School Field Trips From My Childhood: Fourth Grade

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In fourth grade, the entire grade went to a local mine since we were learning about the California Gold Rush. They took us fourth graders in two groups spread across two days. I was in the group that went on the second day. When the first group came back, all the kids were spreading exciting tales about how they got to ride down in the mines in the old carts like it was a roller coaster. Even my friend Chandra claimed this. So when my group went the next day, I was excited and expecting roller coaster rides. Only the field trip turned out to be a boring educational experience where we had to listen to lectures about mining and sit and watch some boring video. We did get to go inside a mine entrance, and you could see down into the mine and there were tracks and a cart leading down into it, but it was all blocked off. Another field trip that was a huge disappointment, and I was angry that my friend and all the other kids had lied to us, and furthermore that I had believed them. We also went to the Beckwourth Pioneer Day they used to have here locally, where actors reenacted the tale of James Beckwourth, who discovered a trail through the Sierra Nevada into California during the Gold Rush. The actors shot off old cannons, which was neat. The funny (and very sad) thing is, after all the history lessons we had about James Beckwourth, not to mention the fact that we had the Beckwourth Pioneer Day every year at our river bottom, it wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized that he was black. They always portrayed him as a white man, when the reality was he was an African-American mountain man and early pioneer of the American West. He also lived with the Crow Nation and adopted Native American dress. Which is much more interesting in my book. Then there was the big fourth grade trip to the Oroville Fish Hatchery, which is downstream from Oroville Dam, where we got to see how the salmon are harvested and killed in order to fertilize eggs. I had been to the fish hatchery many times before, but I had never witnessed that part of it. What they did was cut open the female salmon and rip all her eggs out, then they hit a male over the head with the hammer, drilled a hole in him and squirted his sperm all over the eggs to fertilize them, then threw the still writhing fish in a big tub off to the side. The room they did this in was very much like a factory with them performing this to multiple fish in quick procession. It was a very horrifying scene, which we watched from above through a glass window. They gave us kids some salmon eggs in a little plastic cup to take home as a souvenir, and some kids ate theirs thinking it was caviar. Afterwards we went to a local park for lunch and we got to spend the rest of the day playing on the playground. Maybe that part was to make us forget about the horrors we'd witnessed at the fish hatchery! My class also got to go bowling on the day before Christmas break and on the last day of school. My friend Alyson and I got in trouble for trying to run into the men's restroom at the bowling alley and also for trying to buy cigarettes out of the cigarette vending machine. (Thanks again to @Courtlynn for the inspiration for this post series.)