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September 21, 2005
Baskets weave families together forever
By ROBIN FLINCHUM
Between them, the two sisters were packing and organizing Rook's belongings, gathered over more than 60 years of living in the house her husband built of railroad ties in the 1940s. Approaching 90 and matriarch of a large and close-knit family, Rook had become the conservator of family memories and heirlooms, with boxes packed full of them in every spare corner of the house. But this particular box took Huff by surprise. During a special ceremony at China Ranch in Tecopa on Saturday, she explained why. Mary Huff was maybe ten or 12 years old when her and Stella's oldest, married sister, Nona Proctor Rosenberg, came home for a visit bringing a treasure Mary would never forget. At the family's desert service station in Cronese, on the old highway between Barstow and Los Angeles, Mary remembers Nona's eyes lighting up when she showed her mother a small, tightly woven Indian basket. "They were both so thrilled about it that it really impressed me," Huff recalled, "and I still remember it to this day." Both women handled the basket with such awe and admiration, Huff said, that she knew it was something special. In the early 1930s Nona Rosenberg lived in a boxcar that traveled up and down the tracks of the Tonopah & Tidewater Railroad between Beatty and Ludlow, Calif. Nona's husband, Harry Rosenberg, was the foreman of the railroad bridge crew and it was his job to keep the tracks shored up under the train. The couple's life revolved around the railroad, and their friends were found among the people who inhabited the small towns along the line such as Shoshone, Baker, and Death Valley Junction. In Shoshone, Nona forged a friendship with a Paiute Indian woman named Julia Weed Ross, who lived in a small house there with her two children, George and Stella. Ross was born near Pahrump in 1894 and had lived in or around Shoshone all her life. Her mother had been a basket maker and Ross, whose husband died in a Nevada silver mine while the children were still young, carried on the tradition. It was Julia Ross who carefully crafted the small, decorative basket and gave it to Rosenberg as a gift. "Nonie told Mother that Julia had apologized for the basket being so small, but Nonie was so excited and couldn't have been happier with it," Huff said. Nona Rosenberg had taken a deep interest in the local Paiute and Shoshone people, and had begun collecting arrowheads and other artifacts she and her husband gathered in the desert while they explored together in his off hours. She even planned to collect and preserve other examples of local American Indian baskets. But Rosenberg's plans were cut short when she died at age 30 from a lung abscess, leaving her family, including two small boys, desolate without her. Huff was about 15 when Rosenberg died and was devastated by the loss of her brilliant and beautiful oldest sister. "I often thought about that basket over the years and wondered what became of it," Huff said. But she never saw it again. Harry Rosenberg remarried and as Nona's two sons, Harry, Jr., and Lloyd grew up, Mary always assumed the basket must be somewhere among them. She never expected to find it in a cardboard box under her sister Stella's bed. "I called to Stella to come look, and she was just as surprised," Huff said. "She said, 'Where did that come from?'" In amongst all the other treasures family members had stored at her place over the years, someone had lodged the basket, and another larger one presumed to have also been crafted by Ross, in Rook's spare room, and there they remained. Huff and Rook estimate that it had been at least 30 years since anyone had seen or at least recognized them for what they were. But Huff recognized the smaller of the two baskets immediately. It had faded a little, but more than 70 years later she could still vividly remember seeing it in her mother's kitchen. Since Rook was in the process of moving into her daughter's house, Huff took the baskets home with her and began to think about what to do with them. Last year, on another visit to Shoshone, Huff picked up a copy of a book called "Remembering the Early Shoshone and Tecopa Area" written by Ken Lengner and based on the memories of George Ross, Julia's son, now nearly 80 years old. The two families, the Proctor girls and the Rosses, stayed in touch as neighbors and friends over the years, and George often attends Proctor family reunions. They have known each other so long they feel like family, Huff said. But what she didn't know, and learned from reading the book, was that George could remember his mother making baskets, but that none of them had remained in his family. "I thought then that George should have these baskets back," Huff said. And she approached Ross about it. Together, they decided to hold a small ceremony to celebrate the discovery of the baskets and the friendship between their two families. But, in honor of his mother's original gift, Ross also insisted that the baskets remain with Nona Rosenberg's descendants. Cynthia Keinitz of the Old Spanish Trail Association offered to host the ceremony at China Ranch and last Saturday some 50 people gathered to watch as Mary Huff handed the two family treasures to George Ross, and then Ross in turn handed them to Nona Rosenberg's grandson, Phillip Rosenberg of Las Vegas. "I remember Mother making baskets," Ross said during the ceremony. "She would gather with other women and they would sit on their haunches while they made them, maybe to be closer to the earth." Julia Ross worked with a bowl of water beside her, he said, to keep the reeds wet, and used a small hook to work the material in and out. It was a painstaking process, he said, and "it took a really long time." Julia Ross quit making baskets when he was about 10 years old, Ross said, and he never knew why. She died in 1975, while George was living out of state, and many of her belongings were stolen from her home in Shoshone. None of her baskets remained in the family and it wasn't until Mary Huff brought the baskets to China Ranch that he ever saw them again. To see, as an adult, the results of his mother's work so many years ago was "really something," he said. At the ceremony many of those in attendance shared their memories of Julia Ross or Nona Rosenberg, recounting stories of the T&T Railroad and the Shoshone bench, where Julia and her sister Lilly often sat in the afternoons. Huff shared a scrapbook of Nona's life, including wedding photos and mementos from Nona and Harry Rosenberg's life on the T&T Railroad. Ethel Proctor Talbot, another of the five Proctor sisters, also attended and shared her memories of Tecopa and Shoshone. Nona's oldest son, Harry Rosenberg, Jr., flew in from Pennsylvania to witness the ceremony and the Proctor family held a reunion barbecue in Shoshone afterward. Once all the hoopla dies down, however, Huff and Ross have taken precautions to see to it that the baskets don't disappear again. Now under the protection of Phillip Rosenberg, the family plans to eventually donate the baskets and some of Nona Rosenberg's other artifacts to a museum facility. Currently they are evaluating several options in an effort to determine which one would provide the best preservation and access to the items. |
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