From Seven to Seventy: Memories of a Painter and a Yankee

by Edward Simmons

Here we were fifty miles from the Oregon border, and no way to get there but by sea.

One day while looking down the side of Shasta through the vast cathedral of trees, I saw, about a hundred yards off, what looked like a rabbit. It proved to be a man on horseback, a half a mile away. A red-headed woodpecker, which is about the size of a robin in the East, is as large as a pigeon in the north of California. All nature is in scale, so that one does not realize the immense size of the trees and mountains. We mowed a field of timothy, and it was so tall that I constantly lost sight of the head of the man who went before me. The stems were as large around as my thumb.

The northwest slope of Shasta looked like a great big beautiful lawn, and I had planned to go up and make a sketch from there some day. What I had thought to be soft grass proved, on close inspection, to be brush, fifteen or twenty feet tall and so interlaced that a deer could walk on it in summer. One loses one’s sense of proportion completely. Even the snowfall, not to be outdone by the other elements of nature, was prodigious in its generosity. One winter I made a notch upon a tree, and the next spring, when the snow had melted away, it was so far above my head that I could not touch it—a matter of eighteen feet or more.

The health of the community at Strawberry Valley was greatly benefited by the numberless springs that gushed out of the sides of the slope, bringing cold water of the first purity. Some of these formed streams which ran under the houses, and if a busy housewife had neglected to prepare anything for dinner, all she needed to do was to open a trap in the floor, put in a colander with some meal scattered on the surface, and pull up one or two flapping trout ready to clap into the frying pan.

The hotel was the stopping place for teamsters, and very rough. The main room held a bar, a table for poker, and a fireplace lined always in winter with these men who drove horses or mules all day and played cards and told stories all night. As I remember Sisson’s family, it consisted of his wife; Ivy, about five years old; Joe, of two years—and “Lizzie.” Lizzie was a short name for “lizard,” and she was taken for granted, the same as one of the members of the family, by the hotel boarders. They would speak about her much as if she were a maiden aunt, and she did not seem to be a particular pet or noticed much. One night a number of these men were sitting in a circle around the great open fire after supper, when a man, new to these parts, came in and joined them. They were chewing tobacco and swapping yarns, when all of a sudden Lizzie ran out from her hole onto the stones of the hearth and played around fearlessly, as she did every evening. The new man grunted and, taking careful aim, spat a squirt of tobacco juice on the little animal. Instantly the others were upon him. The air was blue with oaths, and he was punched and clouted ten feet. Ashamed and very much abashed, he picked himself up without offering any resistance, and the group reassembled as if nothing had happened. These men did not cease to be poets just because they carried guns and had never gone to school.

Justice was administered quietly, and each man was his own judge. The theft of a horse was punishable by death, as a horse meant a man’s whole existence. I remember a man who lost his brace of mules out of his wagon as he was sleeping under it. He borrowed a team from Sisson, but returned them the very next day. He had met the thief on the Ridge and had calmly shot him.

My duties were varied at Sissons. I was general help on the farm; I waited on the table at meal time; tended the bar—under which I bunked; and was village postmaster. In the last capacity it was necessary for me to get up at four-thirty in the morning, meet the coach, and change the mails. I shall never forget this. Six feet of snow, the moonlight, and away down the road, a half mile or more, from amid the great trees came the weird cry of the stage driver calling for me to get up. Then with rattle of harness, loud screeching of brakes, the unwieldy vehicle came to a stop, still swaying and swinging on the leathern supports, like a ship at sea. And the effect upon the occupants was very much like that of a sailing vessel. The men rode outside, but if there were women and children they were within, and the memory of the smell of musty seats, close air, sweat, and stale vomit that issued forth upon the opening of the door has remained with me ever since. It was my business to have whisky ready for these poor, suffering souls, and it was certain that some of them could not have finished their journey without it.

There was always some new job presenting itself for me to do. Quite unexpectedly, on the day and night of the 24th of December, twenty-five hundred merino sheep began to lamb. It was dry, cold, with a heavy snow. The mothers, showing the quality of inbreeding, did not want their lambs, would not nurse them unless we tied them together. The Cotswold, of far less value, is a perfect mother, but the high-priced Spanish merino would, on a drive, walk behind a bush, lamb, and go on without it. There is everything non-aristocratic in being a perfect mother.

Another one of my occupations—and, indeed, one in which all of the help about the house joined—was keeping track of Sisson’s glass eye. He had a beautiful fifty-dollar eye which he wore to market and down to San Francisco, but this one we rarely saw. His cheap ten-dollar one was constantly slanting in the wrong direction, and then Mrs. Sisson would say, “Sisson, northwest.” Back it would go at its proper angle, and all would be well again. But the great excitement was when it was lost entirely. Everything stopped until it was found, which was generally in the wooden gutter that led away from the washbasin under the pump. Coming down in the morning, with it in his mouth, he would place it temporarily on the shelf while washing, and it would roll down the gutter, where it remained—gazing fixedly with mute and silent reproach at the diligent searcher. Sisson, being small and of a combative temperament, was the butt of many a joke. Old Andy Gregg passed one day just after a new and beautiful sign had been put up, announcing that the place was:

SISSONS.