. There used to be a trail that come down from Bear Camp. That come right down the mountain to Muir Creek. The lower end of Muir Creek. And then you could ride right through the meadow there, across Muir Creek itself. And then all of a sudden one year there was that much water! And now it's dry again. You can ride up through there again. I don't know where those beaver went.

AS: They moved to another spot. We had a fellow that wanted to come in there and trap 'em, but the Forest Service wouldn't give him a permit to do it.

JL: When was this?

AS: Oh, that's been years ago.

DS: It was thirty years ago.

JL: On Buck Canyon--the beaver there. Had they been there before the '64 flood for quite awhile?

AS: They were in there for quite awhile. There were also some down on, in the middle of Buck Canyon, down in the lower meadows. There were a couple of dams in there. They had that water backed up in there for a long time. But they disappeared. I don't know whether they went back up above where the others was. But in '64, when the ones went out above--there hasn't been any back in there since. Unless it's come in the last couple years. I haven't been up there now…

DS: Went in there this year.

JL: You did some fishing up in those streams. Not real big native trout, I'd imagine.

DS: Usually 8 or 9 inches--7 or 8 inches. Not very big. Back then, you could catch thirty fish, six inches or over. We'd go into Fish Creek Valley and fill our packsacks. Take 'em back. In Buck Canyon, you could just get fish all over the place, before all the roads went in there.

AS: In Fish Creek, you could catch your limit in ten minutes! Up until the Boy Scouts went in there. They camped in there for a week and they just cleaned it! There haven't been any fish in there since.

JL: Is this at Fish Lake or along the creek, the creek itself?

AS: Along the creek itself.… In Fish Valley, it was the best fishing spot you ever saw. People used to go in there and camp at the shelter, catch their limits, you know, and live on fish. Gosh, they held up fine! But, when the [Boy Scouts] went in there… There was about twenty-five of those Scouts in there and every one of 'em had a fishing pole. They just cleaned it out!

JL: About when was that?

AS: Oh, that was about twenty years ago.

DS: That was after they put the road in there. Probably in the mid- to late '60s.… The road that goes clear to the head of Fish Creek Valley. It makes it so accessible now for these… And it's a great place to go camp. The Boy Scout leaders would take them in there. And it's not just one, it's several groups. I've seen at least probably three or four groups a summer. I see them go in there. I know there's probably way more than that. It's a real nice place to go down and camp. [110--skip in tape] …themselves in the wilderness. But the poor little ol' crick, it's such a small crick it just can't survive that kind of…

DS: And they're--the Umpqua folks--are saying it's because of the overgrazing! The fish are threatened. The cutthroat and coho salmon are threatened because of the degradation of the resource by grazing. That's just a little bit hard for me to…

JL: What about salmon? I know no salmon above about Prospect. Is that right? Because of the barriers there. Both the human-made barriers and even before that.

AS: Well, the drop, you know, where Rogue River's north fork drops into the rivers. Big drop. They couldn't go up the North Fork anyway. They can go up the south fork, and probably in the middle fork. I don't know whether there's any barriers there or not. But now, with the dam in there, they can't get up over it anyway.

JL: [Did] you fish for salmon back in [illegible]

AS: [I never] did much salmon fishing ever in my life. I fished for [illegible] [more than] anything else.

DS: Steelhead. Used to fish for steelhead.

AS: [illegible] fished for steelhead quite a bit.… From Gold Ray Dam on down.

DS: [My] granddad, on my mother's side, that's all he ever did, fish and hunt! [And] camp! That's all I ever saw him do anyway! And, that's all he did. He caught a lot of salmon. He had a big ol' cane pole that went from here to that fireplace over there. He'd throw that thing out there; he sure did love to catch the fish!

JL: The fish up in the upper Rogue--when did they start stocking up there?… About what year would you say they first started planting fish in those waters?

DS: Oh yeah! See, they been stocking, at least in the river, they been stocking… And I know, in those creeks, for at least thirty years.

AS: They were stocking Minnehaha when Art was still fishing up there. How many years ago has that been?

DS: At least thirty years ago!

AS: Time goes too fast!

DS: Fishing, that's one of the things that we really looked forward to. Of course, we knew that country because we ran cattle up in there. We'd go on camping trips and stay at the old Muir Creek Campground or the Foster Creek campground, or one of the campgrounds…

JL: Where did you pick your berries generally?

DS: At that time, we went to Gypsy Springs.

JL: Oh? Way down there?

AS: I went to Huckleberry Mountain several times. Best berry-picking I ever had was on Huckleberry Mountain. We went out Brandenberg Trail, right straight out east, or south of Huckleberry City. We had a draw there and [Dalton's] granddad, my wife's dad, was with me. He was one of these kind that'd be picking huckleberries and he'd forget about you, and just go right on picking! I lost him. So I finally quit picking and started back and I hit a draw and saw tracks going up. I thought it was his tracks maybe, so I followed 'em for a ways. I ran into the doggonedest berry patch you ever saw! Big pear-shaped berries and big black round berries, you know. I picked five gallons of berries there in just about an hour!… Best picking I ever had in my life! He was so mad at me he coulda shot me!

JL: Did you can them all?

AS: (Laughs) We took 'em home and my wife canned em!

DS: He used to be a great one for making--my granddad used to make huckleberry dumplings right there in the camp.

AS: Good cook!

JL: I guess Huckleberry Mountain, Huckleberry City, that was a pretty popular place back in the '20s and '30s.

AS: Big center for Indians as well as whites. They had camps all over that place. More so than there is now.

JL: Oh yeah. And, I guess there was a dance floor, a dance hall out there?

AS: Yeah, a big dance hall there. They had dances almost every night during the main season. During September, especially August, the middle of August. It'd last up to the last of September.

JL: I've heard stories, because it's kind of a big, broad mountaintop, of a lot of people getting lost up there in berry season. They wander off and they end up wandering a long time!

AS: Yeah. They could wander quite awhile there to find your way back. Of course, they've got so many roads in there now you can just about go anyplace and hit a road somewhere. Them days, you just had one road in there and a trail.

JL: That was the one from the north? From Wagon Camp?

AS: Yeah. The only way you could come in.

JL: How about wolverine? You ever hear or heard tell of wolverine?

AS: Never heard, never saw one in my life!

JL: Anybody ever claim to have seen one up there?

AS: Not that I know of. Not anybody that I know of anyway. They never mentioned it to me if they did.

DS: Badgers, but no wolverines.

JL: Fishers?

AS: Oh yeah, fishers and marten.

DS: Those badgers over on the Lonesome Meadows side. And then we had the burrows with badgers would get in there years ago. I haven't seen any of them for a long time either.

JL: Badger? Up that high?

DS: Yeah.

AS: There's a lot of otter up there. You see their slides where they pick some places and get up on the bank and slide off on down the crick.

DS: They had a big colony of them [on Muir Creek] for awhile. But, I don't know what happened to them either. I haven't seen 'em for several years now.

AS: I didn't know the otter were that far up, you know, that far upstream. I've seen 'em down on the Rogue. I'll be darned! Well, a little bit about the old trapper, Dunkin, that you recall. I've read about him and I've heard people tell stories about what happened with him and shooting the officer, Phil Lowd.

DS: [Dunkin] was a loner. He had his cabins. He always moved in along about the last of September. He'd pack his stuff into his cabin, stocking up for the winter. He'd [make it] to Buck Canyon, from Buck Canyon to Sherwood, then from Sherwood to Hamaker, and then from Hamaker back to Buck Creek. That was his rounds. He was a fellow that wouldn't hardly talk to you at all. He gave us the understanding to stay away from his cabin. But Earl Day, the fellow I was telling you about awhile ago, he carried some [woolen] socks. They'd been darned several times but he quit using them. He said, "I'm gonna give 'em to the old man. Maybe he'll get in a better humor!" And, by golly, he did! After that, he treated us good. And then we saw a cougar up there and we told him where we seen it. He put his traps out and caught him. And then he was real nice after that! He never give us much trouble.

AS: He didn't want anybody bothering his cabin, I'll tell you! We stayed away from it, too.

JL: What did he look like?

[AS/DS:] He was a short, stocky fellow. Wasn't that tall. Beady eyes. He could look right through you!

[AS/DS:] And he must have been, when he shot Phil Lowd in the mid-'50s, what was he? About 60? In his 60s?

[AS/DS:] He was close to sixty.

JL: Where was his summer place at? Down around Trail?

[AS/DS:] Elk Creek, he had a cabin up on Elk Creek. That's why they went up there, 'cause they claimed he was killing deer to eat. They went in to check on him and he told 'em to stay away and they wouldn't do it. Till Lowd, he got brave. He just got too brave…

JL: I guess Dunkin's shooting of Lowd made a pretty big splash!

AS: It sure did! They tell tales about him where they had this half-breed Indian over there checking out. He and this other guy, they were sitting on a log eating their lunch. Had the sack setting beside 'em. And he sneaked in and stole their lunch while they were eating and they never knew it! They claimed that to be true!

DS: I'm sure that all kinds of folk stories developed over somebody like that.

JL: But he was definitely a kind of a loner, kind of an odd duck.

AS: Oh yeah! He wanted to be by himself. He didn't want to be around anybody. Finally his nephew turned him [in].… He called the authorities and had 'em come and get him because he was afraid Dunkin would freeze to death. The winter was coming on, you know. It was getting late. But I don't know how he survived as long as he did.… He was sent to the state penitentiary.

JL: Quite a change, though, from the wilds of the upper Rogue to inside walls in Salem!… Well, let's leave the upper Rogue for a little bit and come back down in the valley and talk about your recollections of the time during the Depression, as it affected you and your family. The hard times then and what you remember.

AS: It was pretty tough going, I tell you. I was--it was before I was married. When I got married in 1928, we lived on $15 a month! And that's a fact! That's all the money we had to go on. After[wards] I went on my own and built my own house. The good house wasn't finished until a couple years later. After he was born.

DS: We didn't have a--we had a room for a bathroom but no bathroom. The old galvanized wash tub was what we took our bath in, and the 2-holer out behind was where we went to the toilet at. Pretty typical.

JL: Did you have electricity out there in the '20s? By the '20s? I guess electricity didn't get to some parts of the country till the '40s.

AS: I think we got it in '21. I went and put in a private line. A bunch of families went together and put up the money and put up the line. Brought the electricity in there.

DS: How long after that before the telephone line came in?

AS: Oh I don't know. Not very long. It come in pretty close after that. 'Cuz we had--it was in already before '25. So it must have been about '23 or '24 when the telephone line come in.

JL: I know the Depression affected a lot of people in the valley…orchardists, farmers, and ranchers, everybody basically. I'd like to ask you what you remember about the "Good Government Congress" episode and Llewellyn Banks and all of that. Do you remember ever seeing him?

AS: Oh yes. I've seen Banks several times. I was never in favor of his crazy ideas at all.

JL: I guess he was popular with a lot of folks out in the valley.

AS: Oh yeah! People [was] following his ideas. "Good Government Congress," you know. I never did, 'cause I was too busy to have any, to do much with it anyway. Them days…

JL: I've done quite a bit of research on the Good Government Congress actually, and I'm always interested to hear what people who were around then remember about it. I've read some of the documents that the state police gathered up after the shooting. It was part of the trial. A lot of people's names come up as real strong Good Government Congress supporters. One of them was L. M. Sweet. Do you remember him?

AS: He [was] up in Beagle. He was a supporter of the Good Government Congress. He was a strong Grange member too. He used to get up, he and a fellow by the name of R. H. Burton. He ran the Sams Valley store. They, both of 'em, belonged to the Good Government Congress.

JL: I guess Emmet Nealon, out there, was kind of a target of the Good Government Congress.

AS: Yeah, he was. Course, he was on the County Commission at that time…

JL: Yes, he was, right during the middle of it.

AS: He was a man to speak out. He wasn't afraid to speak out. He [Nealon] was the backbone of our Grange out there. He kept things moving all the time, on legislation.…

JL: The Civilian Conservation Corps did a lot of work in the upper Rogue during the Depression years. Do you remember seeing them up there?

AS: More or less up on the South Fork. They built a huge camp up there on the South Fork of the Rogue River. You know, out towards, what do you call it? Those springs you was talking about where we used to go huckleberry picking.

JL: Gypsy Springs.

AS: Out in there.

JL: It was a Medco logging camp.

AS: Yeah. They built it into a huge camp.

DS: Don't you remember, though, when they were building all those campgrounds up there too? They built those Forest Service campgrounds.

AS: The old Hamaker Campground. They built Muir Creek Campground. All those campgrounds, they set 'em up. Course they closed up Muir Creek and Foster Creek 'cause they were too close to the river. But, they got Hamaker, which is right on the river also. They got outhouses there. But, I suppose they…

DS: They're more spread out. I think the problem was they were--at least at Muir Creek, they thought it was too concentrated and there were too many people compacting the soil around the trees. Jeopardizing the life of those trees. But, what I remember during the Depression is the Civilian Conservation Corp camps working on that blister rust control. Killing those wild gooseberries. Remember that?…
    Well, the Depression was kind of tough, to expand a little bit on that, I guess, but we didn't know any better. At least us kids, we didn't know any better! I didn't know we were supposed to have bicycles. Was supposed to have toys. Things like that, ya know. When we'd get a Christmas present…in fact I think the first thing that we ever got that was bought was a--was one of those little toy soldiers. And I thought I had the greatest thing in the world, you know! I was maybe eight or nine years old by that time. Most of the things we got were made. Somebody made 'em and gave 'em to us. We were just as happy with those as we would have been with toys [from] town. I guess we didn't know any better.…

JL: With the Depression and then all of a sudden this big change here in '42 with Camp White, and a big "shot in the arm" cashwise to the valley, it must have been like [a] night-and-day change.

AS: It was. It really brought us out of it. We was in the dairy and we was [getting] only about three dollars and twenty cents a hundred for our milk. It jumped up to six dollars and forty cents a hundred. We delivered to Camp White before Camp White.… It really put us on our feet. We were just slugging along and barely making it until then. Then we started making a little bit of money. We'd have done real good if we could have kept our herd. We got hit with "bangs" a couple times and really got cleaned out. Had to start all over again.

JL: Hit with what?

AS: "Bangs." Brucellosis. We always called it "bangs." A disease the cows would get and they won't breed.

DS: It would also create undulant fever. That's what gave humans undulant fever at the time. It was pretty scary. So the government had a program to test your cows and make darn sure that you didn't have it. We had a clean herd and they were doing so well. The government wanted more milk. They needed to expand so they went up to Eugene and bought a herd that was selling out. Supposedly, they'd been tested for "bangs" before they came down here. Came down and brought the "bangs" with them and got into the herd. Must have taken ninety percent of your cows, didn't it?

AS: Yeah. The first time we--out of two hundred cows, we saved eight of them.

JL: This is in the '40s? During the war?

AS: Probably in the '30s when we first--the first time we got hit. Then in the '40s is when we got hit the second time, when we needed the milk the most. We bought a herd of Jerseys, on the coast, that give it to us in the first place. Bought nineteen head of Jersey cows over there, somewhere around.… I don't remember exactly what town that was now. Down below Bandon somewhere.… Anyway, that's where we bought nineteen head of cows and only one of them wasn't tested. The others were all brucellosis. We had 'em tested.

DS: That was before anyone knew anything about that.

AS: That was our first experience.

JL: With Camp White so nearby, you had--you must have been just outside of the land that they purchased for…

AS: Yeah. They [the Army] didn't come into Table Rock. They shot right along back of Modoc, and took all the Beagle area. All of everything north and east of us.

DS: They took everything to Table Rock Road.

JL: Was there some unhappiness about that? About people being bought out?

AS: Oh, a few of them were.

DS: I think in the long run they were all tickled to death to get rid of most of those ranches. The farms that they bought were squirrel ranches. They were just barely existing.

JL: Small acreages.

DS: Exactly. Well, some of them were pretty good-sized acreages, but they didn't have the equipment to till it or farm them properly. They were just getting by.… The best thing that ever happened to most of them, they got to town and got a good job. Never had it so good. I thought the best thing that came out of that was the fact that the Army came out and said--told him, "You can't have hogs if we're gonna buy milk from you unless you get them a quarter mile from the dairy!" So they had to sell their hogs. And that, coming from Iowa, that's what they did back there. They had hogs and corn…and cows. When they came out here, that's what they did out here. And nobody else, even clear up until probably the '60s, really understood corn silage in this country. Very few people knew and understood and raised corn silage. We were probably the only farm, for at least until the '50s, that raised corn silage.

JL: And that's that Iowa heritage.

DS: Iowa heritage, exactly. And the pigs. That was just normal. Everybody had to have pigs. It was their philosophy. And they had this old hog house. I can remember when I was a kid, packing that slop out to them hogs. The mud was probably a foot deep and you're trying to pack these two big five-gallon cans of slop out to the hog house. I couldn't keep 'em up out of the mud. I'd go [dragging them out] through the mud, trying to get out there. I hated the smell of them! I hated everything about them things! I didn't even like to eat em! But we still had hogs. So I was so thankful when the Army told him, "Ya got to get rid of them!"

JL: And that's for sanitation reasons?

AS: Yeah. You couldn't have any drainage at all towards any of your dairy cows.

JL: Do you remember…you must have heard the artillery practice and all that going on.

AS: You could see the shells going through the air.

DS: Used to hear 'em at the old school. BOOM! A projectile would land and BOOM again! Then the school was built on concrete. When was it built? 1919…

AS: Nineteen twenty-four. Opened in '21.

DS: Nineteen-nineteen and 1920, when it was being built anyway. It had these real thick concrete walls. But probably in those days they didn't have any steel reinforcement in them. So then this constant pounding--the walls started to spread, and so we ended up with great big cracks in the wall. Dad had the good fortune to be on the school board at that time… Do you remember how?

AS: They put some reinforcement through the corner. Tried to pull it together. I don't [remember] just exactly what we did do. I know we had a lot of talk about it before we ever went ahead with it. Still standing, though, now. All the windows are out of it. The kids have knocked all the windows out.

JL: Did you ever have any of the German P.O.W.s work on your ranch?

AS: Never did. No.

DS: Used to see 'em though, at Snider's Dairy, when we'd deliver milk. When we'd deliver milk to town. They had 'em there in P.O.W. uniforms and doing odds and ends for the city.

AS: …working alongside the road, digging ditch. That wasn't earning their money either, I'll tell you! Some of them would work, but the biggest majority of them was leaning on their shovels. You come back and they'd still be doing the same thing. They didn't know how to work.

JL: Well, that gets us after the war and into the '50s and all the incredible changes that have taken place down here and in the upper Rogue country since then. You talked about that some this afternoon already, but what would be some of the major changes in the way you operated your range cattle operation after the war?

AS: Later on, after the was was over, we started to increase our herd bigger. We put a man up there. We had a man up there all summer. First we hired somebody for two or three years to look after them, and he couldn't do a very good job of it. Then finally I went in there myself. I must have spent ten years, ten summers up there myself, or more.

JL: This is at the Muir Creek cabin where you'd stay?

AS: Yeah.

DS: Twenty-three years he spent up there.

AS: I don't know how many years…

DS: Twenty-three summers, because you were sixty-five when you made up your mind you were gonna go up there.

AS: And I just lived with the cattle all summer. Moved them around from one spot to another whenever they'd overgraze something. And I knew where the cattle was in the fall. When I was getting ready to round up, we'd go out and get 'em. We was running four hundred and fifty head of cattle. Just the two of us would round 'em up. Only time we had any help was when we first went to Dog Prairie. Usually take a couple of hands extra there to bring the main herd out because we had four miles to drive them. It was kind of hard to get 'em through the timber for just two fellows with that big bunch. Otherwise, just two of us gathered the cattle.

JL: So it went from the '20s, where you had half a dozen or more different families involved, to the '50s with just two, then eventually only yourself?

AS: Yeah, we're the only ones on that range.

JL: And you trucked the cattle up by this time? Where did you dump them out generally?

AS: One bunch was dumped out at Muir Creek, that went on Fish Mountain and Fish Creek Valley. Then another bunch went on to what they call Beaver Meadows. We had another corral that's about, I guess about four miles up…

DS: Fifteen-mile marker.

JL: Right on the side of the highway?

DS: That's the eleven-mile marker. That's where we dump 'em at Muir Creek.

AS: Then about four more miles up…

DS: Beaver Meadows is at the fifteen-mile marker.

AS: Anyway, we dumped out everything that went to Skookum and Lonesome Meadows and that area out there. Then we went on to Old Man Camp, which is on Three Lakes Road.

JL: You drive around Sherwood and back of Three Lakes. The back way in.

AS: Go down the hill, to Old Man Camp. We had a corral there. Then we'd unload them and drive them four miles back to the range.

DS: We built a corral behind Red Blanket, on Boise Cascade property. We built one in back of Union Creek, when we had the Huckleberry allotment. Huckleberry Mountain allotment.

JL: When was that? In the '60s?

DS: Yeah, I think that was in the '60s when we developed that one. I'd spent all summer up there building a cull-log fence around Huckleberry Campground and putting in those cattle guards.… And then when we traded that, that became unmanageable for us. We had to give up the Huckleberry allotment. We just couldn't manage it all. We traded with Estremados. When we had bought out John Day, they had bought the east and south side of the river; Hamaker allotment. We took everything on the north and west side of the highway and they gave us part of what used to be, at that time, the Brown's Cabin allotment. The Foster Creek-Foster Glades.

JL: Who had that before?

DS: At that time, nobody. But before that it was Dugan, I think, and Smith. Smiths had been in there and they went broke and kinda gave it up. First it was my uncle, Wes McDonough, who bought it originally from Morrison. Then he sold it to Dugan. Dugan sold it to Smith, who was also a brother-in-law to McDonough.

JL: This is Brown's Cabin--Foster Creek?

DS: Right. So then, when the Smiths gave it up, it was kinda open and we ended up picking up Foster Creek and Foster Glades allotments.

JL: How about over in the Woodruff country. There's a cull-log fence, corral, cull-log corral around…

AS: Smiths built that when they were running in there.

JL: Doesn't look all that old. '60s? '50s?

DS: Sixties. yeah, I'm sure they built that in there in the '60s.

JL: Where did they live? Where was their home ranch at?

DS: Sams Valley.… They were kind of all over. They were kinda like us. Pretty nomadic. At the time, whatever they could lease and put together for spring and fall pasture, and winter feed grounds, they did. They ran in California in the wintertime. Hauled their cattle down to Red Bluff.

JL: Well, Mr. Straus, with your twenty-three years up there bunking in the cabin, but spending most of your time out in various parts of your allotments up there in the '50s, '60s, and I guess into the '70s…

AS: Clear into the '80s.

DS: Until 1993. He did that every year until he was ninety, er, till he was eighty-eight.

AS: Almost eighty-eight.… You could haul your horse. You didn't have to ride miles and miles! I started out there at eight o'clock in the morning a lot of times and never got back until ten o'clock at night. I'd make one ride from the cabin and on through Skookum, down through Devil's Canyon. We was missing nine head of cattle out of Dog Prairie. Couldn't find 'em nowhere. So I finally decided I'd make that trip. So I left just at daylight in the morning from the cabin and I rode all the way clear to Skookum and down into Devil's Canyon and over the top into Elk Creek and back out and up to by Three Lakes, and clear back to the cabin again. I found where the cattle were and I tracked 'em out to Dog Prairie. They hit the road out for Diamond Lake. It was too late then. It was dark and I couldn't follow 'em any further. So I left 'em and went back the next day and I couldn't find 'em! Guys that was building that new highway at that time, they came to the cabin the next morning and told me, "I saw your cows this morning," so I went up and got 'em.

JL: That's a long ride!

AS: Yeah, a long ride.

JL: As the roads got punched in, you'd hitch up your trailer and take your horse and just have little, short rides here and there?

AS: I hauled a horse right in the back of my pickup! I had racks on the pickup, and I had a tailgate on it. You could turn it around anyplace with that. It made it real handy. Had a block and tackle on it to pull my tailgate up with. I got too weak. I couldn't lift it anymore!

DS: Let me inject a little bit here. We started out like he said. But, I can remember manys the time leaving the cabin at six or 6:30 in the morning. I mean, just so early because we had so far to go. Riding clear to the back end of the range.… Scouring that area, such as Fish Creek Valley and Lonesome Meadows. Finding some cattle and getting 'em back on the trail, starting 'em down. Getting back at nine or ten o'clock at night.

DS: So dark you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. Leaving the cattle at the cabin because they were tired. You were tired. You were ready to hit the cabin. Across the creek right there and go to the cabin. And the next day, if you were gonna haul 'em out, you'd go down and round 'em up all over again. And so, what's happened now, with the advent of the roads, we'd go back. You could get 'em in. Ride on… I'd go in the morning, ride all day, bring the cattle in. We were in time where we could take 'em on up to the corral. Come back and get the truck. I could load the cattle up in the truck, bring 'em down…

JL: Down to?

DS: To the valley where the fall pasture is. And unload 'em. Spend the night down here. Get the crew organized the next morning. Head for the mountains. And be able to ride again all day. And if we'd get enough to make it worthwhile, bring 'em down again that night. So that's the transformation of.… Also, when we first started in '54, we used to have to hire. We had a little old bobtail sixteen-foot old Army truck. A converted Army truck that we had for a stock truck. That's what we hauled our horses in. That's what we hauled what few cows we hauled cause you couldn't haul that many. I can remember manys the time going up early, like six or seven o'clock in the morning, trying to get up there after snow, and getting stalled on the Foster Creek grade there. Couldn't get up that hill. We didn't have chains. Had to wait till another truck come along and put on chains and make his way to the top and get in his tracks to get on up there. But we used to have to hire to haul. There was an outfit in Phoenix at that time called.…

AS: [Athel H.] Dudley.

DS: Dudley… hauled cattle. He had two, probably thirty-five-foot, semis. Single deck. I mean, they were just old wooden-deck semi-trucks. We had to hire them to haul 'em. Gosh! When was it we finally--we finally bought that Ford truck? In '58?.… It had a big old heavy wooden bed on it. It had dual drive, and we bought a brand new tilt-cab Ford in '58. Tried to put that big old heavy bed on it. And we were overloaded most of the time. But I started trying to haul 'em all myself. A lot of times I started four-thirty in the morning and go to the mountains to load up a load of cows. Come back, maybe make three, maybe make four trips a day. Just trying to haul a "bobtail" load at a time. The corral would be packed. Mud would get that deep cause the cattle were in there just milling around and around.

JL: And this would be in one of the Muir Creek or Beaver Meadows?

DS: Mostly Muir Creek because by the time we got to the Beaver Meadows, when we bought John Day out, then we had progressed a little bit further and I ended up wrecking that tilt-cab forward and ruined the bed on it. We ended up with a new bed and a lighter bed so we could handle it. Then we bought a trailer to go behind it. So then we had two twenty-foot boxes.

DS: A truck box and a trailer box. And we were able to haul twice as many cows. So that really made things a lot better for us. So by the time we picked up the additional cattle up there, from John Day, the additional range, we were able to haul more cows. I thought I was really in heaven with that longer bed and not quite so many trips! Then that truck kinda gave up the ghost in 1972. And we started to shop around for another truck to put under that bed. .…and that really made things nice. At least for me, 'cuz this bed, I could haul almost all the cows we could gather in a day, I could haul in one trip. So, as the years have gone on, we've got softer. Don't have to spend near as much time. He can go out and ride the back part of the range, take the horses out with the trailer and drop 'em out. Go out and check things out and be back in by two in the afternoon to take his nap. Then go back out and check things in the evening, and just see how things are going in another part of the range with his little pickup, or something like that, rather than take the trailer and big pickup. Now all a sudden [1980] we had this four-wheel drive. We don't have to get out and put those chains on any more, especially with two horses in the back! You could practically go anywhere! So that really made things a lot easier. Then, of course, the next thing he decided he liked that so well, his next little pickup was gonna be a four-wheel drive! So he got a four-wheel drive Ford Ranger. So rather than have to take the big pickup up there to look around to try to find trails or something after the snow comes, why he could do his running around with the little pickup, find where they're at, then go get 'em with the horses. So, over the years, it really has transformed into almost a "vacation" compared to the way it had been, back in the '20s. I can't even imagine us doing that today. That kind of abuse that those…

AS: Nobody would do it!

DS: That's right! Couldn't get anybody. Nobody'd do it. I mean, shoot! Here it's probably been fifteen years now. A little anecdote about him…I was on a PCA board in Portland. We usually have three-day meetings. About every two or three months we'd have a meeting.… He was upset with me because I had to go at that time. So, in the middle of a board meeting one day, I got a call in the board meeting. He said, "Get home [immediately]! We got two feet of snow," or something or other, "and the cows are all coming in and nobody's [home] and ya gotta get home!" So, I got in my car and headed back home late that night, and went up there the next morning. He had worn out one of the neighbors! Friends had gone up there to ride with him the day before and they'd found some cattle at Dog Prairie, but the snow was so deep they couldn't get in there with the rig to get them. So they had to ride all the way from Beaver Meadows to get into there. They left at eight o'clock that morning, rode all day bucking that snow with their horses clear into Dog Prairie. Broke a trail into Dog Prairie. Got those cows. Headed 'em back out. Here, he had to have been eighty! Almost eighty years old then! At least.

AS: At least that old!

DS: I'm used to riding, though. But, they rode clear into Dog Prairie. Brought those cattle back. Didn't get 'em back to Beaver Meadows that night till ten o'clock. He was still going strong. The other guy, I mean, he was sick for a week! He just couldn't handle it. He used to like to come up there. He's never been back! He's a farmer. Pretty tough old farmer! But, you know, it just takes just intestinal fortitude and determination to face that kind of a challenge. And that's what he sees in it, I'm sure, is a challenge. "It's gotta be done, and I'm gonna do it." I can remember when we first started going up there and I used to get so aggravated at him! Pouring down rain. "We gotta get those cows!" We'd go out there and just get soaked, freeze to death, and never see a cow! But we went out and tried, by golly, anyway! Him and I was--it used to be the way he was! You just went out and worked, even if you knew you weren't gonna get anything done. It used to frustrate me when I was younger, but I understand it a little bit better now.

JL: You got the perspective of running your own operation.…
    Well, I feel like I probably asked enough questions now, and I just want to, before we end this, open it up to both of you, to share any other anecdotes, stories, or impressions. Anything you want to remember. Just anything you want to get off your chest or say at this point. Maybe you've been thinking about it a little bit, because this interview has been coming up and just wanted you to have that opportunity to do that.

AS: Well, we have a lot of episodes that way. I don't know which one would be most desirable to tell!

DS: I tell you the thing that, I guess, sticks most in my mind the most is the relationships that we've had with the rangers over the years. And not only the rangers, but the supervisors, of course. We've had rangers that have come that took a real interest in what we were doing and spent time out there with us. Knew what they were doing and what we were faced with.… And it's such a pleasure to be able to have somebody that takes an interest in what you're doing. Ask you questions about what you're doing on the range. Make some recommendations. Of course there's some that come in that could care less what you're doing out there. And NEVER go out and get involved with what you're doing. Really don't even ask you any questions about it, or have any suggestions. They just kinda turn it over to their assistants. I guess that's always been the frustrating thing to me, is the change of people we have to deal with. Some are just super communicators and great to work with. And others are just… They come in with a misconception of what needs to be done and they want to change things immediately. It makes it really difficult for us to manage the cattle or run an economical operation with what they're trying to propose. Usually after a couple years, you get 'em educated and they understand by that time and things get better. But for that couple of years, it just really is frustrating and difficult for us to deal with.… So I guess if I wanted to leave any impression on your mind at all, is somewhere along the line, maybe a little more education in the area of public lands management, grazing management for some of the forest managers. And most of them end up, turn out to be pretty good guys! A couple of them that never did, I mean in my opinion, never did--never should have been put into a management position.… I don't know what else I can say. It's come to a point now where it's not any fun anymore. It's got so many regulations, and so many environmental groups that never even been on the range, or any area even, that are wanting to just get us to go away. Lawsuits and regulations, and countersuits, and injunctions, and every other cotton-pickin' thing in the world! Letters to the supervisors that have no bearing whatsoever on the management of the resource. They just want to get the cattle off the range. It really makes it frustrating to plan for your future; the future of your operation when you've got those kind of uncertainties to contend with. The next ranger that comes in might be the greatest guy in the world. He might be the worst! Just the luck of the draw I guess. Kind of a straw you pick when they pick the person to come in.

AS: I think, more or less, most of the rangers that used to be up there, they had a kind of a farm background, you know. They knew what livestock was and what it took to graze 'em and so forth. They used to go out and ride every year. Take one or two rides a year, maybe three rides a year and the ranger'd go with you. You never get that anymore.

DS: I got a little off of history!

JL: No, that's fine! This is what this is all about! It's part of history, you know! Current attitudes are definitely a--kind of brings things right up to the present.
    But, before we close, I have a couple of real specific questions about place names again.… There there was Wiley Camp. I guess he was a sheepman?…

AS: Yeah, that's another sheep camp. That's where Lewis camped. He had a big corral right in below it one time, where he corralled his sheep at night. Made out of logs. It's all gone too.

DS: How many sheep did they run? Do you know?

AS: They run about two thousand head in there.

JL: In the Fish Creek?

AS: No, on Fish Mountain. They never did go into Fish Creek. Kohlhagen had Fish Creek. They came all the way from Brown's Cabin up. They went in at Brown's Cabin and went up over Anderson Mountain, and right on back to Abbott Butte. Come right across the ridge. Followed it right on through, all the way.

JL: Would they have been in Alkali Basin, too? Alkali Meadow, Fish Mountain?

AS: Yeah, they took all that top of the mountain.

JL: That was Lewis?

AS: Yeah, that was Lewis.

JL: He was a Central Point…

AS: Yeah, he was Central Point. Yeah, he was in there already in the '20s. He'd come down the road, riding a spotted horse. He wouldn't get to the side of the road to let your cows go by. He'd go right through the middle of 'em! Cowboys'd use to get so mad at him they coulda shot him I think!

JL: No love lost between the two?!

AS: Not a bit!

JL: Do you think the Taylor Grazing Act had a lot to do with the end of sheep?

AS: Well, I don't know. I think the Forest Service kinda pushed them out, too, because they were overgrazing. They were just tromping it out. They'd been in there too many years. Some of the range, where they'd just grazed lightly, wasn't growing as bad as some where they'd had a lot of sheep. Like in Fish Creek. They went in there and stayed in there for six weeks. A lot of times, before they'd leave, they'd clean it out, slick as a whistle! There was nothing left!

JL: Up the sides of Fish Mountain, too?

AS: Yeah, all over the top. On Buckneck, you know, there's a huge meadow lays clear the length of Buckneck. It's grown over in with jack pine now pretty much, Filling in all the time. But there was a lot of feed up there and he used to run his sheep up on that. He'd go up at Rogue-Umpqua trail and go up on top and take that all in. That was his range. He come clear down as far as Ice Creek.

JL: Well, you spent a time out there at the age of late '70s and into your 80s alone. You ever have any occasions to maybe wish you weren't up there alone on a horse? Any close calls?

AS: No, I never was. I never got scared or nothing. Even when I got lost that time. I really wasn't lost. I was trying to hit the highway and knew exactly which way to go. I knew how I would eventually get there, but it was too far around because huge canyons come down. You had to go around the upper end of a canyon. I was gonna follow the river down, and I finally spotted some lights going on the highway. And so then I was relieved right there! I headed for--I had to walk because the snow was breaking through. My horse was breaking through with me riding him. So I had to walk and lead him, and I was about pooped myself! He was all in. I finally hit the highway about ten o'clock, I think. Then I had to go clear down to Muir Creek yet to get to the truck. I met those guys down by the Obstinate J wasn't it?

DS: Yeah. Because I'd decided there was something drastically wrong and I started up to find him. Must have been eleven o'clock or so at night.

AS: It was after eleven because it was after twelve when I got home.

DS: That's when I recognized the rig coming down. That's kinda been one of the difficult things, being up there, as far as--far away, is not being able to communicate. You can imagine, if it's difficult now, how it must have been back sixty years ago, or seventy years ago, I guess. Not even the telephone that you could call home on. You just had to trust that everything was all right.

JL: Do you have a CB now, in your rig?

DS: Cell phone. We got a cell phone now. But, there's only certain places that you can get out with it. I got one of the biggest ones you could get to be able to get out. I thought I could get out up there and I could.

JL: How many people do you typically have working for you at a given summer?

DS: We have around, full time…three people full time. And then in the summer, we managed to get by last summer with two additional people.…

JL: Are they up there? Or they down here?

DS: No, no, basically we try to do as much of that as we can by ourselves, or with family. Or with one other hired--one of the hired hands. Our lead cowboy. If I can't be there, why then he's kind of the lead.

JL: Has he worked for you for a long time?

DS: He's only been with us three years now. But he spent a lot of time--he grew up on a farm, on Evans Creek. And they ran cattle on BLM and Forest Service land, up at the head of Evans Creek. Up in that country. So, he's very familiar with that type of an operation. He's also very thorough when it comes to rounding up. He'd go down into a brush patch and he doesn't come out until he finds the cows! And he's got an excellent sense of direction, so you don't have to worry about him getting lost. So you feel comfortable turning him loose up there. That's the trouble with most people. You turn 'em loose and you always worry about them until you see 'em again!

JL: So down here, most of the activity--most of the work, jobs during the summer… You're growing…

DS: Growing, irrigating…

JL: Moving pipe…

DS: Putting up hay…

JL: Cutting hay…

DS: Cutting hay, raking, baling, hauling, stacking hay. And later in the season, harvesting grain and…

JL: What kind of grain?

DS: Wheat and barley mostly. We used to raise a lot of corn. Put up a lot of silage. That was always our September job. Before we got the big equipment, we used to take the whole month of September just to put up out silage. The whole month! I hated that. I just HATED that month! Silage is a high…It takes a lot of people. See, ya got a crew of say, four or five people maybe, working on a crew. But, it's also a high-maintenance thing. So, a piece of equipment breaks down. You've got a cat at the pit. You've got three or four trucks hauling. You've got the tractor. You've got the chopper in the field. And if one piece breaks down, until you get it fixed, you've got four or five people sitting around not doing anything. And so, it's a lot of pressure on, but you know, to keep everything [going], to get it fixed fast. If it [broke] down, you're up all night getting it going so you could get going again the next morning. By the time September was over, you were just totally exhausted! And it was time to go round up the cows! That's kind of what we did. And that didn't help any in the "good ol' days" because it was just that much more exhaustion, trying to get that old truck up and down the road and ride all day, too!

JL: Then you bring 'em down here in September or October?

DS: October. Normally it's October before we can get 'em out. We're supposed to have 'em off by the fifteenth of October, and usually we can get probably sixty percent of 'em off, in a normal year, by that time. Unless we get a good snow. If we get a good snow during the first two weeks of October, we can maybe get ninety percent of 'em.

JL: It drives 'em down?

DS: They'll come down to the corrals pretty much.

JL: Saying "Take me down"!

DS: Exactly! We just load them up and bring 'em on down.

JL: Now, when you get 'em back down here, is that the big time when you're going out to the livestock auction on Table Rock Road?

DS: Usually we bring them down. We wean the [calves] if we've got the pasture. What we do is we wean the calves off at that point. Cows have done all they can as far as growing the calves. So we poll 'em. We put the heifers in one pasture and the steers in another and the cows would go up to usually a leftover hay field. We take two cuttings of hay off of the pasture fields and it's growing back up. Stubble. And we'd put the cows in there. And the heifers and steers. Sometimes we leave the heifers with the cows and sometimes we don't. Until December. In December, the grass is usually gone by that time and it's turned cold and there's not much strength in the grass anyway. So we'll start bringing 'em in to the feedlots. We'll put 'em in the areas where we feed 'em. Which really, in some cases, are meadows. Some cases, like right out behind, east of the house here, we've got a pretty good-sized pasture. And north of the house, another one where we feed. If we had to, if we wanted to, we could probably feed one hundred fifty cows and have 'em calve right here on this place. But, we've got a place east, across the river, where we keep--we had one hundred and ten cows in one field and thirty-five across the [lower] meadow. A good river--a well-drained river bottom ground. Part of it's our meadows when we pasture 'em in the summertime. In the springtime rather.

JL: How many acres do you have here?

DS: In this piece? Or just down in the valley?

JL: Down in the valley. Total…

DS: We have about seven hundred irrigated and maybe another fifteen hundred dryland. All together…I think we probably run around two thousand acres total down here. Some of it here's just wasted land, where there's nothing but maybe brush, scrub oak. A lot of it just good until from the time we turn out, like right now. We've been turning out the last couple weeks on their spring pasture. It'll hold 'em until the first of July, when it's time to go to the mountains. It's worked out pretty good for us over the years. It's allowed us to use those hay fields--those pasture fields--for hay, rather than to force us to pasture the cattle there, and buy hay.

JL: I'm going to show my ignorance here [about] the whole business, but… The calves have all been born well before you truck 'em up there, and they're ready to… But, they're still nursing?

DS: The calves are supposed to be under six months when they go on the range. And most of ours are five to six months old. So they're big, pretty good sized at that point. The cow usually--it works out good because when you take 'em out of the feedlot in spring, in April, it's nice lush grass, and the cows get on that. Makes 'em give a little more milk when they get that grass. So the calves really do good for awhile, till the grass starts tapering off. Then you move them to the mountains. They get that lush grass again. They give another surge of milk plus the calves are big enough by that time to start eating a lot of grass. Give them the milk plus the grass and they really grow. Just really grow.

JL: Is it all artificial insemination? All bulls?

DS: No no, it's all bulls. Used to do, when we had the dairy, it was all artificial insemination at the dairy. Sometimes they wouldn't breed and you'd have to put a bull in. But, we could do it, we could certainly do it with our beef cattle herd, but it would be more management intensive. And, we tend to be less inclined to be management intensive than some.

JL: Do your bulls stay down here all summer?

DS: Yeah, we don't take the bulls to the mountains. We used to do that, but there was no reason to because the cattle were--if they weren't gonna breed by the time they went to the mountains, they weren't gonna breed anyway. And we found that always the bulls were traditionally the last ones we were able to find. We'd look and look and look and look! And we couldn't find those stupid things! One year we found--an elk hunter found one clear up on the top of Cold Springs! He went up there on the top of three feet of snow and tracked that thing! He thought he had the biggest bull elk in the world! Finally found him…

JL: He had a bull all right!

DS: …and we knew the guy. And so he called me that night. So we took the snowmobiles and went up the next day. Took him some hay and some water. We figured he probably hadn't found any water up there. Took him some hay and water and we figured out where he was at and how we were gonna get him out of there! At that time, one of the Smith boys…had these two rescue Skidoos. So he let us borrow them. Or, let me borrow one and we took the sled, and he went with me on the other one. We took the sled with some hay and some water, and found the old bugger. Then the next day, why Gordon Walker, he was working, still working. He was the Range and Recreation guy there in Prospect at that time. He got the Sno-Cat and took the backhoe bucket up and we went in the road right below where he was at. The road went up over the top of Dead Soldier. Kind of swung around under the hill. So we went up with the snowmobiles, and we got the old bull, and got him headed over and forced him down over that bank. He went down probably, oh, fifty feet maybe. Straight down. It was almost straight down, just like that. And hit the road down below. We kinda forced him over there. They were down there with the Sno-Cat. They took that backhoe bucket and hooked it on behind the Sno-Cat and started down the road. Got him in to that trail and he just followed that Sno-Cat right down to the pickup, down out of the snow where we could load him!

JL: Do you have your own snowmobiles?

DS: No, we haven't. No more than we would have time to use them, it just doesn't justify. If we have to have them, we have enough friends that own them that would just love to go up there and ride. And, there's a lot of folks that ride up there just anyway in the winter time. We get enough snow, at least I do. I get enough snow during roundup to last me the rest of the winter! And I don't need anymore playing in the snow! It ceased to be fun a long time ago!

AS: Yeah, I was in snow right up to my hips at the cabin one year!

DS: These guys got snowed in one time at the cabin. He and his brother.

JL: How long were you there?

AS: Oh, we went out--it started in snowing on Saturday. We stayed over Saturday. Tried to go out Sunday morning and we couldn't. So we stayed over Sunday and the Monday morning, why we were able to ride out to the highway. The Smiths had come up because they knew we were snowed in. They come looking for us. So they loaned us their truck. We rode down to Muir Creek with the horses and they come up with the truck and we picked the horses up and took them to Prospect. And Dalton come up from below and picked up our horses.

JL: Do you ever have any problems with people breaking in your cabin and vandalizing? I know it's not very well known.

AS: Not very many times, but last year--the last couple years they broke in twice.…

DS: We always left our utensils up there. We had some iron skillets, those old-time iron skillets hanging on the wall there, that we cooked in. And all of a sudden, those things had become collector's items. Somebody went in there and took all that stuff. They did it again this summer. They went in and broke the… They didn't get in this time though! They broke the windows out. Tore the shutter off the outside back door. We have everything closed up in the wintertime. Cover it all up with shutters. He tore it off and threw it out on the ground and broke the windows out. Jack, my cousin, had to drive in there just about the time that the guy was standing there. He couldn't prove that he did it, but he did get his license number at least. He didn't do anything about it. What are you gonna do? How you gonna prove that? He might of just happened to come down there and… I think that if somebody hadn't a come in, he'd a probably been clear in. But, we've been pretty lucky. We haven't had that much vandalism. Always gonna have a little.
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Last revised July 6, 2025