“Bidwell Park: Personal Reflections And Casual Conversations About Chico’s Crown Jewel”

After he and partner Kate Roark moved to Chico in 2016, environmental educator Paul Belz looked for a memorial to the Hooker Oak’s collapse on May 1, 1977. 

“I only found a small stone structure with a metal plaque describing the Hooker Oak. Cars zipped past on busy Manzanita Avenue….. I wondered how many people remembered the great tree. Is it a ghost only rooted in a few peoples’ memories? If people forget about Hooker Oak, I fear they can also forget how important Bidwell Park is.”

Chicoans must never take the park for granted. And so, undertaking a years-long writing project, including three dozen interviews with those who love the park and a deep dive into the Bidwell Park and Playground Commission minutes from 1918 to the present, Belz has produced an enticing invitation to consider forces shaping the park.

“Bidwell Park: Personal Reflections And Casual Conversations About Chico’s Crown Jewel” ($19.95 in paperback from ANCHR, the Association for Northern California Historical Research, anchr.org) is an extraordinary and nuanced guide to 3670 square acres and their management.

After detailing park history, Belz considers “many visions for the park.” “Reader, let’s imagine going for a hike that begins in wild Upper Park. We follow Big Chico Creek through the more developed Middle Park, ending near downtown Chico in Lower Park. I show you places involved in some of Chico’s most contentious debates about the park.”

The key question looms over every chapter: “Does the park exist so people can have recreation, or should it be more of a nature preserve?”

Belz explains why a freeway crosses the park, considers Horseshoe Lake and guns, golf and beer, invasive plants, park volunteers, budgets, children’s education, homeless encampments, and the importance of remembering “that this is Mechoopda Maidu land and that tribal members see it as part of their home and their cultural heritage.”

As Belz and Roark hike the Yahi Trail in mid-May 2019, “Kate and I hadn’t seen many of the butterflies this spring, and we were excited to discover how many caterpillars had survived.” 

How to ensure the park itself survives? “One does what one can.”

“Before Ishi: The Life And Death Of The Yahi”

For decades, longtime Chico Enterprise-Record reporter Steve Schoonover, aided by his wife and fellow reporter Laura Urseny, have been in search of Ishi’s heritage and the fate of his people, the Yahi. They “backpacked in 1995 from the Sacramento Valley floor near Red Bluff to Childs Meadow, in a bid to replicate the Yahi annual migration.” 

Schoonover’s dogged investigation of the historical record challenges claims made in books about Ishi, and paints a nuanced picture of gruesome violence against native populations in the mid-1800s in Butte, Tehama, and Shasta counties.

“Before Ishi: The Life And Death Of The Yahi” ($24.95 in paperback from Stansbury Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle) is available at Made in Chico, the Bookstore downtown, at the Chico History Museum, and at beforeishi.online. 

Schoonover bursts the “Ishi myth,” that he was starving, that he and the Yahi were part of the Mill Creek Indians, “the last survivor of a tribe that had terrorized Northern California for years.” Wrong.

The book focuses on the life of the Yahi and surrounding tribes, and the coming of white settlers. California, Schoonover writes, “wanted the natives out of the way and had the authority to use gunpowder….” By contrast, federal troops called in to “protect the settlers from Indian depredations” often “discovered it was the Indians who needed the protection more than the settlers.”

By 1867 “the organized carnage” in the three counties ended. Some fifteen whites died in the preceding six years;  the Indian death toll was more than a thousand “if you add in those who died of malaria in 1863 at the camp on John Bidwell’s ranch in Chico, and on the forced march from there to Nome Cult.” Most of the Yahi had been killed.

“It’s important to understand,” Schoonover concludes, “what your predecessors and ours did to those who lived where you and I now live, in order to claim the land for ourselves.” His is the most piercing book you will ever read about the ghosts that haunt us still.

Schoonover will present at the Chico History Museum, at 10:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., on Saturday, May 25. For ticket availability visit chicohistorymuseum.org/event-5737721.

“Gam Gam, Am I Mixed?”

For longtime Chicoan Mollie Openshaw, entrepreneur and Butte College vocational nursing instructor, her young granddaughter Bellahrainee sparked something deep within, an honoring of “the richness of cultural diversity.”

That led to a partnership with Chico artist Linda Phelps to publish a children’s book that “encourages children to celebrate the tapestry of their own identities and unique characteristics.” A grandmother’s love comes through mightily in “Gam Gam, Am I Mixed?: Promoting K.I.D; Kindness, Inclusion, and Diversity” ($29.99 in paperback from FMG Press in Chico, amimixed.com; also for Amazon Kindle).

That love is expressed in Phelps’ full-color artwork on each page, blending whimsical paintings of Chico places (like Caper Acres, Made In Chico, and Shubert’s) with photographs of Mollie, Bellahrainee, and many other children. Each page, in “find Waldo” fashion, contains Dot the ladybug (for Kindness), Buzzy bee (for Inclusion) and Flutter the butterfly (for Diversity).

When the book is opened, each left-hand page contains the question “Gam Gam, Am I Mixed?” with Gam Gam’s response on each right-hand page. Here are some of the answers:

“Yes you are my darling, you are mixed with anything you want to be and with lots of gumption”; “… you are mixed with imagination and wonder”; “… you are mixed with equality and acceptance.”

The foreword is by Alan Floyd, “the former head of global touring operations for Beyoncé” and “son of Eddie Floyd, one of the leading voices of the 60s and 70’s era of soul and of rhythm and blues….” “As we immerse ourselves in the pages of this book,” Floyd writes, “let us be reminded that our diversity is our collective strength. Each one of us is like a puzzle piece, and together, we create a more complete and harmonious picture of humanity.”

From the book’s webpage, ladybug Dot reminds readers to practice the Golden Rule, “being considerate and generous,” and that “Kindness makes our hearts shine!” Buzzy the bee says “no one is left out” and “everyone is included.” And Flutter the butterfly emphasizes “things that make us special and unique” and “Beautiful differences in language, abilities, skin color, religion and more!”

Though the book is for children, it's not just K.I.D. stuff.

“The Jefferson State Rebellion: A Story Of Northern California’s Past, Present, And Future”

The time is just a few years into our future. A California mega-drought has returned. Two friends, meeting at the Lopez family ranch west of Gridley, are plotting. “After years of bitching and occasional bouts of heavy drinking, Dan and Eddie developed a bold plan they called the Jefferson State Rebellion. Dan was the big picture guy. Eddie’s role was tactical. Twelve hours earlier, the rollout of the initial phase of the rebellion had begun in the halls of the state capitol.”

The rollout, on Valentine’s Day, is when Democratic State Senator and Glenn County rancher AJ Donelson, relaxing with his wife Rachel at home, hears from chief of staff Andrei Volkov. There is trouble brewing at the upcoming water hearing AJ is set to chair. Andrei has been visited by “six men dressed in black and grey camouflage wearing combat boots and berets,” and they want no water compromise with the South State. 

At the same time, a Republican kingmaker from the South State pressures AJ to cut a deal to transfer more water, turn Republican, and in return get backing for a Congressional run. To top it off, the head of the DWR is about to sell out the North State.

AJ will be severely tested, in both body and soul, as he becomes enmeshed in the murderous violence of “The Jefferson State Rebellion: A Story Of Northern California’s Past, Present, And Future” ($15.95 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) by Robert M. Jackson, professor emeritus of political science and past dean of the School of Graduate, International, and Sponsored Programs at Chico State. 

Politically complex and deeply human, the book is just stunning. The North State becomes a character in the story, from a heist of explosives in Chico, to meetings with a reporter at Action News Now, to a bloody encounter at an abandoned barn in Colusa County. In Jackson’s telling, the push for a 51st state of Jefferson becomes deadly serious. 

Dan tells the reporter, “Jefferson will be able to defend our water resources…. We have a right to chart our own destiny.”

But at what cost?