CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
FINDING AND LOSING A FORTUNE
Our youthful dream of becoming farmers was now realized in fullest measure. The clearing was gradually enlarged, and abundant crops came to reward our efforts. The comfort and plenty we had hoped and struggled for was attained. Next came a development in the family fortunes that we had not dreamed of. Never had we thought to see the Meeker family conducting a business that would require a London office.
This unexpected prosperity came to us through the hop-growing industry, upon which we entered with all our force. The business was well started by the time of my father's death in 1869, and in the fifteen years following the acreage planted to hops was increased until the crop-yield of 1882, a yield of more than seventy-one tons, gave the Puyallup valley the banner crop, as to quantity, of the United States—and, some persons asserted, of the world.
The public, generally, gave me the credit of introducing hop culture into the Northwest. Therefore it seems fitting to tell here the story of the beginnings of an industry that came to have great importance.
In March of 1865, Charles Wood of Olympia sent about three pecks of hop roots to Steilacoom for my father, Jacob R. Meeker, who then lived on his claim in the Puyallup valley. John V. Meeker, my brother, passed by my cabin when he carried the sack of roots on his back from Steilacoom to my father's home, a distance of about twenty miles, and from the sack I took roots enough to plant six hills of hops. As far as I know those were the first hops planted in the Puyallup valley. My father planted the remainder, and in the following September harvested the equivalent of one bale of hops, 180 pounds. This was sold for eighty-five cents a pound, or a little more than a hundred and fifty dollars for the bale.
This sum was more money than had been received by any of the settlers in the Puyallup valley, except perhaps two, from the products of their farms for that year. My father's near neighbors obtained a barrel of hop roots from California the next year, and planted them the following spring—four acres. I obtained what roots I could get that year, but not enough to plant an acre. The following year (1867) I planted four acres, and for twenty-six successive years thereafter we added to the area planted, until our holdings reached past the five-hundred-acre mark and our production was more than four hundred tons a year.
None of us knew anything about the hop business, and it was entirely by accident that we engaged in it. But seeing that there were possibilities of great gain, I took pains to study hop culture, and found that by allowing our hops to mature thoroughly, curing them at a low temperature, and baling them while hot, we could produce hops that would compete with any product in the world. Others of my neighbors planted them, and so did many people in Oregon, until soon there came to be a field for purchasing and shipping hops. But the fluctuations in price were so great that in a few years many growers became discouraged and lost their holdings.
The site of the cabin home in Puyallup is now Pioneer Park, Ezra Meeker's gift to the city that he founded. In it still stands the ivy vine that for fifty years grew over the cabin.
Finally, during the failure of the world's hop crop in the year 1882, there came to be unheard-of prices for hops, and fully one third of the crop of the Puyallup valley was sold for a dollar a pound. I had that year nearly one hundred thousand pounds, which brought an average of seventy cents a pound.
My first hop house was built in 1868—a log house. It still stands in Pioneer Park in Puyallup. We frequently employed more than a thousand people during harvest time. Many of these were Indians, some of whom would come for a thousand miles down the coast from British Columbia and even the confines of Alaska; they came in the great cedar-log canoes manned with twenty paddlers or more. For the most part I managed my Indian workers very easily. Once I had to tie up two of them to a tree for getting drunk; their friends came and stole away the prisoners—which was what I intended they should do.
It was in 1870, eighteen years after my arrival from across the Plains, that I made my first return journey to the States. I had to go through the mud to the Columbia River, then out over the bar to the Pacific Ocean, and down to San Francisco. Then there was the seven days' journey over the Central and Union Pacific and connecting lines; this meant sitting bolt upright all the way, for there were no sleeping cars then, and no diners either.
About 1882 I had come to realize that the important market for hops was in England, and E. Meeker & Co. began sending trial shipments, first seven bales, then the following year five hundred bales, then fifteen hundred. Finally our annual shipments reached eleven thousand bales a year, or the equivalent in value of half a million dollars—said at that time to be the largest export hop business of any one concern in the United States. At one time I had two full trainloads between the Pacific and the Atlantic, on their way to London. I spent four winters in London dealing in the hop market.
Little as I had thought ever to handle an international business, still less had I thought ever to write a book. My first publication was an eighty-page pamphlet descriptive of Washington Territory, printed in 1870. My first real book, Hop Culture in the United States, was published in 1883. I mention this fact simply as one instance out of the many that could be given of the unexpected lines of development that life in the new land opened out to the pioneers.
The hop business could not be called a venture; it was simply a growth. The conditions were favorable to us in that we could produce hops for the world's market at the lowest prices. We actually pressed the English growers so closely that more than fifteen thousand acres of hops were destroyed in that country.
Our great prosperity was not to last. One evening in 1892, as I stepped out of my office and cast my eyes toward one group of hop houses, it struck me that the hop foliage of a field near by was off color—did not look natural. One of my clerks from the office said the same thing—the vines did not look natural. I walked down to the yards, a quarter of a mile away, and there first saw the hop louse. The yard was literally alive with lice, and they were destroying at least the quality of the hops. I issued a hop circular, sending it to more than six hundred correspondents all along the coast in California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, and before the week was out I began to receive samples from them, and letters asking what was the matter with the hops.
It appeared that the attack of lice was simultaneous in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, extending over a distance coastwise of more than five hundred miles, and even inland up the Skagit River, where there was an isolated yard. This plague was like a clap of thunder out of a clear sky to us.
I sent my second son, Fred Meeker, to London to learn the English methods of fighting the pest and to import some spraying machinery. We found to our cost, however, in the course of time, that the English methods did not suit our different conditions; for while we could kill the lice, we had to use so much spraying material on the dense foliage that, in killing them, we virtually destroyed the hops. Instead of being able to sell our hops at the top price of the market, we saw our product fall to the foot of the list. The last crop I raised cost me eleven cents a pound and sold for three under the hammer at sheriff's sale.
At that time I had advanced to my neighbors and others upon their hop crops more than a hundred thousand dollars, which was lost. These people simply could not pay, and I forgave the debt, taking no judgments against them, and I have never regretted the action. All my accumulations were swept away, and I quit the business—or, rather, the business quit me.
After a long struggle with the hop plague, nearly all the hops were plowed up and the land in the Puyallup valley and elsewhere was used for dairy farming, fruit growing, and general crops. It is actually of a higher value now than when it was bearing hops.
United States Forest Service