The Home Makers
The 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.
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.
[Illustration: Irrigation--"First, parched lands of sage; then the flow"
Series Copyright 1909 by Asahel Curtis]
[Illustration: Irrigation--"Next, water in a master ditch and countless
man-made rivulets between the furrows"]
"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.
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!
[Illustration: "It was a very typical stagecoach"]
[Illustration: In the homestead country]
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.
[Illustration: 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.