Harriet Murphy: A Little Bit of Something

Harriet Murphy

A Little Bit of Something

Janet K. Brennan

Copyright © 2009, Janet K. Brennan. All rights reserved.

Smashwords Edition

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of Janet K. Brennan unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal copyright law. Address inquiries to Permissions, Casa de Snapdragon Publishing LLC, 12901 Bryce Court NE, Albuquerque, NM 87112.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008911208

ISBN 13: 978-0-9793075-6-0

Casa de Snapdragon Publishing LLC

12901 Bryce Avenue, NE

Albuquerque, NM 87112

https://www.casadesnapdragon.com

20101016

Cover photo Copyright © John Newlin, all rights reserved. Companion poems copyrights are owned by the individual authors. All items used with written permission from the copyright holders.

Acknowledgements

The Harriet Murphy Chronicles could not have come to fruition without the inspiration of several people in my life and I want to thank them.

Harriet’s village of Old Pine in the Tahoe foothills is a very real place that was visited One Hundred and Fifty Nine years ago by the original 49ers hoping to find their fortunes in the rivers and gold wealthy hills along the American River. Without fail, I want to thank those heroic pioneers who came west and then built their lives around their fortunes. Yes, many returned back to their eastern homes with great wealth, but many stayed and helped to develop northern California and make it the beautiful and intelligent place it is today.

To the residents of Foresthill, California who offered me nothing but hospitality, some sumptuous steak dinners; the Bartender, God bless him, who let me drink my Manhattan out of a plastic cup on the front porch of The Ore Cart’s Red Dirt Saloon while watching the Tevis Horse Endurance Race from Lake Tahoe to Auburn, California. Thanks to all of the more than eager responders to my questions while researching the area. A special thanks to Lori Lunsford and her Ride the Divide Stables who actually led me down a canyon on the back of a great old Quarter Horse by the name of Pager. I was able to get a real feel for the lay of the land and the old mining camp ruins as well as the great American River in Placer County.

For my sister, Patricia Barrett who actually envisioned the wonderful character of Smithy the blacksmith in the book. She helped me to develop her character and enhance my knowledge of the blacksmith trade at the turn of the century. Patricia also took me to many of the places in the hills that few people ever see, filled me in on some interesting legends of the area, hiked with me down to the Old American River for a day in the water when it was 110 degrees in the shade! We conjured up spirits that day!

To the wonderful poets from around the world who fell in love with Harriet Murphy and wrote such beautiful introductory verses for them.

They are:

P.L. Devan – Sarasota, Florida, USA

Katriona Wallace – Oslo, Norway

K.L. Wagoner – Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA

Raven Jardin – Minnesota, USA

Shanu Goyal – Uttar Pradesh, India

Lou Davies-James – Florida, USA

Terri Tanner – Alabama, USA

Carrie Ann Thunnel – Washington, USA

Patricia Barrett- Forest Hill, California, USA

I also want to thank some exceptional photographers who were willing to bestow us with their gorgeous work (these pictures appear in the hardcover version of the book):

John Newlin – San Diego, California, for his barn photos

Leah Barrett – Foresthill, California – "Pager"

Robin Creager – turn of the century cabin

Art Brennan – Ghost and Mining Town Photos

JB Stillwater – Sutter’s Mill Pictures, California

Thanks to all of you for your wonderful contribution to this humble, but historic book. You all will be forever in my heart.

Janet K. Brennan

Foreword

Finally, Harriet Murphy has arrived on the scene and not a moment too soon!

Harriet was born in my mind during a three day sabbatical on Long Boat Key, Florida. While walking up the lonely shore in 2004, I began to envision a life in the wilderness and what it would have been like at the turn of the century for a young woman living by herself. Spying a very fat sea gull on the beach, I stopped to photograph it and out of my mouth came the words, Dang, you are big! Never having used the word dang before, I could not imagine where it had come from. I would soon learn. That following autumn, I visited my sister who had recently bought a home in the foothills of Lake Tahoe in a small, former gold mining and lumber town by the name of Foresthill, California. I was immediately drawn to the area and began gathering as much information as I could regarding its colorful history and the role it played during the huge migration of gold seekers who traveled west to try and find their fame and fortunes in the red hills of the area. It was shortly thereafter that I began to think about what it must have been like for the families who survived the 49ers and began formulating what would become the Harriet Murphy Stories.

The following pages are just that. Story after story came to me and I began to realize that the saga of Harriet Murphy, a thirty year old woman living alone in the original cabin that her father built, would be limitless. This was a period of great invention in the United States, as well as a reckoning for women who wanted to forge ahead in a world not quite ready for such a feat.

In the first chapters of what will be a serialized book, you will step into the memoirs of Harriet Dang Murphy as she tells these stories about events that occurred in her life. What you will notice is that each story is resolved at the end and that you may take away the lessons that Harriet learned from the events. Each chapter presents life and the world the way Harriet saw it in the early nineteen hundreds.

Many of the events are not always in chronological order as she often will stop in conversation and remember something that may have happened a few years prior that would relate to the story that she is telling you at the time.

In short, after reading this book, the reader will feel as if he or she has just spent a few hours sitting across the Breakfast Board in Harriet’s kitchen, sipping coffee and munching on a piece of one of Harriet’s apple brown sugar pies while she regales you with tales of her own life in the foothills of the Tahoe.

Janet K. Brennan

Chapter One

A Little Bit of Something

I guess you can’t really call Old Pine a ghost town, though for some reason or other, people like to think it is. If they are referring to all the strange calls and sighs through the long nights, well they had best look into their own souls for an answer to what they say they hear. I have only had the lucky occasion of running into a few ghosts, some of them my own I suspect, and they seemed like harmless critters to me. I guess there probably are several of those restless spirits lingering up in these hills and, to my way of thinking, if they are happy hanging around a dusty old, half deserted town, then more power to them.

During the peak of the Gold Rush, this old town was booming with folks living in tents or makeshift cabins, but after a few years, when it became abundantly clear that California was going to run out of gold, most of them high tailed it back to where they came from either taking their booty with them for bragging rights or with their tails between their legs. The smart ones stayed and invested their money in land or fruit. They were the ones who just kept getting richer by the day, turning their gold into the rich, fertile farming lands of the Sacramento Valley.

My parents came west a year after the first bit of the shine was discovered, so they never really called themselves certifiable ‘49ers. The gold brought them west though, no doubt about it. My mother, being a Smyth from the Smyths of Boston, was reluctant to leave her fine and noble town, but my father, a Murphy of the South Boston Murphys, decided he was going west. Mother, loving him so and being only sixteen years old, was not about to let her man go without her and she joined him on the trip West to Missouri and then on a wagon train across the high Sierra Nevada. Their destination was none other than the gold mines that lie along the rich American River in the foothills of the Tahoe.

They got lucky enough and hit a small vein along Devil’s Ford. Being prudent people, and not ones to squander their riches, they placed most of their diggings in a vault in Auburn Town. The rest went into the building of a log cabin, fit and proper. Back then, the cabins were constructed from the bare ground up. They had but dirt floor and canvas roofs, but that would not prove to be the specifications of our home. No siree! My Papa thought it best to provide a wooden floor set up on large, flat boulders, one next to the other to provide stability. Over the years, as the other cabins slowly became one with the ground they sat on, our fit cabin never budged an inch. He set forth a double row of logs all the way around to provide proper insulation during the cold winter months. The windows were plentiful to let in the gentle breezes of spring, summer and fall. Bedrooms were up a narrow stairwell and open to receive the warmth of the fire on cold nights.

He loved the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, with its sunny, gay springtime and gentle, warm summer. Autumn was pleasant enough and, if one were to live far enough down on the hill, winters were not quite so jaw tearing.

It wasn’t long before both my parents realized that gold was not going to go on forever and they decided to retire from the blasting and tedious panning for Placer. They soon planted twenty apple trees. Being the visionary that he was, the trees proved to be a second pot of gold. Every year, as the good Lord smiled down upon our apples, they ripened into the most succulent pieces of fruit. After saving a bounty for our own table, the remainder were carted off to the mercantile on Sam’s Ridge and sold for a good profit that kept us comfortable throughout the year.

It was eighteen hundred and seventy five, the Indian Wars were just beginning, and women were marching against the sale of liquor in upstate New York. I came into the world amidst all of the crazy shenanigans that were going on around me. My mother, a tad older for birthing, had her own set of ideas about raising a child and I suspect that accounts for many of my differences.

I was baptized Henrietta Murphy, as was deemed a fit and proper a name by my mother. It never bothered me that I was not given a middle name. As to my way of thinking, middle names were only good for cussing out when needed or to prove who your daddy was. I got plenty of cussing out as a child and for the longest time I thought my true middle name was Dang. I knew who my daddy was and I didn’t really mind the dang. It was not long before they dropped the prim and proper Henrietta and began calling me Harriet. Then I was Harriet Dang Murphy. I have since shortened my name to Harriet D. Murphy.

When I was five years old, a collision with a stage and a runaway mare took my Papa’s life on a trip back from Sacramento. When that happened, my mother immediately took off her apron and bought four horses. Not long after a corral was built and the following year a lean-to for shelter and hay. Proper folks own horses, she told me. I never once saw her mourn for her lost husband and I guessed that was because she was so darned busy working the orchard, maintaining our garden, and cutting wood for the fire. She taught me early on how to survive in the hills without need of another human being. That was a weakness of the soul and body and would not be tolerated. She died when I was twenty and five years old, some ten years ago, never once complaining about the pain she felt in her left breast which eventually consumed her entire body and brain.

The year after mother passed was the most difficult for me. The first winter, I lost ten apple trees. That was fine with me as it was ten more apple trees than I could handle by myself. The remaining ten were healthy and did well. The fair profit continued for me and that, along with the Auburn Town savings, would provide for me for the rest of my natural life, God willing.

It was the alone time that almost got the best of me. Due to this unexpected emotional twist in my life, I soon learned that a little bit of company could always be found at Seb’s Tavern. That and a bit of Irish whiskey seemed to be just what the doctor ordered. Most nights, with the exception of the barmaids, I was the only woman drinking at Seb’s, but it made no difference to me. I enjoyed the ribald stories and jokes the men had to offer and they were mostly gents as they had all crawled through a mine or two with my Papa. It didn’t hurt none that overalls were my customary way of dress and most of the men turned a blind eye to the fact that they were drinking with a woman.

The women of Old Pine noticed the sudden addition of the fair gender amongst their men and were not at all pleased. They seldom spoke to me on a good Saturday afternoon and simply nodded their salutations to me in Sunday morning service as if it was their God given duty to acknowledge me. I knew however, that if God himself was to raise His hand in protest, saying Never speak to that sinner of a woman again, they would have breathed a collective sigh of relief. The hysterical truth of it was that most of them were active in the Women’s Temperance Movement, yet were addicted to all kinds of the new medicines that were being sold in Old Pine. I was pretty dang sure that they all contained generous servings of alcohol.

It was my misfortune one night, to leave Old Seb’s after having a bit more of the Irish than was my habit. My cabin was a good walk and, on such a night, it was my feeling that I would enjoy the crisp, late autumn night air. As I approached the old stamp mill, I made a decision to cut across the Old Pine Cemetery, as it would take me home by way of ten minutes faster. No sooner had I trespassed