I think they were out of poles, but I’m not sure because they were demolished in 1970.
It seemed to me they were out of poles, but I’m not too positive of that. I know that the boards that we nailed the shakes to were boards. There wasn’t much lumber in one of them. The floors were made out of boards, and I don’t remember whether the floor joists were sawed or whether they were logs. It has been a lot of time since we built those things.
What did they have on the inside of them?
They had some cabinets in there to keep their cooking utensils and their food in, their canned things and things like that. I know we built them right there on the job. We built some regular cabinets in there. It seemed to me like there were just wooden bunks built against the wall. They would have to haul a mattress and stuff into them.
Was there anyplace to cook?
They had a cook stove of some kind. I don’t remember what we had in there, but they a regular little cook stove of some kind. Back in those days you could buy these little cast iron cook stoves that had about four lids on them, a fire pot, and a little oven underneath with a cast iron door.
Sort of like a Dutch oven?
You might say that. They were just one of the popular old time stoves that you’d see out on the cattle range or sheep herders camp or the old sod-buster shacks. They were just a common stove in those days, as far as I know. I’ve seen hundreds of them.
Those stoves, they’d get them in Medford or somewhere and bring them out?
I don’t know. I couldn’t say. I don’t know where they came from. You could get them at any place. I don’t know whether they were issued to the Forest Service or the Park Service or whether they had to buy them back east and have them sent out here.
How big were the crews when you were building those cabins?
It seemed to me like there must have been six or eight of us, at least. There must have been about eight of us, maybe 10 with the cook and the foreman.
