The Macnabs were chased out of Scotland by the Campbells. Yes, they were probably the Campbell’s Soup Campbells. My husband’s mother father was a Macnab, and the family originally immigrated to Canada. Two of the brothers and two of their cousins moved south to homestead the Oregon Territory. This part of the Columbia Gorge looks amazingly like northern Scotland and I imagine they felt a kinship with these hills.
They married into the Van Patten family, another resourceful “clan.” Getting a crop into the field was the primary goal. The Oregon Homestead Act required you to eat and sleep on your land and have glass in your windows. Showing great resourcefulness, or perhaps just being Dutch, they built only one house on the four corners where their land joined in Sherman County. Each had a bed and small table in their corner of the house. You had to live on your land, sleeping and eating there. Five years later the land would officially be theirs.
I haven’t been able to “fact check” this, but they were told they need glass in their windows, too. Pane glass broke easily and was hard to come by. Ingeniously, they drank the pints of whiskey and placed the empty bottles in the windows, fulfilling the letter of the law.
Today my windows are real pane glass, nary a whiskey bottle in sight. My dining room is all that is left of their hastily built homestead house and I don’t know how much of it is original. Still, I feel like a pioneer. Twelve children, including my husband’s mother, were born and raised here. The house is small, maybe eighteen hundred square feet. Five hundred feet were added in 1930.
The uncles and aunts still make regular visits to their old home. They enter, often without knocking, to the home they still consider their own. I enjoy following them around as they reminisce, trying to see my home through their eyes…
“I swear, this house sure seemed bigger when we lived here…” they muse. I’m sure it did…the uncles are all over six feet tall now and have to duck through some of the doorways.
“Remember shoveling out this place after a dust storm? Sometimes we had to move out…couldn’t breathe. Come back days later, after the wind died down.”
I remember when I first moved in. I had to vacuum the windowsills. Farming practices have improved the situation. I added double pane windows, insulation and vinyl siding. No longer do I fight the raging windstorms that suffocated and blinded and sometimes killed those unfortunate enough to be caught in their fury. I still dust more frequently than those living in civilization, but at least I do it with a cloth and a can of Pledge.
“Remember when this bedroom was a sleeping porch? Many a morning I woke up covered with a blanket of snow.” Uncle Tom shivers, remembering.
“You could see your breath. Remember the icicles?” Uncle Pat adds.
Eight boys, farm hands all, slept outside in the freezing Oregon winters. They were hardy stock. All of them survived World War II, too. Uncle Tom was down to eighty pounds when he came home from the swamps of New Guinea, suffering from malaria. Their cousin Bill was killed instantly when his B-17 collided with another near Hamburg, Germany in 1944.
“The old barn…still there. Remember when we were playing cowboys and Indians out there? I aimed my gun at you and said ‘Bang.’ You dropped down and I thought you were dead! We ran for the house, sure we would be in big trouble for killing you. Then you wandered in, bawling, half an hour later, bleeding and bawling your head off. That bullet went in through your jaw and out through your cheek!”
Rose nods, remembering well. Her teeth and jaw still give her problems. Her only satisfaction was the whipping her brother and cousin received.
“How about the time you shot the hole in the kitchen floor? We covered it up pretty well for awhile…threw a rug over it and the kitchen table over that. Then Mom went down to the cellar and saw the mess…glass and peaches blown to bits everywhere. We caught holy heck for that, too.”
I can still see the repaired hole in my cellar ceiling. Winter nights when we put together jigsaw puzzles or play cards I can almost hear their rowdy clan…popping corn over the open fire and playing Ping-Pong on a piece of plywood Grandma Bee placed on the dining table.
The double-hole outhouse seat remains in the barn, testimony of days so long ago when, windstorm or blizzard, going outside was a necessity. The uncles delighted in hiding in the dark, leaping out of the shadows and tossing clawing, wild kittens on their shrieking, terrified sisters. To this day the girls are afraid of cats and guns.
The siblings remember windblown drifts of snow so high farming horses were used to break through and carry them to the one room schoolhouse. Today we occasionally have enough to sled on. Rose and Helen remember dresses made from potato sacks and being thankful for them. They hauled water by hand up the canyon in buckets. The same water was used first for cooking; then for washing dishes, clothes and bathing; finally, for watering the rose bushes. I can only marvel at their tenacity as I push buttons for my dishwasher and run clean water for my bath.
As solitary as life is here, it is hard to imagine the hoards of people who came by this remote place on their way west. The Oregon Trail ran right through our property. So deep were the wagon ruts that we can still see them in the spring as the new shoots of wheat push skyward. My nearest neighbor is a mile away. I rise each morning to the crowing of pheasants and fall asleep to the howling of coyotes. You’ve never seen so many diamonds in one sky as we can, lying in our Jacuzzi stargazing. You’ve never seen a lawn like ours, either: thousands of acres of lush, green winter wheat.
Paradise.
We truly are in the middle of nowhere. The toolies.The boondocks. Country hicks to some…providers of a nation’s food to others. Our life is simple, our wants, few. Sunrises are fantastic…sunsets over Mount Hood, amazing. However, my idea of homesteading is far removed from days of old.
Most of the old homesteads have been burned or fell down. The few that remain, like sentinels in the fields, are a testimony to how many people used to live here, before tractors got bigger and more land worked in a day. My kids and I loved to four-wheel down the canyon behind our house to the old Happold Place. (See the fictional story I wrote about this house, “I Am The Ghost.”)
Springtime brings a profusion of wild onion, lupin and balsam root. Deer and antelope truly play nearby, along with elk and cougar and the occasional bear. Living here, in the middle of nowhere, is a paradise I never expected to find.
Road closed due to four more broken poles. So much for Wasco Electric and Sherman County maintenance...where does all that wind tower money go?
