I spent a couple of mornings recently sifting through about a century of Baker County history, but I never touched a book.

I just listened.

I asked an occasional question.

But mainly I listened and I scrawled notes, my right hand gradually growing a bit numb and my neck developing a crick from holding the receiver to my ear.

These interviews, though prompted by somber events, were nonetheless punctuated by laughter. The people I talked with were saddened by the death of their friend — Howard Payton, who died on Oct. 18, and Fred Warner Sr., 10 days later.

But we weren’t discussing their deaths.

The much more pleasant topic was the long and vibrant and productive lives that these two Baker Valley natives had lived.

And in those moments when I was talking with Ralph Ward and Sean Lee and Casey Vanderwiele and Dan Warnock Jr. and several others, Howard and Fred might well have been sitting beside me, doing the yarning themselves.

I wanted to tell, in an exceedingly modest form, Howard’s and Fred’s stories. And of course I could do this only by listening to the people who knew and respected and loved them. The people who had taken dinner with them, who had gathered their own patina of dusty sweat as they bucked hay bales or drove cattle while mounted on a favorite horse.

I was fortunate to find many people willing to share some of those stories.

But it wasn’t until later, in the relative tranquility after the passage of publishing deadlines, that I came to appreciate just how lucky I was to have those people share with me some of their precious memories about Howard and Fred.

Unlike so much else these days, these anecdotes aren’t digital.

Google couldn’t tell me about how Ralph and Fred, as boys during the depths of the Great Depression, used to mess around at the Missouri Flat Grange until their parents had to tell them to settle down.

No algorithm can capture the timbre of Ralph’s guffaws as he tells this tale.

The internet, omnipresent as it sometimes seems to be, was ignorant of how Howard encouraged Sean’s interest in working as a volunteer firefighter, and it knew nothing of Clair Pickard’s memory of sitting beside Fred at a cattle sale, the self-described “young buck” learning from the cattleman whose descendants arrived in Baker County in 1862, the year the county was created.

I have a great affinity for this organic version of history.

It is the absolute antithesis of academic examinations of the past. The stories I listened to on those mornings replaced the footnotes and bibliography of the historian with the piquant phrases of rural patois.

“I knew Fred from a way back,” Ralph told me, a description far richer than whatever the rigidly grammatical version would be.

On the late afternoon of the day I interviewed Fred’s friends, I went for my customary walk. My route included the section of Indiana Avenue between the golf course and Reservoir Road. From that elevated spot I looked down on the heart of Baker Valley.

As I strolled along in the gathering gloom, the sun having dipped behind the Elkhorns, I thought about Fred and Howard, and about their legacies in this fine and fertile valley between two great ranges of mountains.

Both lived almost the whole of their lives here. Howard was 83 when he died. Fred was 94.

I pondered those considerable spans.

I thought about how many chill autumn sunsets they watched, tired and dirty from the inevitable chores that are the rancher’s burden. How many summer afternoons they saw the southern sky turn slate grey, flickering with lightning bolts, how many January snow squalls sweeping across the valley, whisked along by the keen and cruel north wind.

I imagined the dozens of birthdays they celebrated, the Christmas mornings they sat in a comfortable chair and watched children and grandchildren squeal with delight as they ripped paper to reveal the treasures, those moments of joy exclusive to childhood.

Mostly, though, I marveled at the reality that for these two men, the notion of home, that one place where each of us truly belongs, was so simple, so absolute.

Fred and Howard were from Baker Valley, and from no place else.

They are gone now, the both of them.

But it seems to me, after hearing so much about these two men, and particularly how much they contributed to this place and to the people who live here still, that both Fred and Howard will always be part of Baker Valley.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.