Rosa Curless Langin
Contributed by Lance Beeson of California
The following narrative was presented at two school assemblies to honor Rosa Curless Langin, daughter of Biar Curless. I have left it as is with several addendum in brackets. Although it approaches hagiography and has many of the stereotypes of frontier life since rebuked and reconsidered, it exists as an interesting source of information about Biar, Lovina and the Curless children in Humboldt County, California. - Lance Beeson, great grandson of Rosa
Old Man River Program
Sponsored by William N Abbay Jr.
Fortuna, Calif January 16, 1948 12:50 PM
A little doll, a China doll, cuddled in the arms of a frontier maid who lived in a frontier cabin. Painted savages and the eerie cries of the bloody trail, the old warpath that led past the door of the little girl and her China doll. Endless fathoms of that sea of wilderness where flows the gravelly brook that pours into the body of our Old Man River [the Eel River].
 These things, added together and cross-multiplied by unending drudgery and eternal hardship, these make our river saga for today, the story of a little girl, the story of all women in that time and in that place. (Music swells, takes over, then wanes and stops.)
A China doll. A little China doll. It was given by a kindly lady to a maid of ten years who was the first white child to be born in all the vast expanse of wilderness that lay to the South and East of the town of Hydesville [There were probably earlier births south of Alderpoint. The author was referring to the area of southern Humboldt county east of Garberville, west of the Trinity mines]. The little maid had squalled her advent into the world of trees and brush on a day in May of the year 1870 [her birth year has been disputed to be 1869 as well]. She had arrived in a small split-board cabin near the town we know as Blocksburg and she was christened Rosa Curless .
Today, as she approaches her seventy-eighth birthday; she is known and loved by many, old and young alike, as Mrs. Rosa Langin, of Fortuna. No doctor attended Rosa's birth and the reason for this was very simple, there were no doctors in all that wide expanse of territory at that time. Women took care of themselves. If help was present at all on such critical occasions it came in the form of the crude husbandly hand or the simple assistance of a neighboring wife. Rosa's parents had crossed the plains from Iowa twice [thrice] in a covered wagon drawn by a plodding team of oxen [and mules] before they planted their destinies firmly in California for better or for worse.
 On the second [third] trip across the plains and mountains the small convoy of wagons in which Biar Curless and his wife rode held the trail without pause through all of one day and all of one dreary night in a vain attempt to catch up with a larger train of more than one hundred wagons that had gone before them. The train that they failed to catch is known in the history of Indian wars as the hapless Massacre Train [not validated by current history, Massacre Trains are a familiar folktale of that period] because it was annihilated completely by a horde of bloodthirsty savages on the Nevada desert.
In California, the farmer immigrant took a brief foray into mining [actually 8 years] in old Hangtown, now known as Placervllle. When his mine flooded out [not clear what this means], Biar Curless moved to Humboldt to take up a pre-emption about seven miles north of where Blocksburg now nestles against the hill above the bank of Larabee Creek, one of the tributaries on our Old Man River.
There was no town, then, only a store run by a squaw-man called "Beanie" Powell. Thus, the first name of that little settlement that grew up there was Powellsville. Rosa Langin remembers now that "Beanie" Powell is said to have died of food poisoning, possibly caused by eating sour beans [really!]. In that year of 1870, no road had yet been pushed through from Hydesville, still the last outpost of civilization. It was not until Rosa was six years old that wagons and stages were able to make their way past the Curless home. Even then, the road was open for little more than half of the year.
But a word about the lot of women who lived and raised their families on that wild frontier. The tiny cabin, only ten feet wide and twelve feet long, must have seemed terribly remote and lonely to Rosa's mother had it not been for her noisy brood of children. There were five young ones in the family when the Curlesses arrived on their homestead [actual age spread of Biar and Lovina Curless' children were 13, 11, 9, 5, 2] . Rosa was the sixth. Another six were to follow [wrong, only one followed, they had seven children total, but perhaps there were children of Biar's brothers present?].
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The little home was built of split boards because these, or plain hewn logs, were all the building materials available [ this conflicts with existing barn on homestead that is made with yew log framing and sawn boards, unless they were later added]. Not one sawmill as yet droned and whined and belched its smoke in all that fabulous wealth of timber. The cabin was roofed with pine shakes, nailed to rafters shaped down from sapling firs. The floor that Rosa Curless swept each day was seamed with drafty cracks.
Mother and father slept on the bed in one end of the single room but most of the children had their mattresses of straw in the little floored space overhead, under the eaves. As a very little girl, Rosa slept in a trundle bed, a box filled with a straw tick. This was shoved out of the way, under her parents' bed during daytime hours. Mrs. Curless cooked over the flames of a stone fireplace and her only utensils were two Dutch ovens, two long handled iron frying pans and one large brass kettle.
The family ate the standard breakfast of cornmeal mush on a kitchen table built of rough boards and it was here, too, that the dishes, such as they were, were washed afterward at least until Mr. Curless constructed a sink all out of wood.
Water came right to the back door in a trough that led from a spring on the hill above. But when she did her washing, Rosa's mother had to make her own supply of soap out of lye, seeped from ashes, and tallow stripped from the carcasses of wild game and from sheep or hogs. Clothes were laundered for several years in a trough hewn by hand from a solid log and here, in this rough tub, the family also took their baths.
If Mrs. Curless could make her own soap, Biar himself was equally as ingenious. He manufactured his own coal to heat the glowing forge he used in his blacksmith shop. He made his coal out of wood which he laid between alternate layers of straw and dirt over a slow fire that burned in a hole in the ground. One of the earliest chores that Rosa remembers was the job of grinding the cornmeal that the family used in place of flour. Later, she learned to tend the smoke house where the venison and pork were cured. Housewives who go to town or who order from the store every day will be appalled to know that Biar Curless' wife did her shopping once a year.
Even then, the greater part of the wagonload [family tradition says Biar used a horse-drawn sled in the earliest years] of goods that she and her husband freighted back from Hydesville or from Hookton (where they drove to sell their wool) was taken up by salt for the livestock. Nearly everything else that the family consumed came either from the garden patch or was found grazing in the surrounding meadows and woods. Mother Curless, who was an expert seamstress, made all the clothes the children wore. Winter and summer, they went barefoot and felt it no hardship for their little brown feet were as tough as leather. Rosa recalls that the nicest dress she owned during all her childhood was made from burlap sacks, trimmed with red material of some kind. "And that was a really pretty dress, indeed," says the present Mrs. Langin, "If I had one like it today, I'd be proud to wear it."
Life and death were a simple matter on that early frontier. Women lived face to face with the grim realities, and found them not so grim. If they sometimes bore their own children alone and unaided, they also helped to lay out the bodies of their loved ones when they died. Those last remains stayed in the tender care of friends and relatives until lowered into the warm earth of the grave.
The men-folk built the coffin and the women lined it with cloth, black for the very old, and white for those who passed on before their time. Those were rough but not unhappy times. People relished the happiness that came their way all the more because they had to earn it. Rosa had reached eight years of age before she saw her first safety pin. She believes that this safety pin is still in existence, pinned to the little China doll that she gave to her daughter, Winifred, who now lives in Martinez.
The doll itself was a present to Rosa from a neighbor lady named Mrs. Curtis, the wife of Jeremiah D. Curtis, early day stage driver. By a strange coincidence [?], Mr. and Mrs. Curtis are found to be the grandparents of the author of this script, Wm N. Abbay, Jr. Mrs. Langin was able to present Abbay with the only photograph of his grandfather he has ever seen. His grandfather, "Doc" Curtis, was killed in Round Valley in the year 1894 while driving a stage to another man's funeral.
Students of McDiarmid School at Metropolitan, who are listening to this program today, will be interested in knowing about the school that Rosa attended sixty-four years ago. It was called Inland School and was built of logs by the fathers of all the boys and girls who were to attend. For seats, there were no chairs or desks. Instead, the children studied on benches made by nailing wide rails to short sections of logs.
Two of the first things our early pioneers did as soon as they settled the land and learned to make their livings was to build a school and a church. You students at McDiarmid can ask your teacher, Mrs. Scribner [Gay Scribner, who remained a family friend for many years after], why this was so.
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Even the barest outline of the life of one who has lived as thoroughly as Rosa Langin must require more than the time contained in this program. So we shall have to leave our pioneer miss in old Inland School, hard at work at her lessons, and return to her next week. (Music swells and takes over.) January 23. 1948. They studied reading and writing and arithmetic on weekdays, and on Sundays they went to church. The travelling men came through the country and spread their sophistication along with the goods they sold. Every Fourth of July, a budding politician bellowed at the people for three hours under the shade trees in "The Grove." This was a nascent civilization. This was America in the process of being born. It all started with three apples. The seeds were planted and they grew to shoots. The shoots were set out and they sprang into saplings, then to trees full blown with blossoms before bearing their summer fruit. Fifteen kinds of apple trees came from three kinds of seed [????]. But that is the story of America, varied, competitive, democratic. A future governor of the state waded barefoot and chased minnows with a pioneer maid in the cool waters of Larabee Creek, which is a lonesome branch of our Old Man River. (Music takes over and stops.)
The roar of mighty Niagara was ever present in her mother?s childhood [Lovina Shaw was born in Genesee County New York]. Her father came from the Hoosier State [Biar was born in Indiana though family only stayed there for 10 years; his father was from New Jersey]. They met in Iowa and Joined their lives for the great adventure, the trek across the continent and the settling of golden California. Rosa, the first child born to them on this raw, new frontier, breathed no heritage of York State or Indiana and was never shaded by the tassels of Iowa?s tall corn [corn is right]. Rosa was part and parcel of the country in which she was born. She was a Humboldt girl then and now.
We left her last week in old Inland School, scribbling her newly learned letters on her smooth grey slate.
Rosa's marks were uniformly good for the lessons she learned while sitting on that rough, splitboard bench in that log schoolhouse. But, although she earned 100 percent in attendance and 100 percent for punctuality, she was set down once in deportment because of her negligence in regard to the young immigrant boy who studied beside her.
His name was Henry Sorenson and he later struggled upward to a position of prominence and responsibility in the Humboldt banking world. He came to America as a boy, alone, with his sister, Sofa, to live with his uncle, Peter Knack, near Blocksburg.
The teacher told Rosa, "Any young lady who sits beside a young gentleman deserves a zero if she lets him write with his nose." Ah, do the problems of schoolteachers ever change? That was in 1883. Rosa was thirteen then and her education fast advancing. At ten, she had seen her first safety pin. She was six or seven years old when she tasted her first apple. A teamster friend of the family, name of Mr. Miner, drove in from the Valley, "whoaed" his four horses before the Curless home, and shouted for Rosie." He plucked three big apples from the jockey box and said, "Catch these, dropping the fruit in the little maid's apron. Rosa's mother sliced the apples into small pieces so that everyone of the large family should have a taste. Then she saved every last seed and planted these in a box of good earth until they had grown to healthy shoots.
These shoots the family transplanted to a cleared space near the house. Thus they started an entire orchard. Almost a score of trees later came to bloom in their own time and, strange as it may seem, every tree produced a different kind of apple [???]. Some are still be bearing under the present ownership of Harry Payton, State Traffic Officer [CHP]. As far back as she can remember, Rosa knew Indians. The Curless homestead lay sandwiched between two camps. Indian ponies were seen frequently in her father's corral and Rosa played unafraid in the native villages. In her own back yard, she built brush wigwams with her first playmate, an Indian boy named Charlie, who was the son of Taylor, who was one of the children of "Old Grey Brother" the oldest and most sagacious Indian of all.
When an Indian brave left this world for the happy hunting ground, the sound of the funeral chant and the mourning dance wafted on the dismal twilight breeze up to the Curless cabin. Rosa listened entranced as she listened also to the War Dance and the great Indian powwows [along the Laribee?] which saw the braves from far and near, caught in the bewitching spell of the tom-toms, dancing to the hypnotic rhythm all through the gaudy night until they dropped unconscious on the hard packed earth, limp from utter exhaustion.
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Indian war parties took the trail past the Curless cabin and little Rosa remembers those fascinating childhood images: the dusky skins, smeared to the Devil's taste with nature's pigments, barbarians, half naked in their ragged buckskins, clopping furtively through the barnyard on their barefoot ponies. She never saw them return, nor did she ever know fully the outcome of any of their forays. But she remembers with righteous indignation some of the tales that reached her ears during her childhood, tales that explained the Indian uprisings....
There was the story of the kidnapping of Indian children and babies. Rosa heard of a stout stockade erected by white men to hold the infant redskins they abducted [possibly the Butte County relocation]. And when the Indian mothers came in search of their papoose, they were set upon by savage dogs that guarded the stockade.
These are the beliefs that Rosa Curless carried from her childhood. That such provocation for Indian trouble might have existed is verified by at least one other reliable source, complete with the names and places. The Curless family, and others in the immediate vicinity, were never molested by the tribe of Digger Indians [possibly Wailaki?], however, and the only unpleasant memory Rosa recalls from her own experiences with the natives was an occasional louse infestation which she picked up in the teepees and which her mother scrubbed out of her. Yes, she even dined with the neighboring redskins and she remembers now, with humor if not with relish, Old Grey Mother's prized delicacy. It was a kind of Mulligan stew made with wild onions, potatoes and a few other ingredients, but built around the main part which consisted of embryonic yellow jackets, dug from their holes and cleaned out of their protective combs.
The pattern of pioneer progress and development overtook the Blocksburg area, however, along with the rest of Amerlca's boundless West. The old split board cabin gave way to a larger structure of shakes which, in its turn, surrendered to a "real house," all of sawed lumber. Mrs. Curless continued to doctor the family with bear grease, mutton tallow, herbs, chittum bark and pine pitch, when they were sick. And it was silly to think of traveling the many miles to the nearest physician when brother Albert broke his arm. Mother set that and it healed and knit well enough. But the traveling men, peddlers and teamsters, began to ply the new road and soon the nearby town of Blocksburg had grown into a real frontier community.
Every Fourth of July, the entire countryside thronged to "The Grove," about two miles from town. For this huge annual event, the families brought bushels and bushels of bread and cakes. Whole beeves and muttons were provided for the occasion. A speaker came from outside, usually a politician, and he charged the drowsy summer air with eloquent Americana for as long as three hours after dinner. Stout lungs and larynx were, in themselves, often a sufficiently successful political formula in that mike-less day when the stentorian tones of the speaker had to compete not only with natural after-dinner drowsiness and inertia but with the hum of the beetle, the drone of the summer cricket, and with all of the outdoor space in creation as well. Rosa had turned sixteen and had three years of schooling tucked away in her pert head when her father was named chairman of the huge Fourth of July celebration. For feature orator, he invited a rising young aspirant for the state legislature.
Rosa enjoyed immensely the visit of this young man. She entertained him by taking him wading in the cool waters of Larabee where they had fun chasing minnows up and down stream. The budding politician left Blocksburg to become merely a memory until he paid a visit to Mrs. Rosa Langin, in Fortuna, many years later when he was campaigning for state Governor. His name was Hiram Johnson. A quaint custom prevailed at all those early Independence Day celebrations . On the outskirts of the frontier throng hovered the ever-present vanishing American, guest by tacit invitation at every gathering. While the white people ate, an Indian orator named Chief Sawn harangued the whole assembly. He spoke on and on until the banquet ended. This was his privilege. Then he and his tribesmen took over the feasting where the whites left off. None of the frontiersmen ever carried anything home from those meetings. All the leavings went to the dispossessed savages.
But memories like these are ripe and mellow in the mind of Rosa Langin. She lived in a day that was utterly remote and different from our own. Even so, she never outlived her time, for people with her imagination, spirit, and life are timeless. They fit into the atomic age as easily and naturally as they adapted themselves to the hazard and hardships of our early frontier. This has been a great life for Mrs. Rosa Curless Langin, and there's lots of it still to come.
Rosa Desiree Curless Langin, born May 31,1870 near Blocksburg, CA, died September 14, 1966 in Walnut Creek California
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