C.. Lewisburg Clearcut

Charlie Olson: We put it in Charlie Rauls pick up and we went out through Harlan. He wouldn't go back down through Alsea.

Bob Zybach: You said there was a problem in one of the areas where he was driving the pick up out.

Charlie Olson: Well, between Burnt Woods and Harlan and on up it's awfully zig-zaggy, an awful lot of crooked road. That's where he hooked on to this piano outfit, I don't remember what they called themselves, but it was a piano outfit and they had a rig that they could move pianos with a pick up, but it was a closed . . . they knew Rauls rig and he knew theirs but he didn't stop.

Bob Zybach: Then you ended up hauling it out that way then.

Charlie Olson: We brought out that way.

Bob Zybach: And those bench legs, you think, inner breed with the other deer in this area and now they're just part of the population.

Charlie Olson: They've crossed. I've shot several of them.

Bob Zybach: Several bench legs?

Charlie Olson: Yes, I've shot several of them that were crossed. And I had one killed after I wasn't shooting here anymore and was feeding them. And it was killed from the road just beyond where this bee man, you know where he's located, over there just north of me.

Bob Zybach: Where you live now?

Charlie Olson: Williams. Somebody had shot this bench leg, and it was only a half breed bench leg, but they'd shot it, it was a doe and they had dressed it out but they had left it. They just left it lay there and rot. They'd shot it from the road.

Bob Zybach: On the bench legs, other than the short legs and the heay chest and that the bucks only have spikes. Was there anything else you could tell was different from the other black-tail deer?

Charlie Olson: No, they were heavier. They were heavier and shorter legged and that was about it. Had nothing but spikes.

Bob Zybach: Okay.

C. Lewisburg Clearcut

Bob Zybach: We're at the Lewisburg clearcut, at stop 9 on the tour [Soap Creek Valley Auto Tour, Bob Zybach, OSU Research Forests cc: 1989] or stop 10. We're looking out across the south

Bob Zybach: slopes to the north of us. Can you describe what that looked like?

Charlie Olson: Coffin Butte of course you can hardly see that. Writsman's Pasture over there, it's pretty near covered, it was bare.

Bob Zybach: Is that Writsman's Pasture where we see that patch offir?

Charlie Olson: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: What did you call that hill up there? Right above Writsman's Pasture, what was that hill called?

Charlie Olson: I don't know. I don't know what that was called.

Bob Zybach: Wanda Cook called it Writsman's hill, but you don't remember a name.

Charlie Olson: It undoubtably could be because that. . . it runs right up through there and Writsman's undoubtably had quite an area of acres. And all of this other here that you can see has got timber on it now, it was bare.

Bob Zybach: Was it grass?

Charlie Olson: Grass and strawberries.

Bob Zybach: And strawberries?

Charlie Olson: Yes. That's Bakers Mountain right there.

Bob Zybach: That's Bakers Mountain off to the left.

Charlie Olson: The one that your finger's pointing at is Fogies Mountain.

Bob Zybach: Is what mountain?

Charlie Olson: Fogies Mountain. The only name I ever heard for it.

Bob Zybach: F-o-g-i-e?

Charlie Olson: I never saw it spelled but that's .

Bob Zybach: The one with the bald is Fogies and the peak to the right [east] of that is Bakers Mountain?

Charlie Olson: The one right in front of us is Bakers Mountain.

Bob Zybach: Oh, the lower -- the front profile here -- the vety foreground.

Charlie Olson: Yeah, that's Bakers Mountain.

Bob Zybach: Okay and the one behind it is Fogies Mountain.

Charlie Olson: The one way over there on top of that hill

Bob Zybach: With the bald on it. .

Charlie Olson: That was Fogies Mountain. And up on there were some big trees that I didn't know just for sure what they were. They looked different from everything else.

Bob Zybach: Could they have been pine?

Charlie Olson: No. No, and I kept wondering for a long time what they were until probably. well, about the time they started to log in there, I found out what they were. They were hemlock.

Bob Zybach: Oh, there was hemlock up in there. Up on the peak?

Charlie Olson: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: I've been looking for hemlock all through here. That's why I'm interested in that. Now on Fogles Mountain, that's where the hemlock were.

Charlie Olson: There was a heck of a lot of hemlock, old growth, big trees.

Bob Zybach: And they logged those out of there?

Charlie Olson: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Do you remember when?

Charlie Olson: About. . . I could get pretty close to that, they went to Airlie.

Bob Zybach: Was there a mill at Airlie at that time?

Charlie Olson: There was a railroad there and that's where they went out. There's a fellow by the name of Winson Reed that bought the old Matthews place up here. That Matthews place joined us on the north and it was 160 acres. And this Winson Reed had his eye on all that timber in there was going to have to come out through there. And he was going to get a little commission on that as it came out, but it didn't turn out that way. They went out toward Airlie.

Bob Zybach: So was that hemlock visible from here?

Charlie Olson: Huh?

Bob Zybach: Was that hemlock. . . could you see it from here, from this spot?

Charlie Olson: Oh, sure you could.

Bob Zybach: So, where would it be in relation to that bald?

Charlie Olson: Well, it was where that other green stuff is now.

Bob Zybach: Up along the ridge?

Charlie Olson: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: How about down in the draws?

Charlie Olson: Well, it didn't come down too far. It didn't come down too far until there was fir. Old growth and the bastard fir.

Bob Zybach: On these hills here was there any oak?

Charlie Olson: Most of the oak would be in the little clumps and they would start I think probably some of it is still visible in places here, I can't tell, but I think they would be oak visible yet there in some places. The oak would start first and then this bastard fir would come right in and grow right with it and choke it out. There would be great big ones about like that, occasionally.

Bob Zybach: About twenty four inches.

Charlie Olson: Occasionally. And they would die when the fir trees would come up around they would choke them out.

Bob Zybach: These occasional oak, would they be in small groves or would they be just one or two?

Charlie Olson: There would be quite a lot of oaks in groves that would come down on these bald places and they would be taken over as soon as . . . it seemed like they have to have fertile ground and moist ground before the seed of these firs would take.

Bob Zybach: The oak would create a climate for the fir to come in. Did they start growing in the shade of the oak or underneath the branches?

Charlie Olson: Underneath. They'd crowd the oak out.

Bob Zybach: And then they'd choke them out and start seeding in the area, and that kind of moved down hill maybe like with the acorn or something.

Charlie Olson: Yeah, they would. They'd come down the hill.

Bob Zybach: How much time would it take to go from the oak to the fir?

Charlie Olson: Oh, they didn't have any time limit.

Bob Zybach: So some hills would seed in pretty quickly and some would be kind of slow?

Charlie Olson: It just depended on what the wind would happen to blow and. . . that's kind of an asinine question, I think.

Bob Zybach: Okay, I'm sony for being asinine. On the grasses and the strawberries, can you remember any other kinds of plants that grew in conjunction with those, any kinds of wildflowers or berries?

Charlie Olson: Goat weed.

Bob Zybach: Goat weed, is that a native 7

Charlie Olson: Goat weed took the whole works, all of the bare ground became goat weed and it choked out the strawberries . . . we could go down and pick wild strawberries and

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Charlie Olson: and just like they did when Custer attacked them.

Bob Zybach: So you think that these were Indians that were driven all the way across the United States essentially.

Charlie Olson: Sure.

Bob Zybach: And these were eastern tribes that had been moved into the Willamette Valley by.

Charlie Olson: Sure, they drove them west and north.

Bob Zybach: Did any other people in this area feel that same way, was that considered common knowledge or it that just your theory?

Charlie Olson: Hoskins . . . no, let's see . . . I can't think of that guy's name. At Hoskins, he had a big barn and a good beautiful house

Bob Zybach: Chambers.

Charlie Olson: No, that wasn't Chambers, there's several Chambers there.

Bob Zybach: Eddy or Norton?

Charlie Olson: No.

Bob Zybach: Dunn?

Charlie Olson: I knew those too, but then this wasn't them. I can tell you what he was doing, maybe he was representing the British. He was representing the British and he was building a railroad.

Bob Zybach: Hogg or Hoag? Nash, Wallis Nash?

Charlie Olson: Nash. That's the name. He saw when the Indians came through. He saw them come through and they did the same there that they did all the way before. They squaws came ahead.

Bob Zybach: So he was watching them, this was in the 1870's or '80's, this is from the Indian Wars, as they were putting people back on the reservation then?

Charlie Olson: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: That's why I didn't get it.

Charlie Olson: He saw them when they came through and so he could give us a pretty good description. But he started a railroad and Britain was backing that, but there was another outfit that started and they were also from Britain. And they started to go the other way. And he was trying to get his through first and they were trying to get theirs through first, but they had more money. Now get this, Newport, that was what

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Charlie Olson: to talk about Ernest Cook.

Bob Zybach: Ernest Cook, okay.

Charlie Olson: And we're also going to talk about Peacock.

Bob Zybach: Where did Peacock live?

Charlie Olson: They lived just across from the school house.

Bob Zybach: Okay.

Charlie Olson: And there was another one, that place that I'm speaking of Peacock, that was the Moore Place.

Bob Zybach: Okay.

Charlie Olson: And it was Lacy, it was Smith

Bob Zybach: Was that Joseph Smith, John?

Charlie Olson: I don't know.

Bob Zybach: Okay.

Charlie Olson: I don't know, it could have been an offspring of his, but he had a kid about four years older than me and they got to school they had a daughter, Bessie Smith. My uncle and my brother built a fence, a woven wire fence, with barbed wire around the entire Cook place. That was about eleven . . . I think the Cook place was eleven hundred acres.

Bob Zybach: Yeah.

Charlie Olson: And this other place, Ball . . . Smith, then Dorgan, what ever you want to call it, Moore, that I think was about the same. They built a fence around both of them. Wire fence and they built it with oak.

Bob Zybach: Is that oak off of these hills up through here?

Charlie Olson: They cut the oak as close as they could to where they were building the fence.

Bob Zybach: So they had an eleven hundred acre ranch fenced in there.

Charlie Olson: They got the older oak that was grown in among the fir trees and it was killed, you know, and got dried and was . . . well, a lot of people called black oak because it black. It would turn kind of black after it was dead. And stand, and it was hard.

Bob Zybach: How about Yew wood, did people use yew wood for fences?

Charlie Olson: That yew wood comes in a little bit on the mountain on this side of the school house of the mountain just to the right, coming home it would be to the right. On there was

Charlie Olson: an old fence and it had been some yew wood. Those posts, yew wood posts are setting there when these oak posts are rotten and gone.

Bob Zybach: So yew wood was a better post material?

Charlie Olson: Oh, gosh, yes.

Bob Zybach: Did anybody use the madrone for anything through there?

Charlie Olson: I've never heard of it.

Bob Zybach: it's got another name, they called it something else too. it's kind of a waste wood, it's that wood with the bark that peels off and it's got the leathery leaves to it.

Charlie Olson: Laurel.

Bob Zybach: They call it laurel too.

Charlie Olson: Laurel, that wouldn't last long.

Bob Zybach: Did people use it for anything?

Charlie Olson: I don't know what it would ever be good for. It was so brittle that you would have to be careful when you fell it, you know, you'd cut an undercut and then you'd start in the back with a cross cut saw awful carefully, if it leaned a little it would be apt to pop anytime and go up a ways and split up there and. . . any direction wherever it would happen to fall. Laurel, I don't think, was good for anything else to but write your initials in. It would never disappear. It sheds it's bark but that initial will be into the next underneath, it sheds it's bark every year.

Bob Zybach: We talked about the animals in this area on the other side. And I want to talk about the fish when we get down below, but can you remember the bird population through here, the owls or the hawks or the pheasant.

Charlie Olson: There was a pheasant that we called bush pheasant here, and in Canada they called it fool's hen.

Bob Zybach: Grouse?

Charlie Olson: They called it rough grouse, some of them do, but there's another grouse, a blue grouse, and it's a bigger heavier bird and they are more adapted to the old growth or yellow fir. They are more adapted to that than the owls that they're talking about, because you could find them in that type of timber and I happened to have my little double barreled shotgun and go up through a trail one morning pretty early and there was a lot of fluttering up above and I looked up there and there was grouse, and they

Charlie Olson: were picking buds. And I shot one and it come down, they didn't fly, I shot another

Bob Zybach: one, they didn't fly. I don't know why but they . . . I could shoot. . . I had only thirteen shells with me, I'd already shot two rabbits so when I ran out of shells, I went home. So there used to be a lot of grouse in here?

Charlie Olson: Oh, yeah.

Bob Zybach: Did they call them anything, did they call them hooters or boorners or.

Charlie Olson: Yeah, they called them hooters.

Bob Zybach: Can you remember many owls or hawks through this country?

Charlie Olson: Yes, quite a lot of them. Quite a lot of them and they . . . they were pretty bad, there was a hawk that was not, not the great big ones, the big ones were bad too. But there was a hawk that was about . . . a little heavier than a pigeon, but they looked a whole lot like a pigeon.

***

Bob Zybach: We're talking about the small hawk that was a little bit bigger than a pigeon.

Charlie Olson: They would catch the pheasants and they couldn't carry it but they could kill it and eat it. They were probably the worst of the hawks.

Bob Zybach: What did you call them, what kind of hawks?

Charlie Olson: Well, as far as I know they were no other name.

Bob Zybach: Just hawk?

Charlie Olson: Just hawk.

Bob Zybach: How about the bigger hawks, like the red tails or something? Did you just call them hawks too?

Charlie Olson: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: How about owls, just call them owls?

Charlie Olson: There were hoot owls and then there was other owls, there were small owls, little fellows.

Bob Zybach: Pygmys.

Charlie Olson: I don't know what they called them, but they're small. They didn't do any harm, I don't think. They didn't . . . they were probably the size of a robin.

Bob Zybach: Would you shoot owls or hawks?

Charlie Olson: I would shoot hawks, yes. I would shoot owls too. Because they were bad, there

Charlie Olson: was an owl that got into our chicken house and didn't know how to get out. And it killed several chickens before my mother went over to feed them in the morning and it couldn't get out. There's a little narrow door and it had gone in through that narrow door and the whole front was wire netting and it was trying to get out through that wire netting and she just got a club, you know, and when it would try to get out there why it would stick its head through that wire netting and she'd come down on it with a club. So she had an owl. But they . . . the pheasants

Bob Zybach: What you call pheasants are these China pheasants or the grouse?

Charlie Olson: We had no China pheasants yet until . . . they never did come up through the timber up to my place . . . our home. They were down here in this area, there were a lot of them down here and one year it rained so that they couldn't thrash, all the grains was left and the pheasants were awfully thick, they grew awfully thick after that. Down in the valley. Gray diggers, lots of gray diggers.

Bob Zybach: There's something I've heard of called a brush bunny, in which they said it had short coarse black fur up on the higher elevations, do you recall anything like that?

Charlie Olson: Brush bunny?

Bob Zybach: Yeah.

Charlie Olson: That was a red rabbit that we called a timber rabbit.

Bob Zybach: Timber rabbit?

Charlie Olson: Yeah, that's what we called them. And my little shepherd dog would get after one of them and they could go around a while and then if it happened to come back to where she jumped it that's where I would be and I could shoot the darn thing. And if they could get into a log, they would . . usually would, they would get into a hollow log and she'd bark and stay there, and I would come down there and poke it out, you know, and she'd get after it again.

Bob Zybach: Were those about the size of a regular bunny or were they more like a jack rabbit?

Charlie Olson: They were not as big as a jack rabbit, but they were much bigger than these little rabbit that we have here now. But they seemed to disappear, but they were good to eat. But the jack rabbit, of course, they wasn't fit to eat. They had warbles all over, you know, I wouldn't want to eat them.

Bob Zybach: So you had timber rabbits, gray diggers, do you remember when foxes. . . anything about

Bob Zybach: foxes?

Charlie Olson: There was only one group of foxes in this area and that's when Marvin Clark's got away. He had . . . he was raising them for fur.

Bob Zybach: Red fox?

Charlie Olson: No, they were not the red, they were the grey, I think they call them.

Bob Zybach: So the grey fox was brought in from outside?

Charlie Olson: Yeah. They got away some how and there was foxes for a while, but they didn't last too long, I don't know just what happened to them.

Bob Zybach: Okay. You mentioned pigeons came through this area, was this a pigeon flyway?

Charlie Olson: The pigeon got to being pretty thick and they . .just down there by Nashville, there's a..

Bob Zybach: That's the other side of the hill though, I kind of want to keep on this side here. I'mfa,niliar with the pigeons in the Nashville area, just on this side here. Can you recall pigeons from this area?

Charlie Olson: Oh, yeah. There was pigeons here. And the only things that I ever was successful with them was with the twenty-two. I had a little twenty-two stephens favorite. And I could kill them with that, but with a shotgun it just seemed like they'd fly away. But they . . . I got a different shotgun and we had strawberries and there was some wild strawberries from the house north and there was kind of a ridge there so I could go down in this side of that ridge with the shotgun and then come on up other and be right on top of them and of course, they'd take off. And this was a pump, and I shot right in to the pile of them and they started to fall and I pumped it and shot again and they started to fall and then they got down by the creek and they lit down there . Mary's River. And they lit down there and every once in a while one would fall out. So they started to move . . . and they went on over towards Summit and Vie Plunket lived in a place where Weavers live now and they got over that fall and they were still dropping once in a while. And I didn't know what Vie was talking about when I met him and he says, "Why don't you take care of your chickens." I didn't know what he meant. And he told me. He told me that those pigeons were falling every once in awhile out of that bunch.

Bob Zybach: The pigeons would fly this far east too? They moved through here.

Charlie Olson: Oh, yeah.

Bob Zybach: Did they have chitum or was dogwood, were those major trees at that time?

Charlie Olson: I planted a bunch of chitum.

Bob Zybach: In this area?

Charlie Olson: Yeah. I planted a bunch of chitum, I got it from the Arboretum.

Bob Zybach: That's Peavy Arboretum?

Charlie Olson: Yeah. I planted in rows so I could till the two ways. And they. . . pigeons got in there and they . . . teachers in Philomath wanted to come out, you know, and shoot them and they did, and they came out and shot pigeons. I told them they could shoot pigeons anytime they wanted to there.

Bob Zybach: How about ducks and geese?

Charlie Olson: No. There was no place much for ducks and geese unless you'd go out to Corvallis and north of Corvallis.

Bob Zybach: But in this area here, there was no flyway?

Charlie Olson: No. They'd go over, oh, yeah, they'd go over, but then they wouldn't lite. There was nothing here for them to lite on.

Bob Zybach: One more thing at this spot here, these trees. . . that they dynamited, do you have any idea why they did that?

Charlie Olson: Why they did it?

Bob Zybach: Yeah.

Charlie Olson: I don't have any idea except if I was to quote Wilson, E. E. Wilson . . . "It probably was Professors that did it."

Bob Zybach: That's what E. E. Wilson would say?

Charlie Olson: You know who E. E. Wilson was.

Bob Zybach: I know they named the game farm after him. Did you know him?

Charlie Olson: I should have. My sister was his secretary.

Bob Zybach: Oh, I see. What kind of man was he?

Charlie Olson: He was a nice fellow. He was a real nice chap. She worked for him until she got married and the man she married induced her to go out to the farm where he was.

Bob Zybach: Oh, Isee.

Charlie Olson: And she quit Wilson then. And this man he had a place about three miles south of

Charlie Olson: Monroe and he was building a house, but he didn't have money to finish it and he didn't have the money to pay for the ranch. And he got her to come out there and he had her pay for the ranch and then he had her pay for finishing the house and she told me "I don't know what he did with his money." She couldn't just sit there, you know, she had to do something, so she got turkeys and raised turkeys. She got a pretty big flock of turkeys and she would take them out to the neighbors where they had grain and they would catch grasshoppers, you know, and eat the grain that was lost and she would transfer them to another place and she was doing pretty well with the turkeys. And then he sold the place.

Bob Zybach: Her husband? When she worked for E. E. Wilson, what was he doing there?

Charlie Olson: He was a lawyer.

Bob Zybach: He was lawyer.

Charlie Olson: Why sure.

Bob Zybach: Why did they name the game ranch after him?

Charlie Olson: Because he owned that.

Bob Zybach: So he was the land owner.

Charlie Olson: He owned that. . . well, did you ever see a lawyer that didn't own land.

Bob Zybach: I've seen afew poor lawyers. Not a good lawyer.

Charlie Olson: Well, he acquired that out there and he set it aside for a game reserve.

Bob Zybach: Oh, so he created the reserve.

Charlie Olson: Of course.

Bob Zybach: What kind of game was he into?

Charlie Olson: Well, Chinese pheasants was the main thing. And he planted a bunch of stuff, you know, where they could hide and.

Bob Zybach: So he was creating habitat for them?

Charlie Olson: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Now when he would say "it must have been the professors that done it", what kinds of things was he talking about?

Charlie Olson: Well, I can quote him. I'll just quote him, that "they're the most ignorant thing that you could ever try to make a contract out for, because they can't understand anything."

Bob Zybach: And he's a lawyer? So when you're saying "it must have been the professors" that blew out these stumps here, you're saying they couldn't quite figure it out?

Charlie Olson: Well, can you tell us anything about that, that was practical? Can you name a practical thing to take dynamite and blow these things all that high up and then leave them set there?

Bob Zybach: It leads to good discussions.

Angela Sondenaa: [ANGELA] The reason they did it was for bird habitat, because a lot of these areas when they go through and they clearcut the whole thing, they don't leave any snags for the owls and the other cavity nesters and the hawks to build their nests in. And so this is something a lot of people are starting to do is leave damaged trees or just old trees and blow the tops out for the birds. Once the forest grows up these will be used --probably every one of them -- for nesting birds of one kind or another. So it's a wildlife habitat project.

Charlie Olson: Well, that sounds practical for a professor.

Bob Zybach: So you're saying that the creation of this kind of habitat for owls, you'd rather see it used for people.

Charlie Olson: I doubt if there will be a bird nest or an owl's nest in any of those snags.

Bob Zybach: And what's the reason for that?

Charlie Olson: They want a nest where they have cover, where it's hidden.

Bob Zybach: So you think that these are too far out in the open and by the time the trees come up these will be gone, rotted out or something.

Charlie Olson: Of course! They're too open. Stuff won't nest in that.

Bob Zybach: Okay. We'll have to wait another forty or fifty years and we'll check back with you.

Charlie Olson: Those will just rot and fall. [Olson's Note: You'll have to put preservatives in them or they will be down in ten years.]

Bob Zybach: Okay, that's interesting on both sides. Can you think of anything else in this area, can you see any places that we haven't maybe mentioned or any types of vegetation that have changed or think of any animals we haven't discussed or types of birds that we haven't discussed.

Charlie Olson: Not from this point of view, I don't believe, but farther down we can point out roads where the county roads have been.

Bob Zybach: Down below I want to get into roads, and houses, and orchards and fish, so we don't want to forget those. I think we covered most of the general patterns of things. And I also want

Bob Zybach: to talk a little bit about your family histoty.

Charlie Olson: We can speak a little bit of fish here because the whole area is

Bob Zybach: Okay.

Charlie Olson: This Soap Creek really had good fish and the water was good, you could drink water from any little stream and it was good water and the fish were really good.

Bob Zybach: What kind offish were they?

Charlie Olson: Trout.

Bob Zybach: What kind of trout?

Charlie Olson: I don't know.

Bob Zybach: Would you call them brook trout or cutthroats? Just trout?

Charlie Olson: It could have been both, I don't know. I'm not a fisherman and I don't know much about fish, a little bit about salmon but not trout. I don't know much about them only that I could, without a hook, I could make a hook out of a needle by getting it hot, you know, and bend it. And I could go and catch fish.

Bob Zybach: How big would the fish get?

Charlie Olson: Well, [spreads hands between one and two feet apart].

Bob Zybach: Sixteen or eighteen inches?

Charlie Olson: Pretty good sized ones.

Bob Zybach: Get some pretty good sized ones?

Charlie Olson: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: How far up the stream could you get them that big?

Charlie Olson: That's another item, that's another item and it would cover several things that are a little bit extreme but they've got to be. We could go up above our house and go down . . . our house was on the side of the hill, and there was a spring above it and we could get water from that spring through a pipe to the house and we could also pipe if from . . . not pipe it, but ditch it, from where we took water and go down to where we had a garden and irrigate the garden. There was a stream that was far enough up from our house that we could do that you know and it would run. So now rainfall comes in, after a while, and I'm not going to say that it -- falling the timber between here and the coast -- was the only reason for it because I don't know, but that rainfall started to get less and less and less.

Bob Zybach: Less rainfall now than there was when you were a boy?

Charlie Olson: Less, much less. When I say two hundred inches a year, I'm guessing because I didn't measure it, but it had to be somewhere in that area. And I . . . when I first realized that they was checking it . . . it was pretty close to 100 inches a year. And this is marked at Summit at the Post Office, she checked and 96 was what it was doing when she started and when they moved the Post Office and she moved away I started to keep track and it got down to 56, out in the valley here it was .32. Now there is something there that I have to go back and say that I think it was over 200 inches a year.

Bob Zybach: So that would be like Olympic Peninsula or some of the real wet areas up around Valsetz maybe?

Charlie Olson: I don't know what the reason was unless their cutting the timber between here and the coast. But they weren't cutting so much at that time that that could have done it.

Bob Zybach: I see, like condensation from the trees would be pulling it down maybe, or change in weather patterns, wind patterns.

Charlie Olson: That will create more when there's a lot of trees, it will condense it you know, and it will fall if there's a lot of timber, but and that later on has proved out but it hasn't been as extreme as that had to be at that time. Now to catch fish if we would go back to where we could catch fish at that time when I was a kid, there isn't any stream.

Bob Zybach: We're going to be heading down to that area, so we can kind of see it from here.

Charlie Olson: You go down to the school house. And there was a little creek that came down from up above and we got our water for the school house out of that little creek. There isn't any creek now. Right below the school house was a bridge across Soap Creek. That bridge floated out three different times while I was a kid and right now I don't think that creek was over it's banks.

Bob Zybach: So you think there's a lot less moisture. .

Charlie Olson: There's something else that has changed that I think besides the falling of the trees between here and the coast.

Bob Zybach: How about temperatures, are summer temperatures do you notice much diJerence?

Charlie Olson: The temperatures vary from year to year and of late years and particularly of this

Charlie Olson: year now, we are having a milder winter than we used to have.

Bob Zybach: How about snow falls and freezes?

Charlie Olson: Less, it seems like we have less. In 1937, my father started for the barn from the house in the morning and it took him till noon to get over there.

Bob Zybach: I talked to Jim Hanish and he said sometime about the mid-30 's there was a three foot snow fall on Berry Creek.

Charlie Olson: Three foot wasn't any where near to what there was up there. It came up to his neck.

Bob Zybach: So it would be over five foot.

Charlie Olson: And he would lean and wiggle you know and then he would move forward and my stepmother would come behind and she would tromple it down so that you could walk back and it took him until noon to get over to the barn and it was about a hundred yards from the house to the barn.

Bob Zybach: And that was in 1937?

Charlie Olson: 1937. That same year I started to go up, I had a set a snow shoes and I had to take them off and leave them and started in walking and there was a crust on it. About three feet up and then it rained and then it froze and that crust would just hold until you were almost on it and then it would break. And it took me about three hours to go from the house and up to the top of the ridge above where Marvin Clark lived and when I got up there, there was a buck laying under some hazel bushes and he saw me, he heard me come and he saw me and when I located him why I just veered off a little bit, you know, so that I wouldn't be going directly at him and went on and I knew that he wasn't going to get up. When it snowed on top of this already. It snowed another two feet and it was on for five weeks and then when it was almost off, why it snowed and stayed two more weeks. Well, I went back up through there and his bones were there all right but he hadn't left, he was still there.

Bob Zybach: So that was going to be my next question, you kind of anticipated it. What effect did that snow have on the wildlfe population through the area?

Charlie Olson: Well, it almost depleted the deer . .

Bob Zybach: The one bad snowfall knocked the deer population way back.

Charlie Olson: Oh, yeah, it pert near depleted that. They had to. . . I don't know how long it took them to come back. I wasn't shooting very much after that because we stopped eating

Charlie Olson: meat and.

Bob Zybach: You're a vegetarian?

Charlie Olson: No. Oh, no, but there are things that will happen that you have to . . . I like meat and pork was my pet meat and I had to stop it, but

Bob Zybach: For health reasons?

Charlie Olson: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Were there ever any elk in this area, I've never heard anybody ever mention any elk?

Charlie Olson: Yeah, there was elk.

Bob Zybach: Right here in Soap Creek?

Charlie Olson: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Until when?

Charlie Olson: Well, they were probably out of here by 1910, but I found horns

Bob Zybach: Elk horns?

Charlie Olson: Yeah, I found a horn that was deep enough covered with fir boughs so that it was a little hard to pick it up and I had a gun that was fairly long and that one horn was as long as my gun. I stuck it up on a limb of a tree and somebody else had found it, I think they took it.

Bob Zybach: Jim Hanish mentioned a type of sheep that the early pioneers had might have been wild, it had a curved horn to it. Did you ever find any sheep horns back in these hills? Nothing like that?

Charlie Olson: No. Talking about sheep, on that picture that you have [Soap Creek Schoolhouse student picture, e. 1900), is a guy by the name of Dell Baker. When it had rained real hard, we came home from school and it was just pouring down and my father had just gone up and seen where the sheep and a horse and a dog had come by and had gone on down. And he went on up to see where they had started from and there was a bell strap, cut with a knife and dog tracks and so he followed them down and he came down to where they had been forced across the creek. The creek was a torrent at the time, but there was a foot bridge so you could walk across but he had apparently swum his horse across and he had forced the sheep to go across and he had them up there in his yard and he had about two or three thousand more and . .

Bob Zybach: So there was two or three thousand sheep in this valley?

Charlie Olson: Well, at that time, yes, oh, yes. But my father's sheep was branded with his special type of brand, an 0 and a bar out from each side, but it was paint. You put paint on it instead of heating the iron. So it was easy to go and pick them out so he had Dell Baker pick them out and bring them back.

Bob Zybach: So this area here. . . somehow kind of went from on the south slopes it went from grass to strawberries to oak started coming in and goat weed took over. How did the goat weed get in here?

Charlie Olson: I don't know but it grew . . . it grew thick and it just choked pert near everything else out.

Bob Zybach: Was that during your lfe time or was there goat weed in here when as long as you can remember?

Charlie Olson: I didn't know of any of it at first, because there was strawberries and the goat weed choked them out you know, and there wouldn't be anything else but goat weed. But it seems to have a cycle. And not only goat weed but silver grays [squirrels] seem to have a cycle. There was a lot of silver grays and I shot a lot of them with my little .22.

Bob Zybach: Would people eat those?

Charlie Olson: Oh, yeah, they were good. Yeah, they were very good. And when after a while, they disappeared and they said that seventy-five years they will come back.

Bob Zybach: Are they back?

Charlie Olson: They did, they came back, there's quite a few out there south of Monroe and in '76 I was building a house over in Alsea, Maitby Creek, and there was three of them there, but people were hunting and they shot them.

Bob Zybach: You think they should be allowed to come back possibly?

Charlie Olson: Well, it doesn't hurt. They've got quite a few at the state house in Salem, but they're not the same, they're either stunted or something. They're not .

Bob Zybach: They're not the same kind of animal.

Charlie Olson: they're not near as big and they haven't got near as much nice fur and the tail isn't near as long.

Bob Zybach: But there used to be a lot of silver grays in this counny?

Charlie Olson: Oh, gosh yes. Alvie Govier's folks, we were down there to visit them one day and

Charlie Olson: their dog treed something. I went over there, well, it was a big bunch of maples, you know, about four or five trees and I counted seventeen silver grays in there.

Bob Zybach: Seventeen?

Charlie Olson: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Those were wild, they weren't like the state house, so they used to be thick through here?

Charlie Olson: They were bigger than those down there at the state house. Prettier. I didn't have my gun. I didn't have my gun with me, so I didn't shoot any of them.

Bob Zybach: Then it went from this goat weed which you think might be a cyclical thing, might come back choke everything out and maybe go away and then the oak started coming down the hills and the fir started replacing the oak, but on the north side here, this was pretty much the way it is now.

Charlie Olson: There was fir there but it hadn't gotten started on the south side.

Bob Zybach: How about the draw there then, right along the creek where we're seeing oak and maple and some ash, is that pretty much the same as you recall?

Charlie Olson: Well, there's a whole lot more of this Douglas-fir now than there was then.

Bob Zybach: Just along the creek there, though, there's hardly any Douglas-fir along there, how does that compare to the way you remember?

Charlie Olson: There wasn't much of it. There was very little of it.

Bob Zybach: People just pasture right up to the creek?

Charlie Olson: On this side of the creek, there was quite a bit of it

Bob Zybach: On the south side.

Charlie Olson: But on the other side there wasn't hardly any of it.

Bob Zybach: Okay. So, did the creek run pretty much the same course that it is running now?

Charlie Olson: Oh, yeah.

Bob Zybach: Can you think of any kind of vegetation along the creek like skunk weed or cattails or something that has changed through time?

Charlie Olson: I don't really know what there is there now. I haven't been up in there and messed around with it. I don't know.

Bob Zybach: Okay. C'an you remember anybody living around this area that we're at right now or anything happening with people in this particular area where we're at right now?

Charlie Olson: Well, I can think of something that happened that might be interesting to you. The

Charlie Olson: fellow by the name of William Henry Matthews, and Ernest Cook is involved. He had the place right next to us on this side, 160 acres. And he always wanted to monkey with a pretty foxy horse, you know, and break them but he was old and Ernest Cook discovered a horse that was down here and he had part of the harness on and he got kind of suspicious so he went on up. He knew it was Matthews' horse so he went on up there and he found and traced and checked what had happened. They had started to run away with him, there was two of them . . . they started to run away with him and they had taken him about a mile and there was a place where it was a marshy place and they had put a lot of pole in there tight, close together and when that buggy hit that why it of course bounced. And it probably tipped over and threw him out because he was dead. His head was stuck in the mud and he had it had broke his neck.

Bob Zybach: This was Heniy Matthews, one of the Matthews family in this area?

Charlie Olson: There wasn't any other Matthews that I know of.

Bob Zybach: Okay.

Charlie Olson: They called him "Junk" because he used to always had . . . all the houses that he had he filled them full of iron. And they called him Junk Matthews.

Bob Zybach: But that's how he died with this run away horse?

Charlie Olson: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Isn't there a place here called the Matthews place though, it seems like on the map [Appendix B] that you drew for Soap Creek [School House Foundation], that they had Matthews?

Charlie Olson: Well, that would have to be up there by Sulphur Springs.

Bob Zybach: Okay, let's.

Charlie Olson: That was one of them, he had that over from Sulphur Springs, it joined Sulphur Springs territory.

Bob Zybach: I see, but he was just a bachelor, I was thinking Matthews family, but Matthews was a single person.

Charlie Olson: His family was kind of spread out. His daughters were both gone and married and he married a woman at Falls City named Martin. And they had a boy. .

***

Bob Zybach: Okay, we're talking about Aubrey

Charlie Olson: Aubrey Martin.

Bob Zybach: Martin.

Charlie Olson: Yeah, he got into the reform school up there. He stole something and they put him in a reform school. And Matthews married his mother and they didn't get along so he moved back over here to where he had these two places here. Aubrey Martin apparently didn't get along with his folks either too good because he came on over here.

Bob Zybach: And lived with Matthews?

Charlie Olson: And lived with his step father. And his step father of course bought him his clothes and what ever that he could help with why he helped Matthews with it. And I chummed with him quite a little bit.

Bob Zybach: With Aubrey Martin?

Charlie Olson: Yeah. He was a nice kid. And now, we'll go back to something that is involved with what you have in here. [Soap Creek Auto Tour Booklet]

Bob Zybach: Good.

Charlie Olson: With this guy that has this elephant [tooth]

Bob Zybach: Glender.

Charlie Olson: Yeah. Glender. We were thrashing right back of that barn . . the water came from that spring where they found this.

Bob Zybach: That down there at the other end of the valley?

Charlie Olson: Yeah, it was down there where Glenders lived, out pretty close to Tampico.

Bob Zybach: And you say "Tampico" [tam-PUH-ko], that's how you pronounce it?

Charlie Olson: Well, it wasn't clear down there, but it was pretty close to it.

Bob Zybach: I've been to the spring.

Charlie Olson: Aubrey Martin . . . I will . . . Govier came to me and wondered if I knew where he could find a pitcher and I told him I believe Aubrey Martin would do it, so he went up and saw him, and Aubrey Martin did. He came down and he pitched for them and we thrashed until we were almost through. We thrashed twenty days and we only had about ten more days left and we were thrashing for Glender and the water came from that spring, came down to by the bar with the stand pipe and about an eight foot hose

Charlie Olson: and Aubrey Martin came in from the field and took a water bag out from under a wagon and was going to fill it . . . that's the only water they had out in the field you know. And so when he came with that old man Govier was drinking out of that pipe and he thought it would be funny, you know, to turn it on Aubrey when Aubrey came and he did and Aubrey didn't run like he expected him too. He just pulled the cork out of that water bag and it was . . . it probably had two or three or four cups of full of water yet and he just pulled the cork out and run it and shook it over Shorty Govier's head. Everybody laughed you know and Shorty Govier got mad. And he said, "You're canned."

Bob Zybach: He fired him for that?

Charlie Olson: He said, "You're canned, go home. I'll send you your check. I'll mail you your check." And then in the evening he said, "I don't know what we're going to do." He says, "I don't know where we can get another pitcher." I've been a damned fool lots of times in my life and I was then.

Bob Zybach: That's what Shorty Govier said?

Charlie Olson: No. That's what I'm saying now. I said, "George," I'll call him George right now, he was sowing sacks with me and I said, "George can go out and pitch and I'll sew the sacks." "Oh," he says, "I'll help you." And he was very pleased about that. And then in the morning we started to thrash and I would get a sack off of there and put it over on a sack pile and come back and he wouldn't have that empty sack on the sacker, you know the other sack. And it run over and I of course had to sow this one and let that one run over for awhile. And when I came back with this . . . after putting this one on the sack pile, why he didn't have this one on. Well, I pushed him away then and put it on. And when you sew sacks a little while and get used to it, it don't take you very long to sew a sack. When you learn how to get the thing up so that you can carry it, it just flies up and hits you. You get your knee under it and you get a hold of the sack on the other side where the ear is.

Bob Zybach: What did you call them, "ears"?

Charlie Olson: Huh?

Bob Zybach: Did you call them "ears" on the sacks?

Charlie Olson: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: We called them a djfferent name when I was a kid, that's what I was wondering.

Charlie Olson: You get a hold of the one on the other side and your knees under the sack and you're giving it a pull and at the same time you give it a flip with your knee and then you get up off of the two sacks that you're sitting on the sack just hits you right across the chest and you grab it and run. And well, I got him to stay off of there and I made it during the day without problems, in the evening, he would sit down every time at the cook house. You know, he would sit down and figure out what he had made that day. I think it was seven cents a sack for oats and nine, I think, for wheat, I don't remember for sure. But he would Sit down and figure that every night. Then sitting across the table from me and he asked me if I knew how many we threshed that day and I told him, no. And he told me how many. And he wondered if I knew how long it would take a guy to sew a sack. I didn't know. He said, "You sewed two sacks a minute. Bucked, sewed, and jigged." Well, I think I didn't finish what I should have.

Bob Zybach: You were telling the story about the spring and the.

Charlie Olson: This one I didn't finish. If I hadn't been a damned fool when he said, "Where can I get another pitcher?" I should have said, "you'll need two more sack bucks in the morning too." That's what I should have said. But I didn't.

Bob Zybach: What's the reason he'd need iwo more sack bucks? What was the reason for that.

Charlie Olson: We should have walked out.

Bob Zybach: I see, you should have quit because he did that.

Charlie Olson: When a man will act like that, you know

Bob Zybach: He's not worth working for.

Charlie Olson: For a kid, Aubrey was the best pitcher they had.

Bob Zybach: I got you.

Charlie Olson: And when he'll act like that and fly off.

Bob Zybach: That was Shorty Govier that fired him.

Charlie Olson: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: What did Glender think about that?

Charlie Olson: Huh?

Bob Zybach: What did Glender think about that?

Charlie Olson: Glender didn't give a damn. He was only paying seven cents

Bob Zybach: So Shorty Govier was in charge of the crew?

Charlie Olson: Shorty Govier owned the threshing machine.

Bob Zybach: I see, so he was hiring Shorty Govier's threshing machine to work on his farm then.

Charlie Olson: Shorty Govier threshed for everybody in the neighborhood.

Bob Zybach: I got you.

Charlie Olson: And he had his own threshing crew. And Alvie Govier was his roustabout, that was their younger boy, you know. And he had two sets of horses and there wasn't any automobiles at that time, so those horses, the ones that he used, they went on the run wherever they went. Went out to the mailbox in the morning and got the meat. They had a contract with a butcher to set that out and he'd bring that to the cook shack in time that they could have that by noon. And any other things that they needed why those horses had to go and they got it. They were running all the time wherever they went.

Bob Zybach: Was there things that Shorty Govier did later where you said you were a damned fool that you wished you had quit at that time, or just because he did that one thing was the thing.

Charlie Olson: Well, he was all right normally, usually, but that one stunt, you know, that he pulled there. I should have

Bob Zybach: Should have called him on it.

Charlie Olson: I should have just told George Benedict. That's the name, I couldn't think of the Benedict. I should have just told Benedict "Let's walk off, let's just walk off." And he would need two more sack bucks. It would have been pretty hard for him to have found them too.

Bob Zybach: Why don't we go down to the next stop, where I'd like stop now, we're going to start getting into some places where people lived and I would like to get some names associated with them and some roads and trails. Can you remember any roads or trails or anybody living up in this area at all or was this all just timber?

Charlie Olson: There wasn't any here.

Bob Zybach: Okay. Just on the road.

Charlie Olson: Cook was the only one . . . except us and Matthews.

Bob Zybach: Okay.