Ever since Man and Woman were evicted from the Garden of Eden–metaphorically if not literally–providing themselves with food, shelter and clothing has been a basic necessity. On an individual level in the post-industrial world, meeting these needs seemed readily possible. This was especially so for the urban dweller, for whom the question was not so much one of availability as acquisition. The items could be found on any street and could be gotten through purchase if one had the means, through theft if one did not and were clever or lucky enough to get away with it, or through cadging if one were destitute or lazy (the two are not necessarily linked). For those migrating into the remote fastness of the Owyhee Canyonlands, however, the facility with which these needs might be met depended largely on the material resources at hand and the spiritual reserves found within. If one had or could find (say, by being hired on) enough of the former to get a start, assiduous application of the latter could lead to a satisfying and perhaps even prosperous life in the Owyhee.
While Nature might at times provide ready shelter in the form of caves, this was normally a temporary solution resorted to by men out herding sheep or in need of a place to conceal a still. For a family it was necessary to fabricate something more substantial. New arrivals relied on tents they brought with them. According to Joe Beach, “As I recall, all the places were just about like ours. Boarded-up tents, some with no floor, even. We kept warm. A tent doesn’t need much, but you have to keep the fire going, or you get really cold. We stocked up the stove and used lots of covers in the winter time. In sheep camp my stove was so as I could build a fire before I got out of bed.” Some slept in tents even after they had built a house. The first house was sometimes a dugout. When Joe’s father moved his family downstream of Watson in 1903, he constructed a twelve by sixteen foot one-room dugout:
The inside was rock walls. These dugouts are built into the hill, and the front stuck out of the ground. The inside would be lined with stone. The roof was of logs. Then we laid willows over it; then straw and adobe dirt. We tacked up canvas wagon sheets to keep the dirt from getting down. If you put on enough adobe dirt, the water won’t get in. It was nothing more than a cellar really. It had a door and two little windows on each side of the door. There was a room for a bed, table and chairs and stove. Like a camp. There were bunks for me and my brother–I was three years old, and he was just a baby. We lived there the fall and winter.
Later the dugout could become the foundation for a board house. Beach’s uncles built another storey atop the dugout, which then became bedrooms rather “like a daylight basement.”
In a region with little timber and no convenient saw mill, rocks were a convenient source of building material. Part of the house might be dug into the side of a hill, and the stones would be laid using mortar. The interior walls might simply be bare rock or were sometimes whitewashed. Some rock homes could be quite large. Sophia Bethal’s parents had “four rooms downstairs, a big kitchen because we always had so much company, living room, two bedrooms and a pantry.” She doesn’t say what might have been upstairs or whether the structure was entirely of rock. Smaller stone houses might be converted into root cellars or be used for storage if the owner decided to build a home from lumber.
The earliest wood houses were mostly board and batten buildings, what James Page described as “just shoestring places.” Constructed from one by twelve boards, they were merely “a shell.” When Stacia and Conley Davis bought the Hole in the Ground ranch from Conley’s father in the early 1930s, they inherited a fairly large board and batten house with three sizable downstairs rooms and two bedrooms upstairs. Page gave a sense of the comparatively primitive character of such houses in describing his as “just shelter,“ noting in the next breath that they often slept in a tent. When the Davises moved to Hole in the Ground, the first thing they did was to build a “nice house.” The lumber would have had to be transported some distance, perhaps from Vale or Ontario. When Riley Horn built the original house there, he packed the lumber down by horse from the Rinehart ranch up on the rim of the opposite side of the river.
On the evolutionary scale of housing that began with tents and dugouts, frame houses would have been the next step up from board and batten and marked the top of the progression. By that stage a family’s dwelling had evolved from being primarily shelter into a real home, and people introduced the touches that would make them warmer and more comfortable. Clinton Anawalt’s parents’ place on the Cow Lake ranch began with a single large room and a shed kitchen with stove and table. His father added two rooms built with South Mountain lumber. The house sheltered the young Clinton, his parents and three sisters, but he recalled that many families had less. Dirt floors were replaced by wood that might be oiled and polished until it shone like hardwood, or it might be finished with that old reliable covering–linoleum. Small throw rugs were put down in the bedrooms. Interior walls were finished with wood so they could be papered.
The newer frame houses had a living room, kitchen and pantry downstairs and perhaps a bedroom or two. The Walter Perry house at the Island Ranch had a screened porch where he and his brother Ted slept summer and winter. The porch was cold, but they used “lots of covers...cold didn’t bother us as much in those days.” The new Davis house, which still stands, had two bedrooms that were on the ground floor. Stacia was proud of the new house’s walk-in closets. Likewise, Josephine Scott’s place had a pair of bedrooms with small rugs on the floor. Opal McConnell remembered some larger homes with bedrooms upstairs. Her Gramma Page’s place had two bedrooms upstairs, which could each accommodate two beds. There were blue curtains on the windows, and the stairway was in the center of the house. The family burned sage brush, which was stored under the back part of the stairs. Ceilings were quite high, and stove pipes went straight up through them, which was a bit of a fire hazard. The Anawalt bedroom contained “an oak bedroom set, bureau, washstand, bedstead and a cot.”
There were no bathrooms (in the strict sense of a place to bathe), according to Opal, so the family had to pack water in and out for their baths. The Majestic range had a reservoir in which water was kept warm by heat from the stove. Heating a couple of buckets of water to pour in a No. 3 washtub supplemented with water dipped from the reservoir was enough to take a bath. Stacia saw to it that her new place did have a bath, and it proved popular with “the boys”:
The boys were so enthused about the bath, and of course everyone was welcome. I was so proud of a new bath mat that I got, and I put it on the bathtub. And, everyone of them dried themselves on the bath mat. Bathrooms were few and far between out here. In fact there was a man by the name of Fred Walz who flew in from Jordan Valley–they had him out there rounding up wild horses–and he always flew in on a Saturday night to take a bath... “whether he needed or not,” a wag is tempted to add.
Little is said in the interviews about the living room, which perhaps reflects an emphasis on the more functional parts of the house. Still, given the importance of occasional parties and other social activities, living rooms can be expected to have been relatively large. Stacia describes hers as “big.” Clinton Anawalt remembered his parents’ living room had a couch.
The central room in any ranch or farm house was the kitchen, which was not simply a place where food was prepared. Sophia Bethal’s parents had felt the need for a large kitchen to entertain company. But even without company, sitting down to eat could involve a substantial gathering. Stacia’s description is instructive:
We had eight or ten men–not hired. But, there was Conley and myself, and my father was there. And an old man, Jimmy Townsend, born in Maine, and he worked for Conley’s father and heard that Conley was married, and he came to see what I looked like and he stayed seventeen years until he died. He was a marvelous old man. And we had hired help. Our table seated ten. It was a great big ranch table, and it was always full. It was impossible to get any help, so you did it yourself.
George Palmer remembered his mother cooking for as many as twenty-five to thirty men. Everyone ate together and sometimes would have to rotate through two or three seatings. The Davis and Palmer kitchens perhaps represent more prosperous households. At the Perry house at Island Ranch a lean-to on the north side of the building served as the kitchen. Water for drinking, cooking and washing dishes might be brought in from a well. At Joe Beach’s home, drinking water was carried in a bucket with a single dipper that everyone shared. At Josephine Scott’s there was a sink in the kitchen with a hand pump. “Pump the water to go into the sink, and it would go back down and out.”
In many homes near or even adjacent to the kitchen was another room whose comparatively modest size belied its importance–the pantry. In modern homes, the pantry–if there is such–usually comprises a few shelves in a small space or cabinet that is used for something else as well. That is all that is needed for a family whose members likely pass a grocery several times in the course of a week. But with a kitchen in a house that is distant from anything resembling a grocer, often without a refrigerator much less a freezer, and where upwards of a half dozen hungry people might be sitting down at the table three times a day, it was necessary to have a pantry or what George Palmer referred to as a “commissary.”
Although Owyhee residents raised most of their food and considered themselves to be self sufficient, they did find it necessary to make periodic trips to Vale or other nearby towns for supplies. The Davises took a wagon to town once or twice a year and bought groceries in October to last until May. A typical load consisted of a ton of flour, a half ton of sugar, 100 pounds of beans, fifty pounds of beans and “canned goods to fill in sometimes.” During WWII they did well with their ration stamps since they could trade their meat stamps for something they were short on. The semi-annual trip required two days in and back for Walter Perry’s folks. They bought 2-300 pounds of flour by the barrel and boxes of crackers. Their “cellar and storeroom had about as much stuff as a lot of these little old groceries nowadays....Of course it didn’t take much money in them days. A hundred dollars would buy a whole wagonload of groceries. Now you can buy fifty dollars worth of groceries and pack it out in your arms.” In the spring and fall Opal McConnell’s folks would hitch up four or six horses to a couple of wagons for the trip into town. She got to miss school so she could accompany and help them bring back flour, sugar, salt, dried apples and the like.
The bulk of what was consumed at ranch house kitchen tables, however, was raised and processed on the ranches. Everyone had a vegetable garden that might produce beans, peas, cabbage, carrots, turnips, corn, parsnips onions, squash, sweet potatoes, and peanuts. In the gardens one also grew herbs and spices, including sassafras, tame sage and red peppers, for flavoring and medicinal use. There were fruit orchards, berry bushes and ground cherries. This cornucopia was not intended simply to be consumed as it was harvested but was expected to sustain the family through the winter. Storing and preserving thus became prime concerns. Some families had separate cellars for fruits and vegetables, because “apples don’t keep good with potatoes. Cabbage doesn’t keep with fruit.” Potatoes and onions had to be kept in ventilated bins. Apples and other fruit could be dried, if there were enough, though just as often families relied on purchases of fifty pound boxes of apples, twenty pound cartons of prunes, and boxes of raisins. Ethel Raburn’s mother stored apples under the floor to keep them from freezing in winter and buried carrots and cabbage until needed in pits four or five foot square and filled with straw.
Canning was an important means of preserving not only fruits and vegetables but meat as well. Ethel’s mom canned fruit in old Mason jars sealed with rubber rings, and she put her jams and jellies in tin cans with paraffin and tied paper over the top. Nothing fancy. She kept them all in a box in the cellar, and “it was mouse tight”! Vegetables might also be pickled. During the sugar rationing imposed by WWII, Stacia canned 1045 quarts of fruit from her orchard.
For a people who spent much of their time engaged in hard physical labor, meat was an important component of the diet. Most of the meat was raised on the ranch and comprised poultry, sheep, hogs, and beef with some goats. The fowl included not only chickens, turkeys (which were raised primarily for sale but eaten at home as well), ducks and geese but wild fowl as well. Although none of the interviewees mentions hunting wild ducks or geese, we probably can assume that is was done. Sage hens were also hunted but received mixed reviews from local food critics such as George Palmer:
Them young sage hens, boy, they’re better than chicken or grouse. Guinea is good eating when they are young. When they get a little old they get damn tough as a whalebone and get to tasting like sagebrush. They eat sage, you know. I remember one time there we had a little Dutchman working for us, and there was some people who lived up there. They took up a homestead in the hills, and they got to eating them sage hens when they was young, you know, and they kept eating them, and they didn’t know that it tasted like sage brush. The just fed theirself into the sage brush. We had a dance out there one time, and they come down to that dance, and they thought they was bringing something great, and they fried up a lot of them sage hens and brought them down. They tasted like sage brush. By God, I remember we had a little Pennsylvania Dutchman working for us, and he bit into a chunk of it and he said, “This is a goddamn sage hen” and throwed it out the window!
For meat, everyone had a hog pen with a few hogs for the winter. Hogs and sheep were preferred because as comparatively small animals, in the fall and cooler weather they could be butchered and consumed before refrigeration would be required. (Bear in mind the number of hungry men who would be sitting down at the kitchen table for each meal.) Because of the size, beef presented a bit more of a problem. One solution was to share. “Three or four would get together and each one take a quarter of it. When that’d run out, the other guy would butcher and divide his up. That’s how we had fresh meat.” During haying time, a beef or mutton might be killed and buried in green hay where it would keep for awhile. Winter was a bit easier, Here’s Walter Perry:
In the summertime when the weather got hot, we’d generally butcher beef up and down the river. Three or four families to share in the slaughter. Each would take a quarter, and when that had run out the next. When we run out, the other guy would butcher and divide his up That’s how we had fresh meat.… We all had cellars dug back in the hill, and they stayed pretty cool. We’d hang it out at night. No refrigerators or ice boxes to take care of that kind of stuff. We hung it high so the coyotes couldn’t reach it. We’d hang it up on the derrick, and we did that in winter time too, and it would freeze. If it was real high, the magpies wouldn’t go up there to get it, and the dogs couldn’t reach it. We’d let it down to cut off some meat to last for the day, and go back out the next day and do the same thing. Everybody had a meat saw to cut frozen meat with. No trouble in the winter time, but it was trouble to keep meat in the summer time.…
At times meat kept in this way might freeze so hard that it could not be cut. To prevent this it was wrapped in heavy canvas.
Aside from keeping meat fresh, there were also several methods for preserving it for longer periods. The meat might be cut into strips and made into jerky by hanging it over a clothesline. Jerky was a handy food to take riding. Meat was also cured by putting it into a barrel and covering it with salt or by smoking it. Opal’s Grandpa Ivers had a large smokehouse, and he smoked hams and bacon for others as well as his own family’s needs. Stacia used a pressure cooker to can meat. Ground meat and sausage patties would be fried and then covered in their grease, followed by another layer of meat. When needed, they had only to be dug out of the fat and warmed up. A particularly popular method of preserving beef was corning it, that is boning it and putting it in a brine in a crock or barrel. “Everyone” had a barrel of the stuff, and some was better than others. Bill Ross was particularly impressed by Olé Stanford’s:
Olé Stanford made awful corned beef. Jerry Shea went over there one time during the summer, and he smelled the corned beef and thought Olé had died. It was that bad. You can’t imagine anyone eating that. It would be charred on the outside, and black and green. Wow. I went in there one time, and Olé invited me to supper, and Olé brought out the corned beef. I didn’t want to offend him, so I’d eat a few bites, but when he’d look out the window, I’d throw it under the bed–I was sitting on the bed–and the cat would eat it. Oh, you can’t imagine that awful stuff! But he ate it for years and lived to be an old man.
On the other hand, Ethel Raburn loved her mother’s corned beef and continued to eat it into later life.
The preference for beef probably explains why not much is said about fish, even though up until construction of the Owyhee Dam, which began in 1928, salmon and steelhead and Pacific lampreys made annual journeys to the Owyhee headwaters as far as Duck Valley in northern Nevada. Leonard Duncan said he caught but a single salmon in his entire life. That was when he was hauling manure and speared a fish through the mouth with his pitchfork from the back of the wagon. Buck Scott would catch rainbow trout behind a dam he’d put in Crooked Creek, load them into a wagon filled with cut hay to keep them fresh and haul them into Jordan Valley to trade for groceries. But even before the Owyhee dam had closed off migration of the anadromous species, mining had damaged the fishery. Ethel Raburn, who lived on Jordan Creek, related that they didn’t fish in the creek to speak of. “The minerals they used up there at the mine killed all the good fish in Jordan Creek. About the only thing they left was suckers, and they’re not a very good fish. Once in a great while you’d see a whitefish, but there used to be, they tell me, years and years ago, a lot of fish.” Clinton Anawalt caught whitefish, carp and suckers in Jordan Creek as a boy. Ironically, those who wanted to eat fish bought dried cod as well as canned oysters from which they made oyster stew, a common fare at the different dances.
Each ranch had milk cows and some folks even had goats for milk. The challenge with milk during the summer was to keep it cool. Joe Beach’s family kept theirs in what appears to have been a wooden box with a tin roof and wrapped with burlap that was placed so that it was kept wet by water from the splash board where the water wheel dumped water into the flume. It was cooled by the splash from the flume, and flies could not get in. His mother kept the milk in tins sixteen inches in diameter and three inches deep. They were set level, and the cream was skimmed off to make butter. Stacia Davis employed a frame covered with gunney sacks. A container on top was filled with water which then dripped down through the burlap, wetting it. As long as there was water in the container, the wind blowing through the sacks would keep the milk cool. And Ethel Raburn’s family had a well next to the river with a boxed-in section through which the water ran. There were hooks in the lid from which buckets of milk would be suspended and kept cool.
With the cream skimmed from the milk, Ethel’s family made butter in a crock churn with a home-made dasher, a large wooden butter bowl, and a wooden paddle. During Spring and Summer when the cows were giving a lot of milk, they would put away butter for the Winter. “We’d put it in a bowl and put cold water over it and wash it good, and then just keep a-working it with that butter paddle, get all the water out. Then we’d put some salt in it and work it good, and then put it in little rolls. First we’d put a little cloth around it, then the waxed paper around it, and then we’d wrap it up and put it where it was cool....It never spoiled. We cooked with it a lot.“ Stacia remembered putting the butter in crocks and then covering it with salt brine, a common method for preserving it.
Eggs were another staple that in the absence of refrigeration required preservation to ensure an adequate supply through the winter. They were kept in crocks in a solution of water glass (sodium silicate). Ethel remembered they had to be placed with a certain end down. The solution would prevent bacteria that could spoil the egg from penetrating the shell and the eggs would retain their water. Eggs in such a solution could be kept for several months, but because the shells were no longer porous, if they were to be boiled it was advisable to first prick them with a pin. Sophia Bethal couldn’t “imagine the eggs being of top quality after they’d been there for quite awhile, but they were usable.” Ethel’s mother put some eggs in sand, and Stacia put them in a brine that contained sufficient salt to float the eggs.
Ice was something of a luxury for the Owyhee families. In the early days it was cold enough that streams such as Jordan Creek might freeze sufficiently to permit the harvesting of ice. Opal remembered her family getting ice from the river, though at ranches down in the canyon, such as at Hole in the Ground, the temperature probably did not drop low enough. The ice would be cut into large blocks and hauled to a small ice house on the ranch where it would be packed in sawdust. Families that lived near the creek such as Bill Ross’s might even have an ice box. Bill and others recalled that the ice would last quite awhile, probably running out near the end of summer. His mother used it to make ice cream. Nowadays (1980), he noted, one could not rely on the ice; the climate was no longer as cold as it once had been. Opal’s mother would color hers with cherry juice to make pink ice cream for the Fourth of July. In the mid-Thirties gas refrigerators began to appear. For Stacia it was a “gala day” when she got a refrigerator that used bottled gas.
As one might surmise from all the flour that was purchased on semi-annual trips to town, baked goods were an important part of the diet. Every house had a Home Comfort or Majestic kitchen wood stove. (Interviewees who mentioned the brand of stove their family had were inclined to claim that “every ranch on the river” had that brand.) Temperature was regulated by guess. From doing it so often Ethel’s mother knew how much fire was needed to get the oven to the right temperature. “She’d just open the oven door and put her hand in, and she’d tell whether it was too hot.” Opal claimed, not without reason, “The best biscuits you can make are baking powder biscuits baked in an old Home Comfort range.” Baking bread was an almost daily chore. When Ethel was a kid at home the Raburns would bake six loaves at a time, and at Josephine Scott baked “six or eight loaves every day or every other day” to ensure the ranch hands had the sustenance they required. Pie, angel food cakes, and cookies were baked for dessert and to take to the dances.
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Stacia’s Cookies
(Recipe discovered in the cookbook of Stacia’s good friend Claudia J. Merritt)
1c. grated carrots; 1/4 tsp soda in 1 c honey; 1/2 c shortening; 2 eggs; 1 c chopped raisins; 2c oatmeal; 2c sifted flour; 2 tsp baking powder; 1 tsp cinnamon; 1/2 tsp each cloves, nutmeg; 1/4 tsp salt. Combine in order listed. Sift dry ingredients together. Drop from spoon. Bake at 425˚
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A woman found that much of her day was devoted to preparing meals. A bit of planning and a shortcut or two were required if she were not to be overwhelmed. Here’s Stacia Davis:
You got up at 5:00 a.m, and you had your breakfast on the table at 6:00, and the men ate and went to work. I always had the meals on time. They would leave the fields at 11:30 and come in and eat, and then they went back at 1:00. That gave them a half hour to rest. Then we had the meal ready at 6:00. They left the field at 5:30, but if you were buckarooing, you had to stay until the job was done, and you ate when you got home. It was hard to get help because it was far out, and womenfolks–what was there out there? A young girl, she made more money downtown. I can understand it. That’s why I made all this needlework–for something to do. [Beautiful needlepoint covered the chairs and a hung on the walls of Stacia’s home in Ontario.] Most of the women out there on the river, after breakfast was cleared away, right then you made your pies for your dinner. For lunch, we call it. The evening meal was supper. You fixed whatever dessert you were going to have for your supper in the cool of the morning. Generally you cooked enough for one meal that you had plenty left over for the evening meal. But there was always a little time in the afternoon if you wanted to sit down and rest.
Cooking was done on wood ranges, which came in different sizes. The larger stoves had a warming oven on top in which food could be kept hot. Most burned sage brush, though occasionally they might be stoked with juniper or mountain mahogany that was stored in a wood box in the corner of the kitchen or perhaps on a back porch. Sage was considered better for cooking than pine or fir, according to Joe Beach, because it lasted longer and burned hotter. But, “It could burn the grates off the stove as fast as coal will. So much sand in it, you know.“ Opal remembers the pots and pans as being “mostly porcelain”–probably porcelain enameled cookware. There were also black iron frying pans (“but they weren’t heavy”), tin dishpans and porcelain tea kettles. Opal’s Gramma Page had a copper kettle that was plagued with lime from the hard water. Gramma Page would remove the lime by pouring vinegar in the kettle. Someone had told her that if marbles were put in a kettle they would absorb the lime, but Opal declared that to be “a fish story. It doesn’t work.”
Breakfast presented the biggest challenge for the family cook. It had to be on the table early and in sufficient quantity that the cook would not fall behind. George Palmer’s mother “would have our breakfast in the oven before she went to bed, to warm up for breakfast. She’d have a stack of hot cakes that high before she’d turn us loose on them because we’d devour them so fast that she couldn’t keep up cooking.”
As Stacia suggested, lunch (or “dinner”) was often pretty much the same as supper. In Josephine Scott’s recollection, “Meat, potatoes, beans and bread. That was the main thing you had to have.” Hired hands and family ate together. There were often visitors, expected and otherwise, and all had to be fed. As Stacia noted, “You never asked a man if he was hungry. You went to the door and said ‘Put up your horse and feed him, and I’ll fix you a bite to eat.’ Because of course he was hungry. Where would he get anything to eat?” And then there was cooking at festive occasions, as when people gathered for “turkey pickings” (plucking the turkeys and preparing them for market). George Palmer: “It was just the same as a celebration, and everybody tried to outdo everybody else cooking.”
Those children who attended school of course did not lunch on meat and potatoes at the kitchen table. They carried lunches of sandwiches of homemade jams and jellies or cured meat–ham, bacon, or salt pork. Slices of the meat would be parboiled to remove the salt and fried. Or, perhaps a child would get a good sandwich of corned beef. Each child had a 5 lb. lard can with the name scratched into the lid. Practical jokers would sometimes switch lids, which “caused a rumpus” if someone ended up with a lunch that wasn’t so good. As kids will, Joe Beach and his brother thought they could find a way to get out of carrying the lunch cans.
We had a little dog. When we crossed the river on the boat, we made a packsaddle so he could carry our lunches. We cinched the saddle on him. Then we turned him loose and he trotted along with us. The first time we got to the river, he swam around the boat, got out, shook off, and the lid came off, and the bucket was half full of water. Next day we put string on him and wouldn’t let him get in the water, and after crossing, turned him loose and the lids flew off. He took off across the flats and when he come back, we didn’t have anything left in the buckets.
With that, they decided to carry their lunches.
Not all meals could be prepared with the luxury of a wood stove. Buckarooing involved days working, sleeping and eating out under the open sky, and preparing meals required innovation. Rocks would be carefully placed on the ground so branding irons could be laid across them and a fire built to cook on. Next to a tin can to be placed in the coals and used for brewing coffee (“it’s better than with a percolator”), Dutch ovens were perhaps the most important utensil. Josephine Scott’s husband was an expert. “He’d salt his meat and flour it good and put a lot of water in the Dutch oven and dig a hole in the ground, put a flat rock down in there, set the oven on the rock, and put a paper over it and wet it, and put a gunny sack over the top of that. He had his fire right there close, and coals was all he’d put on that, and leave it until evening. My, that meat was good. They called him the ‘Dutch oven man.’”
In the sheep camps the situation was a bit different. Even the most expressive historian will find it difficult to improve on George Palmer’s description:
Once in a great while at our lambing camp, we’d get a man cook, and they was kind of like school teachers. They was so damned cranky you couldn’t get along with them.… At the sheep camps we had little sheet iron stoves. They called them McCanfield stoves. They used to make them in Ontario. They were about 12 x 24 inches. They had an open lid like a range. There was a fella working for old Andy Little--he was the sheep king of the world, Andy Little was, and he’d get stoves by the carload. Some of them had lids on them with a hole in the top of it, and so the herder told the camp tender, “Bring me out a stove, one with a hole in it. Main food in the sheep camp was beans, and dried prunes, and if we was where we could get them, we had potatoes. Oh yeah, and sourdough bread. You betcha, that was the main part of our living. We had a sourdough jug, even at home. We made our own bread at sheep camp. You done all your own cooking when you was out. Before camp stoves, we used to stir up the dough in the top of the flour sack. Just make a hole in the top of the flour in the flour sack and make the bread there, and put it in a frying pan and cook it on the bottom, and then we’d stand the frying pan up in front of the fire to bake it on top, and boy, that was good. We drank mostly coffee and water if we could get it.
With such a larder and adeptness at meal preparation under primitive conditions (though they may not have thought of them as such), one can only wonder what these folks would have thought of the freeze-dried kung-pao chicken and Jet Boilers of today’s backpackers. Still, it was far from luxury. While Stacia had fond memories of life in the Owyhee, horse camp cooking was one reason “I don’t want to go out in the wilds hunting or fishing. I’ve had it. I’ve slept on every anthill out there, I think. We’d be out a week or so.”
Owyhee residents probably mostly obtained their clothes ready made from the stores in nearby towns or perhaps through mail order. Men and boys alike wore Levis with the metal rivets that got hot if one got too near the stove trying to keep warm in the drafty schoolhouse. Joe Beach “dressed up” for dances in new Levis and a white shirt. But not everything was purchased. Opal remembered that Mrs. Stickney (“I think it was Mrs, Stickney”) used to weave cloth. “Kinda rough lookin’.” Opal’s Gramma Page made socks and gloves for the boys. Others did as well. Mittens were made with one finger “because we drove teams all the time, and it was handy to have a finger you could use.” Children’s clothes (presumably adults as well) might be mended “patch upon patch.” Some of the home-made clothing might be quite fancy. When Phyllis Ross told her newlywed husband that she wanted a fur coat, he replied “All right. Trap it.” She did–enough for a full-length beaver coat. She so enjoyed trapping that she continued for several more winters until she’d made coats for her mother, mother-in-law and sister. Presumably for the work day men wore boots; the interviews don’t mention them. But for dress up, men still wore shoes that buttoned up the side, and they carried a button hook in their pocket to put them on. A photograph of the young Stacia Davis and her saddled horse shows her wearing lace-up riding boots, a dark wool skirt and sailor top.
Next to preparing meals, the major quotidian activity for most women probably was doing the laundry. Initially it was done by hand with tub and a wash board, and clothes were boiled in a wash boiler “to get the white clothes all clean.” It must have seemed onerous, even to someone as yet unfamiliar with labor-saving devices and without a basis for comparison. Sending one’s kids to school meant ensuring they had clean clothes. George Palmer recalled seeing his mother bending over a washboard “all day long, washing clothes for eight or ten children” in addition to “cooking for 25 or 30 men.” One mother of five put her washing in a tub of suds on the floor and her girls got in there and stomped the clothes clean.
Improvements did come, however. Households went from zinc tubs and washboards to lever-operated wash tubs that replaced scrubbing with back and forth agitation, albeit still by hand. Then “along came the Maytag gasoline washer and you were just delighted.” Like her reaction, Stacia’s description is probably fairly typical:
The boys were delighted. Everybody had a way to wash their clothes. It had a wringer. Believe you me, it was quite a relief from bending over a washtub washing with a board. It had a gyrator. Of course, it didn’t spin. You poured the water in and it had a hose on it, and you let the water out in a bucket and you dumped it outside. I had mine on the back porch, and I ran a hose out to the ditch that went to the garden. You had to fill it and you had to heat the water. You heated the water in a wash boiler. You dipped the water out of the ditch and you put it in the wash boiler. When it got nice and hot, almost to the boiling stage, you poured it in, then added cooler water to the right temperature. Then you dipped it out of the boiler and put it in the washer, washed the clothes, and then you drained off the wash water, and then you filled it again with a bucket to rinse your clothes. They didn’t go through two rinses at my place. We bought the gasoline by the barrel and hauled it out from town. We had a pick-up on the ranch, and we needed gasoline for that, and for the wells to pump stock water.
The wash was hung out on the clothesline to dry, which in the dry climate of the Owyhee, must not have taken very long. During the winter, clothes froze as quickly as they were pinned to the line. If the sun were shining, they would “freeze dry” (Josephine Scott’s description); wool items that couldn’t freeze were kept inside.
Once the clothes had been washed came the ironing. Most homes were no doubt like Opal’s: shirts and dresses were pressed with a pair of sad (from Old English sæd, “weighty, dense”) irons made of cast iron. They were heated on the stove top. When one cooled, it was put back on the stove and the second iron was taken up to continue while the first reheated. Because iron also required a hot stove, less ironing was done during the summer when it was hot. Later, in some households the sad irons were replaced with gas irons. Sophia Bethal still had hers in 1980. “They had a little tank for the gasoline and a pump for pressure, and a little generator. You light it and it has a little flame very much like the butane gas does today. It took white gas.” If a household had an older girl, ironing–like sweeping and milking–might be counted among her chores.
Although it may not be readily apparent to an urbanite living at the beginning of the 21st Century, in the approximately a half century covered by the interviews, the Owyhee families saw some very significant changes in their quality of life–change that came by dint of their own effort more than technological change. For the newly arrived, shelter consisted of modifications to what was available naturally (dugouts, for example) and the tents or wagons they brought with them. But fairly quickly dwellings evolved from mere shelter against the elements to homes built from rock found locally and lumber hauled from nearby towns. Multi-storey structures were not uncommon, and very soon the accouterments that made a shell a home began to appear–Gramma Page’s blue drapes, Stacia’s needlepoint, and the peonies from Gramma Iver’s garden. While well-oiled wood floors could foster a feeling of warmth and elegance, Stacia recalled one neighbor–the ailing woman who put her children to stomping the laundry–who had a dirt floor and a house that was immaculate, “one of the cleanest places on the river.”
Although initially some may not may not have had all they needed to eat–Joe Beach recalled one “old fella” who accompanied him and his dad on a trip to Vale to purchase supplies with but $25.00 to spend for the whole winter and nothing but sugar sprinkled on bread to eat on the trip. Joe’s dad insisted on sharing from the Beach grub box. The man “came out of it in a couple of years, but the first years were tough for a lot of people.” Most, however, had the meat, poultry, wheat, dairy products and vegetables for a nourishing diet. Emphasis was on meat and starches, but everyone had to work so hard that it probably never occurred to anyone to be concerned about their weight. Just processing the food and preparing the meals alone required significant physical effort! Ironically the introduction of labor-saving devices and electricity would make preparation easier but bring potential problems for those who carried on with a diet meant to meet the needs of a hardworking people but who allowed themselves to become more sedentary.
Clothing was fairly simple and functional, but effort was devoted to making it clean and presentable. For the most part, dress then was probably little different than the pre-Gore Tex, down-filled garments of stockmen in the post-WWII period.
While one might say with Joe Beach that “dad was always a good provider,” in truth daily responsibility for attending to basic needs largely fell to the women. These activities–keeping the house, processing food and preparing meals, and looking after the clothing–were full-time activities that began before the men arose in the morning and continued after they had completed their day’s work and had finished their evening meal. Moreover, they were required, albeit at lower intensity, even on “days of rest.” Unlike later descendants or even urban contemporaries, Owyhee women were responsible for feeding more than just their immediate families, and they had few alternatives–no restaurants or microwaves if they didn’t feel like cooking, no laundries if the wash had piled too high, no convenience stores if they ran out of butter. Running a ranch house was more than a simple (!) matter of cleaning, cooking and washing clothes. Adroit planning, management skills, and extraordinary self confidence were required for “washing clothes for eight or ten children and cooking for 25 or 30 men.” But as Stacia commented, “It was a way of life. It was all you knew.”