Early Childhood
Chapter Two from
The Melodramatic Life of Eva Evans, 1876-1970
courtesy of Raven River Press
Way down in the meadow where the lily first blows,
Where the wind from the mountains ne'er ruffles the rose;
Lives fond Evalina, the sweet little dove,
The pride of the valley, the girl that I love.
--19th Century popular song
When Molly gave birth to her second child on May 13, 1876, it appeared as if this one, too, would not survive. The tiny baby, a girl this time, weighed scarcely two pounds and was only twelve inches in length. To further complicate matters, Chris was far away from home. The tallest mountain range in the country separated them: Chris working the Cerro Gordo mines, and Molly lying in bed holding their newborn to her breast, praying her baby would somehow survive
A tune called "Sweet Evelina" was popular in California at that time. "Dear Evelina, sweet Evelina/My love for thee shall never, never die" proclaimed the chorus. Molly named her tiny baby Evelina Isabella after the sleepy-time song and paid tribute to her mother with the choice of middle name. Molly’s mother, certain the child would die, thought it would prove a bittersweet honor. She believed no baby that small had ever survived. She even admitted later that she intended, once the baby did die, to put it in a jar of alcohol and send it to a museum—a statement no doubt intended to garner a reaction.
Although Molly’s baby was small, she wasn’t what one would call skinny. She had dimples in her knees and elbows, and seemed to be otherwise healthy. She ate well, but still could not drink enough milk to keep Molly’s breasts from hurting. Molly’s mother suggested they look for a newborn puppy to help alleviate the pressure, and one was found at a neighboring ranch. Putting a puppy to the breast was a fairly common means of relieving nursing mothers.
Molly’s mother told a story—which became an often-repeated family legend—of similar problems when she nursed Molly’s older brother, Louis. It seems there were no puppies to be found in the mining camp near Jackson where Jesse and Isabella Byrd lived when they had little Louis. Just about this time, Jesse was out hunting and shot a bear. When he went over to retrieve his kill, he saw two tiny cubs trying to hide under a log. He caught one and brought it home. "Here, Mother, this is just as good as a pup," he told Isabella, who put the baby bruin to her breast. Thankfully, the hungry cub latched on and was a great relief to her swollen breasts.
She nursed the cub alongside Louis and the two would often play together. But the bear grew faster than the boy, and before long he’d hug Louis and nearly squeeze the breath right out of him. By this time, Isabella no longer had the need to nurse, so they gave the tame bear cub to a miner headed for San Francisco. About a year later, Isabella was in Stockton and saw a crowd gathered on a street corner. She edged her way through the throng to see what they were watching. It was a bear—a thin and neglected-looking animal on the end of a chain—standing on his hind legs and "dancing" around slowly while his keeper played the harmonica. The bear saw Isabella. He suddenly dropped to all fours and pulled at his chain, trying to reach her. She knew it was her bear, just as he obviously knew it was her. She turned and hurried away, tears in her eyes, and regretted sending him into such a miserable existence.1
This would become a favorite story of Eva’s, as tiny Evelina Isabella came to be called.
In November, Molly and six-month-old Eva
journeyed by wagon, train and stagecoach to Inyo County. Chris was happy to have his family back with him. His brother, Tom, had earlier come to Inyo, but it wasn’t long before he and his homesick family returned to Canada. Chris was surprised to see how small his little daughter was. Perhaps Molly wasn’t exaggerating when she claimed she could put her wedding ring on the little girl’s arm like a bracelet.2Cerro Gordo was the site of one of the most productive silver and lead mines in the state. The mines produced bullion so fast that transportation became the chief problem. In 1873, the mine owners had organized the Cerro Gordo Freighting Company, but the company’s sixteen- to twenty-team wagons could not keep up. The advent of steamships by the company on Owens Lake helped, shaving eight days from the round trips made solely by the wagons. It was on one such steamer that Chris Evans found work.
The Bessie Brady was an eighty-five-foot propeller-driven boat with a twenty-horsepower steam engine. With Captain Titchworth at the helm and engineer Chris Evans on board, the steamer made daily round trips from the Swansea smelting operation on the north side of Owens Lake to Cartago Landing at its southern foot, hauling seventy tons of freight. The vessel performed the same service cheaper than teams and wagons hauling a mere one-tenth the weight between the same terminals in five days.3
The 1870s were a turbulent time in Inyo County. The area became host to some of California’s most notorious Mexican bandits. Tiburcio Vasquez and his forces arrived there in 1874, one time even holding up a stage that carried Mortimer Belshaw, the owner and financier of the Cerro Gordo mine. Belshaw was relieved of his watch, a pair of new boots, and the money in his pocket.4
Tensions between the Americans and Mexicans remained throughout the decade. Molly recalled when a Mexican killed a popular law officer in Inyo and rekindled a feud. One day she opened her door to see a dead man hanging in a tree. Molly told Chris she could no longer live in such country and demanded that they leave. By then, fortunes were waning in Cerro Gordo, so he happily acquiesced.5
During the first few years of Eva’s life, Chris Evans moved his family around often. After leaving Inyo County, the family journeyed to San Francisco and then took a boat to Seattle, where Chris hoped to homestead. It was a stormy trip, and Molly was seasick for the entire eight-day voyage. Once in Seattle, the incessantly rainy weather depressed Molly so much that after six weeks she demanded they go back to California. Again, Chris honored his young wife’s wishes.6Perhaps one reason Molly was so sick on the journey to Washington was because she was again pregnant. The family returned to Visalia in 1878 where Molly gave birth to another baby boy they named Elmer. Not long after, Jesse Byrd traded his Auckland ranch for one in Adelaide in San Luis Obispo County, some 150 miles to the west near California’s Central Coast. Chris decided to move his growing family out to Adelaide as well and was able to get work in a nearby quicksilver mine.7
When Eva was just four years old, both she and Elmer contracted diphtheria. A doctor told Molly he didn’t believe he could save the little girl, who was still so tiny, but was confident the husky boy would pull through. Miraculously, it began to look as if both would survive. Eva was beginning to wobble around on weak legs, and Elmer was regaining much of his strength. Then one day Elmer had a convulsion and suddenly died.
No one had told little Eva about her brother’s death, but as she remembered decades later:
I must have wondered where the baby was, because when no one was looking I slipped into the bedroom and saw a box on the table in the corner of the room, pulled a chair up to the table and looked into the box, and there was baby brother, looking just as though he were made of white wax. Even if I did not really understand it, it must have been a shock, because it is the first thing I can remember. I was four at the time.8
.
While Chris and his family were living in Adelaide, beyond the Coast Ranges from the Central Valley, an even occured in Tulare County that would become historically emblematic of the relationship between the entire state of California and the Southern Pacific Railroad. In an indirect way, this event—the tragedy at Mussel Slough—would become an almost necessary preface to any mention of Chris Evans
While no one could deny the prosperity that the arrival of the railroad made possible in the San Joaquin Valley, frustrated farmers, merchants and land seekers also blamed their troubles—high transportation rates, a slumping economy, and a frustratingly slow agricultural development—on the highly visible railroad monopoly. In the Mussel Slough area, near Hanford in the west of what was then still Tulare County (now Kings County), groups of settlers began moving onto railroad-reserved sections of land in the early 1870s. The reserved land had yet to be patented to the railroads, and these settlers were betting railroad claims would eventually be voided by the courts. The government had reserved this land for the railroad in alternate sections along various proposed rail lines, which, in addition to cash subsidies, provided the capital to build and begin operations of the railroads. (There would also be complaints that many of these proposed rail lines were only that: proposed but never realized.)
The settlers tried in vain to file claims on the land. They sent petitions to Congress with no result. In 1878, some Mussel Slough farmers formed the Settlers’ Grand League to publicize their position and create solidarity. Seeking to allay growing alarm, the railroad sent out prospectuses, which assured that when the railroad won title the farmers occupying the land would be offered the right to purchase that land at $2.50 per acre "without regard to improvements."
The railroad received legal title to their grants and began to send land appraisers to evaluate their holdings as a step toward sale. The land was first offered, as promised, to those in possession, but at exorbitant prices of $17 to as much as $80 per acre, a value that reflected the improvements made by the settlers, ignoring the option price promised. League members refused to pay. In 1879, the courts upheld the railroad’s right to evict the settlers, who were squatters in the eyes of the law.
The situation deteriorated. In May 1880, U. S. Marshal Alonzo Poole, along with a Southern Pacific land grader and Mills D. Hart and Walter J. Crow, two recent purchasers of railroad land, set out to take possession of the disputed lands. While settlers had congregated in Hanford for what some called a picnic but which the Visalia Delta described as "a grand indignation meeting of the settlers,"9 Poole and his contingent visited a ranch and emptied the house of furniture in preparation for the new owner, Mills Hart, to take possession. After arriving at the second property—the Brewer ranch where Walter Crow was to take possession—Poole and his men were met by a contingent of settlers who had gotten wind of his mission. The settlers demanded Poole and the others surrender their weapons. According to the Delta’s early account:
Some fifteen settlers on horseback came up to within fifty or one hundred yards of the Marshal, he alighted and advanced, meeting them half way, and saluted them in a gentlemanly manner, saying that in his official capacity as U.S. Marshal he was compelled to perform his duties in this matter, although it was against his desire. A formal demand to surrender was then made to the Marshal by the leader.10
There was, in effect, a stand off. The marshal began to read his orders from the court. One of the settlers remarked that they didn’t want to hear any of it. At a signal from the leader, each of the horsemen cocked his weapon, some armed with rifles, others with shotguns and revolvers. Poole later recalled the clicking of the locks to have been a startling sound to his sensitive ears. Suddenly a horse reared, knocking Poole into the road. Shooting broke out on both sides; five of the settlers and one of Poole’s men were killed. Walter Crow was later found dead in a field two miles to the south with a gunshot wound in his back.11
The tragedy at Mussel Slough was an immediate cause celebre. Settlers, frustrated at their inability to acquire land, cast the railroad as pure villain. Nearly twenty years later, Frank Norris summed up their attitude in his historical novel, The Octopus. In the book, loosely based on the Mussel Slough affair, he called the railroad:
The symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path; the leviathan, with tentacles and steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the Monster, the Colossus, the Octopus.12
While Norris’ account may have been highly fictionalized, it depicted the prevalent attitude toward the railroad with stunning accuracy.
The Evans family would eventually
return to a vastly changed, and changing, Central Valley. The previous decade had been one of great development there. The arrival of the railroad in 1872 had, for better or worse, affected the life of every resident. Bulk transportation was the catalyst that made cereal-grain farming possible on an unprecedented scale, ushering in the era of the bonanza wheat farms. Irrigation was further bringing opportunities to persistent small farmers who had earlier been derisively labeled "sandlappers."Furthermore, the passage of the No Fence Law, in 1874, made it mandatory for cattle ranchers to fence in rangeland, putting the onus on them to keep their stock off neighboring farms rather than making the farmer fence in his land to keep cattle off. In an era before the development of cheap barbed wire, it was a blow to the cattle industry, but a boon to the ever-growing number of crop farmers. It hastened the end of the open range.13
The new decade also brought many changes for the Evans family. In August 1880, Ynez was born. Unlike Eva, she was a big baby, weighing almost ten pounds. All little Eva could think when she saw her was that she didn’t like the fat red-headed baby. She was so fat you couldn’t even see her nose when you looked at her sideways. In 1882, Molly Evans gave birth to another girl, Winifred, who weighed even more than Ynez.14 Perhaps little Eva had gotten used to pudgy babies, because the now six-year-old girl thought this one looked all right.
The family returned to Visalia in the autumn of 1882 to a city that, like the Evans brood, was expanding. The Evans family holdings were also expanding. Chris had earlier purchased property in a recently added tract of city lots in northwestern Visalia for two hundred dollars. He had apparently done well working in the quicksilver mine because upon their return to Visalia, he and his mother-in-law, Isabella Byrd, also purchased forty acres of farmland from J. M. Canty. The property was located about a mile south of the city. They planned to farm it, and in the meantime, built and maintained homes on their city lots on the north side of town.15
By this time, Molly’s mother had separated from her hard-drinking and abusive husband, who was now living with one of their sons on a ranch not far away. Isabella never talked of the cruel treatment she had endured from Jesse Byrd.
The Evans family’s return to Tulare County also meant a return to the Sierra Nevada, the mountains Chris loved so much. He was finally able to bring his daughters to a place that was very special to him: the redwood cabin on the forest homestead where he had earlier buried his firstborn son. The family would stay there in the summer months to escape the valley heat and also so Chris, who often found work in the sawmills, could have his family close by.
In the spring of 1883, Eva saw the Redwood Ranch for the first time. The family drove up in a lumber wagon, Eva riding in the high spring seat atop a tool box that her father had converted to a seat. From that lofty perch, as evening approached and the mountaintops glowed with the last warm light from the setting sun, she saw the little house half concealed by cedar trees; her dad declaring that because it was getting late, they would camp there. He tried the door to the house and it wasn’t locked. They walked in, and her father boldly proclaimed, "Nice in here. Why stay outside?"
There was a big living room with built-in bunks, a fireplace with wood stacked beside it, and a good stove in the kitchen with the wood box full.
"What do you think of a fellow that will go off and leave a place like this?" Chris asked seven-year-old Eva. "Let’s stay till he comes back." Molly had to suppress a giggle, knowing full well that Chris himself had built and stocked the cabin. It was some time before Chris let his daughter in on his little joke.
Sitting in the cabin at nights, gathered around a roaring fire to chase the mountain chill, Eva and her sisters would listen to their dad tell Indian yarns and the occasional bear story. He often told them of the time when walking across the High Sierra to the Cerro Gordo mines, he was attacked by a grizzly and killed it with his hunting knife. But, for Eva, the Indian stories were the best.16
One such story was recounted by historian Wallace Smith in his book, Prodigal Sons. Smith relied heavily on interviews with Eva, and one can easily imagine the following account remembered from countless retellings at the behest of a youthful Eva.
Late one evening Chris, on patrol duty in advance of the troops, lay down on his blankets in a small thicket. A Sioux Indian had been trailing him cautiously and, in the early dawn, sneaked up on Evans and swung his tomahawk at the sleeping scout, cutting through three of his ribs. This annoyed Evans very much, who did not like to have his slumber disturbed in such a rude manner. He felt that a remonstrance, a reprimand, or even an argument would not meet the situation. After thinking the matter through, which didn’t take him long, he decided that this was a time for action and that steps must be taken to remove his assailant from this mundane sphere. Evans hurriedly assembled his weapons, and employed them in the execution of the techniques learned in the school of the soldier. This led to the demise of the noble red man. Chris wanted his girlfriend in Canada to appreciate his prowess, so he carefully removed the scalp from his late opponent and mailed the Indian’s hirsute adornment to her. The stench from the uncured souvenir led postal inspectors to open the package somewhere en route and Evans received a severe reprimand from Washington D.C.17
One can almost hear the crackling fire as this yarn was gobbled up by enthralled children. And although this story brags of killing an Indian, Chris always claimed his sympathies were very much with the "Red Man."
Chris was, in the eyes of his adoring daughter, very much a man of principle. Eva maintained there was a very strict code in their home. "You must not lie. You must not steal. You must not carry tales. You must respect the rights of others. And you must fight your own battles." It was a code that Chris knew could only be established by example. In the matter of lying, Eva later wrote that she never lied to her father but once to escape a scolding, and she believed that he never lied to her or to the other children. The deception about the Redwood Ranch was a joke, a little game. And there was one other time when he concealed the truth to save her pain, but it was not, in her mind, a lie. She told the story in her memoir as follows:I had a black spaniel—Toodles—and sometimes Dad used to take him to the south ranch with him. Coming home one night, with the dog running beside the wagon, a big dog jumped out at him, and in escaping he got under the wheels. When Dad arrived home he said nothing about it, but after we children were in bed, he and Mother went to the back of the vineyard with a lantern and buried him. The next morning I couldn’t find my dog, and Dad said, "Yesterday I fired that Swede who has been working on the ranch, and after he left I couldn’t find Toodles, so maybe he stole him to get even."
Months went by, and no Toodles: and I spoke often of what I’d do to that Swede if I ever caught him.
The following summer, while I was helping Dad build a fence at the Redwood Ranch, I started in on the Swede again.
Dad said, "I just can’t stand your never forgiving that poor man. He didn’t steal your dog; Toodles was killed." He recounted the whole incident, telling me where the dog was buried, and I said, "You are just a common liar, and I don’t want anything to do with you."
As I turned to leave him, he said "Eva, listen to me. This was not a lie—just an effort to save you pain. I thought you’d forget it in a little while. I’d never lie to you, dear. How could I expect the truth from you if I did?"18
Little Eva stayed angry for nearly a week, but then felt all was right between them. She evidently saw the good intentions in her father’s withholding of painful facts. "Never again," she claimed, "did I have reason to doubt my father’s word."
Just a few days before the Christmas of 1884, another child was born to Chris and Molly. This one a boy they named Joseph. Chris was a devoted father to his growing brood. Eva often enjoyed watching her father walk the floor, reciting Tennyson’s Locksley Hall in his "wonderful sing-song voice," lulling the baby in his arms to sleep. Chris only completed seven years of "common school" as a child, but read extensively and educated himself far beyond his formal education. He loved poetry and Tennyson was his favorite.19
Here about the beach I wander’d, nourishing a youth sublime
With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of time;
When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;
When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed;
When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see,
Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.
How apt that he would recite the dramatic monologue which, according to Tennyson himself, represented "young life, its good side, its deficiencies, and its yearnings" to his various progeny.
It was about this time, according to her memory, that Eva began school. Books had always been important to Chris, and so it is odd to think that he would have waited until then to send his oldest daughter off to school. Proximity wasn’t the problem, as the public school in Visalia was about a half-mile from the Evans house. Originally called the Little White School, Visalia’s first public school was organized in 1857 and the whitewashed board-and-batten building was replaced by a commodious two-story building in 1872.
Nonetheless, it wasn’t until she was nine years old that Eva experienced her first day of school. Considering the prevailing schooling habits of the time, this wasn’t so out of the ordinary. Student attendance was inconsistent at best; in fact, it was common for many children to stay out of school part of the year. For example, in 1875, the total enrollment at the Visalia school was 441 children, but the average daily attendance was just about half that number.20 The need to work at family farms and businesses and, for many families, the regular relocation to summer mountain homes contributed to sporadic attendance. The Evans family usually left for the Redwood Ranch in early April and often would not return until after the first snowfall in October. Consequently, the Evans children averaged only about six months of school a year. "What I liked was missing the final examinations; a written review of the work of the entire term, on which depended one’s promotion to the next grade," Eva once recalled, adding that "Not one of us ever failed to be promoted; how we got by, I don’t know."
Eva’s size may also have been a factor in keeping her away from school so long. This is best illustrated by a memory she had of her debut at school. On that first day, the janitor, "an older man with a thin lined face but twinkling blue eyes," came up to Eva on the school grounds during recess and said, "Ain’t you awful young to be comin’ to school?"
"I’m nine years old; I’m not young," Eva replied.
"You’re awful little; whose girl are you?"
"My father’s name is Christopher Evans," she snapped back, and walked off with her head held high in the air. She had evidently heard enough about her size for one day. The janitor, Mr. McKeon, later became one of Eva’s most valued friends.21
Chris Evans, who was well-read and prided himself on his literary prowess, spent time teaching his children himself. This was how, even with her late start and sporadic attendance, Eva still managed to progress through the grades; that and her oversized sense of pride and determination.
Like any father, Chris’ greatest responsibility was providing for his growing family. He had always been able to find work doing a variety of tasks such as teamstering, logging and mining, but these jobs were mostly up in the mountains. Down in the valley he found various jobs, from clearing land of oak trees, to operating a gang plow and Fresno scraper, to working the twenty-two-mule-drawn harvesting combines during the wheat harvesting season. But many of these jobs, too, were seasonal and took him great distances from his family. He was also at the mercy of employers, a mere wage earner. Like many men, Chris longed to work for himself. He was now in possession, along with his mother-in-law, of forty acres just south of town. Making it sound grander than perhaps it was, they referred to the property as the "South Ranch." Farming was the opportunity that would finally put his fortunes in his own hands. In 1885, Chris decided to plant the entire tract to beans, the emerging popular cash crop in the San Joaquin Valley.
As Wallace Smith explained in Prodigal Sons, Chris was cautious about his horticultural venture. He checked with the depot agent at Tulare about shipping rates before signing a contract with an Oakland firm to sell his entire crop at an agreed-upon price. Doing his homework, he knew that a decent crop would turn a handsome profit.
When he brought his crop in to the depot in Tulare, the shipping agent informed him that the rate was considerably higher than when he had checked earlier. Having signed an ironclad contract with the buyer in Oakland, Chris was forced to ship his beans at a loss. He had no other options.22
Farmers were at the mercy of the Southern Pacific Railroad, which held a monopoly on transporting goods in the San Joaquin Valley. Of course, the owners of the railroad could argue that they made commerce possible in the valley, so the farmers owed their very existence to them. Still, in the eyes of many, the huge corporation hardly seemed to be playing fair. If Chris harbored resentment toward the Southern Pacific over his failed business venture—and by all accounts he harbored a great deal—he was far from alone. He had plenty of company, from the displaced settlers of Mussel Slough to other frustrated farmers paying exorbitant freight charges.
Soon, another man would join this brotherhood, and there is nothing like a common enemy to bring people together.