Collection: Directories and Documents > Pamphlets

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Title: The Life of Herbert Hoover, the Engineer - Chapter 4: A California Apprenticeship (PH 6-12)(1983) Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Pamphlets Catalog #: PH 6-12 Author: George H. Nash Published: 1983 # of Pages: 5 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

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Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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A California Apprenticeship 43 here and walk to the wharf when they get anxious to do some mountaineering.”® As for the landscape between Carson City and Mono Lake, “Camping on the Nevada desert is not what its said to be for if the Good Lord, made a few Trial Hades before the completion of the final resort he must have had his Experiment Stations N of Mono Lake,”7 On another occasion, when one of the teamsters in the party quit his job, Hoover “had to drive four gov. mules to a buckboard over the worst road ever made, slept at Donner Lake one night (Place where the Donner party gave up the ghost) it froze % inch ice, had neuralgia in one jaw and a general bad humor that kept those 4 mules pretty well on the jump.”8 And yet, in truth, Hoover was happy that summer. His work, for all its hardships, was satisfying and the environment “almost intoxicating.” Nothing could compare with the splendor of the Sierras. At one point he climbed an 11,000-foot mountain peak simply “to drink in the view of my old friend Lake Tahoe . . . the most beautiful lake on earth.” The scene evoked in him a cascade of youthful prose. “Giant peaks” rising beyond the lake resembled “buttresses and turrets from a great wall, ther sides splashed with snow.” “Giant palisades” with “sharp Gothic pinnacles” made his nerves “tingle with awe.” He watched a mountain snowstorm: “great whorls” of snow and mist attacked the rocky “battlements spreading their fleeces over turret and crest. . . .”? It was exhilarating, unforgettable, and sublime. What arduous work in stunning mountain scenery did not provide in the way of excitement for a young scientist, frontier revelry and horses did. One night at a dance ina mining camp, Hoover reported, two men “were shot in royal mining style and the dancers . . . danced on and on as if nothing had happened the blood smeared over the floor became slippery then sticky and finally brown again. I did not dance. I am timid about arguments on a six shooter basis.”!° Ornery horses—including a “diabolically wicked bronco” named Napoleon von Sandow!!—added to Hoover's discomforts as he hiked on horseback through the mountains. Eventually he concluded that “a horse was one of the original mistakes of creation.” !2 As if rambunctious equines were not trouble enough, one morning Lindgren’s Geological Survey party discovered that one of its pack mules was dead. Inspection revealed that the animal had been scratching its head with its hind foot and had caught the calk of its hind shoe in the halter rope around its neck. Jerking back, the mule had broken its neck. As disbursing officer for the party, Hoover dutifully prepared a required affidavit to explain this loss of valuable government property. Eventually a distressing message came back from Washington: Hoover's account had been rejected, and one month's salary had been deducted from his pay. The government did not believe that mules could scratch their heads with their hind feet. Lindgren thereupon reimbursed Hoover for the loss and vowed to collect it from “some d bureaucrat” in Washington the next winter. He never did; the incident was proof, he later said, of “the dumbness of bureaucracy.”