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Sifting through time Photo by Joe Mayr Forest Service archaeologists are at the site of an old Applegate-area mine By Paul Fattig To most folks, the rustic one-room cabin built on the side of a mountain wouldn�t be much of a home. But to gold miner John "Knox" McCloy, it must have been mighty fancy diggings. "One story about him is that the first season he came here he spent in a hollow log," said Jeff LaLande, archaeologist for the Rogue River National Forest. "He�s representative of America�s image of the old hermit prospector of the West," he added. "Yeah, he was very colorful." McCloy�s cabin site high in the mountains of the Applegate Ranger District is the focus of an archaeological dig this week being led by LaLande. Five volunteers in the Forest Service�s Passport in Time program are participating in the project. They�re spending much of their time looking through McCloy�s refuse heap that stretches several hundred feet down the mountainside. Built up after decades of garbage being tossed out of the cabin, the trash is yielding bits of history: an ancient lock, broken pottery, rusted cans, broken glass, even an old hat. "This is in an area that will only increase in public use," LaLande explained. "We want to salvage information before it is lost. Right now, it is very undisturbed compared to most historic sites." McCloy likely built his cabin around 1910 and mined in the area into the 1940s, LaLande said. "One of the stories about him is that he came out here after being jilted back East," LaLande said. "He was apparently from a wealthy family." Local lore has it that when his sister came to visit him from the East, she arrived at the ranger district office in a long, chauffeured vehicle. Once, when McCloy was going back East to visit family, he never bothered to pack his luggage for the train trip, LaLande said. "The ranger talked about him coming down from his cabin wearing all his clothes � three shirts, a sweater, two coats and a couple pairs of pants," LaLande said. The research on the ground helps put a face on miners like McCloy, who built another cabin in a meadow about a mile away, perhaps as a better place to raise his goats. "He had his goat meat, goat�s milk, wild berries and his mining," LaLande said. "I imagine it was subsistence living. He probably went into town � Jacksonville � once or twice a year for basic supplies." The researchers found a rusting horse or mule shoe, indicating he had four-footed help. They also found a couple of human boot soles whose length matches those of volunteer Jim Hust, a teacher from Sacramento, Calif. Hust wears size 12. "Things like the shoes give you an idea about what he was like," Hust said. "It�s very interesting work." Volunteer Rhonda Refsnider, a Medford tax preparer who has volunteered on more than a dozen digs, agreed. "This is the best way to learn history," she said. "It�s hands on. This comes alive. A book does not. "A lot of history is being lost," she added. "This is a way of helping to preserve history before it is lost forever." Working at the cabin site, volunteer Pam Debarruel, also a teacher from Sacramento, thinks about how the old miner may have looked. "You picture the old miner with the plaid shirt, suspenders, long white beard and floppy elf hat," she said. A shovel blade lies rusting near the piles of rocks that were once the fireplace. Save for a few foundation logs, the cabin has rotted back into the earth. "Mud was probably used to mortar the fireplace chimney," LaLande said. "That was very typical of the earliest miner�s cabins you find." The chimney was likely built of stone as high as McCloy could reach. He then probably used mud-daubed planks for the remainder of the structure, LaLande said. Up the trail from the cabin, McCloy mined mineral that had sloughed off the canyon walls. "You can see where he dug back into the deposits," LaLande said. "He was probably going in there, breaking off bits of ore and breaking them up." The material was then hauled on his back or by mule a short distance to a stream where a water-powered ball mill crushed the ore. As the mill rotated, heavy metal balls crushed the ore which was later sluiced for gold, LaLande explained. The heavy ball mill, about four feet in diameter, can still be seen in the stream. "It looked like he was doing most of his work totally on his own," LaLande said. According to folklore, McCloy eventually grew feeble atop the mountain to the point he was nearly blind and had to be led along the trail. His mountain friends took him to Yreka, where he died in a county home, LaLande said. "The old stories about McCloy and other old miners like him are really tantalizing," LaLande said. 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