An Oregon High Desert Journey
Last month, accompanied by grand daughters Sofie and Lara (10 and 5 respectively) and Mei-Yueh, I headed out for Eastern Oregon to first visit Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge followed by Jordan Valley and the Owyhee country. This wasn’t to be merely a camping trip. After a year in Copenhagen daughter Claudia’s family is permanently relocating to Munich, Germany–about an hour’s drive from son-in-law Mathias’ hometown. The prospect of the future's offering only occasional short visits to the States led me to propose the trip to introduce the girls to their Eastern Oregon heritage and to the people who live in the rural West, a segment of our society too often misperceived through a prism of myth and distorted history. The icing on that cake would be the wildlife and landscape and a few subtle lessons on the importance of preserving them.
With our trailer in tow, we departed Portland the morning of Tuesday, July 9 for Hart Mountain. In view of the distance we took two days to get there, with an overnight stay near Sisters. Although the stay at Hart was only two nights, it proved a real adventure for the girls, who haven’t done much camping or had a lot of experience with wildlife. An indication of what was in store was the pair of roadside turkey vultures greeting us as we approached the mountain. It was the first time they had seen TVs close enough to be able to identify them, and from then on they kept their eyes peeled for the red heads and characteristic wobbly flight. By the time we reached refuge headquarters twenty minutes later they were doing the same with the white bar that marks a Northern Harrier’s tail and the white butts of fleeing pronghorn.
Warner Lakes at Dusk (Sofie Drton)
Lara and Sofie Capturing the Sunset at Warner Overlook
Our first morning on the mountain, everyone piled into the 4Runner to visit Petroglyph Lake, really a large pond that usually attracts migrating birds. It is bounded on its West side by a rock wall 20 feet high or so, the northern end of which is covered with faded Native American rock art. No one has with any certainty explained the majority of the images, but the girls had fun searching them out and suggesting their own interpretations. An even more exciting sight was the Northern Harrier Sofie spotted flying about twenty-five feet above the car grasping a surprisingly nonchalant-looking rubber boa in its talons. The highlight of the Hart visit, though, came as we made our way back to the refuge headquarters. A herd of more than fifty pronghorn was grazing near the road, while a smaller group crossed the road in front of us. We stopped and the girls hopped out and began walking toward the animals. Several does with fawns halted and turned to watch the advancing girls. Pronghorns are curious animals; I have seen them wander into a Sage-grouse lek where the male birds were strutting their stuff and just stand there to watch the show. This time, I suspect they did not feel threatened by two young girls who were no taller than they. In any event Sofie and Lara were able to get within twenty feet of them; the two sides stood and studied one another until the animals moved off to join the rest of the herd. The girls were ecstatic.
Sofie and Lara Approaching the Pronghorn (M-Y Crowell)
In the afternoon we drove out to Guano Creek canyon to the site of the Old Camp Warner where 96 Native Americans were massacred in 1866 by a local posse and a company of soldiers. Nothing remains of the original Fort Warner, though treasure hunters with metal detectors have occasionally (and illegally) recovered cartridges and brass uniform decorations there. That evening we soaked in the campground hot springs.
By this point, we were beginning to understand the limitations of our 17’ Casita. The RV park in Sisters where we stayed the first night had required all of us to sleep in the trailer–the girls and Theresa on a converted dining-table double bed and I on a cot-sized bed from the dinette. Even with no snoring, two adults and two squirming children in a small trailer does not make for restful night. In the public campgrounds I could sleep on the ground next to the trailer, but most RV parks don’t allow that. The decision after the second night was to sleep in motels rather than RV parks. There was some regret on my part, since I slept best when I slept on my ground pad. That includes the night I would spend on the floor in the Best Western motel in Nampa because I’d messed up the on-line reservation and got a room with a single king-sized bed. Sofie and Theresa grabbed the bed, and Lara slept in an arm chair.
On the fourth morning, we drove from Hart into Burns for a motel stay and to do some grocery shopping for our stay in the Owyhee. This was made necessary by our desire for fresh vegetables and limited space for carrying comestibles generally. The highlight of the Burns stay wasn’t the food, however, but the motel swimming pool where Sofie met a young boy her age traveling with his German grand parents. Nicklaus is also from the Willamette Valley, and by the time we parted a few hours later, they’d made plans to meet back in Portland for a swim in our HOA community pool. The manner in which Sofie and Lara are able to quickly make friends almost anywhere they go never fails to astonish me. Lara especially has an ability to insert herself into groups of strangers–regardless of age–and become a generous contributor to the conversation no matter the topic.
The drive to Jordan Valley was smooth and the passing landscape was still surprisingly green. Jordan Valley’s slow decline has left it without a grocery (there is a pair of convenience stores good for essentials such as beer, chips and motor oil). In the last year the regionally renowned Basque Inn closed down; I suspect its being renamed the Flatiron Steakhouse probably contributed to its demise. At one time it was known for serving “Basque cuisine,” which made it worth the stop if just for the experience. This left just the JV and Rockhouse cafes. The latter is really a coffee shop with espresso drinks, Italian sodas and fine ice cream, but also with excellent burritos and owner Cindy Beckwith’s homemade cinnamon rolls, cookies and hospitality. But most of all I looked forward to the girls’ reaction to their first encounter with a rural community. Sofie can describe it best:
“The next stop on our eight-day trip was Jordan Valley. We arrived on Saturday. Now, when we first arrived at Jordan Valley, it looked like nothing special to me. It didn’t have any grocery shops except for the corner market and the gas station. I didn’t know why it meant so much to my grandfather. But as we started to get to know the place and the people who lived there, I started to feel as comfortable there as I had been staying in the hotel in Burns. The first person we met on our stop at Jordan Valley was Glenn [Fretwell]. As the owner of the RV park where we stayed those first few nights, his house was right across from where we parked our trailer. The first night we stayed there we had the privilege of getting to watch Glenn throw the atlatl and we got to try it ourselves! It was such fun for both me and Lara. The next morning we woke up bright and early (i.e., 10:00 AM) and got to watch Glenn carve an arrowhead! I was fascinated whilst my sister spent half the time pretending to gallop around on horses with my grandmother.”
Glenn Showing Sofie and Lara How to Knap Flint
“Though I said we woke up at 10:00 AM, both my grandmother and I had rough time sleeping, bringing us to the decision of sleeping the next few nights in the motel down the street. This worked better for us the next few nights. Anyway, later that evening, waiting until the sun was nearly under the horizon, we threw darts again. I was so happy when I first hit a bullseye!”
Sofie Throwing the Atlatl (M-Y Crowell)
On Sunday, we decided to drive up into the Owyhee Mountains to Silver City, an old mining town that has become something of a weekend tourist destination with old buildings, a church and a cemetery. Some of these have been refurbished after a fashion and house a souvenir store or two, a restaurant/hotel, homes and a lot of history. The day we visited, Silver City was the destination of hordes of ATVs and Mormon crickets. The latter infestation Lara described as “very disgusting!” In the late afternoon we returned to JV and the girls immediately went looking for Glenn to resume their attacks on the atlatl targets. By the end of our stay, Glenn judged Sofie to have great potential as an atlatl thrower and gave us contact information for atlatl aficionados in Germany.
Monday was Labor Day, though aside from a few scattered American flags, there was little to suggest that it wasn’t just another day in Jordan Valley. But for us–and especially Sofie and Lara–it was very special. They had been invited to the ranch of Elias Eiguren and his family to compare riding Western saddle with what they’d been learning at the riding stables in Portland and Copenhagen. Sofie picks up the story:
“The next morning we actually woke up bright and early ( I mean it this time!) at 7:00 AM. Then we all piled into the car and were headed off to Elias Eiguren’s ranch. Lara and Zada (Elias’ daughter) hit it off right from the start. At first we watched Elias, Thales (his son) and Zada ride around for a bit and then the show was on! Our turn! In the beginning we just walked around a bit, me alone and Lara led by Elias, and then I started to trot, while Lara refused to, even while being led. I had a great experience at Elias’ ranch, seeing what it was like to ride Western. Plus, we each got to take home a horseshoe, and got a nice hour-long tour around their property and where their cows graze. At some point grasshoppers started flying in our faces and we had to close the pickup windows! My favorite part was obviously riding Cheks and I bet Lara’s favorite part was riding Captain (aka Captain Sassy).”
The visit to the Eiguren place was an excellent introduction into the lessons of rural life. When we returned from our tour of the ranch, nine-year old Thales came riding up on an ATV. His dad asked what he’d been up to, and Thales explained that a drive chain on the hay baler had broken and launched into a description of how he’d been helping replace the broken link. During our tour I was also witnessed an elegant example of the use of one's surroundings to teach a child ecology when Sofie said she wished they could get rid of all the annoying grass hoppers. "But birds rely on them for their food. What would they do then?" Elias asked. "They'd eat something else." "What would the birds that eat those other things do then?" Elias replied. "Oh! I don't know." Without a lecture there had resulted a moment of understanding.
Elias with Thales, Lara, Zada, and Sofie in the Saddle
In the afternoon Elias had to get back to baling, so we headed south along the Owyhee canyon to an overlook where the girls got their first glimpse of the canyon’s magnificence and took pictures (they had commandeered two of my cameras), and we ate our picnic lunch. And then it was back to town where I took the girls and Mei-Yueh to meet Glenn's mother, the wonderful and warm 99 year-old Hazel Fretwell.
Owyhee Canyon from the Overlook
Tuesday took us to the part of the Canyon I really wanted to show the girls. Sofie continues:
“The next day we (unfortunately) had to wake up just as early. We drove to Jordan Craters and walked around a bit. We chose some lava rocks and headed off to our next stop. But not without stopping to be fascinated, though. We took so many pictures, some of which are included in the blog. On the way back we got some real good shots of cowboys herding cows (there was a cowgirl too, though). Next we headed off to Hole in the Ground, where Gonggong’s godparents’ ranch used to be. We also took some great pictures there because the sight was just beautiful!”
Viewing Hole in the Ground Ranch from the Canyon Rim (M-Y Crowell)
I’d wanted to take them down into the canyon to the ranch house, but we’d been warned that spring rains had taken probably taken the road out. A sign informing that the road down into to the Birch Creek ranch was closed underscored the likelihood. We settled for viewing the ranch house from the rim through a spotting scope before heading back to see rancher-historian Mike Hanley. I'll let Sofie describe the meeting:
“After that we drove back to Jordan Valley. I discovered the letters ‘J.V.’ painted on the side of the mountain above town. The last (but not least) stop for the day was Mike Hanley’s ranch. We found Mike in his shed fixing a buckboard.
Lara and Sofie in the Buckboard with Mike Hanley
" Now, the cool thing about Mike is that he collects old buckboards and wagons and repairs them. He is also a great artist. We spent a good amount of time just looking at his drawings. Then Mike led us into the pasture to get Gus and Patience, the two horses that would pull us. As we were standing in the pasture waiting for Mike to return with Gus and Patience, two horses, one white, one chestnut brown, came galloping into the pen we were in. I backed up into my grandmother, alarmed. And then when they really started galloping straight towards us, I was shivering with fear. Luckily by then Mike had returned. We made our way out of the pasture, pushing aside other horses who wanted out, and watched Mike tack them up. The first buckboard ride was Lara’s and mine. It was such fun. After our ride, my grandmother and I got a ride and then Lara and our grandfather got one. After that we went to visit Hazel (Glenn’s mother). The next day was the day that we left Jordan Valley, sadly. And so the next moment I found myself looking back at Jordan Valley, the “nothing special” town that turned out to be very special, thanks to the people like Glenn and Mike and the Eigurens who live there.”
Sofie’s reaction to Jordan Valley was gratifying; helping the girls understand and appreciate the life and people of rural Oregon had been my motive in putting the trip together. But I think they went beyond. Both had brought forth an unending stream of questions. They were taken with Thales’ and Zada’s garb and wanted to know where they could get hats and boots. Elias’ mother recommended the D&B Supply in Caldwell, one of those stores that has just about anything one might want or need for ranch life. (The “Big R” in Burns is another.) As we left Jordan Valley, D&B became the object of their repeated query “Are we there yet?” When we did finally make it they got complete outfits. (Except for their red bandanas, which we got in Pendleton.) I got a package of licorice, surely a necessity of ranch life for those who don’t use snuff (or “snoose” as the old Finn Vern Mackey of my forest service days called it). It seems to be available in every ranch supply store I’ve ever been in.
All Duded Up
Our last morning in Jordan Valley morning we packed up the trailer, stopped at the Rock House for cappuccinos, hot chocolate and cinnamon rolls, and then we headed across the Idaho border for Nampa to see my half-sister Karen. The highway out of Jordan Valley was posted with bright orange warnings of slippery roads ahead. In some years–as with this one–a crawling horde of Mormon crickets blankets highway 95, forcing ODOT to put up the signs. Along the fog line at the edge of the road was a low, brown berm of mashed crickets that hadn’t made it to the other side. Their mushy remains splattered all over the front of our trailer, which would cause folks back in Portland to ask if we’d been driving through a barnyard.
The visit with Karen was short–less that 24 hours. She has Down Syndrome and at 59 is slowly sliding into dementia, which sometimes makes visits short. That in turn gives rise to guilt feelings, since studies have suggested that social interaction can improve cognitive function and increase brain volume, which has been correlated with a reduced risk of dementia. The quality of the care is reassuring, however, thanks to Social Security, Medicaid and a devoted but underpaid staff of caregivers. Seeing her situation, I could not help but think of Jordan Valley and wonder what life would be like there for someone like her. It was a reminder that medical care and support for the disabled in this country are too often a matter of chance.
Our last stop was Baker, Oregon. My great grandparents migrated there from Montana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The exact timing is a bit unclear, and this has presented a challenge to my family history research. My great grandfather Benjamin Jacobs–“Jeep” to the family–was drawn by the Sumpter gold rush and had several placer claims that don’t seem to have panned out. My great grandmother “Tarty,” being descended from good German Protestant stock, seems to have been more sensible and acquired ranch land and a brand. Having witnessed Jeep’s handling of his father’s not insubstantial estate, she chose daughter Claudia over her husband to administer her estate. Individual failings notwithstanding, my research has shown them all to be good if not always sensible folks.
Lara Pointing to Her G-G-Grandmother's Class Picture
We visited the Baker Heritage Museum, which has my grandmother Claudia’s class picture hanging on the wall. Then we took flowers to the cemetery where my maternal family (mother, brothers, grandparents and great grandparents) are interred. We had visited the cemetery a few years ago, but Sofie and Lara had been too young to understand. This time was different. I explained to them the different people and told them a bit about the family history I have been writing, causing Sofie to interject, “I want a history too!” “This is your history,” I replied. “The history will become yours and you can continue to add to it.” She was overjoyed and asked if it would be all right to use the material as a basis for writing a “fantasy”–a fictional account of the family. She began working on it that night. Later she would describe her impressions of the visit:
“The graveyard was a slight twist to our vacation. The graves left me feeling sad, especially after seeing some graves that looked all broken and uncared for. I left a flower on an especially sad looking [neighboring] grave. Made it look nicer. The family history really interested me and I spent about half an hour pestering my grandfather about the names of all of the people so that I could include them in my story. It seems funny to me how so many people that my grandfather knew, such as his grandma, seemed so ancient and long dead to me. I really wish that I could go back in time and meet all of those people. My grandpa said that I and his mother would probably hit it off. Makes it seem so sad to me that I can’t meet so many wonderful people. His mother especially had very beautiful handwriting. Most of our trip had been all happy–look at this beautiful site, this is where these people lived, oh look how wonderful! So like I said, the graveyard was a twist to our trip and left me feeling moodier than ever, really. But it was so nice to learn about family! Although sad, it was really fun.”
Sofie and Lara Putting Flowers on the Family Graves at Mt Hope Cemetery (M-Y Crowell)
I was filled with gratification, though not surprised, that Sofie seemed to understand the importance of family history. It was Lara, however, who provided the unexpected reaction a few days after returning to Portland when she came to me with a small booklet she had made and asked me to write on each page the biographical information of the occupants of each grave, beginning with my mother.
On the 19th we returned to Portland stopping in Pendleton on the way to get bandanas to complete their western outfits at the Hamley Saddle & Western Store, a local landmark. But all they had were silk scarves, so we went to Bi Mart where the working man gets his red bandana. Having filled up on mediocre pizza at Big John’s, we hit the road for Portland for an unhurried trip down the beautiful Columbia Gorge, arriving home in the late afternoon.
Researching and writing my family’s history I have come to understand the importance of sharing this sort of knowledge with children when they are young. Some have told me that kids aren’t interested and won’t be until they are much older, if ever. That has not been my experience. My mother never sat my brother and me down to tell the family’s story. She answered questions when asked, but usually rather briefly. It wasn’t until at the age of nine my daughter Claudia began asking about her namesake–my grandmother–that I began to appreciate how little I knew. And that came mostly from overheard conversations between mom and my grandmother Gam when we traveled to Baker each Memorial Day to place flowers on the graves. Knowledge that is shared unintentionally can be just as important as that passed on purposefully. Often it was simply a few names of people or places. In response to Claudia’s questions I wrote mom, and after a long delay she replied with a seventeen-page history of the family on her side as she knew it. Appropriately it was dated on my daughter’s birthday, just a little over a year before mom’s passing. That letter contained much I had heard as a child but even more that was new to me. It became the starting point for my own research through which I found a great deal of what my mother knew to be mistaken. The names generally were not, however, and even the errors provided essential guideposts.
That letter not only launched my research into the family but also to an effort to put my findings into a form that daughter Claudia and others would want to read. I wasn’t interested in compiling an extensive genealogy so much as in composing a family history that included social, political and economic context to reveal motives, values, and anything else that might bring long-lost folks back to life. I recall once when I working in the St Lawrence University Library the special collections librarian emerged from his office and asked, “Are you interested in a masonry family history, that is building a wall brick by brick, or in a landscape history that gives a broad view?” I replied my interest was in a “landscape history.” He went back into his office and returned with several volumes of census data and analysis of the late 19th C society and economy of the region. It proved invaluable to filling in the gaps and helping to understand just who and what these people I was studying were and what they had achieved.
The goal of a “landscape history” is what brought me to the Owyhee. My grandparents never lived in the Owyhee country, but their good friends Conley and Stacia Davis did. The two couples shared many values and similar views. I remember as a child accompanying my grandparents to their home after they had sold the ranch and moved to Fruitland and then Ontario. And I continued to visit them up until Stacia passed away in 1990. (Conley died in 1974.) The attachment to the Owyhee that I gained through them remains even though they are gone and gains strength from the people I have come to know there and from the stunning natural beauty and history of the place. That is what I hoped to share with Sofie and Lara.