Chamber of Commerce News

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Laura Wainwright, Lauren Burns, Eddie Davenport, Dr. Burns
Entertainers at the Chamber of Commerce meeting,
April 2, 2002. From left: Laura, Lauren,
Eddie Davenport, and Dr. Burns.

The Happy Camp Chamber of Commerce holds an evening meeting on the first Tuesday of each month at the Family Resource Center. The April 2 meeting was well-attended with lots of news about community projects underway.

Bigfoot Summer Games

There will be a Canoe & Kayak Family Fun Festival here on Memorial Day weekend, May 25 and 26. That’s the weekend of the Bigfoot Summer Games, which take place all along the Bigfoot Scenic Byway, Highway 96, from Happy Camp to Willow Creek.

While Happy Campers will be having fun in and on the Klamath River, with races and activities from Indian Creek to Elk Creek, the Hoopa Tribe downriver will be hosting their annual Coyote Run. The Coyote Run will have 9 mile, 2 mile, and 1/2 mile events for all ages. Orleans and Willow Creek will host festivals and activities as well, so there will be something to do in each town along the byway.

The Hoopa Valley Tribe led the planning for these events with a federal grant proposal submitted to Six Rivers National Forest in Eureka. Event planner Jaclyn Traversie of the Hoopa Tribe met with representatives of Orleans and Happy Camp on December 8, 2001, to discuss plans for each community.

Department of Forestry

A new interim ranger, Jay Perkins, has been appointed to manage our local forestry office. He plans to return to Yreka and the search is on to locate someone who wants to live in Happy Camp and take charge over the office here.

Action Committee

Tom Waddell reported for the Happy Camp Action Committee. It has been meeting once each month to discuss community improvement projects. They are planning to locate and move old mining equipment from forestry land to the park in Happy Camp as an added attraction. They also are working on plans for a new tourist and art information center in Happy Camp on Highway 96.

Waddell also reported that the new economic development plan is still being studied and modified by the Karuk Tribe and will be released to the community soon.

Marcia Armstrong

Our new county supervisor for District 5, Marcia Armstrong of Quartz Valley, was here to let us know about projects she is working on. With her strong positive energy and warm personality she is always a popular guest in this town.

The Arts in Happy Camp

Happy Camp is becoming an artist’s haven with emergence of fine art classes and activities, the formation of the Klamath River Writers Club, and performances by many talented musicians who have chosen to make this area their home.

Chamber of Commerce

St. Patrick’s Day Dinner and Dance

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A few of the diners on St. Patricks Day 2002
A few of the diners at the St. Patrick’s Day
dinner this year. Photo by Judy Bushy.

Decorating the tables for St. Patricks Day
Local teenagers volunteered to decorate.
Photo by Judy Bushy.

With the luck of the Irish, all Happy Campers were invited to participate in our annual Saint Patrick’s Day Dinner and Dance. This year the festivities were held at the Family Resource Center (once known as the Headway Market) where dinner included traditional corn beef and cabbage, along with a special Irish stew prepared by the Family Resource Center staff.

A beautiful green knitted afghan – made for this event by Jean Dulong, was raffled off and won by Stella Clark. This afghan was special as it will be the last one donated by Dulong, who moved to Madison, Wisconsin last month.

Dinner and a silent auction started at six pm. By eight, the hall was ready for dancing. Vivian Jordan, a DJ from Yreka, provided the music from her vast collection of CD’s. The dance attracted around seventy children, teens, and parents.

Donna McCulley and Rosemary Boren
Event coordinators Donna McCulley and
Rosemary Boren at the dance.
Photo by Judy Bushy.

Rosemary Boren and DJ Vivian Jordan.
Vivian Jordan, our DJ for the night,
wisely wore green. Photo by Judy Bushy.

Chamber of Commerce

Is This Sign Obsolete?

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Happy Camp City Limit Sign

Happy Camp is still here and the elevation hasn’t changed, but how about that population figure? Didn’t the recent year-2000 census change that at all?

The US Census Bureau lists Happy Camp in their American Fact Finder section. It is easy to see they have counted 2182 people in this area now… which sounds like a remarkable increase! But look at this carefully. It doesn’t really say there’s 2182 people in Happy Camp – what it says is there’s that number of people in “Happy Camp Census County Division” and that happens to be a large slice of western Siskiyou County, from the county line – east all the way to Scott River. As we know, most of that area is completely unpopulated, but it does include Seiad Valley and Somes Bar.

Not only that, but the number 2182 doesn’t represent an increase at all. Comparing with the year-1990 census population number of 2876, there’s been a decrease in population. This is more what we would expect to find, for as we all know, hundreds of people left Happy Camp when the lumber industry was devastated during the last decade.

Where then, did the 1,110 number come from, and how many people are really living in Happy Camp today? While doing this demograpic study, we discovered the source of the 1,110 number is the 1980 census, twenty-two years out of date! This figure can be found on a xls format spreadsheet file found at the California Dept. of Finance website. Whether that number counted only people living in Happy Camp, or in the entire Happy Camp Census County Division, we don’t know.

Conclusion
To find the number actually living in the area of Happy Camp today, we discovered we can request statistics for the 96039 zip code area. In this area, 1277 people were counted during the year 2000 census, and this is the number that we think should be on the Happy Camp sign. As for how many were here in 1990 – that number could not be found.

Happy Camp, Uncategorized

Naomi Lang, Karuk Figure Skater, To Compete in Olympics

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Naomi Lang, 23, a member of the Karuk Tribe of California, and her partner, Peter Tchernyshev, 30, born in St. Petersburg, Russia, have qualified for the 2002 Winter Olympics to be held February 8-24 in Salt Lake City, Utah. From March 18-24 they will compete at the World Figure Skating Championships in Nagano, Japan.
This comes after the 2002 US Figure Skating Championships held January 6-13 in Los Angeles where Lang and Tchernyshev won one dance competition after another defending their National Championship title, and earning the right to compete in the Winter Olympics!

We can see Lang and Tchernyshev on ABC television:
Sunday, January 20, Free Dance, 2pm ET
Saturday, February 2, Exhibition, 4 pm ET
Note that there’s a three hour difference between Eastern Time and our Pacific Time.

Lang, who lists her hometown as Allegan, Michigan, was born in Arcata, California, on the coast west of Happy Camp. She includes the Karuk flag on the bio page of her website. The Karuk tribal headquarters are in Happy Camp as this is part of their ancestral territory.

Naomi Lang and Peter Tchernyshev – Official Website

Karuk Tribe, Sports

Henry Doolittle, A Happy Camp Pioneer

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By Linda Martin

Richard Ramsey, the great-grandson of Happy Camp pioneer, Henry Doolittle, signed the guestbook of the Happy Camp History website this last week and solved one of our long-standing mysteries for us. He told us where Henry Doolittle went when he left Happy Camp in the early 1870’s!

To this day, Henry Doolittle is one of the best-known gold-rush era Happy Camp settlers. There’s a street named Doolittle in the center of town and there’s Doolittle Creek Road a few miles north, off Indian Creek Road too. At one time he and his brothers, Alfonso and Albert, owned most of Happy Camp.

Henry Doolittle sold the lot the Camp Mercantile Store sits on to James and Heil Camp and John Titus in the late 1850’s. He served as postmaster from 1858 to 1860 and from 1864 to 1870, and as Justice of the Peace from 1866 to 1870. He sold his vast properties and extensive business interests in 1872 and left town. Thanks to Richard Ramsey, we now know he moved north to Washington state with his second wife and two children.

Happy Camp History

Saturday Night Jam

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Billed as “The Son O’ Pop’n Jam” and as “an evening of music and popcorn”, the jam session on January 19 was an attempt to discover if there’s local interest in having a coffee house type evening in Happy Camp. I could not resist the opportunity to see who might show up and with what. My curiosity was not disappointed.

Wandering into the Family Resource Center an hour after the jam began, I found Robert Goodwin at the mike, playing his acoustic guitar and singing with a friend. About twenty people sat in the darkened back room, listening; the only light came from the stage where a drum set, keyboard, amps, mikes, and electric guitars were set up. Goodwin’s final tune was one he had written himself, and I heard Coreen Davis say it was the best song he had sung that evening. I agreed – it was awesome and heartfelt. It seems that the songs best suited for our voices are often the ones we write ourselves.

Next Coreen and her husband, Scott Hampson, played with a friend, Denise, on guitar, Scott on banjo. They did a few blue-grass mountain-folk tunes.. very entertaining. I had to leave about then, but later in the evening returned to find a group of about ten musicians still at it. There were several electric guitars, drums, two keyboards, and a bass guitar. The music was loud! We heard Dylan’s tune, All Along the Watchtower, in the Hendrix style, and something that sounded like Pink Floyd. Some of the musicians are very talented and some are beginners, but everyone was having a good time groovin’ with the music, deep into the night.

Music
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