What with the return of Smokehouse Sunday (today’s cookins: Berkshire pork ribs and belly roll, hot links, and cabrito), we are working out sourcing our hardwood.

We want to use locally appropriate species, and only to use wood which is already died. Bruce from Wingshadows Hacienda had told us he had lots of old oak firewood up on their property, and we’d been meaning to visit the farm this season anyway, so yesterday we took a drive up past Palomar Mountain to their neck of the woods.

The farm was amazing as always, but the new treat was a visit to Bruce’s family’s homestead which was founded in the late 1800’s, and their family ranch.

Bruce’s great grandmother built this building as a homestead. It was originally stone, and since covered in cement.

Homesteading was a very effective method through which the United States exerted claim over the American West, over other European nations, individuals, and Native Americans. The US government would “give” land to any citizen who would secure a medium-sized parcel to live on. It was like a crowdsourced eminent-domain land grab — each individual homesteader only had a manageable effort, the US paid them in land it didn’t pay for, and very quickly the US controlled the land all the way to the western shining sea.

The narrow windows in front were for Bruce’s great-grandmother to point a rifle through. That’s because the local Luiseño who had lived in the area for thousands of years didn’t see how the Homestead Act was really working in their benefit — about which they were quite right, of course. After enough of the land had been privatized, around the beginning of the 1900’s the US forced all the indigenous people in the area on to reservations.

The house is quite small, as you can see.

After seeing the original homestead, we trekked deep into the mountains to the family’s later ranch, which was built in the early 1900s. The roads we drove on through the family’s current places weren’t really roads (by design, they like it quiet), and when we couldn’t traverse the roads any more, we hiked a short way into the woods to the remnants of the second ranch.

Bruce told us that back in the day, if you wanted to work as a school bus driver, you had to own your own bus. This was theirs.

The ladies took the house Model T out for a spin.

It probably would have gone further with an engine.

Anyway, we got to the wood and discovered that, by wood, Bruce meant “felled oaks”. And we hadn’t brought a chainsaw.

But Michael, aka “John Henry”, tore off some branches with his bare hands which we are using right now to smoke up some meat.

Bruce also gave us some wood from an tree called red shank, which used to be abundant in our region but through overcutting and burning now is principally found in the area near the ranch, and only at around 2500 ft elevation. The forestry department had had to clear some for a firebreak so he had a little bit. We’ll experiment smoking with that wood, too, and see what happens.