Right Place, Write Time

Local historian is the author of dozens of books about her favorite place on Earth — Yosemite.

by Flora Beach Burlingame
Fresno Bee - May 21, 2003

Author and historian Shirley Sargent has two passions -- one is writing and the other is her home at Flying Spur near Foresta, 11 miles west of Yosemite Valley in the Stanislaus Forest.
Visitors can readily understand Sargent's love for her mountain home. At an elevation of 4,600 feet, wildflowers paint the slopes lavender, purple, pink, yellow and white. A gentle breeze stirs the air -- bearing pungent scents of new growth conifers and mountain shrubbery. The view from Sargent's typewriter in her bedroom is unrivaled -- that of El Capitan and Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. "This place is a magnet," Sargent said. "I never feel truly whole away from here."

It was 1936, when she turned 9, that Sargent first discovered Yosemite. "My dad worked on the highway and we lived in a construction camp in Tuolumne Meadows. It was great; I loved it," she said. But she admits she got into trouble a lot.

"One day I lost my shoes in the water and a woman in camp said to my mom, 'Shirley is drowning.' " Her mom replied, "If she's drowning she wouldn't be yelling that much."

One of Sargent's books, "Yosemite Tomboy," portrays a young girl whose temper frequently causes her problems. When Sargent's dad read the book, he commented, "Sounds like somebody I know."

Because of her dad's employment with the Bureau of Public Roads, the family made frequent moves. Aside from Yosemite, temporary residences included construction camps at Currant Creek and Jacobs Lake, Nev., the Grand Canyon, Kings Canyon and other locations in California. Her favorite school was in Twain Hart.

"We moved 24 times in 10 or 12 years," she said, "so I went to 12 schools. The first day I would cry. The second day I would fight."

In 1941, Sargent's dad left the road job and went to work for North American Pipe, moving the family to Pasadena. While there, Sargent attended Pasadena City College and then ran a nursery school in her home.

She began creating fiction for the juvenile market. Her first book, published in 1955 by Dodd and Mead, was titled "Pipeline Down The Valley." "I was so excited," Sargent said. "They offered me a royalty of $200. In those days it seemed like a fortune."

Although Sargent lived in many different locations, the Yosemite area won her heart, influenced where she would spend many years of her life and determined the bent of most of her writing.

In 1953 she had a cabin built in Foresta, a small community just inside Yosemite park lands. Once again summers were spent in the Sierra. That same year she saw the property at Flying Spur for the first time. In place of a house stood ruins of a fireplace and chimney -- remains of a forest fire that swept through the area years before.

Originally homesteaded in 1910 by Theodore S. Solomons, the man who surveyed and mapped the John Muir Trail, the location is in her book "Solomons of the Sierra."

"Its attraction included a level, tree-thronged spur that overlooked the McCauley meadow and the canyon of the Merced River. On the west the spur was bordered by a steep, stream-threaded canyon, but sloped gently down to a green, grassy meadow on the east," she said.

By 1961, Sargent owned the property and in 1964 a house, built around the fireplace that once warmed the Solomons family, became her permanent residence.

She enjoyed living alone and often in the winter stayed isolated for weeks at a time when snow was deep. The solitude allowed her to write without interruption. Her love for Yosemite and the people who made up its past began to emerge in biographies and historical editions about the area. "Pioneers in Petticoats," "John Muir in Yosemite," "Yosemite's Historic Wawona" and "Galen Clark: Yosemite Guardian" were added to the nine fiction books she had written for children, and became but a few of her 32 published successes.

Sargent's niece, Kathy Chappell, remembers accompanying her aunt to large research libraries such as the Huntington Library in San Marino and the Bancroft Library in Berkeley.

"I was 10 to 15 years old at the time," Chappell said, "and it was really fun." She also went with Sargent to check out historical sites about which she was writing. "Accuracy has always been really important to her," Chappell said.

Sargent's insistence upon correctness and her tireless research are highly respected by her many supporters. Leroy Radanovich, a local historian and photographer who has worked with Sargent on a number of her books, called her "a competent historian who has done a very credible job of preserving the history of Yosemite for future generations. She has compiled what I consider to be a definitive body of work which in all likelihood will not be matched by anyone soon."

Longtime friend Helen Fowler said, "If it took her three weeks to get information on one point, she'd do it. She would go through old Mariposa Gazettes with a fine-tooth comb and discover things no one else had found." Fowler also admires what she calls Sargent's "upbeat attitude about things."

"She's the world's greatest optimist, no matter what her problems are," Fowler said.

This outlook on life was tested when tragedy struck in 1990. Lightning ignited a wildfire that raced through Yosemite and the adjoining Stanislaus Forest, burning 24,000 acres, including 70 homes in Foresta and the surrounding area -- Flying Spur among them. All Sargent's books and unfinished manuscripts were lost. Once again the stone chimney and fireplace stood alone against the charred hills.

"When it burned, it never occurred to me I wouldn't come back," Sargent said.

She rebuilt the house around the Solomons' fireplace, and by 1991 it was again her home. "The day after I moved in I had a big party and 143 people came," she said.

Health problems have prevented Sargent from spending as much time at Flying Spur in recent months as she would like. She is now more often in Mariposa at the home that once belonged to her parents, but not being at her beloved Flying Spur hasn't kept her from writing. "I write wherever I am. I'm still writing," she said.

Her most recent book, "Yosemite's Innkeepers," is what she calls an "old book with a face lift." It originally came out in 1975 and did well, but many changes in the park since then prompted her to update it. "I spent the last year redoing it," she said.

Her favorite of all the books she has written is "Yosemite Tomboy." When she first wrote it many years ago, it was criticized for lack of depth. "I was new at this business and didn't know what depth was," she said. "Years later I rewrote it."

Sargent's writing ambitions began as a child. "I told my mother I'm going to be a rich and famous writer," she said.

"I started my first book when I was 9 years old, and here I am -- a thousand years later."