During the first 50 years of the American Republic, an intense interest in learning from nature grew as the largely European-based anglo settlers forged west, and of course ultimately reached California and Alaska.
While Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s thought Americans focused solely on utilizing the economic resources in wild nature, there has always been another tradition focusing on the aesthetic and edifying resources to be found in nature.
Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and others wrote about the transports of joy found in the wild, and we read this line of writing right up to our own raucous time period with Henry David Thoreau, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner, and a host of fine naturalists and writers today.
If deep nature can actually enlighten and uplift us, then those indigenous inhabitants who lived here for thousands of years before the Spanish padres and 1849 American invaders must have learned immense lodes of knowledge and wisdom — hence my own interest in local Chumash, Yokuts and Gabrieleño cultures.
Therefore, those white settlers from Kansas (other sources say Wisconsin) who audaciously began farming near Sisquoc and Manzana creeks in the 1890s must also have gained some fascinating bits of wisdom.
The historic Manzana Schoolhouse is located at the confluence of Manzana and Sisquoc creeks and marks the farthest anglo pioneer penetration into our local harsh, desert backcountry.
Eleven farming families from Kansas (or Wisconsin) led by a faith healer named Hiram Wheat settled along these two eccentric streams in the late 19th century in what is now mostly the San Rafael Wilderness of Los Padres National Forest.
In the early 1890s, these local settlers and hunters, including the Davis, Twitchell, Wells and Willman families, among others, decided they needed a local school for their many children.
After successfully petitioning the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors to start a school, they first built a sawmill and sawed the locally felled gray pine into lumber to construct the Manzana Schoolhouse. This singular edifice still stands today on the bluff above the current U.S. Forest Service campsite.
The original three members of the new school’s board of trustees were Adolph Willmann (sometimes misspelled as “Wellman”), Ed Forrester and William Tunnell. They selected Cora McCrosky, from Long Canyon near the town of Sisquoc, as the first teacher. They paid this poor young woman $50 a month, but she forked over $14 monthly for her room and board with a local farm family, and even shared a bed with some of the girls in that family.
For McCrosky, she wasn’t in the Virginia Woolf book, A Room of One’s Own. (Events apparently worked out for her since she soon married a local ranger.)
Manzana School was popular and became the essential community center (as the only public structure) in the quite remote area, and served at the most about 25 students. In 1897, the government had removed a post office called “Adkins” from this location, which had Wheat as postmaster.
In 1901, local government also shuttered the school, since increasing drought and rugged conditions pushed the settlers back to Santa Maria or on to new homesteading adventures with more water.
I thought about those “rugged conditions” when I hiked through the spacious forest service camp below the aging Manzana Schoolhouse building in July, with the entire landscape showing signs of desperate drought, e.g., the poison oak leaves had already turned bright red beneath the sturdy oaks and the scattered potreros displayed dead wildflowers and wilted grasses.
Oaks cover the broad potrero of the Manzana Schoolhouse Camp, which has at least eight wooden tables and fire rings (no open fires!), good tent spots, and a handy metal hitching post for tying off horses or mules.
What my colleague and I did not find were any other humans, although we encountered flying insects, California quail, wild turkeys, plentiful deer and tiny fish in the Manzana.
The imagination shudders in trying to envision about 200 settlers surviving sprinkled along Sisquoc and Manzana creeks — these intermittent watercourses often run dry, as we saw the Sisquoc was in July. A few segments of the Manzana still dribbled along, but no campers should count on any water from either source for the rest of the summer.
The stony confluence of the two streams (and later the Cuyama River) transforms into the Santa Maria River, which finally debouches into the Pacific Ocean 24 miles away. Yes, it’s quite rugged back here in July, with the Sisquoc completely dry and the Manzana barely flowing as noted: The high summer aridity overwhelms wandering humans.
The correct hiking route to reach the Manzana Schoolhouse Camp starts at Nira Camp (See 4-1-1 below), and hiking near the streambed, you arrive at the schoolhouse in about 8½ miles of riparian walking.
You will hike with the flow downstream through the following trail camps: Potrero Canyon Camp, Coldwater Camp, Horseshoe Bend Camp and, finally, Manzana Schoolhouse with its many campsites (all free).
While in earlier decades I’ve managed to day-hike the entire stretch there and back in one demanding day, age, intelligence and our current summer conditions of no water make July and most of the summer the worst time to tackle this trek. It’s either a 17-mile day-hike (round-trip) or an overnight after humping your backpack into nature.
You would also have to tote water, and I remind seekers that every liter of water weighs two pounds. I suggest the best timing is the three-day/two-overnight backpack model taken during midspring or in early fall after the first rainfall.
On the hike in, one can see the Castle Crags formation as well as the fabled Hurricane Deck. Hikers will see Charles Dabney’s 1913 fishing cabin about two miles before arriving at the schoolhouse.
I hiked in to the Manzana Schoolhouse Camp from Dabney with a colleague. The Dabney Cabin site is Santa Barbara County Historical Landmark No. 8, and some of the logs have suffered from rampaging bears in one corner at the back.
I have read that by 1890 some 20 homesteading families lived along these two weak “rivers” — yet nature had harsh lessons for the 200 or so settlers. Perhaps we need to relearn some of their lessons in order to handle our onrushing Anthropocene Era today.
One by one, the intrepid Sisquoc settlers pulled up stakes and left, leaving a few scattered stone chimneys and field implements behind. The colony died, although two families with historic roots still cling to their private lands back there to this day.
While the indigenous Chumash did have a few interior villages — Father Juan Crespí called them “mountain Chumash” in 1769 — they were few, and probably seasonal just like these two crucial water courses. Indigenous peoples learned from mother nature and obeyed Hutash when conditions became a nightmare and threatened their lives.
A majority of the Chumash people lived along the coast at sites such as Syuxtun, Helo, Dos Pueblos and more in Ventura coastal zones.
Wheat was known as a man of God and a renowned faith healer who practiced a laying on of hands. It’s likely he also believed the 19th-century Manifest Destiny philosophy and the adage that “rain follows the plough.”
Alas, precipitation did not follow their ploughed furrows along the Sisquoc near the rocky confluence of the two so-called rivers, and the colony faded away.
We do not know much about the relations between the white settlers and indigenous people in this area during the late 1800s. I believe the mountain Chumash likely regarded the idea of permanent settlements “way inland” along the Sisquoc as untenable and foolish — not enough water. They might visit for extended periods, but then withdraw back to coastal lands with more abundant resources.
When will we as a postmodern society develop enough interior global consciousness to reduce human population, “withdraw back” and limit our own needs to match the planet’s resources?
4-1-1
» Noozhawk’s note: Summer is not a good time for the popular Manzana Schoolhouse backpacking trek. I got a ride to a spot near Dabney Cabin, then hiked the 1.67 miles in to reach the Manzana Schoolhouse and the confluence of the Manzana and the fabled Sisquoc rivers.
My main sources come from E.R. “Jim” Blakley and Karen Barnette’s 1985 book, Historical Overview of Los Padres National Forest, especially pages 40-44; information on Bryan Conant’s San Rafael Wilderness Trail Guide and Map (2015); and word of mouth.
— Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity and has written extensively about the local backcountry. His latest book, Autobiography in the Anthropocene, is available at Lulu.com. He serves as an archaeological site steward for the U.S. Forest Service in Los Padres National Forest. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at cazmania3@gmail.com. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
