Sierra legend Wolfe’s cabin imperiled?

Recent work at the Monte Wolfe cabin in Amador County could expose it to weather damage. Courtesy photo/Schimke Family Collection

A group of volunteers sent by the wilderness resource manager at the Amador Ranger District of the U.S. Forest Service removed the cabin’s door and stovepipe Oct. 26, exposing the 1930s-era structure to the elements and sparking a firestorm of outcry.
   

Devotees of the convicted robber, hardy outdoorsman and local legend were shocked.

“It was an unwarranted attack on a historic resource,” said Eric Jung, a Bear Valley real estate broker, former Alpine County supervisor and member of the Ebbetts Pass Historical Association.

“It was an illegal act,” said Jim Linford, an officer of the Monte Wolfe Foundation  whose grandfather, James, was a friend of Wolfe’s.

District ranger Doug Barber, who said he did not authorize the action, agreed.

“We goofed,” he said.

Barber said the cabin has been identified since the 1980s as potentially eligible for the National Historic Register. As a result, the 2000 Mokelumne Wilderness Management Plan directed that a management plan be put together for the cabin.

The cabin could still be demolished or allowed to deteriorate, despite its status, but a plan was needed. However, no plan was put together prior to the October trip, he said.

And now, with winter snows already falling, one of the last physical monuments to Wolfe is left with two gaping holes.

Wolfe built the cabin between 1933 and 1934, more than a decade after he came to the area as a wanted man, according to Don De Young, a Walnut Creek resident and author of the biography, “Monte Wolfe: Lone Wolf of the Sierra.”

Wolfe began his time in the area around 1918, working for rancher Charles Tryon under the name Ed McGrath as a cowboy, lumberjack and miner.

Not that either was his real name. In the course of research for his book, De Young discovered the legendary mountain man’s true name was Archey Wright, but he had abandoned that name, along with a wife and four children, after leaving his family for unexplained reasons earlier in the decade.

But by 1921, following an accusation that he had ransacked a cabin in the area that ended with him pointing a rifle at a local constable, Wright was on the run. He fled to the north of the Mokelumne River, where he became Monte Wolfe.

His exile lasted only until 1927, when Wolfe was captured by the Tuolumne County sheriff for a rap sheet of dubious charges that, perhaps with the help of the yellow journalists of the day, had grown quite long.

Yet his profusion of names proved quite hopeful. Lacking evidence to charge him with any of the crimes attributed to Wolfe, they charged Wright — who had served time in Folsom prison for robbery — with being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm, according to De Young.
 The jury acquitted him in half an hour.

“The citizens of Sonora had Monte Wolfe in their hands and they knew it, and they decided to let him go,” he said.

Then it was back to the woods for Wolfe. “He pretty much spent the rest of his life up on Ebbetts Pass,” De Young said.

During that time, his reputed feats of strength, reputation as a ladies man and, above all, talent for surviving the region’s epic winters would make his legend as tall as the mountains where he made his home. His mysterious disappearance in 1940 — his body was never found — only heightened the myth.

Barber summarizes: “He was a guy who was living ‘off the grid,’ before we talked about the grid.” Indeed, before a grid even existed.

For now, Barber said the district aims to visit the cabin to repair the damage as soon as possible, but the cabin’s remote location — between Salt Springs Reservoir and Hermit Valley in the Mokelumne Wilderness — will make that a tough task this time of year.

That would be a starting point for a meeting between cabin supporters and district staff — which both sides have expressed interest in — said Linford. But trust issues remain.

“The sense that many people have is that the Forest Service was trying to pull a quick one,” he said. “Which is something that is really quite distressing.”

De Young said the late fall visit by the wilderness workers is indicative of two splits.

One is between district workers committed on wilderness and those dedicated to archaeological values. The other is between Highway 4, where Wolfe’s legend is well known, and Highway 88, where De Young said it is much less robust.

There is also the matter of the foundation’s own agreement with the Forest Service.

The Linford family maintained and used the cabin under an informal agreement with the Forest Service from 1940, when Wolfe disappeared, until 1962, when James Linford signed a new contract that was written to expire upon his death, according to Barber.

But after that came in the early 80s, maintenance by the family continued. “It was basically an understood thing,” he said.

In 1997, a new agreement was inked with the recently formed Monte Wolfe Foundation.

Whether the new agreement specifies the cabin should be kept in a state of “arrested decay” (as some cabin supporters claim), or requires that the Forest Service be notified prior to maintenance trips (as Barber believes) is unclear.

It may be that the formal letter of the agreement was, under previous district staff, not so important.

“When Dave Hunt was archaeologist,” said Linford, “everyone agreed they could maintain the cabin how it was when Monte Wolfe was there.”

Another consideration is a 2006 U.S. District Court decision that, according to the U.S. Forest Service’s legal staff, determined that structures in designated wilderness areas cannot be maintained, which would spell a slow, but certain end for the cabin.

But the first order of business is to get the cabin fixed up to survive the winter, say De Young, Linford and others. Otherwise, it might not survive the winter.
 

“The objective is to save the cabin, and nothing else matters,” said De Young.