P.O. Box D201, Greenville, California 95947
You don’t notice much with ignorant eyes. I’d been
looking at the drag saw for years, wishing it would disappear along
with stacks of tires, coils of barbed wire and Dodge Power Wagon
fenders listing in the weeds that grow tall in June between our
house and the woods beyond. A useless hulking mass of steel gears
and rods and cogs rusted into rest under a cedar tree that’s
what I saw in the drag saw.
With eyes like mine, you miss the history of a tool in a myopia
of wishful thinking. I would have hauled that thing off to the dump
if I could have lifted it alone, but Elmore stopped me before I had
the chance. And then my brother, Lowell.
Elmore drove out from town in his 1951 Jeep pickup truck, red
faded to nearly pink. Said he wanted to see my flowers. I guess I
invited him one time when we were watching the A’s beat the
Cubs on the town Little League field. I knew Elmore. Every Monday
morning at 9:05 he called the newspaper office to report on the
week’s weather. It was his job, and mine, to get the
temperatures and precipitation into the local newspaper of record.
Sometimes we chatted about this or that, but I knew it was time for
business when he cleared his throat and said, ‘Well, we have
some temperatures.’
On the morning when he came to look at my flower beds, he handed
out some advice about how much water and how much sun. Then he
asked if he could look around a little. He headed directly toward
the bone yard and I followed, embarrassed by the junk poking out
from under every tree. Elmore ignored it, walked straight to the
collection of gears and rods and cogs moldering under the cedar
tree and knelt down in the weeds. He brushed aside some brittle
brown fronds and stared at a bit of metal on the inside of a large
spoked wheel.
‘Yep, this is it,’ he muttered. ‘It’s what?’
I asked. ‘My daddy’s drag saw.’ Elmore was grinning.
Behind his thick scratched glasses his owlish eyes had a gleam.
The drag saw belonged to A. E. Hunt, Elmore’s father. He was
born in Indian Valley in 1866. His parents had come to the valley
in 1855 after a few years in the Sacramento Valley. They
home-steaded in a little canyon a mile from Peter Lassen’s
cabin, Hunt’s Canyon. A. E. Hunt worked in the Fippin Sawmill
close to the family place until he retired.
He bought the drag saw around 1916. No one around the area had
heard of the machine. I figured A. E. must have been quite an
entrepreneur to bring in such a piece of equipment when no one else
had one, but Elmore just chuckled.
‘Well, he sawed wood by hand for many years. Got pretty
tired of that. I guess he was willing to try most anything.’
The drag saw probably cost his father a couple of hundred dollars,
he said.
‘I was just a kid. My brother Ed he run it most of the time.
Soon as we got it we set it in a little meadow close to where the
road is now. There were Indians living all around. They’d come
around when they heard it start up. They’d be sitting back
there maybe 100 feet, afraid to get too close. It made too much
noise. They’d seen what work it was to do, the cutting by hand,
and this fascinated them.
‘As far as I know this was the first drag saw around. I
never heard of another one before that. Several ones got them soon
after it but I don’t think there was any before ours.’
But the Hunts had trouble with their drag saw. They couldn’t
make the drive sprocket stay on the shaft. A. E. sent Elmore off to
fix it.
‘I took it over to Westwood. Took the wheel just the wheel,
probably in my old Model T, something like that. They didn’t do
very much electric welding before that time but there was a fellow
there at the Red River sawmill that did welding and we took it to
him. He was an expert welder and by God he welded that thing. It
was the only way we could make that thing stay on. It behaved
itself after that.’
The work on the Hunts’ drag saw was the first electric weld
in Plumas County. But the drag saw soon lost its usefulness to the
chain saw. It stayed on the Hunt family ranch until the 1930s, when
they sold it to the Myers, Elmore’s wife Dolly’s family.
When the Hunts moved into Greenville they left the drag saw behind.
It remained there, summer after summer, until sometime in the
1970s.
Bill Williams, a sweet man with a penchant for horse trading,
came into the rights to all of the equipment left lying around the
old Hunt ranch. He began gathering up plow parts and lumber for
trade. The drag saw he hauled back to his place on Pecks Valley
Road, unloaded it under a cedar tree and left it right where Elmore
found it in 1980, five years after we bought the property from Bill
Williams.
It would be there now I still can’t lift it if it
weren’t for my brother, Lowell (his story follows). On one
visit from Salt Lake City he asked if he could take the drag saw
home and restore it. That was the second time I looked at those
gears and rods and cogs and saw something more than rusted junk.
The first was through Elmore’s fading eyes.
