Mysterious Cross Baffles Hikers After 87 Years

The inscription is large, perhaps three feet across, and hacked deeply and crudely into solid rock:

J. B. KING

1908

JAN 30

Above the name is a cross mounted on a square--an icon, it appears, for a church.

Then again, maybe not. Nobody knows. For that matter, nobody in these parts recalls J. B. King, whoever he was.

But the inscription lives on as a turn-of-the-century tag: a haunting piece of graffiti in the pristine wilderness. It begs the attention of anyone who climbs the Ortega Trail west from Route 33 above Wheeler Gorge.

The rock appears on the left of the trail about 1.5 miles up, at perhaps 2,500 feet of elevation. It’s a sandstone outcropping on an east-facing slope and looks out over a verdant gorge to the undulant, treeless mountains that typify vast tracts of the Los Padres National Forest.

It is indisputably a beautiful place to say you were, if that’s what King was doing. But the marker raises so many other questions.

Is it the site of King’s burial? Did tragedy occur here? Did some form of epiphany strike King--or someone else who wanted to do him honor, or infamy--here?

Consider first the season: dead of winter. The Feb. 1, 1908, edition of The Ojai, the newspaper of the day, makes reference to punishing storms that left “the mountains back of (Ojai) a scene of winter beauty.” While snow at this elevation is not common, gushing wet and blinding cold are the price one pays to achieve vistas of the higher peaks buried in snow. It would appear that King’s work was one of inspiration--unless, of course, the inscription was retro-dated and carved in summer.

Consider next the man: not dead that winter. The county’s register of death records shows no one named J. King died in 1908. Moreover, no obituaries appear that year for a man by that name. But 1908 Ojai voting records do show a John Burbridge King, alive and 33, occupation laborer. And the 1908 Ventura County directory shows a Nordhoff (later renamed Ojai) resident named John B. King, occupation teamster, or someone who drives teams of horses or mules, perhaps those of a stagecoach.

It is unlikely that a 33-year-old teamster registered to vote would have an unrecorded death. And so it makes sense that down the mountains and well across the flats of Ojai, in Plot No. 192 at Nordhoff Cemetery, lies the only J. B. King to be found: John B. King, the apparent tagger, who died in 1933.

King’s obituary in The Ojai of that year makes no mention of backcountry exploits that would have occurred 24 years before his death. But it does say that King, born in 1875 in Ashland, Ky., was a member of the Holiness Church in Ojai, and it addresses him as Reverend King.

The Holiness Church, however, is long gone, so no one is around to address the question of whether The Reverend John B. King, in carving a cross in outback stone, was attempting to deify the Ortega Trail or even hold freezing services there. In any event, King’s defacements do seem somewhat sanitized by the apparent holy impulse.

Surely the authoritative voice on King would have been that of his wife, listed in the obituary as Katherine Linder King, who served as Ojai’s postmistress with iron rule. “Oh, as a kid growing up, I knew not to swear around her, or she’d really let you have it,” says Bill Friend, an Ojaian steeped in backcountry history who now lives in Ventura.

But Bill Friend knows nothing of the postmistress’s husband, the mystery tagger John B. King. And Katherine King, it turns out, would go on to marry the Rev. W. J. Craig, the Holiness Church pastor officiating at King’s funeral, before dying in 1975. (She’s buried in Nordhoff Cemetery alongside J.B.)

A last hope for solving J. B. King’s Ortega Trail riddle might have been King’s son, Robert Linder King, buried in an adjacent Nordhoff plot in 1981. Robert, known genially as Bob, says Friend, had a plumbing business in town and also served, with a penchant for being outspoken, as Ojai’s mayor.

Now, of course, nobody’s around to be outspoken, least of all J. B. King himself. So everything behind the inscription is speculation, with a few indicators along the way pointing to an Ojai horse-team driver and man of the cloth who apparently wished for himself or Christian stewardship a brand of immortality only a few centuries of wind and rain can erode. His body’s in town, but he’s a rustic billboard in these mountains.

Maybe J. B. King wanted it that way. Maybe somebody else wanted it that way for him.

It wouldn’t be the first time the backcountry got indelibly marked with something odd. Ramon Ortega, who created this trail as a wintering route from the high country down into Ojai, found it unnecessary to tag anything. His memory is still vivid from the fact that his death wish was carried out and quite possibly along the trail where King’s marker appears.

Ortega had made it clear to his vaqueros that when he died, he didn’t want to be slung over a horse and carried into town like buckshot game. So when he was killed in a horse-fall accident north of here, Ortega “rode” in a team into town: lashed upright in the saddle to tree branches mounted behind him.

It must have been an eerie sight--an image so clearly etched as to take centuries for it to wash away.