Book Review: "Mendocino Papers. An Informal History of Mendocino County, Vol 1"
by Bruce Anderson

AVA, Boonville, CA. 2008. $20.00 ppd.

Review by Martin Murie

Bruce Anderson came to Mendocino county in 1970, not so much to "go back to the land" as to leave the city, San Francisco, that had turned mean and murderous. He was among hippies, counted himself as one of them. It didn't take long for experiences in the city and in the wild haunts of Mendocino county to turn him into one of the most astringent critics of the hippie generation and of American culture in general.

Bruce's antennae picked up the fact that he was in Indian country. Indian residence for 12,000 years is a major theme in this account of Mendocino: Murder of Indians. White people as murderers. White people "clearing" the original inhabitants from the lovely valleys, faithfully transmitting American's deeply embedded racist virus to the shores of the Pacific. Spanish church fathers, the Franciscans, were no better. Backed by armored soldiers they enslaved, missionized and tamed Indian tribes. Northern wilds of California were on the fringes of this onslaught, until the forty niners came.

"The first white Americans who came to stay in Mendocino county--the Asbill Brothers and Jim Neafus in 1854, shot an unknown number of Covelo Indians dead when the Indians rushed out to greet them." (p 34)

This book, unbroken by chaper breaks, is a single tapestry, a weaving of incidents large and small. Back and forth the shuttle moves, to the city back to Mendocino, enlivened by Bruce's close observations of members of his own species, moving from humorous happenings to tragic events, from examination of personal traits to what those traits do when triggered into action. The book is also autobiographical, but the charm is the lack of self-centered focus. Instead, we have context, an outlook on the world from a man who was, and is, deeply embedded in that world.

"My connection to the heavily Southern, heavily predisposed to violence, heavily sensitive to the slightest insult, perceived or actual, heavily at all times predisposed to kill with a gun, a knife, by hand, my connection to the wild people who settled Anderson Valley, and the rest of Mendocino county, is specific."

"My great grandfather on my mother's side was a Quantrell raider." . . .The James brothers and Quantrell's guerrilas were a 19th century version of a criminal gang on horseback, subsequent romanticising of them aside." See pages 58 to 61 for a brief sketch of genealogy.

We are reminded that even in the lofty heights of literature we find that deadly racist virus.

"And that was the long Salinas Valley . . . First there were the Indians, an inferior breed without energy, inventiveness or culture, a people that lived on grubs and grasshoppers and shellfish, too lazy to hunt or fish. They ate what they could pick up and planted nothing. They pounded bitter acorns for flour. Even their warfare was a weary pantomime."

That's from John Steinbeck's "East of Eden." Is this the same man who gave us tender lives of white Okies on the road, of clever white froggers selling bull frogs to Doc in Monterey?

"Further back, Jack London, whose name appears with his wife Charmian's, in an old Boonville Hotel register, had commented, 'What the Devil ! I am first of all a white man, and only then a Socialist.' To which Mark Twain replied, 'It would serve this man London right to have the working class get control of things. He would have to call out the militia to collect his royalties.' " (p 36)

And that brings to my mind a few words written by our highly esteemed environmentalist, John Muir, on meeting an Indian woman somewhere in the Sierras:

"Her dress was calico rags, far from clean . . . had she been clad in furs or cloth woven of shreddy bark . . . she might then have seemed a rightful part of the wildlerness like a good wolf at least, or bear."

Mendocino Papers treats us to numerous small happenings, some humorous, some tragic, that add up to nobody knows what sum.

"One hundred years later in front of the Alderpoint Store not far from where the gun Indians met to plan counter-attacks on Covelo's murderous pioneers, an Indian is sitting in his pick-up truck. He's drunk. The Indian was born in Garborville and raised up in the hills near Zenia. A man with two well-groomed poodles walks past his truck, heading for the store. "If I had a fuckin' dog like that I'd fuckin' commit suicide," the Indian says, taking a suicidally large swig from a fifth of whiskey." (p 58)

The book is full of stories: cowboys, wine growers, violence that goes with industsrial-scale marijuana growing, baseball, beer busts, social worker mis-steps. Best of all, long transcripts spoken by old-timers, independent workers proud of their lives dedicated to survival. The pace slackens at these places; the speaker is given all the room he needs; we catch the language, the rhythm.

It is the superficial brushworks that romanticise home-grown violence and hypocrisy that Bruce Anderson tries to clear away, both in this book and in his weekly newspaper, the Anderson Valley Advertiser. (ava@pacific.net ) His bullshit detector is at full throttle when the shuttle brings him back, again and again, to the hippie generation. The telling blow is his identification of the bland and fairly useless cliques of county directors, social workers and judges that infest the bureaucracy of Mendocino county.

I agree with this assessment. The hippies made a great mistake, though predictable enough, given their class origins, in announcing that the next step to "revolution" would be the "long march through the institutions." Well, that is exactly what a lot of them did, not knowing how dangerous the journey would be: soaking up establishment views, turning timid, caring, liberal and self-satisfied.

"Mendocino Papers" gives us the acid tone that readers of the "Anderson Valley Advertiser" have come to expect. And often hilarity seeps through, because we are witnessing, not boilerplate or apolgetics or narcissistic musings, we are witnesses to behaviors of actual living people. See especially his returns from time to time to the squad of city youth he and other hippies were supposed to be reforming of their deeply urban traits. These accounts are real journalism. Too bad mainstream journalists can't get word of this book.

". . . we (hippies) thought we could remake these doomed little sociopaths into more or less productive citizens, people like ourselves--book readers, organic gardeners, social philosophers and earnest liberals. We were already fools, as the delinquents knew almost immediately, but our idiocy hadn't occurred to us until we moved in with them." (p 138)

We have to realize that our nation hasn't moved very far from the nineteenth century when caring "conservationists," as they were known as in those times, shepherded city youth into rural places and turned them loose, assuming that wild nature would perform marvels. One story: a perpetrator of this folly decided to sneak up on his group of city kids, spy on them, found them gathered at the base of a beautiful big tree shooting craps.

"Mendocino Papers" is generously sprinkled with asides, tasty bits from the evasions of our times. "Mother Jones, revered by coal miners, is buried 45 minutes from Hillsboro at Mount Olive. A passion-free magazine bears her name these days." (p 61)

This book is highly personal, yet, highly contextualized. It is a looking outward into the morass we have gotten ourselves into. It's a myth-smasher and for that we can be grateful, because we can't make a meaningful move to get out of the morass until we pay attention to where we Americans have in actual fact been, what we have actually done, the specifics. In a word, REAL HISTORY.

My copy has some blurred printing lapses, a few typos.
I look forward to Volume 2.
Martin Murie

Bruce Anderson. /The Mendocino Papers. An Informal History of Mendocino County/. 2008.
ISBN 1-4196-9014-0
$20.00, postage included.
Order from ava, Boonville, CA 95415 or your local bookstore or amazon.com
or try: Lee Booksellers in Lincoln, Nebraska pays shipping charges and the phone is not plagued with "press this, press that." Toll free number: 1-888-665-0999.