W.. The Oak Creek—Sulphur Springs Trail

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, I think so!

W. The Oak Creek—Sulphur Springs Trail

Bob Zybach: We just got up to the top of the peak there, and I just took those panoramas, so we're coming downhill on the 700 road on the Oak Creek side; just left the Soap Creek side. And so when you and Charlie came through, you left at Sulphur Springs and crossed at Sulphur Springs and then you started up a ridgeline?

Neil Vanderburg: Urn hmm.

Bob Zybach: And how far did you go before you ran into the CCC boys? Oh, one question, did you ever call them the "3-C boys"?

Neil Vanderburg: Oh, yeah, that's all they were ever called.

Bob Zybach: "Three-C Boys".

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: And not "CCC".

Neil Vanderburg: Oh, sometimes, but I think more usually "3-C's". We're going to go left, huh?

Bob Zybach: Yeah, I think so. 740 goes to the right. We'll try to the left. How many cows did you take over?

Neil Vanderburg: 27.

Bob Zybach: Those were all your father' s herd?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. And two horses and no saddles.

Bob Zybach: Did you and Charlie ride the horses?

Neil Vanderburg: We rode the horses bareback across.

Bob Zybach: So you left Berry Creek in the morning? Then how did you get from Berry Creek to Sulphur Springs?

Neil Vanderburg: Right down the gravel road. We left just at daybreak. Of course it was I think in probably January, and we got over to Oak Creek after dark with the cows. And we were pretty fortunate they moved right along, and we kept moving and I've often wondered how far it was across, between Sulphur Springs and Oak Creek. I think the road goes quite a bit further up Oak Creek than it did when we came across and Charlie thought we might run into a locked gate on the Oak Creek side, but we didn't. We were kind of afraid we might have to break the gate down because we sure weren't going to go back that night! And Charlie knew how to break gates down.

Bob Zybach: Do you know who owned the gate?

Neil Vanderburg: I have no idea.

Bob Zybach: Did you see anybody on your trip over?

Neil Vanderburg: No, nothing but the CCC boys.

Bob Zybach: When you saw them, how far from Sulphur Springs were they?

Neil Vanderburg: Probably a third of the way across.

Bob Zybach: A third of the way towards Oak Creek?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Up on the ridge?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. But they were on the . . . actually not on the ridge, they were on the east side of the ridge, where they were working.

Bob Zybach: Did you have any other contact with the 3-C's?

Neil Vanderburg: My dad worked for them for a short while. There was.. . when they signed up I

Neil Vanderburg: think they signed up for a couple years. And my dad worked for the CCC's down in California some place and actually he was a boss. He kind of got to missing my mother after a couple weeks, and managed to get out. I never did know how he did that.

Bob Zybach: He'd actually signed up as a 3-C member then?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: And that's when you lived on Berry Creek?

Neil Vanderburg: No, that was when we lived in California. Where he was in the CCC's was I think up around the Los Angeles County park, up at San Bernardino. So I knew about them before we ever moved up here. And this camp was fairly new when we moved up here. I don't know when they started them, but of course Roosevelt started them and he went in in 1932, then I imagine it took him a couple years to get some of these programs going. Social Security went into effect in 1936. That's where things were coming from. What are we looking at over there?

Bob Zybach: If I'm not too lost, we should be looking across Alder Creek towards Philomath. If I'm too lost we're looking at Kings Valley or Albany.

Neil Vanderburg: Or Portland!

Bob Zybach: So you drove 27 head of cows and. . . do you call them cows or cattle?

Neil Vanderburg: Cattle.

Bob Zybach: How many of them were milk cows?

Neil Vanderburg: All of them were either milk cows or heifers. We didn't take any bulls across.

Bob Zybach: Then you moved them to where your family was moving in 1939?

Neil Vanderburg: I believe it was '40.

Bob Zybach: Just the year before Adair, then.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Can you recall any incidents along the trail, other than seeing the 3-C's?

Neil Vanderburg: No, we just followed the cows and the cows followed the trail and we just kept pushing them about as fast as we could keep them walking. When we got there and got the cows in the barn and went in the house to eat supper, my mother had supper ready and my dad was still over at the other farm, and we were sitting there eating and all at once the dining room window started going up. And it went clear up to the top and everybody was holding their breath, but it stopped there and there was nobody around. It just happened that in those days they had sash weights to open the window and the weights were heavier than the window was, so with us vibrating the house well it just started going up! Scared the daylights out of us!

Bob Zybach: Oh, so that's when you and Charlie had first gotten into the house there?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, we'd just got in the house and my mother was there. And she'd cooked supper and we all sat down at the dining room table and just as we started to serve that window goes up very slowly. Now we're looking at some country we ought to know!

Bob Zybach: Yeah, let's see, we're on the Patterson Road, on the 600 Road, and we've moved west from Lewisburg Saddle, and we're overlooking Corvallis through this clearcut here.

Neil Vanderburg: I don't know what those big houses are down there. I saw them from up on top of that high peak.

Bob Zybach: That's gotta be Oregon State, doesn't it? Or is it?

Neil Vanderburg: I don't think so. That's north of Oregon State quite a ways.

Bob Zybach: Could that be the hospital?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, might be the horse barns or something like that.

Bob Zybach: You were talking about knowing Bill Wheeler.

Neil Vanderburg: Okay. I met Bill Wheeler at Northwest Hills Church where Jeff also goes, and Bill Wheeler's a real likeable guy. And we just hit it off real good together. He's not quite as big as I am, but he's pretty chunky and always got a smile and a laugh and so forth, and he was of course a professor up there in the Forestry Department. Apparently my son took a class under him. But he came out from Minnesota on a kind of a sabbatical for a year or two, and he decided he didn't want to go back to Minnesota. So he got a permanent teaching job here. And I've got a boat and he's got a boat just exactly like mine, and we've gone out fishing a few times together. Unfortunately he's had boat motor problems and he was quite amazed at how fast I could fix his boat for him. And anyway, we went up to his house one time for a visit and coffee, his wife makes real good apple pie, and he invited us up for apple pie and coffee, and a visit. And so when he told me where he lived, well I told him you've got to live awfully close to where I used to live on Oak Creek. So when we got there, I looked out his front window, and I says, "See that barn right down there straight below us?" He says, "Yeah." I says, "That used to be our barn!" So if we get over on Oak Creek early enough, before it gets pretty dark, I'll show you where we lived and where Tortora's live and where old Bill Wheeler lives.

Bob Zybach: Does Bill Wheeler still live there?

Neil Vanderburg: Yes. Now where do we go?

Bob Zybach: Says 600 road to the right there. Did Bill Wheeler ever talk about his work with the College of Forestry?

Neil Vanderburg: A little bit. Really he's not a bragger or anything, and every once in a while we'll run into people that we know, mutual friends and stuff, he'll say, "Oh, yeah, I had him in my class" or something like that. But really he didn't. . . I think mainly he was just a teacher not a guy that was out looking around and writing books. However, from his house he walks clear up here past the Oak Creek gate every day. He and his wife walk about four miles a day and they walk up here. And try to keep healthy and so forth. But he's been retired now for seven or eight years.

Bob Zybach: When you say you 'ye got the same kind of boats, would you go fishing?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. Yeah, we've got Bayliners with 50 horse Evinrudes on them. His is a Johnson and mine's an Evinrude, but they're identical.

Bob Zybach: Where do you go fishing at?

Neil Vanderburg: We used to go fishing up on Foster. I fished Foster quite a few years and I fished there long enough my dad and I developed a . . . changed a lure that you can buy in the store and I can normally go up there and take two guys with me and limit out in two hours or less. And anyway, so, we went up there several times and we'd get up there about 8:00 or so, he and another guy and I. I was always the pilot because the guy that brought the boat and the motor, the other two guys were supposed to buy him dinner in that restaurant there. If we didn't limit out by noon. So when I started to see we were getting to close to limit, well I'd try to knock them off those guys so we wouldn't get limited out until afternoon so I'd get my free dinner! Because if we

Neil Vanderburg: limited out at 9:30 or so, we just loaded up the boat and went home. But anyway, that was . . . I fish with a triple teaser and I found that I could bend them to make them dart instead of just spin. And they're really effective. It was kind of interesting one time I was up there fishing, and came in at 10:00 and there was a guy camped next to us so I asked him how he was doing, he had three boys there, and he says, "Oh, just like everybody else, not catching a thing. I don't even fish, just the boys fish." So I says, well, let me give you a lure for the boys to fish. So I gave him one that I'd fixed up you know, and towards noon I came in and he was there, he was waiting for me and he says, "I can't figure it out. We no more than dropped that hook in the water, and we had a fish on. We were just catching one after another."

Bob Zybach: This the road you were coming in on?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, this is right about where we were coming through. Right in here.

Bob Zybach: Yeah, this should have been it. You should have been coming down the ridge and then they'd be tapering down right about through here.

Neil Vanderburg: So anyway, he says, "Man, we just caught fish to beat the band on that setup of yours! I went back to Sweet Home and went into the tackle shop and said 'I want four riggings, just like this.' And they made up four riggings identical to this, but we can't catch anything except on yours!" He says, "We can't see what's different." I says, "Well, you just watch and I'll show you." So I bent those four of his and took mine back. When I came in that evening . . . now mind you, they only have three boys, but he was standing there on the dock bragging about how all four of them limited out. And he told me he wasn't fishing. All at once he got into it.

Bob Zybach: So Bill Wheeler, was he like a fishing buddy of yours pretty much?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. Yeah, I've got a picture of Bill Wheeler and Dean Webb was a dentist, and I with a limit of fish. Dean Webb took the picture, he just got a new camera that he could set and get the picture of himself too. I was up to Bill Wheeler's house about a month ago. By the time we got this far with that herd of cows, we still had three or four miles to go and we were getting pretty antsy to get home. Cause it was probably about this dark when we were here, and we still had a ways to go.

Bob Zybach: Did your folks drive around the other side to meet you?

Neil Vanderburg: Oh yeah. My mother did. My mother drove around to meet us and she also . . . see this is where the horses are really tearing things up.

Bob Zybach: See the beaver ponds through here? This is all pretty new. That grass growing up through those trees there, that's that Brachopodiun. I don't know what the deal is there, i've never seen grass grow so much underneath fir trees before. Here 's the road we're going to come into right here, one goes up toward the old homestead and one. . . that would have been the 680 coming down to the 600 here.

Neil Vanderburg: Getting roads all over here, huh.

Bob Zybach: Yeah. There used to be a mill down through this area. In fact the school owned it.

Neil Vanderburg: 'What's all this?

Bob Zybach: I'm not sure. It's some kind of testing on grass or something. They've got sediment tests through here, and they've got quite a bit of research through this area here.