Browntown
When I left southern Oregon for college in 1961, I had the sense that I had come from a special place. The San Francisco Bay Area where I attended school was vibrant, exciting, and eye-popping, but I missed the mountains, the rivers. I took to describing the Rogue Valley as “God’s Country.” In retrospect, that hubris in an eighteen-year-old must have been obnoxious. Quickly I realized that while the Bay Area was urban, there was a surfeit of undeveloped areas—forests, bogs, wetlands. You could find a path not far from the dorms, and suddenly find yourself in an oak savannah with no one anywhere to be seen. I soon stopped calling my home town “God’s Country.” God, it seemed, had not limited His particularly beautiful creation to 300 square miles in southern Oregon.
But once you got off the beaten track, southern Oregon really did seem particularly beautiful. The valley was surrounded by wilderness, Forest Service, and BLM land. Opportunities to enter these exquisite wild areas were many. The Pacific Crest Trail, which snaked through southern Oregon along the Cascade Mountains to the east, led one into the backcountry to stupendous scenery—I think of the nearby Blue Canyon and Seven Lakes Basin as prime examples. But even more mysterious, and ultimately more satisfying, was the area to the southwest. The forests seemed denser, the moss thicker, the streams faster and noisier, the lakes more inaccessible. It is now designated as the Red Buttes Wilderness, but in my teens we just referred to the area as “the Siskiyous,” a reference to the mountain range that crossed from the Cascades to the Coast Range straddling the California border. Back then it didn’t need a wilderness designation; it was so hard to get to, few people ever found their way into its depths.
There was only one way into the Siskiyous: from the Oregon side of the mountain range. And only one road to follow: the Upper Applegate Road. It ran south from Highway 238 along the banks of the Applegate River. The road narrowed around McKee Bridge; in another ten miles, just beyond the Copper Store, the road simply petered out, becoming a narrow, unimproved Forest Service road that passed into California within a mile.
The Copper Store was the last vestige of civilization before entering the Siskiyous. It was a rough-hewn lodge of a building that housed a post office and a store providing provisions to the miners who worked the banks of the various tributaries feeding the Applegate.
Things have changed. The Upper Applegate Road is now paved well into California, servicing the development around Applegate Lake, a reservoir completed in 1980. A new road surrounds the lake; campsites and boat ramps are everywhere; there is a lodge. And the Copper Store is now 100 feet under water.
* * *
My first foray into the area was in high school, when Troop 3 planned a long hike up Steve’s Fork to a site known as Browntown. About ten of us, with Larry Schade and Carl Olson as the adult leaders, drove through Jacksonville to Ruch, then south to the Copper Store where we crossed the Applegate. We found the Forest Service road that followed Carberry Creek to the trailhead on Steve’s Fork. The hike that day was incredibly difficult, much more so than any of us, adults included, had expected: the trail negotiated the steep terrain by sometimes following the creek, sometimes climbing high to bypass areas where the creek roared through narrow chasms. The trail was poorly maintained, and we found ourselves climbing over and under fallen trees. We had left home early, at dawn, and hiked until the sun was low. The steep canyon that had hemmed us in mile after mile suddenly broadened enough for us to find some flat ground. It wasn’t a meadow, exactly. Trees were still thick right up to the creek’s edge. But some sections had been cleared, and we found ourselves amid the ruins of an old Chinese mining camp from the 1860s. We were told it had been called “Browntown,” probably the nicest epithet the locals could come up with. The rough foundations and large timbers from the shacks the Chinese had used still littered the banks; you could still see where the stream had been diverted, though the sluice boxes were long gone, victims of spring floods. Everyone began exploring the well-rusted and deteriorated equipment and collapsed buildings. Larry shouted to us to tread lightly.
I was struck by the quiet amid the roar of the water. It was as though the spirits of those miners still roamed the area. There was nothing ominous about the quiet; it was just that they had left something of themselves in that remote place. I waded out into the stream and sat on an island of boulders. Looking back at the site, I could see in my mind’s eye what the camp must have looked like—the bustle, the labor-intensive work of gold mining, the buildings and equipment, all of which had either been carved out of that wilderness or carried in.
* * *
A decade or so later, while I was home in the summer after graduate school, a friend of mine who was working on his PhD in Chinese literature visited me in Medford. We decided to hike into that mining camp. We loaded the pickup with gear, and I drove the familiar path. But once on the road that followed Carberry Creek, I found myself driving much further than I remembered. The old rutted Forest Service road was now paved, which certainly wasn’t the case when I had first hiked into Browntown. Suddenly the terrain shifted, and we drove down a grade into a small and narrow flat area. This I didn’t remember. And there was a signpost: BROWNTOWN. We parked the truck, walked around, but all vestiges of Browntown were gone. The trees had been recently cut; nothing of the thick stands of Douglas fir, yew, and other rare firs that I had experienced remained. The resultant meadow was covered with invasive grasses and shrubs—mostly blackberry. A sea of stumps stretched across the meadow like grave markers. The timbers, the fallen shells of buildings, the littered remains of the sluice boxes were gone. A different kind of quiet resonated across the landscape.
It was obvious that something had been irreparably lost. At that moment, I couldn’t form my feelings into anything cogent. I remember anger giving way to frustration. I doubted that the people who drove that road even knew what that signpost signified. The ghosts of the Chinese who worked Steve’s Fork for the gold were gone; no one remembered, no one seemed to care. The stumps and newly carved roadbed said all that needed to be said. It left me with a ponderous feeling of sadness.
* * *
Writing about these two episodes in my past from the perspective of the present provides an odd juxtaposition of clarity and embarrassment. The clarity comes from the years of experience that one brings to the discussion at hand. Over the years my experiences have created a mesh through which I can sift my past. Certain themes continually pass through, among them the losses that time permits me to see. The embarrassment rises from the realization that my naiveté and lack of information in the past allowed me to be a poor steward of this amazing world I had walked into. I didn’t know Browntown would disappear. When I did some recent research, I found there is no remaining information about a mining camp on Steve’s Fork in the archives of the Southern Oregon Historical Society. The Forest Service archeologist for the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest who helped me found (and provided copies of) maps that pinpointed Browntown as a site and showed the trail. She also discovered a one sentence reference to Browntown: “Supposedly named after another Mr. Brown, an early (ca. 1855) miner in the area; it should not be confused with the better known “Browntown of the upper Illinois River drainage.” But this solitary fact doesn’t necessarily negate my story. It was common for white miners to utilize claims quickly, always looking for the big payoff. If a site didn’t produce enough quickly enough, they moved on. At which point, the Chinese would take over the claim and scour it clean. Many Chinese became quite wealthy sweeping up after the white miners had left.
* * *
The process of remembering this mining outpost in the midst of some of the most formidable terrain imaginable has revealed something hidden, something inexplicable. It is as if when I experienced this place fifty-some years ago, some unstated, undeveloped concepts became registered in my mind. There they remained in the peripheral vision of my consciousness and revealed themselves, little by little as I wrote. I missed an opportunity. It would be wrong to beat myself up for this failure. Ultimately, we all have to recognize the disappearance day by day of pieces of our past.
Perhaps there is a silver lining to the Browntown story.
During my youth, forest fires were spotted through a process of triangulation. Individuals in lookout towers reported the heading of the fire to a central location. With three headings, the lines intersected at a point very near the fire. A crew would be dispatched to the area. Sometimes if the fire was caught early enough, a single jumper would parachute into the forest to do initial control.
There was a story adrift in my teens that in the early 1950s a fire jumper based at the Star Ranger Station, ten or so miles north of Browntown, had parachuted into the area when a forest fire had been detected. When he had finished his work, he hiked down various unnamed canyons toward the Applegate River. Along the way he chanced upon a hand-hewn stone Buddha image at a wide spot along an unnamed creek; there was evidence that many others had stopped there to offer prayers and obeisance. He vowed to go back with others to share this discovery. He tried, but the Buddha remained hidden. Browntown may be gone, but perhaps that Buddha is still protecting the voices and spirits of the Chinese who lived and died in this wild, mysterious area.
Fred Lorish, MA ’68, is a retired teacher living in Eugene.
