They had a system now so they simply did the same as before, and when it was adequately cleared, they were off again. These slides were new; there had been a 5.5 earthquake only two weeks before and that must have caused them. The good news was if anyone found this old railroad bed, these slides would make things more difficult for them and would likely discourage any further exploration.
After a fifty-minute bumpy ride, they came to the remains of what had once been an old railroad shack that had seen better days. What was left of it sat off to one side of the track area, and it was evident that a large boulder had tumbled down from the huge rock overhang that towered above it. When it hit the little shack, it simply exploded into debris. The area was fairly wide and the shack originally sat at the bottom of a very steep grade. The rock that had caused the damage must have kept rolling along and disappeared over the cliff. It was nowhere to be seen.
The wide table-top plateau sported huge sand traps designed to stop a runaway train. The engineer would sound the warning with his whistle as he sped down to this spot, and the switch man would pivot the large lever that turned the tracks to divert the train off to the sand pits to stop it. There were no longer any such switches in place to do this, but the layout was still indelibly clear. Those switches had been removed along with the tracks.
The plateau also had a place for switching the engine and caboose for the return trip down the mountain. The area was large enough for the entire train to be sidetracked and unhooked, and the engine was moved to another area. From there, it was switched to a different set of tracks that sent it in a wide arch to the newly designated front of the cars.
An old railroad loading platform sat to one side with its depot building in semi-disrepair. Here, the shipments of goods being delivered to the ranch occurred and passengers were loaded or disembarked.
Off to one side, a huge corral and loading platform eased the cattle on to the cattle cars. Just beyond that they had buried a very large cache of essential goods for the retreat. It also served as a backup of indispensable supplies in case the retreat was unavailable, for whatever reason.
Looking around, Mike noticed this had also been the place where the men camped and cut thousands of trees for the railway’s construction. Throughout the new growth were huge stumps that resembled tombstones revealing the size of the trees removed more than a century past. Some of those trees had been ten feet across and remained as silent reminders of a time when things were still relatively untouched.
A little ahead and off to the right of where the tracks once sat, an old water tower stood to the side for the steam locomotives’ water supply. It still stood as a silent sentry, yet another testament of times past. A small stream swept by this area and had been the water source to resupply the tower. It went under the tracks and fell from the side of the mountain in a small, but spectacular, waterfall. There was an impressive rainbow that was perpetually off to one side, hovering above the spiraling cascade of water whenever the sun was out.
Off to the right of a large stand of Douglas firs was a dirt road that disappeared from view. At the end of that road, hidden in the trees, was their retreat. Once a lonely derelict, it was now a beacon of hope and security that would serve as a refuge for them and several others.
In the old days, around the turn of the century, it had transformed through more than one design. What had begun as a pioneer cattle ranch was later converted into a prosperous and posh dude ranch. Later, it was simply forgotten and sat derelict and devoid of any human activity for more than eighty-five years.
There was a time when the railroad brought trainloads of people and visitors to this place. They also hauled in supplies, animals, vehicles, and spare parts that were eagerly awaited, at times for months, by the full-time inhabitants of the ranch. As time marched steadily onward, the owners eventually died off through the steady progression of years and the property sat in the state archives as an abandoned trust.
Mike and Dan found it, paid the back taxes after a brief but brisk round of negotiations with the state, and became the owners of what some might consider a ghost town; less the mineral rights, which the state retained for itself. It had everything a group such as theirs could need in preparation of an undetermined long haul. This was that time and no one knew or could even guess how long it would last.
Mike pulled out his GPS and found the coordinates that led them to the last cache. It had been designated a “last ditch” backup, which meant it was large and would take quite a few people to dig up and transport to the retreat. They eventually decided to skip it and wait for a larger body of the members to get that job done. They were tired and wanted to relax now that their journey was virtually complete.
The original purpose of this cache was two-fold and had shifted as they prepared over the years. Originally, it was the primary long-term cache that protected their resources before they established a rotation of groundskeepers at the retreat. Later, they had decided it would make a good fall-back supply in case something like a major fire rendered the retreat inaccessible.
It had taken a lot of bodies and a few trips to move it all here. It was going to take an equal amount to get it all to the retreat, which was another fifteen miles down the dirt road past the stand of firs.
Mike stared at them for a moment and took in the splendor of the huge trees, which was always a humbling experience. A single tree provided enough lumber to nearly complete a three bedroom house.
“Through those trees is our new, and possibly permanent, home.” He continued to no one in particular, “We all thought today might come, but none of us could say when that day would arrive, if ever. It’s come to pass, though, and we’ll be safe here. We’ll raise families and do more than just survive… we’ll thrive.”
The conviction could be heard in his tone.
“It may be hard to believe but down there, where we just came from, there will be millions that will not. They will die, and many of them will die in the most brutal and painful ways. Whatever man can dream up will be done in terms of man’s inhumanity to other men. We will survive because we had the foresight to prepare for this day, to make ready for an event that was foretold by many, even though no one knew exactly when it would occur.”
He paused and took a breath.
“We will live, we will prosper, and we will have the opportunity to teach those who are not yet born what it is to be a truly patriotic and God-fearing people. We will instill in them the values that once made our country the greatest country man was ever able to conceive in all of recorded history. Hoooraah. Hoooraah!”
The small group understood his words and the important message they conveyed. Each had their own motivation for why they were here and most of them, possibly all of them, felt the same sentiment Mike had just expressed. That was why they had made the original commitment to the group and to themselves.
They were here.
They were alive.
And they would begin a new life in this place.
Chapter 6 Crowning Glory
Avalon was originally founded as a cattle ranch in 1878. Its mainstay was the beef market, and it reached key profitability when the railroad was installed to access three big moneymakers of that period… cattle, coal, and lumber. Prior to then, it was a long and dangerous drive to get the cattle to the nearest railroad junction, and the coal and lumber were simply inaccessible. The Elyria and Sacramento Railroad came at just the right time, and profits boomed as beef trade blossomed.
Eli Cameron, the man who founded Avalon, ended up shipping all the cattle east to the slaughter houses in Chicago, and the lumber industry began in earnest right around the same time the railroad’s need drastically increased. Large timber was required for both laying track and building railroad bridges through the jagged canyons that joined one mountain to the next with the long wooden trestles.
Coal was discovered in the mountains during that time and that one commodity, alone, was all the railroad barons needed to make it w
orth the expenses incurred from carving out a path through the mountains surrounding Avalon. Profits surged as everyone needed coal, including the railroads.
In short order, one rail car after another piled high and loaded with all three moneymakers began leaving the mountains. Eli built Avalon at a time when men who had vision and the guts to stick it out made massive fortunes. A few of those immense fortunes still stood a century later. Weyerhaeuser was one of them and there were many others, but Avalon was no longer among them.
Eli was born in 1838 in Kentucky where he grew into manhood. In 1861, at the age of twenty-three, he saw the “Great Trial” of the nation come. It came to a head when, after years of economic hardship imposed on the southern states by northern politicians, laws were passed that made the price of southern cotton nearly worthless.
The South seceded from the Union at that time and some would argue that was really the beginning of the war. But the reality is there was talk of formal separation from the American alliance for fifteen years before it actually happened. That was one of many reasons for what is often referred to as the American Civil War.
One such cause was that there were many more people who could vote in the North than in the South. The larger population in the South was negated by the fact that four million of those people were slaves and had no vote. The result of this lopsided population disparity was that the Northern states had more representatives in the House of Representatives and could get laws passed that favored the industrialist economy.
In order to reduce the asking price of the Southern grower’s cotton crops, for instance, the Northern industrialists had laws passed that imposed a tax on slaves. They then reduced the tax on imported cotton from England and increased the tax on cotton from the southern states. Ironically, Lincoln was a much hated President well before his assassination because many in the South considered him to be against slavery. They feared he would end slavery, which would impose a terrible economic burden on the growers.
In December of 1860, South Carolina led the way for the South by voting to break away from the Union when it became too much for the southern states to bear. On that fateful day of April 12, 1861, General Pierre Beauregard gave the order to fire on Fort Sumter and the misnamed “Civil War” began. It was also known as “The War Between the States,” “The War of the Rebellion,” and the “War of Northern Aggression.”
The irony in terming it a “civil war” is that it technically wasn’t; the Southern States actually had the right to secede. The North, recognizing the future financial potential of the South, simply refused. As a result of this well-debated point and many others, the young men of the day sat in groups, expressed their bravado, and yearned to get the war started. Both sides were initially convinced that the war would be short lived, a few months at the outside. No one believed the war would be as devastating as it turned out to be in the end.
Brother against brother, idealists against realists, and in the course of a few years, a generation of men were removed from the population of the United States. They died on battlefields, mowed down by rifle salvos and the terrible effectiveness of the cannon and its grapeshot, which rendered flesh worthless in a moment of stark terror for those Soldiers who were exposed to it. Legs and arms were seen stacked up in front of the surgeon’s tent as amputations were carried out endlessly.
In the end, the South was mortally wounded and left to dig itself out of a financial hardship formerly unknown to any of them and it took a hundred years to come full circle financially. Regardless, more than 600,000 men died from both sides by the time it ended on April 9, 1865 when General Lee surrendered his sword at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia.
In the beginning, young men like Eli jumped at the opportunity to “teach those damn Yankees a lesson!” As the war dragged on and hundreds of thousands were laid in their graves, or left where they fell, it became apparent that the might of the industrialized North would prevail against the predominately agrarian South.
Eli came through the war broken in spirit but with one burning resolve. He was going to move from the ravaged South and go West to where the opportunities didn’t include the unscrupulous tactics of a Union bent on punishing the South for its sins of the war.
He was especially wary of the insidious northern outsiders who often appeared out of seemingly nowhere to exploit anyone by whatever means possible. With questionable objectives, and unscrupulous tactics, they often meddled in local politics, manipulating and controlling former Confederate States for their own financial and power gains. Given the name “Carpetbaggers,” which reflected the material from which their luggage was crafted, they often bought up plantations at fire-sale prices and lined their own pockets at the expense of many people Eli knew personally.
Eli was also consumed with a dream of striking it rich.
Wandering from the gold mining areas of California, he eventually saw the large cattle enterprises of Montana and Wyoming. After spending a short time in Alaska, he came back to California with a small stake in his poke. He met a meek and ugly little woman by the name of Eldora Avalon Spears and married her during his late wandering years.
One day, as a prospector in search of a rich claim that had him drifting through those hills for many months, he came upon the area that would become his ranch. Eldora was with child and so he stopped and built a home. The two of them planted their roots and the base for a cattle empire grew that would, in the coming years, make him a very rich man.
In August 1902, while taking down a big fir at the age of sixty four, Eli died when the big tree split up the middle and the shards shot out in every direction, killing both him and his son Jeremiah instantly. Eldora was left to run the ranch, but the death of her son and husband at the same time was too much for her to bear. Being a frail Southern woman and not accustomed to those business decisions usually reserved for men, she wandered off naked one night from the house and was found a few days later dead, propped against the crook of a tree, stiff as a board. The wolves had eaten a large part of her.
Soon thereafter, a relative from back east took over the ranch but he was a gambling man and the ranch quickly became mired in hopeless debt. That was when Slim Rankin came into the picture. He was legally named Aloysius, but no one had the guts to address him as such so they just called him Slim.
When he found out about the old cattle ranch, Slim decided it could be immediately maintained as a working cattle ranch and later as a resort. It was also a wonderful place to raise his two sons away from the city life, so he made the commitment to buy the place at first sight. His wife had died while giving birth to his youngest son and he wanted to honor her memory by raising their children in this wonderful place. It didn’t hurt that the potential was enormous for making a profit, and he was generous with his money in such a way that the sale went forward. He paid off the huge debt of Eli’s relative and gave the gambler more than he deserved.
Cattle in that time fetched tremendous prices from the Eastern city slickers and there was good money to be had selling beef to them. There was also profit in selling coal. Those were the days when mineral rights transferred as a matter of process. He made most of the money back in two years that he had spent on the purchase of Avalon.
Slim was a big man of six foot, six inches in his bare feet and weighed in at three hundred pounds. His parents were from Wales and it was said that when his face got as red as his hair, it was time for a fellow to look out. He was often described as “meaner than a two-headed rattler” when he got riled.
Having struck it rich in Nevada a few years previously, he had money to burn. He had struck gold and silver on his claim just outside of Silver City and he was known to have killed several claim jumpers before the mine began to pay off in a big way. Although Slim could handle darn near anyone, it was always understood that he never killed anyone who didn’t merit killing… he simply accommodated the scurvy skunk.
He was so wealthy, even in those early days, that people who kne
w him joked that when the government needed money, they came to Slim to get it. The money was simply a means to an end for him, and he eventually tired of the mine and sold it for a healthy profit. He was ready for a change and one day, as the good fortune of a word here or there passes between men, he heard about Avalon and bought it.
Slim was a masterful businessman and with the help of his two sons, his coal, lumber, and beef industry continued to thrive. One son became a silent movie star. He was blessed with good looks and a ready smile and women of the era loved his panache. He was successful in the movie business and lived in a small southern California town called Hollywood, which was nestled among thousands of orange trees and dry canyons.
Slim had sent him away to the university at Stanford to get an education, but his good looks soon had him socializing with a different cut of people who frequented the new Hollywood sets. Slim didn’t find out about it until later, however, and since his boy was doing well for himself, he decided to let it ride and see how it turned out.
The efflorescence industry was beginning to make celebrities from the recent invention of creative genius Thomas Edison, which he called a “moving pictures camera.” While working in Hollywood on pictures, Slim’s good looking son talked up the frontier spirit of his father’s ranch that was located high up in the mountains. Many of his fellow silent movie stars begged to go there to ride horses and just get down to the basics of how their pioneering ancestors had lived. It was all the rage.
Big names like Henry Ford and George Eastman were doing it, as well as old Tom Edison, himself. They all came to the ranch by train, either in groups or as individuals. But they came, and the ranch expanded like never before.
It wasn’t only the stars who were going to Avalon by the trainload, film producers often did, as well, with some young starlet or another under their arm to do a “casting couch” screen test. They were essentially hidden in the mountains, unmolested and out of sight of the newspaper people. They were able to be tucked away in luxurious splendor and out of the main stream media for several days. It was ideal for everyone and the staff at Avalon served their every beckoning need.
Avalon: The Retreat Page 5
