sonora2sonoma

by Tim Konrad

Chapter Five

Everyone has their own favorite stories to tell, and my father was no exception. Among the stories he was fond of recalling from his earlier days was one in which a deer jumped over the moon. Back when they were living at the Von Tromp Mine, northeast of Columbia, the family had a roadster made by the Moon Motor Car Company. One evening, as they were descending a hill into Columbia, a deer leaped from the bank overhanging the roadway and passed over the car on its way down the hill, narrowly missing my father’s sister, Dorothy, my mother and father and Veda, who were seated in the car with the top open.

Another story he would recall from time to time, usually after he’d had a few drinks, was about the time he and his brother, Jack, were in a bar in Angels Camp. As this occurred during one of the Frog Jump celebrations for which the town was known, the place was packed with celebrants, many of whom, my uncle included, were taking full advantage of the libations flowing freely from the bar. Never one to shy away from a good fight, my uncle became engaged in a scrap with a local, not realizing the fellow had a twin brother who was also a participant in the melee. No sooner would Jack knock the man down than he—actually his brother, unbeknownst to my uncle—would suddenly reappear asking for more punishment.  While Jack was holding his own, the better part of the crowd was disproportionately inclined toward seeing the twins prevail. My father, sensing this, grabbed Jack, whereupon they made a hasty retreat back to Tuolumne County.

Rivalry between communities was not uncommon back then but was often moderated, as it still is today, through athletic competitions such as baseball and football leagues. Whereas these days this is mostly seen in high school sports, back then, before the rise of professional sports franchises, minor league baseball and football were an essential part of life in the foothills and beyond. The rules were a little different back then too. Contrary to the current emphasis in football concerning the long term effects of concussions on players, for instance, my uncle told of a football game he played in as a young man in which one of his team-mates—a big Indian fellow—played a whole quarter with a broken shoulder. Such behavior, while viewed as evidence of manliness in those days, would not be possible in this age of frivolous lawsuits.

Sometimes community rivalry took on a deeper tone. A life foolishly lost at an E Clampus Vitus gathering in the 70s led to a decade of hard feelings between rival communities and a several-years suspension of Clamper festivities that wasn’t lifted until it was agreed that no more guns or knives would be allowed at gatherings. The event, or “Doins,” as they are referred to in Clamperdom, took place at the former site of a placer mining operation at the foot of Big Hill east of Columbia. The victim was the cook for the gathering and was from a prominent Angels Camp family with roots going back to the Gold Rush. The shooter was a member of an old-time Columbia family with similar tenure on the south side of the river. The latter fellow didn’t mean any harm and thought he was shooting blanks when he shot the cook in the stomach at near point-blank range as he was going through the food line. My father, a friend of his and myself had just been through the line and were sitting down eating around 50 feet away when we heard the gunshot. I remember seeing a crowd gather around the food line as confusion spread and medics were called. The hapless fellow was taken to hospital but his injuries were too severe to stop the blood loss and, late that night, he succumbed from his injuries. The Columbia man was convicted of manslaughter but justice is a bittersweet solution that does nothing to ease the pain of the loss of a loved one.

The man who owned the property where the Doins took place had a colorful history himself. As the story goes, this fellow purchased a brand new Cadillac from the local General Motors dealer with the stated intention to pay if off in installments. Some time later, when the missed payments reached a certain point, he began to receive demands for payment from the lender, who was threatening to repossess the vehicle if the payments weren’t addressed. Not one to be outdone and inclined by nature not to bend to pressure of this sort, this fellow devised a novel way of dealing with the situation. He would dig a hole with his D-8 Caterpillar tractor sufficiently deep to conceal the vehicle somewhere on his property and then conceal its whereabouts, to thwart any attempts at repossession.

The foothills were full of characters back then—in some cases tough individuals who had their own ideas about how to deal with life’s little problems. One such person was the owner of a famed and fabled downtown Sonora saloon. When I was a kid growing up I recall going inside the place and seeing large photographs on the walls—mural sized but crude in quality—that depicted large pits dug in the ground that were filled with dead cattle that were the result of an extermination campaign designed to eradicate an outbreak of hoof and mouth disease. The owner of this establishment had the misfortune, one evening, to be shot in the face by an unnamed assailant. Owing more to luck than anything else, the wound did not prove fatal. The police had their hands tied because the victim refused to identify the shooter, so the case remained, and still is to this day, unsolved. The owner was quoted at the time as having said he would deal with it in his own way. The man is now long since passed, but I had the good fortune to chat with his daughter a few years ago. She would not speak to the identity of the assailant except to say her father “dealt with it.”

Another shooting incident, at another bar in downtown Sonora in the same general time period, involved a disagreement over a card game gone wrong. The guilty party, believing he was wronged, went full blown wild west and pulled out a pistol and shot the victim between the eyes from across the card table. Imagine this fellow’s surprise when the victim rose up out of his chair and proceeded to deal with the situation personally. It turned out the gun was a 22 caliber—not an efficient choice for a murder weapon—and his intended victim was an extremely large MiWok man with, apparently, a thick skull, as the bullet, deflected by his skull, circled to the left under the skin around his skull and exited the back of his head.

There were a couple of MiWok families from Tuolumne who produced young men of exceptional size, averaging 6’ 5” and weighing in excess of 280#. I once saw one of these fellows wade through three booths of diners at a local diner in response to a challenge from an antagonist. Another time, I witnessed a handful of these behemoths cruising main street in Sonora one Sunday afternoon with a keg of beer clearly visible in the back seat of their vehicle. The local police chose discretion whenever possible with these folks, for obvious reasons. They pulled over the car in front of a liquor store on the south end of town, one patrol car in front and another behind the cruisers to contain them while they negotiated a solution—take the party elsewhere or face arrest.