 I'm Thalia Truesdale. I moved to Sawyers Bar, California in 1973 and lived there until 1988. And we had to leave because our children were going to be going to middle school and high school and had to, the school only went through eighth grade. And so we moved there not knowing what we were going to be doing or anything, we were just looking for someplace free to live. And a friend of ours had a mining claim, so we moved into this little 10 by 12 cabin and immediately began to become, immediately began to become part of the community. And I had never really known community before and I became a passionate advocate of community. Everybody knew everything everybody was doing. It was a very, very, very small place, maybe a population of a hundred at the most. I mean, that's in a big watershed area, so everybody was miles away from everybody else, but we all got together all the time. We had dinner with another family probably three or four nights a week, always. And all the children were at somebody else's house on Friday and Saturday nights and sometimes we didn't have our own, but we had somebody else's and that's just the way it always went. Very, very, very powerful community and mostly heatheness, people who were escaping the city for some reason. Some people were sort of back to the landers, which is what we sort of were. We lived in this little cabin, knew we couldn't have a baby there because it was, well we had a baby, but we knew we couldn't stay because it was literally on a cliff. Just a little tiny piece of property that, like maybe 30 by 20, by 15 actually. If that and the cabin was just perched on the edge of the cliff. On the other side of the river was a waterfall and a sheer rock wall and there were square nails all over there and some old few little pieces of boards and some other hardware and doorknobs and stuff. So there had been cabins there too and it was even steeper than where we were. But there had once been thousands and thousands of people living on the river and getting rich as much as they could and when the gold played out a little bit toward the turn of the century the Chinese took over a lot of the mining claims and did a much better job of cleaning up and got quite rich with everybody's leftovers sort of. And then there was a resurgence during the early 30s during the Depression. There were quite a few people moved back in and the town swelled a little bit more. The town had, at one point it had doctor's office and houses of ill-repute, houses of ill-repute and big hotels and bars and a bowling alley and even electricity for a little while from a town generator that didn't quite work out because of politically people couldn't figure out who was going to get electricity and who wasn't. So anyway it was a very thriving community and there are other thriving communities up the mountains on the gullies and up the gulches and stuff as well. The Forest Service didn't want any of that. They wanted to just control natural resources and not have any people living on Forest Service land which it all was Forest Service land. There was like one tenth of one percent of the Klamath National Forest was private land and that included huge logging swaths too all over the place. So they began tearing down cabins. So we had a mineral exam the summer after we got there and we were dredging for gold and we were earnestly dredging for gold. That was sort of our job and they came down and I didn't tell us, the ranger came down and didn't tell us who he was and just was really friendly in everything and are you planning to stay et cetera and the next thing we knew we got this notification about a mineral exam. So we contacted miners that we knew on the Trinity River and the Salmon River and we had a huge turnout of people, many of whom we didn't even know. We'd only been there about a year who came to protest and as it turns out they had this huge hullabaloo to get their dredge down these cliffs that we lived on down to the river and it turns out that the women who owned the mining claim we were living on had refiled and changed the name of the claim and so the whole thing was null and void but no claims had ever been declared viable by the ranger and it was up to the ranger to determine what viable meant. The 1872 Mining Law says that, I can't remember the exact wording, but it's up to the ranger. So if the ranger is making $30,000 a year, he thinks everybody should be making $30,000 a year yet we were living on $100 a month really nicely, we had no bills, we had nothing so we were fine with that. Anyway, we did move and build our house, they did burn down our house, they burned down every cabin on the river that was on Forest Service land on a mining claim. They didn't want anyone living on a mining claim, you could mine it but there's nothing in the laws that said you were allowed to live there. So they just made sure that they just they got rid of the riffraff, they just made sure that everybody was gone and they tried to eliminate the town basically. So I became very interested in buildings and the first building that I was really enamored with was a church that was built in 1857 on what was then flat ground but then it was totally mined around it and it was just left on a pedestal which is where it is today. Just a little plain church that was lined with muslin on the inside just to make it a little bit brighter because I guess they couldn't paint it or something. There was a picture of a painting that was probably I don't know five by ten at least a huge painting in the church of the crucifixion and the church that owns that building, the Catholic Church in Fort Jones, took the painting out in the 80s for cleaning supposedly and never returned it. They said there would be vandalism and there had never been any vandalism there including the people who tried to dig under the church to get the gold that was left there because like $50,000 worth of gold came out of there in those days and that's when gold was pretty cheap so there was you know there's a wealth of money under that church right now. In 1982 we bought an old miner's estate and really interesting old place up on a again on on cliffs that were literally that steep just a tiny little notch where he could he could build well he didn't build it I don't think but he was a hermit who had lived there from then on 1923 until he died in 1982 and he had never thrown anything away it was just astonishing what he had his collections of everything were just amazing and for people who live on the river you have to be extremely creative in in what you are how you do things how you fix your broken muffler and you know how you how you make things go and he was just an incredible tinkerer so he had all this great stuff so we inherited or we bought all this wonderful stuff and then we became a resource for everybody on the river who needed a thing a mojigie or who's a mouflage it you know they could come to us and we would have it which was nice. So when this library was being planned we knew we wanted some community artwork in here and we talked to Lillian and Marvin Rosenberg Lillian has been doing this type of of of installation art for many many years all over the country and when the building was begun in 2003 the the Lillian and her husband Marvin went to the school and had all of the kids make a clay piece for the walkway outside the from that connects here from here to the school so once we bought this piece of property we knew that the connection between the the library and the school was going to be huge so every one of the staff and children and everybody at the school made a clay piece of something that represented the Applegate Valley to them an animal or flower or plant or something like that and they were set in cement stepping stones like this and they are all the way along the along the walkway and then once the library was built originally this was going to go in front of the circulation desk but this was a better wall for it and so Lillian opened up her studio for about a year on Mondays and anybody who wanted to come could come up and make one of these clay pieces and she did not want to teach she just wanted people to just either know what to do or learn from another person there and so we did we all sort of there were maybe two three four five maybe eight people there at a time for the for a full year making these pieces and some of us made some leaves and grasses and generic pieces as well as as other things too her husband did the the letter stamping that's kind of the his was his contribution he also made the sun some people did the woodwork they cut the cut down the trees this is from three different trees and they slapped it it tells the history of of the Applegate and starting with the prehistory and going through the the mining and the current history and people could just do whatever they wanted to this was a a man who has who raised his black Angus so he he did his his black Angus it was very very fun very educational and and then we wanted to I wanted to have this little this little blip about it and so I contacted all the artists and asked if they could send me some information about their experience and this book was born this was a I started getting between two sentences and three pages from everybody and so we included it here with with the photographs of of each of the pieces and it was a very different experience for everyone this is exactly what we got we didn't do any editing or anything and everybody's story is different and together it makes this amazing whole it's just wonderful and Lillianne was dying when we did this and she was 84 and had cancer and was not well at all and we had a little gathering and I'm going to cry and gave her the book it was very heartwarming so anyway it was a wonderful thing and I'm really happy that we have this here as a history we have an eye spy for little kids they can you know look for the picture of the cow we have a card that has a cow picture on it and they can see what they can find and yeah it's very fun and that's the story of the mural