What a Gal !

I read a lot, mostly court room dramas, who dunnits, etc. but other day I bought a book that was truly hard to put down once I started reading it. It was about a woman by the name of Stella Walthall Patterson who, at 80 years of age decided to get away from it all and go live in her primitive cabin on her gold mining claim in the Siskiyou mountians of Northern California.
She wanted to see if she could stick it out for one year. Her cabin was bare bones, set on the side of a mountain above the Kalamath river. She cooked on a wood burning stove like my grandmother did. Her water supply was the water running from a creek and funneled into a pipe that ended close to her cabin. Her bathroom was outback. She made kitchen curtains from flour sacks and dyed them with boiled onion skins which gave them a pale gold color. With no electricty, there was no refrigerator so meat was cooked immediately lest it spoil. Every meal was made from scratch, as there were no restaurants within miles of her cabin. This may sound like a hardship to many people but the eighty year old lady loved every minute of it.
She was called Dear Mad'm by the local people that she got to know. Her unusual name came about because she couldn't remember the name of a man she had hired to work her claim so when she spoke to him she called him, DearSir. He laughed, and responded by calling her DearMad'm. The names stuck and so to everyone she was , " DearMad'm and the man was "DearSir".
The one and only time she fired a rifle, a 30.ought 6, for goodness sake, which she could barely lift, she killed a cougar with one shot. It was a head shot, no less. When DearSir and UpandUp, a name she gave to a tall fellow, came to check on her she told them she had killed a cougar. They laughed. DearSir said something to the effect that her little pea shooter, a small Iver Johnson hand gun couldn't kill a cougar. She lost patience and told them to go find the dead cougar...they left and were back in less than 10 minutes dragging the carcass of the cougar between them.
She enjoyed her life in the midst of nature and when one year was up she decided to remain in her rustic cabin instead of returning to her comfortable home in San Francisco.
While living in the wilds, she wrote a book about her life in the rustic cabin and the people she met in the area. The manuscript was picked up by a publisher and it was eventually published under the title of , Dear Mad'm". The sad thing to me is, she passed away before the book hit the stands and so she never got to read it. She was one spunky lady.

Till next time.
Marion Springer