Did all the guys know each other ahead of time before they got on the crew?
Yes, I would say so because we had been together in the camp. Some of us, four of us in that group, mined and hunted and fished together before we ever went to Crater Lake. There were a lot of other people that you had known from the areas around. The ones that were in our spike camp on those cabins, four of us, were right out of the same community. The other were just guys you got acquainted with in the main camp.
How many guys do you think were in the Annie Springs camp that summer?
That’s a good question. Right now, I haven’t the slightest idea. But I’d say there must have been 150 to 200 guys in that camp. Maybe more.
Would they all have the same enrollment period?
No. Some of them in there had been in for a year or more before I went in. Some may have been in the three Cs ever since they’d started it and had been stationed at different camps. There were some in there from the Lava Beds camp. There were some that were in there from Round Prairie, up here on top of the Green Springs (5). That wasn’t a very big camp. It was a spike camp of a sort. There were some that were over at Dog Lake. That’s out of Lakeview. There were some from Middle Fork [of the Rogue River]. We had some in there that were up on Roxy Ann (6). They had a spike camp up there. I don’t know if I knew of any that came down out of the Applegate country in Carberry Camp and the Seattle Bar, which is on the Applegate. I don’t know whether we had any in out of that camp or not. But, by the time we got to Evans Creek, we had a few people in there from every place in half the state of Oregon (7).
Did you notice a difference in the way the Forest Service administered their camps as opposed to the NPS?
It was pretty well the same because most of the guys that worked in through the park service were in with the forestry. There wasn’t a whole lot of difference. I just can’t say that we had any differences because we had the same army regulations and the same captain and lieutenant, people like that, that governed the camp. So we were pretty much the same.
It was more similar because…
You’d go out on the job, whether you were working on the roads or not. When we got to Evans Creek we were on mostly roads. We had a rock crusher down there that we operated. So we were cutting right of ways and making and maintaining roads. To me, I don’t know that there was a whole lot of difference. It was down there at Evans Creek in the rain all winter, were you had been in the snow at Crater Lake. It was kind of wet.
