Carroll Howe

How was Rocky Point developed? Was it initiated by the Harriman Lodge?

I think Flyshacker and Sam Johnson developed the Harriman Lodge. That’s S.O. Johnson right there, I think. They came here after the railroad and there’s a whole chapter on Harriman Lodge.

They were the ones that controlled the steamers that went across the lake from Klamath Falls to Rocky Point.

Did they? They tried to get the railroad, the street car. But somebody else got it, and so they got these-the automobile was being invented then. And the street car went out of business…that’s Becky Johnson. She’s still alive.

 What led to the establishment of Kirk, Oregon?

I know something about Kirk. It was the end of the railroad. Do you get the Klamath newspaper?

Occasionally.

There will be a special issue come out. And I took a picture up there. It’s [Kirk] where the Southern Pacific Railroad ended and the logging railroads took off. In those days, railroad logging was the big thing.

In the teens, when they went and took a lot of that pine out of there.

Yes. There were four or five companies that did railroad logging. Algoma had a road come right over the rim up there. An engineer developed a technique whereby the loaded car coming down on a cable would pull the other car up. They had it wrapped around a pulley or something. I’ve seen them letting logs down and pulling cars up with the other one.

That must have been how they did it on steep grades.

They had a locomotive called a Shay, and it was a gear driven deal rather than the type you see now. They had those Shays, and there is a picture, in this special edition, of a Shay at Kirk, operated by a man named O’Calligan. He was later killed out at Bly. This old Shay was slow, but it was gear-driven and it would go up a much steeper grade than an ordinary locomotive. And of course, logs always go downhill. There’s no money pulling logs uphill.