Thursday morning at 4:45 a freight left Ashland with 4 engines, 3 pulling and one pushing, for Dinsmere [Dunsmuir], we’re 4125 ft above sea level. While the train was standing on a trussle 100 ft. high on top of those mts. the brakeman came around & collected his fee. He ask us if we had any money & I told him we had 2 bits & he said that “that is no good to me.” He wanted a dollar to pass us to Dinsmere. I gave him 95¢ & he dropped a dime which went 100 ft. below. Well, we sped on & in about 10 or 15 minutes we were dropped from the height of 4125 to 2000 ft. While on our road we met a party & stopped to find out what the matter was. A man, the assistant civil engineer of the S.P. R.R. had been dumped off his handcar & his head was cut off. It was the work of a train that did this work. Well, we finally got to Dinsmere at 7:00. We ate supper & bought a ticket for Castella. Got to Castella & walked to Conants Spur, [about] 2 miles from Castella where Callie lives. We got to Callies about 9:30 which ended our cruise on the S.P.R.R. While in Densmere the Conductor said to me, there is a bundle of blankets on a car of lumber, go get them. I made the bum leave them. After I got them, he said “pay me 4 bits or you dont get them.” So I gave him 4 bits. While at the hotel eating supper the conductor & his crew all came in & the conductor said “look a there” for he beheld the bums that he had packed for more than a hundred miles over the Calif. Mts. While I didn’t like this kind of riding, we saw & learned more on this cruise on the S.P.R.R. than we would on a dozen trips on a passenger train. Thus ends my first cruise on the S.P. & also my last cruise on any R.R. It only cost us $1.70 on the R.R. from Portland to Castella. The whole cost from Gate City to Callies was $10.00 for over 600 miles.
Ninety-five cents in 1901 was like $28.56 in 2019. Dropping ten cents was like dropping $3 and a penny. A “bit” is 12.5 cents, 1/8 of a dollar, or half a quarter. A dollar and seventy cents is the same as $51.11 in 2019, and $10 in 1901 has the same spending power as $300.64 in 2019.
The boys might have eaten at the Mount Shasta Hotel next to the train station. That site burned down in 1903 and was replaced by the current Hotel Weed.
After some amazing detective work from Nathan Haley, we now know that Callie is Tom Allen’s younger half-sister, Callie Minerva Johnson Smith. They share the same mother, Jesse’s Aunt Hannah Mandy Reynolds.
