Excerpts from The Sandpile
How well I remember looking with trepidation at the sagebrush and sand dunes covering our homestead and wondering how we could ever develop it into a good productive farm. It looked like we were back in parts of Utah or southern Idaho. Cultivating the Roza was surely a challenge to the people who planted potatoes, alfalfa, vineyards and orchards. Through a gap between two hills we could see nice farms which had been established on land like ours when irrigation water was first delivered there some fifty years earlier.
The sand and sagebrush on the Roza was still as untouched as when other parts of the valley were settled. In 1893, freight and mail were picked up from the Northern Pacific train at Mabton by horse and wagon which crossed several miles of dusty sagebrush land and forded the Yakima River before reaching Sunnyside. Anna Puterbaugh (an early settler) told about arriving alone on the train when she was a young lady and how the conductor didn't think she should get off at the isolated Mabton with no one to meet her.
How different the Yakima Valley must have looked in the mid-1800s. That wide expanse of range land with lush bunch grass was the area where Ben Snipes, the "Northwest Cattle King", centered his 125,000 head of cattle. His range reached to Montana and to the Fraser and Cariboo Rivers in British Columbia, where he traded his cattle for gold dust. Ben Snipes dressed simply, wore no gun and was trusted by white men and Indians. His log cabin was moved to a Sunnyside park from a place west of town near the Yakima River. Ben Snipes may have envisioned settlers eventually developing the valley with towns, farms and roads.
Many wild horses used to roam in the Horse Heaven Hills on the south side of the valley, and Indians would round them up each year to sell at Toppenish. The Roza is located on the north side of the valley near the Rattlesnake Hills. They are aptly named as we saw plenty of rattlers the first year or two.
It was a warm and sunny spring day as we began to unload the truck and trailer onto the hot soft sand. Carl was anxious to provide some shelter for all of our possessions. He lowered the refrigerator and other heavy items down long planks by rope, then put those planks under the trailer for support and dug under the wheels. All was eventually in a huge pile covered by a large canvas.
To pay our irrigation water bill the next day, we drove about 25 miles back toward Yakima, to the town of Zillah, where we paid $126 at the Roza Irrigation District office for three acre-feet of water to be used during the growing season ahead. That meant the equivalent of water three feet deep metered out to cover each acre of land. The field director from Yakima happened to be in the office so he took us out to meet the Burns family, who were also homesteading. They lived in a large army tent big enough to have one area for cooking and eating and another for their beds. Their picture had been in Life Magazine, with an interesting article about the irrigation project and the veterans homesteading government land. Mrs. Burns was the secretary of the Homesteaders' Club; she invited us to attend a meeting the next Friday evening. After our visit, we went back to load the remainder of the machinery that Carl bought at the sale east of Granger. Carl took Kathleen with him and went on to the bank in Grandview to cash some war bonds to cover the checks that he had written. I was delegated to drive the tractor home.
Oh, what a ride that was! There I sat, in my nice black pin-stripe skirt and jacket, perched on the seat of the tractor as it went putt-putt-chug-putt in 2nd gear, along the highway. All I knew was how to steer and stop! On a long curve north of Sunnyside there were four trucks, several cars and a trailer all lined up behind me, wondering what on earth was causing the delay. One by one, when they could finally pass me, people gave me very annoyed looks or honked their horns, but a few gave me a smile. The truck drivers all waved, as did farmers in the fields as I passed by. When I finally entered Sunnyside and crossed the main intersection at Sixth Street, spectators (including two truck drivers) were waiting to wave and cheer me on as I slowly rolled by. That memorable little 14-mile trip took three hours and 20 minutes, and I was mighty glad when I finally reached home!
Our meals outside, under the canvas, often included the cry, "Quick, cover the food," whenever we saw a dust devil wandering over the ground toward us. We would grab a towel to protect our meal hoping to minimize the crunch of sand. I'll never forget how the refreshing breezes on hot days would sometimes produce various sized dust devils which picked up twigs and sand in funnel shaped spirals as they traveled haphazardly over the land. Occasionally, stronger winds would last several days and blow swirls of sand and dust thousands of feet in the air. These blinding dust storms engulfed the entire valley. Some roads were closed due to poor visibility and drifting sand. The dust settled everywhere, and blowing sand changed the shape of the land. To the south, we could see it roll down the Horse Heaven Hills into the valley, covering everything like a blanket and finally engulfing us.
My parents in Delaware were very concerned about my welfare, as they shook a few grains of sand from my letters, and they were always ready to help us both financially and emotionally. They had hoped that we might move back to my ancestral Wilson farm in Indiana, but Carl was from the west. People raised near the western mountains seldom go east to live. However, we felt that we had made the right decision to leave Utah. Our small orchard in Orem was not large enough to be our sole support, but it required time and care. Carl had not found suitable employment after the war, and he felt that developing the new land in Washington was the answer to our situation.
Rill irrigation was very time and energy consuming. Daily, at the top of the field, Carl would direct little streams of water down each row. Sometimes, I would stand at the bottom of the slope to tell him when the water reached the end of a group of rows so he could direct it down the next group. Carl spent many hours managing the water and establishing furrows. He became so completely exhausted most days that he hardly felt like eating supper. Usually, he would go back to the field again until dark (about nine o'clock).
As water settled the ground, a l0'x60' wet spot with thin crevasses appeared in the middle of the field for a few days. Water seemed to run down a hole forever if it wasn't plugged with dirt. The east end of our hilltop was very rocky, and some places sounded hollow when we stamped there. Gophers dug long tunnels underground, and water starting down a hole would emerge somewhere way downhill, carrying a surprised gopher along in the flood.
When we first arrived, we noticed water seepage at the bottom of the field without nearby irrigation, indicating an underground flow of water. The wash had year-round water fed by small springs along the way, including one at the bottom of the hill on the southeast side of the wash. We could sometimes see water bubbling to the surface in the wash just east of the dirt road to Grandview.
Baby fish would find their way from the Roza Dam on the Yakima River (north of Yakima) into the canals and laterals. They would eventually reach the furrows in the field and sometimes get stuck in the mud at the end of the rows. Carl would rescue them and put them in the small pond at the bottom of the field which was filling with irrigation runoff. The little fish could then swim down the shallow stream which drained across the dirt road to Grandview and go on into the wash. From there they could continue their way through larger drain ditches and finally reach the Yakima River again.
One afternoon the little Young boy dropped a shoe into his father's weir box, at the end of the lateral (just around the hill), and it plugged their outlet pipe. Carl was asked to handle the irrigation water overflow through our weir box as their water needed to be shut off. Monroe had to take the pipe apart, retrieve the shoe and cement the damaged connection. Then while the cement was drying, he helped Carl with the extra water. His wife, Irene, came with their two children, and I invited them all to have supper with us. I had just baked bread, and later sent a loaf home with them.
After supper, we rode in their company jeep to the top of the hill, and while the men checked the water again, Irene, the children and I walked over the hilltop to watch the valley lights just coming on. A trace of sunset was still in the sky; to the south were beautiful green farms with town lights in the distance. It all looked so perfect. To the north, there was the different beauty of the wide expanse of dry rolling sagebrush-covered hills just waiting for irrigation water to transform them into green fields and orchards.
The top of the hill would have been a beautiful site for our new home, but would have entailed building a road, bridging the lateral and setting extra power poles. Instead, we built a 24'x24' house near the road and the existing power line. It was all we could afford at the time, and we were anxious to have a better place than the trailer to call home.
On September 9, 1948, Carl began digging a small cellar to go under the house, which he would build near the trailer. He borrowed a scraper from a neighbor. At first, I drove the tractor to pull it while he guided it to scoop out the hole, and we dug down about two feet, then stopped for lunch. We had just started to eat outside, when the wind began to blow, so we grabbed our food and went inside where we sat down to a very sandy meal. The plates and the silverware were covered with a thin layer of dust before we could even get the food off the plates, and our forks scraped along with each crunchy mouthful. Within 15 minutes, we could barely see anything past the trailer, and the air was so full of dust that we could hardly breathe. Then, at two o'clock, the electricity went off. Of course, sand drifted into the hole that we had just dug, and we watched it almost fill in again, leaving little ripples on top of small sand dunes.
We resumed digging the next day, and the hole became deeper and the incline steeper. Once I backed down and kept rolling to the bottom. Carl very quickly had to jump out of the way to keep from being hit; after that, he backed the tractor down the slope, and I drove it out while he managed the scraper and dumped the dirt elsewhere. About two feet down through the loose sandy soil, we hit solid clay, called caliche. It became harder and harder, and eventually Carl had to use a pick axe and shovel. At about five feet he decided the hole was deep enough. It was 16'x16' surrounded by a 4' ledge for the house to rest on.
Snoopy was a good little watchdog. Late, one hot June night, she barked furiously at a noise near our gas barrels. Someone shot at her. She raced back to the house, and by that time Carl was out of bed and outside to yell at the carload of boys looking for gas. They shot again, and Carl heard bullets whiz past his head, hitting the house. He grabbed the old sawed-off shotgun and shot into the air to scare the boys away. It sure did, as the gun sounded like a cannon going off. The boys immediately turned off their flashlights and searchlight then scrambled back into the car to speed away around the hill toward Grandview.
About a week after the shoot-out, gas thieves visited us again; that time we were not at home, as we were spending the evening with the Jacobs family. The thieves stole a five gallon gas can (probably full of our gas), undoubtedly filled their car's gas tank and also took about five gallons of oil. Some people who lived west of us consistently had gas stolen, and one night at a place east of us, thieves mistakenly siphoned diesel fuel into their car. It was found stalled on the side of the road the next morning.
The gas thieves came again November 15th while Carl was attending evening classes in Sunnyside. They were in the process of helping themselves to our gas when he arrived home at 11:15 and scared them away. A five gallon drum of our oil was at the side of the road, the lock was broken on a gas barrel which had been rolled down the bank and a gas can was partly filled. After that, I resumed sitting with our house lights out with a loaded shotgun on the kitchen table when Carl was away on school nights.
On November 27th, when Carl was at class, thieves may have returned yet again. The lights were out, Kathleen was asleep and all was quiet in the house when the dog began to bark. There was a bright moon which enabled me to see something lurking near some sacks which were hung on the clothesline, but I could not determine whether the figure was a person or a coyote. The loaded shot gun was on the table, and I had my coat on, ready to go outside into the chilly night to see who or what was there. But, nothing moved near the gas barrels which Carl had placed closer to the house, and it was a relief to have him finally come home; all was well. My parents must have worried a lot after I wrote about waiting for gas thieves.
Finally, in desperation, Carl rigged a trip wire around the gas barrels and attached it to the trigger of the shotgun, pointed out toward the field. It went off one night, and we found where a hastily retreating car left deep tire tracks in the sand. That ended the gas thefts.
After we settled into normal living conditions in our recently completed house and had most of the homestead under cultivation, there was time to see beyond the sandpile. One day, in early August, we went for a drive with the Caldwell family. We drove west to Toppenish, then south through miles and miles of rolling arid land changing to tree covered hills and then over the forested 3,107 foot high Satus Pass, before reaching the town of Goldendale followed by more miles of arid wheat land and a final steep descent to the Columbia River. The magnificent vista included an old road on our left which tortuously wound down the steep hill on the other side of a deep ravine; we could see the Oregon hills on the other side of the wide river-carved gorge.
We traveled west along the Washington side of the Columbia and soon came to the Maryhill Museum, in the middle of nowhere, in stateliness, on a bluff overlooking the river. It contained the most unexpected and magnificent collections. Exhibits included Queen Marie's Romanian royal summer throne room furniture, Rodin sculptures, Indian artifacts, unusual chess sets from around the world and many mannequins dressed in beautiful fashions of days gone by. The museum was built by Samuel Hill and was dedicated in 1926, by Queen Marie. About two miles east of the museum, a replica of England's Stonehenge was built on a high bluff overlooking the river in memory of the soldiers and sailors of Klickitat County who gave their lives in defense of our country during WWI (later to include those of other wars).
Beyond the museum, we continued west and then went down a steep dirt road to a place where we could drive over rounded river rocks out to an island. We crossed a shallow branch of the river to a fishing camp where the Indians sometimes sold salmon. Small cabins were built with river rocks for overnight guests; a larger building was used for cooking and eating. After our picnic lunch under some shady trees, the children played safely in the shallow water before heading home. But, we got stuck. One rear wheel of the Caldwell's car slipped a bit to the side as we tried to leave the island, and the car soon settled to the axle in sand. Fred jacked up the car, and we gathered rocks to fill the hole . . . to no avail. We became rather concerned as darkening storm clouds threatened (high water sometimes covered the place that we were crossing). Just then, another car came toward us over the river rocks, and we were thankful to greet four men who put their shoulders to Fred's car and pushed it onto solid ground again. In 1960, The Dalles Dam was eventually built across the river, and the little island fishing camp was covered with water. On the Oregon side, the Celilo Falls, where Indians fished for many, many years, was also covered by rising water behind the dam.
At last, the long-awaited day arrived. We received the United States Government Patent No. 1138051, dated February 24, 1953, for our homestead, just a month short of five years after our arrival on March 25, 1948. We were now truly on our own ground, with all the problems and joys, for many years to come.