Generally, when junk mail comes in, it becomes kitty litter.
But a little card came in that caught our attention. On the weekend of August
11-12, all museums participating in the “Heritage Trail”, from Roseville, California to South Lake Tahoe, were
free. Now we usually catch a museum or two when we travel far from home, but
who ever goes to museums near home? It’s not something I would ordinarily do on
a Sunday, but we figured why not.
First stop was the Maidu
Indian Museum in Roseville. We had passed it a thousand times
and never even knew it was there. Inside the museum are a number of millennium-plus
old artifacts and artistic, interactive displays and films of the lifestyle and
culture of the Nisenan
Maidu tribe, who for thousands of years, lived in the oak savanna along the
American River before they were pushed out by the gold rush settlers in the
1800s. The land became farms, and then the farms became today’s jungle of
asphalt and concrete. A few Nisenan Maidu remain to preserve, share, and teach
their ancient culture. Behind the museum, we took a walking tour through a 30-acre parcel
of open space, which holds what remains of a Maidu village, with petroglyphs,
grinding stones, and carved-out rocks that even our interpreter didn’t know
what they were used for.
Surrounded by houses, streets, schools, and a large
community park, a walk through the ancient Maidu village was like a walk into
the past. Understanding Maidu culture is to understand nature--to respect,
love, and give thanks to the grasses and the trees, the acorns and the waters that
gave this area life.
Our next stop was in the small foothill
town of Colfax,
lunch at the Colfax Max diner, where
the menu offered elk, kangaroo, and alligator burgers (but I stuck with the
beef). Then the Colfax
Heritage Museum, situated by the old railway depot, next to a
decommissioned train car that is now a music shop. The small building was
filled wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor with history. Every antique household
product, gadget, tool, or you-name-it was there, from the temporary campers
building the railway in the 1800s to the agricultural tycoons of the early
1900s. It’s not a place I could walk into and see everything in one half hour. But
I could imagine myself as an old railroad worker, shopping for a bottle of this
or a cask of that or an ancient pharmaceutical sitting on the shelf. But there
was so much more to see in one afternoon, so we grabbed our free cookies and
started back down the hill.
Free root beer floats and dramatic
historical enactments were the lures that brought us to the museum in the historical
courthouse in Auburn. Auburn is the seat of Placer County,
and the first floor of the grand capitol-style 1889 courthouse had displays of
native Maidu and other historical artifacts, the Sherriff’s office of the early
20th century, and a large chunk of pure Placer gold. Annie, the
husband murderer, was locked up in the women’s jail below the courthouse, or at
least the volunteer who acted as her was kind enough to sweat all day in 1880s
clothing in a dungeon of Auburn heat for our
edutainment pleasure. Two more Auburn museums filled up the rest of our
afternoon—the Auburn Joss
House Chinese museum downtown and the Bernhard
Family museum complex, an estate next to the Placer County
fairgrounds. The latter consisted of a restored 19th century ranch
house, winery, and garage with 19th century farm wagons. A
horse-drawn wagon of the time sat in the driveway, and we were invited to climb
aboard and have our photo taken. While we took our tour through the
well-preserved lifestyle of the past, a volunteer churned out homemade ice
cream, while another volunteer provided fresh-baked buttermilk biscuits. Lack
of refrigeration in those days meant ice was hauled off of the mountain and
brought down in a covered wagon, used for ice cream, and placed in an “ice box”
to keep the freshly slaughtered meat cold. The wood-burning stove kept the
kitchen so hot, the residents had to do a lot of their cleaning and cooking
duties outside, such as baths in a bucket and laundry on a washboard. We
brought some of the historical simple-life home with us—buttermilk biscuit
batter in a small cloth bag tied smartly with a bow, which provided a delicious
snack while working in our overly complex, modernized world.
