Irene Stapp Interview

Contributed by Beverley Windbigler of Blocksburg

Irene Stapp is tired of hearing the story about how her great-grandfather, James Joseph "Beanie" Powell, got his nickname. Mostly, she says, because it's just not true. He didn't earn the moniker posthumously after eating a batch of sour beans as the legend goes. Irene says he was called "Beanie" simply because he always had a pot of beans cooking on the back of his stove.

Powell was from Kentucky and one of Blocksburg's first settlers. In fact, before Blocksburg was Blocksburg, people called the region Powellville because of the store he established near the headwaters of Laribee Creek. We (Bev Windbigler, Veltha Coleman, and Kristin Windbigler) sat down with Irene in October, 2002, to learn about Powell and his wife, Ellen, as well as several of Irene's other relatives who have played a big part in our region's history. What follows is a partial transcript.

Beanie and Ellen had five children, and all of them were born and raised in Blocksburg.

"There was Clay, then Grandma Fannie, then Aunt Dora, then Robert, then Elizabeth. Clay Powell, he was killed in Covelo and he was buried down there. I don’t know where he was buried. Grandma’s older brother, Joe, one of my cousins, said he was buried there. He knows where he is. He was in one of the old cemeteries. He was shot in a battle of some kind. So was her younger brother. Mom called him Uncle Robert. He was shot and killed down here on Long Ridge when he was about 20 years old. He was mistaken for Jack Littlefield during that time. But neither one of them married or had any children that I know of. But she said he was about 20 and was shot in the back. He was the older boy, but there was one girl younger, Elizabeth. She died when she was about 16 years old, they said with tuberclulosis, and she’s buried in Eureka. I think it was Sunset.

“James Joseph Powell’s wife was a full-blooded Indian, my great-grandmother, Ellen. Apparently they were captured. It was her and Lucy Young and maybe another one, but I don’t know that for sure. Lucy said she and Ellen were sisters. And you asked her, “Well, how old were you when the white men captured them?” and she would say, “We same age, about 14.” Well I don’t think there were many twins, I think maybe they were first cousins because if they were the same age, about 14, they would have been twins, and I don’t think there were very many twins. We’ve always just assumed they were probably cousins.

“Lucy was Wailaki. There’s been a big controversy over that. They talk about the Lassic tribe. What I always heard was that Chief Lassic was a Wailaki but his name was Lassic, but he was of the Wailaki tribe. He was old Lucy Young’s uncle, so possibly he was related also to my great-grandmother. But Lucy always said (I seen Lucy a lot of times, she used to come to our house) that the mean one got her. He was real mean to her. To keep her, he kept her chained up, Rogers. Now Ellen, I don’t know what her Indian name was, but Powell renamed her. He named her Ellen. But Ellen got the good one. He was real good to her, Powell was. In fact he sent the girls, my grandma and her sister Dora (she had a sister Dora). He sent them out down below Santa Rosa to a finishing school after they finished grammar school. Because I can remember Grandma laughing about her sister-in-laws out in this area didn’t like Grandma because she could sew a fine seam, had cloth napkins on her table, and didn’t put her fruit on her table in a fruit jar. She put it in a bowl. They always thought she was 'uppity.' She was refined. [Click here to see a two-minute Quicktime video of Irene talking about her great-grandmother and Lucy Young.]

“When they finished the eighth grade, he sent them to maybe Guerneville, it was something with a "ville." It was a Normal school where girls could learn to be teachers. I don’t think they were (teachers). I never heard of them teaching school. Grandma was a seamstress. I can remember that she sewed and made clothes for people."

Ellen’s daughter Frannie married a man by the name of Bill Axton who lived in Blocksburg. Irene said that since there were no ministers in the area at that time, the common practice was to sign a contract, which they did. The marriage didn’t work out and eventually Frannie returned to her parents' home along with her three-year-old son. About that time Jim Wilburn Jr. was looking for a cook for his hay crew over in Hettenshaw Valley. It took all summer to cut the hay and he sent word over to Blocksburg for a cook.

“Grandma took the job. She said, 'I’’ll go to Hettenshaw Valley and I’ll take the job.' She said that her little boy was three years old. The only thing she had to ride was an old white mule, so she tied her clothes on the saddle in flour sacks and put her son on behind her and she road over from Blocksburg over Grizzly Mountain to Hettenshaw Valley and took the job a cooking for this crew of men. And she never left. She and Jim Wilburn (James St. Clair Jr.) had signed their marriage contract. Now that’s what she said. That was Frannie.”

Frannie Powell Wilburn’s new father-in-law was Jim Wilburn Sr. and was something of a legend. There was one story about a bear hunting trip that was somewhat exagerated in a San Francisco paper. Irene remembered the story as it was related to her.

“All I know is that they were hunting and the dogs treed this bear in a bunch of rocks, and he tried to shoot it, and the bear knocked the gun out of his hand. He had some hunters with him, too. Somebody was with him. He rammed his arm down the bear’s throat and stabbed it with his bowie knife, and killed the bear. The ones that were with him thought he was dead and came back over here. It didn’t happen on Grizzly Mountain. When you come around from Zenia through Refuge Valley, you can look across and there’s a rock sits up there like a thumb. That’s Jim’s rock. That’s where it happened. But they did name the mountain for the incident. They went back after him. I mean his dad and different ones they took in there, and he was still alive. His arm was all mangled. It was named for that incident, but it really wasn’t on Grizzly Mountain. [Click here to see a three-minute Quicktime movie of Irene telling this story.

“Mom says that, of course, he [Jim Wilburn] came from Texas, and they used to, as little kids, ask him what nationality he was, and he would never say anything but ‘a blue-bellied yankee.' He came in here with the army. I haven’t been able to locate anything on this fort here [in Hettenshaw Valley]. He was stationed here. It was right across the street, right behind the barn. When he was stationed here, he was in the cavalry. He was a captain in the cavalry, but he came out of Sacramento and evidently they maintained all these little cavalry units like here at Fort Rascal, Fort Baker, Fort Seward, when they were collecting all the wild Indians to put them on reservations, and he was stationed here. Fort Rascal. I’ve heard that this right here [ her house] was in the stockade. I don’t know how many years he was here. There’s a soldiers’ cemetery right back up here.

“See I don’t know how long he was here. I don’t know how long they manned it or whatever they did. And then when he was out, according to the family, he went back to Texas where his family was. I’ve got a paper signed by President Arthur, a land grant for his services in the army. James St. Clair Wilburn. It’s just happenstance that I’m back here. He mortgaged it several times. He fell in love with the area. When he went back, he put in for this place. I think it says 400 acres, more or less, a land grant. It’s very strange because he sold it, he mortgaged it, he borrowed money against it, he sold it, it changed hands several times and it ends up that Lee’s [Irene’s husband] grandparents bought it, and then Lee inherits part of the ranch, and I married Lee and end up back here. Strange how things twist and turn.

“James Powell had a hunting partner. Two old guys, they always hunted together. And James Powell was a huge man, over six foot tall and he was heavy. He was real big. Anyway they had hounds and they always hunted, and they were hunting someplace across the river from Blocksburg. They had treed a bear and he [Powell] was afraid that the dogs were going to get killed so he ran in. The bear took a swipe across his tummy and his guts all pooched out. His partner then shot the bear, and he knew he had to help his partner, so he took the lace out of his hunting boot and used a bowie knife to poke holes to lace it back and forth. But his hands would get slick from the fat that was pooching out so he would reach down and wipe them on his boots. It made Jim Powell mad because he said it was bad enough to be gutted by a bear, but to have your partner grease his boots with your gut fat.... Whether it was true or not I don’t know, but I felt your dad [Veltha Coleman’s] was verifying the story. He’d never said anything to me before that about it, but he just grinned that one time and he said I can show you where that rock is.” [Click here for an alternate version of this story.]

Veltha asked Irene what became of the little three-year-old boy Ellen had with her when she took the trip over the mountain.

“He lived there in Covelo with us. He married. He must have been pretty young because I know Mom said the girl he married was about 16, but she died during that flu epidemic after World War I in 1918. They hadn’t been married very long and he promised her he would never marry and he never did. But he lived with us. We had what they called the bunkhouse. She had two brothers that were bachelors and a brother-in-law that was a bachelor cause all those young ladies had died during that flu epidemic. They never married again. They ate in the house and in the living room and around, but they slept out in the bunkhouse.’”

Irene talked about some of the names connected with local history that have appeared in other books and stories. She answered some questions from Veltha and Bev.

Veltha: “How were you related to Johnny Watham?”

Irene:” He was my half-brother. She [her mother] had the twins. He and his sister were twins. They were Wathams. I think they were six years old when mom and dad got married.”

Veltha: “That Wylakie John, was that him or his father?”

Irene: “That was either his father or his grandfather.”

Veltha: “Cause that’s the one in Genocide and Vendetta, Wylakie John, and his name was John Watham.”

Irene: “Yeah, I think so, ‘cause John’s father was a lot younger. He must have been about 20 or 21 when all of that was going on because the twins were six years old when mom and dad got married. They were 13 years older than me.”

Veltha: “I always wanted to ask you that, cause they called him Wylakie John.”

Irene: “I think he married a Wailaki woman. They were Wathams, and he was named after his father, but he never knew him. He had left the country by then. He was one of White’s men.”

Bev: “Do you know anything about the man named Yellow Jacket?”

Irene: “Yep. I went to his funeral. I know exactly where he’s buried. They called him Jack French. He took the name Jack French.”

Bev: “Now was he related to Dolores Fearrien?”

Veltha: “That was a different French. She was married to a French from Garberville.”

Bev: “Did Yellow Jacket live on the Murphy Ranch in Blocksburg?”

Veltha: “No, you know where Rick and Carol Sherman live? [Fort Seward] Yellow Jacket Butte is right down there, down from Baney Butte.”

Bev: “Was he full-blood Indian?”

Irene: “Yes. Some place I have a picture of his wife, Sally Jacket. Maybe Betty has it. Taken with Lee’s dad. He came up from Oakland and he had his picture taken with him.”

Bev: “So his last name was actually ‘Jacket’?”

Irene: “That was just his Indian name.”

Veltha: “Everyone called him Yellow Jacket, and he went by that one name didn’t he? His given name was Jack French wasn’t it?”

Irene: “That’s what white people called him. That’s kind of the way they did cause my grandmother, Ellen, was married to Powell. After he died, she married a man that they called Wailaki Tom. That was just what the Indians called him and everybody else called him. And then when they took them to Covelo, and they had to be enrolled on the reservation, he had to have a surname. They insisted. He had always been called Wailaki Tom, so they put down Wailaki as his first name and Tom as his surname. So when they registered his wife, she was Ellen Tom. She’s on the roll like that now.”

Bev: “They were forced to move to Covelo then?”

Irene: “Evidently. Because I know she was one of the original allotees on the reservation. Ellen. Sally died. I don’t know where Sally’s buried.”

Veltha: “Yellow Jacket’s buried where, out there in Covelo?

Irene: “Uh huh, out in that Pine Grove Cemetery.”

Veltha: “There’s a really good picture of him in that book, “Families.” My dad talked about Yellow Jacket, all these stories about Yellow Jacket.”

Irene: “He always came to our house, him and old Bill Dobbyns. And Yellow Jacket and old Jim Hoaglin, all those old Indians, because of Mom and her connections. They always stopped at our house. They always stopped to eat. Mom would always cook for them.”

Bev: “Was the Hoaglin, Silas Hoaglin?”

Irene: “This was Jim. I only knew him as Jim Hoaglin. I think the same family. They never talked much. They talked to my dad and he wasn’t Indian at all, but they all liked my dad. He just loved to talk to them. He was paralyzed, in a wheelchair and boy, they’d come to our house and they’d sit by the hours, those old guys, and visit with Dad.

Veltha: “Now who was Davy Wilburn? Was that your mother’s brother?”

Irene: “Uh huh. They called him Little Dave.”

Bev: “The Dobbyns you mentioned. Was that the man Dobbyns Creek was named after?”

Irene: “I don’t know.”

Veltha: “You said this Dobbyns was Indian? The other one was white.”

Irene: “Uh huh.”

Bev: “It could have been his son?”

Veltha: “Yeah, ‘cause they took Indian wives.”

Irene: “Those Indian girls, they were real quick. If they had a, when I was in high school, if they had a boyfriend from town that was not Indian, it was a big thing. If they got pregnant, they immediately named the father. They may not have married them, but they named their children after the father. Always. So that could have very well been. But he always stopped at our place. But even though dad was a white man, he wasn’t Indian at all, but Mom was part.”

Bev: “Did Yellow Jacket have a family?”

Irene: “Not that I ever heard of.”

Bev: “You know, I talked to Herb Kay once and he told me a story about back in the 1920s when he was a little kid. He said that there was an Indian that would walk through every year by their place. He was coming from somewhere around Blocksburg and going to the ocean. And he wore a deer skin skirt. He was an old man, and they would watch for him every year. I never could find out anymore about him. I wanted to find out who he was and where he came from, how far out.”

Veltha: “There was that story about Hustes, and there was suppossed to be an Indian called Hustes. Earl [Burgess] talked about him. He ran through Blocksburg with just a shirt on. He didn’t have, it was probably a buckskin shirt, but they said one time he embarassed a whole bunch of ladies because he had everything showing. I heard that story. But they called him Old Hustes. But wasn’t there a Captain Hustes who probably would have been a white man? But the one I heard was always around Blocksburg was the one who always wore the buckskin shirt that was real short.”

Irene: “Well I know there, we lived on the north end of town [Covelo], and to go to school we had to pass the reservation school, the Indian school, to go to town to the other school. Even though Dad wasn’t Indian at all, he wasn’t prejudiced at all, but he wouldn’t pass that Indian school because it was an Indian school (to send us to another one). It was a far better school because they got so much federal money. They even paid the teachers more and had more supplies than the school down here at the white school. A lot of his friends said, “Why are you sending your kids to the Indian school?' And me, I looked just like him, red-headed and blue-eyed. I used to wonder, the Superintendent of Schools would come from Ukiah, like at graduation time or something like that, and they all stared at me. And I said why are they staring at me? Everybody knew who I was. I was totally accepted. I thought later after I moved up here, I must have looked like a fly in a pan of milk. I didn’t feel any different than any one else and I wondered why they were staring at me."

Veltha: “See when I first saw you and Lee, I though Lee was Indian and you were white. He had dark eyes and dark hair.”

Irene: “Yeah, and he wasn’t Indian at all. Well I can remember, I don’t know what year it was, but it was the first year we were being enrolled on the reservation, the tribal reservation. I couldn’t have been very old because my sister was two years younger than me and she was a baby. It seems like there was a whole group of people who came from the mountains for this enrolling thing on the reservation, and they all stayed at our house. Apparently Mom got me all dressed and cleaned up and bathed and whatever, and had told me to go outside and play. To stay clean, but play until she got the baby ready. I know I went out and Aunt Nan Duncan, from Long Ridge, she was there and she came walking by as I started out the door, and she always called, Mom’s [full] name was Frances and they called her Frankie, and she took a look at me and I think she ruffled my hair or something and she said 'Frankie, you're going to have to take this one out and rub her up against a burnt log or something...for the enrollment.' Well it scared me and I went and hid. Out behind the smokehouse, there was a pile of, I guess, apple boxes. They picked the apples and then they stored the boxes for the next year. I crawled in to one of those boxes, and I could hear them calling me, calling, calling, calling, 'cause they were ready to go and I was gone, boy. I didn’t want to be rubbed up against a burnt log. And I don’t remember how they found me or what. I sure didn’t want to be rubbed up against a burnt log. I knew what that was.

Veltha: “So the reservation schools weren’t the same as the Indian schools that they had to begin with? That’s where they rounded up all the kids and put them in the Indian school?”

Irene: “Yeah, they called it the Agency. There’s an Agency Lane there now. I can remember some big buildings there. I think my sister and I took some dance lessons there. We went there to take tap dance lessons one year or something.”

Bev: “When you were there [in Covelo], was the community segregated at all, where they had the separate schools?’”

Irene: “Oh yeah. Definitely. Not only that, but tribal wise. If you weren’t a Wailaki, you didn’t even speak to them or play with them. We were never allowed to go to any of the other kids' homes in school.

Veltha: “And there were all different tribes?”

Irene: “There were all different tribes. We were never allowed to go and stay overnight or anything like that, only within our own family."

Bev: “What year was that, when you were going to school there?”

Irene: “Well, I was born in 1922, so I graduated from grammar school in 1936 and then I went to high school.”

Veltha: “So in '27 or '28?”

Irene: “Yeah, ‘cause I know when there was an old man there, they called him Wailaki Tim [or Jim]. I never heard of any other name for him. He was a real old man, and he had an orchard and he had cherry trees, big beautiful cherry trees. Well if you were a Wailaki, you could go and get all the cherries you wanted and you didn’t have to pay for them. If you were some other tribe, you could help yourself but you had to pay for them. If you were a white person, you didn’t get them at all. My mom and Nelda, my sister, went down. My sister married my brother-in-law, Lee’s brother, so he wasn’t Indian either. He was a big tall blond guy, where Lee was dark. Anyway they went down there to my Aunt Nancy’s and she said, 'Oh the cherries are ripe. Why don’t we go down to old Tim’s place and get some cherries and we’ll make a cherry pie.' So they went down there, and there was Nelda and Everett and they had two little kids, little blonde blue-eyed kids. Well anyway this old Wailaki man was so happy to see Nelda 'cause he had known her since she was born, I guess, and was glad to meet her husband and see her little kids. And he kept making over these little kids. He was so happy to see these little Wailakis. One of Nancy’s daughters, June, who was a Wailaki, but she married a Britton, which was a different tribe. And she had several little kids, and finally Nelda felt so bad she said, 'June’s Wailaki. What do you think of my little kids. These are my kids, little Wailakis.' And he says, 'They’re not Wailakis. They're just Injun babies.' Nelda said you should have seen the look on June’s face. So there was a lot of pride between the tribes.”

Veltha: “Even years ago they warred among themselves. Over land or whatever.”

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