CONDUCTED BY STEPHEN R. MARK IN JACKSONVILLE [OR] ON 3/17/89
Where were you born and raised? What is your educational background?
I was born at Bend, Oregon, in 1917, during the winter in about three feet of snow. That gave me a good start to be at Crater Lake! I went to school through the eighth grade because back in the Depression years there were a lot people that didn’t go too far in school because they didn’t have money to travel very far to get to school. If you lived very far from school, it was just impossible to g any further in your education at that time. After I got out of school, we were into the mining game. We had a hard rock mine, quartz.
Is that how you came to Medford?
We had come down here in 1929, during the Depression, when things were really tough. We had to just about give our dairy away and a whole lot of other things because there just wasn’t any way to continue. We were leasing property, trying to buy it, but there wasn’t that much money to buy anything with. You couldn’t even give it away because people couldn’t pay the taxes on it even if they got it. Finally, we got acquainted with a fellow that was from the Medford area. He kept telling Dad how nice it was down here. He said this was a real paradise, lots of fruit, the weather was great, nice winters and all that. When you’re in the Bend country, you can figure on some pretty harsh winters. You get a lot of snow and ice. So you had some winters there about like they had this winter in a lot of the colder country. So Dad came down and looked the place over. Finally, he found a place out at Eagle Point that he kind of liked the looks of. It belonged to a banker. It had quite a bit of ground and a big house. So we sold out what we could and gave the rest of it away. We loaded up what stock we had, milk cows, and what we had left, anyway, and we migrated down to Eagle Point. We went by Klamath Falls, over the Green Springs, and through Ashland out of Eagle Point.
While we were there, we got acquainted with an old miner. He was a shoe repairman, a cobbler from the old school. He was a guy that knew how to make a shoe from the bottom up. He had done quite lot of mining in his earlier years and he was still interested in it. He knew where there were a couple of pretty good possibilities of finding some gold. So we got to monkeying around and finally went out with him. [That’s when] we really went into the mining business. We started working on a prospect up here in Sterling and we finally ran into some pretty good gold (1). We took out somewhere near $3,000 that winter and spring. That was when we were getting $14 something and the top price was $16.50. But it was the other minerals that were in it that lowered the price on our selling to the guy that bought the gold. Most of it we traded right here in Jacksonville, to the Goddard Store. He bought gold. The gold scales that he had in his store are now in the U.S. Bank building down here, I believe.
Anyway, that’s how we got down into this country. In 1934, our gold had petered out and we were having a hard time making a living. So the next best thing for us kids was to go into the three C’s. We could send $25 a month home and spend the other $5 in the camp or wherever. My brother finally came out of the woods after they had gotten shut down because they couldn’t make any money. He joined up with me in the three C’s, so that sent $50 a month home for the family. So we managed to survive in pretty good shape until things started picking up on the outside. We both mustered out in ’35 in the spring. He went back to the lumber and I went back into mining. I finally went into the lumber industry and wound up over at Klamath Falls.
