Uncle Jeff’s Cabin

How interior California’s most important oral historian tells one of the state’s most interesting stories, before it got lost.

In May 1928, oral historian Frank Forrest Latta spent four hours interviewing a Yokuts tribe member in the Sierra Nevada mountains outside Visalia, California. Because of the language barrier, one misunderstood word at the beginning of their four-hour conversation somehow changed the course of their exchange. When Latta wrapped up, he not only realized most of the material was useless; he realized he needed a new system. Ideally, he needed a native English speaker who understood Yokuts dialects as well as the Yokuts.

That summer, Frank Latta was a married, thirty-six-year-old rural California high-school teacher with three kids. Born in Stanislaus County in 1892, the family bounced around the enormous San Joaquin Valley, from Gustine to Porterville to Tulare, and he worked as an unpaid historian on the side.

Some people collect records or paint landscapes as hobbies. Latta spent his free time recording stories and ethnographic information from pioneers and Native Americans because, as he once told a newspaper, “I couldn’t help it.” He believed history mattered, and California’s Yokuts tribes fascinated him most. His research had him driving dirt roads all over the Valley and Sierra in the early 1900s, interviewing pioneers, trappers, miners, farmers, ranchers, railroad workers, sheriffs, and tribal elders, to secure a record of life before modernity erased it. He wasn’t interested in politicians, bankers, or frontier California’s upper echelons. He interviewed people with dirt under their nails. On this day in May, he hadn’t yet published any of the material he’d gathered. He was just collecting it. But he was about to meet a person who had lived with the Yokuts as a child. These recollections would become Latta’s first book, Uncle Jeff’s Story, which would establish him as the San Joaquin Valley’s most important early historian and launch his life-long double career—a career that ended in 1983 at age ninety with approximately eighteen thousand interviews, three thousand articles, and fourteen or so books, depending on who’s counting. Uncle Jeff’s Story stands alone in California’s historical canon, both as a portrait of frontier life and as the only portrait of Native American life provided by an English speaker who could share his knowledge of their culture from the inside.

Standing at six feet two inches with a face that alternated between quietly contemplative and childishly happy, Latta wore a short mustache and kept his dark hair tight on the sides and high on top in a military-type crew cut at an age when other men went bald. Sometimes he carried a broad-brimmed hat in the field. Sometimes he wore a sport coat and tie. Despite the summer heat, he often wore long-sleeved collared shirts tucked into high-waisted trousers on his research trips and drove a Model T that he wrenched on himself when it got stuck in sand or needed a new axle.

When he was twenty-four, Latta had started creating lists of translated words from different Yokuts dialects, and he patiently assembled the lists into dictionaries: “sister,” aw-gáwish; “squirrel,” skée-til. Seven years later, while teaching high school, he started systematically interviewing Yokuts in his free time, trying to record elders before they passed away. He understood how susceptible the historical record was to accidents and neglect, how the Spanish adobe structures he photographed one year got toppled in heavy rain the next. He also regretted that many stories were never recorded—like those of Chappo, the Potwisha’s last chief, whose account of his first contact with white settlers in the Sequoia National Park area died with him in 1890.

Before Spaniards arrived, an estimated 150,000 Native Americans lived in California. Between thirty thousand and eighty thousand of them were Yokuts people living in the San Joaquin Valley. The Yokuts formed what William Preston’s landmark book Vanishing Landscapes calls “the densest nonagricultural population in North America.” Despite the singularity of their lowland terrain and a fairly uniform language, the Yokuts didn’t have one leader or capitol. They weren’t technically a tribe, though white ethnographers grouped them that way. The Yokuts were composed of about sixty separate, individually named subtribes who had their own leaders, territory, beliefs, and customs. They were the Wowole, Tachi, Chunut, Yokodo, Tulumne, Yowlumne, Wukchumne, Chukchansi, Kaweah, Koyeti, Wechikit, Nutúnutu, and Chaushila, to name a few. Together their names are musical. These largely peaceful people didn’t need to farm. Instead, they moved seasonally through different habitats; collected acorns and piñon pine nuts; hunted antelope, ground squirrels, deer, ducks, and grebes; and gathered roots, berries, and seeds. In clothing stitched from grass and bark, they fished wetlands in boats made from reeds. They herded rabbits into ingenious nets made from tree branches and plant fibers, gathered shellfish with their toes, and burned grasslands to flush out protein-rich grasshoppers by the thousands. Even before irrigated agriculture, feasting was easy. The Yokuts called themselves Yokoch, “the people.” When asked what that meant, some used the word to mean “they come everywhere” because they were so numerous. Some Yokuts called the San Joaquin Valley Chaw-láw-no. Latta is the main reason we know all of this.

Using his collected words, Latta drove through the Valley in the 1920s, meticulously gathering ethnographic information and direct quotations that, as he later put it, preserve “a dream among the ruins of an extinct civilization” recorded “from the lips of the departed.” He interviewed Sínel, a Tachi doctor known for having “supernatural curative powers.” He interviewed Yoimut in Hanford, last of the Chunut tribe and last person who spoke the Croo’-noot and Wo’-wole dialects—and who pointed out that Yokuts’ practice of burning good clothes after a person’s death was no different than white people burying people in good clothes in expensive coffins, so why the fuss? And Latta drove four hundred miles through the Sierra with Las’-yeh, an eighty-year-old Porterville woman who used her friend Toi-eh’-yets as an interpreter so Latta could catalogue her Koyeti tribe’s place-names and traditional stories about the Sierra’s origins, why roadrunners’ heads are striped red, and how rainbows end up in the sky. He’d interviewed so many Yokuts that people in villages recognized his car and nicknamed him Weé-chet-e, meaning little sticks, after the bundles of pencils he brought with him for interviews. Latta’s limited language skills meant that nuance sometimes got lost, and details stayed hazy. It was detail that Latta wanted: how Yokuts learned to use bird wings to dust their houses; how they threw huge Tulare Lake clambakes; how they made chewing gum from milkweed; why women didn’t smoke tobacco.

Latta’s model, California ethnographer and linguist Dr. John P. Harrington, could passably speak between forty and sixty different Native dialects, including ten Yokuts ones. As Latta said, “He was able to record more data in one hour than could any ten contemporary recorders, using an interpreter, in ten hours.” Latta needed an interpreter.

Near Visalia, around 1923, Latta met a Wukchumne woman named Wah-nom’-kot, the wife of the tribe’s last chief. Latta helped Wah-nom’-kot’s family build a tourist exhibit to display their tribe’s baskets on Highway 99 near Tulare. In return, Wah-nom’-kot helped Latta interview other Yokuts, performing essential communication functions, gaining people’s trust, and helping him find more sources. Wah-nom’-kot wasn’t with him on this day in May.

Frustrated, Latta drove out of the foothills and met his friend Mrs. John Cutler in Visalia. She was an early settler and frequently helped him with research, clarifying details about pioneer life. He told her about the day’s frustration because of the one word, and he told her how much he wished he could find a white person “who had been raised by, or who had lived with the Indians,” so they could interpret the languages’ connotations and denotations. “Of course,” Latta said, “this was asking too much, more than was possible; but, as it was expressed at the time, ‘It cost nothing to wish for plenty.’”

Cutler encouraged him, saying that if he would look “for such a person and not give up, sooner or later he would find what he was looking for.”

He drove to the town of Tulare to run an errand, and when he parked in front of the Tripletts’ family store, his friend Mr. M. C. Zumwalt walked up. Zumwalt was an early Tulare pioneer, and he knew Latta was always searching for a story. “I was just now going to the store to telephone you,” Zumwalt said. “Mike Mitchell of Ducor knows an old man at White River who was raised by the Indians on Kings River. He has been over this part of the valley with them and on Tulare Lake, and he knows more Indian than all the Indians in the country.”

Surely Latta’s brow raised. He’d heard of other white men being raised by Native Americans. He might have even located a few, but their stories never panned out. Latta trusted Zumwalt, but as he later wrote, “Surely this was too good to be true.” That was my sentiment exactly. Reading this version of events in the introduction to Indian Summer, I couldn’t help wondering if this sequence happened as quickly as he described, or if Latta invented it. Even those devoted to history are prone to mythmaking and self-aggrandizing. Whatever the timeline, things worked out well.

I picture the two mustachioed men standing in the sun, their boots on the wooden boards that counted for sidewalks, and Latta nodding his head. “So,” Latta would say, “raised by the Indians?”

“Yes,” Zumwalt would say. “From age seven or eight. He tells the most astounding stories.”

“Are they true?” Latta would say. “Can we believe him?”

 “Oh yes,” Zumwalt would say, rolling his pocket watch in his palm. “He’s not a Christian man, but he is an honest one. His word is gospel truth.” Then Zumwalt would mention how the old man had recently fallen ill. “Bedridden with a cough,” he’d say, “but taking good care.”

Latta would pull out his trusty pencil and paper and put on his sun hat. “How can I meet this Mayfield gentleman?”

The next day Latta drove to Ducor, a tiny town of four hundred acres set against the Sierra foothills, where Mike Mitchell confirmed Zumwalt’s claim. They piled into Mitchell’s Model T and drove up a winding dirt road between the spacious oaks, over rocks and ruts where dry creek beds cut across the gravel, to White River. This mining town used to be called Tailholt, named when a stagecoach passenger grabbed “holt” of her dog’s tail to keep it from chasing a cat, but White River sounded more civilized. Mitchell grew up in Tailholt, where his family ran a store and hotel. He knew everyone, and the Mitchells were as close with Mayfield as the old-timer would let anyone get.

Latta only recorded part of this first meeting in his book, but from his notes and photos, I can imagine the rest. On the front porch of the town’s one store, a thin, bearded man with white hair sat in the shade. He wore a loose, stained collared shirt tucked into dark slacks with no belt, and he fastened his shirt to the top button. A cane leaned against a porch whose white paint chipped where people used it as a bench.

“Hi, Jeff,” Mitchell said. “How ya doing?”

Jeff uncrossed his long legs and waved. His hard, high cheekbones and sharp nose gave way to a warm smile at Mitchell’s approach.

Latta offered his hand. “Mr. Mayfield. Good to finally make your acquaintance.”

“Please,” said Mayfield. “Uncle Jeff. That’s what everyone calls me.”

When Latta shook his hand, Jeff was eighty-six years old and lived alone in a cabin by a cemetery, where friends brought the old bachelor food since he no longer hunted and fished. The three made small talk under the oaks; then Latta got to work trying to establish Jeff’s credibility. “Is it true what they say about your childhood with the Indians?”

 Uncle Jeff nodded cautiously, running his hand down his beard. “Yes,” he said. “Quite true.”

Mike Mitchell stood beside them, fanning the shy old man with his hat to get him to continue. “Go on, Jeff. Tell Frank some more. I can vouch for Frank’s character. He wants to write your story. He’s a respectable historian.”

“Well,” Jeff said, squinting, “what have I to say?”

Mitchell looked at Latta and laughed. “Only everything.”

Latta’s stomach tensed. Maybe this was a bust.

“Well, since I moved to Visalia as a boy in 1862,” Jeff said, “I haven’t talked about Indians more than an hour altogether, except to the Mitchell family. They have always been good to me and helped me a great deal during the last few years.” He explained that during the first six of his ten years living in the Yokuts village, he learned to speak fluent Choinumne, and during that time, he spoke little else. “Since I left the Choinumne, I have seldom talked any Indian, but I have forgotten very little of the language.” He named a few things in their dialect. “Háh-pul means hot,” he said, “like today: hot. And those pencils in your shirt pocket, they called them weé-chet-e, or little sticks.”

Latta nodded. He knew this was true. Weé-chet-e was what his interviewees had nicknamed him. The old man even accented the correct e.

Standing above Uncle Jeff, studying his bony frame and thin neck, Latta realized he wasn’t the interpreter he’d hoped for, but after five minutes, he knew that Jeff contained more ethnographic information than he ever dreamed of hearing.

More than fluent in Yokuts dialects, Mayfield had lived alone with the Choinumne tribe in the Sierra from the age of eight to eighteen. They dressed him in bark and woven plant fibers. They let him share their beds, and they taught him to read the weather, cook wild-plant foods, and swim the cold Kings River despite the swift current. “On their large tule rafts he had traveled with them to Tulare Lake on their fishing expeditions,” Latta later wrote in his book about Jeff. “He hunted with them, fished with them, and shot with them with their own weapons. Then, too, his whole life was just as interesting. He had stories of the first bandits of the San Joaquin, prospecting in Death Valley when it really was the valley of death, the Mojave Desert in the [eighteen-]seventies, murder and mystery stories of the old valley settlements, and many other things of a like nature.”

I’m sure Latta’s gut filled with butterflies on that porch: the frontier tales Mayfield could tell, the interpreting he could do with Yokuts sources, if he could drive Jeff around the Valley soon. With the amount of time Latta spent talking to strangers, he was bound to meet interesting people. But the original settlers were dying quickly, and someone like Jeff was one in a million. Mrs. John Cutler was right: sooner or later Latta would find the person he was looking for. He and Jeff met just in time. Jeff had the flu.

Between Mayfield’s cough and light-headedness, Latta recognized the urgency of the situation and spent the rest of the day and following night at home “typewriting questions for him to answer; a vocabulary such as was probably used by the Indians, questions about their life . . . and a thousand other things.”

* * *

Raised on a grain farm near where tiny Orestimba Creek flows into the San Joaquin Valley, Latta became enthralled by history as a kid. Interstate 5 now runs by the creek’s mouth, but Orestimba used to cross the Camino Viejo, a road the Spanish built in the 1700s to connect the Bay Area with Los Angeles. In 1906 Latta’s middle-school teacher Edith V. Hollingsworth suggested that fourteen-year-old Frank interview the people who had settled their west Merced County school district for a history project. History soon became his life’s central project.

He reached those first interviewees on horseback, including James Hitchcock, who came to California on the first wagons to cross the Sierra Nevada, before the doomed Donner Party, when the state was part of Mexico. Ten years later, he reached his next subjects in a beat-up, roofless Model T with half a windshield.

For two days in August 1916, he drove down the Valley’s swampy center toward Bakersfield, talking with old-timers about interview possibilities, camping outdoors, and bouncing down roads that a newsletter described as “mostly gravel, some oiled”; one was made from a “sixteen-foot concrete pavement with broken edges and cracks every twenty feet.” Even though the sound of switching freight trains kept him up at night on this 1916 trip, Latta described this first journey into Tulare County as the most interesting one he ever made—strange, since he took countless journeys during his long life. He published a whole book using that word in 1937, called Little Journeys in the San Joaquin. 

Working together as a team, Frank, his wife, Jeanette, and their four kids collected artifacts in tiny towns, from Native rabbit-skin blankets and Spanish daggers to the hooded tapaderos stirrups the state’s most famous bandit, Joaquin Murrieta, used on his last saddle. They even owned a huge rusty anchor from a steamship that fished the Valley’s massive Tulare Lake, the largest freshwater body west of the Mississippi at the time. They catalogued these items in what the family called the Bear State Library, but Latta specialized in oral history: works primarily composed of the direct words of interview sources, often arranged for effect, and supplemented with context and commentary. Latta viewed the interviewee’s words and voice as essential parts of the story, if not more important than the information they gave, then just as vital.

“The man himself is the source,” Latta said, using the gendered speech of his time, “the authority.” Latta found no distance too great to find a story. He sometimes labored for years to locate key people who had witnessed, or knew participants in, particular events. Someone might mention a certain colorful character or old-timer, and Latta would ask locals their whereabouts, following rumors and leads and dead ends until he found them. He interviewed the sister-in-law of a man that Joaquin Murrieta, California’s most feared bandit, supposedly killed in 1852. He interviewed Newman police officer William G. Newsom, whose father saved the family house in a flood by chaining it to a tree, and who described the six cattle thieves authorities hanged from a big oak tree. “Often we are in daily contact with remarkable people,” Latta once said, “and fail to recognize that fact.” He’d talk to anyone who looked interesting.

“After 3:30 that Friday after school was out,” Latta recalled in an article, “I hopped in my car and headed clear to this little town in the northern part of the state, and I came up to this fellow while he was feeding his chickens. He leaned against a post and began answering my questions; we talked for eight hours.”

As an oral historian, Latta was a scrappier, less monomaniacal version of California’s most accomplished ethnographer, Dr. Harrington. A voluminous workaholic who studied Native languages and liked pulling eighteen-hour days, Harrington spent the first half of the twentieth century driving all over the West on the Smithsonian’s payroll, practically living in the field, taking photographs, pressing plants, collecting baskets, and filling a million pages and hundreds of museum boxes with notes about Native culture. He cut 950 audio discs on a 150-pound, portable aluminum-disc recording machine that he had to haul in his car on dirt roads, and he singlehandedly documented multiple California languages before they went extinct. Latta and Harrington corresponded by mail, and the former modeled his efforts after the latter’s.

In photos, Harrington has thick bags under his eyes and dirt on his pants. He was obsessed. He neglected his wife and daughter. Some critics say he cared more for data than people. He definitely didn’t care much about his physical existence, be it for food or clothing, but he believed in the necessity of ethnography’s mission.

As Harrington told a young field assistant in a 1941 letter, “If you can grab these dying languages before the old timers completely die off, you will be doing one of the FEW things valuable to the people of the REMOTE future. You know that. The time will come and SOON when there won’t be an Indian language left in California, all the languages developed for thousands of years will be ASHES, the house is AFIRE, it is BURNING. That’s why I said to go through the blinding rain, roads or no roads, that’s why I thanked God when you tried to cross the Matole River, haven’t I gone back even two weeks later to find them DEAD and the language FOREVER DEAD?”

Latta’s interests were wider than language, and he split his time more judiciously between his family and his work. Harrington worked for the Bureau for forty years. Somehow Latta never signed on with an institution. Maybe he didn’t want to. He wasn’t formally trained in anthropology, and he was an independent spirit who got to dictate who he interviewed and when, and keep all his books in his name.

Harrington and Latta were not lone geniuses. They were part of a larger documentary movement in America. In 1879 Congress created the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology. Headed by John Wesley Powell, the ethnographer who mapped the Colorado River and Grand Canyon, the Bureau sent out a fleet of scholars during the late 1800s and early 1900s to record Native American languages, tribal knowledge, artifacts, and images, and to hold public exhibits. Using portable phonographs and notebooks, fieldworkers created an invaluable, lasting document of America’s first cultures while capitalism, racism, and Manifest Destiny were busy eradicating them. As staff workers and affiliated “collaborators” with the Smithsonian, Frances Densmore spent half a century recording Native Americans’ music on wax cylinders, and the famous Franz Boaz became “The Father of American Anthropology.”

In the early 1900s, banker J. P. Morgan paid Edward Curtis to spend the early 1900s taking more than forty thousand photographs of over eighty tribes in what stands as the most humanizing and important collection of historic images of Native American cultures. Similarly, Fortune magazine paid James Agee to gather the interviews with poor white farmers that became his influential social document Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. During the Great Depression, the Federal Writers’ Project sent fieldworkers out to collect the songs, stories, and dialects of working-class rural Americas, the so-called “common people.” The material collected from former slaves proved invaluable; historians still rely on that primary body of work. In the 1930s and ’40s, the Library of Congress paid Alan Lomax to drive all over the American South with a heavy disc recorder in the back of his car, hooked to his car battery, on which he recorded groundbreaking performances and interviews with musicians like Muddy Waters, Lead Belly, and Woody Guthrie. Latta rarely had institutional support. He supported his wife, Jeanette, and four kids by teaching agriculture, drafting, carpentry, and drawing at high school, and he funded the family’s research. Instead of recording musicians with audio equipment, he recorded his sources with a camera, pencil, and paper. Latta’s subjects never became famous like Muddy Waters, but his subjects were important in their own way: the Valley’s last stagecoach driver, the last of General Custer’s scouts, the last of the Nutúnutu tribe. And like Lomax and Agee, Latta gathered their stories because, as he told a newspaper, “I couldn’t help it.” He believed history and folklore mattered.

His technique was primitive, his prose workmanlike and unadorned. Although easily dismissed as esoteric and regional, his contributions are unparalleled. Numerous books of California history lean heavily on his research and list it in their bibliographies, and like the San Joaquin Valley he loved, few modern people, even locals, know Latta’s name.

* * *

Latta returned to White River at 10:00 a.m., two days after first meeting Uncle Jeff. Over coffee at the old-timer’s rickety kitchen table, Mayfield answered questions while Latta recorded, using nothing but pencils and paper. “Without as much as ten minutes of lost time or a stop for lunch,” Latta said, “this was continued until after six p.m., eight hours or more, and at that time Uncle Jeff was as fresh and as interested as he had been at the beginning.”

Latta came as frequently as his three children’s summer schedule allowed: sometimes only on weekends, other times every day for an entire week, and they maximized their opportunities by talking for eight hours a day with few breaks. It took a while to loosen Jeff up. Initially, he’d talk in generalities when Latta wanted particulars, and he’d stop himself from going in depth. It drove Latta nuts, but Jeff had shared few of these details during the previous six decades.

When his father finally moved him from the Yokuts village to a Visalia school in 1862, Jeff’s unusual speech drew attention. “It may have been that I unconsciously used a few Indian words,” Jeff said. “At least the boys at school used to make fun of me. I had to whip every boy in school before they would let me alone about it. Then, too, there seemed at this time in the minds of many white people to be some sort of a stigma attached to my life with the Indians.” If he tried to talk about his life in the mountains, the games he and his adopted family played and the members he missed, people ridiculed him. In those days, many white settlers considered Native Americans savages, part of a primitive culture. Instead of respect or curiosity, settlers treated them with pity and suspicion, because people believed they’d steal your horses and equipment, and even slit your throat. People who found out Jeff lived with the savages treated him like an uncivilized “half-breed” and looked down on him, too. “From then on,” Jeff said, “I resolved never to speak of my life with the Indians. People in general had so many wrong notions about Indians and were so ignorant about their life that I was continually drawn into arguments about them. Everyone was so sure they knew all about Indians that I made up my mind I would never tell them any different.”

“But as he found that someone else was as much interested as he was,” Latta said, “and was willing to preserve what information he had without any changing or ridicule, he became as enthusiastic as a boy.”

Over their first six weeks, the men established a productive rhythm, talking and transcribing, questioning and answering. They worked at the table. They worked on the porch. When Jeff’s back ached from coughing, Latta transcribed by his bedside, where the cabin’s dry boards creaked, and an oil lamp burned above Jeff’s bedpan and one of his two pairs of shoes. Latta often abandoned his list of subjects to let the old man’s stories go wherever they took him, covering the details of Yokuts hunting, fishing, house and raft construction, manners, ceremonies, language, fights with encroaching Mono tribes, the way Jeff’s father left for a year at a time, how a Mono man tried to choke Jeff in his cabin, how Jeff shot another intruder in the back with an arrow, and, always, stories of how his Yokuts family fed him, loved him, and taught him how to thrive in nature with no gun, no watch—only his wits, friendships, and the sun.

“His expression was good,” Latta said, “his understanding of what was wanted complete. He had an absolutely accurate memory and the mind of a scientist. When a question was asked about Indian life he was ready with a comprehensive answer. Those things he had studied for more than seventy-five years. No one with whom he came in contact had any understanding, or appreciation, of what he knew, and he had never discussed his life with the Indians. Mr. Bellah, who conducted the store at White River and has been there continuously for more than twenty years, had seen Uncle Jeff almost daily during that time. He told [me] that Uncle Jeff had talked more for Mike Mitchell in thirty minutes than he had heard him talk in twenty years. It was interesting to observe the change that came over the man as the work progresses.”

Talking was cathartic. Jeff finally felt appreciated. Sitting around the table, stuffing an oil cloth under the short leg to keep it from wobbling, both men came to life. Once Jeff started, Latta’s hand cramped from writing fast enough to keep up. “Wow,” Latta would say, “go on.” And he did. From May into August. To celebrate their progress, Jean Latta packed hot fricasseed chicken and buttered biscuits into thermoses one day, Frank picked up Mike Mitchell and some other old-timers in Ducor, and they shared lunch at Jeff’s cabin. Then they got back to work.

Even when Jeff was ill, his wit was as quick as his recall, and he rarely stumbled over words. So much time had passed since those Yokuts years that Latta initially questioned Jeff’s clarity. He was eight years old when a lot of this happened. How much did anyone remember from age eight? But rather than blurring Jeff’s memories, decades of silence had preserved details in the formaldehyde of memory. Telling stories over and over by rote often lessens their complexity and smoothens their edges, leading to simplified versions too polished to be true. Had Jeff told his stories to a hostile racist world before meeting Latta, he might have revised them to match his audience, toning down and editing so as not to elicit judgmental responses from white people. Being told now for the first time, Jeff’s stories came out crisp and clear, and Frank got them ready for permanent display.

* * *

Thomas Jefferson Mayfield was born on the family farm in East Texas around 1843. His father was a military man who, so far, had survived many battles. To avoid Apache warriors on the trail west, the Mayfields took a six-month boat trip to California. After landing in San Francisco in spring of 1850, the year it became a state, they formed a mule train headed for the San Joaquin Valley in order to secure land.

In Pacheco Pass, six-year-old Jeff got tired of riding on his mother’s horse, and he requested she let him ride by himself so he could get a better view of the Valley when they reached it. “I remember that I proudly smiled back at her from my perch,” he told Latta, “and that she returned my smile. I can see her yet. This is the last real picture I have of my mother, as she died within a year.”

They passed deer in a meadow, and they didn’t run at their approach. “Suddenly,” Jeff said, “my daddy pointed over the tops of the bare hills ahead of us and exclaimed, ‘Look there!’ And there in the distance, until then lost to us in the haze, was our valley. A shining thread of light marked El Rio de San Joaquin flowing, as my mother said, ‘through a crazy quilt of color.’” The quilt was flowers, rows and rows of “rose, yellow, scarlet, orange and blue,” each species attached to a different soil type, with some colored bands stretching a mile across. “And my mother cried with joy,” Jeff said, “and wanted to make a home right here in the midst of it all.” They kept going.

As the Mayfields contemplated the wisdom of crossing the swollen San Joaquin River, a group of Yokuts, who had been washing their hair on the opposite shore, swam across to offer assistance. “Finally a young girl about sixteen years of age offered to take me on her back and swim the river with me,” Mayfield told Latta. “So Mother took off my clothes . . . I clasped my hands around [the girl’s] neck, and she took my feet under her arms and waded into the water . . . until we arrived at the south edge of the stream in shallow water . . . [The girl] was very proud of me and, holding my hand, kept the rest of the Indians at a distance of several feet. She would talk to me and laugh, but, of course, I understood nothing she said and remembered only the words.” Chólo-wé-chep, the girl called him, “little white boy.” That image is so tender, so touching, that it attached itself to my brain with the tenacity of a cocklebur when I first read it.

Between the hills in the lower Sierra, the family built a cabin on a level plot where Sycamore Creek flowed into the Kings River, immediately across from a Choinumne village. The families befriended each other. In fact, the Yokuts supplied them with so much food during the Mayfields’ first three years that they quit subsistence hunting. While the new arrivals slept, the Yokuts hung deer and birds in an oak tree and set bread at their door made from acorn meal. The Mayfields reciprocated with wheat, potatoes, and corn when their fields produced it, though as Jeff said, “we never in any way came near repaying them for what they did for us.”

William Mayfield had fought Native Americans back east, so he was no friend of theirs. But the Choinumne were a generous, nonthreatening tribe, and as more white settlers poured into their territory and other Yokut bands chose to defend themselves, both groups here on Kings likely recognized that their survival depended on peaceful coexistence. “Several years later,” Jeff said, “I learned from the Indians that they kept us in meat in order to keep us from firing our guns and scaring the game.”

When Jeff’s mother died less than a year into their homesteading, his father and two older brothers decided homesteading wasn’t enough. They needed to pursue lucrative activities. “The Indians at the ranchería had always taken an interest in me,” Jeff told Latta. Some would stand behind the house for hours watching the family cook and dress, curious about their life ways. His mother trusted their neighbors and let her son spend hours playing in their village across the river. His father and two older brothers already spent a lot of time away wrangling wild horses, searching for ore and grazing cattle. So when the Choinumne offered to take care of eight-year-old Jeff, his father eventually accepted and took off for good.

Jeff’s account of his ten years in the village is filled with stories of children’s antics, wild animals, brushes with death, frequent swims, hunting expeditions, and the joys of young life. The saga of the annual fishing trip the Yokuts took down the Kings River to Tulare Lake is as vivacious and detailed as anything in Brewer’s and Derby’s journals, except closer to its people than its landscape.

As John Harrington said in his forward to Tailholt Tales, “Few readers will realize that this information which Mr. Latta has preserved lies on the very outskirts of human knowledge and that he has rescued practically all of these facts from oblivion.” Oblivion is the hole both men reached into. California lost its biggest lake, many of its first people and their tribal knowledge, but not all of its stories. Tailholt Tales is a time capsule from this vanished world. It’s the sort of document that Latta always aimed to create, and it represents one of Latta’s two most valuable cultural contributions, which is why he considered Harrington’s endorsement the highest compliment he and Mayfield could receive.

Writers often recognize themselves in their material. Frank’s father, Eli C. Latta, moved to the Bay from Arkansas in the same year that Jeff’s family moved to California. After Frank’s father tried and failed to make money mining and shipping freight, he built and ministered at Presbyterian churches on the Valley’s west side and ran a grain farm with his wife, a schoolteacher. The Lattas and the Mayfields belonged to the same generation, and Frank, though younger, had a lot of Uncle Jeff in him—the pioneer son, at home in the backcountry, spending time with the Yokuts. As a portal into the early California that Latta was born into, Latta wasn’t just documenting Jeff’s world. He was preserving his own.

Mayfield’s father and brothers would return to the homestead intermittently, and when they did, Jeff would stay with them until they left again. After ten years living in the Village, Jeff said, “My daddy decided that I had been with the Indians long enough.” He enrolled the boy in school in Visalia at age eighteen. That year, his father’s luck ran out when got shot in a battle with the Paiute tribe on the Sierra’s east side, where a canyon now bears William Mayfield’s name. Both of Jeff’s brothers died in the 1870s: one was killed a famous bandit; another got poisoned after a scuffle over cattle. None of them had kids. For the rest of his life, Jeff lived alone, uncle to everyone but kin to none.

While Jeff searched for ore and herded sheep, his Yokuts family died off. Americans took over their land, cut the oaks, and crowded them out. Overhunting and grazing caused shortages of wild game, and European diseases like measles, smallpox, and tuberculosis reduced the three-hundred–person tribe to forty people. Survivors joined other tribes or moved to small towns where they worked cattle ranches, got absorbed into the population, and even married into Latino families, whose language they often spoke from Alta California days. Their Choinumne bloodline drained away.

The construction of Pine Flat Dam in 1954 put the village and Mayfield homestead under water, though not before Latta took photographs. Water diversion helped drain the Tulare Lake that Mayfield’s Yokuts once fished, so in a sense, Latta and his dam advocacy helped end the very world he was so grateful to have preserved in his books.

Tailholt remained. When he got too old to prospect, Jeff settled there. It had two cemeteries. His cabin overlooked the town’s “respectable” one, the one where people went when they died of natural causes, instead of with their boots on because of gunshots, stabbings, poison, and mining accidents. Jeff had no will and few material possessions. He only wanted one thing. “North of the river the dead were buried in pine boxes of lumber,” he told Latta. “I want to be buried on the north side of the river, but I want to be rolled in a blanket.” Latta regretted not being able to give him that.

In late August, Mayfield suffered a stroke, and his friends moved him from his cabin to the closest hospital in Visalia. He showed no sign of paralysis when Latta visited, so they kept talking. Jeff’s health seemed dire now. Their project was nearing its end. Such quick changes in fortune were why documentarians like Latta and Harrington did not wait to start recording: sources were here one minute, gone the next.

One day in late September, Latta found Jeff sitting on the edge of his hospital bed, more tired than he’d ever seen him. “Knowing that Uncle Jeff was very weak,” Latta said, “I asked the nurse, Mrs. Ruth (Gloss) Warner, if I should talk to him. She stated that, although he was feeble, he was very independent and would not let her feed him or even give him water.”

When Latta sat down, Jeff stared at him. “You know I never told you how we came to this country.” For two hours, Jeff filled the gaps in his narrative, starting at the beginning of his story, describing his family’s trip through Pacheco Pass, their first sight of the Valley, and the girl who ferried him across the river. It’s my favorite part of the story, my favorite of all Latta’s work. If Latta had arrived at the hospital one hour later, the world would have missed it.

“By this time Uncle Jeff was becoming quite tired,” Latta said. “He sat on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.” When Latta tried to excuse himself, Jeff told him, “No, I want to finish telling you about this before I lie down.” Jeff told him an incredible, harrowing story about how he and his burro survived for two years in Death Valley during a drought with no food or water. Finally, Latta felt guilty for keeping his exhausted friend awake. Visiting hours had ended, so he patted Jeff on the shoulder and said, “Goodbye, Uncle Jeff.”

“Dow-wit-kow,” Jeff said: goodbye in Choinumne.

As Latta descended the hospital steps, the nurse came to check on Jeff, and he “fell backwards in the arms of the nurse, dead.” Or so Latta said. Like finding Jeff that one frustrating day in May, this seems too slick to be true. It made a good story though, one he’d probably told countless times. But I trust the bulk of Latta’s account of Jeff’s life. It contains a great deal of what he knew about the Yokuts, and he preserved it in Jeff’s words.

The beauty of oral history is the voices. The conversational form lets you hear the people of the past speaking as if they were right in front of you, forming an intimate connection across time that defies death.

Latta knew what a score he’d stumbled on, partly because he’d spoken to so many people with relevant but more mundane accounts: first person to produce kerosene; first person to plant wheat. That’s why Latta published the Mayfield material so quickly, first as Tulare Times newspaper articles in the months after Jeff’s death, then together as a poorly designed, eighty-eight–page book in 1929 called Uncle Jeff’s Story. “This is Uncle Jeff’s own story,” Latta told readers in his introduction. “The writer has tried not to profane it in changing the form of expression.”

Jeff told the beginning of his story last, but in his book, Latta arranged the material chronologically. Latta listed himself as editor and Uncle Jeff as author, since the book was composed almost entirely of Jeff’s words and arranged to tell a story. Latta loved the text but not the physical edition. “Accept my apologies,” Latta wrote to the New York Public Library when he sent them a copy. “It was printed from type used in a newspaper set-up and is quite crude in composition.” The next edition would be better, if he could get someone to publish it.

Latta exchanged letters with the editor at Stanford University Press, who was considering republishing the book in an improved format. But after four years of correspondence, the editor ultimately declined, hit with the Great Depression and lessening interest in what he called “Californiana.”

The failed plans frustrated Latta, but he shared what he called Uncle Jeff’s “iron man” constitution. He also saw how tirelessly John Harrington labored, driving village to village, dragging his car from muddy creeks, and stuffing boxes full of raw data that he rarely reread or reworked because there was always more to gather. Rather than mailing his notes to his employers at the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology, Harrington stored a lot of them in the field because, as he told Latta, “If I sent my work to the Bureau, those swivel-chair Ethnologists never would get off their fannies and go to work. There is more work here than a hundred of us can do.” If no publisher would reprint Uncle Jeff’s Story, Latta decided he’d print it himself.

For forty-seven years, he labored on an expanded, more rigorously vetted version, if not fact-checked in the modern magazine sense, then at least checked against other settlers’ accounts. As he interviewed sources for new books, he talked to others to confirm things Mayfield said, writing letters to people like Judge Atwell’s son to get their versions of events that Mayfield described, and he photographed landmarks and mining sites to add context to Mayfield’s oral history. In this improved manuscript, Latta let Mayfield talk for pages about life after he left the village, mining, shepherding, and doing various jobs in Tailholt—material left out of the first version.

A more sophisticated writer now, Latta added bits of his own dialogue between blocks of Mayfield quotes to create the illusion of an exchange between them and, in places, to create scenes. Some of Latta’s new dialogue reads like a screenplay designed to create dramatic moments that, to me, verge on fiction. But Latta had grown reflective, even nostalgic, about his past, and he wanted to amplify what he, at age eighty-four, knew was his best material, the highpoint of his career. In the process, he weaved a sort of memoir element into this new book, adding anecdotes from Latta family research trips, the rigors of data collection, and correspondence with the legendary Harrington to depict Latta’s experience as an independent researcher who had stumbled on Mayfield. When he printed the new 323-page edition himself in 1976, he renamed it Tailholt Tales, and this time, instead of “Arranged by Frank F. Latta,” he listed himself as the author. It was still Jeff’s story, but Latta had created a larger tale around it, and his ethnologist family were characters in the story, keepers of the flame of what happened that summer in Tailholt.