[PDF]A homesteader's portfolio

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A HOMESTEADER’S
PORTFOLIO


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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NSW YORK * BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited

LONDON • BOMBAY * CALCUTTA
MELBOURNB

THE MACMILLAN CO. OP CANADA, Lm

TORONTO


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Prineville, County Seat of Crook County


A HOMESTEADER’S
PORTFOLIO


BY

ALICE DAY PRATT


Sot*

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1922

All rights reserved


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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA


Copyught, X9*a,

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.


Set up and printed. Published October, 19 22 .


Press of

J. J. Little & Ives Company
New York, U. S. A.


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1 59/130



cunt MOB

I. The Adventure i

II. The Roundup ........ 7

III. Business Is Business 15


IV. The New Land in Autumn .... 21

V. The New Land in Spring .... 29

VI. Incubation 38

VII. The Life of the Pioneers .... 42

VIII. “And the Evening and the Morning


Were the First Day” .... 46

IX. White Leghorns 54

X. Acquaintance 66

XI. The Bachelors 71

XII. The Old Oregonian 73

XIII. The Quest of Diogenes 76

XIV. Dinner in the Basin 80

XV. “Behold, in the Tent” 86

XVI. Spring 97

XVII. Aunt Polly, Pioneer 103

XVIII. “To-morrow and To-morrow and To-
morrow” 1 12

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vi


Contents


CHAPTSl PAGE

XIX. Bossy and Psalmmy 125

XX. Fly 133

XXI. The Companions 136

XXII. The Survival of the Fittest . . . 139

XXIII. The Witness 151

XXIV. Plowing 158

XXV. The Old Oregonian Again .... 164

XXVI. To Have and to Hold 170

XXVII. Afterword 178

A Tribute 180


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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


Prineville, County Seat of Crook County . . Frontispiece

PACINO PAGB


The Grand March, Pendleton Roundup . . . . 8

Friar Butte 26

Untamed Fields of Broadview 26


White Leghorns (Enjoying a Winter in Town) • . 56
“Whitefaces,” Typical Central Oregon Herd . . 74


Bingo — (Guard of Broadview) 112

The Lodge in the Wilderness 112

The Serpent in the Garden 140

The House that Eggs Built 140


The Lone-hand Crop . . ... . ... • > > . 172


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SONG OF THE HOMESTEADERS

Serried and sharp is the region’s rim
Like lunar cliffs clear-cut and bold,

Plains under quivering waves of heat,

Plains under fierce, untempered cold.

Dreary the landscape, lichen-gray,

Sage brush and juniper miles on miles.

Never a wood bird whistles gay,

Never a violet peeps and smiles.

Coyote and jack rabbit, wolf and owl,

Prairie dog, eagle, and rattlesnake.

Bones of the bison and starveling steer
Season on season bleach and bake.

Whirling dust storm and shifting sand—

This, oh this, is the Promised Land!

Silvery, sinuous, ditch and flume
Leading down, from the arid steep,

Water of life to the land below —

Virginal valleys rich and deep.

Limitless orchards of peach and plum
Checking the landscape east and west,

Garden and vineyard and soft-eyed herds,

And woolly flocks with abundance blessed.
Bam and haystack and bungalow
And blaze of flowers for the passerby,

And soldierly ranking of poplar spires
Silhouette on the sunset sky,

And sweet-breathed meadows a billowy sea —
This is the Country-That-Is-To-Be!


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A HOMESTEADER’S PORTFOLIO


I

THE ADVENTURE

About the year nineteen-ten came to me — teacher
and spinster — the conviction that Fate had paid me
the compliment of handing over the reins. She had
failed to provide for me that ideal relationship
which alone is the basis of the true home, and I
was by nature obdurate toward accepting anything
less at her hands. When a youthful friend was
surreptitiously chidden for using the term “old
maid” in my presence, the incident gave rise to
thought. What now? I asked myself. Quo vadis,
old maid? What will you do with life? Perhaps
you have known the glory and the dream. Will you
subsist henceforth upon the memory thereof or shall
life continue to be for you that “ecstasy” “nothing
less than which is worthy of the name” ?

But by what route, if any, was that ecstasy to be
attained? Not in the character of an “unplucked
rose on the ancestral tree” — an illustration of the

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A Homesteader’s Portfolio

immemorial dependence and subjection of the femi-
nine. Not through that occasional achievement —
“fifty years a teacher.” The road that led that way
was far too closely hedged about by organization,
boards, principals, superintendents, wise and other-
wise parental interference, for 'any satisfying and
permanent results. Not through social service as I
knew it in the great city. The slum missionary with
a country heart is far more truly a subject for charity
than little Paolo and Francesca in the tenement of a
thousand souls. One’s course, to be most effective,
must be in line with one’s spontaneous loves and
interests.

For some months, while work went on as usual, I
reflected deeply, and gradually evolved the determi-
nation to be a creative farmer. There recurred to
me the longing and ambition — innate but hitherto
suppressed — to own a portion of the earth’s crust
in my own right and to tamper with it unrestrained.
I would build a farm, whereon I could exercise my
delight in all forms of nature life and to which in
time I might bring some little unparented children,
on whom to wreak my educational convictions and
whom I might hope some day to turn over — a little
bunch of good citizens — to my native land.

My fellow teachers wondered somewhat that
winter at my unaffected cheerfulness under certain
afflictions that visited themselves upon us. They
never dreamed that I was all the tiipe afar on the

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The Adventure


prairies with the wind in my hair and the smell of
new-plowed earth in every breath I drew.

From the Department of the Interior I obtained
facts as to public lands — for I had no treasure laid
up wherewith to buy. Anyway, the virgin soil suited
my plan. My farm was to be a true creation.

Gradually the prospective field narrowed itself
until I had derided upon Oregon. Then, that I
might not be a pauper immigrant, I decided to pro-
cure a school in the state and take what time might
be required for finding my waiting acres. Through
the State Superintendent, rather late, I obtained a
position as primary teacher in the little town of
Athena, eastern Oregon, and, on one memorable
September day, companioned by an inseparable
brown dog, I found myself about to embark upon
the great adventure.

“Portland, Oregon? To your left. Leaves in
twenty seconds.” The forbidding gate clanged to
behind me and I sped down the track.

“Portland, Oregon ? Right here. Mind the step,
Madam. All aboard 1” The conductor and his little
stool swung themselves up behind me and the fast
train for the Pacific coast moved noiselessly out of
our great metropolis. Behind, what extremes of
gayety and misery, what competition, what life at
high pressure! Before, what calm, what freedom,
what limitless spaces, what hope and opportunity ! I
had become a homesteader !

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A Homesteader’s Portfolio

Out of Manhattan, out through garden-like
suburbs bright with velvet lawns and asters and
scarlet sage, through golf links and country clubs,
slowly climbing into high and woodsy places where
belated summer people thronged the platforms and
plodded along the dusty roads. Over the mountains
and down again through mining camps and iron
towns blazing their flashlights to the sky. Out into
lovely old farm lands whose fields and vineyards
creep to within a stone’s throw of a white-capped
inland sea — and the farm-house windows look on
both. Out into the dear, familiar Middle West,
with its boundless undulating tide of crops and crops
and crops, its Lombardies and its windmills, its
roomy, hospitable homes and spacious barns — homes
sheltering the bent and withered parents of college-
bred sons and daughters.

In and out of the smoky shroud of a great city;
over the river and into the corn lands — com and
com and com, a day of com! Corn on the stalks
for miles and miles, com in huge, golden pyramids
upon the ground, corn in wagons, com in cars, com
in towering warehouses. Once, in a prairie of corn,
the train came to a sudden halt and there was an
altercation vigorous but brief. A fellow traveler,
who had stolen out to investigate, came back laugh-
ing and explained that it was “bums.” “Bums on
top, underneath, and all over us,” he testified. “The
conductor’s shaking them here where they can get a

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The Adventure


job if they want it. Don’t seem to take to the idea
much.” He had brought back with him two or three
sample ears of corn which he measured upon his arm
— the full length of the lower arm from elbow to
finger tips — “American gold,” he commented, strok-
ing the polished ranks of seed.

Somewhere in this borderland also we were
flagged at a crossroads where was a sign bearing
the legend “Rawhide.” “Yes, bragged that he’d
kill the first chief he met,” related a neighbor,
“down-East boy, just a youngster, he was. That’s
where he met his man. The tribe stayed their march
just long enough to tack up his skin on a tree that
grew where that sign stands.”

And, suddenly, with daylight of the third morn-
ing, there is a change. We have slept in the old
land and waked in the new. The sun comes up in
red-gold majesty above a lofty, untamed, illimitable
land that sweeps ever upward in bold, bare reaches
to its crown of bold, bare mountain summits, un-
softened by foliage, undimmed by distance — clear-
cut as the mountains of the moon. The Northwest
— the great plains, the land of wild-west romance
and cowboy domination! Early in the gray dawn
of this morning I hear across the aisle in eager girl
tones, “Mother, Mother, guess what place this isl
Medicine Bow! and there is a hotel over there called
‘The Virginia.’ Oh, my!”

Up on the highest point of the railroad, eight

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A Homesteader’s Portfolio

thousand feet above sea level, where many miles of
gigantic snowsheds tell of abomination of desola-
tion in the winter season, something caused a few
moments’ halt and the passengers got out and
walked beside the train. In sparkling draughts
from the direction of the dawn, came that atmos-
phere that brings life to the lifeless — champagne-
like, intoxicating I Eastward to the golden morn-
ing, westward to the soft-toned horizon, northward
and southward the view was limited but by the eye’s
own mechanism. In every direction one might ride
for days without guide and without trail. Standing
bareheaded on the heights, filled with new plans and
with new hopes, one pilgrim surrendered herself to
the spirit of the West!

At noon of the fourth day out, the conductor
walked the train with jovial apology, announcing a
holiday for the purpose of attending the circus. In
fact the train would be held up for five hours at
Pendleton and every one could go to the “Roundup.”
What was the Roundup ? Why, an annual wild-west
show characteristic of the country. No one, having
seen it, would regret the delay. There was many-
hued disappointment among the passengers, but, on
the whole, amused and curious acceptance of the
circus idea, and all turned out into the bustling,
dingy streets of Pendleton.


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II


THE ROUNDUP

The dingy streets of Pendleton, on this final and
great day of the show, were filled with a seething
and motley multitude. There had been a street
parade and its elements passed hither and yon on
various errands, mingling with guests from a dozen
states who had honored the event with their pres-
ence. Dashing western gentlemen — officers of the
day — sheriffs and mayors and private citizens, gal-
loped this way and that, making arrangements for
the afternoon. Young buckaroos in outlandish
chaps — black and white, crimson, mustard-colored
and green — paraded with due importance, three or
four abreast. Here and there a group elicited loud
applause from the bystanders. Women of all
grades, from pretty ladies in handsome riding cos-
tume to savage-looking squaws bare-headed and
blanketed, made common holiday. Scores of spec-
tators crowded about a harness-maker’s window in
which were displayed the gold-and-silver-inlaid sad-
dle and the jeweled bridle — prizes to be awarded
the champion of the buckaroos and of the eques-
triennes. Evidently there was no nooning on this

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A Homesteader’s Portfolio


festive day. Lunches were hastily snatched from
booths on the street, and the crowd melted from the
thoroughfare to reappear in the great outdoor am-
phitheater, which, by one o’clock, was packed to the
last seat on the bleachers.

Five hundred horses chafed at the gates ; one hun-
dred wild-eyed young steers tossed their horns in
the enclosures; the band played intermittently and
the feet of the expectant crowd beat time upon the
benches. In the arena, the water wagons prepared
the ground, and that ubiquitous black-eyed horse-
man of the official decoration — the goal of number-
less feminine eyes — the marshal of the Roundup-
sped his deputies hither and yon. Above all hung
that indescribable, diamond-dust western sky, swept
by fleeces of cloud soft as the down on the breast of
a swan. Near at hand, low, rock-rimmed hills en-
closed this new-world drama from all the world
without.

The trumpet blast, the instant parting of the
great gates, the forward leap of the leaders of the
grand parade, and in they come — gallant gentlemen
and dainty misses of the western metropolis,
browned ranch maids and buckaroos, male and fe-
male champions of the ranges, sullen squaws in rain-
bow garb and resplendent savages in paint and
feathers. Varied as the hues of their habiliments
are the riders, yet exhibiting without exception that
one gift in common — the careless command of the

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The Grand March-Pendleton Round,


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The Roundup

horse and saddle. While the audience roars itself
hoarse for its favorites, they ride below in proud
and smiling nonchalance. The broad felt hat is
raised to this hail and to that. The gauntleted hand
flies up in joyous salute to neighbors and home folks
on the benches. One guesses how many days of
ranch-house drudgery have been lightened for that
smiling maiden by the thought of this day when,
with new riding suit and saddle, she will ride with
the youth of her choice in the Roundup at Pendle-
ton, or, during how many solitary nights on the
plains that champion has pictured the face that shall
witness his triumph in the Pendleton arena.

On the benches, alert and keen-eyed western citi-
zens, professional men late from eastern universi-
ties, grizzled ranchers and homesteaders, and many
a king of wheat and of cattle claim their share in
the grace and new-world chivalry, the dauntless
courage and conquest of Nature represented there
below. Little wrinkled grandmothers scramble to
their feet and cackle congratulations to Buddy or
Sissy for whom they once played cock horse back
there in the old ranch kitchen. Sunburned ranch
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