CALIFORNIA ALBUM : A Final Turf War : Hmong immigrants in the Central Valley favored a mountain cemetery as their burial ground. But some residents complained, and now the Hmong are staying away.

For more than a century, the pioneer families of this Sierra logging town have buried their dead in a dirt, oak-studded field at the edge of Burrough Mountain. The Yanceys. The Greens. The Bretzes. The Deans.

Tom Dean’s great-grandmother is here. So are his grandfather, father, mother and wife, Mary Francis. The double headstone that marks her grave will one day mark his, too.

Dean, 78, always figured there would be enough room to accommodate another century, his children and his children’s children. But only 220 plots remain, and now the ground swells with different pioneers.

The Vangs. The Vues. The Fangs. The Chas.

These are Hmong tribesmen who settled in the Central Valley after the fall of Indochina. They are buried here, 37 miles northeast of Fresno, even though they never lived in Tollhouse or gazed upon Burrough Mountain.

“This cemetery was donated by the Yancey family for the mountain people,” says Dean, a retired carpenter-truck driver-TV repairman in cowboy hat and suspenders.

“The Hmong have come in and taken it over. I don’t begrudge them for needing a place. But why our place?”

The three-acre graveyard is split into distinct sides. Local folks with their plain flat markers over here. “Hmong Hill” is over there, with its incense sticks, American flags and giant headstones with inscriptions such as:

Chua Cha Cha

April 20, 1936

February 27, 1989

He Served for the CIA From 1961 to 1975

Recruited to fight the CIA’s secret war in Laos, the Hmong were considered Southeast Asia’s most tenacious warriors. And they suffered a casualty rate a hundred times that of U.S. forces.

Hmong families in the valley bring their loved ones up to Tollhouse because this spot recalls the remote highlands of Laos. They are laid to rest facing the granite mountain, their journey to “the other dimension” greased with graveside offerings such as a bottle of beer or whiskey, a can of Soya Bean drink, a bag of cooked rice and chicken, a pile of paper money.

Feng Yang is one of the 52 Hmong buried here. Her family resettled in Fresno in 1982 after four years in a Thai refugee camp and three unfriendly winters in Ohio. Yang fell ill a short time later.

Her son, Sue Lee, said his mother talked about going home to the mountain before she died.

“You can see the hills,” said Lee, 27, an attendance officer with the Fresno schools. “You can see the sun rise and fall behind them. So we thought Tollhouse was a good idea.”

But because Dean and other longtime residents griped publicly, the burials have almost stopped. Lee has not visited his mother’s grave in more than a year.

“Our ancestors bless us with good health, good food, good life,” Lee says. “Every Hmong New Year we give thanks. We pray and sing. . . . But I didn’t go up there last year and I don’t know this year. We don’t want to cause problems.”

To locals such as Tom Dean, the Hmong burials are another reason to yearn for the way things used to be in Tollhouse.

Dean said the town of his youth was a rollicking place with three hotels and two saloons--and enough jackass whiskey (sour mash with a kick) brewing in mountain stills to supply a town twice its size.

The whole community got together to butcher hogs and render the fat into soap. When someone died, he said, a contingent of men took off from their cattle and timber work and dug the grave. Everyone attended the funeral.

During the harvest season, Indians came over from the other side of the mountain to bale the hay. Coldspring George. Mono Tom. Bob Buckskin. Pete Hunter. Billy Sunday. None of them are buried here.

“Some of them had a little problem with their English but they were hard workers,” Dean said. “They were exceptionally good at felling and bucking a tree. And you could trust them with your life.”

All that neighborliness has been lost, the locals say, in the influx of “equity refugees” from Fresno and Southern California, all looking to escape the crime and smog. In the past five years, the population has doubled to 3,500.

“The growth has generated animosity,” said Homer Scott, publisher of the weekly Mountain Press. “We’re probably going to wind up a bedroom community of Fresno and Madera. . . . People are frustrated. I’m frustrated. We just can’t go up the mountain any farther.”

Into this flux came the Hmong, with their pride and sense of history and place. A persecuted people whose written language was destroyed centuries ago, the Hmong were pushed out of China in the early 1800s. They kept migrating south until they reached the highlands of northern Laos.

Slash-and-burn farmers, they fought alongside the French when Japan invaded Laos in 1941. Two decades later, after the French departed, the Hmong formed the backbone of the CIA’s clandestine fight against the Viet Cong.

Drawn by the mythical soil, but often dependent on welfare checks, more than 31,000 Hmong live in Fresno County, by far the largest concentration in the country.

Slumlords exploit them. People joke cruelly about their bad driving habits (admittedly true, the Hmong say) and their consumption of dogs (not true).

Perhaps nothing has bred more misunderstanding and racism than Hmong religious practices, which blend ancestor worship, animal sacrifice and shaman healing.

Rites for the dead stretch 72 hours, a mix of mourning, feasting and woodwind music. No expense is spared.

The Hmong believe that any metal in and around the body prevents passage to the other life. This includes gold and silver tooth fillings, which must be removed.

Forbidden, of course, are metal coffins. Instead, the Hmong use Orthodox Jewish caskets handmade from oak and shipped out of Sacramento or Los Angeles. The Star of David engraved into the top of each one is thought by some Hmong to be a trademark.

Red twine is strung from the casket to a cow waiting outside the funeral chapel. The cow is then taken away and sacrificed and the cooked meat brought back to the chapel and eaten in honor of the deceased.

Hmong Hill takes up a relatively small corner of the cemetery, but its elaborate granite headstones three and four feet high--some graced with a color photo of the deceased in traditional garb woven pa dao style, an exquisite stitchery--overshadow the simple pioneer markers.

In the largest pioneer plot, three generations of Yanceys are buried. Among them are five Yancey children, all interred in the spring of 1878.

“Diphtheria,” Dean says, gnarled fingers wiping clean a name. “Two on the same day.”

Whether the Yanceys long ago intended these grounds only for the people of Tollhouse is no longer relevant, says Pat Barrett of the Clovis Cemetery District.

When Max Yancey deeded the cemetery to the district in 1960, he stipulated that it be opened to all residents of the district no matter their race, creed, color or religion.

“The whole feud is unnecessary,” Barrett said. “We’ve got 10 acres to the rear of the cemetery that could be developed into thousands of graves.

“I think it’s kind of sad. The Hmong have been basically run off.”