The Home Makers
HE horses are ill mated, the wagon decrepit. Baling wire sustains the harness and the patched canvas of the wagon top hints of long service.
"How far to Millican's?" says the driver.
He is a young man; at least, his eyes are young. His "woman" is with him and their three kiddies, the tiniest asleep in her mother's lap, with the dust caked about her wet baby chin. The man wears overalls, the woman calico that was gaudy once before the sun bleached it colorless, and the children nameless garments of uncertain ancestry. The wife seems very tired—as weary as the weary horses. Behind them is piled their household: bedding, a tin stove, chairs, a cream separator, a baby's go-cart, kitchen utensils, a plow and barbed wire, some carpet; beneath the wagon body swings a pail and lantern, and water barrel and axe are lashed at one side.
We direct them to Millican's.
"Homesteading?" we inquire.
"Not exactly. That is, we're just lookin'."
There are hundreds like these all over the West, "just lookin'," with their tired wives, their babies, their poverty, and their vague hopefulness. They chase rainbows from Bisbee to Prince Rupert. Some of them settle, some of them succeed. But most of them are discontented wherever Fortune places them, and forever move forward toward some new-rumored El Dorado just over the hill.
There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain's crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don't know how to rest.
That, of course, is rather picturesque, and, taken all in all, your average wanderer of the wagon road merits little heroics. His aspirations are apt to be earthy, and too often he seeks nothing loftier than a soft snap. In the final analysis some of our western gypsies desire nothing more ardently than a rest.
The wanderer is the shiftless land seeker, and is to be distinguished from the sincere home seeker who fares forth into strange lands with his family and his penates, and who finds vacant government land and proceeds to "take it up." The best of all the free acres went years ago, along with the free timber and the other compensations for pioneering, but here and there remote areas worth having still remain. About the last of these, and by all odds the greatest, was in Central Oregon when the railroads opened the doors of immigration a few years ago.
Before the railroads came I went from Bend southeasterly through what is now well called the "homestead country," and in all the one hundred and fifty miles traversed we saw three human habitations: the stockman's, George Millican, the horse breeder, Johnny Schmeer, and the sheepman's, Bill Brown. The rest of it was sagebrush and jack rabbits, with a band of "fuzz-tails" stampeding at the sight of us and a few cattle nipping the bunch grass. My companions were a locator and a man who took up one of the first "claims" in all that country, at Hampton Valley, one hundred and thirty miles from a railroad.
To-day there are schools out there, homes, fences, and plowed fields. Some of it is very good land, and the modern pioneers are prospering. Some of it is not so good, and there have been failures and disappointments as in all the homestead districts of all the West, past and present. For there is truth in the old saying that for the most part the first crop of homesteaders fails, and the success of the late comers is built upon the broken hopes of the pioneers. However that may be, the battle against the odds set up by a none too bountiful nature is often enough pitiful, and occasionally heroic.
Picture an unbroken plain of sagebrush. Low hills, a mile distant, are fringed with olive-green juniper trees; all the rest is gray, except the ever blue sky which must answer for the eternal hope in the hearts of the home makers—God smiles there. In the midst of the drab waste is a speck of white, a tent. A water barrel beside it tells the story of the long road to the nearest well—no road, but a trail, for this is well off the beaten path and such luxuries as surveyed highways are yet to come. The tent is the very outpost of settlement, a mute testimonial of the insistent desire to possess land of one's very own.
Irrigation—"First, parched lands of sage; then the flow"
Series Copyright 1909 by Asahel Curtis
Irrigation—"Next, water in a master ditch and countless man-made rivulets between the furrows"
Our car stops to inquire the way, and a woman appears. Yes, it is forty miles to Brookings' halfway house, as we had guessed.
"And to Bend?" We ask what we already know, perhaps because the woman—a girlish woman—so evidently would prolong the interruption to her solitude.
"About one hundred and twenty—a long way!" She smiles, adding, simply, "John's there."
Small wonder she clutches at us! John has been gone a fortnight, and for two days she has not even seen the Swansons, her "neighbors" over the hill, three miles away. Like a ship in the night, we all but passed her—passed with never a greeting for which her heart hungered, never a word from the "outside" to break the hard monotony. She is utterly alone, except for the rabbits and the smiling sky. Her husband is wage earning. And she sticks by their three hundred and twenty acres and does what she can with a mattock and a grubbing hoe. They have a well started, and some fence posts in the ground. Some day, she says, they will make a home of it.
"We always dreamed of having a home," she explains a bit dreamily. "But it never seemed to come any closer on John's wages. So when we read of getting this land for nothing it seemed best to make the try. But of course it isn't 'free' at all—we've discovered that. And oh! it costs so much!"
We commiserate. We would help, and vaguely seek some means.
Help? Yes, gladly she will accept it, says the little woman—but not for herself. "Good gracious, why should I need it?" Nor have we the heart to offer reasons. But if we have a mind to be helpful, she continues, there is a case over in eighteen-eleven—she names the section and township—where charity could afford a smile. She tells us, then, of a half-sick woman with three infants, left on the homestead while the husband goes to town. There, instead of work, he gets drink, and fails to reappear with provisions. But the woman will not give up the scrap of land she has set her heart on, and doggedly remains. When the neighbors find her, she and the children have existed for five days solely on boiled wheat. "And we needed it so for seeding," is her lament.
"It was a very typical stagecoach"
In the homestead country
Our hostess of the desert stands by the ruts, waving to us through the dust of our wake, the embodiment of the spirit of pioneering, which burns to-day as brightly as ever in the past, could we but search it out and recognize it.
Such as she are home makers. However, the free lands are overridden with gamblers in values, with incompetents, with triflers. They are the chaff which will scatter before the winds of adversity. The others will succeed, just as they have succeeded elsewhere on the forefronts of civilization; the pity of it is that their lot may not be made easier, surer.
Returning from that trip I read a chapter in a book, newly published, dealing with this selfsame land. Concerning the homesteader I found these words:
I have seen many sorts of desperation, but none like that of the men who attempt to make a home out of three hundred and twenty acres of High Desert sage.... A man ploughing the sage—his woman keeping the shack—a patch of dust against the dust, a shadow within a shadow—sage and sand and space!
The author is a New Englander, who had seen Oregon with scholastic eyes. The harsh frontier had no poetry, no hope, for him—only hopelessness. But the woman in the tent, the Swansons over the hill, and the hundreds of other Swansons scattering now, and for many years gone by, over the lands of the setting sun, know better, though their grammar be inferior and their enthusiasm subconscious. Men saw and spoke as did the New Englander when Minnesota was being wrested from the wilderness, when people were dubbed insane for trying conclusions with the Palouse country, when the Dakotas were considered agricultural nightmares. In the taming of new empires unbridled optimism is no more prevalent than blinded pessimism.
Closer to home I know another woman, a farmer, too. Hers is an irrigated ranch, and she works with her shovel among the ditches as sturdily as the hired man. Poor she is in wealth, as it is reckoned, and her husband poorer still in health, for he was rescued from a desk in the nick of time. He is fast mending now, and confesses to a rare pleasure in making two blades of grass grow where none at all grew in the unwatered sands. And in truth, simply watching the accomplishments of irrigation is tonic enough to revive the faint. First, parched lands of sage; the grub hoe and the mattock clear the way, and then the plow. Next, water, in a master ditch and countless, man-made rivulets between the furrows. Finally—presto! the magic of a single season does it—green fields of clover and alfalfa smile in the sun!
But Heaven forbid that this should smack of "boosting"! (There, by the way, you have the most-used, and best-abused, word in all the West.) It is not so intended, for the literature of professional optimism is legion, and needs no reinforcement. The Oregon country is no more wedded to success than many another, nor is it a land where woman can wrestle with man's problems more happily than elsewhere. The incidents of these pages mean simply that beneath the dull surface may be found, ever and anon, a glow of something stirring; prick the dust, and blood may run.
The West, which is viewed here chiefly as a playland, is a mighty interesting workaday land, too, and numberless are the modern tragedies and comedies of its varied peoples at their varied tasks. Rules and precedents are few and far between; it is each for himself in his own way. The blond Scandinavian to his logged-off lands, the Basque to his sheep herding; the man from Iowa dairies, and the Carolinian, who never before saw alfalfa, sets about raising it; the Connecticut Yankee, with an unconscionable instinct for wooden nutmegs, sells real estate; the college man with poor eyes or a damaged liver, as the case may be, becomes an orchardist at Hood River or Medford. Somehow, some place, there is room for each and every one, and the big Westland smiles and receives them all, the strong to prosper and the weak to fail, according to the inexorable way of life.
Some come for wealth and some for health—a vast army for the latter, were the truth always known. The highness and the dryness of the hinterland draw many to it in their battle against the White Plague, and while victory often comes, there comes, too, defeat.
An empty shack I know could tell such a tale—the tragedy of a good fight lost. They were consumptives, both of them, and they lived in a lowland city, west of the mountains. The Doctor gave the old, old edict: the only chance was to get away from the damp, to live out of doors in a higher, sunnier climate. The boy—he was scarcely more than that—bade farewell to his sweetheart and came over the mountains, where he found land and built the shack that was to be their home and their haven—where they were to become sun-browned and robust. The self-evident conclusion outruns the tale, I fear. The girl, who smilingly sent her lover eastward, dreaming of the happiness so nearly theirs, was distanced in her race for the sunny goal by Death. To-day the shack stands vacant.
A valley of Washington. "The big Westland smiles and receives them all"
From a photograph by Frank Palmer, Spokane, Wash.
A friend, who knew the girl and the story, and loves the land she hoped to see, wrote this to hearten her when the doctors realized that the home upon whose threshold she wavered was far, far distant from the one her lover fashioned "over the eastern mountains":
Over the eastern mountains
Into a valley I know,
Into the air of uplands,
Into the sun, you go.
Warm is a day in the upland;
Warm is the valley, and bright;
Glittering stars are shining
Over the valley at night.
Here in the western lowland
Patiently I remain,
Under the clouds, in darkness,
Under the dismal rain.
Patient I wait, well knowing
The joy that is to be:
Into the east you're going
To build a home for me.
Rather would I go with you,
But, staying, I smile and sing,
For winter is almost over,
And soon will come the spring.
Then to the home you have made me,
Singing, still singing, I'll go
Over the eastern mountains
Into a valley I know.