AFTER THE GOLDRUSH when California was a young state, most of the roads in her vast northern mountains were rough wagon tracks or trails. Some mines were reached only by foot or on horseback. All supplies for the farming and mining communities in this wilderness were carried in on the backs of mules. Pack trains had twenty-five or more mules and at least two packers. A bellboy—a boy whose horse wore a bell at her neck—led each pack train. The mules followed the sound of the bell.
The bells warned pack-trains of each other when they could not be seen on the rocky, steep, narrow and dangerous trails.
Author Margaret McClain grew up listening to her father’s stories of his hair-raising and colorful adventures in the 1870’s as the bellboy for the mule train of a prosperous northern California miner-merchant.
BELLBOY: A Mule Train Journey is a historical novel written for young people, based on the experiences of the author’s father. All of the events McClain recounts actually took place, though not on the same trip. To research the richly detailed setting for the book, McClain immersed herself in the reports of geologists, botanists and anthropologists who had studied extensively the Humboldt-Trinity-Siskiyou County area, and over a period of time retraced the route taken by her father’s pack trains. Her brothers supplied her with all the details of packing.
Margaret McClain felt that BELLBOY would fill an important gap in the history of what are now the Trinity, Six Rivers and Klamath National Forest areas, and in the history of the West generally. She was astonished to find, in the course of her research, that little had ever been written about the pack trains, which were essential to the lives of the early settlers.
McClain’s family lived alongside Karuks, who worked for them and were their friends. In fact, her mother and sister owed their lives to Julia, a Karuk shaman.
Happy, a main character in the story, is half-Indian. In him is shown the conflict between the opportunist white philosophy as regards the environment, which is seen as a resource, and the Karuk way, which is to honor and preserve their world. Happy, a thoughtful but cheerful young man, is regularly confronted with white attitudes which, well-meaning though they may be, are alien to his training and beliefs. Such activities as mining, hunting, killing animals for “safety’s sake”, and white discrimination against natives are seen through Happy’s eyes and heart, and are treated delicately but with a power that leaves the reader looking at his own thoughts and feelings on these issues. Through Happy, the young Bellboy Jake begins to build an understanding of his responsibility to people and nature. The reader cannot help but be affected.
McClain, a descendant of two pioneer families of Siskiyou County, graduated from The University of California at Berkeley. She had a degree in Library Science, was School Librarian for the Humboldt County Library in Eureka, and was later High School Librarian for the San Francisco Unified School District.
The illustrations were drawn by Sara Stuart, who couldn’t have done them without the historical material–publications, documents and family and public photographic memorabilia–loaned her by Margaret McClain.