SHORTY LOVELACE HISTORIC DISTRICT
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Recognizing Tulare County's Last True Mountain Man by Laurie Schwaller Joseph Walter "Shorty" Lovelace may not have looked like the classic image of a mountain man, but the National Historic District bearing his name in the rugged high Sierra Nevada of Kings Canyon National Park is a testament to the lifeway, ingenuity, and endurance Shorty embodied for forty years as a totally self-sufficient fur-trapping mountain man. |
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"One of the most unforgettable characters that I ever knew as a boy in Tulare County was a fifty-plus year old man named 'Shorty' Lovelace. I don't believe I ever knew his real first name. To everyone he was just 'Shorty.' He stood about five feet three or so, and had a very deceiving stature. At first glance you'd say he was fat, or chunky, or obese. The truth was he was hard as nails . . . he had to be to endure the rigors of his unusual lifestyle." -- Jack Harold Moffet, 1990 
Shorty at Crowley Cabin
Jack Moffet was sleeping outdoors when Shorty placed a piece of Limberger cheese near his face. The strong smell woke Jack up. "My shout was answered by a loud, high-pitched belly laughing . . . . Then out popped this diminutive, Santa Claus of a creature . . . holding his belly in absolute delight. . . . He loved a joke or prank, whether executed by or perpetrated on himself." -- Jack Harold Moffet, 1990
 Pine Marten
During the 1920s and 1930s Shorty trapped all over the southern two- thirds of what is now Kings Canyon National Park. His preferred prey was the pine marten, a house-cat-sized member of the weasel family. He trapped in the winter because that was when the pelts of the animals he caught were at their best. -- Central Sierra Historical Society
 Pelts at Crowley
"First, traveling on homemade skis, he set up trap lines using the time-honored snow trapping methods of placing traps in trees, hollow logs, or beneath small conifers. Then he followed a regime of checking established traps, placing new ones, and hauling in the pelts as they were caught." -- William C. Tweed, 2007
 Woods Creek Crossing
(1940 photo)
"By 1922, if not earlier, he was building additional line cabins. Ideally, these small shelters were not more than a day's travel apart. They were arranged in loops so that travel between them would be as infrequent as possible," since frequent travel made the game more wary. -- William C. Tweed, 2007
 Williams (Quartz) Meadow, 1958
Shorty built shelters throughout his trapping territory, at sites including Williams (Quartz) Meadow, Rowell Meadow, Kettle Peak, Ellis Meadow, Moraine Meadow, Cloud Canyon, and probably in upper Deadman and Ferguson canyons. Over the years, he gradually expanded, over Avalanche Pass onto Sphinx Creek, down into Kings Canyon, up Bubbs Creek, over Granite Pass, and into Rae Lakes, Sixty Lakes, and Gardiner basins. -- William C. Tweed, 2007
"[M]oving uphill, Shorty had to use climbing skins strapped to the bottoms of his skis, and there can be no better skin for that purpose than the hide of a marten; it's [sic] finely textured fur grows at a backward angle, allowing the skis to glide smoothly forward while sticking to the snow when slipping backward." -- Steve Sorensen, 2018
 Pine Marten
"I once asked an experienced wildlife biologist why we don't see more pine martens in Sequoia and Kings Canyon. His answer was, 'I don't know. Maybe Shorty trapped them all.'" -- Steve Sorensen, 2018
 Crowley Canyon (date unknown)
Unless he encountered a snow survey crew, he spent his days and months in total isolation. Only once did he try having a partner. Long before spring released them, they were sick of each other, crammed together in tiny spaces, both armed -- and Shorty said he had to spend more time keeping track of his friend in the wilderness than minding his traps. -- from Jack Harold Moffet, 1990
"Once his initial binge was over, Shorty whiled away the remainder of the summer, dividing his time between the mountains and the valley. Sometimes, Shorty hunted coyotes in Kern County for the bounty. Occasionally he took an odd job, building a fireplace or replacing an engine." -- William C. Tweed, 2007
 Cain's Flat CCC Camp; became Sheriff's Road Camp
"In at least two different years 'Shorty' never made it back to his traps. Instead he was an honored guest [working inmate] of the Tulare County Sheriff's Department Road Camp at Cain Flat. Evidently 'Shorty' was a hellatiously [sic] good cook and was a welcomed trustee. The officers and inmates never ate so well as when 'Shorty ' donned the white hat and apron." -- Jack Harold Moffet, 1990
"At seventy-five, [Shorty] was too old to winter in the Sierra any longer. That same summer, he was seen camping in the Roaring River area, where he had set up his first high mountain trap lines nearly half a century earlier. Two years later, he was dead." -- William C. Tweed, 2007
 Cloud Canyon Visitor (2013 photo)
". . . Shorty Lovelace was the first and only Caucasian ever to reside in the upper Kings Canyon region on a long-term year-round basis. Since Shorty's departure, this region of approximately 200 square miles has remained uninhabited except for summer visitors." -- NRHP Nomination Form
"[F]ur trapping [was] the only industrial process ever to be undertaken successfully in the region in question with the single exception of grazing. During the nineteenth century, fur trapping was a major western industry, providing the impetus for the exploration of much of the West." -- NRHP Nomination Form
 1800s Mountain Man by Victor Blakey
"Shorty lived a pioneer life that was anachronistic even in his time; now it seems almost unimaginable. His life, and the surviving cabins that document it, remind us of an earlier America and how it looked at the natural world." -- William C. Tweed, 2007
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Born in 1886 in Sacramento, he moved with his family two years later to a homestead several miles above the village of Three Rivers in the foothills of what became Sequoia National Park in 1890. Shorty spent his early years exploring, hunting, and trapping with his four brothers and his pioneer father. The family moved to Visalia in time for Shorty to attend high school there, and he turned out to be a fine mechanic. He operated a garage in Tulare County and then in Reno, Nevada, before opening a pump shop in Visalia in partnership with his boyhood friend Charles Hammer, whose sister he married a few years later.    But by 1920, Shorty had lost his partnership, his marriage, and all his prospects to alcoholism. His father and his brother Bryan helped Shorty find a way out. Together, they completed a cabin compound begun in 1911, including corrals and pelt-drying racks, in Crowley Canyon near Comanche Meadow, a few miles beyond Sequoia National Park's northern boundary. Shorty would live there all winter, where the solitude, peace, beauty, labors of trapping, and absence of liquor stores would keep him sober and productive for half the year.
From that base camp, Shorty steadily extended his range, building as many as 36 smaller shelters throughout the South Fork of the Kings River drainage. All but one were smaller than six by ten feet, with none taller inside than five and half feet, which was fine for Shorty, who stood only about 5'3". They were tiny because he built most of them single-handedly, so the materials couldn't be too large or heavy. Also, he didn't want them to be noticed, by people or animals. A small space was easier to heat, important when temperatures often fell below zero, and snugly accommodated his furnishings, consisting of only a little plank bed at one end, a mortarless stone fireplace at the other, and numerous shelves to hold his utensils and supplies.    Shorty constructed these winter homes usually in the summer or early fall, from the natural materials available at each site. Whenever possible, he used small fallen trees, which he cut into logs 6-12" in diameter for the walls. He notched them lightly to fit together and spiked wooden wedges or poles into place to fill the gaps. Sometimes he used stones for foundations, but his floors were all just dirt. He cut poles to serve as rafters. Shakes made the roof and also the door, which hung on leather straps. He tied a piece of rope to an overhanging branch so that he could dig below it to locate each den in the snow.
By October, Shorty was loading pack animals, his own or ones he rented, with canned goods, traps, toilet paper, blankets, candles, matches, reading material, and everything else he would need alone in the mountains for the next five or six months. As he stocked each cabin and lean-to, he also laid in a big supply of firewood, his only source of heat for the long winter. When all his shelters were ship-shape, he took the pack animals out of the mountains and watched the peaks for snowfall.    Shorty was a strong, skilled, resourceful mountain man, who worked hard as a fur trapper. He travelled only on foot or his home-made skis (equipped with pine marten climbing skins for trekking uphill) until he brought the pack animals back in the spring to haul out his winter accumulation of furs. His huge territory covered most of the watershed of the South Fork of the Kings River, spanning 50 miles from his Crowley Canyon compound to his cabins in Upper Basin, and ranging in elevation from 4,600 feet to over 12,000. Unless the weather was too extreme, he was out every day, traveling over steep, trackless, rugged terrain, setting his traps, checking them regularly, killing and skinning the animals he caught, processing their pelts, watching for treacherous ice or snow, wary of avalanches, falling rocks and trees, and sudden storms.
   Only once did the mountains almost beat him. One winter in the 1930s, a falling tree crashed into his Granite Pass cabin, caught fire, and burned him out. Despite painful internal injuries, Shorty had to reach shelter before nightfall. Gradually he moved from cabin to cabin, covering almost 50 miles back to his Crowley Canyon headquarters. A snow survey crew, finding him there in March, still in bad shape, offered to take him out of the mountains, but Shorty refused. When the snow melted, he walked out alone.
Shorty continued his annual schedule by selling his pelts in the spring, in Visalia or San Francisco. He earned up to $2,000 a year for his furs (fisher furs averaged about $45 each, wolverines $25 to $30, and martens about $15), when most California trappers reported making about $160. After giving his brother enough money to cover his re-stocking costs in the fall, Shorty spent his summers blowing most of his earnings on binge drinking, but also, when sober, working on his shelters in the mountains and on odd jobs in the valley, and visiting his extended family at various gatherings, where he was especially a much-loved uncle of the children.    A letter was waiting for Shorty when he came out of the mountains in the spring of 1940. It said that Kings Canyon National Park had been established on March 4. Encompassing virtually all of Shorty's trapping range, the park did not allow hunting or trapping. Shorty, age 54, knew what he had to do. Within just a few years, he completed a new layout of traplines and shelters north of the new national park, on the watershed of the North Fork of the Kings in the Sierra National Forest. He worked his new territory for another 20 years, until, at age 75, he brought his winter harvest down from the mountains for the last time.
   Shorty died two years later, in 1963, but at least two of his structures survive. In the 1970s, and again in 2012, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks restored his Cloud Canyon and Vidette Meadow cabins (the latter just north of the Tulare County line). Visitors can duck under their low doorways and imagine spending 15-hour nights there under 10 feet of snow with only a candle and an old magazine for company and a little fire for warmth after working traplines alone in the wilderness all day. As one visitor remarked, "Shorty must have been one tough, savvy woodsman." While our time spent in the high Sierra is different in many ways from Shorty's, these magnificent mountains are still a haven of solitude, respite, peace, beauty, and adventure for us all.
    November, 2020
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Maps, Directions, and Site Details:
Click to enlarge detail map
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The Historic District comprises nine sites in Kings Canyon N.P. where remains of Shorty's shelters could still be seen in 1978 when the District was listed on the NRHP. The sites are accessible only by foot/stock trail. Wilderness Permits are required for all overnight trips.
By 1978, only the cabins at Vidette Meadow and Cloud Canyon were sufficiently intact to allow for structural preservation. The other sites are near Woods Creek Crossing, Granite Pass, Gardiner Basin, Bubbs Creek, Sphinx Creek, Crowley Canyon, and Williams Meadow. "[S]ufficient . . . sites remain to document in rare detail the operative patterns of an alpine fur trapping circuit. . . . {T]his [may be] the only such opportunity present within the national park system." -- NRHP Nomination Form The most-visited of Shorty's cabins in Kings Canyon N.P. is near Vidette Meadow, just north of the Tulare County line. It can be reached via the Bubbs Creek Trail out of Hwy 180 Road's End, a few miles east of Cedar Grove in the bottom of Kings Canyon. At the junction of the Bubbs Creek Trail with the John Muir Trail, go south a short distance on the John Muir to the area of the bear box campsite and the junction with the Vidette Lakes Trail. This cabin can also be reached via the Onion Valley Trailhead off Hwy 395 on the east side of the Sierra. 
Looking southwest from West Vidette
Shorty's cabin in Cloud Canyon can be reached from Lodgepole in Sequoia N.P. via the Twin Lakes Trail, which quickly enters Kings Canyon N.P., then via the Sugarloaf Trail to the locale of the Roaring River Ranger Station and up Cloud Canyon on the Colby Pass Trail about 6 miles to the area of the cabin. This cabin can also be reached from the Rowell Meadow trailhead in Giant Sequoia National Monument. Follow this trail to Comanche Meadow and then take the Sugarloaf Trail to the Roaring River Ranger Station and up Cloud Canyon on the Colby Pass Trail to the area of the cabin.
Looking up Cloud Canyon to Whaleback. Shorty's cabin is in trees.
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Environment: Mountains, meadows, elevation varies, Kings Canyon National Park
Activities: architecture study, backpacking, birding, camping (near several of the sites), fishing (license required), hiking, history, photography, wildlife viewing (NOTE: the structures, ruins, and sites of Shorty's shelters can be visited only by foot or stock trail.)
Open: Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks are always open, weather permitting, unless closed due to emergency conditions; park entrance fee; Wilderness Permit required for all overnight trips
Site Steward: National Park Service-Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks; 559-565-3341; www.nps.gov/seki
Opportunities for Involvement: Sequoia Parks Conservancy (SPC) membership, donate, volunteer
Links: National Register of Historic Places documentation, https://www.nps.gov/seki/planyourvisit/wilderness_permits.htm
Books: 1) Shorty Lovelace, Kings Canyon Fur Trapper, by William Tweed (Sequoia Natural History Association, 1980, 2007)
2) A Branch of the Sky, Fifty Years of Adventure, Tragedy, & Restoration in the Sierra Nevada, by Steve Sorensen (Picacho, 2018)
Photos for this article by: Thor Riksheim; and courtesy of cascadeclimbers.com, city-of-san-gabriel, Corey Hayes, Moose Henderson, debbie-bulger-climber.org reports, dignity-memorial, Don Paulson, Leor Pantilat, Kathleen McCleary, pbs.org/Gianna Savoie@WNET.org, pinterest, Ben Hogan of ManyStepsMakeMountains.com, summitpost.org, Tim Gage, Tulare County Library, Annie R. Mitchell History Room, Victor Blakey Fine Art, U.S. Forest Service, wenthiking.com, Zac Just, and Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks Archives