 I'm Arlen Ragsdale. I've lived in this area permanently since 1986, but my family on my mom's side came from the Butte Falls area. They were among the first to settle in the town when it was laid out. Now, as I record this, we're in the Smith House, which has been turned into a museum. The Smith House is called the Smith House because my great-uncle Ernest Smith owned this house. I can remember being here when I was in my teens and younger before I had to go into the service. We came up here quite often to visit. As far as my history in this area, it started when I was about three years old. My father had a sawmill. We called it a three-man sawmill because it took three men to run it, one to run the saw and another one to turn down the lumber as it came off the saw and another one to stack the lumber after it went through the edger. It took about a week to move from one place to another. The interesting thing that I remember about it as a child is that wherever we went, the first thing that Dad would do is cut enough lumber for us to build a house. We always had a new house to live in. Every time we moved, we had a new house to live in. It was of course cut of fresh lumber. When it was nailed up, the first thing we did when we moved in, we saved all the tin can lids, the bottom and the top, for a long time. We had all the stack or box full of tin can lids so that when the lumber dried out and the knots fall out of the wall, we could nail the tin lids over it to keep out the draft. And so I thought that as a little kid that was a rather interesting thing. I thought it was pretty smart really. I always died of thought of that, you know, that kind of thing. Well, it was about a half-way between here and Prospect. There's a road that goes through and about half-way on that road, there's a place that was called the Beckdalt Place then. And there's a place, a road, a prominent logging road or forest service road that takes off. It's called the Lodgepole Road now. Just beyond that Lodgepole Road was this big ranch. And Dad moved the sawmill to this place when I was three years old. And that's where we had our first new house. Before that, when we lived in the brush with the sawmill, it was in a tent house. And that's another story. But I didn't start really remembering things until I was about three years old. And this place we stayed in, we were there for three years. Because when I became six years old, Mom said, we've got to take Arlen down or somewhere. We've got to move because it's time for him to go to school. No bus comes out here. So we had to move to Eagle Point. And that was a disappointment to me because we had to move down into the flatland where all the people were. And I enjoyed immensely being up in the hills. And one of the interesting things that I should mention here is that I grew up. My first memories, even before I can remember, the first home away from the hospital where I was born, was in the woods by the sawmill in a tent house. And when I got a little older, we graduated to an actual house that wasn't half canvas. And that's when I start really remembering things. But that's been my life. I've been a lot of wearer since. I was drafted in the military. Spent some six months in Austria and a whole year in Berlin in the middle and late fifties. And so I've been all over that part of the world. But there's no place like where you've been born and raised. And I can remember this one thing. We had a dog. It was a German shepherd. She was older. So she was not real energetic. But me and my brother, my brother was a year younger. And when we'd get too close to the sawmill, she knew that we shouldn't be there. And she would knock us down. She hurted us to keep us from getting into trouble. But the thing is we had the freedom to move around and learn things. And we learned how to do things. When I got old enough in the summer, I would go out and work with my father in the woods. We eventually got rid of the sawmill and started logging during World War II. Because to get more money quicker, hauling logs to the mill, then sawing them out in the brush and hauled the lumber in. But my first job that I got paid was with that old sawmill was set up. We had one last job to finish up. And I was 12 years old. And my brother was 11. And we had this little pond at the sawmill where the logs were brought in, dumped into the pond, not to wash them off necessarily, but easy to maneuver to get them onto the head rig to saw. My brother worked on the pond moving the logs when he wasn't in it. And I turned things down on the end after it came off the saw. And those flitches that came off the head rig weighed maybe three times as much as I did. So once in a while dad had to come around and help me pull it down and run it through the edge. But I learned how to work that way. Now my father would have been put in jail for us doing that. And that's the point I want to bring out, that we've lost that in our society. That ability to be out there learning something from as far back as you can remember. I think of when I was in Europe. And I'm not saying their society is better than ours. It isn't. They're too regimented. But they learn from when they're little what they're going to do when they're an adult. They don't have to wonder. They don't have to go to a college someplace to become educated and then try to figure out what they're going to do. We learned at the very beginning how to do something whether we did it later or not. There's another thing. And my heritage here in this place, I'm now 83 years old. I can't work in the woods like I used to. But I stopped working not because I reached retirement age, but because I could not hold up the job anymore. I was almost 83 or 80 years old when I quit working. And I've never wanted life to be any different. Now when I sit in my chair and look out the window at the timber and so forth, I think about all those things that I had that I grew up with. It was a heritage that most people do not have. That's it.