There’s Guns in Them Thar Hills : Julian Does a Slow Boil in Wake of Killings Over Gold Mining Claim

Not in Julian. This sort of thing doesn’t fit a mountain hamlet known for apple pie and friendly townsfolk. It’s not a spot where blood should be spilled.

But sure enough it happened. In a rugged gorge on the backside of town, a bearded young mountain man named Chris Zerbe set out on Memorial Day to roust some claim jumpers near a gold mine he tended. Joe Lopes, an affable old-timer with a gravelly voice and a penchant for drink, went along for the ride.

They didn’t live to tell what happened next. Staccato gunfire rang through the hills. When help arrived, Zerbe lay mortally wounded. Lopes was already dead.

None of it made much sense. The gunmen, an El Cajon family and friends, had filed a claim of their own to prospect on the mine site. Their intentions appeared innocent enough--a day of picnicking, target practice and poking around the property. Then the deadly confrontation unfolded.

Family members contend they fired in self-defense when Zerbe sent a gunshot whizzing their way. Investigators, armed with only the survivors’ side of the story, have yet to file charges or fully assess blame for the bloody standoff.

Tale From Days Past

With its lingering mystery, the episode has blanketed this peaceful mountain town amid the pines with anxiety. It all seems a century too late, a throwback to the lawless days of the late 1800s, when gold was first discovered in these parts and Julian became a boom town.

To some townsfolk, however, the slaying of Zerbe, 34, and Lopes, 66, appeared sadly emblematic of a simmering tension between locals and unruly urban visitors. Dubbed flatlanders, these outsiders from off the mountain have been accused of stirring up bad feelings, traipsing onto private property, vandalizing homes and shooting up the countryside. It’s only a handful of bad apples, folks realize, but the problems are there all the same.

“There is kind of a resentment. People from the city don’t always respect the property rights out here,” said Glen Larson, a boyhood friend of Zerbe. “During hunting season our ranchers have had cattle shot, they’ve had horses shot. These aren’t local people doing it, they’re people coming out of the city and they’re a little bit trigger-happy. It’s scary.”

Roy Larison, a bearded old sourdough who has lived in Julian much of his life, agreed.

“There’s lots of trouble all over these hills,” said Larison. “They come up here with an arsenal. Sometimes they shoot two-, three-, four-hundred rounds. And if they don’t take something, they tear it up.”

Tensions run particularly high these days among the handful of backcountry dwellers still attempting to work the patchwork of mineral claims spreading east from Julian’s quaint, four-block downtown. Though little gold has been pulled from the hills in recent decades, these modern-day prospectors remain undeterred, driven by the shimmering hope of hitting some undiscovered mother lode. And they’re serious about guarding their claims.

‘Weekend Rambos with Guns’

“Every weekend, this place is like a zoo, full of weekend Rambos with their guns,” said Bruce Herrington, 53, a rough-shaven prospector living with his girlfriend and their kids on a mining claim in Chariot Canyon, six miles east of Julian. “What would they do if we went and threw out a picnic in their back yard and started shooting it up? They got no respect.”

Like other miners in the region, Herrington has made a routine of warning off intruders, particularly those intent on hunting for gold on his claim.

Herrington chuckles as he recalls booting four visitors he recently discovered walking the property with a wooden divining rod in a vain search for underground treasure. Those people, like most, went peacefully. But some don’t.

A couple years back, a pack of men outfitted in camouflage fired shots over the heads of his children as the family bounced in a pickup along one of the rugged dirt roads leading onto the land. Herrington reached for the handgun he keeps, but his girlfriend, Davalene Hirsch, pulled him back. They drove on instead to report the incident to authorities, no easy task in this remote corner of the county.

“It takes us an hour to get the sheriff,” Hirsch said, noting how the family must drive 20 minutes to reach the nearest telephone. “If it’s a claim dispute, they tell us it’s a civil matter. And they won’t even come out here at night.”

Though the Memorial Day killings were the first bloodshed over a mining rights dispute in Julian since the region’s heyday, even today’s miners aren’t shy about making a point with a gun.

Bud Sonka, a writer who frequented the Julian area during his “hippie days” in the early 1970s, remembers well an episode of gunfire that erupted when he tried to assume several mining claims more than 15 years ago.

Sonka was renting a ranch house across from the claims when shots rang out one night on the property. He hustled over to find bullet holes riddling the old mine cabin where his two children had been staying. The radiators in two pickups were also punctured by shotgun blasts.

Luckily, the kids and several others had moved outside near a pond to avoid the heat and weren’t hit. But Sonka got the point. He abandoned his effort to seize the claims.

“We reported it to the sheriff, but they said they didn’t have any way of proving who it was,” Sonka said. “We all sat around and talked about it and decided we didn’t want to get in a shooting war.”

Muddled Mining Rights Law

Just who has a legal right to tap the ore-rich federal lands remains a muddled matter. Mining rights stem from a timeworn 1872 law that, if anything, seems to provide fertile ground for disputes over claims.

Under existing regulations, which are administered by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, a prospector is awarded ownership of the land only if a mineral discovery is made that promises to be profitable. A miner who simply stakes a claim, meanwhile, has no more rights to the land than anyone else, be it for picnicking, target shooting or even prospecting, according to Richard Park, a BLM geologist.

“Anyone has a right to go on a mining claim as long as they don’t interfere with an ongoing mining operation,” Park said. “But many miners believe they’ve got exclusive rights to a claim. It’s very difficult to convince them that this is the law because, by God, that’s theirs and they’re going to protect it come hell or high water.”

Efforts to fundamentally rewrite the outdated law have been frustrated by elements within the mining industry, led by the influential American Mining Congress.

Matters are further complicated because the BLM lacks a centralized network to cross-check and determine if an applicant is filing for land that is already claimed. Through the years, the result has been a bevy of claim disputes that can only be resolved in civil court.

“What happens too often is the BLM doesn’t concern itself with the validity of claims,” said James Tweedy, one of two Los Angeles men who hired Zerbe as a caretaker for their claims. “It becomes a matter of fighting it out over who has a legitimate claim to a piece of property. Sometimes you fight it out in court. And sometimes, unfortunately, it’s fought out by force.”

Case of Duplicate Claims

The slayings on Memorial Day stemmed from just such a situation. Though the El Cajon family--Gustave Hudson, his wife and their two teen-age children--filed a claim, the area has been held for more than two decades by Tweedy, an attorney, and Benjamin Haimes, an import-export consultant.

Nonetheless, the BLM’s Park said, the Hudsons had a right to go on the land because the current claim holders do not own the property.

On the day of the fatal shootings, investigators say, Zerbe confronted the family and demanded they leave. When Hudson showed him a copy of a county recorder’s document, Zerbe left to call Haimes and report what was happening.

Within hours, however, he returned and the shooting erupted.

“There’s nothing in the world worth any life,” Haimes said. “Christopher was just doing his job. I feel they must have cornered him. They shot him to death.”

Indeed, the slayings are not sitting well with local residents. Many were troubled that no arrests were made. Others grumbled about a cover-up when sheriff’s investigators refused because of concern for the Hudsons’ safety to release the names of the El Cajon family, even after they appeared in area newspapers.

Some theorized that the case was being pushed aside by investigators because of the background of the shooting victims.

Barefoot Frontiersman

Something of a loner, Zerbe looked every bit the part of a frontiersman, going barefoot much of the time and wearing his hair long, with a bandanna tied around his head. He developed a rapport with nature, to a point where he would only cut fallen timber and would chafe at shooting even a rabbit, friends and family say.

Intelligent and mechanically gifted, he made ends meet with a variety of odd jobs in the area. His first love, however, was gold mining, an avocation he picked up as a boy exploring the beehive of mine tunnels near his home.

“He didn’t see things the way we might, in the spirit of compromise,” said his father, Richard, an architect and amateur historian. “He was given to seeing things as either black or white.”

Although his family has been a well-known and respected fixture in the community for years, Zerbe had several run-ins with law enforcement authorities in recent years. His father blames it on a confrontation Zerbe had with sheriff’s deputies and park rangers after a traffic stop a few years ago. Ever since, police had harassed Zerbe repeatedly, the father said.

Lopes, meanwhile, was a likeable old ex-prizefighter. His round belly and white beard made him look like a department store Santa Claus, but his face was a battlefield of scars. Townsfolk say he was the sort that always had a good word to say, leaning on a beat-up pickup along downtown’s main street and chatting with whoever passed by.

“Everyone liked him. He didn’t have an enemy,” said Larison, a longtime friend. “He drank, sure, but a lot of people drink and you don’t call them a drunk.”

Larison, for one, can’t believe that Zerbe would shoot at anyone.

“He is the type who might point one in the air and shoot for effect,” he said. “But Chris would never point a gun at anyone. If he did, he’d hit them. He’s not an expert, but he could hit someone from 100 feet with a 30-30.”

After the slayings, there was much talk in Julian about retaliating against the Hudsons, who refused to comment on the incident. Richard Zerbe said he preached restraint, expressing hope that the legal process will run its course.

But the talk continues.

“I don’t think it’s over,” Larison said. “I’m not at liberty to say what it might be, but I feel something’s going to happen. I just hope it’s legal.”

Dee Baker, another local resident, agreed.

“It’s at a slow boil right now,” she said. “There are some people who say they just wish it would all go away. But others hope it doesn’t go away. They want some finalization and some justice done here . . .. It’s going to be a very edgy situation for a very long time.”