A simple one-inch ad in the Eureka Times Standard changed my life forever. No, not a personal listing! My husband and I were looking for a house in a rural setting within his employer's work placement area. "Two-bedroom house, two acres, near national forest, job possible." He could scale logs and I could do the job, whatever it was.
We called, made arrangements and drove across the narrow South Fork Bridge into Trinity County. The road to Denny had just been chip sealed, a rural paving process involving hot oil and gravel which coats the sides and undercarriage of vehicles with sticky black tar. As we slid and splattered our way along, we met no other vehicles, which was a blessing because the single-lane road follows the original trail created by the Chimariko Indians, later used by the gold miners and finally blasted to its present state by convicts in the 1930s. One side of the road is sheer rock face disappearing up into virgin Doug-fir, oak and Madrone; the other side drops 300 to 400 feet into the thin line of rocks and white water of the New River.
After what seemed like days of sharp lefts, rights and switchbacks, we found the old wooden shed and took the next road down on the right as directed. The house was clean and practical, set up with alternate power and wood heat, and best of all, within our price range. My husband could scale logs in Burnt Ranch, a mill community an hour's drive back down the road, and I could take over the mail contract and deliver mail three days a week. We went for it.
As we signed the purchase papers I had no idea then what a life-altering moment it was. A 24 year-old recent college graduate with a teaching credential, from a middle-class family, I was moving to a community of outlaws at war with the United States government and I was to become one of them.
Snow hit as we drove a small U-Haul over the summit. Slimy oil in October and slippery snow in November. We ignored the omen and settled in.
A provision in the Mining Law of 1872 provided 20-acre federal placer mineral claims to any "prudent man" who made $100 of improvements every year. When the word got around, the 1970s back to the land rush was on. Cabins and teepees sprang up. Chickens, goats, children, pack animals, gardens and gun-toting hippies filled the distant nooks and crannies of the New River drainage. The new miners trapped and hunted to put meat on the table, scrounged building materials and bought bulk food by the ton. They came from all over the country but had a lot in common. Several were draft resisters; most were college educated and could carry on esoteric literary or socialist conversations while they tanned hides and canned venison and squirrels, and all had a deep distrust of the federal government and authority of any kind.
Because I hauled mail, I began meeting the locals. A few old-timers remained from the Depression-era gold rush. These colorful characters educated the newer back to the land era gold rush participants in the ways of finding transient gold in the icy waters of the New and its feeder creeks. Tom Murphy, however, a frail, conservative ex-seminarian from New York who read all day long, moving from one chair to another following the sun in a Mad Hatter's tea party arrangement in front of his cabin, hated hippies. “Go away!” he’d croak, if a longhaired, bearded man stopped by to visit. If they didn’t leave immediately he’d slowly retreat to his cabin and sit in the dark. Bill Meadows, an Oakie who arrived before the road was finished, spit tobacco juice everywhere and kept his teeth in his shirt pocket. When I gave him rides to the store twenty miles away to buy ice cream he’d spit tobacco juice out the window. At the end of the trip he’d survey the brown streaks down the side of the door. “Looks like an owl been sittin’ here on the winda,” he’d chuckle and slowly hobble down a trail to his cabin. Luke and Marge were a crusty pair who drank and fought, and had wild, noisy sex in their egg-shaped trailer within sight and sound of Tom Murphy. Marge wore white every day, no mean trick considering she washed everything she owned on a scrub board. “A girl’s gotta look good,” she’d advise the women. She shot Luke one night, but the bullet went through muscle and he said, “Why, it ain’t nothin but a flesh wound!” Another old miner named Sparky, fell from a cable car crossing the raging river one winter night and was never seen again. Folks figured he was so drunk he probably didn’t know what was going on before he was dead.
Since we were new and I delivered the mail, we were considered CIA, FBI or USFS plants. It took a few months of giving people rides; visiting and going to parties, but the mining community finally accepted me. While my husband was away from home 70 hours a week and remained suspect, I immersed myself in the life and became a citizen of Denny. I had a flush toilet, but no one shunned me for this luxury.
The women were a tight-knit group, loyal, willing to share food and childcare, supporting each other when husbands were drunk or distant. Nana and Wendy were graduates of a private women’s college on the East Coast, who first met in Denny, and Katie was a former cheerleader from Sausalito. Nana’s husband, Crow, decided raising six boys at home would be easy. Nana shaved him, braided his hair, made clothing, kept the family fed and schooled the boys in her spare time. Crow hunted and beaded. Wendy’s husband was a renegade pilot who later would do federal time for flying in the largest cocaine bust in Dade County history. Katie’s Zeke was the self-proclaimed Renaissance Man from Marin County who made knives from old car springs, found some gold and kept the dream alive. We partied, gardened, canned vegetables together, loaned things back and forth and spent a lot of summer hours hanging out on the river, relaxing and visiting.
While I enjoyed this seemingly idyllic life on the river, the United States lost the war in Vietnam, Patty Hearst was kidnapped, a decade of disco reigned and the Piss Firs (Piss Firs was the name given to Forest Service employees by the locals) brought in heavily armed Federal Marshals to move people off mining claims. The Forest Service interpreted the 1872 Mining Law differently than the miners. The courts agreed and the families were forced to leave their claims and cabins. The one-room schoolhouse shut down. Denny changed again.
I left Denny eighteen years ago and now live in Burnt Ranch and teach school on the Hoopa Reservation. When someone who has heard the rumors about Denny finds out I lived there for nine years, they are amazed and look at me differently. “Wow, you live in Denny?” “No,” I correct them, “ I lived there but now I live in Burnt Ranch.” “Yes, but what was it like? Weren’t you afraid? Did you carry a gun? Did you grow pot? You had to grow pot! Did you know Zeke and Katie? How about …” And so it goes.
I still consider women I met in Denny to be my best friends. We have scattered all over the country, but we still get together for weddings and funerals. We tell stories, remember friends and old-timers and have our picture taken. We were all changed by our time on the New River, we are Denny women.
Looking back, I’m glad we ignored the omens and settled in. I am not the suburban housewife I might have become had we not lived in Denny. I know things now I never would have learned anywhere else. I can gut, skin and preserve animals for winter eating, mend waterline, and cook on a wood-stove. I’ve eaten rattlesnake I killed myself, and cooked mule steaks, castrated sheep and goats, made cheese and walked for miles to visit friends beyond the end of the road. I learned to live without electricity and I am stronger and more self-reliant than I ever could have dreamed. It was a good time and a good life.
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