Bull Creek was once a farming settlement known for its apples. The flood of December 1955 changed the valley for good, and the tale follows what its families lost and how a few women kept the record of it.
Stay with me a spell, friend, because there was a town up Bull Creek once, and you'd be hard put to find it.
It grew apples. A rancher named Tosaldo Johnson was among the men who proved that country could do it, and by the nineteen-tens Bull Creek apples were taking prizes. Then Prohibition came, and the canyons found a second crop. At a spot called Whiskey Camp somebody set a still inside a hollow redwood and let the smoke go up through the hole in the top of the tree.
The town kept its dead on a hill over the creek. A little boy named James Arthur Millsap went in there in eighteen eighty-three, twenty-three months old, and seventy years of neighbors went in after him. Tosaldo Johnson in nineteen twenty-six. His wife Roxanna nine years on.
December, nineteen fifty-five, the water rose, and it came for the hill. Coffins went into the flood. Some of what they held was caught in the trees. Some turned up in the silt. Some, they reckon, went clear to the Pacific.
Folks gathered what they could find, and in nineteen fifty-six they laid it all in one grave, on ground Abner Bruce Lewis gave them, far from the water. One grave for all those families.
Then a woman named Grace Baxter started a list of everyone who had ever lain on that hill. As near as the old records show, Tosaldo and Roxanna were her mother and father. She and a few other women raised the money, and on Memorial Day, nineteen fifty-seven, a monument went up over that grave.
Nobody could tell her who was under that stone and who had gone out to sea. She wrote the names down anyway. There are old apple trees on that creek yet. I've never had the heart to pick one.
Photo: Ellin Beltz (cropped and brightened) · CC BY-SA 3.0