HARLOW FIRE - Part -2 By this time the fire was right close to his dwellings and the power supply was all gone; what little water they had was in their tea kettles and pots. He had mowed around his place with a power mower and the grass was pretty short. I told the family I thought wed be fine and we could probably save their buildings. About this time, a herd of cattle came up out of the FRESNO RIVER to the fence with the fire right behind them. I grabbed the axe out of my pickup and cut the fence down in several places so that the cattle could get out to the road (Road 600). They disappeared towards AHWAHNEE or OAKHURST. By that time, the fire had reached several buildings; the butane tanks had caught and were whistling as the butane burned. Right next to my friends house was a horse pasture and a couple of horses. The horses just went berserk but they were in a fed off pasture and I figured they were safer there than any place else, so we just left them. We did save my friend s house and that of the woman he rented the place from. Across the street, the bus driver HOLDSCLAW had a house and there was no one there. Jim Jordan and I also saved the HOLDSCLAW house. These three houses and a couple more were all the houses left in Ahwahnee and Nipinnawasee. When I drove back towards ELLIOTTS, MECCHIS store had burned, CROOKS store had burned, and all the dwellings along the way. In all that time, I never saw a forestry vehicle in AHWAHNEE. I found out later why. The (State) Forest Service men had been down towards the CHOWCHILLA RIVER. This fire had swept over them and trapped them in the CHOWCHILLA BASIN. (U.S.) Forest Service did have a fire camp on the WORMANS property with maybe two-hundred-fifty men and vehicles. When I drove in there and told them there wasnt much left of AHWAHNEE or NIPINNAWASEE, they couldnt believe it. Bob JORDAN had a big house just past the store but it burned. There were JORDANS who lived across the Street who stayed and saved two houses. On the third day of the Harlow Fire, it was probably a quarter of a mile north of Coarsegold and extended from there north to the Fresno rive. At 9oclock in the morning a crew had been assembled by Fritz KONKLIN a forest ranger. When I showed up, he asked if I would fire a bulldozer line to the line to the Fresno River with a torch. He sent along a Mexican boy named Porfino Porfy GARCIA to help. There was a local man, Enos SHAUBACH with a bulldozer and he started building a line from where the highway and the fire met above COARSEGOLD to the north, toward the Fresno River. We fired this line with a method used many times by local firefighters. We set the first fire well inside from the dozer line; then Porfy came along right at the fireline, setting backfires as fast as he could walk. It took about an hour and a half; we fired this line clear to the FRESNO RIVER. Fritz and the crews came along behind to see that there were no spots or slop-over fires on this line. When we got to the bluff of the FRESNO RIVER, Fritz stopped us from firing and said that Henry BOHNA, who is a COARSEGOLD resident, knew more about the area going down into the river and that he would fire that. The hope was to keep the fire on the east side of the river. We held up firing on down the fire line while Henry fired way back in the fire to pull the fire away from us. Things didnt work out just as planned as the fire crowned up through the bull pines and leaned over the FRESNO RIVER. It set fires in one-hundred places on the north side of the river! Our bulldozer man had anticipated this and had his tractor on the other side of the river. He was able, on his own, to contain the fire on the north side of the river! After that, we fired the fire line on down into the FRESNO RIVER and this contained the HARLOW FIRE on the south side towards COARSEGOLD. Excerpted from AS WE WERE TOLD A publication of the Coarsegold Historical Society, it is an oral and written history of Eastern Madera County California. It is a wonderful book and a great resource. There may still be copies available.