His old Stetson pulled hard down just above the eyes in his weather-lined face, Frank took a stick and drew three circles in the sandy soil on the edge of our greasewood campfire -- its low, dancing flames keeping at bay the chilly winter cold of that semi-desert Arizona night.
"Lenin saw it this way," he told me. "These are the things that strangle the people. Capitalism. Government. Church." And he then drew a complex of intricate, interactive lines between and around the Circles. And, just a few yards to the west of us, we could hear in its little gorge the rushing water of the Verde River, just joined by Sycamore Creek which came down from the north out of that massive, splendid and vasty wilderness area called Sycamore Canyon -- my own great traditional hunting region. And only a few miles to our west loomed Mingus Mountain on which blinked the lights of the old copper camp of Jerome. Now -- with the ore just played out -- it was headed toward ghost and artist town status. But it was once the hell-blasting scene of legendary Wobbly and then other class war struggles -- some of which went well into my own Teen years. I was a young Native -- 18 -- when that campfire burned on the Verde that winter night. And I got a very thorough lesson in class struggle ideology -- not from a college prof-type in a suit -- but from a Levi-clad cowpuncher turned artist because of a back broken from a horse throw. He was, of course, a great deal more than that. Born in 1913 in upstate New York, his father a construction engineer who later did contract work in the developing USSR, Frank Dolphin had briefly attended Syracuse University and then went with his parents to live in a small town in Southern Arizona. While his father worked abroad in the Red East, Frank drifted into California, labored in the "Factories in the Fields," became a militant and Left farm workers' organizer during the great waves of Red strikes in the Imperial Valley and the San Joaquin. Framed up on a murder charge, he left California, went into the Teton Basin country of Wyoming, established a small ranch, married and had a couple of kids -- boys. Sometimes things -- even things in as beautiful a setting as the Tetons -- just don't work out. The War was coming on fast. Pearl Harbor was still to occur but Canada was now fully embroiled. Frank joined the RCAF, rose to the rank of First Lieutenant, serving in the New Hebrides. After the War, he drifted back into Arizona, working for various cow outfits in the northern part of the state. And then he was thrown by a spooky horse. And he broke his back. He never rode again. For awhile he worked as a cow camp cook -- a major and very important vocation. But even that was tough. Horses and wagon, rough country, long hours, heavy weather. In time, he came to my home town of Flagstaff. There he became an art student of my father -- who was the first Native hired as a professor at Arizona State College. And Frank was, even then, a damn good artist. That's when we joined forces. For my part, I was entering a Critical Transition. I was very much -- as a friendly and complimentary reference on my behalf later given the Army by a top U.S. Forest Service official said -- "a nature boy." I spent a lot of time in the woods -- as much as I could -- and had ever since I could button my Levis and pull on my engineer's boots. My parents were permissive but grade school and high school were, to me, prisons -- and some teachers and all administrators seemed to see me as one of the guys for whom God had especially designed punishment. My best high school memories were not classes. They were our match-winning, champion rifle club -- of which I served as president -- and our very wide-ranging hiking club. In each case, the faculty sponsor was an effective teacher -- and eminently kind -- and a friend. In the woods -- and as the years passed I went into ever more rugged and remote areas -- I could be my own person. I was always hunting, sometimes trapping. Claiming to be the legal Federal work age of 18, even as I was actually some years younger, I worked very capably indeed over several consecutive seasons for the Coconino National Forest as a firefighter and as a remote fire lookout/radio man. Early on in forest fire fighting, I saw, first-hand, virulent anti-Black hate and violence in a fire camp -- and years later I wrote an award-winning short story about that, "The Destroyers." But in other such camp settings, coming in from the fire lines to eat and drink coffee and catch some sleep, I heard talk -- very interesting talk -- about the work situations in the nearby metal mines and lumber camps. Favorable talk about militant unions, like the old Wobblies, and some of the newer radical ones. Things -- Big Things for me -- were happening. Flagstaff, a rough and racist mountain town bordering Indian Country, was being challenged on the human rights front by my parents and others of conscience in a very tough crusade. And that effective and long-enduring struggle included people from all Native tribes of the general region and other ethnicities as well. There was a new War -- and a Red Scare. There was a lot of talk about "Communism." In the final semester of my final year of high school, our English teacher, essentially a nice guy, brought men from the American Legion to our class to warn us about That. We were told It was in the unions -- and that It was also, through something called the American Friends Service Committee, trying to agitate the Navajos in our very own setting. I grinned on that one. The young AFSC couple, Quakers starting work in the vast and very adjacent Navajoland, were living temporarily -- at that precise moment -- in our house on the far edge of Flagstaff. There, they were meeting many Navajo leaders. They also met other activists such as Chicano leaders -- and, too, Wilson Riles, principal of the small Black elementary school, whose graduates then went into the fully integrated Flagstaff junior high and high school complex. I was at virtually the end of high school when I read a copy of The Communist Manifesto that an older academic friend of our family lent me at my request from his own vast library. I was surprised at how it stirred my blood, planting seeds for sure. So too and very much did Granville Hicks' excellent biography of Jack Reed stir and plant, that next fall when I started in as a freshman at my hometown Arizona State. [John Reed: The Making of a Revolutionary, Macmillan, 1936.] Mother had suggested I hunt up and read that one. The old Anglo Mississippi-born lady who was college librarian looked suspiciously at the book and then at me. But I was an Indian and so was Dad who, of course, was a professor as well -- and she said nothing, at least not to any of us. The book had not been checked out since 1938. And then, in due course, Frank came into the picture as an older student of Dad's. And he arrived just before I completed my young life-long Mission: to kill a very, very large bear. That was mandated from almost the Hatch onward. It didn't come easily. It took a super long time indeed to accomplish. And then, one warm October mid-day, well off-any-road and far, far down into the huge and remote and heavily forested western slope of the Sycamore Canyon wilderness, I came to a rare wonderful spring of pure water emanating from the rocks in an aspen grove. Flowing in a small stream two hundred yards down a leisurely slope through the yellow pines and scrub oak and even some red maples, it culminated in a kind of level clearing -- a "park" as we call it in the Southwest -- which was about 20 yards across. There the water gathered, surrounded by and mixed with green grass. And there in the mud I saw the many fresh tracks of a huge black bear. And so, under a scrub oak tree, surrounded by its fallen acorns mixing with old needles from the pines, I waited. Hour after hour deeply into the late afternoon. My 30/30 Winchester lever action with the long octagon barrel and the curved metal buttplate leaned against a low oak limb, right handy. And then, looking once again at my Hamilton wrist watch -- the high school graduation gift from my folks -- I saw that it said 5:10 p.m. And I looked up, across the clearing. And there It was. It was a huge black bear, a male, walking smoothly on its fours just inside the timber along the edge of the clearing, its massively long arms reaching full out and moving back and then forward again in easy, flowing graceful coordination with its huge back legs. Still seated, I cocked my 30/30 rifle, aimed and fired. The bear, not mortally hit, turned and ran directly away from me. Standing tall, I now fired by pure instinct -- one of my best shots ever -- hitting It in the back area. It turned, snarling and pawing, and I fired five more shots into It. I had killed it. A huge bear. I was now a Full Man. The sun was dipping far down toward the western rim of the Great Canyon as I cut the throat of the bear and drained the blood, then gutted him. Propping the body cavity open with sticks in order to quickly cool the meat, I also covered the area with my sweat-stained and human-odorous shirt in order to discourage any scavenging critters from getting too close. Then, literally covered with the Red Blood of the Bear, I climbed out of the Canyon in the darkness and, eventually reaching my vehicle, made it back to Flagstaff on the remote woods roads. It was very late. But my parents were fully as pleased as I. My father and I and one of my two younger brothers -- and Frank -- left very early the next morning with bedrolls and three day's rations for Sycamore and the Bear. It took Dad and I several trips and every bit of those three days for us to get all of the bear meat -- in several huge hunks -- out of the super steep Canyon. Green blow flies laid maggot eggs in the bloody hide and we had to abandon that -- save for several furry strips which I cut off. During this back-breaking struggle -- hundreds of pounds of meat from the huge bear whose live weight was estimated as being at least 650 pounds -- Frank cooked for us, assisted by my little brother. And that's where I got to know Frank Dolphin well. And he certainly came to know me. After that, a lot happened fast in my life. Frank told me many things -- radical and militant organizing accounts and sagas and organizations and movements. On things like Wobblies and Communists he had some pithy advice. "You ride one horse," he told me, "and, when it goes down, you find another and ride it. Keep going always, full ahead." It wasn't all Revolution and such. One hilarious account involved his spending six weeks in a brothel at Elko, Nevada painting appropriate murals on every wall. During that extensive, strenuous period, in which all his needs were attended to much more than adequately, he never "saw the light of outside day -- neither the sun nor moon." Even at the time of the campfire on the Verde, the Army loomed in my future. Still 18, I finally volunteered. Before I left, Frank carefully painted an excellent oil portrait of me -- seated and wearing my Levi jacket -- and caught so very well the stubborn Native nuances in my still-searching face. "This is for your family," he said, " Especially for your mother." Pausing, he then he went on, "in case something should ever happen." Again he momentarily hesitated, "If or whenever." He was a realist but I've been lucky. When I came out of the Army, an epoch later, with an honorable release from a full stint of active duty, much indeed had flowed together in an irreversibly committed River of No Return, I was a Red. And I've been one ever since. I went on to many, many radical social justice activist things all around the Land. And I saw Frank, who kept on painting fine stuff, over the many years to come. In various news media, he sometimes saw me in all sorts of colorful and strenuously challenging situations -- and he also heard all sorts of accounts from my family. And he had no hesitation about telegraphing me once from a Montana jail for funds to pay a large fine for whatever Sin -- and I sent it all and more by return wire. Frank died in early 1973 at a wide place in the road called Dolan Springs -- far out yonder in extreme Northwestern Arizona and close to the Nevada border. The oil painting he did of the earnest 18 year old Native who was struggling so hard to find his bearings in the high winds turbulence of the very early '50s hangs now from the wall of our Idaho living room. And it's on our very large social justice website, Lair of Hunterbear http://www.hunterbear.org/this_oil_painting_of_me_was_done.htm All of the bear meat -- rich and strong -- every single bite of it, was eaten by my family and close friends over several years. When I returned from the Army, I resumed my eating. It lasted for a very long time. And His skull, with feathers attached and the salvaged strips of furry hide dangling, hangs always wherever I am. It looks down from my wall, right here in Idaho. It looks at Frank Little, Cherokee Indian, and Wobbly martyr lynched at Butte by the copper boss thugs in 1917. It gazes at a photo of Jack Reed at his typewriter. It looks at a sketch my father gave me in my baby crib of the Mohawk leader, Joseph Brant [ Thayendanegea] burning out the Anglo settlers in up-state New York in the 1770s. And the Skull sees a bust of Lenin -- and his 45 volumes. And sitting right alongside those great works are several splendid books from my special Saint, Ignatius of Loyola -- founder of the Jesuits. They all look at the Essence of the Bear -- the Skull. And They all go together. All of Them. Now and then, I can close my eyes and smell the greasewood fire and hear the Verde in its gorge. For a moment, I see the creased and friendly face under the old Stetson. And then, as I Fight On, I draw three circles in the dust and sand. Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] www.hunterbear.org (strawberry socialism) Protected by NaŽshdoŽiŽbaŽiŽ _______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
