Borderlands: Hazel Sheckler on the California Frontier

The 22-year-old traveling the stagecoach road from San Diego into the backcountry seemed destined to be a lady. Born Hazel Marguerite Finch, she was trained in piano and art in South Pasadena schools and was on her way to a life of entertaining in parlors. When her wagon came to a halt in the little outpost of Dulzura in the year of 1909, however, there were no salons or parlors, just possibly the faint hum of bees.

The Valley was in the grip of bee fever. There was a famous Bee Man who tended the Big Bee House and hundreds of stands of bees in Harbison Canyon alone. The impressionable newcomer had landed in a place named for sweetness (dulce) and honey.

There was a small store run by a sea captain where the occasional mounted customs inspector—they preceded the border patrol—stopped to refresh after riding the border ten miles away. The hills were full of bandits and cowboys, lynx and mountain lions. Upon arrival, Hazel Sheckler (1887-1981) transformed from a debutante into a backcountry pioneer, a settler of the remote eastern San Diego County border.

Along with learning to rope, sew, knit, weave saddle blankets and expertly shoot a rifle, she took up painting the flowers along the dirt roads and later photographing her neighborhood. She set up an art studio in a shed behind her home and installed a darkroom, a kiln and a loom. Her daughter-in-law, Caroline Sheckler–she lives today in the Sheckler family home–still remembers the rhythmic tapping of the weaver at work in the next room.

Hazel’s artwork was not separate from her pioneer ranch life; it was her pioneer life. Unlike the now-popular stereotype of the early woman artist, she was not a radical, a hermit or a change-maker. She was not challenging oppressive roles for women or exploring mysticism…as far as we know.

Dulzura is isolated from the art world and Hazel did not court recognition, so the world has been happy to overlook her. She made lush prints and watercolors for the Federal Art Project’s Index of American Design, work now archived in the National Gallery of Art. She documented settler families and their working gear–bits and bridles–in photography and paints. She worked on an 18-foot tall WPA mural still on view in the San Diego County Administration building.

And yet, when the lead artists on the mural (Arthur and Jean Ames) were interviewed by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in 1965, they could not remember her name. Who was that woman who juggled paintbrushes while sitting high on a scaffold? “Shackler, was that her name?” Arthur Ames asked.

Fortunately, there are forces at work in the world that want us to remember the name Sheckler, not Shackler. In Hazel’s case, a devoted neighbor named Robin Brailsford—an artist known for her public art installations around the state and beyond–has acted as Hazel’s unofficial cheerleader. She is the sentinel who first told me about Hazel and suggested I write about her.

I dug in, happily, but the story of Hazel proved elusive. One of the only mainstream references to her is in Maurine St. Gaudens’ trailblazing four-volume survey on women artists, Emerging from the Shadows.  Author and curator St. Gaudens told me recently: “Hazel’s botanicals are among the best we have ever seen and she definitely needs more attention.”

Looking for clues, I was hopeful when I heard that Hazel’s son, Donald, had written a historical narrative of his family; the letdown came when it turned out the pieces were scattered here and there. “It is sort of like a 1,000-piece puzzle you find in an old shoe box,” said archivist Larry Johnson of the Mountain Empire Historical Society.

Another hopeful thread was Olivia Arthur, a Magnum photographer from London—an unlikely figure in a California pioneer story. Arthur was taken with Hazel’s photographs she saw one day on a café wall in Dulzura. Caroline Sheckler happened to be in the café the same day and invited the photographer over to see her mother-in-law’s work stored in a trunk in the attic.  Olivia Arthur gave Hazel a boost by posting photos on her Instagram page and incorporating Hazel’s work in a group project on the border shown at the Bronx Documentary Center in 2020.

Along with the nudges from Arthur and others, Hazel has that most fortunate thing going for her—a living relative who carries her story. Her daughter-in-law who lived with her in the family home for 28 years guards her archives and acts as the best agent an artist could want. As I was doing research, I got in the habit of hitting a dead end, then phoning Caroline Sheckler, who invariably transported me into Old California with her memories.

Caroline herself came to Dulzura in 1948, living in an army tent with her family the first few years. Not long into her stay she went to have her horse shod and met the best shoer and bronc buster in town, Hazel’s son Donald Sheckler. Once she and Donald married and she moved into the family household, she became the documentarian of Hazel’s life.

She explained that Hazel’s society life ended when her father got a job helping to build the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego. He moved the family from Pasadena to San Diego and soon after to Dulzura. At the time, a major gold rush—compared at the time to Colorado’s Cripple Creek strike—was attracting prospectors to the hamlet. Even Western celebrity Wyatt Earp came out to see what was going on in Dulzura.

Soon after the move, the LA Times society pages posted news of Hazel’s marriage to Claude Sheckler: “The young couple will take up their residence at Dulzura, where Mr. Sheckler is prominently identified with the mining camp.” Claude’s parents, cattle ranchers Benjamin and Rosalie Sheckler, had arrived in the Valley of Honey in 1873.

Caroline remembers Hazel as a “real nice-looking lady”, with hair and dresses almost to the ground. She always wore bonnets and dresses, even on horseback, and never wore jewelry–in keeping with her modest Seventh Day Adventist traditions.

Her faith may have influenced her in another way, as well: Hazel did everything well. A modern-day rancher who lives near the Sheckler homestead, Heidi Boswell says: “Hazel is my idol. She was the epitome of the West. She was elegant and beautiful and always ready to go out with the boys and rope cows. I never knew of anybody with so much talent.”

Where this overarching competence came from, we can’t say for sure but she was a steadfast Seventh Day Adventist at a time when women were increasingly powerful in the church. The church leader Ellen Harmon White was encouraging women to develop their talents. Women’s role in the church peaked between 1900-1915 so Hazel’s faith may have had something to do with her triumph.

 

When not assisting her mother-in-law with ranch chores, Caroline often rode out alone on horseback exploring the hills and valleys of her new home. The place where they lived, Engineer Springs, was name for an 1872 survey party. Highway 94, the old stagecoach route to San Diego, connected the Valley to the rest of the World. Hazel’s husband Claude worked with a pick and shovel and horse-drawn grader to maintain the road for the County Road department.

Along with Highway 94, the border was another central thread in Caroline’s new life in Dulzura. The flow of immigrants over the border in Hazel’s day was sparse and uneventful, easily handled by a lone ranger on horseback—many were drawn from the ranks of Texas Rangers. Even by the time Caroline arrived, the trickle of migrants coming through was just part of Dulzura life. “Donald would always say feed them and give them some coffee,” says Caroline of her husband’s attitude toward the visitors.

Along with an increase in border traffic, border politics has intruded on the town more and more in recent years. A new Border Patrol station just completed will further change the mood of the bucolic town. Yet when Caroline talks about living on the border today she says she has no fear.

When she was out riding her horse as a young woman and looked toward the border there was no wall and no guards, just a magical mountain called Cuchama or Cuchamow (also called Tecate on maps). It was “the mountain of creation” to the Kumeyaay people.

A writer named Walter Evans-Wentz once owned much of the mountain (He deeded it to the state of California upon his death.) He wrote a book Cuchama and Sacred Mountain celebrating its Jurassic rocks, magnetic forces and aromatic mountain-misery shrub (the bears liked to roll in it). Evans-Wentz is a major figure in Eastern philosophy, the Celtic fairy faith (he knew W.B. Yeats) and Theosophy (a lodestar to Agnes Pelton).

So, when Caroline casually mentioned to me that Evans-Wentz had been a neighbor of theirs and that Hazel visited him from time to time–I was again convinced I’d tripped into a California fairy tale.

 

For all of Hazel’s competence, she had one weak spot: Driving. Caroline became Hazel’s driver, shuttling her to school board meetings and church functions. With Caroline at the wheel, Hazel studied the roadside flowers she loved to paint, reciting the names of every bloom along the way.

Hazel showed her new daughter-in-law where the Matilija poppies grow, where to find wild blackberries along the creek, where to see arrowheads and morteros, where the Bee Man lived in Bee Canyon. She only occasionally talked about her sorrows, the greatest being the death of her baby son Benjamin in 1922.

While going to community meetings and helping with the roping and ranching, Hazel somehow found time to pursue her artwork. She painted in the studio attached to the house and sold her paintings to neighbors and the occasional Sunday drivers on winding Highway 94.

She made botanical sketches in a notebook: Desert mallow, Cleveland sage, California poppy. Before Caroline’s arrival, Hazel had joined a WPA crew in San Diego in 1939 to work on the huge mural depicting Recreation, Agriculture and Conservation in the County Administration building. (The mural is in the board chambers, available to view on request.)

San Diego was enjoying a boom in landscape painting at the time and Hazel got to know the artists who came out to paint the rural countryside. Caroline recalls seeing painters with easels stopped alongside the dirt roads. Among them was Butterfield Stage artist Marjorie Reed, a friend of Hazel’s. She was friends with San Diego artists Donal Hord, Anna Marie Valentien and Charles Fries. Artists often visited the Sheckler ranch to paint.

Both Hazel and her son Donald (Caroline’s husband) exhibited paintings at the California-Pacific International Exposition at Balboa Park in 1935. Donald Sheckler died in 2004 and most of his paintings—aside from a few on Caroline’s kitchen wall–have been scattered and lost. In a rural community, artwork gets passed around to neighbors the same as sugar and hay. Given the demands of ranch life, many of the paintings on loan never returned.

Letters from Hazel’s sister Ola Finch living in Loma Linda attest to the physical toll of Hazel’s ranch work at the time: “I do hope your hands are better. Put a little Vaseline on 10X a day.”

After the original Sheckler homestead was swept away in a flood, the clan built a new house in 1929. The house where Caroline still lives was built from the timbers of an old honey barn. Since Hazel’s death at age 94 in 1981, her photos and negatives and a few paintings have been stashed in the house. Caroline took some batches down to the drugstore and had the tiny antique negatives enlarged. Some of the artwork in the house was stolen. She never locked the door until recently.

As I was finishing up work on this article, the deadly Palisades fire blazed up on the coast, followed by 12 or more fires throughout Southern California. Each time a new blaze appeared I’d check the map to see if I had personal connections to the place. Finally, a small orange starburst flashed east of San Diego near the border. Until recently the spot would have meant nothing to me, a blank on my personal map of home.

But now, I zoomed in anxiously to see how close the fire was to Hazel’s place.

As Dulzura and nearby areas were evacuated by the Border 2 fire, I thought of the house standing alone, with a few of Hazel’s and Donald’s paintings on the wall, old photos spilling from a trunk. As Wallace Stegner told us: No place is a place until the things that happened there are told in ballads, legends and song.

The town survived the blaze. But if it hadn’t, we know more about what happened there now thanks to Caroline. I thank her for putting this border ballad on my personal playlist. As California loses more and more places to fire and calamity, every place needs a Caroline who tends the old stories like the bee men tend honey.