Fifty Years in Oregon was written by Theodore T.
Geer, a grandson of Joseph Carey Geer and a shirttail ancestor of
ours.
I have put much of the book on
this website. I started because several
chapters describe the early roots of our family history in Oregon. I
kept going because
I found many of the chapters from this perspective on the early
settlers and the history of Oregon to be quite
interesting.
No doubt most men, in looking back over
their varied experiences, can select a few events which appear to mark
distinctly the dividing line between what might properly be called epochs in
their lives. Some unforeseen happening will often serve to change the entire
trend of one’s life and its purposes – if it had any.
This I can truly say of my removal from
eastern Oregon to my old home in the Willamette valley in 1877. My mother’s
uncle and his wife being well advanced in years and childless, had made me
an offer, in land, to come and live near them during the remainder of their
lives and look after them in their declining years. This, together with my
attachment to the Willamette valley, caused me to accept the proposition
and, in a sense, to begin a new life along different lines and amid strange
surroundings.
We made the trip from the Grand Ronde
valley to Waldo Hills overland, with the exception of the distance between
The Dalles and Portland, which was covered by a Columbia River steamer. I
was just past twenty-six years of age, had a family of a wife and four
children, and was bound for a land which none of them had ever seen and
where my own success was yet to be determined. I am free to confess that I
was filled with a mixed feeling of concern, regret, hope, courage and a
goodly supply of optimism. The second day from “civilization” we were
compelled to remain four days in the heart of the Blue Mountains on account
of a most severe rain-storm and the illness of my wife, being obliged to
send to La Grande for medicine by the stage-drivers who passed twice a day.
The sixth day we reached Pendleton and camped in the suburbs of that little
city. The next morning I discovered that three of my four horses were
missing. They had slipped their hobbles in some way and had of course taken
the back track for the Grand Ronde valley. My wife had been very sick all
the previous night and the baby, four months old, had cried unceasingly from
dark until two o’clock in the morning, which necessitated my holding him,
walking the floor of the tent and occasionally endeavoring to lull him to
sleep by rocking him in a low four-posted, rawhide-bottom chair. Between
acts, or rather during acts, I administered as best I could to the wants of
his suffering mother. A little while before daylight, everything else having
failed to quiet the child, she suggested that maybe he was thirsty. During
the six preceding hours I had given him every kind of medicine the two
druggists in the town had ever heard of as being good for infantile
complaints, but without results – at least desirable results. The thought
was absolutely new to me, but acting upon the suggestion I procured a
tin-cup of water and offered it to the little fellow. Upon his first sight
of it he made such a frantic grab for its contents that it was worth a small
fortune to see him. He drank it all and wanted more; but this was withheld.
Within less than five minutes he was in a deep sleep which lasted for full
four hours.
Some men are so blasted stupid, anyway –
ever notice it?
The next morning my wife was very ill and
could eat nothing we had in our stores; she only wanted some potatoes. So I
went down on Main Street and asked the proprietor of the only grocery store
if he had any. He replied that he had not. I at once pointed out to him a
sack standing in front of the store, but he said they were not for sale.
After I had explained the situation to him, however, he gave me permission
to take all the potatoes I wanted – even the entire sack. I took a dozen and
offered him the price of them, but he replied that he had none for sale! His
name was Lot Livermore, and he is one of the best-known pioneers of Umatilla
County today. He has altogether served twenty years as postmaster of
Pendleton and is as “white” a man as lives in the State of Oregon.
After breakfast I saddled the only horse
which had not played “hookey,” engaged a woman who lived close by to attend
to the wants of the family, and started for the Grand Ronde valley, not
expecting to find the truant horses before reaching their old home, ninety
miles away. But good luck was mine, for before traveling ten miles I met
some of my old neighbors on their way to the “Landing” for freight’. They
had seen my horses, knew them, guessed the situation and were leading them
behind their wagons. It was a most cheering sight when I recognized my three
runaways reluctantly retracing their steps, for it was the only really
encouraging incident that had happened since the beginning of the trip. The
remainder of this journey was without special interest. The route, much of
the way, was along the identical road made by the immigrants who created the
“Oregon Trail” in the early ’40s and some of the camping places were the
same as those used by my parents just thirty years before. To this day many
sections of the Oregon trail through eastern Oregon are used by the people,
and the light soil, blown by the winds of seventy years, has drifted away,
leaving two parallel trenches with a ridge between so high that the axles of
the wagons often drag on its surface. Indeed, in some places, as you descend
the hillsides into the gulches, the alkali soil has been blown out of the
old road until it is only usable by horsemen, whose heads are often below
the surface of the surrounding country.
In 1877, the boundless advantages of the
bunch grass range of eastern Oregon were just beginning to be appreciated
and the first large herds of cattle and sheep were commencing to make their
mark on the almost unlimited stretches of this succulent grass. I remember
that in traveling from Pendleton to Heppner, a distance of some sixty miles,
we drove through extensive sections of grass which stood two feet high, and
not a head of stock had molested it since it began its growth in the early
spring. As we approached the streams, however, which are some ten miles
apart, there were evidences of stock here and there; the grass began to be
shorter, and as we neared the creeks there was literally none at all. The
fact was that my horses were compelled to do without grass as we passed
through this part of the magnificent eastern Oregon range, except as we made
some dry camps at the noon hour.
Since then the immense herds of cattle,
horses and sheep which have made large fortunes for thousands of men have
practically exterminated the bunch grass, which for succulent qualities and
its great vitality on dry uplands has not been equaled by any other kind of
forage plant, native or imported. Indeed, there are many people who believe
the transformation of these boundless ranges into farm lands devoted to the
production of grain has been an industrial mistake, since much of it is, of
necessity, subject to dry seasons and the output often unsatisfactory in
consequence. When given a rest from pasturage for two years the bunch grass
will reappear, strange as it may seem. Traveling in eastern Oregon, one
frequently sees a fence running over a high mountain, on one side of which
the grass, newly grown – or, it may be, drying up in the early fall – shows
plainly for twenty miles away, while on the opposite side of the fence,
where the land has been closely pastured, the hills are perfectly bare and
as brown as a city street.
Many an eastern Oregon grain-raiser of
today often sits on the front porch of his home and sighs for the halcyon
days of King Bunch Grass. Much of that country, however, is splendidly
adapted to the production of grain of all kinds, and without doubt the
section in Umatilla County, consisting of twenty miles square with Athena as
a probable center, has a record as the best wheat producing land in the
world.
Incidentally, though a digression, it will
be interesting to describe briefly the process of harvesting wheat in this
section. While living in Pendleton, during the threshing season in I907,
George Perringer, one of the “wheat kings” of Umatilla County, invited me
one day to accompany him to his farm, twenty miles away – in his automobile.
Many of the big farmers of Umatilla County live in Pendleton and occupy some
of the finest homes there.
Perringer had about three thousand acres
of wheat that year and there were three “combined harvesters” working at
once. Two of them had thirty horses each furnishing the motive power, while
the third was drawn by a steam engine of one hundred and ten horse-power. To
this we drove in our machine and I was invited to ride once around a
five-hundred-acre field which it was transforming from standing grain that
averaged fifty bushels to the acre into the sacked product.
A “combined harvester” is, as its name
implies, a huge header with a threshing machine attachment. The “elevator”
dumps the wheat directly into the cylinder of the thresher, and a platform
carries three men. One of these is the sacker; the other two sew the sacks
and pile them on a broad plank which, when it receives a sufficient weight –
about thirty bushels – automatically uptilts, slides the sacks off in a
pile, and adjusts itself immediately to receive the next sack.
The sickle of this machine was twenty-four
feet long and the amount of headed wheat it gathered in and dumped into the
cylinder was almost appalling – so voracious and monster-like did the
process appear. The man who handled the sacked wheat had a job that kept him
“on the jump,” while the two men who were sewing sacks had not an idle
moment.
The drive-wheels of the engine were eight
feet in height, with a tire twenty-four inches in width. Necessarily, there
is more waste in harvesting with this method than with the ordinary binders,
but where the business is pursued on such a gigantic scale as in Umatilla
County and other sections of eastern Oregon it would be impossible to gather
in the crops without the combined harvester.
Perringer sold a part of his crop the
following fall to Balfour, Guthrie & Co., of Portland, and received his pay
in one check for $72,000, a facsimile of which was printed in the Portland
papers – and there are several other Umatilla farmers who are in Perringer’s
class. In that year, the yield of wheat in that county was estimated at six
millions of bushels.
Next Chapter -
Geer returns to farming in the Waldo Hills in 1877; notes on the changing
communications with rural railroads, a local post office, and the telephone.
If you are interested in finding this book, Fifty
Years in Oregon, it can
often be located at Powell's Books in Portland
which is one of the largest used book stores in the United States or, through the
Alibris service
which catalogs used books from stores across the country. For more information on the Geer Family, visit the Geer Family website. Other resources
and references include:
