bridges, huckleberries and robin stew - Mendocino Art Center

the company agreed to bar the “colored” and Mexican
workers from the fields.
Making Do: For many of Mendocino County’s residents,
making do was not a new thing. They had always
hunted and fished, for instance, to help fill their larders.
They gathered huckleberries and blackberries, grew
potatoes, peas, beans, carrots and greens, and kept chickens,
pigs and cows. A degree of economic self-sufficiency
was a tradition in the county, so when the Depression
A chicken ranch near Fort Bragg. In the 1930’s, egg production became a
major industry on the Mendocino coast. (H.H. Wonacott, photographer, collection
of the Mendocino County Museum, #83-27-1.)
came and cash was short, many people adapted simply
by increasing their reliance on hunting, gathering, gardening
and small farming. Some turned huckleberries,
peas, eggs and even seaweed into “cash crops.” People
adapted in other ways as well. They traded with neighbors
and bartered with storekeepers. They bought on
credit, sometimes putting up their homes and farms as
security. And once they had secured the necessities, they
figured out ways to live without cash. Drawing on their
reserves of optimism and good humor, they entertained
themselves with simple, homegrown pleasures: dances,
picnics, baseball games, boxing matches, holiday celebrations,
and lots of good talk. Family, friends, neighbors
and even strangers found ways to help out.
While hunting and gathering was a longstanding
tradition among the county’s residents, both white and
Indian, the hard times of the Depression heightened
people’s awareness of the food that was ripening and
quickening in the woods, clearings, streams and coves
just outside their doors. Jake Jacobs remembers how it
was: “There was ten years that was rough. If somebody
saw a deer track they talked about it for weeks, because
that meant there was at least one live deer still left in the
county. As for the jack rabbits, if they didn’t have the
boils, they went into the pot.” . . . Although hunting
laws were enforced, and deer poachers were fined $25 to
$50 when caught, people were willing to break the law
and risk the consequences in order to feed their families.
Local fowl and fish also went into the pot. “I was
an adult before I knew that you didn’t eat robin stew,
confesses Carolanne Wuoltee. “I thought everybody ate
robin stew because I’d eaten so much of it through the
years.” When Francis Jackson and his friends were out
of school for the summer and couldn’t find work, they
would head into the woods, “trying to get something to
eat.”
Another widespread practice was harvesting wild
crops for local and distant markets. Seaweed, blackberries,
and huckleberries were all marketable commodities,
and good sources of income for people who had more
time on their hands than cash. Dee Dahl remembers
going with her parents to gather seaweed to sell to a
Chinese man. Isabel Sanbothe picked blackberries – “the
little wild blackberries, not the Himalayas” – and sold
them for 25 cents for a six pound Crisco can. It would
take her all day to pick three cans of berries, but “in those
days 75 cents would buy you a dress.” Blackberries paid
for her school clothes.
By far the most important wild crop was huckleberries.
“That was a big business,” recalls Emery Escola.
“They shipped them by the tons . . . that’s a lot of huckleberries.”
For some people it was the only income they
had.
Like hunting and gathering, subsistence farming
was a well established tradition in the county, and one
that became all the more vital when cash was short and
jobs were scarce. Speaking of the small farms along the
coastal ridges, Emery Escola recalls that, “each one of
these ranches had their chickens, pigs, cows, butter, milk
and eggs and the whole works.” Jake Jacobs remembers
that there was always some suspense about how much
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