"A Miner Prospector At Home," photographed by T. N. Barnard, 1889. Larger.
California's gold rush was a formative event in the history of the Golden State, but even after the rush was long over, writer Idwal Jones found that the hunt never stopped for a hardy few who continued sniping for gold.
Jones was attracted to offbeat characters, especially those who barely scratched a living in the northern regions of the coast range. In "Farm, Rock and Vine Folk" he brings us character sketches of these men and women, like the colorful Dad Dunnaway.
Dad Dunnaway, a forty-niner from Mizzourah . . . moved to Quartz Mountain, where I knew him when he was about ninety, a hobbling venerable with a sunburst of beard. He lived by himself in a shack, which he shared with a flock of hens that nested in the front room, a handy arrangement when it came to gathering eggs. . . .
Dad Dunnaway was spare of talk, and it was mostly of rock, for he had been a miner all his grown-up life, starting at Grass Valley. One night, when the wind was howling among the pines like a thief, and the stove was glowing red, he was talking in scraps of that camp's young days. Something furry banged on the window screen, to cling with sharp talons and utter its cry.
"Them damn catty mounts is gittin' thick around hyar," he said balefully, without slackening the furnace-like draw on his pipe. "'Tain't enough for 'em to take a hen, but they got to come in and get warm."
Idwal Jones was a multi-faceted author whose works include journalism, a collection of short stories, and novels.
Beauty, it is said, is only skin deep, an aphorism just as apt for measuring the true character of grapes on the vine as well as for sizing up our fellow human beings.
Journalist and fiction writer Idwal Jones knew California's wine regions and their history better than most. And better than most, he knew not to judge wine grapes by their poor appearance.
Uncomely and poor to the eye are the true wine grapes. The white Riesling and the Sauvignon Blanc, the austere Pinots, of which some are collectors' pieces, are among the aristocrats, but are ill-formed in clusters, thin and withered, shy-bearing. They ask no more than to cling to some dry, unpropitious hillside, and be left alone. Their yield is a sixth of the lusty commoner like the Alicante who prefer the valley floor; scarcely more that a ton to the acre, but their admirers even love them for their parsimony.
Idwal Jones was a prolific writer on California subjects. He published Vines in the Sun in 1949.
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