I hope this post doesn't embarrass Cousin “Oregon” too much. Actually it shouldn’t, because only a few of us even know who he is. I took this picture out of his facebook album. He probably doesn’t care that I used this picture to describe him, because, when he isn’t pounding on sawmill saws, the guy on the horse is who he is.
He has signed his name a few times to things that he has said on this blog when he felt that he said something that shouldn’t be said unless it was signed. That is just part of his character. We were raised to be proud of our names, and not do anything that we wouldn’t own up to. We weren’t saints, it’s just that we weren’t ashamed of who we were.
This photo was taken a few years ago. I just wanted to pull it up and wish him happy birthday.
Happy Birthday, Oregon.
The only thing that I can figure is he must have been packing that Buck out for somebody else.
Boat and home.
Vette
Truck
Oregon on top impatiently waiting his turn to roll down the hill in the barrel. Me in the barrel
Daughter
Cousin John
Oregon on the left. (He didn't have any choice, his mother dressed him that way!Cousin John. Cousin Margie. Sister Sharon, that's as tall as she ever got.Cousin Karen. Me in the back, Cousin Penny in front.
Oregon hunting, the black things are salmon.
Other daughter.
Oregon Hunting again again. He always caught some fish on a hunting trip just in case he didn't find any game. I have no idea what kind of fish he caught when he was bear hunting. I don't have any bear pictures.
Oregon's son
happy birthday oregon, great pictures especially the one of you on the horse. sort of like rooster oregon in true grit.
ReplyDeleteDang Ernie, thank you for the happy birthday.
ReplyDeleteOregon
Sort of a man for all seasons, wouldn't you say?
ReplyDeleteHappy birthday, Ji... I mean, Oregon!
I Was just watching a TV program about Alaska Bush Pilots. There's a lot of crazy people up there.
ReplyDeleteHappy birthday Oregon!
ReplyDeletexoxoxoxo
Happy 1/11/11!
ReplyDeleteWell Happy Birthday Oregon!
ReplyDeleteCongrats on another time around the sun. Did the sun come out up thar to acknowledge you on your birthday?
Thank you everybody for the happy birthdays.
ReplyDeleteSpy, I still have the Rooster in me but, not as tough as the ones in the movies. LOL
Robin, I printed out a picture of a lemon pie for my birthday and hung it on the wall.
Suzy, back at you sweetheart.
OMR, the sun is out with some high clouds, snow coming in this evening though.
Ernie, I shot that buck. jeeze:-)
I don't have any pictures of bears I shot but do have a couple of the ones my brother shot. Actually, I don't have many photos of anything I did. Deer, abalone, bear, fish. When a camera was around I had it and took pictures of other folks.
I'm am reporting you people to the Vegan Nation. How dare you kill peaceful, innocent animals just to grace your dinner table! You are no better than your meat-eating Bell Springs and Long Valley ancestors. I hope killing and eating God's precious gifts makes you happy!
ReplyDeleteWhat, no squirrels? I can see you are not of Oklahoma descent.
I ate a lot of squirrel when I was a kid. My dad told me that I couldn't shoot anything that I didn't eat. After having a few pet squirrels my heart defrosted and I couldn't shoot them anymore. So, I had to switch to road kill. I figured what the heck, they were dead already and I had already acquired a taste for them. The trick is to soak them in salt water overnight, dip them in canned milk, dredge them in flour, season the with sage, garlic powder, salt and pepper, then and fry them up in good hot hog fat. Yumm,….
ReplyDeleteIs there bad hot dog fat?
ReplyDeleteNope!
ReplyDelete"...similar observations have been voiced many times by US physician Dr William Campbell Douglass II. Late last year Dr. Douglass wrote: “Countless studies show that the MORE animal fats people eat, the better their heart health. Need some proof from the real world? The African Masai, North American Eskimos, Japanese, Greeks, Okinawans, and our good friends the French all consume diets that are extremely high (by mainstream American standards) in saturated animal fats. Yet these people enjoy astonishingly low rates of heart disease, hypertension, and coronary events.”
ReplyDeleteDon't fear the lard.
omr, I have all those things and I pretty much just live on red meat.
ReplyDeleteThe only good thing about it is, it taste good and all my lab panel numbers are fantastic.
Well… If I have to admit it… I have a bit of a sweet tooth. I blame it on Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New-years. Candy apples, candied yams, candy canes, Fancy crème brulee, Crème fresh, and so forth. After fire calls we celebrate with jelly beans. I think maybe I eat too much sugar… Ya’ think?
ReplyDeleteActually if I were going to advocate any diet it would be MODERATION.
ReplyDeleteI'm a little late,But happy bithday,Oregon!
ReplyDeleteDang Ern, I hope you only advocate moderation! I always took to the notion that "if it tastes good, go for it."
ReplyDeleteThat reminds me, "Eat moose, 7,000 wolves can't be wrong."
Oregon
Dangit, Oregon! I forgot the lemon pie.
ReplyDeleteSorry.
Yeah, thanks Robin. Just wait till next year. LOL
ReplyDeleteMy cousin visited from Illinois the summer before last and he and my brother showed up at this neighborhood party that I was at and they got totally drunk. Because they were so out of it I had to have a friend drive my car as I drove them home in my brother's pick up. I took the county road a few miles and then turned down a dirt road. My brother was dozing in the passenger seat and my cousin was in the back.
ReplyDeleteCruising along peacefully on a beautiful humboldt night, the moon peeking in and out between the trees, all of a sudden I hear this clamoring in the back and then on the roof. wtf? It was my cousin, he climbed up on the roof! I was about to stop when I hear bang bang ka-bang! My heart stopped, then it began beating again. My cousin had crawled up on top of the truck and shot a rabbit from up there that was running in our headlights. I didn't know that my brother's rifle was in the back of the truck.
I stopped and made my cousin pick up the dead animal. I told him we're gonna cook it and eat it, that's the way we do things here, this aint no video game, this is real life. I told him it was a sacrament. He was moaning and complaining but I saw to it that we took it home and dressed it out. I told him it was sacred. I told him life was sacred. I had to do most of the work cuz he was half asleep and drunk. I cooked it in the morning and when he woke up we ate it.
Dang these ignorant city slickin newcomers, you gotta watch em.
Well Suzy, I don't know if your cousin was from the city or if he is ignorant but to shoot a running rabbit from on top a moving vehicle he had to be drunk and aiming at the whole road. Also, I am assuming this is after dark so I think he was in violation of at least 5 Calif. laws.
ReplyDeleteNot that I ever broke a law, I was just sayin'.
Oregon
xoxoxoxo
Suzy
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to hear you talk like that. I don't think that any animal should be killed except for food. Then the animal is entitled to a clean quick kill. You would never find me shooting wildly at anything.
When Oregon and I were kids, we shot a few deer for food. The people from the city would laugh at us and call us "meat hunters". They called themselves "trophy hunters" or "sport hunters". They would kill a deer for the fun of it. Take only the horns and give the deer away our leave it to rot. I never thought much good about them, they were shooting deer that should have been left for breeding. The deer we took were the small tender ones. We used to laugh at them at wonder how they cooked up those horns.
Oregon, we never broke our laws, we only broke the fish and game laws. Most of the deer in southern Humboldt are gone now. It seems that some people will shoot them to keep them out of their gardens. We are down to only 5 or 6 deer on the golf course at night. There used to be 50 or 60 back in the mid sixties. There used to be numerous large herds of deer in the Laytonville valley, under the large oak trees.
In 1940 Albert Etter wrote about the declining deer populations compared to the late 1890's.
ReplyDelete"John C. Briceland told me 45 years ago that when he settled here he hired two young men to reduce the deer in the vicinity of Ettersburg, and that in a few months they killed about 1800 deer".
Even into the late 1890's the deer were numerous in some areas, Albert's brother Jule saw 75 on Jewett Ridge prairie, and Albert had seen 42 deer on another prairie.
The thrust of the 1940 article was about bobcats as a major threat to the declining deer population. He cited one trapper finding deer parts in the stomachs of the 40 some bobcats he had trapped in a deer rich area. You wouldn't think a 30-35 lb or so, cat could take out even bucks, but they can and do.
More then than now.
S.B.Fountain, vol 61, pg 46
*****************************
good for you Suzy!
i sent ernie some pictures of 3 deer hanging that my grandfasther shot back in the not sure when last century. when i visited in the early 50's there was no electricity at spyrock and no supermarket. they had hogs and a garden as well as the cattle out on the land. the land was their supermarket. nowadays, my cousins son little mel belongs to a duck club with his dad. they have their own room in this house with a pool table, full bar, full kitchen, and big screen tv's all over the place. on the weekend, these men head for the duck club and their wives are on their own back home. i guess the duck club has saved many a marriage, but what is hunting nowadays is very different from what it was back then. i guess if they can pull themselves away from the bar and the football game they might shoot a few ducks. but it's just not worth the bother for me. i saw four bucks on the way to dove's, they all looked like bambi's grandfather. one of them walked across my medicine wheel. that's what i'm talkin about.
ReplyDeleteDuring the late 40's through the late 60's the deer populations were at a peak because of the cat logging that was going on in Humboldt, Trinity and Mendocino counties. Mendocino had the highest concentration of deer in the State. After a block of timber was cut, brush grew back in place of the trees and the deer population exploded because of all the feed.
ReplyDeleteOregon
Loved all of the photos and the tribute to Oregon's birthday, Ern.
ReplyDeleteCousin
Oregon speaks the truth about the brush for feed during the cat logging era. Do any of you remember the Doe hunt the Fish and Game held during the 1970's because of the overpopulation?
ReplyDeleteBy the way, Hoopa Valley is nearly extinct of deer. Hunted out.
Eko
ReplyDeleteYes, I remember the doe hunt. Everybody around here thought that it was big mistake. About the same time that the F&G had the doe hunt the growers stared killing the deer to keep them out of their gardens. The deer never really came back.
It's true that the deer loved the loggers. A deer will kill for madrone leaves. You can walk right up on a deer eating madrone leaves, they don't like to be chased away. We had a timber faller on our crew that would cut some big madrone limbs off for the deer, to keep them away from where he was trying to fall trees.
some of you know that i'm into creating ponds that are places where the mother speaks. i see my ponds as a liquid medicine wheel. so for me the magic is in seeing a deer drink from my pond.
ReplyDeleteI watched a movie tonight on Hallmark called Grace and Glorie. The older woman mentioned to her care-taker that she had a wood cook stove because the new fangled ones made the food taste funny. This reminded me of a story.
ReplyDeleteThis old guy back in the 6o's, he was about 49 at the time used to tell me stories while we was coming back from a bear or cat hunt. He was pretty close to being a dad to me so anything he said I took as gospel. Anyway, he said he had been to the county fair and they had this contraption called a microwave cooker. He said they had beef roasts that were cooked in the things and he said he didn't much care the way the meat tasted.
When I was growing up my folks had a gas cook stove that seemed to work okay but my aunt Lillian and Great Grandma Middleton used a wood cook stove and I have to say the food, pies included, were the best.
I also spent a couple of holiday weekends at Lee Wilsons cabin up at Woodman Canyon where we had dead turkey and pies cooked on and in a wood cook stove.
Oh yeah, that old man I was talking about that was 49 was Andy Burgess.
Oregon
Wait til next year, Oregon? Does that mean you won't be sending me a picture of my favorite chocolate cake for my birthday? ):
ReplyDeleteLee Wilson's cabin! I was there only once but never forgot it & in a lot of ways, it is my dream house.
I know what you mean Robin, I always liked Lee's place too. I think what I liked the most is the location but now days it has folks living all over the place around there.
ReplyDeleteI've only been to two places that I can remember that had propane lights and that is Lee's cabin and the hotel in Hayfork. For the folks that is wondering, that is copper piped lanterns that were fixed permanently to the wall. I spent lots of time at the Hayfork Hotel but my favorite hang out was Tommy's Joynt, they just used candles when the power was out. The bars always stayed open till 2:00 AM in Haytown:-) Then we tailgated.
Oregon
Oregon,Where is that Boat/small ship anchored at?
ReplyDeleteIn the picture,that is?
ReplyDeleteI would have to dig out my charts to tell you exactly where that picture was taken but I'm sure it was in Moira Sound on Prince of Wales island. The little cove I was anchored in was well protected from the weather. When you look at that picture take note of the sky. That was a nasty storm coming in and I was anchored there for 3 days before I could go home to Ketchikan (Alaska). I don't know right off hand how far I was from home but it was a good poke for sure and I had to cross Clarence Strait.
ReplyDeleteThat boat is a Motor Yacht class "boat". Named on the registration as "MY Ocean Gale."
It is small for a yacht but since I worked in a sawmill it was the biggest I could afford. I was proud of that boat though, it has 2 staterooms, 2 bathrooms and was all electric. It had two Hino Diesel main engines and an 8 KW generator, also diesel. Also had a Zodiac lighter with a Honda outboard for going ashore and taking pictures of the ocean Gale. LOL
Oregon
Thanks! Thats only something I dream of doing!
ReplyDeleteI think there were five of us "kids" who got to Lee's cabin before daylight & the "real" hunters who'd been staying there were making a big pancake & egg breakfast on that woodstove you mentioned when we got there. They left soon after & we had the place to ourselves. The three "boys" headed out at sun-up & the other girl & I stayed at the cabin. It was kind of a long day there by ourselves but we walked around the property, picked some green apples, tromped through the waist-high brown grass, looked for rattlesnakes under the porch, read some magazines & took a nap on the dusty old furniture in the front room. By the time the three boys
ReplyDeletereturned, we had washed all the windows, hung new lace curtains, painted inside & out, rearranged some of the furniture, leveled the porch, pruned all the apple trees, put a deer fence around the garden we planted & a white picket fence with a rose arbor over the gate around the yard where the green grass & a big shade tree grew. I think we also put in some rock-lined flower beds & hung a triangle by the back door.
The most fun, though, was watching my honey take a cold bath in the water trough in the front yard on that hot August afternoon.
You think you girls could have at least baked a lemon pie while you were pruning the apple trees.
ReplyDeleteJim isn't the only person to take a bath in that water trough.:-)
Oregon