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CHAPTER 3

A Hell of a Thing to Do: Incident at Independence High School

Norman Clyde had a bad temper. His anger could erupt at the slightest provocation, causing irrational and sometimes dangerous behavior. Former Sierra Club President Richard Leonard recalled an incident in 1930 or ’31 when Clyde and fellow mountaineer Bestor Robinson were headed for a climb in Death Valley. Robinson’s brother-in-law, Horace Breed, became impatient following the slow-paced Clyde in his car on unpaved dirt roads. Breed passed Clyde, leaving him in a cloud of dust. Clyde became so angry that he produced a revolver and was preparing to shoot Breed for his callous indiscretion. Robinson grabbed the gun away from Clyde, narrowly averting a tragedy.¹

It was not the first time that Clyde had leveled a weapon against another person. In an undated, unpublished article entitled “My Colt Woodsman,” Clyde relates a chilling tale in which he confesses to shooting another man, perhaps killing him. The introductory paragraph of the draft reads:

A hand gun of some sort, provided that its carrier is at least reasonably proficient in its use, is often a convenient [sic] and in case of emergency may even prove a lifesaver. In the mountains and deserts of the west it is rare indeed that one has any occasion to use it against persons. During a considerable number of years of roaming about over them, I have been obliged to do so only once. Had I not, however, on that occasion, a Colt Woodsman and more particularly a Colt 38-40 New Service six gun along with me, it is very difficult to know in what the incident would have culminated. It is very possible that my having a hand gun available and using it for just cause averted certain very serious results: so much so, in fact, that their prevention was far more than worth all the toting of hand guns that I have ever done. There was no law officer to resort to in the affair. I had nothing to depend on to protect two defenseless women, but a hand gun in either hand, and when the menacing party began to shoot, I did likewise with the result that the former was silenced, in very summary fashion.²

After the article was typed in draft, Clyde thought better of the passage, drew a line through it, and wrote “omit.” What cannot be omitted from any comprehensive story of his life, however, is his volcanic temperament. Was Clyde engaging in some Wild West–style fiction, in order to add color and excitement to his story? There does not appear to be any other record of such a showdown.

The most famous and widely spread story of Clyde’s eruptive anger is about when he lost his job as principal of Independence High School. As Neill C. Wilson wrote in a contemporary article, “the high school once had a good, solid sort of principal. And he dealt with his pupils in a good, solid way. But one day one of the older boys took him out in the school yard and offered this good, solid pedagogue a good, solid beating-up, with the result that the school board hired a bigger principal.”³ The school’s new principal was Clyde, a serious scholar and a man strong enough to control his rough-hewn students.

Independence is the Inyo County seat, situated in Owens Valley at the base of the eastern Sierra. The valley was largely occupied by grain farmers, orchardists, and their families. They were slowly being driven from farming by the City of Los Angeles, which had been quietly acquiring land and water rights in the valley since 1904. By the time Clyde had arrived in Owens Valley to stay, the tensions between farmers and Los Angeles’s Department of Water and Power (DWP) were reaching a flash point. In November of 1924, the same year that Clyde assumed leadership of Independence High, the local citizens of Independence, Manzanar, and Lone Pine seized control of the aqueduct floodgates located near the Alabama Hills, on the valley’s west side. They diverted water headed for Los Angeles back to the Owens River, making a symbolic gesture to wrestle control of their lives from politicians and real estate speculators in that distant city. Many valley residents met with financial ruin as their failing farms and businesses were slowly desiccated. It was not an easy time, nor a happy one, in the valley.

Into this high desert town that was struggling to survive came a man who was indifferent to their problems of drought, water diversion, and long-term sustainability. He was a strict disciplinarian hired to do a job: run a school and teach to the best of his knowledge and ability. Whatever economic or political strife the community was experiencing was not his concern. He had no family, owned no land or business, and was not interested in local affairs. He came to Owens Valley to be close to the mountains. On Friday afternoons he would lock the school’s doors and head for the high country, returning on Monday morning (and sometimes not until Tuesday) to re-open the school and resume classes. Many people in the valley thought him strange, eccentric; they didn’t understand his attraction to the mountains, or why he would want to climb them. After all, they’re just there, a constant lurking presence that, sooner or later, everyone took for granted. They could understand going to the mountains to fish, or hunt, or to work in the mines or cut timber, but to hike and climb the more formidable peaks for climbing’s sake was a pastime enjoyed by relatively few. To compound the problem, Clyde did not perform the social duties that were thought proper for a school principal to perform—attend social functions, become active in community affairs.

The students also thought him strange for his habit of shooting birds with a BB gun, an activity that, according to Omie Mairs, then a recent graduate and Los Angeles DWP employee, Clyde spent “a lot of time” doing.⁴ He was proficient with all sorts of guns—handguns, rifles, shotguns—a skill he no doubt learned while growing up in the mountains and woods of Pennsylvania and Canada.

It was Halloween night, 1928, and Principal Clyde was on patrol at the high school. It was still a relatively new facility, built in 1922, and Clyde was determined to protect the school from the hooligans and rowdies who had committed acts of petty vandalism in the past. Early in the evening a group of students took a casual drive by the school. Omie Mairs was in the front seat of the old touring car; three of his friends were in the rear. As Mairs recalls, Clyde “was in the school itself. And he stepped out on the front porch and he shot the gun, and bang! It sure made a loud noise and I didn’t realize where it hit until we drove around. Somebody said, ‘well, it hit the car.’ So we drove up to the sheriff’s office and showed the sheriff where it hit. It had hit right under the rear seat and it went completely through that car….I remember [Sheriff] Tom Hutchinson came out and said, ‘well, I’ll be darned. That’s a hell of a thing to do.’ That’s all he said, old Tom, he just looked at it for a while and we drove off. We probably went and got some more wine or something….We didn’t go up and down the street showing it to people, either. We just drove over there and I guess we were a little frightened. I was. After I saw where the bullet hit, I was a little frightened.”⁵

Were the students egging on the hotheaded principal? Perhaps. Was his response extreme? Absolutely. He was an excellent shot, and it has been suggested that he was aiming for a tire, but the fact remains that Clyde’s temper got the best of him. He later claimed to have warned the cars away from the building earlier in the evening, something that Mairs did not remember. For years Clyde would staunchly proclaim his innocence, maintaining that he did not shoot at the car, only into the air over their heads.⁶

At the Monday night meeting of the school district trustees, five days later, Clyde presented his resignation for acceptance “at their pleasure.” According to the account published in the Inyo Register, the trustees’ “pleasure happened to be for immediate acceptance, and a warrant was drawn paying Clyde in full to that time.”⁷

While some difficulties were brought to an end, others lingered. Clyde was finally free to hike, climb, read, and write without the daily obligations of a full-time career. He had been teaching for fifteen years, and his heart was in the mountains and not in a classroom or an office in the valley. He was now able to embark on a life lived in the open, without all of the attendant responsibilities that a job and family entailed. While there would be many times that Clyde lived hand to mouth, his remarkable constitution enabled him to endure hard physical labor, punishing weather, and months of solitude. One difficulty that grew over time was his animosity and resentment toward the people of Owens Valley, and especially of the town of Independence. Although Omie Mairs claimed that there were no hard feelings toward Clyde, the reverse was not true. For years Clyde harbored ill will toward and a sense of alienation from the people of the valley.⁸ That he may have been “framed” remains a distinct possibility, however, the facts have faded with time, and the full truth may never be known.

The challenge remained for Clyde to reconcile his love of mountains and nature with his tempestuous relationships with people. His quick temper seemed at odds with his cool, calculating, and methodical movements on mountainsides. He was able to have a much greater degree of control over his environment when he was in the high country, either alone or with a few close friends and climbing partners, but when he felt pressured or otherwise imposed upon, he would lose patience and sometimes resort to violence. Clyde was smart enough to understand and respect his limits while in the backcountry; he must have realized that in order to maintain his personal freedom and keep from making a serious mistake that could land him in prison he needed to go into a self-imposed exile, become a refugee from society. His sanctuary became the Sierra Nevada.