Big Dreams Read online

  At the county courthouse, I studied the gold that had bedeviled poor Fernando—mega-nuggets like asteroids—and in A. J. Bledsoe’s Indian Wars of the Northwest, I came upon an official telling of The Lost Cabin story that did not differ much from the version that Geneva Sanchez had performed for me.

  In Bledsoe’s rendering, an adventurous miner strikes it rich “in the foothills near the sea-shore” and buries his fortune by his cabin “on the northern Coast of California.” Some Indians attack him and believe that he’s dead, but they can’t find the treasure and burn the cabin down. The lucky miner regains consciousness—but he’s gone crazy! Somehow he makes it back to his hometown in the East, where, on his deathbed, he suddenly turns rational again. Summoning his friends, he gives them a detailed description of the cabin’s site, but, to this very day, the gold still has not been found!

  Yreka was not a corruption of Eureka, as I’d guessed. It was derived instead from an unidentified Indian tongue and probably meant “north mountain,” a reference to Mount Shasta, a volcanic cone that was the central landscape feature of Siskiyou County. At 14,612 feet, its peak was always snowcapped. It had a younger twin, Shastina, that had reached a height of 12,336 feet. All through the southern Cascades, there were such cones. The range had incurred more volcanic activity than any other part of the state, resulting in a dissected tableland of basaltic sheets, mudflows, and ash.

  Foothills were strung between Yreka and Shasta Valley, an area of about five hundred square miles. The valley’s eastern half was raw, rocky, and short of water, a scabby territory of sagebrush and volcanic debris, but its western half tolerated farming and ranching. Native grasses had once covered it, but the settlers had plowed them under to plant wheat. In time, livestock was introduced—horses for the mining camps, sheep, and cattle, both dairy and beef.

  Alfalfa was grown in Shasta Valley now, enough for three cuttings a year, and so was barley, all of it dry-farmed without any irrigation. Dairying didn’t matter much anymore, but there was still some wheat. The cattle grazing in pastures were usually beef cattle, either Herefords or Aberdeen Angus, and I passed small herds of them as I made my way, slowly, toward Alturas.

  THE CATTLEMAN’S CLUB IN GRENADA, in Shasta Valley, was established in 1917. The building didn’t look that old, any more than it looked like a private club. What it looked like, really, was a roadhouse where a man could get a decent burger and a cold beer on a warm afternoon in early May. The jukebox was playing some Randy Travis, and when the bartender brought my Bud and asked if I wanted a glass, I knew instinctively that the correct answer was “No.”

  The bartender, Jim, conducted himself convivially. He was new to the job and hoped that it wouldn’t last forever. By trade, he was a millworker, he said, but his union, the International Woodworkers of America (IWA), had been on strike against Roseburg Forest Products, which operated a mill in nearby Weed, for about four months. The strike was mainly over wages and benefits. Jim had run through his savings and needed some cash to pay his rent.

  Roseburg was a huge corporation, he told me, one of the largest in the timber industry. Its home offices were in Oregon.

  A couple of Shasta Valley cowboys were sitting to my right. They were working men in dirty jeans and scuffed boots, and they carried on a muted conversation, parceling out their sentences with deliberate care, as if an auction-yard foreman of the English language might hold them to account for anything they uttered. Chuck Pearce, who was sitting on my left, had no such fear. For him, talk was like breath, a gusher compounded of gossip, anecdotes, jokes, and opinions.

  Although Pearce had no ties to Roseburg, he still had strong feelings about the strike. It had crippled the economy in Weed so badly that he couldn’t sell his mobile home there and move to Blythe for the bass fishing, as he wanted to do.

  “When I can’t catch a fish, I just hook some old girl in the ass,” he remarked with a wink, reaching over to give his wife, Juanita, a sexy pinch.

  Pearce was definitely a ladies’ man. At the age of seventy-two, he kept his stomach flat and his figure trim. If a song he liked came on the jukebox, he hopped up and danced to it alone, hooking his fingers through the loops of his jeans. Juanita watched him with bemused affection. She was a Cherokee about fifteen years younger than her husband, but he was her wayward boy.

  He poked me with an elbow after one of his dances and whispered, “There’d be no damn divorce courts if all the women were like her.”

  He knew whereof he spoke. Juanita was his third wife. They’d been together for twenty years, while his other marriages had lasted eleven and six years respectively. Pearce had a thing about numbers. He believed in their potency and proved it by taking off his straw cowboy hat and showing me how he’d written the date of purchase on the sweatband. He’d bought the hat in La Paz, Mexico, on a fishing trip.

  Pearce was from Madisonville, Kentucky, but he’d earned his fortune in the Golden State like the Argonauts before him. The army sent him to California, and when he finished serving, he opened a dry-cleaning business in Chula Vista, south of San Diego, in 1946. The navy threw him a contract to clean its uniforms, and soon he was pushing sailor blues through his shop at a blizzard clip, running the machines around the clock.

  He had retired to Weed in 1981 to be closer to his sons. One of them, a contractor, was even more successful than he had been, Pearce claimed.

  “That boy’s got a house with nine bedrooms,” he informed me, counting away. “He owns thirteen cars.”

  Jim had the Weed Press-Herald with him and pointed out two ads that Roseburg had placed. They were there to hurt the strikers, he thought.

  In a full-page ad, the company had printed some tables indicating that the average Roseburg worker in Weed earned $32,096 a year, which was a heap of money in a poor town. Jim felt that the statistic was misleading because it included such extras as health and unemployment insurance, workers’ comp, social security, pension benefits, and vacation and holiday pay. The figure for regular wages was only $19,106.

  “If we were really making $32,096,” he asked, “would we be out on strike for four months?”

  One line in the ad went, “These yearly earnings are equal to or certainly better than our competitors and are certainly better than other jobs in this community.”

  There was a time in the lumber trade, I was told, when small, independently held firms had treated their employees as family, seeing to everything from their housing to the schooling of their children, but that time had passed. Now corporate giants ruled the forests of California—Weyerhaeuser, Georgia-Pacific, Louisiana-Pacific, Roseburg—and they were strictly profit-driven. Often they depended on clear-cutting, a practice that the California Forestry Handbook, a government publication, describes as “a drastic treatment.” Clear-cuts reduce the forest cover so much that soil damage can result, unless appropriate erosion control procedures are undertaken.

  A Waylon Jennings tune started playing, and Chuck Pearce hopped up to do his unique, personal-type dance. He wanted me to join him and Juanita on an excursion to The Dugout, a bar over in Black Butte, but I had an intuition that The Dugout was only a stop on a caravan that might roll on for hours, so instead I escaped into the fine spring day and pushed on toward Weed, hoping to get there before evening.

  WHEN ABNER WEED, a former soldier from Maine who was at Appomattox with Robert E. Lee, came to California in 1869, about 17 percent of the landmass was given over to forests. The most prominent tree species were fir, redwood, Douglas fir, and pine. The Spaniards and the Mexicans had mostly ignored the resource, and it was only when some ambitious Americans took matters in hand that an embryonic timber industry started to develop.

  In 1834, J. B. R. Cooper built a water-powered sawmill on the Russian River, in Sonoma County. Within the next decade, there were mills at nearby Bodega Bay and in Santa Cruz, south of San Francisco. In 1848, James Marshall, a carpenter, built a sawmill for John Sutter on the South Fork of the American River, not far from Sa
cramento—a mill that became the most notorious in history when flecks of gold were seen flashing in its tailrace.

  The Gold Rush sparked a big increase in the demand for lumber. Miners needed wood for sluices, flumes, dams, and cabins. By the time Weed headed for the Siskiyous, the finest, most accessible redwoods and pines had been cut, but the forests were so rich that the harvesting had scarcely affected them.

  The pressure accelerated, though, as loggers on the eastern seaboard laid waste to the last virgin stands of white pine. Timber companies began exporting lumberjacks and materials to strip the western forests, sometimes breaking down an entire mill, loading it onto a ship, and sending it around Cape Horn. There were few restrictions in the timber business then, and blocks of trees could be bought reasonably from homesteaders, who’d been deeded them by the government.

  The forests in Siskiyou County where Abner Weed established his Weed Lumber Company had some towering groves of Douglas fir. The tree grows in every western state, and it was destined to replace white pine in terms of importance and would eventually account for about one-quarter of all the standing saw timber in the country.

  A Scottish botanist, David Douglas, had identified the trees while on a scouting trip in the United States for the Royal Horticultural Society. He was astounded by their size—one tree he measured was 227 feet long and 48 feet around—but the size also worked against his attempt to gather specimen seeds. He couldn’t fell a fir with his hatchet or hit any of the high-up cones with his buckshot.

  Douglas fir proved to be ideal for lumbering. It grew rapidly, was long-lived, large, and yielded a wood that had superior physical properties. It could be used in many ways—for railroad ties, telegraph and telephone poles, structural beams and trusses, and as a sturdy form for pouring concrete. Carpenters liked it for its nice grain and its ability to withstand warping. When the technology evolved for making plywood, the Douglas fir became a principal element in its composition.

  The captains of the timber industry in the West had apparently learned very little from the leveling of the eastern forests. They practiced clear-cutting, but they rarely did any reseeding. Their unwieldy donkey engines damaged sprouts and seedlings and killed off the future crop.

  So outrageous were their abuses that in the 1890s a Board of Forestry was instituted in California to exercise some control. The first forest rangers went to work in 1919, but they were in the hire of individual counties, and the counties were often too broke to meet the rangers’ paychecks.

  Gradually, the U.S. government acquired more and more western timberland, preserved it as national forest, and accorded it some protection under the law, but the Forest Service did a poor job of enforcing any safeguards on the public’s behalf. Its record in timber sales was equally abysmal. In a recent year, 76 out of 123 national forests lost money in their dealings with the timber industry. A tourist could buy a Forest Service map for a dollar, the same price that a timber firm paid for a hemlock one hundred feet tall.

  As for Abner Weed, his timing was perfect. He had access to the Scott Bar, Trinity, and Klamath mountains, and to all the trees on Mount Shasta. He created an economy in the wilderness, and a town sprouted around it and showed its appreciation by taking his name. Weed went on to be a county supervisor and later a state senator. He quit the timber business in 1913 and severed ties with his businesses—a box factory, a sash and door mill, and a plywood plant, the second on the West Coast.

  Long-Bell Lumber acquired the complex in 1924 and owned it for about thirty years before merging with International Paper. In 1981, International Paper sold everything to Roseburg Forest Products, the largest privately held timber corporation in the nation.

  THE MILL IN WEED STILL STOOD AT ITS ORIGINAL SITE, on a hill at the edge of town. Its founder had chosen the location for the breezes that blew there most afternoons and helped to dry the freshly cut wood. Some scabs were operating the plant at half-capacity when I pulled up in the late afternoon, and I could smell a characteristic odor in the air, a sharp, bitter, chemical stink of pulp and sawdust that defines the processing of lumber, just as a billowing smokestack defines the processing of coal.

  The IWA pickets were hanging around a shed across from the main gate of the plant. An old Chevy with a cracked windshield was parked by the shed, and the black millworker at its wheel was talking to his daughter through an open window. She was playing in the dirt with a wigless Barbie that somebody had donated to the cause. There were other donations, too—stacks of canned goods, some firewood, and some paper for printing leaflets. The strikers had also held two rummage sales for families in need.

  About six men were on duty. They had none of the distress that comes at the start of a job action. Four months was a long time to be out—a long time to have your hands idle—but they seemed to have adapted to their situation, much as they’d adapted to the stink of the mill.

  Rich Fulkerson was trying to make the best of things by relaxing in a lawn chair in the sun. He was a big redhead from Michigan, and his face was as bright as a firetruck. He had fallen in love with a woman from Weed after he’d got out of the army in Los Angeles, but life was too hectic for them in the urban south, he said, so they had come back to her hometown. Now they owned a house, and though Fulkerson knew he could lose it to the bank, he wasn’t worried.

  “You can bring up a family on the minimum wage if you have to,” he asserted, in the happy-go-lucky way of big, freckled redheads. “I’m thinking of trying a more artistic line of work, anyhow.”

  “What might that be?” I asked him.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe writing stage plays or scripts for the movies.”

  Robin Styers, a shop steward, sat on a log near Fulkerson. He was shy but intense, and his jaw had the firm set of a person given to moral convictions. He was a Weed boy, born and bred—his father had driven a logging truck there. In his only foray away from town, he had gone to college in Chico, but Chico didn’t suit him and he’d left without graduating. He understood the timber business inside out and probably had always suspected that he’d wind up in it someday.

  Styers was not the type to instigate a strike, but there was an outrage simmering in him, a pain at being slighted. He gave me an overview of the conflict. The old International Paper mill had been shut down when Roseburg had bought in, he said. That mill was outdated and harkened back to an era when most mills handled lots of old-growth timber. It had saws capable of cutting a log that was ninety inches in diameter, and equipment that could debark a log that was eighty feet long.

  Roseburg had retooled the mill, installing new machinery for dealing with smaller logs from clear-cuts. The machines were speedy and efficient. Clear-cutting was more common than ever, Styers said, since the timber industry had gone corporate. When companies were independent and often family-owned, they tended to manage their holdings for a sustained yield, guaranteeing both wood and work.

  Sustained-yield forestry was not as profitable as clear-cutting, though. By Styers’s estimate, it might bring you a profit margin of 16 percent annually, while clear-cutting—taking all the trees from a stand in one fell swoop, without much thought for tomorrow—could net you a margin of between 25 and 40 percent. Roseburg had earned a profit of about $6 million the previous year, he said.

  Styers didn’t hold the profit against Roseburg. He was not unsympathetic to the problems that a corporation faced. The devastated forests were overly protected now, he believed. Lumber companies had to deal with so many regulations in California that some of them were looking to the American South instead, where the laws were more lenient and there were plenty of softwood trees to harvest.

  “Those environmentalists, they’re too pure,” Styers complained. “They haven’t read their Darwin. It’s natural for some species to go extinct. Even spotted owls.”

  What angered the strikers about Roseburg was that so little of the $6 million profit had trickled down to them. They felt that their employer was being greedy. Everything for Rose
burg and nothing for them—that was how they saw it. When the IWA first tried to organize at the mill, in 1985, management had begged for a chance to prove its sincerity, but the effort had apparently not satisfied the millworkers, who had voted in favor of a union shop two years later.

  The current job action had arisen when Roseburg had demanded an across-the-board rollback in wages, arguing that the employees had to share in the losses that it was supposedly absorbing. But the mill in Weed had a very good record of productivity, Styers told me, and a very low rate of absenteeism. If Roseburg had really taken some losses, the losses had to do with a bigger picture and not with the performance of the men in Weed.

  In all, fourteen Roseburg mills were out in Oregon and California, Styers said. He pushed his cap back on his head and tossed a wood chip at the ground in frustration. There was nothing the men could do, regardless of how disgusted they might be. Roseburg had them by the balls. Good jobs were as rare as prima ballerinas in Weed. You couldn’t make a new start elsewhere, either, because you couldn’t sell your house. Every block in town was cumbersome with realtors’ signs.

  The men hoped that the strike would end soon. It had to end soon, they felt, because spring was a busy season at the mill with lumber needed for new construction.

  In the meantime, they would sit around the shed and rail about the MBA accountants who didn’t know diddly-squat about millwork, and about the Japanese ships anchored in the ocean that were milling trees that could have been milled in Weed. Then, when their shift was done, they would get up to go home, brushing the dust from the seat of their pants as Robin Styers did. He smiled for the first time that afternoon.

  “Damn!” he said, touching his butt again. “That was a hard piece of wood.”

  IN THE EVENING GLOW, I climbed into the bleachers at a playground in Weed to watch a tee-ball game of baseball. Two half-pint teams, the Mets and the Astros, were contending on a gritty diamond absent of all grass and echoing the rough, intractable, bare-bones character of their town. Millworker families applauded the boys from the stands, cheering pop-ups and triples with equal enthusiasm. The men sipped from beers in paper sacks, while the women munched on popcorn that was not store-bought but brought from home.