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Hardscrabble Miners Make Their Last Stand
Forest Service evicts families, razes homes
SHANN NIX, CHRONICLE STAFF WRITER
PUBLICATION: THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
DATE: May 18, 1990
FINAL
Page: B3
Frank Yocum is destroying his home.
Yocum, a 44-year-old gold miner, has lived on the banks of the Salmon River for 19 years. His mother's irises bloom alongside the two-room log cabin, and the loft he built for his children is still filled with toys. A tattered American flag hangs over the door.
He is almost finished clearing his belongings out of the cabin, which the U.S. Forest Service has ordered him to bulldoze and torch, under threat of arrest, fines and imprisonment.
Yocum, a thin, bearded man with a weathered face, touches the meticulously split cedar shakes and the hand-hewn door of the historical site with reverence.
"The old-timer here before me made this," he says. "He was a master. Brought these panes of glass for the windows in on mule-back. You can't get shakes this fine, even from a factory."
Outside the cabin is piled a chair, a lamp, a spice rack and a bathtub filled with planters and rolls of carpet. He will take some things away and burn the rest.
A MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE
He looks at the pond. "I know every bullfrog's voice," he says. "And if you wait a half an hour, four buzzards will come and roost in that tree. They like to watch the sunset.
"They can have it, I guess. I worked hard here. Never took welfare, always took care of myself. Now they're forcing me out onto the street. I've got no place to be now.
"I'm not out to shoot them or hate the government. But this is a miscarriage of justice."
Inside his cabin is posted a notice, charging him with occupying federal land without authorization and maintaining structures and improvements on national forest land without approval.
"I've been living here peacefully in accordance with the law of the land for 19 years," Yocum says. "Why am I suddenly trespassing now?"
Miners have lived on the Salmon River for more than 100 years. The 1872 Mining Law gives every American the right to stake one or more claims, up to 160 acres, on federal land. If enough ore is found to justify a "prudent man" mining the claim, he can work the land and live on it rent-free.
These miners felled trees, built bridges and struggled to establish a community in the forest isolation, where snowstorms or accidents can claim a person's life, miles from any medical assistance. Without telephones, electricity or running water, they planted gardens, canned vegetables, designed water wheels to power their homes, trained roses up the walls of their log cabins and mined for gold.
They built stores, schools and post offices, and named their communities: Sawyer's Bar, Oak Knoll, Somes Bar, Cecilville, Forks of Salmon.
In 1976 the Federal Land Policy Management Act gave the Forest Service the authority to resolve conflicts over occupancy on federal land. Now the Forest Service is using that power to force the mom-and-pop miners to leave the national forest, to be replaced by larger mining operations.
"Society's becoming more sophisticated. This frontier spirit is outdated. The old laws just aren't up with the times," says Mike Lee, the district ranger for the Forest Service. "We want larger, more efficient operations that can get in, get the gold and get out. We don't find these homesteaders consistent with today's standards of mining."
"The less occupants, the less work," says Matt Olson, a 30-year employee of the Forest Service who retired April 7. "Every time the Forest Service removes a structure or a family, it's one less to deal with. And the big operations pay big bucks."
"We built our lives on the Mining Law," says Dan Sagaser, a 78-year-old miner who has been living in the cabin he built for 51 years. "To us, it was like the Constitution. We believed in it. We invested our lives in it. Now they say it doesn't count anymore. I don't understand it."
ARBITRARY GUIDELINES
Four years ago, the Forest Service began to issue orders to the roughly 200 miners and their families who live in the 1.7 million-acre Klamath National Forest, saying residents must obtain permits for their cabins, proving their residences are necessary to their mining. To get a permit, miners were required to file a "Plan of Operations," showing they were "full-time operations" performing "diligent mining."
Who decides what defines a full-time operation? "I do," says Lee. "There are no written guidelines."
How much time constitutes diligent mining? "We can pick any number you want," says Frey.
The deadlines imposed on families told to leave are just as arbitrary.
Lee acknowledges that people complain the decision-making process is unfair. "People say that they can't win. But I don't expect to make bad decisions. I'm not making off-the-hip decisions here."
Besides the stringent new regulations, miners were required to post bonds of $3,000 to $25,000 to ensure that the land was returned to its pristine state after they are evicted. The average income of the miners is $7,500 to $10,000 a year.
"Where am I going to get thatkind of money within 90 days?" said Yocum. "I just don't have it."
Without the money to post bonds, many of the miners were unable to comply with the new requirements. In January 1988, the Forest Service sent 237 letters to miners telling them to settle up or get out. Failure to comply is met with threats of lawsuits, fines and jail.
ONE LAST HOPE
"They put me out of business, they made me homeless," says Carl Eichenhofer, 44, who has just lost the claim he mined for 10 years. "Now I get to tear down my home and destroy all my assets and inheritance.
"And they're suing me for trespassing on a claim that I mined legally and paid taxes on for years. Suing me for what? They've already taken everything I have."
The miners' last hope is that Congress will consider legislation to extend the existing Townsite Act - a law that allows communities surrounded by national forest to purchase land from the federal government - to the miners' homes scattered through the Salmon River area.
Representative Wally Herger, R-Chico, wrote to the Forest Service on Wednesday requesting a one-year moratorium on evictions while Congress explores legislation.
Thirty to 35 homes have been destroyed since the Forest Service mailed the eviction letters last year.
"We started to burn obviously abandoned fire-hazard-type cabins with the permission of the owner," says Olson, who was working for the Forest Service at the time. "Then it seemed to accelerate among the Forest Service guys. Who can burn more cabins? Then it turned into a race. Before the public picked up on it, we had lost 25 to 30 structures. Then we started to plan it. We started to kick people out, so we could burn the cabins.
"I burned down cabins myself. It felt awful."
While the miners were out of town at a Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors meeting last November, requesting a moratorium on burnings, armed Forest Service officials burned a cabin known as the Lowry claim, from which they had evicted three families in the past 12 months. They bulldozed the rose bushes and set fire to the flowering fruit trees around the house.
Six months later, the charred mess remains, with melted plastic, buckled tin roofing, charred asbestos siding and shards of glass. Papery red-gold poppies still bloom neatly in a bank on the side of the hill.
"Property of the United States," reads a warped metal sign nailed to the trunk of a burned tree.
"Smokey Bear sucks," is written in toothpaste on one charred foundation.
"They just left it here, didn't clean up a thing," says Kenoli Oleari, 45, a member of the Salmon River Concerned Citizens group. "I think it's supposed to be a warning to us."
"Why burn the places down?" says Rex Richardson, 38, a local miner. "In this day of homelessness, some deserving person could be living there."
"The people that built these cabins built America," says miner David Haley. "Now we're archaic."
LAST YEAR ON CLAIM
Haley lives with his wife, Nancy, and his 9-year-old son, Caleb, in the cabin his father lived in until his death last year at the age of 74. Although the Forest Service has approved Haley's operation for the time being, they will not approve it again next year unless he brings in bigger equipment.
"My father fought the last two years of his life to save this place for me," he says. "I see him everywhere I look."
The Haley home is a knotty-pine cabin with a stone roof and hand-cut beams, set into the serene slant of the mountain, surrounded by fruit trees and hummingbirds. The river sounds in the background like rain in the distance.
The Haleys wake up early. They light a fire in the wood stove against the chill of the mountain morning, turn on lights powered by the hydroelectric generator David's father designed, and wash with water from their rigorously maintained water system. Nancy Haley takes Caleb to school, across the river on a narrow cable bridge that sways 30 feet over the river.
When she returns, she works in the vegetable garden, cooks, cuts wood for the fireplace and cans vegetables to stock the stone root cellar.
David Haley goes out to mine gold, dragging his equipment in a wheelbarrow. He is a lanky man with a beard, refined to knots of muscle by his long days of mining. He stands grinning in the sunshine, his heavy waders in icy mud.
"If they did come in and bulldoze my place, I think I'd live in a tent," he says. "This is my home."
He will spend much of his time today repairing equipment, tuning up the generator, adjusting hoses and pipes. Miles from town, help or extra equipment, he has learned to weld, to make dredging machines out of bed frames, to do for himself.
His "placer mine" operation consists of two pools of water carved into the rocky clay of the hillside, roughly 20 feet across. He washes and shovels dirt from the "high bar" where the river used to be, down through a graduated series of boxes meshed with wire.
Any gold flakes in the muck end up trapped in a piece of blue carpet lining the sluice box. Haley figures he makes $25 to $30 a day for 10 hours of heavy labor. He keeps the gold flakes in a tiny vial, scraping them carefully into a pile with a piece of paper plate.
"I'd like to fight the government to stay here. But I'm young, I've got a family, I don't want to spend my life in prison. If I were rich, I'd hire a lawyer. But I can't afford it. So there's no justice for me.
"But it makes me angry when the Forest Service says my home is a significant disturbance to the national forest, and a 40-acre clear-cut is not."
FOREST SERVICE CRITICS
Some say the Forest Service is anxious to get rid of the miners because they are the last witnesses to its abusive management of the Klamath National Forest.
"When we see the area being clear-cut, mismanaged and sprayed with herbicides, we scream and holler," said Lloyd Ingle, vice president of the Salmon River Mining Council.
Even environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club support the miners' presence in the national forest. "The amount of damage caused by the small miners is nothing compared to Forest Service timber management practices and road building," says Sierra Club spokeswoman Susie Van Kirk. "Forest Service priorities are really mixed up."
In the past three years alone, the Forest Service has clear-cut and sold 201 acres of Klamath National Forest trees, in addition to the thousands of acres logged as a result of the recent devastating forest fires. Some of that timber has been sold at $2 or $3 per board foot of lumber instead of the market price of $200 or $300 a foot.
The results of the clear-cutting are vivid up above the "view shed," the area seen from the road, where logging is restricted. The tops of the mountains are three-quarters bare of trees, scabby and denuded as a mangy animal.
"It's disastrous," says Oleari. "They've destroyed the Salmon Mountains. It will take 1,000 years to come back. And every single clear-cut has been approved by a Forest Service "Finding of No Significant Impact.' "
As controversial as the clear-cutting is the Forest Services' extensive use of herbicides in replanted sections of the national forest.
In 1984, the Salmon River Concerned Citizens filed a suit against the Forest Service alleging that it failed to do an analysis, required by law, of possible irreparable harm caused by herbicide spraying. The Forest Service withdrew its plans to spray, and the suit eventually contributed to a ban on pesticides in national forests,first in California and finally throughout the United States.
But the herbicides used in the Salmon River area had already taken their toll, according to the miners.
"After they sprayed in my drainage, one morning two spotted owls came to drink at my water and they fell over dead," said Jerry Kramer, 69, a local miner. "We could smell a very strong chemical smell like Lysol for three or four days afterward. The next morning, I went to get out of bed and the room started spinning, and I had to lay back down. I was dizzy all day. My wife was, too. It took weeks to wear off, and I never did get all the way over it.
"My wife just died."
"I think herbicide is a good management tool," says Harry Frey of the Forest Service. "Herbicide's not the only solution, but it's one of the solutions. People are just afraid of it because they don't know any better."
It's more than individuals at risk here, the miners say. It is the life of a town.
"You're part of a community here," says Sagaser. "You know folks, and they know you."
Any visit from a neighbor in these isolated hills may turn into a gathering. People stay for the afternoon, overnight or for the weekend, bringing with them food or musical instruments to turn the evening into an impromptu party. Visitors are rare, cherished and offered the best of whatever is available.
The town of Forks of Salmon consists of a shingled one-room post office, presided over for the past 36 years by 65-year-old postmistress Gladys Stansajw; a tiny general store run by Doug McCuddy, 48, and his wife Sally, 51; and the Forks of Salmon school.
"In a small town like this," says Haley, "someone's livelihood depends on how many kids are in the school."
The school, a bright, modern building attended by 40 children and staffed by five adults, recently took a performance of "The Tempest" to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival in Oregon, and won multiple awards in state academic competitions. All the children marched in the recent demonstration in nearby Yreka against the evictions.
"I grew up with most of these people in the forest," says Silas Beaver, 13. "I knew them since I was born. It would be really bad if they had to leave. They're like my brothers. But the Forest Service doesn't want us living on their land."
"It's not really theirs," says Merlin Hanauer, 11. "It's everybody's."
Forest Service evicts families, razes homes
SHANN NIX, CHRONICLE STAFF WRITER
PUBLICATION: THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
DATE: May 18, 1990
FINAL
Page: B3
Frank Yocum is destroying his home.
Yocum, a 44-year-old gold miner, has lived on the banks of the Salmon River for 19 years. His mother's irises bloom alongside the two-room log cabin, and the loft he built for his children is still filled with toys. A tattered American flag hangs over the door.
He is almost finished clearing his belongings out of the cabin, which the U.S. Forest Service has ordered him to bulldoze and torch, under threat of arrest, fines and imprisonment.
Yocum, a thin, bearded man with a weathered face, touches the meticulously split cedar shakes and the hand-hewn door of the historical site with reverence.
"The old-timer here before me made this," he says. "He was a master. Brought these panes of glass for the windows in on mule-back. You can't get shakes this fine, even from a factory."
Outside the cabin is piled a chair, a lamp, a spice rack and a bathtub filled with planters and rolls of carpet. He will take some things away and burn the rest.
A MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE
He looks at the pond. "I know every bullfrog's voice," he says. "And if you wait a half an hour, four buzzards will come and roost in that tree. They like to watch the sunset.
"They can have it, I guess. I worked hard here. Never took welfare, always took care of myself. Now they're forcing me out onto the street. I've got no place to be now.
"I'm not out to shoot them or hate the government. But this is a miscarriage of justice."
Inside his cabin is posted a notice, charging him with occupying federal land without authorization and maintaining structures and improvements on national forest land without approval.
"I've been living here peacefully in accordance with the law of the land for 19 years," Yocum says. "Why am I suddenly trespassing now?"
Miners have lived on the Salmon River for more than 100 years. The 1872 Mining Law gives every American the right to stake one or more claims, up to 160 acres, on federal land. If enough ore is found to justify a "prudent man" mining the claim, he can work the land and live on it rent-free.
These miners felled trees, built bridges and struggled to establish a community in the forest isolation, where snowstorms or accidents can claim a person's life, miles from any medical assistance. Without telephones, electricity or running water, they planted gardens, canned vegetables, designed water wheels to power their homes, trained roses up the walls of their log cabins and mined for gold.
They built stores, schools and post offices, and named their communities: Sawyer's Bar, Oak Knoll, Somes Bar, Cecilville, Forks of Salmon.
In 1976 the Federal Land Policy Management Act gave the Forest Service the authority to resolve conflicts over occupancy on federal land. Now the Forest Service is using that power to force the mom-and-pop miners to leave the national forest, to be replaced by larger mining operations.
"Society's becoming more sophisticated. This frontier spirit is outdated. The old laws just aren't up with the times," says Mike Lee, the district ranger for the Forest Service. "We want larger, more efficient operations that can get in, get the gold and get out. We don't find these homesteaders consistent with today's standards of mining."
"The less occupants, the less work," says Matt Olson, a 30-year employee of the Forest Service who retired April 7. "Every time the Forest Service removes a structure or a family, it's one less to deal with. And the big operations pay big bucks."
"We built our lives on the Mining Law," says Dan Sagaser, a 78-year-old miner who has been living in the cabin he built for 51 years. "To us, it was like the Constitution. We believed in it. We invested our lives in it. Now they say it doesn't count anymore. I don't understand it."
ARBITRARY GUIDELINES
Four years ago, the Forest Service began to issue orders to the roughly 200 miners and their families who live in the 1.7 million-acre Klamath National Forest, saying residents must obtain permits for their cabins, proving their residences are necessary to their mining. To get a permit, miners were required to file a "Plan of Operations," showing they were "full-time operations" performing "diligent mining."
Who decides what defines a full-time operation? "I do," says Lee. "There are no written guidelines."
How much time constitutes diligent mining? "We can pick any number you want," says Frey.
The deadlines imposed on families told to leave are just as arbitrary.
Lee acknowledges that people complain the decision-making process is unfair. "People say that they can't win. But I don't expect to make bad decisions. I'm not making off-the-hip decisions here."
Besides the stringent new regulations, miners were required to post bonds of $3,000 to $25,000 to ensure that the land was returned to its pristine state after they are evicted. The average income of the miners is $7,500 to $10,000 a year.
"Where am I going to get thatkind of money within 90 days?" said Yocum. "I just don't have it."
Without the money to post bonds, many of the miners were unable to comply with the new requirements. In January 1988, the Forest Service sent 237 letters to miners telling them to settle up or get out. Failure to comply is met with threats of lawsuits, fines and jail.
ONE LAST HOPE
"They put me out of business, they made me homeless," says Carl Eichenhofer, 44, who has just lost the claim he mined for 10 years. "Now I get to tear down my home and destroy all my assets and inheritance.
"And they're suing me for trespassing on a claim that I mined legally and paid taxes on for years. Suing me for what? They've already taken everything I have."
The miners' last hope is that Congress will consider legislation to extend the existing Townsite Act - a law that allows communities surrounded by national forest to purchase land from the federal government - to the miners' homes scattered through the Salmon River area.
Representative Wally Herger, R-Chico, wrote to the Forest Service on Wednesday requesting a one-year moratorium on evictions while Congress explores legislation.
Thirty to 35 homes have been destroyed since the Forest Service mailed the eviction letters last year.
"We started to burn obviously abandoned fire-hazard-type cabins with the permission of the owner," says Olson, who was working for the Forest Service at the time. "Then it seemed to accelerate among the Forest Service guys. Who can burn more cabins? Then it turned into a race. Before the public picked up on it, we had lost 25 to 30 structures. Then we started to plan it. We started to kick people out, so we could burn the cabins.
"I burned down cabins myself. It felt awful."
While the miners were out of town at a Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors meeting last November, requesting a moratorium on burnings, armed Forest Service officials burned a cabin known as the Lowry claim, from which they had evicted three families in the past 12 months. They bulldozed the rose bushes and set fire to the flowering fruit trees around the house.
Six months later, the charred mess remains, with melted plastic, buckled tin roofing, charred asbestos siding and shards of glass. Papery red-gold poppies still bloom neatly in a bank on the side of the hill.
"Property of the United States," reads a warped metal sign nailed to the trunk of a burned tree.
"Smokey Bear sucks," is written in toothpaste on one charred foundation.
"They just left it here, didn't clean up a thing," says Kenoli Oleari, 45, a member of the Salmon River Concerned Citizens group. "I think it's supposed to be a warning to us."
"Why burn the places down?" says Rex Richardson, 38, a local miner. "In this day of homelessness, some deserving person could be living there."
"The people that built these cabins built America," says miner David Haley. "Now we're archaic."
LAST YEAR ON CLAIM
Haley lives with his wife, Nancy, and his 9-year-old son, Caleb, in the cabin his father lived in until his death last year at the age of 74. Although the Forest Service has approved Haley's operation for the time being, they will not approve it again next year unless he brings in bigger equipment.
"My father fought the last two years of his life to save this place for me," he says. "I see him everywhere I look."
The Haley home is a knotty-pine cabin with a stone roof and hand-cut beams, set into the serene slant of the mountain, surrounded by fruit trees and hummingbirds. The river sounds in the background like rain in the distance.
The Haleys wake up early. They light a fire in the wood stove against the chill of the mountain morning, turn on lights powered by the hydroelectric generator David's father designed, and wash with water from their rigorously maintained water system. Nancy Haley takes Caleb to school, across the river on a narrow cable bridge that sways 30 feet over the river.
When she returns, she works in the vegetable garden, cooks, cuts wood for the fireplace and cans vegetables to stock the stone root cellar.
David Haley goes out to mine gold, dragging his equipment in a wheelbarrow. He is a lanky man with a beard, refined to knots of muscle by his long days of mining. He stands grinning in the sunshine, his heavy waders in icy mud.
"If they did come in and bulldoze my place, I think I'd live in a tent," he says. "This is my home."
He will spend much of his time today repairing equipment, tuning up the generator, adjusting hoses and pipes. Miles from town, help or extra equipment, he has learned to weld, to make dredging machines out of bed frames, to do for himself.
His "placer mine" operation consists of two pools of water carved into the rocky clay of the hillside, roughly 20 feet across. He washes and shovels dirt from the "high bar" where the river used to be, down through a graduated series of boxes meshed with wire.
Any gold flakes in the muck end up trapped in a piece of blue carpet lining the sluice box. Haley figures he makes $25 to $30 a day for 10 hours of heavy labor. He keeps the gold flakes in a tiny vial, scraping them carefully into a pile with a piece of paper plate.
"I'd like to fight the government to stay here. But I'm young, I've got a family, I don't want to spend my life in prison. If I were rich, I'd hire a lawyer. But I can't afford it. So there's no justice for me.
"But it makes me angry when the Forest Service says my home is a significant disturbance to the national forest, and a 40-acre clear-cut is not."
FOREST SERVICE CRITICS
Some say the Forest Service is anxious to get rid of the miners because they are the last witnesses to its abusive management of the Klamath National Forest.
"When we see the area being clear-cut, mismanaged and sprayed with herbicides, we scream and holler," said Lloyd Ingle, vice president of the Salmon River Mining Council.
Even environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club support the miners' presence in the national forest. "The amount of damage caused by the small miners is nothing compared to Forest Service timber management practices and road building," says Sierra Club spokeswoman Susie Van Kirk. "Forest Service priorities are really mixed up."
In the past three years alone, the Forest Service has clear-cut and sold 201 acres of Klamath National Forest trees, in addition to the thousands of acres logged as a result of the recent devastating forest fires. Some of that timber has been sold at $2 or $3 per board foot of lumber instead of the market price of $200 or $300 a foot.
The results of the clear-cutting are vivid up above the "view shed," the area seen from the road, where logging is restricted. The tops of the mountains are three-quarters bare of trees, scabby and denuded as a mangy animal.
"It's disastrous," says Oleari. "They've destroyed the Salmon Mountains. It will take 1,000 years to come back. And every single clear-cut has been approved by a Forest Service "Finding of No Significant Impact.' "
As controversial as the clear-cutting is the Forest Services' extensive use of herbicides in replanted sections of the national forest.
In 1984, the Salmon River Concerned Citizens filed a suit against the Forest Service alleging that it failed to do an analysis, required by law, of possible irreparable harm caused by herbicide spraying. The Forest Service withdrew its plans to spray, and the suit eventually contributed to a ban on pesticides in national forests,first in California and finally throughout the United States.
But the herbicides used in the Salmon River area had already taken their toll, according to the miners.
"After they sprayed in my drainage, one morning two spotted owls came to drink at my water and they fell over dead," said Jerry Kramer, 69, a local miner. "We could smell a very strong chemical smell like Lysol for three or four days afterward. The next morning, I went to get out of bed and the room started spinning, and I had to lay back down. I was dizzy all day. My wife was, too. It took weeks to wear off, and I never did get all the way over it.
"My wife just died."
"I think herbicide is a good management tool," says Harry Frey of the Forest Service. "Herbicide's not the only solution, but it's one of the solutions. People are just afraid of it because they don't know any better."
It's more than individuals at risk here, the miners say. It is the life of a town.
"You're part of a community here," says Sagaser. "You know folks, and they know you."
Any visit from a neighbor in these isolated hills may turn into a gathering. People stay for the afternoon, overnight or for the weekend, bringing with them food or musical instruments to turn the evening into an impromptu party. Visitors are rare, cherished and offered the best of whatever is available.
The town of Forks of Salmon consists of a shingled one-room post office, presided over for the past 36 years by 65-year-old postmistress Gladys Stansajw; a tiny general store run by Doug McCuddy, 48, and his wife Sally, 51; and the Forks of Salmon school.
"In a small town like this," says Haley, "someone's livelihood depends on how many kids are in the school."
The school, a bright, modern building attended by 40 children and staffed by five adults, recently took a performance of "The Tempest" to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival in Oregon, and won multiple awards in state academic competitions. All the children marched in the recent demonstration in nearby Yreka against the evictions.
"I grew up with most of these people in the forest," says Silas Beaver, 13. "I knew them since I was born. It would be really bad if they had to leave. They're like my brothers. But the Forest Service doesn't want us living on their land."
"It's not really theirs," says Merlin Hanauer, 11. "It's everybody's."
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