Mill Creek Memories

Mill Creek, CA an Introduction

I am going to tell you a few yarns about some experiences I had and some people I met in the mountain towns near Mount Lassen in northern California.

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More than a few years ago I wanted to work in the high mountains. I lived in California but planned to go to the highlands of Ecuador to find a suitable place to work on a project I had in mind––I'll tell you that story later, if I have the time––and I wanted to get accustomed to living and working at a high altitude.

A friend told me about Mill Creek, a pretty, tiny mountain town near Lassen National Park which she had discovered way, way off the beaten track––a town so small it didn't even have a center stripe painted down the paved street going through it to separate the lanes of traffic––and in California that means a VERY small town.

I was living in a "camper" at the time––a little portable house on the bed of an old Ford pick-up truck, so I could live pretty much wherever there was a road and I needed practically no money to survive. I was enjoying the freedom.

I found the town and it was as nice as my friend had described it: one general store with a cafe and gas pump and a post office and that was about it. There were thirty or so very old privately owned summer cottages in the village since this had been a deer hunter's paradise in my grandparent's day. That pioneer generation had wiped out most of the deer, of course, and had also eliminated most of the native fish and all of the native people (Ishi's tribe) and cut down the saleable trees. But the forest had made a comeback in the sixty or seventy years since this had been a flourishing hunting camp, there were a few new deer left for today's generation of sportsmen to shoot, fish were put in the river from state fish farms for today's fisherfolk to catch; and though the native people were extinct, Euro-American people had arrived in sufficient quantities that the "town" still rated the closet-sized post office and had not totally disappeared.

In the days I am talking about there was a free campground back in the trees and I was its only user except on hot holiday weekends when a few other campers from the blistering Sacramento River valley far below would come up to stay for a night or two.

I heard about a man called Harry who had a firewood cutting contract with the Forest Service over near Child’s Meadows––just off Highway 36. I found him and got the job–– hand loading firewood onto a two-and-a-half-ton truck. The pay was lower than the legal minimum, when I got paid at all, (Sometimes I got paid in firewood, which I could sell, or trade.) but it was fun and very educational

I love working outdoors and the men and their women who follow the firewood trade are curiosities to say the least.

For example, one of Harry’s sawyers had cut a window-sized hole in one of the tree trunks near Harry’s camp and he delighted to open his “window” to peer at us from behind the tree. The same guy loved to toss his empty beer cans around where we were working in the deep forest. I scolded him once about littering and he told me “I want people to know I’ve been working out here––that’s why I leave the cans!” To show there were no hard feelings he let me use his chain saw a bit so he could call me “Tom Sawyer”.

We were all dirt poor. One day the grandson of one of the old-time sawyers showed up with his new teenage bride to work with us since there was no work down in the valley (Sacramento, Chico, Red Bluff, Etc.)

When I came out of the woods later that day, I found that the new man had accidentally swung his hand too close to a running chain saw and cut off the ends of a couple of his fingers––and this was before he had even picked up a single piece of firewood! None of the other workers in the camp had enough gasoline in their trucks to carry him to the doctor in Chester so they wrapped his fingers in a handkerchief and he and his bride hitch-hiked out for help.

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