Historical Clippings Book - Nevada County Citizens (HC-07) (296 pages)

The Sage of the Sierra H. P. Davis Is The Man To Ask About Local Lore Up North You Pick uP California State Highway 49 at Auburn and drive northward. Soon you are leaving today behind and by the time you reach Grass Valley you are in the cool Sierra foothills and beginning to feel the indefinable calm of a living yesterday. You drive northward another four miles and the spidery portico of Nevada City’s historic National Hotel looms on your left. It is a long, narrow, chastely simple building, newly painted a serene moss green. There is, in addition to the famous National Club and the equally celebrated Saddle and Sirloin Restaurant, the inevitable antique shop flanking its entrance. You are lost, now, somewhere out of your generation. The yesterday has closed in on you and you are without guide or precept in a strange land and era. So you go seeking information and accost a native comfortably disposed on his elbow at the U-shaped bar of the Naticnal Club. You begin, “I begyour pardon, but could you tell me. . .?” wherat you are interrupted with: “Mister, if you want to know anything about this country, you go ask H. P. Me, I wouldn’t ask anyone else the way to Grass Valley.” You say “H.P.” interrogatively and the native sets his branch water and bourbon down on the bar and says, “HP. Davis, and if you don’t know who he is, Mister, you’re never likely to know much of anything.” The Man. You go. looking for this fabulous fount of knowledge and find him at the writing desk in the National Hotel lobby. He is bent over a sheaf of blank paper and slit envelopes from some of which the contents have been extracted. You perceive stamps from the seven corners of the globe and then you speak his name, already with a sort of nervous reverence. He looks up at you out of clear, blue eyes beneath snowy brows. “Yes,” he says in a voice which must have absorbed all the culture in the modern world, “I’m H. P. Davis.” In an hour, during which your early resolve to be quickly about your business is dissolved in the charm of his impeccable speech and courtly behavior, you realize that you have met one of the most distinguished, if obscure, men in California. Obscure in his adopted land, where he has made his home since 1937, but a name famous in the literary and scientific worlds, a member of one of America’s most distinguished families, the author of Black Democracy, a story of the Haitian republic which ranks with the finest politicoeconomic books ever written by an American and a friend of most of the great of his time. H. P. Davis has adventured in every part of the world, as an engineer, as a press association correspondent, as a THE FAMED CITADEL OF CHRISTOPHE: The Black King of Haiti built it during 1808-1820 as a stronghold in which to retire if Napoleon sent back troops. It is said 20,000 Haitian peasants were sacrificed during the building years. Page 4 ADVENTURER AND ScHOLAR H. P. Davis: In his Nevada City hotel room, pictures and memories. special representative of the United States government and the National Chamber of Commerce, as a soldier and as a benign, Robin Hood type of buccaneer. A brother of Owen Davis, from 1910 through 1950 one of America’s top playwrights, he is one of eight children, each of whom has brought effulgence to the family name. He pioneered the fabulous Cobalt Silver mines in Ontario, Canada, and while there devised a law which effectively checked the genteel felony of Highgrading, a system of metal theft which has, for years, caused gold producers in California losses of millions of dollars. Deceiving Appearance. At seventyfive H.P. is a frail little man, slightly below medium height, with thinning, silvery hair, a rather broad Welsh countenance with startingly delicate features and wide, humorous mouth, but a grim purposefulness in his jaw line that bespeaks the mettle of the man. His conversation is deliberately paced, as are his movements, but his apparent frailty is deceiving. Anyone desiring to fall into bed at night and sleep soundly need only attempt a walking tour of Nevada City with H.P. Strong youths from nearby Camp Beall have been known to throw up their hands and yell for a taxicab after trailing him for half a dozen hours as he shuffled up hill and down over an oft repeated round of his home’s points of interest. H.P. was born in Bangor, Maine, in 1878, the fourth of eight children of Warren Owen Davis, an engineer and owner of the Katahdin Iron Works. While he was still a boy, the family moved to Tennessee, where his father entered the coal mining business. Later, H.P. was graduated from the University of Tennessee with a degree in mining ForTNIGHT, January 6, 1 954.

The Sage of the Sierra H. P. Davis Is The Man To Ask About Local Lore Up North You Pick uP California State Highway 49 at Auburn and drive northward. Soon you are leaving today behind and by the time you reach Grass Valley you are in the cool Sierra foothills and beginning to feel the indefinable calm of a living yesterday. You drive northward another four miles and the spidery portico of Nevada City’s historic National Hotel looms on your left. It is a long, narrow, chastely simple building, newly painted a serene moss green. There is, in addition to the famous National Club and the equally celebrated Saddle and Sirloin Restaurant, the inevitable antique shop flanking its entrance. You are lost, now, somewhere out of your generation. The yesterday has closed in on you and you are without guide or precept in a strange land and era. So you go seeking information and accost a native comfortably disposed on his elbow at the U-shaped bar of the Naticnal Club. You begin, “I begyour pardon, but could you tell me. . .?” wherat you are interrupted with: “Mister, if you want to know anything about this country, you go ask H. P. Me, I wouldn’t ask anyone else the way to Grass Valley.” You say “H.P.” interrogatively and the native sets his branch water and bourbon down on the bar and says, “HP. Davis, and if you don’t know who he is, Mister, you’re never likely to know much of anything.” The Man. You go. looking for this fabulous fount of knowledge and find him at the writing desk in the National Hotel lobby. He is bent over a sheaf of blank paper and slit envelopes from some of which the contents have been extracted. You perceive stamps from the seven corners of the globe and then you speak his name, already with a sort of nervous reverence. He looks up at you out of clear, blue eyes beneath snowy brows. “Yes,” he says in a voice which must have absorbed all the culture in the modern world, “I’m H. P. Davis.” In an hour, during which your early resolve to be quickly about your business is dissolved in the charm of his impeccable speech and courtly behavior, you realize that you have met one of the most distinguished, if obscure, men in California. Obscure in his adopted land, where he has made his home since 1937, but a name famous in the literary and scientific worlds, a member of one of America’s most distinguished

families, the author of Black Democracy, a story of the Haitian republic which ranks with the finest politicoeconomic books ever written by an American and a friend of most of the great of his time. H. P. Davis has adventured in every part of the world, as an engineer, as a press association correspondent, as a THE FAMED CITADEL OF CHRISTOPHE: The Black King of Haiti built it during 1808-1820 as a stronghold in which to retire if Napoleon sent back troops. It is said 20,000 Haitian peasants were sacrificed during the building years. Page 4 ADVENTURER AND ScHOLAR H. P. Davis: In his Nevada City hotel room, pictures and memories. special representative of the United States government and the National Chamber of Commerce, as a soldier and as a benign, Robin Hood type of buccaneer. A brother of Owen Davis, from 1910 through 1950 one of America’s top playwrights, he is one of eight children, each of whom has brought effulgence to the family name. He pioneered the fabulous Cobalt Silver mines in Ontario, Canada, and while there devised a law which effectively checked the genteel felony of Highgrading, a system of metal theft which has, for years, caused gold producers in California losses of millions of dollars. Deceiving Appearance. At seventyfive H.P. is a frail little man, slightly below medium height, with thinning, silvery hair, a rather broad Welsh countenance with startingly delicate features and wide, humorous mouth, but a grim purposefulness in his jaw line that bespeaks the mettle of the man. His conversation is deliberately paced, as are his movements, but his apparent frailty is deceiving. Anyone desiring to fall into bed at night and sleep soundly need only attempt a walking tour of Nevada City with H.P. Strong youths from nearby Camp Beall have been known to throw up their hands and yell for a taxicab after trailing him for half a dozen hours as he shuffled up hill and down over an oft repeated round of his home’s points of interest. H.P. was born in Bangor, Maine, in 1878, the fourth of eight children of Warren Owen Davis, an engineer and owner of the Katahdin Iron Works. While he was still a boy, the family moved to Tennessee, where his father entered the coal mining business. Later, H.P. was graduated from the University of Tennessee with a degree in mining ForTNIGHT, January 6, 1 954.