Did you know O.C. or Elmer Applegate? Where did Ivan run this sheep?
Ivan ran sheep on the Clear Lake country. He supplied Dan Murphy. In that book there’s a chapter about life in a sheep camp, and it’s about Daniel Murphy’s sheep. He was, I guess, financed and set up by Ivan Applegate, and he runs sheep over the Clear Lake country. Later, he bought property down in the Clear Lake country. That’s the Clear Lake in Modoc County (California). He was quite a guy, Ivan Applegate, but I didn’t know him. I did know O.C. Applegate to say hello to him on the street. He was a well-known character who’d run around with his buckskin coat on, long beard. He was a very colorful guy.
He would have been very old by that time.
Yes, he was pretty old. His daughter was a neighbor of ours. Her husband shot our cat, which was killing their chickens. Her name was Rachel Applegate Good, and she is the author of that rather large book called History of Klamath County. I leaned upon her for some of the material in the last book that I prepared. I have in there a poem that O.C. Applegate wrote about Indians. But Charlie Ogle said he was a very pleasant person, and he went about things in a way that was easy to get along with the Indians because he could use their language. Charlie had a lot of admiration for him as a superintendent. Following him, there was an army man who carried a gun all the time. I guess he used a very different method of supervising the reservation. Charlie’s tape is the thing that I would rely on for that information.
I know O.C Applegate Jr. made a tape at Oregon Historical Society that’s fairly extensive. I was interested in Elmer because he was the park botanist for years.
No, I did not know him. But Dan Murphy was a great admirer of Ivan Applegate and I guess he was a hero in the Modoc War. He did a lot of service for the government and he could talk with the Indians.
