Food and the Harvest
Zizonwku
week11lacture.docxGage:
WILD FOOD
After the mine closed, the peo- ple of Tioga had some very hard times but they managed to eat despite the lack of biting money or any other kind. Sometimes toward the end of winter it was bare survival fare but we always made it somehow. I've been remembering the things we ate all through the year, the wild food that sustained us, not only in hard times, but in the easy ones too. Meat was basic, of course, and fortunately deer were usually plenti- ful. Venison roasts, chops, steaks, in season or out, were staples in our diet. If we'd shot an old tough buck, we ground the deer meat into patties for our plates or we beat the hell out of it for our stews. We boiled it, fried it, roasted it, and sometimes fed the last remnants to our hounds. Few of our hunters shot big bucks if they could help it; the young spike- horns or does were much better eating. I ate so much venison when I was a boy I've never cared particularly for it since. I guess I can say the same for rabbits, too. Some of those big snow- shoes could also be pretty tough, especially those from a cedar swamp. After the snows came our rabbits were easier to snare than to shoot because they'd turned white. Often their brown eyes were all you could see before making out their contours in the snow. One year though, their winter change of color betrayed them. We'd had a big early snow, and then, when it turned very warm, we could walk along the south sides of our granite hills and spot them easily against the brown leaves. A lot of rabbits got canned that year. Usually though, we got most of our rabbits by snaring. All we had to do was to find a well trodden runway, put little fences of twigs along its sides, then fasten a loop of picture wire in the middle of it. Five or six of those snares would almost always yield a rabbit or two overnight. There are old folks in the U.P. who still shudder at the thought of eating one more choked rabbit. Deer and rabbits provided most of our meat but we ate other animals too. A young bear, shot in berry time or in the fall when it was still fat, could provide fine eating. The meat was very dark, al most black, and tasted like a combination of beef and pork. I liked it but some people didn't, probably because they hadn't dressed it out properly. Bears have to store up a lot of fat to hibernate, sometimes so much you have to par- boil a bear steak before frying it. We also ate ground hogs, beaver, squirrels and muskrat. I never cared much for muskrat. The meat tasted like the muck they stirred up smelled. The others were pretty palatable when you'd sickened of venison. I even ate, or tried to eat, an old porcupine once. Staying up at our old hunting cabin at the time, I worked over that old porky for three days and nights, boiling, baking, roasting and frying it. Never could stick a fork into that tough meat but I finally cut off a small slice and chewed on it for maybe an hour before quitting. I still don't know how it tasted. Perhaps my trouble was that I killed that por ky at the wrong time. I'd come across it and another one between our hunting cabin and the lake while they were mating. The only time I ever saw that happen! How do porcupines mate? Very carefully! And a bit nastily, too, as I found when I watched them do it. First, they touched noses, and then the male urinated on the female. She didn't like that particularly but I suppose he was just marking out his territory, like timber wolves did by urinatng on certain stones atop our hills to mark theirs. Anyway, after the porkies touched noses again, the female lifted her quilled tail high and he came close and sat up on his haunches. Then she backed into him, with nary a quill shed. Yes, porcupines mate very carefully. I'm pretty sure it was the male that I clubbed and tried to eat. It wad- dled more slowly Pete Half Shoes, our resident Ojibway Indian, claimed that you couldn't find any better meat than a haunch of wolf, or coyote, broiled over maple c0als. I don't know. He offered me a chunk of it once and I was tempted until I remembered that Old Man Salo's big hound was missing. Fish, of course, were very plentiful in the old days. Rarely would a week go by in the summer without having at least one meal of brook trout, fried crisp in the pan and garnished with a sprig of parsley or a slice of lemon. I never got tired of them. Even ate the leftovers for breakfast. These were native trout, their flesh firm and pink. Occasionally we'd also have a huge lake trout from Lake Superior and these Mother always baked so we could flake off big mouthfuls from the heavy white bones. Northern pike were good too but you had to be careful of their fork- ed bones. When we'd get one caught in our throat, we'd swallow a chunk of bread to carry it down our gullets. Early in the spring, even suckers were delicious though later they got soft and tasted muddy. Perch and walleyes always added variety and you didn't have to make your tongue feel around in your mouth for bones before swallowing. Many of our Finn families made fish soup with glazed fish eyes floating on top. I never cared much for it. Our French Canadians often boiled a mess of fish of every variety, even chubs, until the bones were soft, then ground the results up fine and baked them into a loaf. Very good! In the winter we rarely tried to fish through the ice. It was just too cold sitting there even after you'd built up a sweat chopping a hole through two or three feet of blue ice. No, winter was the time for the smoked fish that had been hanging from the ceiling of the summer kitchen, or for the marinated ones from the barrel. Oddly enough,our cats would never eat either. We sure did. We also had fowl, and not just the extra rooster or broody hen from the chicken coop. Partridge was our main poultry dish, and it was excellent if you had a strip of fat bacon to cover it in the pan for other- wise it was rather dry. We shot a lot of partridge every fall but never tried to shoot them on the wing. Shells were too expensive. We'd walk along a deer trail or old logging road very slowly, looking and listening intently. Partridge weren't as wild then as they are now and they did a lot of clucking before they took off. Even then, if you set off an alarm clock in your pocket or had a good barking dog, they'd fly up onto a nearby limb and sit there, just waiting for you to shoot Occasionally, we'd get a spruce hen too. We called them "fool hens" because they sure were dumb, or perhaps just curious. They'd sit on a limb and watch you coming. Sometimes you didn't even have to shoot, just club them if they were within reach. Their meat was very dark and I didn't care much for it. Partridge were much better. One old Frenchman downtown always hung his wild fowl in the barn after they were cleaned, until their heads fell off. "Takes away the gamey taste," he said. Perhaps it did but they sure smelled ripe before he got around to eating them. During their migrations, we also shot a lot of ducks, mainly mal- lards, canvas backs and blue winged teal. The teal were the hardest to shoot on the wing but were the most flavorful. Coots or mudhens were miserable eating but the worst of the lot were the mergansers; they tasted like rotten fish. Once, when some of us boys were camping over- night, Mullu shot a sea gull and that was terrible too. Sieur LaTour told us how to set up a fine meshed fish net on sticks, put chicken scratch feed under it, and then when blackbirds and robins collected to eat the grain, to pull down the holding stake with its rope and catch them. LaTour said he'd never used these bird traps himself but that his grand pere had done it in the old, old days. A lot of work, he said, but they made a good meat pie. Four and twenty blackbirds! It's hard for us now to understand how people ate almost anything when times were hard. Our major vegetables were potatoes, carrots, cabbage, turnips and rutabagas but there were some years when the crop was small because of a wet spring or early frost. Then our people turned to collecting wild vegetables. They waded the shallow waters of a lake to dig up spatter- dock roots to bake; they spaded to get the long roots of dandelions to boil. The pith of burdock roots was good in stews. Cattail roots were best boiled but they could be eaten raw too. Pete Halfshoes told us that his Ojibway mother used to boil Jack-in-the-pulpit bulbs so Fisheye and I tried them once. When they set our mouths on fire with their hot bitter- ness and we complained, old Pete said you always had to boil them three times in new water each time. Maybe so! Pete also suggested we try skunk cabbage but we weren't too interested. Most of us never ate any of these except experimentally but they were available and some of our poor families used them when they had to. We took some pride in being able to live off the land. For greens we had wild lettuce, pursley (a garden weed that's hard to eliminate, hence the saying "mean as pussley"), lamb's quarters, young milkweed pods, wild onions (leeks), fiddlehead ferns and, of course, dandelion greens. Of these, I liked the fiddleheads best. You had to pick them in the spring of the year when the fronds were just beginning to unfold. They looked like clenched little green fists, when fresh, but after being canned, they turned darker. The Finns called them kuolema goru (the hands of death). Our French Canadians canned a lot of fiddleheads and ate them all winter. A lot better than spinach, they were. Somehow, when spring came, all of us hungered for green things, not only for our souls but also for our mouths. We chewed cuds of winter- green leaves; we munched soursap, an acidic sorrel. We'd nibble the succulent bottom ends of timothy hay and wild oats after pulling them from their virginal sheaths. But best of all were wild red raspberry "tucks." These early shoots, when peeled of their fuzzy surface skin and dipped in a bit of salt, sure seemed to fill a basic need and we ate yards of them. Probably needed the vitamins they provided. Perhaps that same need also explains why we would often slice a raw potato and eat it with salt at break-up time or swipe a bit of sugar to put on the first green stalks of rhubarb. There were no salads in our houses when the snows were deep, nor for that matter, at any other time either. We were mainly meat and potato folk. Most of us had sugar because it was fairly cheap. If you ran out, you could always borrow a cup from your neighbor provided that you returned it with a heap on. But our huge maple trees provided a bounty of sweet sap every spring that, when boiled down, would yield syrup, maple sugar, and maple wax. The latter was a very chewy delicacy created by throwing a ladle of thick hot syrup on clean snow. Sometimes maple wax glued your teeth together but it sure tasted good. We also sucked sap icicles when it froze overnight in sap time. Occasionally, someone would find a honey tree by sighting the paths of bees as they went home. I never was successful though I sure tried hard and often got stung for my pains. I'd get a can and put it over a bumblebee on a dandelion or some other flower, waita bit, then release it and try to see which way it went, then can another one and look again. Unfortunately, a lot of them got mad buzzing under the can and nailed me when I lifted it off. I did find a honeycomb of sorts in our garden once but the bees found me so thoroughly too that I never got any honey out of it. Pierre Moreau got honey every year and Fisheye and I watched him do it one winter day when the tem perature was way below zero. He'd spotted the tree and blazed it the summer before so he knew where to find it. As Pierre sawed it down, we could hear bees buzzing around inside and we kept away, much to Pierre's amusement. Finally, when the tree was down, the bees died immediately in the frigid air. Some- times they popped. Pierre made another cut, then slabbed off a huge chunk to reveal a long comb along its hollow. He gave us each a piece full of honey and grubs and dead bees but I knew my mother wouldn't be interested so I threw mine away before getting home. Tasted like honey all right, but it took three days before my face and hands stopped feeling sticky We also ate mushrooms and nuts that we gathered in the woods. Morels, those wonderful wrinkled brown soldiers standing to attention in the spring woods, were hard to find but easy to eat when fried by themselves or better yet when used to smother a steak. We carefully guarded the places where we found our morels, making sure that no one else was following us, because they usually popped up in the same vicinity every year. The other mushroom that was commonly eaten was the white oyster mushroom. It appeared on dead logs a couple of times each summer, usually after a wet spell. Oyster mushrooms arranged themselves in layers on the log and you had to get them early or the insects and deer would eat them. We also ate the fairy ring mushrooms that came up in our pastures at night. All of these mushrooms were dried for winter soups and stews by threading them on fishline hung from the tops of our window for a week or more. There were few nuts in the U.P. Itwas just too cold for such trees to grow there but, like the red squirrels and chipmunks, we sure stored up a lot of hazel nuts. They were small nuts, about the size of a finger- nail, and they came in a greenish brown husk full of prickers that in- serted themselves into the hands that picked them. We'd soak a burlap bag full of hazelnuts in the creek, bang it repeated ly on the ground to thresh them of their husks, then pick them out to put in mason jars for the winter. Or we'd crack them with our teeth to eat them on the spot. Hazelnuts got better as they aged, and on many a winter night, we munched upon hazelnuts by kerosene light until it was time to go to bed. As I recall, my life as a boy in the U.P. at the turn of the century, I was always nibbling something. In the spring, I ate the little bulbs of spring beauty flowers, or violet leaves. In the summer, I munehed on thistle shoots or young burdock stems. In the fall, I chewed wild rose hips, thornapples, wild rice and cranberries. Indeed, we sampled al- most anything that grew. Once I dug up what I thought were ginseng roots and was sick for three days after eating them... If there were noth- ing better, I chewed maple twigs or straw or spruce gum. It took a lot of unpleasant work to get that spruce gum so it was free from pitch after we had scraped the globs of resin off the trees. Spruce gum was a grayish-pink in color but it chewed good. Sure made you spit! For fruit, we had apples and berries. Many of our houses had old gnarled apple trees behind them, usually of the Dutchess or Yellow Transparent variety. They bore heavily every other year but always provided enough green apples for our bellyaches. Every dirt cellar in Tioga had many cans of applesauce on its shelves and also some boxes or barrels of eating apples, especially the Greenings which wouldn't begin to rot until March month. Also, up around the mine and in many little abandoned pastures, we could find a wild apple tree with good fruit. Most of the apples from these wild trees were poor eating without much flavor and only the deer fed from them, but there were a few that had excellent apples. I still remember one snow apple tree down by Maler's homestead that every year bore a good crop of bright red apples with streaks of pink threaded through the crisp white flesh. You'd bite into one of those snow apples and the juice would dribble from the corn- ers of your mouth. Back then our apples had no scab or other disease and no one ever had to spray them with po ison. We ate them baked, in sauce, in pies, or just in hand. But our major fruit consisted of berries. Wild strawberries, red raspberries, blackberries, dewberries, thimble berries, blueberries, we picked them all in huge amounts each summer and they served as our desserts all winter. First in the season came the wild strawberries. Rarely could we pick enough to use them in pies or shortcake. They were mainly for jam or jelly. I remember that once my father insisted that no wild strawberry jam be served when a visitor froma city down below came to our table. "No one who's never picked a wild strawberry deserves to eat that jam," he said. Spread upon buttered home-made bread, fresh from the oven and washed down with cold milk, they were indeed ambrosi a. Unlike wild strawberries, which you picked while appropriately on your knees as if in prayer, our red raspberries could be gathered standing up. We found them everywhere along the edges of the old fields or rockpiles. Some of the best ones appeared along the logging roads a few years after hardwoods had been cut. They weren't hard to pick but you could never really get a heap on your pail of raspberries that would last more than a few minutes because they always settled. With the pails strapped to our belts, we could pick with both hands, the right one for the pail and the left hand for the mouth. Our women canned hundreds of quarts of red raspberries each year. In season, every house had a little sugar sack fastened to the cup- board above the sink from which the scarlet juice dripped into a pan below so jelly could be made. Oh, those raspberry pies with the red juice coloring the latticed upper crust! My mouth wets with the remember- ing! Raspberry tarts, hot from the oven, steamed raspberry pudding with hard sauce, or just a dish of newly picked raspberries sprinkled with sugar and swimming in rich cream! Ah, we lived well up in the U.P.in berry time! And I must not forget the warm fruit soup the Finns and Swedes made with milk and eggs and raspberries. Just a bit of nutmeg dusted on top of the bowl was the final touch. I haven't tasted it for sixty-five wasted years. Thimble berries were a lot bigger than raspberries, although not as flavorful, but your pail filled up fast. Some of us mixed them with rhubarb or apple or both to make a better jam. Gooseberries, once they got thoroughly brown or almost black, were very sweet but the green ones were so sour they'd turn your face into a dead man's skull. Goose- berry jam was excellent on heavily buttered toast and my father preferred gooseberry pie to all others except blackberry Anyone picking wild blackberries pays a price in scratched hands and faces or in torn clothing, but they're worth it. I had one special private patch of blackberries that surrounded a deep running spring which I visited every year to bring back the best blackberries known to our parts. Heavy with huge berries, the tall bushes drooped from their weight into the water. I could fill a ten quart pail in a hurry., Then came blackberry pies, blackberry cobbler, and, after straining the juice, the making of blackberry wines or cordials. Our French Canadians al- ways stored up some blackberry juice for the treatment of constipation, but that was made from dewberries, a smaller, ground hugging variety of blackberry. The great crops of blueberries, however, provided most of the fruit that covered our cellar shelves. We picked them by the gallon, whole families sometimes traveling miles to find the best patches. Every June we explored the plains and granite hills to make sure some late frost had not hurt the little white bells that were their flowers. A failure of the blueberry crop meant that the coming winter would be a deprived one for all of us. There were two varieties, the blue ones and the black ones, and both could be found either on high bushes or low bushes. The black ones were not as tart or as good for pies but they were always sought after. The people who picked blueberries were of several kinds too: the sitters and the stoopers, and the clean and the unclean pickers. Clean pickers prided themselves on never letting a twig or green berry or stink bug enter their pails and, consequently, they often were slowed down by their persnicketiness. That one little green blueberry seemed to have an almost uncanny ability tobury itself the moment you tried to remove it. My Grampa Gage never bothered. He just stripped the bushes with both hands going at once, much to my grandmother's disgust when she had to elean them on the kitchen table afterwards. "Hell, Nettie," he'd say when she gave him the devil for it, "those green ones give character to the pie, and the twigs and leaves soak up the juice." Most of us were cleaners. The monstrous tame blueberries of today that come from the grocery stores bear only a faint resemblance to the wild ones of the U.P. at least so far as flavor is concerned, and I will nevereat another one. They lack being covered each moring with that Lake Superior dew; their color is comparatively dull; there is no reflection of our clean blue skies on their surfaces. They have no tang. I'd bet even the hungriest U.P. black bear would spurn them if it had a choice. Our paneakes, muffins and cakes with wild blueberries sprinkled through their batter seemed to shorten our winters because they tasted of summertime. But, oh, those blueberry pies!I've never been able to decide whether blueberry pie is better hot or cold. With a piece of yellow cheese to restore the tastebuds of your tongue and palate to a new virginity after each bite or two, you'd always want more. After the first fall frost, we'd find a lot of drunken robins stagger- ing around under the chokecherry bushes. Before that time, choke- cherries can pucker up your mouth so much you can't whistle, but not after they've been frozen and have started fermenting. Chokecherry wine is very good, much better than that we made of our black wild cherries or dandelions. Enough! Surely by now you know that we managed to eat pretty well in the U.P. without spending any money. No wonder our kids come back from Detroit when times get hard down below! No wonder we lived long and triumphantly in that hard, but lovely land without vitamin pills! No wonder we had sisu! P.S. If you want my recipe for sugarplum pie, let me kenow.
MUSTAMAYA
It was after supper and four or five men were belly- up to the bar in Higley's Saloon telling their fishing lies as usual. "You know that deep hole just below the Narrows?" asked. "Well, I caught a twenty-one incher there yesterday. A sloib! Never caught a bigger brook trout. "Aw hell, I caught one that went twenty-two in the Spruce River once," said another. "A big old spawner she was. You ought to see the eggs come out of her. Mighty nigh a pint of 'em." Higley, the saloon keeper, couldn't stand it another minute. He smote the top of the polished bar with a mighty fist. "You're just a bunch of bloody liars." he roared. "I bet not a one of you ever caught a trout you had to cut to put in the frying pan." The men were stunned. The unwritten law was that no matter how outrageous the fishing lie, you always nodded your head and then tried to tell a bigger one. Higley was hotted up. "By God," he said. "I'm sick and tired of hearing all them fish lies. Tell you what I'll do. Any man that brings me a trout bigger than nineteen inches, I give him a ten dollar gold- piece and keep the fish." He went to the back room and brought back a heavy leather purse. "And here's the goldpiece. I'll glue it to the under- side of the glass cigar counter so you can see it every time you come here. So put up or shut up!" As you can imagine, news of Higley's offer swept through town like wildfire and the Tioga River and its tributaries sure caught hell, Most of us had never seen a ten dollar goldpiece. A lot of money, those days. Higley's business sure boomed, so many came to look at it. "Yeah, he assured them. "You catch me a trout bigger than nineteen inches and the gold piece is yours. But no dynamiting! If the eyes are pop ped out and its bladder busted, that don't count.
Trapping
Like all the other boys in Tioga I had to learn to trap but it was never an obsession with me as it became for some of the other kids. The work involved never seemed worth the little money I ever got for the pelts. Most of my friends learned from their fathers, but my own, the doctor, was too busy to serve as a role model. So I learned from my friends and a bit from Pete Half Shoes, the old Chippewa Indian, who was so kind to me in so many other ways. When very young I had trapped a lot of mice in our house and barns and also for Aunt Lizzie and I had snared many rabbits. One fall when I was nine years old I snared so many of the latter our family got thorough- ly sick of eating them and forbade me from getting any more. They were easy to catch. All I had to do was to go down behind our grove to the beaver dam swamp, look for a well traveled trail made by the snowshoe rabbits, line up sticks and branches on both sides of a likely place and place my snare, a loop of picture wire, in the runway. If possible I hung it from a bent sapling stuck in the ground and held there with a forked stick so that when the rabbit got caught and struggled the sapling would get loose and hoist the rabbit high in the air. If no sapling was available I just tied the wire to a tree or strong bush. Each day I'd put out four or five of these, collect the rabbits the following day and reset the snares. Rabbit skins were worth nothing, but weasels could fetch three dol- lars and mink paid five or six, so my first efforts at real trapping involved these. I remember my first weasel very well. Mullu had showed me how to set the trap by our chicken coop after one of them had got in one night and killed three hens. He gave me one of his steel traps, baited it with the head of a partridge he'd shot, and placed it on the front step of the coop. Next morning I found the pure white varmint (except for a black tip on its tail) caught by one leg and struggling to get away from the chain. Somehow when I tried to club it to death it got out of the trap and instead of running away, it ran toward me and began to climb my leg before I brushed it off and stomped on it. They're ferocious little devils even though less than a foot long and he actually scared me. I caught a number of them, but never liked the job of skinning them, scraping the hides, and tacking them to the wall of the barn. Holding those tacks in bitter cold was a miserable task. Then I graduated to mink trapping. Brown in summer but black in winter, mink live near water, along streams or at the edge of lakes. We had to scout along the shore, looking for the parallel tracks with a line between them where their tails dragged until we found their burrows or dens among rocks. I used a sardine for bait but did not place trap. Usually there was a "way" or path leading to their den and I made an off-shoot path leading to a circle of rocks with one entrance, put the trap in the path and the sardine beyond it, always covering the trap with on the a few leaves or a sprinkling of new snow, and hiding the chain that was fastened to a strong bush. Mink aren't very wary so I caught five or six of them before I quit. I remember the last one I caught along the shore of the little creek that flows out of Beaver Dam Swamp into Lake Tioga. When I first saw him he was motionless, but suddenly all hell broke loose. He suddenly contorted his body, thrashed around violently, heaving his flanks and making gut- tural noises as he chewed at his leg furiously. I had to club his head repeatedly with my hatchet before he died. Though I got six dollars for the skin, I just couldn't trap another one. When, shamefacedly, I confided my distress to Pete Half Shoes, he told me the old Indians never used steel traps. They got their skins by using deadfalls which killed the animals instantly. When I asked Pete if he would show me how to make one, he took me over to Mud Lake and made two of them, one for a mink and the other for a pine marten whose tracks we had discovered en route. Martens are mainly tree dwellers while mink like the water, but both feed on about the same prey The deadfall he made for mink consisted of a large flat stone weigh- ing at least thirty pounds. This was propped up on one end by a curious set of three sticks arranged so that they resembled the figure 4. The longest stick went under the rock, and the bait, the head of a partridge he'd shot, was wired on its inner end. When the animal tried to bite it off, the whole thing collapsed, the big rock fell down upon the animal and killed it immediately. Pete tried it several times and it worked well. Pete also made a similar deadfall near the base of a tree where we'd seen the marten tracks, but because there were no big rocks around there, he used a heavy log instead and shot a red squirrel to serve as bait. As he blazed a trail on our return so I'd be sure to find both of them, he told me I had to check them both every day. Well, I did and caught a mink the second day, but never caught the marten. I understand they have a wide range. Though it was very interesting, I never made another dead- fall myself, mainly because I wasn't strong enough to carry such big rocks or logs. Using steel traps was cruel, but much easier. About November the rooms in our High School usually had the faint aroma of skunk and so did most of the boys who trapped them. Skunks were very easy to trap. All you had to do was to follow their tracks to the den and set the trap baited with a rabbit's head or sardine or cheese beside it. Often breaking an egg yolk over the bait seemed to help. My trapping of skunks was minimal because I hated having to kill or skin them. It just seemed impossible to do so without getting polluted and then you had to bury your clothes in the garden for a few days before tak- ing them to your reluctant mother to wash. Now, I understand they soak them in tomato juice, but we rarely had it in our home. No tomatoes ever ripened in the U.P. I trapped only two of them, one a bugger that kept prowling around our chicken coop and the other for Aunt Lizzie who had a skunk that made a den under her house. I didn't skin that one, but she paid me five dollars for catching it-but only after I had carried it far away and promised to trap any other one free of charge. Once I went with Mullu and his father as they checked their trapline, a task that took almost a whole day. It was spring and we col- lected three muskrats, two beaver, and a red fox. Two other traps were empty, three were sprung, and one had a squirrel in it. Somehow it seemed to be a hard way to make a living. Not Before Breakfast t had been a hard day for Pierre LaFont and Jacques Broussard and a very hot day, too. They were section hands repairing the railroad track near Clowry, east of Tioga. That morning they had put in a new rail near the bridge over the Escanaba and all afternoon had been spent digging up old railroad ties and replacing them with new ones. After the last one, they lay down to rest because they still had to pump the handcar eight miles back to the depot. "I don' know bout you, Jacques, mon ami," said Pierre, "but me, I got so beeg a thirst I could drink Lac Superior." "Oui," replied Jacques, wiping his brow with a big red bandanna handkerchief, "Wot you say we go saloon tonight? Me, I can't wait for Saturday, non." They agreed to do so, but for one reason or another were not able to get to Higley's until eleven, only one hour before closing time. They did their best and downed two pitchers of beer, but were still thirsty when Higley rang "What you say, Pierre, we buy four bottles beer and lak old times go build fire by creek. "Oui, ze bouche (mouth) she is still dry," said Pierre, so that is what they did. Neither particularly wanted to get drunk because they knew they had more hard labor coming the next day and, moreover, both had wives waiting at home for them. So they made a bargain. When either one of them began to see two moons instead of one, they would quit and go home to bed. Long ago in Tioga when I was a boy the men often spoke of two moon drinking sprees. the gong. Well, they had a fine time there by the fire singing the old French songs and telling of their youthful escapades until finally Jacques said, tree. WHAM! Down went that deer. Broke his neck. Dead as an old tama- rack in the swamp. That was all. Slimber took another snort of his beer. There was utter silence until the little salesman said, "Sir, I have only one question. How come you didn't break your own neck?" Then he picked up his sample case and fled into the night. For a moment there was absolute silence before all the men hollered, "Yah??? Yah, Slimber? How come you didn't break yer own neck?" Slimber didn't bat an eye. "Well, boys, it was like this..“
Hunting
No account of how we lived in Tioga seventy or eighty years ago would be complete without a description of hunting. It was a major part our lives. Nowadays a sport, back then it was much more. Few of us could afford store bought meat and the snows and ice were too deep to get the fish we had all summer. No, we needed the game we shot to make it through the winter. The household that didn't have fifty jars of canned venison or rabbit on its shelves or the car- cass of a deer in the shed or barn was doomed to long months of eating potatoes, rutabagas and beans. A boy learned to hunt as soon as he was able to go into the woods alone, or even before that. We started by shooting chipmunks, rats and birds with our slingshots, then with our BB guns. I got my first Daisy air rifle at the age of six, my first 22 calibre rifle at ten, my first shotgun at fourteen. All of these were single shot guns because my father felt that I would become a better shot if I knew I had to make that first bullet count. Moreover, shells were very expensive and my father insisted I use my own money to buy them, As a result I learned to aim very carefully and became pretty good at it. I never used anything but the air rifle for target shooting, but whenever I missed with the rifle or shotgun I went back to the air rifle to practice. So powerful was this early training that even as an adult when I bought repeating shotguns and rifles I rarely shot more than one bullet. Game was very plentiful in the U.P. at the turn of the century mainly because there were so few people and because the logging of the great white pine forest had opened up the woods to provide lots of second growth timber. One day I went up with my father to make a call at the millionaire McCormick's resort on White Deer Lake and counted 42 deer on the way up and 31 on the return trip. Of course we were in a horse and buggy, but even so, to see that many on a trip that was only about 24 miles both ways shows how numerous they were. They invaded our yards and ate our apples every fall. Partridge killed themselves by flying into the fence of our chicken yard every October, the month of the Mad Moon. Rabbits plundered our gardens. Every pond held some ducks or an occasional goose. Oddly we never hunted anything but rabbits with dogs. No, that's not quite true. We once had a mongrel that Dad used in partridge hunting a few years. The mutt couldn't point them or retrieve but he sure could bark whenever he spotted one and then the partridge would fly up on the limb of a nearby tree and wait there looking at the dog until Dad shot it. I had a white horse called Billy that was almost as good as having a pointer or set- ter because he saw them in the thickets along an old logging trail better than I could and would stop and stay firm while I shot it from his back. But usually I hunted on foot along streams that had both young and mature poplars on their banks, walking slowly and quietly until I heard one clucking as they usually did before taking off in thunderous flight. Never was there time to take aim, I just pointed the gun, made a quick snap shot and got so good at it I rarely missed except when a partridge flew directly toward me and over my head. Oddly much later when I hunted pheasants in Lower Michigan I had a terrible time hitting them. They flew so much more slowly. Only when I finally learned to aim at the bird rather than leading them was I successful. I found ducks easy to shoot on the wing, especially the mallards, but rarely was I able to down a blue winged teal. They just flew so fast. My father, on the other hand, was a whiz with them and shot many on the ponds of Beaver Dam Swamp. But again I never was very successful with woodcock or snipe, both of which would leap into the air explosively and zigzag upwards and be gone in an instant. Some people said they had a corkscrew flight, but I never saw much of a consistent spiral. I think I only shot two or three of either of them in all the years I hunted and since their breasts had only about four ounces of meat, I gave up the quest. Our major quarry of course was deer. Deer season back then started on the first of November and lasted the whole month. Each hunter could shoot two bucks but no does legally but some violations occurred through- out the year. We shot extra ones for the poor families who hadn't been able to fill their licenses or whose men were away in the lumber the winter. No stigma was attached to such violations and the game war- camps for dens were viewed as our enemies. Every year someone got caught, paid his fine or went to jail. That's just the way it was, the gamble we took. Our people needed the meat. It was as simple as that. It had been that way since the earliest times. Sieur La Tour, the old- est man in the village, who settled in Tioga long before the mines opened or the railroad came, told me what the deep pits were along the east shore of Lake Tioga "They were deer pits," he said. "Back then most of the deer migrated south in winter and a major runway, almost a foot deep passed there. Shells were hard to come by and the Indians taught us how to dig those pits, drive in stakes and sharpen their ends, then cover the pits with loose branches and stuff. The deer would break through the covering, skewer themselves on the stakes and couldn't get out. He also told me that when the first railroad came, people would cut sections from the telegraph lines and use the wire as deer snares on the runways. "We had to have meat," La Tour said. For all of us boys in Tioga there were two rites of passage into adult- hood: getting your first pair of long pants and shooting your first deer. At fifteen when I shot my first one, a little spikehorn by the old charcoal kilns north of town, I really felt that I had become a man. I killed it with a shotgun, using a cut birdshot shell. My father, I think, was delighted, but he gave me hell. "You can ruin a shotgun that way," he said, but the next day he bought me my first rifle and didn't even mention that deer season was still a week away. So important was deer season that High School boys were excused from classes just as they were for potato digging in September. All over the U.P. there was the yearly exodus to deer camp. Some of our men hunt- ed near town but most had built a cabin, a camp, in the forest where deer were more plentiful. Rarely did they own the land. They just found a like- ly spot, cut the logs, took a stove apart and hauled it up there in their packsacks. Most of these hunting camps were small, except when groups of men hunted together. Our own was a big one, about twenty by fifteen feet, with such a short door someone always banged his head on entering, but it had four bunks big enough for each to sleep two men. Because I have already described the joyful days in deer tales of Old Napoleon and To My Grandson in other Northwoods Readers I shall not repeat myself here. Suffice it to say that my experiences in deer camp were some of the best I've ever had in a long life. Wonderful as it was to roam the forest, intensely alert, reading the animal tracks, enjoying the contours of the snow and the sounds of a snapped twig or the creak of a sliver cat (two trees rubbing together) the best part was the camaraderie. Man talk, freedom from jobs and chores and wives and chil- dren, poker and whiskey after supper and the yell of "Daylight in the Swamp" before dawn. Gargantuan meals, lots of laughter and lies and practical jokes. Somehow I never could explain to my wife how much meant to me. Although I usually shot my buck and sometimes another for the camp deer or friend, that was not at all important. Often I felt I was carrying on an ancient tradition stemming all the way back to our primi- tive ancestors who were hunters, too. I write this on November 14th, the day before deer season opens. I camp in my shall not be able to go north again to the Old Cabin, to walk the trails and look for deer. I shall not sit by the fire listening to my friends telling their tales of the day's hunt, for they are dead, as soon I too shall be. But I have my memories.
Games
When I last visited Tioga I was again impressed by the changes that had occurred in that little village. The whitewashed log cabins were all gone; so were the barns and chicken yards and fences. The lawns were neatly mowed and the houses painted. No cows or horses roamed the streets. But the thing that struck me most was the absence of children at play. Where were they? Not in school, because it was July. Were they inside their homes watching television? In the early years of this century our hill street constantly swarmed with kids of all ages having a fine old time. An old friend suggested that the children were there, but there were not as many of them now, because people had smaller families or that perhaps they were down at the beach swimming in Lake Tioga. "I think you'll see more of them playing after supper," he said. That made sense. Those delightfully long summer evenings in the U.P. when it doesn't become dark until after ten were when our chores were done and we could play. I left my old home now owned by my sister and first walked south to visit Mt. Baldy where my Grampa Gage and I had acted out our fantasies so often and where we kids had built shacks and rolled the great boulders down the north slope. I found no evidence of any recent child activities there. Retracing my steps I passed Sliding Rock where countless of my playmates had worn a fine sheen on their pants sliding. It was very weathered and no longer smooth. No kids around. Then I walked up the street past where Flynn's store had been, past Easy Street and Aunt Lizzie's house to the level field that once had been the site of the iron mine. Once that field had been our baseball dia- mond. Now it held only little spruce trees and brush. Making Maple Syrup was remembering about making maple syrup today because I saw a squirrel licking an icicle from a broken branch of a maple tree. As a boy those sap icicles were the sure sign of spring and sometimes we even broke maple branches on the trees so they would form. Not that the taste was very sweet, but there was enough hint of sugar to keep us licking. So I chased off the squirrel and tasted it too. Our maple syrup making was pretty primitive compared with the commercial processes today. First we made our spiles by hollowing out sections of elderberry branches, reaming them with a piece of telephone wire or round file, whittling the end of it so it would fit in the tree hole and notching its end to hold the pail or can in which we collected the sap. Then we drilled a hole in the maple tree with an auger, going into the tree about two inches. Usually we hung only one pail or can on a tree and drilled the hole about three feet above the spot where a big root emerged from the trunk because that produced the most sap. Also we usually drilled the hole on the south side of the tree. A few maples were "good milkers" and in them we hung buckets on the east and west sides as well. Boiling the sap down into syrup was usually done on the kitchen stoves of Tioga, but my mother said no. I'd done it one season and that summer the flies on the ceiling of her kitchen were horrendous, probably because the vapor from the boiling sap had condensed there. So I used the range in my father's old hospital. Lord, the wood it took to get any syrup at all.With a ratio of 40 gal- lons of sap to one of syrup I think the most of the latter I ever got in one season was about four gallons, and these were then canned in mason jars and put in our cellar for pancakes to come. My father preferred cornmeal pancakes; my mother wheat, and I liked buckwheat ones, especially those made from dough that had risen overnight. A bit sour tasting, but that just made a fine contrast to the maple syrup. Hauling all that sap from the maple grove behind my father's hospi- tal could be a chore when two feet of snow still lingered under the big trees. I recall getting up in the darkness to gather it, although the night run of sap was never copious. After school, though, the pails were full and the hard lugging took again to dark. That and the gathering of wood for the fire. I'd fire up in the morning just before going to school, again at lunch, again after school and finally just before I went to bed. I still don't know why I found syrup making so fascinating when it meant such hard work, but even after I became a professor I still made syrup year after year and I think I still have a quart of it down in the basement, one with a big sugar crystal inside it. We boiled the sap in a large open kettle, skimming off the crud that came to the surface now and then, stirring it with a large wooden spoon and tasting it interminably as it gradually thickened. Since we liked our maple syrup much thicker than the watery stuff you can buy now, we had to be very vigilant as the boiling reached its climax. That moment of truth! If you waited too long you'd have a caramel caked mess in the ket- tle, almost impossible to scrape out. We never used a thermometer, just our tongues and eyes. When you threw a ladle of the almost finished syrup on the snow and it immediately thickened to make our favorite U.P. candy, maple wax, the batch was done. A neighbor, Mr. Rohr, made his syrup differently. Early every spring when the sap was flowing, he'd cut down a lot of big maple trees and strip them of their bark and he boiled that bark in a big iron kettle suspended from a wooden tripod over an open fire. I've tasted it and it was very sweet, but it was also black as tar and my folks threw away the jar he gave them. To0 strong a flavor, even when you put it on a piece of sliced and salted raw potato. I don't know why we always ate them that way in sap making season, but we did. Vitamins after the long winter, or just the contrast of salt and sweet? Frost is predicted tonight so I guess I'll go out and break a maple branch so I can have another sap icicle. The Happy Undertaker he happiest man in Tioga was our undertaker, Lars Stenrud. Always smiling, joking or singing except when doing his funeral duties, he was just fun to be around. Everyone liked the jolly fat man in red suspenders and bright yellow lumberjack shirt. They loved the way his belly shook when he laughed out loud or was just react- ing to some hid den merriment of his own. That happened sometimes even when he was helping in a funeral service, though he always wore a black suit then and an appropriately long face. Lars had a thousand jokes, all of them enhanced by his broad Swedish accent, for he had come to this country as a young man after serving two apprenticeships in Sweden: carpentry and embalming. Be- cause our people in Tioga were a healthy lot, Lars was an undertaker only part time, only when needed. An excellent carpenter and woodworker, he not only built his own coffins but also houses and barns, cupboards and tables, whatever, and when at work he was always singing. Mostly Swedish songs they were, but folks said they'd heard him singing "Oh the worms crawl out/ and the worms crawl in/ and they crawl all over your mouth and chin" while he was hammering out one of his coffins in the back rooms of Callahan's store where he had his body shop. I saw that shop, or rather funeral parlor, only once when my mother sent me down to Callahan's store to buy some korpua and hardtack which wasn't available at Flynn's store uptown. We were to have important com- pany from Down Below and she liked to surprise them with Upper Peninsula foods: pasties, saffron bread and such. We kids always enjoyed seeing those visitors tackling a piece of black hardtack with their dessert
Fishing
Our diet in Tioga in the old days varied with the seasons although always we ate potatoes, onions, turnips and rutabagas throughout the year. Winter meant meat and summer meant fish and berries. Fortunately the lakes and streams were full of fish of many varieties and we caught them with hook and line, with nets, and occasionally by dynamiting. Early in the spring suck- ers were our quarry because then they ran up the streams from the lakes to spawn. Though full of fine bones, at that time of year their flesh was hard and sweet. Many were canned or marinated, processes that softened the bones. Northern pike also ran up the rivers in the spring and every bridge held several fishermen angling for them with chubs or shiners for bait. Many of these were dried and smoked before hanging them in the sheds or summer kitchens. After being cleaned, they were salted thoroughly, laid on the slats of the shelves of the smokehouse so they wouldn't get soggy, and kept there for about five days to be dried and smoked. We had no hickory in the U.P. so used oak chips and bark when available or willow when they were not. These chips were set afire in a big cast iron pot or on the dirt floor and tended so that the building was full of smoke for about five more days or until a brown crust covered the fish. It was a lot of work and often sev- eral families would pool their fish for the smoking. Pike, walleyes, and lake trout were the ones most often smoked, The smokehouse was usually a crude structure of logs and only partially chinked so that the smoke could emerge between the logs, Some Finns used their saunas as smoke- houses. When prepared for eating, the fish were sometimes soaked overnight to get rid of the salt and then parboiled or just eaten as they were. Many households had marinating barrels holding fish of all sorts, even chubs and shiners, rough fish that we usually used only as bait. I don't know what spices were used, but I recall the smell of vinegar. Never ate any myself. Most of our northern pike were caught in summer by trolling for them along the north shore of Lake Tioga or around the islands using very large spinners with red feathers on them. We rowed the boat slowly and used a very heavy line and sinker. The line was coiled in the bottom of the boat and when a fish struck it was hauled in hand over hand and clubbed when we hauled them over the side, for they thrashed around violently. Many were very large fish, weighing ten pounds or more. Old man Elvis fished for them almost every summer day of his life, arising before dawn but always quitting by ten o'clock. You could set your watch by Old man Elvis. In the dog days of August, however, he quit at eight o'clock, saying the pike had sore teeth and didn't bite very good. We always wondered how he knew. Lake Tioga held a lot of big walleyes too, but they tended to bite best after dark, so I rarely fished for them even though they were wonderful eating. Several times though, Mullu and Fisheye and I would camp out overnight at the old concrete dam where the Huron River runs out of the lake, build a fire, and fish all night between naps and korpua. Walleyes did not put up much of a fight. A few of our lakes contained large mouth bass, but few of us ever fished for them, considering them unfit to eat and too hard to scale and clean. Once my father and I caught fifteen of them one afternoon in Splatterdog Lake and had to bury them in the garden because none of our neighbors would accept any of them. That didn't hold true for bullheads though. Their flesh was very white and tasty. Like walleyes, they bit best at night, so we boys would build a campfire along the edge of a slough just upstream from the bridge over the river, string about five hooks on a trotline, tie on a stone, then throw it far out into the water and wait and wait, until the line had quiv- ered five times. That meant each hook had a bullhead on it so we'd haul it in, re-bait with more worms and heave it in again. Most were about ten inches long, but one I caught was twelve inches. You had to be careful taking the bullheads off the hooks because they could inflict a nasty wound with their horns. I once had a wound that took five days to heal. When cleaning them, we'd nail their heads to a barn door before stripping the entrails, but at least there was no need to scale them. We did little ice fishing because of the amount of labor involved when the snow was four feet deep on the lakes and the ice underneath was three more. Blue ice, it was; hard ice. Mullu, Fisheye and I tried once, but gave up before we ever hit water. I never sawa fish shanty on Lake Tioga. Indeed the only time we fished in the winter was when men made ice for their icehouses. Several men and a horse and sleigh would go down to the lake, clear off the snow and, with a one man crosscut, saw the big squares and have the horse skid them onto the sleigh. When they were finished, we would go down to the opening and fish for lawyers using red- worms from the innards of a manure pile for bait. Lawyers are land-locked codfish with a long fin running along their upper back. They were very easy to catch, didn't fight at all, and froze instantly when thrown on the ice. Sometimes we'd come back with a sled stacked with them like cordwood. They were excellent food, but my moth- er always hated to fry them because even when thawed and cut into chunks the pieces would jump reflexively in the pan. But such fish were secondary. Trout fishing came first. Of all fish, they were the most delectable and we never tired of eating them or fish- ing for them. Salmon fontanalis, brook trout, trout of the springs. To catch them we sought the coldest waters that flowed through the most beautiful parts of the forest where every rapid and pool was a visual delight. In 1905 when I was born, the daily limit on brook trout was fifty and they had to be seven inches long. I never had the heart to catch that limit nor even to fill my wicker creel as my father always did. Often I filed off the barb of my fly so I could release them without harm. It was enough just to see them leap out of the water to take it on the way down. Sometimes when I'm hurting and cannot sleep, I wade the pools and rapids where I have caught them and the remembrance is almost real. Because of the new roads along the streams I knew so well, there are only a few brook trout left and I no longer fish for them. Except in my dreams. In 1937, the year after I married Milove and introduced her to the joys of fly fishing for trout, we explored a lot of the U.P so she could know its enchantments too. After spending a wonderful night on the Grand Sable dunes near Grand Marais, I drove her to the Two Hearted River northwest of Newberry. She too had read Hemingway's story of the blissful time Nick had experienced fishing that stream. Neither of us then knew that it was the Fox River, not the Two Hearted, that he had described. The road in was terrible, just a two rut lane through the forest, but near the mouth of the stream we found a good place to put up our little tent before flyfishing. It was so windy it was very difficult to cast a fly and the trout weren't rising. Nevertheless, she caught three small ones, enough for supper, while I had been thoroughly skunked. So I left her and waded upstream, finding a good pool shaded by a big maple tree whose lower branches almost touched the water. There a larger trout was feeding on some large bugs falling from the tree. I couldn't see what they were, but guessed they might be bees, so I tied a McGinty which resembles a bee, on my leader and prepared to make the cast. It was apparent that the only way I could put the fly under those branches above the big trout was to make a perfect side rolling cast. It's a tough one to make because the line comes back to you in a circle before it shoots outward. Knowing that I'd have just one chance, I backed downstream a little way and practiced that difficult cast until I had a reasonable chance of making it under those maple branches where the big trout continued to feed. OK. One more trial and then I'll go after him. Alas, I never did. A sudden gust of strong wind on that last practice cast buried the fly in the cartilage of my nose. I couldn't unhook it so I cut it off the leader and felt like a fool when I returned to my wife to ask for help. She laughed when she saw me and even kept giggling as she tried to work the McGinty loose. "You're beautiful, Cully," she said. "I like you with that ornament in your nose. You ought to wear it more often." But she stopped giggling when she found she couldn't get it out. And when I got some pliers from the car and asked her to use them, she refused. So I had her fit the pliers to the hook and tried to yank it out myself. Three times I tried and the pain was so terrible the tears came to my eyes. "I've got to go to town to get help," I told my new wife. She insisted on coming with me. So I drove in to Newberry and inquired about a doctor. The man at the filling station laughed as he told me to phone the county nurse. "I have a fly in my nose. . .," I began. "Well, why don't you swat it?" she replied and hung up. When I told my wife what she'd said, the unfeeling wench started giggling again. Finally I found where a doctor lived. When I knocked at his door, his wife appeared and grinned widely as she told me he was out fishing, but should return fairly soon because by that time it was getting dark. Then he came, took one look, laughed, shot some novocaine into the nose and cut out the fly. When I paid him he said, "You damned fool. Serves you right, trying to flyfish in this wind and using a McGinty that big, for God's sake. Next time use a number sixteen." Fishing isn't always fun.
Slimber Has a Wild Ride
It was seven thirty that night when the regulars gath- ered in Higley's saloon to spend a few hours nursing their beers and telling tales. Pete Half Shoes was in the corner of his booth, the card game hadn't started, and most of the men stood at the long polished bar joking and laughing. Higley filled a mug from the spigot of the big beer barrel, wiped his hands on his apron, then slid it along the top so it would stop directly in front of the man who had ordered it. Higley was good and knew it. Sometimes a man would take his place at the very end of the bar just to see if Higley could slide his mug right to him. Higley always did. This evening the men were talking fishing and hunting stuff and Lafe Bodine, the best poacher in Tioga, had just finished telling how he'd outwitted the game warden by changing the straps on his snowshoes so his tracks would look like he was goi north. All his listeners had heard the tale before, but they acted as though they hadn't. That was the custom. Another custom was that you never appeared to doubt any tale told by a fisherman or hunter-no mat- ter how outrageous the story. No, you just said, "Yah" and never with an upward inflection. Always "Yah" but never "Yah?" Lafe was saying, "I never paid a fine nor spent me a night in jail for poaching." That we knew was true. Lafe had made a monkey out of every game warden who ever came to Tioga. "Well, I wish I could say the same," said another man at the bar. "The game warden he catched me once and they put me in the pokey fora month. Took my rifle too." "How did he catch you?" asked the man next to him. "Oh, Father Hassell squealed on me, but it was my own dumb fault. It was September and we were sick of fish and wanted red meat, so I thought to shoot me a deer in the woods back of Keystone Hill. Well, one afternoon I was walking down the old right of way of the Northwestern Railroad tracks back of the Catholic Church when a big buck comes out of the brush right in front of me. So I let him have it. One shot and I'd got him. Then what to do? I couldn't drag him back through town in broad daylight and I couldn't leave him there. Too many people walk them tracks. Well, I should have drug him back into the woods by Mt. Baldy but that would of meant too much extra dragging when I come after him that night. So instead, I figured it best to hide him in the women's part of south when actually he was going the church outhouse. "There's a lot of spruce trees between the church and that there out- house and I knew nobody would be using it, not being Sunday, so I stuffed him in there. But the only way I could fit him in was to sit him on top of one of the holes. Looked kind of funny seeing that buck looking as though he's taking a crap." The man paused to take a big gulp of his beer. "Well, how did they find out?" someone asked. "From what I hear tell, Sylvie Vautrain, Father Hassel's ugly house- keeper, went out back to do her duty and found that buck sitting on the hole and run back to tell the priest. Hadn't figured on that happening, dumb me. Father Hassell, he got mad and tells the game warden and he was waiting for me when I come that night to drag it home. So that's how I got caught." "Yah," said the men in unison. "Yah," echoed a a little salesman sitting at the end of the bar. With his sample case beside him, he was passing the time until the next train arrived. Others told of their poaching exploits and then the conversation turned to other things. "I seen an albino deer once," someone said. "Pure white, he was, and he had pink eyes just like that Sleeman kid. What makes them albinos, anyway?" No one knew, but some remembered the albino wolf that used to hang around the Haysheds Dam, the one that Eric Sippola killed before he himself died "I shot an albino partridge, once," Pete Ramos offered casually. When no one said "Yah" he felt he had to add something. "Yes, that pat was whiter than a leghorn chicken ." Henri Poule, an old French Canadian trapper, rarely spoke, but this time he did. "Non, non. Zat was a ptarmi- gan. Lots of zem I see when I spend two year trapping up by ze Hudson Bay. Lots in Canada up zere." Then came stories of freak animals. One man told of a beaver he'd caught that had no tail. Another claimed that he'd once landed a brook trout with two heads, one above the other. A pause occurred before the "yah's" were heard on that one. The lies were beginning. "I shot two deer with one shot," one man claimed. "Buck and a doe standing side by side. Hit the buck back of shoulder and bullet went through and got the doe in same place. One shot, two deer. "Yah." "Could be," remarked Pete Fant. He was the man who claimed he'd sailed all around the world and wrestled with the crocodiles in the Zambesi River of Brazil, when we all knew he'd been no farther than Green Bay. A liar, but a second rate one. "I once shot a big buck," he said "and when I went over to see it, I couldn't find where I'd hit him. No wound. No blood. Then I seen I'd hit him right in one eye and the bullet come out of the other." Pete didn't even get a single "Yah." Slimber Jim Vester could stand it no longer. Slimber was Tioga's treasure, the best liar in the whole U.P. His tales were told for years in our town, the tales of the giant mosquitoes, how he crossed a heron with a duck, how he taught a frog to jump, his tale of the three legged chickens. There on the wall behind the bar was Mustamaya, the great trout he claimed to have caught with a posthole digger. When Slimber spoke, everyone listened. "Boys," he said, assuming his saintly look and stroking his white beard, "I don't doubt a word of anything you've been telling me and know I've a repertation for telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, swelp me. I've a mind to tell you about something happened to me when I was a young man but I'm afeared you'll think I was lying. Anybody wants to buy an old man another beer?" Several of the men put down their money on the bar. "Well," Slimber drawled after taking a huge gulp of the beer, "I was a young buck myself back then, strong as a horse too. Could bend a horse- shoe with my bare hands. Well, one day I was out deer hunting out of sea- son up in them old beaver meadows by Bulldog Creek. Tall grass there, waist high, and there were deer trails everywhere. So I sank down besides one of them waiting, and sure enough along comes a big ten point- er. Big as a horse he looked. Well I aimed at his head to save the meat and down he went, kerplunk. I was a good shot them days. Well, I went over to see it and the buck was dead all right, just twitching a little, so I straddled him, took out my knife and began to cut his throat. Lots of hair there but, when I finally draw a little blood, up jumps that damned buck with me atop him." Slimber filled and lit his pipe to help the Somebody bought him another beer noo suspense. Well, there I was, hanging on to his antlers for dear life as he takes off across the marsh to the tall timber, running like hell, and I'd lost my knife in the commotion. A what you call it, a perdicament? He didn't buck at all like a colt that's not been broke, but just kept running fast. What a ride that was. I see what happened. He'd lowered his head just as I shot and my bullet had knocked off part of one antler and just stunned him. I thought of jumping off his back 'cause his backbone was sure ahurting my crotch, but then he might turn and gore me.' Slimber lit his pipe again. "Go on, go on, what happened?" one man shouted. "It come to me that maybe I might jump off, holding his antlers and break his neck like old man Charon did to that buck he killed on Donegal's hill, but I wasn't sure I could do it so I just kept on riding him. I seen that I could steer him a little by turning his head. A deer always goes where his nose is pointed. "Well, at last he run out of the swamp and up the hill and I knows I had to do something right away so I steered the bugger into a big pine tree. WHAM! Down went that deer. Broke his neck. Dead as an old tama- rack in the swamp. That was all. Slimber took another snort of his beer. There was utter silence until the little salesman said, "Sir, I have only one question. How come you didn't break your own neck?" Then he picked up his sample case and fled into the night For a moment there was absolute silence before all the men hollered, "Yah??? Yah, Slimber? How come you didn't break yer own neck?" Slimber didn't bat an eye. "Well, boys, it was like this.
APIL FOOL ON YOU, EMIL
In our little forest village of Tioga, April Fools Day was taken seriously, almost religiously. All day long you had to catch someone else and avoid being caught. Even the little kids would go to the window and cry out, "Hey ma, there's a robin. Come see!" though there were still patches of snow on the ground and the maple trees were just beginning to fill the sap buckets on their waists. Hell, the crows had just started to come back No one loved the day more than Emil Olsen, our town's practical joker. All year long he was always pulling some trick on someone. Why once he even greased the grave digger's shovel and laughed uproariously when the clods stuck to it instead of covering the casket. But April Fool was his day of days and his favorite victim was Eino Tuomi, his best friend and neighbor. Every year when the evening mail was being "disturbed" (distributed) in our little post office, Emil would be there in the anteroom telling all the tricks he'd played on Eino that day. "Oh, for stupid! Oh, for dumb! Eino, he fall for any- thing I do!" And then he'd tell how he put a horsehair in his pipe or salt in his sugar bowl, or glued the pages of the Sears Roebuck catalog together in his outhouse and nailed his barn boots to the floor. And more. Oddly enough, Eino never resented the tricks. He just said patiently, "You crazy, Emil. You nuts!" But I'd better tell you something about these two characters so you can understand and appreciate how Emil finally got his comeuppance. Both had been hard ore drillers and had worked together for many years in the Oliver Iron Mining Company's deep Tioga mine until it suddenly shut down. Evidently the management had robbed the supporting pillars of ore that held up the overburden a bit too much. Anyway one afternoon when I was playing in the sideyard, a monstrous roar occurred, our new cement sidewalk cracked, and the house shook. A great cloud of dust obscured the sun. "Cave in! Cave in!" All the people along our street streamed out of their houses and started running toward safety for they knew that the whole west end of town had been undermined. However, as things turned out, only an area about the size of a city block had collapsed but what a huge gaping hole remained. For years, we kids used to go gingerly to the edge of that hundred foot deep pit and wonder where the two men lay who had been buried in it. Anyway, the mine shut down never to reopen and Eino and Emil were too old to hunt for work elsewhere so they stayed, eking out a precarious existence on tiny pensions and their own hard work. Perhaps an account of how they managed it will show you how our people survived hard times. After the mine closed, Eino and Emil moved into two log cabins that had been abandoned. They were well built, snug structures of square hewn logs, warm in winter and cool in summer and they sat side by side across the street from the cave-in pit. Eino always had two old chairs in his front yard and it was there that the two old men would sit on a summer's day smoking their corncob pipes and arguing. Always arguing. Why they'd even argue about which bird would fly off the telephone line first. Eino, the Finn, was a small but wiry man with a soft voice but Emil, the Swede, was a huge fellow with a voice like a bull. You could hear him bellowing all the way from Flinn's store. At first, I thought they were mad at each other, but instead, they were great friends, almost inseparable. They had evolved a symbiotic way of living that really worked. Eino had a barn behind his house and kept a cow; Emil had a chickenhouse and a big garden full of potatoes, rutabagas and cabbage which both helped till. They shared everything and we never saw one without the other. Why, when Eino's cow had to be serviced by Mr. Sulu's bull, they both held the rope that led it, almost hand in hand. Didn't bother them a bit when the usual bystander made the usual bawdy remarks about their mission. (I always hated thatjob when I had to take Rosie, our Jersey cow, to the Sulu's bull. It was interesting once I got there, but oh, how everybody kidded me along the route. "Wassa matter, Cully? Why you no do it yourself?" (Stuff like that) So they had milk and butter and eggs and occasionally they stewed a tough old rooster all day and night on the kitchen stove. Or if the gods were good, they had real meat from a young steer they'd raised instead of the usual illicit venison. Once Eino traded a calf for two of Delong's young pigs but the bear got them before they could be butchered. Besides berries, the only fresh fruit they ate were apples they had picked from a tree at one of the abandoned houses. And they had fish, of course, fresh trout or pike in the summer and smoked or marinated for the long white of winter. They didn't fish much with hook or line for the trout though. Instead, as they showed me once, they'd take a stick of dynamite, a blasting cap, and length of white fuse, put it on a raft in a promising beaver dam, light the fuse and run like hell. Then they'd scoop up all the trout, suckers and chubs, put them in gunny sacks and dump them uneleaned, guts and all, into the marinating barrels in their cellars. Almost every family in town had dynamite after the mine closed. Very useful in making a new outhouse hole or getting rid of a big stump. We kids used to have fun throwing chunks of ore at a blasting cap trying to get it to go off until once one did and Nicky Johnson lost an arm. For the necessaries, the two old men had to have some biting money and that came from odd jobs or the thirty dollars pension checks that came to them each month. I was up at M.C. Flinn's store once when they came there to have the checks cashed. Emil, who Could neither read nor write, always got red faced when he had to put his mark (X) on the check and when Mr. Flinn wrote "Emil Olsen, his mark. M.C. Flinn, storekeeper" under it. They always bought the same stuff: a pail of Peerless smoking tobacco, two dozen circular discs of black rye hardtack, a bag of korpua (a dried toast flavored with cinnamon), coffee, sugar and salt, a chunk of salt pork, and a half slab of bacon. Once a year they bought a sack of flour and some baking soda for their pancakes. Like all of us, they made their own maple syrup, so all in all they ate well and lived well. Nobody thought of them as being poor, nor did they. On the afternoon of the last day of March one year, I had been selling copies of Grit up and down the street to my regular customers and somehow had an extra copy left, so I thought I'd give it to Eino who could read fine. I'd done that before and was always rewarded by having them tell me stories of mining in the old days or hearing them argue over something in the magazine. I could hear them hard at it by the time I got to Flinn's store. With a brace and bit, Eino was drilling a hole in the telephone post beside his house and Emil was giving him hell. "Oh, for dumb!" he was yelling. "You no get any sap from telephone pole. It dead wood. It got no roots. Eino, you crazy dumb!" The little Finn was not bothered at all. "Oh, yah, I get sap. Best sweet sap. More sweet than maple tree give." "No!" roared Emil. "Look, dummy. Hole is dry. Pole is It no give sap, stupid! Oh, for dumb!" Eino, unperturbed, took a length of elderberry stalk out of his pocket, slit it in half, scraped out the pith to make a little trough, hammered the spike into the hole and hung a pail from it. "Sure, Emil," he said. "No sap now. It come at night. You see in morning I get pail full." They were still arguing when I left, but I heard Eino say, "I make pancakes tomorrow for new syrup. You come eat my house, Emil. Bring eggs. I got sour milk." According to the way Eino told the tale at the post office that next evening, on his way to breakfast, Emil had stopped at the telephone pole, put a finger first in the sap pail and then in his mouth. His face red with fury, he charged to the chair where Eino was sitting. "You sunabits, Eino, you peed in sap can. I going bust you in nose!" Eino didn't get up. "Apil Fool, Emil! Apil Fool. Old Eino, he not so dumb!" spruce, dead spruce.
Cawely
Camp Foolishness
(Come to think of it that's a dandy name for any deer camp.)
Deer hunting, as we all know by now, is serious business. One must always stay wide awake and on his toes, for who knows when that big buck might come crashing out of the swamp. Come to think of it, one can only be legally in the woods 10 hours out of a day. That leaves 14 hours out of a day to relax and prepare for tomorrows hunt. After all, who in their right mind would expect you to stay at full alert all day long? Witness if you will, hunters during these hours as they attempt to improve not only the skills required of them as hunters, but also improve themselves, in order that they may become better campmates.
Jamie started it off at 8:00 with a 4 pt. corn-fed buck shot right in the base of the neck. The buck came from the "Pink Carpet" to "The Ditch Stand." Jamie had a 20 yd. shot and the buck just flew over backwards and was a goner. This is Jamies' first buck shot with a rifle so he's a happy Willard. Adam shot a doe right in the heart at 25 yds. This is the first full-size deer he has shot. He played it smart and let the doe walk by him and when she looked away-Adam greased her. He may want to remember that technique on any future dates. He gutted the deer himself so he's on his own from now on. He made a nice shot on a nice doe. Bill shot a beautiful even-racked 8 pt. at 7:00. It was fol- lowing four do es and had already run out of luck as it went by Jamie at 30 yards but the Rat hadn't put a shell in the cham- ber so he just practiced aiming and the buck ran past Dad. The buck had a 13 and 5/8" inside spread and Bill figures on having it mounted to go on his wall with the big buck he shot with the bow a few years back Darrell, Garf, Norb, and Al all missed bucks today. Darrell missed a one-horn buck, Norb missed a spike, Garf missed a spike, and Al missed a spike. We all screwed up one way or another. Snowy, windy, and miserable all day. Some of us stuck it out until 3:30 or so but the deer weren't moving unless some- one kicked them out. Day 2 Rod shot a spike today. It may have been a 6 pt. but its horns were all busted up and it only had parts of the main tines left. He shot it about 9:00 after another guy had jumped it and missed it three times. The buck was running by Rod and then it turned and ran right at him and he kilt it right on the logging road. Adam popped times and we won't have conclusive results on where and how many times he hit it until after the autopsy. Let's just say it took some mighty fine shooting to hit a target that small. It was tough shooting too because the fawn kept hiding behind twigs and it really got tough as some of those twigs had a leaf or two left on them. 10:15 a.m. Garf shot an 8 pt. that came along the east side of the pothole. He had a few shooting openings and then the buck stopped behind some trees. He took one step out and Garf shot him through both front shoulders. He dropped on the spot. Unusual items: The deer was bigger than the one Garf shot last year and it didn't have a ribbon on it. It didn't blow out of the truck and he used 40 lb. test line instead of 10 lb. test to troll for muskies. It was not easily confused with a squirrel. An autopsy later revealed the buck was shot in the neck not the front shoulders-Garf's sight must have been off-right? 7:15 a.m. - John D. Polack shot a 7 pt. It was the 18th deer he saw. It came from the east down the hill. He hit it the first shot, missed the second, and probably missed the third. He took the top of the heart off and blew up the lungs. The buck ran about 30 yards and slowed to a walk and then dropped. 10:00 a.m. Bill shot a 5-1/16 point that he saw laying in its bed. It may have been there all morning as the blankets were all messed up and its dirty underwear were still at the bottom of the bed. Bill hit him straight on in the neck and the buck just went back to sleep. Deer seen 30. Unusual items. The buck had a golf-ball size tumor on the inside of its left back leg. There was an alarm clock in its bed and a Hustler magazine. The deer Darrell shot was a credit to Darrell's keen eye- sight and is a serious threat to Garf's record for the camp bambette. It's a good thing the snowshoe bunnies are turning white now so Darrell could tell this was a deer. Josh dragged it out but he said it hardly touched the ground when he pulled it. This deer was so small we call it our "Dangerfield" deer cause it don't get no respect. This deer was so small when we hung it on the pole the sag went out of the pole. This deer was so small only chickadees came to the gutpile. This deer was so small we field-dressed it with a finger-nail clipper. This deer was so small we'll have to cook it in a micro wave. This deer was so small it dragged faster uphill than it did down- hill. This deer was so small Darrell could be arrested for in- fanticide. This deer was so small Darrell had to take its dia- per off to field- dress it. This deer was so small it never turned a leaf or left a trail when Josh dragged it out. This deer was so small a squirrel was following it with lust on his mind. This deer was so small when Rod butchered it he had to cut half- minute steaks. This deer was so small we cut it in half to get two quarters. And finally, this deer was so small even Garf thought it was small. Garf, Adam, Bill, Jamie, Eric, Rod, and Al here today. Up and out early today and made two drives on our land. Drove the front half first and Bill shot a big dog coyote down by the beaver dam. It ran by him just as Bill came over the knob by "Partridge Rock." Drove the back half and kicked some deer out. We could have shot plenty of does this morning but didn't. There was a deer bedded down again today where Al and Jamie shot their does. They seem to like that spot. Day 4 Garf and Darrell relinquished their rights to claim the small- est deer ever shot up here. Adam now holds that record. He has a 11½ to 42 scope and he says he had it on 4½ when he shot the deer. I guess we can be glad he didn't have a 9 power or we would have had to put a tag on a squirrel. As it is we aren't too sure if we tagged a squirrel or not. Oink-Oink! Al the Hoople shot two bucks at 8:30 this morn- ing. They were traveling together. His first shot dropped the lead buck in his tracks and the second buck jumped back a few bounds. Hoople shot again and the buck tottered out of sight. Al went and called Garf and John and two bucks were in the bag. Speed-gut record also set as Al gutted both bucks in a total of 13 minutes including travel time between them. One didn't get past Josh. Some guys will do anything to get their name in the camp journal. Josh said "It's a fawn and I'm proud of it." Jamie and Adam went over to see it and did see it-as soon as they brushed a couple of leaves aside. John and Al went over to see it and did see it-as soon as they lifted Josh's gloves off it. It was a twin to the one Rod shot in the bow season-although I think this one was the premature twin. A little smaller and it would have been a miscarriage. Day 5 The weatherman finally got a forecast right. That's the good news. The bad news is that the forecast was for RAIN!!! It started raining at 6:30 a.m. and rained until 1:00 p.m. Even with that we did pretty good. Bill shot a 3½ point at 7:23. It came up alongside him about 10 yards away and walked by him and then he dropped it. All he saw at first was a horn moving along like a puppet on a string. Hugh shot a "perfect" spike at 7:00 on the dot. He had seen it well before he shot but wasn't sure it was a buck or doe. We drove the Dumpling Lake knob and the slashings and found a dead 6 point. The buck had been dead for quite awhile-at least a couple of weeks. Tomorrow we plan on propping up the dead buck we found and seeing how many goofy roadhunters stop and take a shot at it. Adam wrote in the journal without permission but he's for- given cause he was a little excited after winning 10 games of buck euchre. The boys stayed over last night so the spots are getting worn off the cards. They're all winning money so it's just like Las Vegas around here. Nobody ever goes to Vegas and loses-they all either win or break even. Early to bed as to- morrow we're going to fill that buck tag of Jim's Day 6- Turkey Day! Very windy-raw and cold. Drove Dumpling Lake, our land, and the flowages. Saw a lot of deer but wanted the boys to shoot so we passed on a few. Saw a bear walking in to the flowages to make a drive-almost everybody saw it except Hoople and Adam. Adam proceeded to get lost in the elbow. He put a lot of miles on but came out to the lake. He stayed put until he heard John yell for him and then he thought maybe John was lost too. They both got out and we're back at the shack with "lost" stories and "bear" stories flying around. Raining cats, dogs, pitchforks, horseapples, and anything else you can think of. Can't get to go-raining too hard. Fore- cast is for rain turning to snow today and winter storm watch for tomorrow. Some of the boys went road hunting and some went shopping. Big poker game today. Bill went out in the rain for about one hour. He jumped 3 big deer right behind Ed's place but couldn't tell what they were. Started to snow at 3:00 p.m. and windy. We feasted ona meal of turkey and all the goodies. One thing that should go on record is the fact we have yet to lose a man in camp due to starvation. Day 7 7:00-Drove the slashings-Rod let a doe and two fawns go by. Drove the land, Burroughs, Kelly's, and Winkie's till noon. Nada except John shot three times at an invincible fox (Reginald, Fleetfoot, HA, Fox). After lunch we drove behind Popple Knob. Bill got a wet hinder as he fell in-gun and all His backstroke needs a little polishing. Drove the slashing again-nothing. Getting late in the day and still need a doe and 3 bucks. Started a drive between the lakes and Rod stayed back at the bottom of the land. Boom Boom-Rod shot a "nice" doe going across the ice. Chuck "The Rifleman" Fleming tried to shoot a doe at 20 yards. Emptied his gun but no blood. Randy's doe was a "per- fect" doe. Hughie dulled all his knives gutting out deer to- day. Hunter's choice are filled and the day is done. It's Miller Time!!! Everybody is beat-most in bed by 8:30. Darrell won $9.00 from Dana playing "31" and in bed by 11:00. Six to twelve inches of snow forecast for tonight so we took the deer in and registered them. Back to the shack. Day 8-Saturday There's about 2 inches of heavy wet snow on the ground and it's falling steadily so it looks like the season could be over. We haven't filled Dana's hunter's choice tag but not because we couldn't. We just wanted to be able to hunt a little longer. Everyone is getting their stuff together and Norb is cooking up a big breakfast. Winter storm watch for to- night and tomorrow. Forecast is for 6-12 inches tonight so today may be our last day of fairly easy walking. There is over 15 inches of snow in the woods now and any more will make it rough going. Now the snow is powdery because of the cold. A mystery man dampened our porch last night from inside the screen door. Even Norb the party animal is ready to head home. Day 9 A BLIZZARD! Lots of snow falling and everybody up and packed and on the road home by 9:00. Left the shack dirty and will clean it up later in the week and this season is history. Rod and Bill are licking their wounds yet from last night. The rest of us didn't drinka drop. Another great year as we saw a ton of deer and our hunter success rate was 100% Can it get any better than this? The young boys will remember their early hunting years all their lives and hopefully turn into as great of guys as their dads and their hunting buddies are.
Plan your days hunt to keep the sun on your back
Hufford
CHAPTER 36
AMERICAN GINSENG AND THE IDEA OF THE COMMONS
Mary Hufford
The view from the Sundial Tavern
The Sundial Tavern, known up and down Coal River as "Kenny and Martha's," is a mom-and-pop-style beer joint on Route 3, in Sundial, West Virginia, just north of Naoma. Retired coal miner Kenny Pettry and his wife, Martha, now in their sixties, have been the proprietors for nearly thirty years. The bar's modest facade belies the often uproarious vitality of its evenings. On weekend nights the music of Hank Williams, Bill Monroe, and Dolly Parton flows from the jukebox to mingle with the haze of cigarettes, the clangor of pinball, the crack and clatter of pool, and the jocular talk and teasing of friends from neighboring hollows and coal camps Like many taverns, the Sundial Tavern is a dynamic museum of local history, its walls covered with photographs, artifacts, and trophies that register local perspectives on national events, the triumphs of patrons, and the passing of eras. Among the items displayed are photos of Dolly Parton (who is Martha's second cousin), an ingenious trigger-and-funnel mechanism for planting corn, and a souvenir present struggle of the United Mine Workers of John Flynn, a beloved science writer and forest advocate, deemed one of the three best pool players on Coal River. He spent many nights here talking, sympathizing, arguing, joking, and shooting pool. He died in March of 1996 and is buried not far from Sundial in his family cemetery on Rock Creek, the hollow he was born in fifty-seven years ago. Tucked into the display on the wall behind the bar is a set of framed and laminated leaves. Most people would be hard put to identify this specimen, but for many of the tavern's regular patrons it represents an extraordinary trophy and object of desire: the stalk from a rare six-prong ginseng plant, Panax quinquefolia Above the large specimen is a lesser but still remarkable five-prong. The display speaks to the high status accorded to ginseng in life and thought on Coal River. Diggers call it "seng," and on Coal River the passion for seng runs deep. In 1994, the most recent year for which figures are available, the state of West Virginia exported 18,698 dry pounds of wild ginseng root from its fifty-five counties. Though ginseng grows wild throughout the Mountain State, more than half of the wild harvest came from eight contiguous counties in the state's southwestern corner (Kanawha, Boone, Fayette, Raleigh, McDowell, Wyoming, Mingo, and Logan). "It's always been like that," said Bob Whipkey, who monitors the export of ginseng for the state's Division of Forestry. "There are more diggers there because of the culture, People there grow up gathering herbs and digging roots." Because of wild ginseng's limited range and extraordinary value (diggers are averaging $450 per pound for the dried wild root), the federal government has been monitoring the export of ginseng (both wild and cultivated) since 1978. Of nineteen states authorized to export wild ginseng, West Virginia came in second, behind Kentucky, which certified 52,993 pounds. Tennessee came in third, with 17,997 pounds. In 1994 these three contiguous states certified more than half of the 178,111 pounds of wild ginseng reported among nineteen states.
The commons
There is a story in these figures of a vernacular cultural domain that transcends state boundaries. Anchoring this domain is a geographical space, a de facto commons roughly congruent with two physiographic regions recognized in national discourse. One is the coal fields underlying the ginseng, most of which are controlled by absentee landholders. The other is the mixed mesophytic forest, known among ecologists as the world's blologically richest temperate-zone hardwood system. This multi-layered region is increasingly the focus of debates pitting the short-term economic value of coal and timber against the long-term value of a diverse forest system and topography. Because the Social and cultural significance of the geographical commons is unrecognized in national discourse, it is particularly at risk. As Beverly Brown points out in writing about the rural working class in the Pacific Northwest, the widespread loss of access to the geographical commons occurs in tandem with a shrinking civic "commons." This loss of access is one effect of the increasing privatization and enclosure of land that for generations has been used as commons. Rural populations with uncertain employment have typically relied on gardening, hunting, and gathering for getting through hard times. Over the past decade, processes of gentrification, preservation, and intensified extraction of timber and minerals have eliminated the commons in which communities have for generations exercised fructuary rights. However, this exercise is motivated by something that goes beyond the prospect of economic gain. Ginseng provides a case in point. Dollar for pound, ginseng is probably the most valuable renewable resource on the central Appalachian plateaus. A linchpin in the seasonal round of foraging, ginsenging is also essential to a way of life. "Td rather ginseng than eat," said Dennis Dickens, eighty-five, of Peach Tree Creek "Every spare minute I had was spent a-ginsenging "If you can't go ginsenging." said Carla Pettry, thirty, of Horse Creek, "it totally drives you crazy. Ginseng's etymology and economic value both come from China and neighboring countries, where the root has long been prized for conferring longevity and vigor of all sorts on its users. The term ginseng is an Americanization of the Chinese jin-chen, meaning "manlike." The Latin term Panax quinquefolia alludes to the five whorled leaves on each branch and the plant's function as a panacea. The active ingredients in the leshy, humanoid root are ginsenocides, chemical compounds celebrated for their capacity both to stimulate and soothe. Whether ginsenocides in fact warrant such claims is a matter of continuing controversy among scientists and physicians." According to Randy Halstead, a Boone County buyer, "stress rings," which give the wild root its market value, are linked with a higher concentration of ginsenocides. Nearly impossible to reproduce in cultivation, stress rings are produced as the root pushes through soil just compact enough to provide the right amount of resistance. The ancient, humus-laden soils in the mixed mesophytic forests of Tennessee, Kentucky, and southern West Virginia are ginseng's ideal medlum. "The most prolific spreads of wild ginseng." writes Val Hardacre, in Woodland Nuggets of Gold, "were found in the region touched by the Allegheny Plateau and the secluded coves of the Cumberland Plateau." Through centuries of interaction with this valuable and elusive plant, residents of the plateaus have created a rich and elaborate culture, a culture of the commons.
Historical background
The history of human interaction with ginseng lurks in the language of the land. Look at a detailed almost any portion of the region and ginseng is registered somewhere, often in association with the deeper, moister places: Seng Branch (Fayette County), Sang Camp Creek (Logan County), Ginseng (Wyoming County), Seng Creek (Boone County), Three-Prong Holler (Raleigh). The hollows, deep dendritic fissures created over eons by water cutting through the ancient table land to form tributaries of the Coal River, receive water from lesser depressions that ripple the as "coves" (shallower, amphitheater-shaped depressions), "swags" (steeper depressions, "swagged" on both sides), and "drains" (natural channels through which water flows out of the swag or cove). The prime locations for ginseng are found on the north-facing, "wet" sides of these depressions. "Once in a while you'll find some on the ridges," said Denny Christian, "but not like in the swags there." "You just go in the darker coves," said Wesley Scarbrough, twenty-five, who grew up on Clear Fork, "where it just shadows the ground so it'll be rich for ginseng Occupying higher and drier ground are sandstone "camping rocks," formed on the bottoms of ancient seas. These natural ledges have sheltered people hunting and gathering in the mountains since prehistoric times, and during centuries of corn-woodland-pastureland agriculture such ledges sheltered stock as well. Named by early settlers who came to stay, sites like Jake Rock, John Rock, Turkey Rock, Crane Rock, and Charlie Rock served as bases for ginsenging expeditions. "My granddad and all them used to go and lay out for weeks, ginsenging." said Kenny Pettry. "A rock they stayed at, they called it the Crane Rock, and they stayed back in under that. They'd be gone for weeks ginsenging "Did you ever hear tell of Charlie Rock?" asked Woody Boggs, of Pettry Bottom. "That's a famous place" "Ive camped out many a night under Charlie Rock," said Randy Sprouse, of Sundial. "People used to live under Charlie Rock two or three months at a time, camp out and dig ginseng. map of These depressions are distinguished in local parlance The harvesting of ginseng (as well as other wild plants) flourished within a system of corn-woodland - pastureland farming. Crucial to this system was recourse to a vast, forested commons rising away from the settled hollows. Though nineteenth-century patriarchs like "Mountain Perry" Jarrell homesteaded portions of it, the mostly unsettled higher-elevation ridges and slopes supplied the community with essential materials and staples: wood for fires, barns, fences, homes, and tools; coal for fuel; rich soil for growing corn, beans, and orchards; nuts, herbs, mushrooms, berries, and game; an open range for hogs and cattle; and spaces for anonymous stills. Because of the abundant supply of tree fodder (wild nuts and fruit), the central Appalachian plateau in the nineteenth century furnished some of the best pastureland in the country. A seasonal round of plying the commons is registered in many of the names for swags and coves: Walnut Hollow, Paw- Paw Hollow, Beech Hollow, Red Root Hollow, Sugar Camp Hollow, and so forth. During the turbulent early decades of industry the suppressed civic commons survived in lofty thickets where miners met in secret to organize the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). As practice and concept, the commons is ancient, predating the idea of private property, which began exerting pressure on local commons in England at the time of the Norman Conquest Since then history has been marked by recurrent efforts to enclose the commons for use by wealthy non-local interests. In England the social and environmental effects of such use included irreversible deforestation, degradation of soils and water, homelessness, and the emergence of the world's first industrial working class. What happened in the late nineteenth century on Coal River and throughout the plateaus may be viewed as an episode in the continuing history of transnational appropriation and enclosure of the commons. Throughout central Appalachia, newly formed land companies surreptitiously subverted the system of the commons, taking out deeds on its unclaimed portions, offering small amounts of money and the right to continue using the surface resources in exchange for mineral rights. Hence, despite the flurry of "quit clain deeds" and "deeds in ejectment" on record for the early decades of the century, the condition of exile imposed on some people by those transactions has only gradually been realized. In the aggregate, whatever the terms of individual transactions, access to the land for fructuary uses like hunting, gathering, and farming has tempered the negative effects of corporate domination over the past century Before the development of a wage-labor economy, ginseng was the most reliable source of cash income on Coal River. "The whole economy was built up around ginseng." said Quentin Barrett, of Beckley. "They had a few eggs and chickens, but most of it was the whole crew would go out and hunt ginseng in the fall" "That's all my grandma used to do, years ago, shed ginseng" recalled Shelby Estep, who now ginsengs with her daughter and granddaughter on Coal River Mountain. "That's the way she bought the kids clothes, She had twelve. Around the export of ginseng a class of entrepreneurs emerged who would buy the ginseng from diggers and get it to the metropolitan centers to trade for goods that could not be produced locally. In 1871 Quentin Barrett's grandfather, R. E. Barrett, began trading merchandise for ginseng from his store on Dry Creek. "Just about his only Source of cash was from ginseng sales," said Bob Daniel, R. E. Barrett's great-grandson. "The people would come out of the hollows in the fall and sell him their ginseng and they would buy their shoes and salt and staples and so forth and he in turn sold it to exporters in New York or a broker, and that sent some cash dollars back here." Fortunes and political careers were built on ginseng in the nineteenth century. Daniel Boone on a bad day lost two tons of the root when the barge carrying it sank in the Ohio River. Ginseng money helped build the fortune of John Jacob Astor as well as the political career of an early senator from California, according to a ginseng tale" told by Quentin Barrett "There was an old man at Madison, over on Little Coal River" said Barrett, speaking of his great-grandfather "His name was Griffin Stallings. And he was a wheeler and dealer. He was wealthy. So he puts up a store at Whitesville and he buys all the seng at Whitesville, and he buys all the seng at Madison and puts up another store somewhere toward Logan up in the head of Pond Fork "So he buys all the seng coming and going. So come fall, he's ready to ship it. How do you get your seng to market? Only place you could sell it, really a big bunch, was Philadelphia or Cincinnati or someplace like that. So he loads up his hired man, the wagons, and takes all the seng down to Huntington, puts him on a boat. The hired man was supposed to take all this seng, a year's supply of seng and sell it and bring the money back. He never saw the hired man again. He never got it back" "Well, after the Civil War was over, he had a boy (Joel), and the boy was a high-ranking man in the Confederate army and so his son ran for office. Along about that time, he got elected, he goes to Washington. And the first man he run into was a senator from California, and that senator from California was the hired man whod left with his daddy's ginseng! " During the first half of the twentieth century, ginseng continued to infuse cash into the scrip-driven economy of the coal camps. "My dad was a coal miner when the union was organizing," said Randy Halstead. "He was involved in that, so a lot of times he was out of work. So you send ten children to school, and working now and then, you had to make money whatever way you could. We would dig ginseng to buy our school clothes and buy our books so we could go back to school in the fall." In the coal boom of the 1990s, when the coal industry no longer depends much on a resident population, many roads leading into the commons have been gated off. Ginseng nonetheless contributes a vital piece to an economic patchwork that includes recurrent outmigration to find temporary employment, odd jobs, fishing. flea-market work, and raising produce. "Ginseng's getting rare because so many people's out of work and so many people's digging it," said Randy Sprouse, who was himself unemployed at the time. Joe Williams, who ginsengs with Randy, disagreed. "Td say most of the people that ginseng are people that works. They just love to ginseng. I miss work to go ginsenging." "What do you like about it that you'd miss work for it?" I asked him. "Well, it's really something to finda big old stalk of seng. That's what you're looking for. Five prongs. If youd ever get into it, you'd like it" Stalking the Wily Seng Though in biological terms ginseng is properly flora, in the ginsengers' world it behaves like fauna. Ginseng is not merely "harvested," it is "hunted," and rare six-, seven-, and eight-prong specimens are coveted like twelve-point bucks.
There is an agency assigned to ginseng unparalleled among the many plants valued on Coal River. "It hides away from man with seeming intelligence," wrote Arthur Harding in a 1908 manual for diggers and cultivators. You never know where you're going to find ginseng," said Ernie Scarbrough, of Rock Creek Seng is a verb as well as a noun. "I senged in there, and senged in there, and senged in there," reported Cuba Wiley, of Peytona, "and I didn't find any" In stories about ginseng the plant appears unbidden, almost like a quarry sneaking up on its stalker. "I was standing there looking around," said David Bailey, of Stickney, "and there was a big four-prong brushing my britches legs before I looked down and saw it." "Now a lot of times," said Joe Williams, "you'll walk up, be standing there, and look right down at your feet and it'll be there. Ginseng's uniqueness is much vaunted. "It's the most beautiful plant in the woods, said Randy Halstead. "Especially when it changes its color and it's got the seed on it." In spring ginng sends up a stem that branches into stalks, each terminating ina cluster of five toothed leaflets. The older the root, the more stalks, or "prongs," it sends up.5 A cluster of yellow-green flowers, scented like lilies of the valley, appears in spring and matures through the summer into the bright red "pod of berries" that ginseng diggers look for in fall. In late September ginseng begins to turn an opalescent yellow, utterly distinctive to diggers. "That is a different color to any other yellow," said Dennis Dickens. "You can spot that. On a warm day in September photographer Lyntha Eiler and I are clambering around on the near- perpendicular slopes of Tom's Hollow near Whitesville. Joe Williams, of Leevale, selected this site because it contained poplar and sassafras growing on the "wet side" of the mountain. "You don't find it where oaks are at, he says. He peers out through the columns of maples, hickories, sourwood, black gum, walnut, poplar, and sassafras, searching for brilliant red berries and the distinctive yellow of ginseng. Slung over Williams's shoulder is a bag for carrying ginseng, and in his hand he carries a "seng hoe. Seng hoes are essentially double-bladed mattocks modified to serve as walking sticks. You cannot purchase one. On Coal River seng hoes are produced by recycling implements made for other purposes. Taken as a collection, seng hoes register in concentrated form a pool of experiential knowledge attached to the commons. "They used to take old mine picks when they'd wear out and cut them off at the blacksmith shop," said Mae Bongalis, eighty, of Naoma. "They make a good one." Herman Williams, of Clear Fork, has adapted a fire poker for use as a seng hoe. Ben Burnside's is made, like his father's, from a modified automobile spring. A popular model generally has an axe blade for cutting and a mattock blade for digging. Its long handle serves as a walking stick and a weapon to be wielded in self-defense against copperheads and rattlesnakes. "It's real light," said Shorty Bongalis. "Something you can carry through the woods." "It's light," said Randy Sprouse, "to beat the weeds." Brandishing his seng hoe, Williams calls out in jest, "Here Mr. Four- Prong!" Ginseng is notoriously unpredictable. It does not send upa stalk every year.1 Added to this is the appetite for ginseng shared by deer, pheasants, groundhogs, squirrels, and other small birds and mammals which consume stalks and berries. unwittingly conserving the plant both by hiding the roots and serving as agents of dispersal. Thus theories of where to look for this scemingly peripatetic plant flourish. "Everybody's got a different way of fishing," said Randy Halstead. "You know: 'My bait works." Vernon Williams sengs in "the roughest, wildest, snakiest places" he can find. Denny Christian looks around "sugar trees" (Acer saccharum) and black walnut. "If you look under the right tree," said Ernie Scarbrough, "you might find a stalk of I go for yet, ginsenging...sugar maples and black gum, whenever you can find one. And the hickories Squirrels is in the hickories, and they eat the ripe ginseng berries. So it makes a lot of ginseng around the hickories." There's trees Ginseng orders the landscape around itself, providing a basis for identifying related flora. Look- alike plants like sarsaparilla and cohosh have been given nicknames líke "fool's seng" "he-seng" and "seng pointer. "The reason why they call it 'seng pointer," said Randy Halstead, "it's got three branches, one goes this way, one this and one goes straight out this way, and the old people would say that one would be pointing towards the ginseng plant. Of course it probably is somewhere within a hundred miles out in front of it, but that's how that got started. They like the same kind of a place to grow. Halstead said experienced deal ers can tell which county a root came from because differences in soil conditions produce roots that are bulby like pearl onions, or elongated like carrots. "Now in this area we have dark, richer, loose soil, and the ginseng grows longer, like a carrot. But you get into some of the neighboring counties with clay soil, it's real bulby because the ginseng can't push down into the dirt Dealers can also tell at a glance whether a root is "wild" or "tame" "Wild" seng exhibits "stress rings" from pushing through wild soils. "Loosening the soil causes the roots to grow rapidly," explained Randy Halstead "What makes the roots valuable is the ringiness, the rings that's on the ginseng." Pausing for breath in Tom's Hollow, Joe Williams finds a four-prong, topped with a "pod of berries." Flailing away at its base he discovers to his chagrin that someone else has already taken the root, adhering to the local practice of replanting the stalk attached to the dog-legged rhizome pocked with stem scars. That's called the curl," says Williams, carefully reinstating it. "I usually put maybe two joints of it back It's a better way of keeping it going than the berries...I'll come back here some year and get another root way off of that. Other strategies for conserving ginseng include scattering seeds where ginseng is known to grow, snipping the tops off of "five-leaves" and "two-prongs" so that less scrupulous diggers won't find them until they are bigger in future years, and transplanting young plants to sites closer to home where they can be monitored.7 Many residents on Coal River propagate wild patches of ginseng in the woods surrounding their homes. "We didn't exactly cultivate it," said Dave Bailey. "See our back porch went up to here, and then up here was the woods. Me and my brother, we just got some of it and we set it, to see if it would come up next year, and when it did, it accumulated and accumulated, and whenever I got married and left, why the whole back of that hill was ginseng Left to its own devices, ginseng simply sheds the seeds for gravity to deliver downslope. Consequently, one mode of tracking ginseng is to look uphill from any "five-leaves" or immature plants for the big progenitor. “I have done that many a time," said Dave Bailey. "You go up the hill, you come to a little flat area and if there's any seng growing there you always look above it for a big one." Giles the Seng Man One of the more famous buyers who infused cash into the economy during the boom-and-bust period of coal was "Giles the Seng Man." Diggers generally sell ginseng to centers that recycle scrap metal and broker other non-woody forest products like moss, mayapple, bloodroot, cohosh, and golden seal. During the thirties, forties, and fifties much of the ginseng on Marsh Fork was bought by "Giles the Seng Man," remembered for his woolly aspect and bibbed overalls and his annual trek along the roads tracing the tributaries of the Coal River's Marsh Fork "There used to be a gentleman," Denny Christian said. "Old Man Giles, they called him. The Seng Buyer. And he wore bibbed overhauls. Had no vehicle, no horse, nor nothing. He always come in a-walking Every fall he would make his rounds. And I'd senged that summer with my grandpa, and old man Giles, he came "He was a legend," said Jenny Bonds, quilting with the women who gather weekly on Drew's Creek "Nobody knows where that old man come from," said Mabel Brown. "And nobody knows where he went," Jenny finished. "He'd just walk by in his big old overhauls and strut, strut by. "Old Man Giles many a time come to our house," Dave Bailey remembered. "Hed keep change in his pocket. Wore overalls, had a gray beard and an old hat and here's the way he'd walk, you know" Here Bailey demonstrates Giles' inimitable strut. "He'd say 'Hubert, you got any seng?' And Dad would get wood all the time, go out in the woods, cut a little timber, if he found seng he'd dig it. Hed have a handful dry, maybe fifty cents worth. "Do you remember Giles the ginseng man?" I asked Dennis Dickens. "Tommy Giles?" said Dennis Dickens. "I remember him well. I used to sell to him. He was originally from Germany, I think. Someone told me that they got him as an alien and kept him in prison through the war. I know he wasn't around here through the war. He was a great big man, black beard, and he always walked Somebody'd stop and ask him, Want a ride Mr. Giles?... No, I'm in a hurry, I'll just walk Seng talk and ginseng tales Conjuring the commons For seng aficionados, the ongoing prospect of ginseng makes the mountains gleam with hidden treasure. "It's like catching a big fish," said Randy Halstead. "You're out here all day and you find this big fish, and you know it's everybody's desire to catch this big fish in the lake. You find this big enormous plant and everybody that's out there digging, this is the one that they'd like to find. So you get an adrenalin rush when you find them, and when you find a big one it's like showing off your daily catch. You bring it in and say, 'Look what I found today." "You can't get out and dig it for the money, said Joe Williams. "It's like looking for Easter eggs. You're always looking for the big one. If I found one eight ounces, I believe l'd quit." "The one that boy brought in up at Flats weighed a pound," said Randy Sprouse. "Td ike to have seen that one," said Williams. “It was a monster, Sprouse emphasized. "That's what you get out for." Williams mused. "Always looking for the big one On Coal River, ginseng plays a vital role in imagining and sustaining a culture of the commons. Among the means of keeping the commons alive is talk about ginseng: where to hunt It, its mysterious habits, the biggest specimens ever found, and the difficulties of wresting the treasure from an impossibly steep terrain shared by bears, copperheads, rattlesnakes, and yellow-jackets. The ability and authority to engage in this discourse is indeed hard won. Over generations of social construction in story and in practice, places on the commons accrue a dense, historical residue. Every wrinkle rippling the mountains has been named for people, flora, fauna, practices, and events both singular and recurrent: Beech Hollow, Ma Kelly Branch, Bear Wallow, Board Camp Hollow, and Old Field Hollow. "I guess there must have been a newground in there at one time," said Ben Burnside, of Rock Creek, alluding to the old-time practice of clearing woodland to grow corn and beans. Overlooking the valley from its giant tightly crimped rim, places like the Head of Hazy, Bolt Mountain, Kayford Mountain, the Cutting Box, Chestnut Hollow, and Sugar Camp anchor realities spun out in a conversation that Woody Boggs videotaped in Andrew, West Virginia. In one exchange, Cuba Wiley and Dave Bailey conjure and co-inhabit a terrain so steep that seng berries would roll from the ridge to the hardtop. "You know where the most seng is I ever found up in that country?" asked Cuba Wiley. "Im going to tell you where it was at. You won't believe it. "Chestnut Holler, I'll bet you," guessed Dave Bailey. "I found one of the awfullest patches of it, left-hand side of Chestnut Holler," Cuba continued. "I never seen such roots of seng in my life, buddy. And where I found all my seng, the good seng, come right this side of Clyde Montgomery's, and come down that first holler, and go up that holler and turn back to the right. Buddy it is steep. "Going toward the Cutting Box?" asked Dave Bailey, referring to a place named for a mining structure "I senged that through there," said Cuba, "from there to Stickney, and I have really found the seng in there. One time me and Gar Gobel was in there, and Clyde would start up the mountain, and we just kept finding little four-leaves, all the way up the mountain. "Gar says, 'Cuba, there's a big one somewhere. It seeded downhill We senged plumb to the top of the mountain, Cutting Box, got on top, and that old big nettleweed was that high, Gar had him a big stick, was hunting for the big one. Right on tip top the mountain, directly beneath them, it was about up to my belt, buddy. It didn't have such a big root on it, and I still wasn't satisfied. Gar, he dropped over the Cutting Box. and I still searched around up on top, parting the weeds, and directly, I found them about that high (indicates a height of about three feet], two of them right on top of the mountain. It was so steep, [the berries] rolled plumb down next to the hard road, buddy. I got more seng in there than any place I ever senged in that part of the country. It's steep, buddy." "It's rough too, ain't it?" said Dave Bailey "It's rough, buddy," Cuba agreed. "But I swear I dug some good seng in there, buddy. And I dug some good seng in Sugar Camp Cuba's amazing account reminds Woody Boggs of a tall tale he heard from his brother. "You remember that time Bud and French Turner was...up there sawing timber for Earl Hunter? Remember Bud telling you about that? He said he was sawing that big tree. Thought it was a buckeye. And stuff like tomatoes started hitting him in the head." "It was seng berries," laughed Dave. It was seng berries," Woody deadpanned. Said it was big as tomatoes," said Dave, still chuckling Boy, that was some stalk of seng," allowed Cuba, his eyes twinkling Such stories conjure the commons as a rich social imaginary. Through narrative the commons becomes a public space, its history played out before audieces who know intimately its spaces whether they have been there together or not. Inhabiting the commons through practice and narrative confers social identity and makes a community of its occupants. "I work in construction," wrote Dennis Price, forty, of Arnett, on a petition to document the cultural value of the mixed mesophytic forest. "But really I consider myself a ginsenger In the realm unfolded through ginseng stories and other tales of plying the woods, the commons becomes a proving ground on which attributes of courage, loyalty, belonging, stamina, wit, foolishness, stewardship, honesty, judgement, and luck are displayed and evaluated. Collective reflection on what it means to be a ginsenger gives rise to reflection on what in fact it means to be human. It is through such a process that the geographic commons nurtures a civic commons as a forum for consensus and dissent. Ginseng and the future of the commons "Understanding the commons and its role within the larger regional culture," writes Gary Snyder, "is one more step toward integrating ecology with economy."1 Environmental policy, focused too narrowly on physical resources, loses sight of the web of social relationships and processes in which those resources are embedded and made significant. "They're taking our dignity by destroying our forest," as Vernon Williams, of Peach Tree Creek, put it. Williams was referring to the landscapes taking shape on the plateaus during the present coal and timber boom. Since 1990 the state has permitted tens of thousands of acres in southern West Virginia for mountaintop removal and reclamation. Mountaintop removal is a method of mining that shears off the top of a mountain, allowing the efficient recovery of multiple seams of coal." When the "topped" mountains are rigorously reclaimed under the terms of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, the rich soils essential to ginseng and hardwood cove forests are gone, and with them the multigenerational achievement of the commons. What is missing in the environmental planning process is any recognition of the commons and its critical role in community life. Such recognition, not unusual in the countries of Europe, could reopen portions of the civic commons that is suppressed in environmental planning by an unwieldy and inaccessible of technical assessment. For instance, a slurry pond that fills the evacuated hollow of Shumate's Branch was permitted on the grounds that there were no endangered species, no historic artifacts (with the exception of a cemetery, which was relocated), and no prime farmland (despite a history of subsistence farming at least three generations deep). With that testimony, the commons specified in Cuba Wiley's narratives was quietly erased.20 cacs As vital cultural resources, ginseng, commons, and community life are inseparable, yet there are presently no means available for safeguarding that relationship. A standard recourse, declaring ginseng an endangered species, would clearly be culturally destructive, since it would make a vital cultural practice illegal. Wild ginseng in fact would seem to merit federal protection not because it is endangered but because within its limited range it is integral to the venerable social institution of the commons. Ginseng may be a powerful resource for resolving some very thorny dilemmas. A touchstone for economic, cultural, and environmental interests, ginseng provides a tangible link between ecology and economy. Given ginseng's predilection for native hardwood forest and rich soils, national recognition of its cultural value would be a way to begin safeguarding both a globally significant hardwood forest and the cultural landscape to which it belongs
