As new arrivals to the Owyhee country settled in and built homes, cleared fields and planted crops or started herds, they also turned their attention to creating the social context for raising a family. Central to this task was provision of the essentials of basic education for their children, including schools, books and teachers. This was not a simple matter. Malheur County’s “magnificent distances” presented serious, though not insurmountable challenges. In the words of an early county superintendent of schools, “In round numbers Malheur county covers a domain larger than the combined areas of Delaware, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Puerto Rico! Sage brush instead of steamboats. Cow trails in place of trolley cars. Ponies in place of Pullmans.”1
With the exception of the towns, most school districts in the county amounted to a single school. In the Owyhee Canyonlands, these were drafty, one room affairs with students of different levels no higher than the eighth grade. The exception was Jordan Valley, which by 1915 was offering a four-year course above the eighth grade but “owing to a limited number of teachers could not become standard.”2 Some of these schools were erected before Malheur County was calved off from Baker County in 1887. Rockville district was established in 1877, Jordan Valley district in January 1878.3 The Glover district near Jordan Valley was organized in 1892 followed by Danner district on Jordan Creek in 1894; Sheaville district north of Jordan Valley came sometime prior to 1895 and the Watson district down in the canyon the following year.4 There were schools centered on a single family that lasted only as long the children were too young for heavy work or until the family moved. For example, the Crutcher district (SD 35) was created for the Andy Loveland family, whose children were three-quarters of the enrollment; the district lapsed after the Lovelands moved to Nampa in 1907. 5 Kirt Skinner described going to school part-time on the family ranch around the turn of the century; his parents hired a teacher who taught three or sometimes four or five months. Chesley Blake offers a vivid description of the situation in the canyon in the region now covered by the reservoir,
The kids all went to school, and there was forty some, forty-four kids went to school at the Watson schoolhouse…. That was way back 1906 and ‘07, in there. Before I was born.... I remember when the school was down at the Brandon place. [My brothers] Pete and Bill went to school there; I didn’t. I never did get to go to school. Pete and Bill went to school there. Down at the Brandon place. Then we moved back up to what we called the Fred Palmer place, and they finished out up there. They started at Watson schoolhouse. Then we moved down to the Brandon place for two months…. There musta been, uh about thirty to thirty-five [students] then. Well, now the Maupin kids went to the Brandon school….below Leslie Gulch. It’s about two miles below there. Little Maupin kids went down there. Page kids, ... Lester Page went up to the Watson schoolhouse. But Jimmy Page and Pat Page and Archie Page and them, they all went to school at the Brandon Place. They lived below, two miles below there. Then they went to down to the, to the… there musta been twenty kids went to school at that school. Then they went down to the McNulty place, and I think there was fifteen that went to that school. So they had to come up from down toward Dry Creek. (Interviewer: So there were about sixty-five kids out there?) Yeah, when we were little kids, yeah when we were kids. But at the Watson schoolhouse when mom and them all went to school, there was forty-four kids went to school there. Sophia and….all her family went to school there. (Interviewer: But when your mom was in school, there was only one school, right?) Yeah, there was only one school right there, up at Watson. Yeah, then when they went to high school they come out to Vale and went to high school at Vale.… They come in and lived in town. Grandpa bought a house in town…. Sent them out to school, out to high school. Eighth grade’s as far as they’d go out there. Then they’d send them out to high school. Yup. That’s what most families did with the high school age kids. They stayed with relatives, or stayed with the ones that had homes there.
A distinctive feature of the student bodies of the Owyhee schools, and indeed of Owyhee society more generally, was the number of Basques. Curiously this does not come out in the interviews, though individual Basques are referred to occasionally. But in the 1936 school district clerk’s census for Jordan Valley (SD#3), sixty-three of 112 students are Basque.6 The Arock school district (SD#81) that year recorded fourteen Basque students out of forty-six with three fathers foreign born and not naturalized.7 In 1915, the country school superintendent reported that in the southern part of the county, “where not a single American family lives” residents had contracted for a school term of nine months and might extend it to ten.8 Ten years later the superintendent reported “In the southern part of the county a school has been organized for the purpose of giving the foreign-born residents instruction in how to become good American citizens.9 This was probably the McDermitt school district (SD#51); the board members were Martin Echave, Jose Jaca and Nortes Lasa.10
School facilities in the Canyonlands were spare. Leonard Duncan’s classes were in a little stone cabin at the Scott place. School district #9 at McDermitt in the far south of the county had a log schoolhouse.11 More common were wood buildings of plain boards. Sophia Bethel remembered mixing lime and water to whitewash the school house interior. Walter Perry’s school “had a big old stove right out in the middle of the room. Anywhere from five to fifteen or twenty kids going to school. Rows of desks going up and down. Some had double desks–two kids to a desk. Finally we had single desks. One was better.”12 The stove was a necessity, as Joe Beach who apparently attended the same school described,
The school house. The wind blew through it pretty bad in the winter time, when the snow was blowing. Had one stove in the middle of the school house. We had get around that pretty close in the winter time. One room. One teacher taught all eight grades. And, uh, we’d have to get around that pretty close. In the winter time, to keep warm. And our desks were made out of rough lumber. Just lumber. Two kids set in one desk. Not very good seats, not very good desks. We’d usta stand around the stove–God! it’d be cold–and warm our backs awhile, and then turn around and warm the front of us. It’d be that cold, ya know? And uh, I remember, we all bigger boys, well started pretty young wearing these Levis with the rivets on the pockets? Well, that was all right, unless you backed up to that stove awhile, started to move or sit down, well those rivets’d be a little hot to sit on.
Basic amenities were lacking or rustic. In the beginning, Ethel Raburn’s school had no well, the closest water source being a quarter of a mile away. The lavatory, however, was probably state of the art for the time.
It was all one room. When I first went to the school, we didn’t even have a well. Closest people to the school was a quarter of a mile. And we brought the water to the school. They sent a couple of kids out to get a bucket of water for us to drink. We all drank out of the same bucket with the same cup. Then finally we got so we brought our own cups. They finally drilled a well years later for the school. But that was years later. We had the outdoor backhouses, and coats were hung on nails in the back of the schoolroom. And it was just one room. There was a little shelf up above where you could set your lunch pail.… there were double desks. They were school desks, but they were double desks. Two people to a desk. And then we went three or four years and they built a new one. Same principle but a little bit larger. Then we had homemade desks for quite a while. Then finally we got one-seat desks when I was in the eighth grade. (What were some of the problems about being in a two-person desk?) Well, it all depended on who sat with you. You could be compatible, or you could fight. But I never had any trouble getting along with anybody. You had no choice of who the teacher decided to set by you. And she had it figured out pretty good who’d get along with who. If they didn’t, she’d change them until she worked it out. There wasn’t no problem, But the kids then, I think–of course today they have so much more to learn, but I do believe they were brighter in their subjects then.
Teaching materials were limited. The blackboard might be a plain board; Clinton Anawalt remembered the pupils cleaning the blackboards without being asked. In Sophia Bethel’s school, a large dictionary and a big world globe were about all there was aside from the students’ desks and a small desk for the teacher. There was no library; for 1902 a total of 111 school library books was reported on hand for the entire county.13 For textbooks, early Owyhee teachers were probably had to rely on whatever they or their students had at hand.14 Later, textbooks were chosen from a state list adopted by vote of the county superintendents.15
School terms in Malheur county were determined more by an agricultural calendar than an academic one. In her report for for 1895-96, the county superintendent Susan W. Moore wrote that countywide many districts could not have terms of more than five or six months.16 Some were less. Five or six years later, the situation remained unchanged.17 Early Owyhee school terms can best be described as flexible, making education sometimes catch as catch can. The school year might last but a few months, one factor being the availability of teachers. Kirt Skinner’s family hired a private teacher for anywhere from three to five months, but found them hard to get. The Skinners sometimes hired teachers from the regular schools who wanted to work in the summer and could give them three months. In the Glover district, summer terms in 1894-96 ran two and a half to three months. And Jordan Valley district (SD #3) held terms of three, four and five months in the period between October 11, 1897 and June 30, 1899. Watson, which had a larger, albeit one-room school house, offered eight months according to Opal McConnell. She does not say which year(s) that might have been. Term lengths often varied by district and by year.18 By 1915, the county superintendent reported that a “goodly number” of schools countywide had lengthened their terms from six and seven months to eight.19 Ultimately of course they would all go to nine months,
Each school district was overseen by three “directors” chosen from local residents, usually the students’ parents.20 In such cases as SD #69, which was at the Skinner ranch and primarily for the Skinner children or the Crutcher district # 35 established for the Loveland family, we can assume that the board mostly comprised family members with meetings perhaps conducted across the dinner table. Opal McConnell recalled there being a board at Watson that hired the teachers and took care of the school. The directors of course would have been concerned about finances. Much of the budget came from the county government, which relied on tax revenue. Those revenues depended on the economic health of the county, and that was tied to the bounty of its harvests. The county school superintendent reported for the 1892-93 biennium, “The average school year was shorter than it was in 1891…. The loss of stock in 1889-90 was so severe that the assessment roll of the county was seriously diminished. We are recovering from that and I look to a return of about five and a half months’ school in every district.”21
Aside from capital outlays for such things as a schoolhouse, a well and an outhouse, the most important expenditure would have been the teacher. Owyhee residents recognized what many people now seem to have forgotten–good teachers are essential to educational excellence. In 1897, the county superintendent of schools wrote in her annual report, “As is the teacher, so is the school, where the influence of the teacher may be felt throughout the entire community, permeating every home with a desire for better and increased educational advantages for its inmates.”22 But hiring people to teach in the remote Owyhee was not easy. Ethel Raburn commented,
As far as I can remember, most of them were from back East. We had one teacher that lied about her age, and she was only seventeen. The others were about eighteen. The seventeen year-old was from Portland. Her folks found she was up here, and Jordan Valley was listed as wild territory, you know. They wanted her to come home, but when they saw what it was like, they finally let her stay.
Once a teacher was hired, the problem became keeping her. (Most teachers but by no means all were women, though only women are mentioned in the interviews.) The problem countywide was of such importance that the county school supervisor, B. L. Milligan, devoted a substantial paragraph to “The Permanency of Teachers’ Work,” declaring “that frequent change in the personnel of the teaching force of the school is a serious bar to its progress and efficiency.”23 One might reasonably expect that this problem would be particularly acute in the Owyhee, but the families there had an effective solution: Local young men would marry them. Chesley Blake describes four cases–Dennis Hahn, Carl Simes and Jim Palmer all married teachers, as did Chesley’s own uncle George. Others are mentioned in the interviews, and John Sackett Skinner describes two cases in his own family.24
Salaries were modest but perhaps still as much a ranch hand’s. The State Superintendent of Public Instruction reported reported state-wide averages for all of Oregon for 1901 and 1902:25
Male Female
1901 $56.83 $44.42
1902 $53.91 $41.75
The rates paid by Owyhee schools probably didn’t vary much from these. According to the 21st Biennial Report covering 1913-14, no district paid less than $50 and most, $60-$65 per month; About fifteen years later the rate was $70 to $100. The salary for the “splendid young woman” teaching in a district (presumably McDermitt SD#51) in the south of the county went from $75 her first year (1913) to $90 the second, proof of the families’ commitment to their children’s education and futures.26
Ethel Raburn recalled that teachers who were not local residents often stayed with a family that had children in the school, though none stayed with her family. She lived on the opposite side of the creek from the school, and when the stream iced up she would miss several days of school. That wouldn’t do for a teacher, who had to be living with a family where she could always make it to school. As a rule the teacher stayed with a family living within a quarter mile of the school. In the morning she had to arrive early and build a fire to warm up the schoolhouse. Teachers also did the janitorial chores but often could talk some of the bigger boys into helping. One wonders what motivated these young women to choose such a remote place to teach. Separation from family must have been difficult and the stresses more than some could bear. This surely was a factor in an incident Clinton Anawalt recollected occurring when he was a first-grader. One of the teachers in Jordan Valley suffered a breakdown and kidnapped a girl and held her at gunpoint. But there were those as well who adapted, married a local fellow and raised a family. A striking example was Johanna Murray, who applied to teach at the Skinner ranch. Born and raised in Scotland, she accompanied her uncle who had come back to Scotland for a visit and was returning to Central Oregon. She taught in several schools there until being hired by the Skinner family. She met and married Silas Kirtland Skinner and never returned to Scotland.27
School curriculum was often a compromise between what was established by the state superintendent of public instruction and what an single teacher could handle with a student body of mixed grades. As is clear from the Rules and Regulations governing public schools the challenge could be formidable.
In all ordinary ungraded district schools in the state where there are pupils of the proper age and degree of advancement, classes may be organized and kept up in the following named studies, to wit: First, second, third, fourth, and fifth readers; orthography (embracing pronunciation and word analysis); penmanship; primary, elementary (mental), and practical arithmetic; elementary and comprehensive geography; beginners and advanced grammar; United States history; elementary natural science; common school literature; citizenship; physiology and hygiene; and vocal music. In such schools no branches additional to these shall be taught unless the directors so order by positive vote; and in no case shall teachers neglect the classes pursuing the above-named studies in order to make room for any additional branches.
Walter Perry remembered being taught reading, writing, spelling, geography and history. “That’s about the size of it.” There were spelling bees and arithmetic matches each Friday afternoon at Sophia Bethal’s school.
The multi-grade classes available at the country schools did not go beyond the eighth grade, and to get high-school level courses required going to the larger school districts in Vale or Ontario where a student might board or stay with relatives. Some families moved to town or purchased a house there for that purpose. Others went further abroad. Kirt Skinner’s grandparents moved to California for their son’s education, while Ethel Raburn sent her daughter Mabel to the Intermountain Institute, a boarding school in Weiser, Idaho. Ethel did her own high school work in Jordan Valley where there was one teacher helped by the eighth-grade teacher, who taught some high school subjects. Once the Union High School was formed there the following year, there were two teachers to share the subjects, but it was some years before the high school in Jordan Valley was considered standard.
Most of the Owyhee kids attended a “country school” in one of the remoter districts, and their experiences were much the same in the one-room schoolhouse with a single teacher described earlier. Most enjoyed the experience, the rare exception being George Palmer, who considered attending school to be his least favorite part of living in the Owyhee. “By God, I never did like to go to school, and I was dumb. By God, I think I was the dumbest kid there. Goddamn teacher slapped me every time she’d go by me whether I needed it or not.”
Country school students usually lived some distance from the schoolhouse. The family that lived a quarter mile away with whom the teacher boarded was probably as close as any. At Watson some lived on the opposite side of the river, and until the bridge was built, the river had to be forded to get to class. Joe Beach recounted that living near Watson “we all had to walk to school, or go horseback. And we had to go about a mile and a half, and we had to cross the river. So, our dad would take our boat down, and we’d tie it up and then we’d walk to the river and cross and go over and go to school and cross back [to return home]. Until about nineteen and twelve when the bridge was built.” Sophia Bethal didn’t live far from the schoolhouse as the crow flew, but because she didn’t have a horse, she had to walk up the river to the bridge and then back down to the school, a total distance she reckoned to be two or three miles. Living near Jordan Creek, Ethel Raburn faced a similar situation, having to cross the creek in a home-made boat and walk about a mile and a half to reach Pleasant Valley school. Going to school in Jordan Valley, Clinton Anawalt had it somewhat easier though the distance was greater–four and a half miles. He drove to school in a horse and buggy. Arriving there at nine in the morning, he was home by five in the afternoon. With school at the ranch, Kirt Skinner had it easiest of all, though of course after school he couldn’t completely escape the teacher. The arrival of gas-powered transport didn’t necessarily improve matters as shown by the challenges Ethel Raburn faced getting her daughter to school in Jordan Valley by pickup. During the winter of the daughter’s senior year the temperature was below zero “day and night” for seventy-two days. Ethel had to use a team of horses to pull the pickup to get it started. The highway hadn’t been paved yet, and she sometimes couldn’t find enough gravel showing to get traction on the wheels to start the pickup. There were no “snow days.”
Pupils all brought their lunches in five pound lard pails with their names scratched on the lid. According to Joe Beach, in addition to a variety of jams and jellies for making sandwiches, there were cured meats–ham, bacon and salt pork–that were parboiled to remove the salt and then fried. Everybody had a barrel of corned beef. Every so often a prankster would switch the lids on the lunch pails, resulting in “a rumpus” when a hungry pupil found she had someone else’s lunch. Not all lunches were created equal, and if one got stuck with someone else’s mediocre sandwich they weren’t very happy. Joe and his brothers made a pack saddle for their small dog to carry their lunches, a pail on either side. The first time they tried it things went fine until they got to the boat to cross the river. The dog decided he wanted to go for a swim, and out around the back of the boat and back he went. Coming back ashore he of course shook himself. The lids flew off the cans, which had filled with water. The following day they kept the dog on a string until they got across the river before turning him loose. He took off out through the flat, lids sailing in all directions. By the time the dog returned the lunches were gone, and the boys had decided that from then on they would carry their own lunches.
Beyond learning, an important function of the country school was to provide regular opportunities for children from scattered ranches to be together and play. Among their priorities, recess probably ranked just behind lunch and well ahead of studies. Although an early Owyhee country school had neither gym nor playground equipment, the children had no trouble improvising. The smaller children would play Ring-Around-The-Rosy or marbles and hopscotch. Blind Man’s Bluff and Pop the Whip were other popular choices. At Walter Perry’s school the big game at recess was Black Man in which one player who was “it” stood in the center and tried to tag the other players who ran back and forth between two “safe” zones. At lunch time they might ride stick horses out into the brush. Opal McConnell would ride hers “to the hill, and when the teacher rang the bell, we’d come racing back, jumping all the gullies and holes.” Those who rode horses to school might have races at noon when they went to the river to water their animals. The big game, however was baseball with homemade bat and ball. As Opal McConnell explained, “We didn’t have a real ball, so we wadded up paper and unraveled some old socks and made us a ball. And we didn’t have a bat, except for a board, to play with until Palmers brought a bat from Vale.” Many of the balls were fashioned by Joe Beach, who recalled “We had a ball team. Most were girls. Homemade bat and a homemade ball. We wrapped our own baseball. It was twine around a hard rubber ball, then covered with leather, but we never could do the stitch holes, so they didn’t last long. We used beeswax, but it wouldn’t hold…. With the bigger kids, boys played girls. The girls hit home runs every time, so far out in the greasewood it would take us a while to find it.” Sophia Bethal and Ethal Raburn both played ball.
Field trips were another possibility. One year on the last day of school at Watson, the teacher took the students on a field trip up to Three Fingers Canyon. Jim Page related that they went by wagon as far as they could and then walked up to a huge cave “just to show them where it’s at.” He claimed that the Ward brothers from Nyssa once put their entire band of sheep in there to shelter them from a storm. He guessed the cave was now (1980) a quarter to half a mile above the reservoir.
An important part of the children’s entertainment was pranks, of course–especially around Hallowe’en when the school outhouse would disappear. Sometimes the boys drew pictures and wrote on the walls, though the teachers would make them wash off the “art work.” “Kids played pranks all the time,” recounted Walter Perry. When asked to describe some of them, he couldn’t even remember his favorites. “We had too many of them.” Ethel Raburn on the other hand never claimed to have participated in any because she’d “get the devil” if she did. Still, she knew that mud fights were one of the kids’ favorite pranks and that if her brother were the victim she’d be in trouble if she didn’t come to his rescue.
While education was clearly valued, it was not and perhaps could not be a priority. When George Palmer was asked why children mostly did not go beyond the eighth grade, he offered a compelling explanation,
I don’t know of anybody that was raised out there…..goin’ to college. Eighth grade was about the size of it. Some of them got through high school. Well, people was… young people was different then. They was mostly raised on stock ranches, everything like that, you know, farming. And uh, they had their mind on their business more than schooling. And people wasn’t as strict about schooling then. The parents wasn’t. Well, by golly, it was pretty doggone hard for a big family to send their children away to school, you know. I’ve seen my mother bend over a washboard all day long, washing clothes for eight or ten children and cooking for 25 or 30 men. Putting away winter food and vegetables and making sausage, and stuff like that.
Of course, as we’ve seen already George didn’t care much for school anyway. He probably expressed the view of many when he said, “kids just grew up like a stem of wheat then, I guess. (laughter) They did. It come natural to them, you know, they didn’t.... My mother went through the third grade, and I defy anybody to set down and read and understand it and make you understand it any better than she could…. education ain’t all of it. Actual experience is worth more than any education you can get in my notion.”
But this was not some sort of an anti-elitist sentiment. For those who felt this way, the attitude was determined by necessity and opportunity. Joe Beach was but eleven when his father died and he never went a full term of school after that, though he did make it through the eighth grade. Like others his age, he began working in the lambing camp in the spring and herding sheep in the summer. He was proud that he pulled in $75 a month where his friends who had gotten saddle horses and “a buckarooing outfit” made only $45 a month. They might feel they were better than he, but come Fall he had money and they didn’t.
Still, there were those who made a special effort like the Skinners, the Raburns, and Walter Perry, who moved to Vale from his homestead on Mahogany Mountain to have a school for his son. One suspects this was the case too with Basque families, who wanted their children to learn English and assimilate. Unfortunately, little is known about the school they opened at McDermitt. As we have seen, others moved or sent their children away so that they might get an education. Joe Beach, for example, stayed with his grandparents in Payette for his first year. And there were even some–Ethel Raburn, for example– who went away to college, the Oregon Agricultural College (now Oregon State University) in Corvallis being the most popular destination. Even Clinton Anawalt, who did not graduate from high school, did “four and a half semesters” at OAC. But where attending college was concerned, Josephine Scott probably identified the determining factor when asked whether young people went. “Oh yes, some of them did. Some them that could afford it. But there’s a lot of young folks that couldn’t afford it. And they didn’t.” Some things don’t change.29
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I want to thank Debbie Belnap of the Malheur Education Service District and rancher/historian Mike Hanley IV for their assistance in my research.
1 Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. 15th Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Oregon, to the Legislative Assembly. 1903. Salem, OR: W.H. Leeds, State Printer Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. 1874–1953, p.213. Volumes in this series are hereafter cited with the short form of the number of the report and the year published.
2 21st Biennial Report. 1915, p. 169. Four years later, it was reported that Jordan Valley would soon have the fourth standard four-year high school. The others were Ontario, Vale and Nyssa. 23rd Biennial Report. 1919, p. 55. In 1925 reported high school enrollment was Jordan Valley 37, Ontario 219, Vale 90, and Nyssa 66. 26th Biennial Report. 1925, 77. However, 31st Biennial Report. 1931, p. 43, table 4 shows that as of 1929-30, Malheur had but three standard high schools. Ultimately a union high school was formed that in addition to Jordan Valley SD#3 served surrounding school districts. Mike Hanley, personal communication, 1/11/2017. The date of the first contracts recorded in the Register of Teachers Employed in Union School #1 is May 24, 1921.
3 Marion Gerald Dazey, “History of Education in Public Schools in Malheur County before 1920,” MA Thesis, Eastern Oregon College, 1960, pp. 10, 11.
4 Dazey, “History of Education in Public Schools in Malheur County before 1920,” pp. 34, 40, & 42.
5 Dazey, “History of Education in Public Schools in Malheur County before 1920,” p. 44. The 1902 School Census recorded a total of seven students four students, six boys and one girl; the 1903 School Census, two boys and two girls.
6 Clerk’s Annual Census Report, School District No. 3, 6 Nov. 1936. The report records that eleven fathers and twelve mothers were foreign born and not naturalized.
7 Clerk’s Annual Census Report, School District No. 81, 6 Nov. 1936. There were four Basque families, the Eigurens listed as citizens.
8 21st Biennial Report. 1915, p. 169.
9 25th Biennial Report. 1925. P. 77.
10 Dazey, “History of Education in Public Schools in Malheur County before 1920,” p. 65; Joseph Gaiser, “The Basques of the Jordan Valley Area, A Study in Social Process and Social Change.” PhD diss. Univ. of Southern California, 1944, p. 100.
11 An Illustrated History of Baker, Grant, Malheur and Harney Counties: With a Brief Outline of the Early History of the State of Oregon. Baker City, OR: Western Historical Publishing Company, 1902. p. 540.
12 It is not clear which school Perry attended; this is true of many of the interviewees. Neither is it always certain what period is being described, though presumably some idea can be gained from dates of birth and death.
13 15th Biennial Report. 1902. p. 34. By 1914 there were 5209 library books on hand. Presumably these were primarily available to students in the larger towns. Dazey, “History of Education in Public Schools in Malheur County before 1920,” p. 78.
14 W.G. Thompson, who in 1873-74 taught thirty pupils in eight grades at Jamieson reported the students used books they had brought with them from twelve different states and not more than six of them were alike. Jacob Ray Gregg. Pioneer Days in Malheur County. Los Angeles, 1950, p. 120.
15 Dazey, “History of Education in Public Schools in Malheur County before 1920,” p. 120.
16 12th Biennial Report. 1897, p. 177.
17 15th Biennial Report. 1903, p. 237.
18 The School Census for 1903 records the following numbers of months taught in Owyhee schools: Rockville, 6; Jordan Valley, 9; Sheaville, 3; Watson, 4.
19 21st Biennial Report. 1915, p. 169..
20 Although I have been unable to find a complete list of directors and students for a given year and school, comparison of the Registers of Teachers Employed, which gives the name of the contracting director with parents’ names on the School District Clerk’s report suggests such to be the case.
21 10th Biennial Report. 1893, p. 234.
22 12th Biennial Report. 1897, p. 177.
23 15th Biennial Report. 1902, p. 213. He further commented “the pedagogue is more important than the police,” a view he claimed was widely held.
24 John Sackett Skinner, High Desert Promise, The Skinner Family Legacy. Hillsboro, OR: Golden Quill Publishing, 2009, pp. 137-40.
25 15th Biennial Report. 1903, p. 51.
26 21st Biennial Report. 1915, p. 169.
27 John Sackett Skinner, High Desert Promise, The Skinner Family Legacy, pp. 130-34.
28 13th Biennial Report. 1898, p. 183.
29 After I finished this chapter, I sent a copy to Elias Eiguren of Arock. Elias responded with the following comment:
Great piece! It was fun to read and so much of it strikes home with me. I'm actually chairman of our school board in Arock right now, and many of the issues of 100 years ago have not changed. We still face transportation challenges, finding quality teachers that are capable in multi-grade classrooms, and working education schedules around work schedules. Good work.