“Dear Mad’m”
(Stella W.
Patterson)
So many times in recent
years, I have been asked by those who have read the book ‘Dear
Mad’m’ if
I knew her. They also ask if I had any knowledge of what happened to
her
after the years that she wrote about while living on her remote
mining
claim in the 1940’s after she turned 80 years old.
I only knew of her as one of the rural
residents who lived the simple life deep within the walls of the
Klamath
River canyon west of Happy Camp where I lived. At the time, none of
us
were aware that she was a writer or where she came from. We only
knew of
her as an old lady that lived on her mining claim.
Years later after her book was published
following her death, her story of the years on her claim became dear
to
our hearts, her vivid descriptions of happenings along the river,
were
real to all of us who also lived in the area prior to electricity
and the
conveniences of city life.
Excerpts from a newspaper column written
by Medford Mail Tribune Regional Editor Marjorie O’Harra May 22,
1968 is
a nice tribute to the author and I have kept the clipping along with
a
photo that I had of Mrs. Patterson since that time. I share my
research
with those who have read the pages of that book.
Ms O’Harra wrote:--“ In 1946, Stella
Patterson, an author who lived in San Francisco where she enjoyed
concerts,
lectures, parties and many of the refinements of metropolitan life,
decided
she would spend a year on a mining claim she owned in Siskiyou
County.
The fact that she was 80 years old
and that she would be living alone in rugged, wild country, didn’t
slow
her up a bit. She packed her bags, took a bus to Arcata, hitched a
ride
on a mail truck, and arrived at her cabin, a log and lean-to
structure
perilously perched on a bluff overlooking the Klamath River, in the
middle
of the night.
And she stayed, for several years.
Her nearest neighbors were two miners.
Rather than bother with the formality of names, she called one,
Dearsir,
and the other, Up-and-Up, and they called her Dear Mad’m.
Dear Mad’m fought everything from
goats on the roof to bear in her garden and frequently she did
things wrong,
like “straighten up” Dearsir’s tool shed. She made friends with
Frenchie,
a garlic-nibbling, book-reading fellow whose background was
questionable,
and she grew to love Millicent, the little Karok Indian girl who
read Emily
Post. She was frugal when she bought her groceries in Happy Camp but
poured
over catalogues and ordered expensive seeds and bulbs for her flower
garden.
She proved it is never too late to
seek adventure and a new life and she wrote a delightful book about
it
all called, “Dear Madam”.
The book was published in several
languages and was well received in the United States and many
foreign countries
because the author had the knack of sharing not only her philosophy
of
life and her experiences, but her friends as well.
It was because of the book that we
took a trip down the Klamath River. In Happy Camp we were told that
Mrs.
Patterson died before her book was published but that ‘Dearsir still
lives
down there where he has always lived’.
At the same time we were cautioned
that social amenities were not exactly a way of life with Dearsir,
and
that he may, or he may not, choose to receive us.
We probably will never know if Dearsir
felt especially affable that day, or if he just wondered at what the
dogs
were barking, but he came out of his cabin and he seemed to
understand
why we had come.
In fact, he seemed pleased. Apparently
we weren’t the first devotees of Dear Mad’m who wanted to meet her
friends.
He said he was still mining up the
canyon and that it was too bad we hadn’t arrived a few days
earlier-before
he did his ‘spring clean-up’ work. He said he would take us to his
placer
mine if we’d like, and yes, it would be fine if we called him,
Dearsir.
He pointed to a forest trail that
he said led to where Dear Mad’m’s cabin had been (the spot now cut
away
because of highway re-alignment) as we trudged up the steep hill
toward
the mine, and, he asked if we had seen her garden, now tenderly
cared for
by three Chicago businesswomen who had been so smitten with the book
they
purchased her property for their retirement home.
We had. And it was still beautiful.”
And on the cover of my First
Edition book is this information:-- Mrs. Patterson writes of
herself--- “I was born in Stockton, California, in 1866 in that
tumultuous period
following the close of the Civil War. I was educated by tutors and
in private
schools, graduating at Mills Seminary (now Mills College) at the age
of
sixteen. I wrote my first story for publication when I was fourteen;
it
was accepted, printed and paid for by the Oakland Tribune, to the
horror
of my English teacher. After studying in Europe I returned to
California
and led a social life in San Francisco, belonging to the literary
set and
basking in the light of Jack London, Ambrose Bierce and other
writers.
I wrote stories for Century Magazine, Colliers, and others. Then in
1906,
came the earthquake and fire in San Francisco which changed my whole
life.
Most of my worldly possessions were lost. I fled from the ruins of
my beloved
city and have never returned. I decided to live in the quietness of
faraway
northern California and have grown to be a part of this wild and
beautiful
Siskiyou country. It is the sort of life I love and expect to
continue.”
Like many of the other readers
of one of my favorite books, I wanted to know the rest of the story
and
her last years. It took hours of computer research before coming to
an
entry in California Deaths, 1940-97 that I found that she had died
December
23, 1955 in Shasta County at the age of 89. A trip to the Shasta
County
Courthouse revealed that the cause of death was Coronary Artery
insufficiency
and was signed by a doctor who had been attending her in Anderson,
CA.
since May of that year. She was laid to rest at Lawncrest Memorial
Park in Redding December 27, 1955.
Since I live near Redding, I knew
I had to visit her grave. One sunny fall day I asked directions to
her
final resting place and located her headstone, simply carved with
dates
of birth and death, I noted the day of birth Oct. 14, 1866. The day
that
I located her grave was October 13, 2002, I returned the next day
with
flowers for her birthday.
(Written by Hazel D. Gendron)
