Chapter 13
Learning to Believe in Myself . . . and Write

The following school year was very different for me. For the first time in my life I wasn’t going to school, either as a student or a teacher’s helper. It made me realize in a whole new way how much things were changing.

For everybody! Zack wasn’t in school anymore either. He spent his time about equally between helping Pa and Uncle Nick at the mine and helping Little Wolf and his pa with the riding and training and selling of horses. Now that Central California had been being settled for five or six years, there were a lot more than just gold prospectors coming into the state, including farmers and ranchers. Little Wolf’s pa had developed a fair business in horse selling. There seemed to be a continually increasing need for good riding and cattle horses, and they brought even more money if they were already broke and trained—which was where Zack and Little Wolf came in. The two of them loved it! Anything to do with horses made them as happy as could be.

Anyhow, with Zack and Little Wolf and I gone, and Elizabeth Darien married and moved to Oregon, Miss Stansberry chose a new helper—Emily! During that year she turned fifteen, the same age as I was when we came to Miracle Springs.

Without older boys like Zack and Little Wolf and Artie Syfer in the school anymore—and there weren’t any fourteen-or-fifteen-year old boys coming up in the class—Rev. Rutledge came to check up on Miss Stansberry usually once a day, to see if she needed any help moving a desk or lifting something. She was such a capable lady it was easy to forget about her being lame, but the minister didn’t forget. He was always trying to find ways to make it easier for her. Sometimes when I was on my way home from town late in the afternoon just before suppertime, I’d see Rev. Rutledge’s buggy out in front of the school where he was still helping Miss Stansberry. I suppose, though, with the two of them sharing the building like that, using it both as a school and as a church, they probably had plenty to keep them both occupied.

We continued living in the cabin out at the claim. Almeda and I would take a buggy into town with Emily and Becky and Tad every morning and return in the afternoon. Sometimes only one of us might go into town. Occasionally I’d want to stay home and work on something I might be writing, and other days Almeda would want to spend part of the day with Pa. By that time, whenever she did want to stay at home, I knew most of what needed to be done at the freight office. When she wasn’t there, I wasn’t Mr. Ashton’s or Mr. Weber’s boss. They knew what to do too, and we all did our jobs together and talked about any decisions to be made before Almeda got back. Yet they would ask me questions, almost as if I were their boss, just because of me and Almeda being in the same family now. Although it was a mite peculiar, I got used to it—but I’m glad she was there most of the time.

I didn’t forget Almeda’s words about having to work for something you believed in. I figured if I had the Belle blood in me, like Pa sometimes said, then I ought to put it to work for me.

So I didn’t let myself get discouraged because of that letter Mr. Kemble wrote, saying he didn’t believe what I wrote about Mr. Jones was true. I just said to myself: “Well, we’ll see, Mr. Editor! I’ll show you who can write around here! You’re not just talking to anybody, Mister—you’re talking to a Hollister, half of whose blood is Belle blood! Yeah, Mr. Editor, we’ll see about what’s true and what’s not! And what’s true is that I’m gonna be a reporter for your paper someday!”

That’s what I said to Mr. Kemble in my thoughts. But I was nice as could be whenever I sent a story to him. And I kept signing my name C.B. Hollister. Almeda had talked to me about believing in myself, but I wasn’t ready to believe in myself quite enough yet to start using my real name! I figured what he didn’t know about who C.B. was wouldn’t hurt him for the time being.

So I wrote stories on anything that I thought might be interesting to the folks either in San Francisco or in Sacramento. If it seemed more to do with Sacramento, I sent it to Mr. Singleton in Marysville. If it seemed more appropriate for San Francisco, I sent it to the Alta. Since I didn’t know exactly what kinds of things a newspaper editor would be likely to publish, I tried all kinds of different approaches. Here’s one I tried.

This fall the school in Miracle Springs begins its third year. Teacher Miss Harriet Stansberry reports an enrollment of twenty-four students, up eight from the previous year, though she says the average age of her children is younger than before.

When asked about the future of the school, Miss Stansberry answered: “There are still new families coming to the area, even though the rapid growth has slowed somewhat. From the age of my students, it seems as if the enrollment will probably stay about where it is for some years to come.”

I then went on to tell a little about the school and what kinds of subjects the children studied, and even had a quote or two from some of the students, including one from Emily.

I sent this to Mr. Singleton, reminding him that he had printed the very first thing I had written about the opening of the school back in December of ’53. I don’t know whether it was that, or whether maybe he was afraid of losing the Parrish Freight advertising, but he did print this new article about the school, though he cut most of it out, including all the quotes from Emily and the others. When it appeared it was only two paragraphs long and didn’t have my name anywhere on it. And Mr. Singleton never paid even fifty cents for anything I sent him. I began to wonder if that $2.00 was the last money I’d ever see for anything I wrote. But even if it was, I still wanted to write newspaper stories. I’d just have to keep doing other work besides.

I can’t say that anything I wrote was any good compared to real authors like Thoreau or Hawthorne or Cooper or Irving or Walter Scott. But I wasn’t trying to be a real author, only to write for a newspaper, and it didn’t seem to me that you’d have to be as good to do that. Besides, I figured maybe writing was one of those things you had to learn how to do just by doing it a lot. So that’s what I did—I wrote about a lot of different things, and practiced trying to make my writing more interesting. Like this one:

Mr. Jack Lame Pony, a full-blooded Nisenan Indian, has turned his skill in training horses into a livelihood. “When white men come to California in search of gold,” says Lame Pony, “many of my people went farther north, and to mountains and hills. But I had son, cabin, land. I not want to leave.”

After two or three years trying to scrape food out of the soil and sell furs trapped in the high Sierras, Lame Pony began to acquire a stock of riding horses. He was very bitter against the intrusion of gold-seekers into what he considered the land of his people. But when men began coming to him one by one in search of sturdy and dependable horses, he found that most were reasonable and not as different from himself as he imagined.

Slowly, word about his horses spread throughout the region north of Sacramento, and he had more requests than he had horses. He also found that doing business with ranchers and farmers, and even some gold miners, was not as difficult as he had thought.

“As my anger left my heart,” he says, “I sold more horses. Soon had no time to trap. Had to find more horses—always more horses, then break them, train them, teach them white man’s ways.”

Perhaps even Lame Pony’s name might have helped his reputation as the best horse trainer in the region. Wherever one goes in the foothills north and east of Sacramento, the mention of the name Lame Pony always brings a chuckle and the words, “Whatever his name says, his horses are the best.” A rancher from Yuba City, who has purchased eight different horses from Lame Pony for his hands, was quoted as saying, “None of my men ever been throwed by one of his horses yet!”

Recently Lame Pony and his son Little Wolf, with the help of neighbors, enlarged their corrals and added another stable. With the continued growth of California, they foresee an even greater need for well-trained horses in the future and want to be prepared for it.

Of course I asked Little Wolf’s father if I could write about him first, and Little Wolf talked him into agreeing. Mr. Singleton printed this article just as I’d written it—after he had signed up a small advertisement for the Lame Pony Stables to appear on the same page. The neighbors I mentioned were Pa and Uncle Nick and Zack. I didn’t really talk to the man from Yuba City, but Marcus Weber knew him and heard him say those words.

I wrote a short article about Patrick Shaw, our neighbor from over the ridge, who in his spare time was getting to be a pretty well-known banjo-picker and was often invited to hoe-downs from as far away as Coloma and Placerville. I drew a picture of him playing, too, to go along with the written part. But that was one of my articles that never actually made it to a paper. Mr. Shaw did ask me, though, to do a drawing of him and his banjo for him to use on a sign if he was going to be playing somewhere.

Another article I wrote was about a new church that was getting started down at Colfax. They didn’t have a building yet and were meeting in a great big house. Rev. Rutledge went down there every two weeks and was more or less in charge of it, though he had people in Colfax helping a lot too, like Almeda had done when he first came to Miracle Springs.

Both the minister and Almeda were excited about the opportunity for new churches starting throughout this part of California, something I know they’d been wanting to see happen from the very first. Of course, as interested as we all were—and he would tell us what was happening in other areas on Sunday—Almeda didn’t actually participate in his plans as she did at first. But at least he didn’t have to make that long ride back and forth to Colfax alone every time ’cause every once in a while Miss Stansberry would go along with him to keep him company.

Religious news didn’t seem to be something most folks were interested in, because that was another one of my articles that never got into a paper.

One that did, however—and I admit it surprised me, because I wrote it just for fun—was an article I called “Virginian Finds New Home After Unusual Beginning.”

When Miss Kathryn Hubbard Morgan stepped off the steamer in Sacramento in May of 1854 as a mail-order bride, she could little have foretold the strange turn of events that would make her future so different from what she had planned.

Miss Morgan carried with her that day a handful of apple seeds, a seashell, a rock, a tuft of grass, some Virginia moss, and a piece of dried bark—all as remembrances of her past in Virginia and as symbols of the new life she was starting in California the moment she set foot upon the bank of the Sacramento River.

As it turned out, Miss Morgan, now Mrs. Nick Belle of Miracle Springs, did not marry the man who had paid half her passage to the west, but his brother-in-law instead.

“You cannot imagine the thoughts that were racing through my mind as I stood there in my wedding dress,” Mrs. Belle said, “only to have the ceremony so suddenly interrupted and thrown upside-down.”

I then went on to tell a little about the wedding and what Uncle Nick had done and the story leading up to that day, including quotes from Pa and Uncle Nick, and another one or two from Katie. When I was asking them questions, Uncle Nick got to laughing and talking and said this, which people who read the article liked best of all: “When I lit outta here on the Thursday before the wedding, I figured I might never come back. I was so mad at Drum I coulda knocked his head off. But I didn’t know whether to be mad at Katie and just say good riddance to the both of them, or if I oughta come back and just grab her away from him and tell her she was gonna marry me. I tell ya, I didn’t know what to do. I was just all mixed up inside! And so when I rode up and saw that the wedding was going on, I don’t even remember what I said or did!”

Then I finished the article like this:

So now Mrs. Belle, still known to all her friends simply as “Katie,” has found a new life as a full-fledged Californian. Like all Californians, she came from someplace else, but now calls this her home. Her seven-month-old son will be a Californian born and bred, one of the first in a new generation of Californians who will carry the hardy breed of pioneers—from Virginia and every other state of the union—into the future of this western region of these United States.

When Katie looks out her window, if she lets her eyes go to the edge of the pine wood, she will see a thin apple tree, still too young to bear fruit, but a growing reminder of where she has come from. At its base, a different variety of grass and moss than can be seen anywhere in the surrounding woods is growing—also a reminder that this is a big land, and that its people have roots that stretch far away.

One day Katie’s young son will eat apples from that very tree, Virginia apples, and Katie will be able to tell him the story of how its seeds ventured to a new and strange place called California, and put down roots and began to grow, in the same way that his own mother did.

The “hardy breed of pioneers” and the “venturing to a new and strange place called California” and “roots that stretch far away” were all Mr. Kemble’s words. But the ideas, even at the end were my ideas, and he just helped me to say it better.

Having this article published surprised me, especially since most of the things I’d written had been sent right back to me. But Mr. Kemble was real interested in this one. He sent me $3.00 for it—the first time since the blizzard article that I’d gotten any money. And afterward, about a week after the story had come out in the paper (we sent for ten copies! Katie had lots of folks back east she wanted to send them to), a letter came to me from the Alta. I hadn’t sent anything else to them and couldn’t imagine what it was. But when I read the letter, the tears that came to my eyes were not tears of disappointment like the last time the editor had written to me.

Mr. C.B. Hollister
Miracle Springs, California
Dear Mr. Hollister,

Your recent article “Virginian Finds New Home,” etc., has been very well received, both by the staff and the readership of the Alta. I must say, your writing has improved very much since your first story with us, “Blizzard Rescue on Buck Mountain.”

As I read those words I couldn’t help thinking of what he’d said when he sent back the Alkali Jones story about finding gold in the creek. I wondered if he remembered. I read on—

I would be interested in seeing other such pieces in the future. There have already been two inquiries as to when the next piece by C.B. Hollister is going to appear. I hope to hear from you soon.

Sincerely,
Edward Kemble,
Editor, California Alta

I sat down and handed the letter to Almeda. She read it.

“There, you see,” she said. “You never know what can happen if you believe in yourself and just keep moving in the direction you think God wants you to go.”

And if you practice your writing a lot, I thought, and don’t mind getting most of your things sent back to you!

But in an instant this one brief letter seemed to make the earlier disappointments all forgotten.