DYER: Mrs. Black, it’s been sometime since we had an opportunity to sit in your living room and chat about the good old days.  Unfortunately our schedules have been rather hectic; but now that we are back with our tape recorder, why don’t we talk a little bit about some of the people—different groups of people—who lived in and around the Ward’s Ferry area.  Earlier you had mentioned some of the Indians in the area, do you remember stories about the Indians or areas around you home where the Indians lived?

BLACK: Well, somewhat.  When I was in school in Curtis Creek, the Indians were…a good many Indians live here at that time.  Especially one old Indian they called Indian Jenny.  And she picked up acorns, and how she carried as many as she did, I’ll never know. But she would pick the acorns up to take up towards Tuolumne—she lived near Tuolumne—and I imagine right probably up near the reservation. And she would pick up these acorns, and take them home for bread or whatever they made.  And when she would come by the school, the children would be out there watching or watching her pick up the acorns.  And I remember one day there was just two of us out there and we were very small girls at that time and Old Indian Jenny was picking up this sack o acorns, and she moved on to another oak tree and had the sack over her shoulder.  And it scared th4 two of us so bad that we ran back into the schoolhouse as fast as we could go.  And she was a very noticeable little old Indian lady.  She was small, bent over, and she washed clothes for people.  And old Charlie Myers in one of these old houses up on Tuolumne highway as you might look into someday, which is an old house and beautifully decorated house with the…

DYER: Oh, with the gingerbread around it.  The white house...?

BLACK: Yes. 

DYER: I know…

BLACK: that’s an old house too. It had ceilings so high when I was a little girl, that I wondered why they build a house with ceilings like that. So this little Old Indian Jenny used to wash clothes for Mrs. Myer.  When I would go up to see the Myers we used to be able walk up there—it wasn’t too far and we were always used to walking.  And we’d go up there and I found out that the little Old Indian Jenny was the lady that picked up the acorns over by the school that scared me so bad.  So after I got used to seeing her washing clothes for the Myer family, well, she didn’t scare me anymore. 

DYER: Did she put them in a regular burlap sack or was it a basket?

BLACK: no, it was a sack.  I don’t know where she got the sack or how she got it, but it was a sack—an old brown sack she carried on her back.  And I never did see her with a basket. 

DYER: What about Indians near the Black Ranch? Were there Indians living in this area, or are there examples of Indian artifacts around here?

BLACK: Oh, I should say.  There’s Indians—must have been the digger Indians—so Harry Hill, and old gentleman here, told me.   But I imagine that’s the Miwok tribe.  But they were, from what I gather from the old folks here, they were rather lazy.  And they did find many acorns here because of so many oak trees.  And they lived along the creek—Curtis Creek—at one time before any lumber companies or anything came.  It was a running stream most of the year and it was clean because there was no lumber or anything…logs or anything to cause it to be dirty.  But they lived along here and there was very much water here because of the springs.  The springs were over across the creek and, in fact, the spring was still there up until last year.  That my folks even used out of and the Old Man Stonks still move out of.   

DYER: which spring is that?

BLACK: It was a little dug spring over across Curtis creek.  We had to carry water when our well didn’t produce enough or if we used extra water we would go to the spring and carry the water up here.  And I imagine the Indians lived very well with the spring running right out of the ground.  And the acorns were very plentiful, and I don’t imagine there was very many fish though.  This creek didn’t seem to have too many because it would get to low in the summer time. 

DYER: well, what about deer? Surely there were…

BLACK: …lots of deer.

DYER: …vast numbers around.

BLACK: And the creek bed, or along the creek, the coons and small animals, oh, there were many of those; but deer were plentiful here.

DYER: Certainly that’s a favorite part of their diet. What about the grinding rocks around?  You’ve mentioned earlier that there were some grinding rocks along the creek. 

BLACK: Yes there were.  Right on this ranch there were several large rocks and they must have been fifty or a hundred feet across.  And they had…well, one rock we know of had fifty-five holed in it.  And we have found several of the pounding stones which we have kept.  There were several rocks that were mortar rocks, I guess you call them, or bowls that were able to be carried and moved with the folks—Indians.  But there were two heavy or large sets of rock with the holes stationary.  They just lived there evidentially.  Now, that’s near the trailer park—Cascade Mobile…

BLACK: Yes, there is still one still in the trailer park as far as I know, and the other one right on Curtis creek had been destroyed.  And it’s such a shame but it was a beautiful rock.

DYER: Was the Cascade Mobile Home Park, was that part of the Black Ranch?

BLACK: Yes it was.

DYER: …originally?

BLACK: It’s on a forty-five acre lot—tract I might say.  The ranch was originally one-hundred acres, and then we purchased forty more acres—approximately forty acres—to go with it.  So in fifty years the ranch has had 135 acres or there abouts.

DYER: Do you remember any stories about the Indians from your parents?

BLACK: Well, my father had heard several stories that he told to the children here in the family.  And he said that they lived up and down the creek here and that they were sort of lazy and they traveled between here and Twain Harte and Tuolumne.  That was their ground.  And it said that they didn’t seem to go much farther down than this.  However, there were some further down on cutis Creek. But the biggest part of them were from Twain Harte, Tuolumne, and as far down as here.

DYER: Do you remember the old chief fuller?   

BLACK: Yes, very well.  I even met him as a little girl.

DYER: Now, was he the actual leader of the Indians around the Twin Harte?

BLACK: Well, I believe he was a leader in the years that I was here. He was a very strong strapping man.  He was a very nice looking Indian.  And when we were all children, we would go up to the old Yancy Ranch, which is up on the south fork of the Denistua River…yes south fork.  And we had to drive through the Indian, it was a sort of Indian reservation at that time, and it’s right at the forks of the road that go to Cedar Ridge and goes on into Twain Harte up Middle Camp Road.

DYER: Oh, Middle Camp Road.

BLACK: yes.  And that whole area right in there was all Indians.  And when we would go to the Yancy Ranch for a visit with my folks as friend, they would be sitting out there.  All those Indians…I imagine there must have been fifty or more when we would drive by.  And they seemed to be just enjoying themselves sitting out in the sun.  They weren’t working hard.  And I didn’t see any garden, but I heard later that there was lots of corn. 

DYER: …corn.

BLACK: there was quite bit of corn.  There was a flat up there, as you will notice as you drive by. Leroy Hutchings has his house on it now.  And there’s a large flat out here in the back of this…on the right hand side of the Middle Camp Road growing up.  And that was solid full of corn.  They did grow a lot of corn.  And the Indians lived clear down over the hill to...well, to Phoenix Lake almost—all down in that area they lived.  So from the back of Phoenix Lake to Twain Harte and Tuolumne and clear down to here it was all Indians.  And I think that it was just the one tribe as far as I know. 

DYER: Did you go to school with any Indians?

BLACK: No. We didn’t have an Indian in Curtis Creek School. We had some Mexicans and, you might say, pert-Indian, but they were just moved in here from the only family that I knew of that was part Indian that was from Calaveras County moved over here for the lumber mill. 

DYER: where did most of the Mexicans live?

BLACK: The Mexicans lived right in standard. There was, for a good many years, when I was a girl there was a little town in the back of Standard there.  It was shacks and small houses and they called it Mexican Town.  And there were a good many Mexicans here at that time working in the…lumbering.  Some of them helped with even farm work. 

DYER: Did the Standard Lumber Mill hire a lot of them?

BLACK: yes.  For awhile there was lots of Mexicans here. I don’t know whether they were just drifted in here, or whether they were allowed to come in here at that time or what; but there was a good many Mexicans.  And from the Mexican period, it caged right over quickly to a Negro.  They had a whole Negro town in Standard at one time.

DYER: I’ve heard people refer to it as Coon Town.

BLACK: Coon Town. That’s it. 

DYER: Now, was that composed of hundreds or thousands?

BLACK: No, just hundred.  There might have been, oh, possibly two or three hundred.  Not any more.  And why they allowed them t come in here, I don’t know…or why they wanted them.  But I understand the man that took over the Pickering Lumber Company—he was a man from Kansas City—and he thought that he could get cheaper labor with the Negros.

DYER: So he was using them at the mills?

BLACK: Yes he was. And they had, out in back, as you go through Pickering Town—the town of Standard—and head towards 108, the whole flat to the left of the road was just Coon town as they called it. 

DYER: Oh, I know that area. 

BLACK: Oh, that whole flat area in there and up on that little rounding hill, but beyond the rail road track was all Negros.  And I’m telling you, the Negros and the Mexicans.  And Mexican Town was further back—further over there.  And they really had terrible fights for some time. 

DYER: were they gang fights?

BLACK: Not gang fights really, just the Mexicans and the Negros would probably get drunk and just have a few fights and then maybe Negros would step in there.  There was an awful lot of knifing going on at that time.  But it didn’t seem to last too long.

DYER: What happened to most of these people, since we don’t find…of course there are many people of Mexican origin around, but you find very few Blacks Negros in Tuolumne County. 

BLACK: No.  Well, it was a very strange thing happened.  The people of this county, and especially Standard Lumber Company, as that was named at that time, did not want the Negros here.  So what did they do but start up this Ku Klux Klan thing. And they scared them out so badly that they didn’t come back again.  So we only had a few of the older Negros that stayed.  They were quiet and weren’t fighting people. They just had a job and they stayed there.  And there was one old Negro fellow tat stayed in the fire room that worked with my husband. Even that late, he was there at Pickering Lumber Company.  And he was an old Negro fellow.  Ad he was a firemen down there in the fire room. 

DYER: Did they ever have burning crosses to…

BLACK: Oh yes, they did.  Up there on the rail road track behind where the warehouse now stands, I remember my father coming home—he had delivered milk up there—and he came home and he said that it was a terrible sight that they scared those Negros so badly.  They just burnt crosses and they lit great big sacks of fire with gasoline and oil and just scared them right out.  They just picked up and left and some of them even walked out to get out of the way. 

DYER: Was there any effort—organized effort—to drive them out…physically drive them out?

BLACK: No, only that.  That was the only one that I remember of was what they called the Ku Klux Klan and they just run them out. They didn’t…I don’t think they did any damage to them as far as killing or beating, they just scared them out. 

DYER: About when did this occur, Agnes? Do you remember?

BLACK: Let me see, that happened in about…

DYER: before the depression, or…?

BLACK: Yes; it was in nineteen…about 1922 or 1923 I guess. It was along in that period because I was about fourteen or fifteen and my brother used to go up and work part-time in standard when they’d hire young boys to work.  And I was about fourteen or fifteen when they did that.  So I imagine it was…it was before the depression.  And it was after the depression and during the depression there was very few Negros left here.

DYER: did you go to school with Negros at Curtis Creek?

BLACK: No.  No Negros. 

DYER: Where did they go to school?

BLACK: Well, they didn’t seem to have any.  Children here going to school, I don’t know what had become of the children.  There was a lot of [phone rings]

DYER: the Blacks then evidentially did not go to any of the schools.  Is it possible that most opf the blacks were males?

BLACK: Yes.

DYER: …and they had come just as laborers?

BLACK: that’s right.  But there were some…I can remember of some of the old Negro ladies coming up to the Standard store and buying groceries.  I was up there at the time.  But where are the children, I don’t remember of any children being there because there was no Negro school down at the Negro town—and we called it Coon Town—there was no school down there for them. And if there was…I just don’t know where they could have gone. I don’t think there was any Negro children that cam there. If there was, they didn’t send them to school, because we didn’t have any Negro children in school at all. 

DYER: Do you think then that one of the primary reasons for this friction is because the Negros were keeping wages low?

BLACK: That’s right.  That’s what it was doing.  The president of the Pickering Lumber Company brought them here purposely for low wages.  They’d work for a very small amount of money.

DYER: Were there other groups that you remember that Pickering imported in order to keep wages down?

BLACK: Oh yes.  They imported the Filipinos here. And the strangest thing about the Filipinos is that they were very cheap workers and they’re upkeep was very small. They didn’t eat heavily or heartily like the American people do or the white people.  And they had cabins—just all kinds of cabins were built many years ago for the first Lumber workers that came there.  They were down along where the pond is, and also right around past the pond there was the lumber yard which was for lumber drying; and the cabins were there.  And these Filipinos…they were put down there, especially to stay out of the town of Standard.  They didn’t live in the town with the rest of the people; they lived in the cabins.  So we automatically called that the Filipino Cabins.  And we were told not to walk by there because we used to go to school through the yard—lumber yard.  So all the parent to lf their children when they went to school to go up the other trail to school and to go in front of the Filipino Cabins as we called them.

DYER: Was there a real danger?

BLACK: No. No, it was just because the mothers felt that Filipinos didn’t belong here and they didn’t want their children going in front of these cabins.  And it was all men; there was no Filipino ladies, it was just young Filipino men here.  And four, or five, maybe eight stayed in one cabin.  They…most of the cabins had a little sort of a cellar underneath—maybe for storage or something—but the people here in the town of standard made fun of them a lot because they said they ate so cheap and all they….they even accused them of eating cats.  So that was a strange thing and none of the parent wanted their children going by there and watching such things at that, so they made children walk the other way to school instead of going by that way. 

DYER: were there other employees who sought the cheap labor sources?

BLACK: Well, not very many other than in and around Sonora and all the gold mining had their Chinamen.  But the Filipinos didn’t come here, they came here for cheap lumbering industry to keep that down.

DYER: Do you remember Chinese laborers while you were in the…

BLACK: Just in town.  There was a number of them working there, but most of them had restaurants, and laundries, and did housework for people. And there was a good number of Chinese living in Sonora at the time I was a small girl because there was at one time a creamery down on Stockton Street.  And we delivered our cream there.  My mother would take my sisten and I to town in a buggy, and we would take our separated cream—you know, the cream—to the creamery for butter.  And right across the street from the creamery—and I wish somebody could find this out—there was a Chinese laundry.  And how well I remember, they were right on the creek—the laundry was right over the creek that goes through Sonora.

DYER: would that be where Danbacker’s…

BLACK: …cars are.  Right bellow where the title company is.  

DYER: I see.  That’s Yosemite title company, is it?

BLACK: Yeah, I believe it is.  Now, there was a laundry there, and how well I remembered  is because we stopped at the creamery with the cream, and of course there was a hit hitching rack there to tie up horses.  And we left the horse and buggy there, and for some reason or another, we walked over by that laundry.  Whether we just walked by it to go up into the town or not, I don’t remember.  But I saw the Chinamen with their water in their mouth.  And they were spreading the clothes and ironing them as fast as they could iron. And their irons were so funny looking, and when I looked at my mothers, they were so different.  They were a big, heavy sort of an iron.  And if I’d just been a little bit older, I would have remembered that much better.

DYER: Do you thing they put the coals inside the iron to keep it hot?

BLACK: Well, now that I think of it ad know that there was an iron like that, I believe that there must have been coals I there because the iron were quite large, and they looked heavy, but these Chinamen were small people, and they looked like they were laboring with that big iron.  But I asked my mother as we went by.  I just happened to look in—I was very inquisitive—and I saw the old Chinamen go ph ph (making sounds of spiting water), just like that.

DYER: they kept their water in their mouth…

BLACK: …in their mouth.  And then they would sprinkle it on the driest part.  They probably had sprinkled them at one time and rolled them up and then as they had come to a little dry place, they’d blow the water on them.  And that was so funny to me, and I can still remember talking to my mother about that.  And I cannot find anyone in town that has found out anything about that laundry, and I’d like to know.

DYER: where did most of the Chinese live in Sonora?

BLACK: Well, a big part of them lived out in the back of Sonora by the post office—where the post office is now—and there were some…I can see why they were taken down because they were shacks.  An I can see those old brown board shacks and there was…they almost looked like, what some of our people call, jungles now. They were just some boards were leaned up and they we not very good looking.  The best building was that one that has been torn down and then [had a] plaque put up for it.  It was a solid building.  But the others were more or less shacks and there was also some shacks down on the creek by the laundry as I remember.  But I just don’t know anyone that knows about them. 

DYER: Now, the charge is that the Chinese were inclined to use opium.  Were you aware of this as a young girl in the area?

BLACK: No.

DYER: …the opium dens…?

BLACK: I was told about it, but opium to me then meant nothing.  I didn’t realize what opium was.  And when I was a girl, I can remember reading stories about the opium dens, but I never came in contact with any, or knew anybody that had anything like it in Sonora. 

DYER: did you know any of the Chinamen or women?  Happy Hen Chao, Chao Berry, Lamb in Jamestown?

BLACK: I knew Lamb in Jamestown.  And that was in later years after he had been there a good many years and I had happened to go down there with my brothers or company, you know.  But the old Chinese man, Happy, and his son that had the Chinese restaurant about where Penny’s is—it was right in that area—I think where Joey’s dress shop was I think that’s the…it was a (___) restaurant.  And I knew those two Chinamen, just to barely speak to. But Happy… not Happy, his son…what was his name?   He went to high school with us.  I’d just forgotten his name.  But Vernon McDonald knew him well.  In fact, they kind of would walk up and down the street together and it always occurred to me to be kind of funny because Vernon was a colored man and the Chinaman from the restaurant went to the high school.  And I didn’t know him personally, I’d speak to him as us girls would walk by, but that’s all.

DYER: did any of them live this way, east on Sonora in Twain Harte, Standard, or Tuolumne?

BLACK: I don’t believe so.  They went down towards Jamestown.  They lived that way. 

DYER: Are there other groups that you remember; people who have had a prominent part in the history of Tuolumne County?

BLACK: As groups?

DYER: French community, for example.  We’ve already talked about the Germans earlier in our discussion.  Easter Europeans, Russians, White Russians?

BLACK: No, I don’t ever remember of coming into contact with any of those folks at all.  The only other ones was the Cornish, and we talked about hose already I believe. 

END OF TAPE

General Information:

Interviewer: Dyer, Richard

Interviewee: Black, Agnes

Name of Tape: Agnes Black on the Black Ranch (black_a_4_0)

When: 1973 or 1974

Where: Wards Ferry Road

Transcriber: Ariella (3/5/09)