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Boontling was in full bloom between 1900 and 1940. "We would make fun of the visitors when the mail stage came through every three weeks," recalls Levi. "They all thought we was crazy. I spoke Boontling ever since I could talk. When they drafted me in '17, I had to learn to talk English all over again."
With bad times in the '30s, some of the Boonters lost their sense of humor, and the number of Boontlingers declined. In the '40s, when a logging boom began, the population of Boonville temporarily tripled to 3,000. This was the first real influx of new people from the outside world since the town was settled, and the strangers dealt the language another blow. Television also has brought change, as Boonters soak up pernicious English from the machines.
Now Boontling is spoken by only a minority of Boonters. They have a club that meets every other week in one of the members' houses to harp (speak). There are 20 members, though more like 200 harp and understand. Mack Miller, in his 60s, drives down from Ukiah, a larger town on the coast, "because I'm tonguecuppy [sick] when there's nemer to harp Boont with." The local highway patrolman, a young fellow who lives up the valley in the state park, has picked up Boontling and started to lose his tenuous grasp of the mother tongue. "You're arking the jape-way," he said to a stranger recently. "Sorry, I mean you're blocking the driveway." They predict that the cop will start attending meetings soon.
But codgiehood, their word for old age, is overtaking most of the Boontlingers. The oldtimers—Wee Ite and Buzzard, and Fuzz and Deekin', Wee Tumps and Highpockets, and Iron Mountain, Skeeter and Sandy—are dwindling. They are saying their last sayings in Boont: "A dom in the dukes is bailer than dubs in the sham [bush]." A couple of dude ranches have sprung up in the valley, and just a year ago, for the first time ever, a bank dared open a branch in once-woolly Boonville. The end is near.
* Piked is went, chigrel is food, book is place, belljeemer is hound or dog, which comes from beljeek, the word for rabbit (a corruption of Belgian hare), plus a suffix that makes it a rabbit dog, shied is gone away, strung is dead or empty.