Long before stores specializing in outdoor supplies existed, camping required extensive preparation. Without prepackaged dinners or pop-up tents, campers were exposed to the elements and arguably more in tune with their natural surroundings. Despite this, camping was still a popular activity in the late 19th century.
Before the Ford family left Mendocino for Oakland in 1872, the family went on a camping trip on the North Fork of Big River with the Denslow, Chalfant, and Hill families. Cook Mary Beaver also came; she was likely the cook for one of the families.
In her memoir, Catherine “Katie” Ford remembered being 10 or 11 on the trip. She wrote “The older folks went in wagons, and the youngsters on horseback or in the provision truck with bedding. An old cabin formerly used by [a] logging camp was our common sleeping house.” The children swam, fished and picked berries. The girls used poison oak leaves to decorate the edges of their night dresses with “unexpected consequences!” The men fished and hunted for food.
When the Ford children became adults, they regularly traveled to Mendocino. With their own children, Katie, Chester, and Ella Ford frequently camped at Alder Camp, located below Big Hill, near the confluence of Little North Fork and Big River. They regularly encountered wildlife. Chester and Ella claimed to kill a “panther” (likely a mountain lion) outside of camp; Chester wore its claw as a necklace for many years after. Ella’s daughter Alice Earl Wilder remembered the children’s tent being moved because her father spotted a lion nearby. A canvas called a mosquito bar was attached around beds and would be pulled down at night to protect the tents’ inhabitants.
Despite the rustic conditions, women still dressed in their typical day dresses, using a circle of redwoods surrounded by ferns as a dressing room. For entertainment, they fished and swam, but they also brought some of the amenities of in-town life. In 1887, Katie recalled, “We had our instruments and string quartette every day,” playing music for each other and visitors from town.
With material from an abandoned logging camp, the men built a music room with a roof and one wall open towards the fire. Katie’s husband John Rea built a darkroom for developing photographs, using mud to fill up cracks in the wood. One summer, John developed 30 photos, the best of which were sent to town to be duplicated.
Averee McNear is curator at the Kelley House Museum in Mendocino, Calif.
This story originally appeared in The Mendocino Voice.