U. S. Forest Service
I want to digress a bit to 1934 when I left college because of the lack of money. I was fortunate to be picked for a job on a special crew which was to build experimental erosion dams in the national forest. The leader of that crew was an elderly man named Parker. He had earlier suggested the site for a dam where Boulder Dam was ultimately constructed on the Colorado River.
The crew was camped at Grapevine Springs near Roosevelt Lake when I joined them. There we built dams of stone and wire called "sausage dams." Since we were digging rocks we found numerous rattlesnakes and Gila Monster lizards. One man was fascinated by the Gila Monster and he captured a very large one which he kept in a cage at camp. As an experiment he caught a large rattlesnake and put it in the same cage with the Gila Monster. The two just ignored each other as nearly as we could tell until one morning the rattlesnake was gone. Apparently the Gila Monster had eaten the snake and seemed very pleased about it. The Gila Monster was released unharmed when we moved camp.
When the weather turned hot in June we moved camp to Round Valley near Payson where we made dams of tree branches and stones. The area was very hilly and we managed to turn our trucks over with great regularity as we delivered rocks or tree branches to the dam sites. We had removed the doors of the trucks so when the truck rolled we simply bailed out on the high side. The other trucks were used to right the overturned one and the work proceeded.
During the middle of the summer a forest fire started in the Matazal Mountains just north of Sunflower and we were ordered to report for duty at the fire. When we arrived in the area we were each assigned about fifty CCC boys and were sent out on the fire lines. We spent most of our time making sure that none of the boys in our crews were trapped in the blaze. My group helped protect a large building at a mercury mine near camp. We went from there to a remote canyon where an elderly couple and their grandson were trapped in an isolated spot. When we got there we found them to be safe but they were very exhausted. The fire had jumped across the canyon during the previous night, right over their cabin. The grandson had kept the roof wet all night by dipping water from a spring and throwing it on the roof. He had saved the cabin and was glad to leave the area with the elderly couple.
At the Matazal fire I discovered that you cannot successfully fight a fire in heavy thick growth. It moves too fast to keep up with and during most any breeze the fire can jump a quarter mile. We timed the pace of that fire at sixty miles per hour on one occasion. You just have to find a break like a deep canyon or a wide road right of way to start a back fire and stop the flames.
We had numerous close calls at this fire and could have lost many men if we had not been extra cautious. In one case we simply carried an exhausted local forest ranger out of danger when the wind suddenly changed direction and the fire raced toward us. As we carried him out into a burned area I looked back to see a solid wall of flame where we had been only seconds before.
We were at this fire for nine days and nights and only succeeded in saving some mining buildings. The fire simply burned everything available to it and then went out. We were glad to get back to our camp on the East Verde River.
Our experimental crew's last job involved finishing the Chamberlain Trail. Our camp was on Haigler Creek and we had managed to get a small caterpillar tractor with a bull dozer attachment. We would drill holes using hammers and tapered steel drills, load the holes with dynamite and blast the "rounds." The bull dozer would then push the loose rocks and dirt over to the low side making a road bed over which trucks could operate. The largest rocks were removed by hand and then the road grader was brought in to finish off the surface. Not a fancy job but one that would serve.
Shortly before Thanksgiving we decided to go hunting for wild turkeys. Frank Pascoe and I hiked down to Ellinwood where there was a cornfield on a ranch. It was a lucky day because the field was full of turkeys. We proceeded to kill three large gobblers and were just starting back to camp when someone came out of the ranch house and came toward us. Frank put the three turkeys on my back and I left in a hurry while Frank went to intercept the man from the ranch house. I had sixty pounds of turkey on my back and I did not want to hang around but I saw Frank holding his gun on the man as I went over the first ridge east of Ellinwood. When Frank finally came into camp he told me that the guy was a game warden and that he was really angry about being restrained at gun point. Of course I knew who the warden was and he would have known me but he had no idea who Frank was. Neither Frank nor I had a license to hunt turkeys.
Frank Pascoe was an ex-rancher who lost his "outfit" when the Great Depression came and he was working as a cooks helper at our camp. His old ranch was the Butcher Hooks in the Superstition Mountains east of Superior.
Many of the men in the camp were ones who had been displaced by the Depression. Denver Tomlinson was an ex-rancher who borrowed money he was unable to repay because the price of cattle was too low. Ersel Anderson was a heavy equipment operator and there was no place for him to work. Earl Stevens and Jim Hansen were miners but the mines were closed so they were just marking time until the general economy improved. The Great Depression left its mark on many of us who lived through it and saw the havoc it wreaked on many common people. We came to believe that a steady job was the most valuable asset that a person could have. We saw hundreds of people who were unable to feed their families, buy decent clothes or find acceptable housing. Medical service was simply not affordable. When Earl Stevens was injured on that road job he was taken to Globe to be checked by a doctor but Earl paid the bill. He was off work two days to see the doctor and then had two days pay deducted from his check. Everyone felt fortunate to have a job so we did not expect any "special" treatment in case of an accident.
When we finished the Chamberlain Trail, Mr. Swift, Supervisor of the Tonto National Forest came up from Phoenix and drove over the trail. We had a short dedication ceremony and then began to break camp and take equipment back to it's customary location. I was then ready to return to college.