Those Were the Days

By RHEA-FRANCES TETLEY
Historian

The Alpine Mountaineer is delighted to announce the return of Those Were the Days, a weekly feature that first appeared in this paper’s forerunner, The Crestline Chronicle, in 2001and continued in The Alpenhorn News until 2018.

I want to thank my parents, Ruth and Richard Tetley, my grandparents and great-grandparents and my great-aunt, Frances Tetley Harthan, for sharing with me the rich history of the San Bernardino Mountains and for choosing such a beautiful area to develop. I want to thank my husband of over 50 years, Douglas Motley, for his encouragement and editing skills and I want to thank members of the Rim of the World Historical Society for sharing their memories of this beautiful paradise that we call “home.”

I also look forward to sharing with you what I have learned about the various mountaintop communities and the people residing within. Beginning with Crestline, which was a summer home to the Serrano Indians who came to the mountains to escape the heat of the desert floor.

The metates used for grinding acorns and other seeds and berries at Metate Rock Camp north of Lake Arrowhead

The Serrano people, being hunter-gatherers, moved with the ripening of their favorite nuts and berries. They spent the spring, summer and early fall gathering acorns and pinyon nuts and hunting small game. They lived in brush dome-shaped huts in family villages of 25 to 60 people. They cooked “we-wish,” made from the flour that was made from grinding the acorns in those bedrock mortars, such as those found at Rock Camp, north of Lake Arrowhead, where an excavation of that village site, metates, and meadow was conducted in the 1970s by the county museum.

The Serrano seasonal villages were located throughout the mountaintop through Big Bear. The family clans would move with the ripening of the various berries and seeds they enjoyed. Most of their village huts were located in meadows, near streams. One such camp was in what is now the Valley of Enchantment, near Seeley Creek. Others are found in the Running Springs area, also with bedrock metates.

In 1852, the Mormon Colony in San Bernardino built a road up the steep southern front of the mountain to harvest the timber they saw on the crest, and cut into lumber which was hauled down the mountain by oxen power and sold to construct towns throughout California. The city of Los Angeles was a big customer of the Mormon lumber which was referred to as “Mormon bucks” as it was used to pay the Lugo family for the land the Mormon colony had bought from them.

Life began to change for the Serrano after Mormon lumbermen arrived but mostly the peaceful Serrano just relocated themselves to some other camps sites. Later, after the Mormons left, the newly arrived American lumbermen built permanent sawmills in the Crestline and Little Bear areas in the early 1860s. Some conflicts began to occur both on the mountain and surrounding areas. Locally few of the conflicts were with the Serrano, but with other tribes such as the more aggressive Paiutes who also used the mountains annually for hunting.