I naturally leapt at the opportunity to liquidate most of the contents of the home for the home's owner, a delightful retired language professor and academic dean named Valerie Masson Gomez. Valerie's great-grandparents, Ross and Mary McCloud founded an inn just outside Dunsmuir, California in 1853. Later, under the management of her grand-parents, John and Elda Masson, it would develop into the Upper Soda Springs Resort -- a magnet, for upper crust adventurers in the late 1800's.
Although the hotel closed in 1920, Elda continued to live on the grounds until her death in 1945. At that point, the many possessions the family had gathered through several generations were transferred to the family home in Dunsmuir where Valerie was raised by her parents, Charles and Marcelle Masson. When Valerie and her husband, Angel, bought the bungalow in Oakland in 1960, they brought with them the Victorian trunks that went into the attic as well as the ornate, hotel safe that went into the garage.
Inside one of those trunks, I discovered a shoebox that contained a number of daguerreotype cases circa 1870 with slips of paper tucked inside identifying the subjects. Four were of William Gladstone Steel's family including this one of his mother and sister. These four dags are now in the collection of the Crater Lake Museum where W. G. Steel is honored as "the father of Crater Lake National Park" as well as its second superintendent. I was astounded to find that one of the cases was the repository of the two locks of John Brown's hair inscribed to W. G. Steel by Salmon Brown, the tenth of John Brown's twenty children. Salmon lived in Northern California and later settled in Portland where he is buried in the Grand Army of the Republic cemetery.
An online internet search quickly established a link between Steel and the Browns. The following quote is excerpted from the August 31, 1911 entry in the Crater Lakes Special Events Log:
"Will Steel makes a journey to his boyhood home of Stafford, Ohio where he tours the old Steel family home. Since his family had been heavily involved as abolitionists in the Underground Railroad in Ohio, one could still view the four secret panels and the tunnel that connected to the Steel store. Will corresponded with several of John Brown's children for a number of years."
It may be a coincidence but the presentation date, February 22, 1897, is the day President Grover Cleveland proclaimed the Olympic Forest Preserve that would later become Olympic National Park. Steel had done extensive surveys in Washington state and, as the Northwest's version of John Muir, had undoubtedly lobbied heavily for this measure. Conceivably, Salmon Brown gave this treasured relic to Steel in recognition of this milestone.
How did the Steel family photographs and the John Brown locks of hair end up in the Massons' possession? It's unlikely we'll ever know for sure, but there is the geographical proximity: Dunsmuir is only 50 miles from Crater Lake. There were also shared interests: both operated resort hotels that catered to a very discriminating clientele and both were avid mountaineers.
In addition, there's an intangible factor to be considered. The McClouds and Massons were packrats to the extreme and Elda Masson, in particular, had an abiding interest in history that led her to preserve and protect objects that would otherwise have been lost to history. Viewed from that perspective, two locks of John Brown's hair in the family attic seems no more implausible than a cabinet from the Mission Inn in the same location or a 125 year-old, 750 pound hotel safe tucked into the garage.
