Too excited to wait for daylight, we began searching the wagon road in the early dark of an October night.

Joe and I had a plan one night in 1970. I had scraped together wages from a variety of odd jobs and mailed off for a Heathkit metal detector kit. My brother Arnold agreed to put it together for me: he always was an electronics whiz. Now it was done, and Joe and I had a plan. We threw some matches, water, weiners,  bread, pop and cookies into a couple of backpacks, tied on some sleeping bags, and I took a shovel out of the garage. Then, with the metal detector slung over a shoulder we set off up the road in the late afternoon.

The idea hatched a few weeks earlier when my Uncle Luke had piled us into the back of his Ford Econoline pickup to drive up to the cliffs. As we ground our way up the primitive dirt track we kept crossing wide ditch-like ruts leading off into the sagebrush, but we were too high up for irrigation. At the summit of the pass we stopped for a breather next to a small cairn of rounded basalt stones. There were several of those ditches leading through the gap, and my dad told me they were the ruts of a wagon road. As the ruts wore too deep into the powdery earth, succeeding travelers would break new trail parallel to the older ruts. The whole north face was interlaced with wagon trails, twisted into switchbacks. We scrambled back into the pickup to continue our trip and a low flying private plane buzzed us, sneaking over the gap in a shortcut across the forbidden airspace of the Hanford Reservation. But I was pondering the plan.

Joe’s folks had given him permission to spend the night with me as long as his brother Curt came along, but they didn’t suspect exactly where we’d sleep. But what’s the use of a metal detector if you don’t use it someplace where there’s probably lost treasure? Our destination was the old White Bluffs Trail where it crossed the low ridge on Saddle Mountain.We were going to follow that trail down the south side of the mountain, onto Hanford where people never went: it would be unsearched and undisturbed. We were going to search for lost goods from the wagons that crossed the pass more than a hundred years before.

It was October, and night came early. By the time we reached our target area it was already dark and it threatened to turn cold, so we planned to lay out our blankets close beside a fire. But we were wary of getting chased off the Hanford Reservation, so when we built a fire we kept it small and placed it in the bottom of a wagon rut where it wouldn’t be visible from a great distance off. And although it was late, we couldn’t resist trying our luck with the metal detector in the dark. No finds, and after our long hike we were ready to lay down by eleven o’clock.

Next morning I woke up before dawn, with scarlet wisps of clouds in an otherwise clear sky. The others were still sleeping so I built a little fire for them and took a stroll across the slope, snapping a picture or two with a little Kodak camera. The hillside glowed golden and brown in the morning light and it was poxed over with Russian thistles. Some had broken free to become tumbleweeds, piling up in gullies. Where the trail crossed the next gully I found it was lost beneath a great pile of them.

We worked the ruts of the old White Bluffs Road as soon as the sun came up.

When I returned to camp Joe and his brother were up and using the detector. Joe hailed me from a distance and I jogged back to them to find him poking gently into the dust with an ice pick. Soon he had uncovered our first find, a flat chunk of iron broken off the leaf springs of an old truck. Our lust for treasure reached a new high. In the next several hours we uncovered a total of five historical artifacts: another broken spring, a open-side link from a chain, a strip of metal torn off a wagon or truck and a small metal pin off some harness.

Across the gully, and deeper into the Hanford Reservation the trail ran onto a patch of earth that caused the detector to register continuously. We speculated about the cause. An iron deposit? Scattered bits of metal shavings? An underground bunker used by the military to support Hanford’s security? That last suggestion was a little too scary, and we turned tail to head for home.

My catalog of finds from that expedition to Saddle Mountain.

I carefully recorded our experiences in a worn out green paper notebook that I still have. My pen and ink sketches of the trail and artifacts are three-hole punched and inserted into a longhand journal several notebook pages long. There are a few blurry photographs mounted on the pages.

I don’t recall ever taking the metal detector up on the mountain again. I never used it in the places a modern treasure hunter would seek out, like Corfu or Taunton or the scattered ruins of old homesteads. It got stuffed into a basement cupboard and may still be in the old home place. But I did explore that section of mountain again one time. I found a few concrete foundations laid out on a bitterly dusty slope. A couple of steps led up to nowhere. There was a deep porcelain-lined cistern beside one of the walls. It was miles to White Bluffs and miles to Taunton, with nothing but sand, brush and stones in between. I wondered why anybody would ever have spent their energy building a home on this desert. At a museum I later found a 1912 atlas that showed the details of Adams County. There were four black squares shown about where the foundations were, and a place name: Daniels. Whoever lived at Daniels in 1912 left decades before my visit, and if anything was left of their homes, the army knocked them down when the Hanford Reservation was created.

We didn’t find any gold that night on the mountain, but the memory of that campout when I was fourteen has never left me. That golden dawn, the mysteries of that metallic patch of earth on the hillside and the abandoned cistern beside the vacant foundations–those are gems I still treasure. That, and the memory of my teenage friendships.

In my last post I analyzed the crashes of Army Air Force P-39s based at Moses Lake and Ephrata in 1944. The crash record was alarming. Several of the comments I’ve had either through the site or by other means inquired about other aircraft, particularly the P-38. This morning I went through the records again and updated the Google map of crash sites to include all of the recorded crashes from those two bases (except for one Ephrata crash that took place in Sandpoint, Idaho and another that took place in California). I do not have confidence that all of the crashes that actually occurred show up in this data.

In the updated version of the map, I have color coded crashes. Blue remains P-39 crashes, which were the most numerous wrecks; green markers indicate P-38 crashes, which were the second most common. Rather than come up with too many colors, I used yellow to indicate all other aircraft, from single engine spotter planes to heavy bombers.

I have included the sparse data from Ellensburg AAF, which existed for part of 1943 and part of 1944. Most of the wrecks from that field occurred at the airport. Note that the army airfield in Ellensburg is not the same as today’s airport. The abandoned army field is visible in the Google map as traces of the runways in an uncultivated area north of town.

I can’t help but wonder what emotional strain the pilots were going through that summer. In two instances I found pilots who suffered a fatal crash who had previously crashed and survived. One of these, Richard C. Livingston, died in a P-38 crash near Potholes Reservoir a little more than a month after crashing a P-39 at Moses Lake AAB. Another, Glenn W. Ingersoll, first crash landed his P-38 at Moses Lake, then died three days later when his P-38 had a structural failure. For the pilots around them terror of such disasters must have been almost overwhelming. For the residents of the area, a similar fear must have grown as they witnessed these crashes so frequently. Army policy of not allowing journalists to record them could not have curtailed the word-of-mouth distribution of news about the plane crashes.

My thanks to Jim Huffman and Clint Bridges for giving me some guidance in updating this article. It was interesting to read Clint’s conversation with my dad about the day Gene Dyer’s crash took place. There is a link to that discussion in the comments to my last posting.

Two mechanics crank the handle of a USAAF Bell P-39Q-1-BE Airacobra, at Hamilton Army Airfield, California, in July, 1943. Saga Boy II was flown by Lt.Col. Edward S. Chickering, commander of the 357th Fighter Group. USAAF photograph as published in Wikipedia Commons.

Early Sunday morning, June 11, 1944, Stanley L. Stroud opened the door to the cockpit of his P-39Q fighter trainer for the last time. Stroud lifted off from Moses Lake Army Air Force Base and headed towards the Lower Crab Creek country to practice strafing or firing his cannon. Maybe both. Maybe he was one of the “flyboys” my dad accused of shooting at livestock grazing along the creek.

Stroud probably drained his ammo cans before pulling up out of the valley, headed east. He may even have jettisoned the empty shells, although that practice was frowned upon. We used to collect .50 caliber shells, some of them still live, and other ammunition from time to time as we wandered across the vacant lands along the creek. With his ammo used up, Stroud gunned the engine and pulled back on the stick to sweep upwards out of the Crab Creek Valley. It would have been a thrill of sheer power, with a roaring 12 cylinder engine just behind his seat, one of the most muscular machines in the world. At the time, nobody knew why it happened, but pilots had for years reported that the P-39 would sometimes spin out of control. As Stroud gained altitude and shot eastwards along the northern flank of Saddle Mountain it happened to him. Stroud may have been knocked unconscious by inertia forcing the blood out of his brain. We can only hope that was the case. His plane plummeted in a tight spiral known as a Stall/Spin, exploding against the face of Saddle Mountain in a huge fireball. A seared patch of hillside, roughly the shape of Alaska, was branded into the sagebrush for at least the next forty years. Today you’d have to know where to look.

When I first heard his story in grade school, the pilot had no name and the story was told as if such an accident were unusual. It was one of the legacy tales that made my hometown seem special. But when I began to research that incident for this article I discovered something astounding. Stroud’s death was only one of 123 accidents involving P-39s from two Army Air Force Base Units located in Moses Lake and Ephrata that were training fighter pilots that summer 1944. All of these incidents occurred in only about five months, from late April to late August, 1944 (except one, which took place the following January).

The two air fields served as home base for other units as well, including those that trained heavy bombers, likeB-17s. Those other units also had their mishaps. Ten Ephrata-based B-17s were wrecked in accidents at the field or in crashes around the area. But with reports of around 100 accidents for all types of aircraft flying out of Ephrata, the 71 accidents involving P-39s amount to nearly three quarters of the base total. Of these, the P-39Q contributed 44 accidents. Moses Lake, which reported only around 75 accidents for all types of plane, gave the P-39Q half of them (37). There were 53 incidents involving all types of P-39 there.

Long and short of it is, that summer of 1944 the sky was falling all over Eastern Washington. Fliers died by the score in training accidents as replacement pilots were rushed through their initial flight training so they could be sent off to war.

I happened across much of this information at a website called Aviation Archaeology for which I’ve provided a link in my History Links. Originally, I  meant to search for data on crashes just around the Lower Columbia Basin, which is the focus of this blog, but it quickly became clear how many accidents centered on those two training fields at Moses Lake and Ephrata.

I remember as a boy being told that the crash on Saddle Mountain had been that of a P-38, the glamorous twin-boomed Lockheed fighter-bomber. That would have been plausible. P-38s were common above Crab Creek that same summer. They flew out of Moses Lake, Ephrata and Ellensburg. And some crashed. One went down at Whiskey Creek west of the Columbia that November, and another crashed after a mid-air collision over Beverly in December. But Stroud flew a P-39Q, the last production model of a unique, if troubled, aircraft.

There were a number of innovations designed into the P-39. It had tricycle landing gear and an all-metal fuselage. It was shaped rather like the British Spitfire or the tip of the .50 caliber bullets it fired. It looked fast. But the greatest innovation was the placement of the liquid-cooled V-12 engine in the center of the fuselage directly behind the pilot. A ten-foot shaft led to the prop, which had a separate cooling system for its independent gear box.

Originally the armaments were all located in the fuselage in front of the pilot, a T-9 cannon fired through shaft of the propeller spinner and two .50 caliber machine guns (later supplemented by a pair of .30 caliber guns) were mounted on the nose. In later designs the guns were shifted around to various other locations, including the wings, but the count remained pretty much the same. All these weapons needed ammo storage, which was designed into the nose of the plane.

The P-39 developed a reputation for tumbling early on, which is not a good thing for an aircraft to do. Seeking to isolate the problem, Bell test pilots ran 86 trials on the aircraft without being able to duplicate the spin. It was the Russians who pointed out the reason for the problem. After Pearl Harbor, the plane was shared with both the British and the Russians. In Russia pilots reported that the spinning took place under strong power when the ammo was used up and the nose was pointed upwards. When American engineers tested for those variables they replicated the spin. Without the ammo, the center of gravity for the plane shifted backwards, making the front end unstable.

The plane also had an electrical problem that led to a runaway propeller. Inexperienced pilots often didn’t know what to do about this, but more experienced pilots knew that when that happened, your only option was to bail out immediately. In Eastern Washington a large number of the crashes were engine failures leading to crashes or forced landings.

Although the P-39 exceeded its design requirement of climbing to 20,000 feet in six minutes (it only took five), the ceiling for effective use of this plane remained around 12,000 feet,  and less if you were in tropical heat. Designers failed to provide enough room for a turbocharger to improve engine performance at greater heights. The plane just couldn’t match up to most of the European fighters, but the Russians nonetheless developed tactics that made effective use of the P-39.

When my classmates and I studied that smear on the face of Saddle Mountain from the playground behind Lutacaga Elementary School, we thought we were seeing something that made Othello unique. We were wrong. Twelve of the P-39Q accidents listed on the Aviation Archaeology database were reported as Stall/Spins. The one other Stall/Spin involved a P-39N from Ephrata. In only two of these incidents did the pilot successfully bail out.

For the pilots, the worst part about the design of the P-39 must have been the way you got in and out. The cockpit had a solid metal roof. On each side of the plane were doors, just like you’d find in cars of the day. You could even roll down the windows! Unfortunately, an emergency escape against the inertia of a tight spin on this plane required jettisoning a side door, overcoming the forces that kept you pinned into the seat, and rolling through the tiny opening in a bulky flight suit with a parachute strapped on your back. Hopefully none of your straps or parachute bags would snag on the stick, the door handle or the window lever. Then you had to hope you wouldn’t get struck by a wing or the tail when you jumped. The feat was hardly possible in the few seconds before impact. Survival rates for bailing out of any aircraft were only twenty-five to fifty percent.

In some cases the emotional toll on other fliers may have led to other types of accidents. On the 18th of July, 1944, Leonard E. Parsons took off from Ephrata AAB. He probably spent his ammunition at the gunnery range located on the plateau north of Badger Mountain. Five miles north of Quincy his wing mates watched him die in a Stall/Spin accident. Harvey J. Christensen crashed his P-39Q as he landed at Ephrata. If you read between the lines, it looks like he was so upset over Parsons’ death that he lost control of his plane.

Quincy, Othello, Wilson Creek, Moses Lake, and Ephrata all witnessed deaths by Stall/Spin, some of them several times. Two Moses Lake fliers died in identical Stall/Spins only six days apart at the exact same spot about a mile south of Highway 26 near Road 1.8-SW, on August 11 and August 17, 1944. At the time there was no road in the area. The lack of landmarks meant that the army had to use latitude and longitude to record the places. The location of these Stall/Spin events at the perimeter of strafing or bombing ranges indicates that the center of gravity issue was surely the cause.

Another flier also died in a spot so remote the report could only describe it by its coordinates. That one fell to earth a few yards south of Highway 26 between the Crab Creek crossing and Corfu, next to the present Road B SE. His name was Robert M. Pickerall, and he died on July 31, 1944. Three days later yet another pilot brought his P-39Q down less than 2,000 feet to the east on a reasonably level rocky patch just south of Highway 26. His engine had failed. My family never mentioned these two crashes, though our ranch was only three miles to the east. We ran cattle in the vicinity, but the Danielsons may not even have known about the crashes on their range. The Army was notoriously tight-lipped about training disasters.

Army Air Force photograph of the remains of Pickerall's P-39Q. Wahatis Peak and the Smyrna Bench on Saddle Mountain in the distance.

From the Aviation Archaeology data I plotted crash sites in their approximate locations on the following Google map. Pickerall’s crash was located in the half circle field. When you open the map, zoom out to see the pattern of wreckage that spread over Eastern Washington in the four months during the summer of 1944. Bear in mind that each of the airfields also had multiple crashes: 25 at Moses Lake AAB, and 34 at Ephrata AAF. These are only incidents involving P-39s, of varying degrees of seriousness from the trivial to the fatal. I have not included wrecks of other aircraft.

Indeed, as the Aviation Archaeology database shows, accidents were happening all over the area that summer of 1944, from engine or structural failures to fuel emergencies or mid-air collisions. Most of the accidents took place on or near base, and it was particularly dangerous in a zone of a few miles around the fields. But other crashes occurred elsewhere, as engine failures and collisions could happen wherever the planes flew. Warren E. Danielson, no relation to my family, parachuted to safety after his mid-air collision with James A. Crunk, 23 miles northwest of Ephrata. Crunk perished. Both planes plunged to the earth below. Nobody and nothing was safe from sudden destruction in the entire region; the skies were dangerous that summer, but so was the earth below it.

Outside the Othello City Hall there is a jet airplane mounted on a pedestal, commemorating the relationship the little community had with the Air Force. It’s not a P-39, but the first jet trainer the Air Force used, a T-33A. I didn’t find any records of this aircraft crashing in the area, although a few other jets have fallen around Othello. Considering the metal rain of P-39s that summer of 1944, giving the residents a close up and safe view of one of these planes may have been a more appropriate gift. At least it would have memorialized Stanley L. Stroud, Robert M. Pickerall and the all other pilot trainees who died in P-39s in the summer of 1944.

The reasons for my father’s decision to abandon the Danielson Ranch on Crab Creek have never been entirely clear to me. I remember that when I asked him about it, he was very close lipped. Myself, I was ready to get away from the Central Washington weather by the time I went to college. No more of these sweltering iron-colored skies for months on end, Enough of these months of boringly gorgeous sunsets and clear nights so starry you could hike the hills without a flashlight even when there was no moon. My father lived in Glenwood long enough to marry and have children, but he moved back to Othello to take advantage of irrigation water from the Columbia Basin Project in the early 1950s.

I’m sure I’ll revisit the reasoning behind my father’s choice another time. But it’s the holiday season, and for me that always brings to mind my grandparents and their old home in the Glenwood valley of Klickitat County. These were the only grandparents I knew, since my father’s folks had both passed on by the time I could crawl. My mother’s parents seemed incredibly ancient from the very beginning, as if they were the living remnants of the rich family history they represented. And if I have any explanation for this urge to write down these stories, it probably ought to be blamed on my Grandfather Herman, who labored over his antique typewriter, one-eyed, pecking out the letters one by one and filling up pages of uneven type that eventually became several volumes of local and family history about life in Klickitat County. Recognizing his skills as a story teller and nurturing my own taste for history, I made it a point to find time to ask him questions whenever we visited, and I was richly rewarded with personal stories and the outlines of a family’s fortunes on the Washington frontier. I’ll be passing some of this on in later articles. I regret that I didn’t inherit more than a few of his marvelous old photographs, so I won’t be able to post clear copies of them to illustrate his tales. Most of the photographs I am publishing came from my father’s collection and were probably his own.

My favorite Christmases as a boy were those we had at Glenwood. Our home place outside Othello might get heavy frosts and the occasional dusting of snow, but Glenwood seemed like it always had a white Christmas. From my present-day perspective as a parent, I have to tip my hat to my own folks, who somehow managed to fit a family of eight, lunches, their luggage and piles of presents for each of them into a Ford Ranch Wagon. Then they put up with our arguing, pinching and punching for hours and hours as we negotiated the sometimes frightening roads along the route to Glenwood.

The drive could be wearisome even for an adult, Now imagine that you are the youngest of six children and your place is over the back seat, wedged in amongst the boxes and suitcases…no seat belts in that old car. And no air conditioning, either, unless you count the windows we could crank down. The swaying and fumes from the exhaust made me sick several times over the years, most memorably the time we decided to drive up by way of Bickleton and we stopped to picnic on tuna fish sandwiches and grape pop. But we won’t get into a description of what ensued.

Our trip began like a ride into town on Highway 26. We headed east until we reached the intersection at Othello. Here, a turn to the left took us into town on First Avenue, but a turn to the right was dramatic confirmation that we were going on a trip. It was always thrilling to make that right turn, even when I already knew where we were headed. Now began the tedious part of the trip, a long drive south to the intersection with Highway 24.  That was followed by a westward journey, climbing over the shoulder of Saddle Mountain to enter the vast and empty Hanford Reservation. Here there were huge warning signs with flashing lights for emphasis: Restricted Government Area. All vehicles subject to search. No stopping. No taking pictures…the signs must have been effective deterrents, for I’ve never found a photograph of any of them!

Entering the Hanford Reservation was terrifying. With visions of soldiers with machine guns, low flying surveillance planes, the distant steam rising from mysterious white complexes barely visible down south, and Nike missiles in the silos on top of Saddle Mountain, this was a classic Cold War journey. Smooth slopes blanketed with steel gray sage brush led to the summit of the mountain on our right, our mountain, the same ridges we hiked on the other side. This was the forbidden side, where no one was allowed to go. Dirt covered bunkers clustered on the open flats beside the highway and mysterious paved roads led out into the sagebrush, going who knew where? Then there was the radiation. We knew it might be here, invisible, pernicious, dangerous. The barbed wire fences that lined the arrow-straight highway were hung with yellow and red radiation warning signs. What if there was an accident at one of the nuclear plants as we were passing by? Would we survive? What if the Russians were to attack? If our radiator boiled over or we had a flat tire, would we be arrested as spies?

It seemed to take hours to travel the length of the mountain, but finally the highway turned abruptly left and began to drop down the face of a gravelly ridge to the place where pavement ended. There, at the bottom of the slope, the Columbia River flowed past a line of cars waiting on the banks for the little Vernita ferry to shunt them across. The ferry was simply a flat barge with room for a few cars and trucks, pushed across the river by a small tugboat with a single life ring lashed to its pilot house. If there were many cars on the road you could wait for a long time for your turn. Then there was the short ride over the river. People would climb out of their cars to feel the wind and watch the water. The highway south of the river seemed to go faster since there was more variety to the landscape. You swept past dying trees from the days when the McGees kept their ranch here, open borrow pits where gravel was scooped up to make the road, towering walls of rusty columnar basalt and distant hills that drew closer with every minute.But then we approached that final intersection, where military guards in white helmets and sidearms tended glassed-in booths beside barricades. Here Highway 24 veered off to the west towards Yakima. With relief we soon crossed the western boundary of the reservation, as if that made us any safer from radiation or foreign aggression. We threaded our way through the whalebacks of Rattlesnake Ridge, taking a left onto Highway 241 at the old stone Silver Dollar Cafe and heading south towards Sunnyside. We made this trip fairly frequently when we went to visit cousins who lived there. But this time we didn’t have time to stop for a visit. We still had hours to go.

With words you can fly across those miles. The reality was that I spent too many hours bouncing around in the back of that dusty pink station wagon. Past irrigation ditches, windbreaks, tented groves of trees shading prosperous farms, graveled roads and pavement, villages and homesteads, fields and bare mountainsides.  Then we turned up Satus Creek, where we invariably ran into a line of slow traffic as freighters struggled to climb Satus Pass. Impatient children and slow traffic are a bad combination.

But it was usually on Satus Pass that we found our first snow, maybe in patches, or maybe coming down in light sprays. For me it was like a magical curtain between our everyday life in Othello and the enchantment of a Christmas in Glenwood. Now pines thickened against the red rock hills and on a ridge just before we reached Goldendale, there was the bald silver dome of an observatory. But there was still that last terrifying canyon to pass.

The Klickitat Canyon Road was a steep, one-lane seven-mile gravel trail notched into precipitous slopes that spilled into the river far below. We’d usually get there just before dusk. Miles away and hundreds of feet below us we could spot the headlights of approaching vehicles. When we met, both cars (or a truck meeting our car) had to drive as close to the edge as possible, taking advantage of whatever extra inches a wide spot in the highway might provide. We would nearly scrape each others’ mirrors off in passing.

Near the bottom of the grade we entered the oak woods, a swale of widely spaced broadleaf hardwoods with dry grass and tumbled boulders in between. It reminded me so much of the Bing Crosby movie of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court  that I always imagined I might spot a knight beneath the trees. I never did, although we saw plenty of deer at various times, and once, a bear. We crossed the river on a narrow bridge, but my fear of falling wasn’t yet put aside. Through the trees flanking the road you could catch glimpses of the abrupt drop-off into the real Klickitat Canyon. It seemed all too possible for the car to slide off the icy roads and plummet over the cliffs.

Finally as darkness fell glimmers of distant light flashed through the deep pine woods. I’d try to figure out which of those houses might be the one that was waiting for us. The agony of the long trip would come to an end in a steamy kitchen with a huge oak table spread with ham, potatoes, salads, jello, beans and peaches. We’d find places to sleep on the couches in the front room where a huge Christmas tree glowed or in a trailer or the chilly bunkhouse. Tomorrow there would be snowball fights, barns and sheds to explore, old cars and trucks to play in, food and talk, my Grandpa’s interminable slide shows of trips to Yellowstone Park or Alaska, and finally…finally, Christmas presents.

The shattered remains of a bison leg bone, found in a bulldozer tailing near the Milwaukee tracks at Taunton. Fossil animal remains from this area are typically severely broken and disjointed.

Recently I acquired Bruce Bjornstad’s guidebook to the Ice Age Floods of Eastern Washington, On the Trail of the Ice Age Floods (Keokee Books, 2006). In fact I’ve been carrying it around in my briefcase and using it to fill in odd moments when I’m waiting for my son to finish his Jazz Band practice or to get out of school. It’s about time an interpretive tour guide like this was published! Because of the immensity of the subject, this book is a field guide only to a truncated rectangle of curious flood features in the Mid-Columbia Basin. But it is rich in detail and information. This year, Bjornstad published a second volume focusing on the northern landscapes where the flood began through the Mid-Columbia. He presumably plans to follow the water through to its eventual mixing with the sea.

An amateur only (have I ever made that completely clear?), I was excited to see that scientists had actually taken time to study the area I’ve been writing about. That gigantic landslide I mentioned in my post The Five Mile Slide actually has a name, quite logically the Corfu Slide…although it stretches from Taunton on the east to Corfu on the west. Bjornstad’s book spends a couple of chapters explaining the mechanisms that allowed the flood to create such a variety of unusual landscapes. The hummocky surface of this landslide had always seemed mysterious to me, but his book details precisely how the original topography slumped away in successive wedges. The feature I refer to as Column Crevice in my post To the Cliffs and Beyond appears to be one of the cracks in the earth where a landslide was developing, left exposed at the end of the flood, a landslide frozen in time. In fact a hike across this landscape would reveal successive events in the process of the collapse of the northern slope of Saddle Mountain.

And I was touched to see that Bjornstad refers to what locals around Othello refer to as The Bench has been named Parting of the Waters. The blunt triangle of northward-facing clay just to the east of our farm was the place where flood waters veered off to the west and Sentinel Gap or to the east and the Othello Channels. If I read my geology correctly, The Bench itself is a remnant of the same lake sediments that formed the White Bluffs, but the flood chewed away at it, leaving rubble and clay behind. And other things. As the waters slowed and churned, backed up by the hillsides at Taunton, whatever they had accumulated in their rush across Eastern Washington had a chance to drop out.

Othello teacher Bill Hanson excavated trenches on the top of The Bench near Taunton. Although his methods were scientific, I've never seen a published report on his findings. He claimed to have found only broken animal bones.

I discovered my high school history teacher digging trenches in the clay where I liked to roam on my hikes not far from Taunton one summer day. You can imagine my dismay. My teacher…my wilderness…intrusion. But Mr. Hanson was congenial about it. He was plotting out a dig, arranging grids with stakes and strings, excavating blocks of soil. My family and I visited his site over the next several summers, hoping to be in on a major discovery, but all the while giggling about the fact that we always found our fossils and relics elsewhere. Hanson reported finding only animal bones, and none of them intact.

None of them intact. When the flood lapped over the hills at Taunton it must have left behind portions of the mangled and ground up remains of creatures from every peaceful creek bottom, every verdant prairie and lakeside from Montana to Saddle Mountain. Nothing would have been able to outrun the flood waters. Violently churning water, clashes with bedrock, icebergs, tumbling stones and forests of uprooted trees would have torn the creatures apart in minutes. Bits of their bodies would have been left stranded on the high water line as the flood waters receded. Their bones would be covered in sand and soil and volcanic ash. Eventually, the Danielson boys would have picked them up as they weathered out of the clay. Petrified bones were so commonplace to us that we would fill Mason jars with them: shattered rodent bones, fish vertebrae, turtle shells, camel, bison, horse. We have no way of knowing what creatures we collected as we stooped in the dry rivulets along the Taunton bench.

My most prized find came easily, as I strolled along the bulldozed firebreak the Milwaukee Road renewed every now and then. I spotted an odd orange shape sticking out of the heap of soil left behind by the machine, something that might have been an odd electrical insulator. But when I pulled it free I held a freshly broken petrified leg joint from some large animal. Although I searched for more, there’s no telling how far the bulldozer tumbled that bone. Later I showed my find to a paleontologist at Central Washington State College (now Central Washington University), who identified it as coming from a bison. I pull it out of my cupboard in my classroom these days as I teach fifth graders about geology and fossils.

The interior structure of the bison bone.

Parting of the Waters is a deceptively peaceful name. It evokes for me the year I spent in Ireland working with children from warring neighborhoods in Belfast. I see green valleys and sparkling lakes, Iron Age hill forts and ruined cottages. As I grew up in the desert heat and searing dust of my home place I often longed for a drop of cold water. It would have been hard to imagine those few days at the end of the Ice Age when a gigantic lake of glacial water slammed into the hills above us, splitting into two separate torrents, bringing down the mountain as it passed, and leaving the carnage of an entire ecosystem to rot and petrify on a desert hillside.

The pipes were four-inch aluminum, thirty feet long. The first field was relatively flat, and when I’d cut water to the pipes there would still be a load in every pipe. I’d have to disconnect each pipe and drain it by lifting it gently in the middle until the water flowed out.

This field fronted on the highway, so I could entertain myself by watching the traffic pass by. But there was also a pond in this field, a pasture frequented by a herd of steers. The sprinklers had to be laid right through the pond. It was disgusting. The water was coffee brown with bovine wastes and it was deep enough that my boots would invariably flood. The sun climbed and the air grew oven hot. I’d spend the rest of my shift squelching around the fields with stinking wet socks.

The farm dog would often accompany me, a wiry blue-heeler with an attitude. He had his most fun on the second field, where the fenceline bordered on the wildlife refuge. This was a hilly field, and my sprinklers had to be laid right over the tops of some small ridges. One morning the dog spotted an intruder at the top of the first ridge, a scrawny grey coyote. Although he was at most a quarter of the size of the coyote, the dog tore out after it. Coyote took to his heels and disappeared over the ridge. I next saw him as he sped up the second ridge, with the blue-heeler gaining ground on him. Then the coyote disappeared over the farthest ridge, with the dog still trailing him at top speed. For a moment all was still. Then the blue-heeler reappeared, running straight at me at top speed. The coyote was on his trail this time, confident that he had drawn the dog far enough away from me that the dog could serve as breakfast without danger of my interference.

Coyotes often showed up in that field. The wildlife refuge abounds in them. One of my most peculiar experiences was when I was hiking out to the old homestead on BLM land a half mile away. It was hot as blazes and dead still. I happened to glance at my watch as the second hand approached twelve o’clock noon. As if on cue a chorus of howling burst out. As howling echoed off the basalt bluffs, it seemed like I was surrounded by a pack of coyotes. Their cries lasted about as long as the noon whistle outside the Othello city hall nine miles away. Then all was silent again. I walked on, spooked and wondering. Could the coyotes have actually heard that siren?

But my favorite coyote episode took place just beyond that second field where I was changing sprinklers one Spring evening. Because that field lay below the hill, it was generally pretty silent there: traffic sounds rarely reached me. As I worked I kept hearing a weird hooting sound coming from the sky. I would stop and look up, search the implacable blue, but find nothing. This kept on until I was finished with the sprinklers. Then, returning to the check valve to turn on the flow, I spotted a flock of Sandhill Cranes descending onto a small pond just beyond the fence.

This pond was ringed by tall cat-tail reeds, with broken desert beyond. The cranes dropped neatly into the center of the pond, stood for a moment, then began stalking about, dipping at frogs, or whatever it is that Sandhill Cranes like to do. But as I watched I spotted some movement in the flats just beyond the pond. A coyote appeared, attracted by the sound of the cranes. What ensued was worthy of a roadrunner cartoon. The poor coyote thought he was wily enough to creep up on the birds and snatch one for dinner. But the cranes clearly knew exactly where he was. Every time he’d come close to the cat-tails on one side of the pond the cranes casually walked across the water to the other side. The coyote tried to slip around to the opposite bank, only to find that the birds had already strolled off again. I watched this dance for about a quarter of an hour before the coyote finally gave up and trotted off into the refuge again.

The way Sandhill Cranes would pass over the farm always impressed me. For such a large bird, they were incredibly difficult to spot on the wing. They must fly at too great a height. But their voices certainly gave them away. More than once I heard them as they circled high above, but I wouldn’t be able to spot them for as much as an hour. In another age, it would be easy to see how a superstitious man might consider their voices the call of spirits.

Since 1998 there has been an Othello Sandhill Crane Festival each  springtime. While I’ve never yet attended, I’m impressed by the way they’ve organized a lot of good tours and talks and special events. Next Spring’s lineup includes several authors who specialize in Eastern Washington lore: Jack Nisbet, for example, teaching about David Douglas and native foods, and Bruce Bjornstad who will talk about the Ice Age Floods. Tours of the area fill up rapidly, but presentations seem to have plenty of room. It always seems to take place on the same weekend as the Washington State Science and Engineering Fair at Bremerton, though, so I get torn away for professional pursuits.

An unidentified traveller in an unidentified location. As the age of the motor car increased demand for petroleum, the industry looked for resources throughout Washington, including in the Columbia Basin.

An information circular published by State Geologist Raymond Lasmanis in 1983 declares that Washington’s first gas and oil resources were spotted on the west side of the Olympic Peninsula as oil seeps in the sea cliffs and mud cones spouting natural gas. That was in 1881. With more than 16,000 feet of basalt flows covering potential petroleum deposits in the Columbia Basin, nobody was really expecting to locate anything there. It was farmland that appeared to be most valuable in that area, and that meant water would have to be supplied.

The early 1900s saw some pretty heroic efforts to bring water to what could become productive farmland. Canals were the favorite projects, luring money from investors from far afield. But in 1913 the Conservative Land Investment Company of Spokane began drilling a well for water on the north slopes of Rattlesnake Ridge. They had reached a depth of just over 700 feet when, to their dismay, it wasn’t water that erupted from their hole, but natural gas. They had no way to accurately measure it, so estimates of the flow rate range from 70,000 to as much as 500,000 cubic feet per day, forced out with a pressure of up to 7 pounds per square inch. You might think they would have tried to contain the flow, but instead the gas from that well and several others in the area was simply vented into the air until 1929. By the time commercial production was attempted, the pressure rate had dropped to around 2 pounds per square inch. Even so, over the next dozen years or so, the Rattlesnake Hills wells produced around 1.3 billion cubic feet of gas until it was shut down in 1941 when the Hanford Reservation was created.

With the Rattlesnake Hills field in production, investors began scouting for similar opportunities. Wildcat operations formed to exploit untouched gas fields hidden beneath the basalt.

Donny Boy Number 1 was drilled into the northeast flank of Frenchman Hill, from 1935-1939. The site is near the west end of O'Sullivan Dam. Photograph by Bror Gustaf Norberg.

People’s Gas & Oil Development Company was one of these wildcat enterprises. W. Gale Mathews of Ephrata was hired to run point in acquiring mineral leases. According to a 1974 letter from Floyd Harris, a local old-timer who witnessed the entire process, land owners on the eastern end of Frenchman Hill were offered ten cents an acre and one twelfth of the all oil found in a well drilled on their property. I had to wonder whether Harris was correct in specifying one twelfth of all the oil, since there weren’t many indications that any oil would ever be found in this region. George Drumheller, the largest landholder in the area refused to sign unless the company agreed to drill on his land first, hoping to get first crack at the production returns. So it was that the well was sited on the northeast flank of Frenchman Hill, not for any geological advantage, but in order to get Drumheller to sign. Drilling was required to begin within a year of signing.

Harris reports that Ephrata driller C. D. Hoff was contracted to begin the well in 1934 with light drilling equipment until heavier bits could be obtained in the fall. Later the work was supervised by the Strauss Construction Company, which also had a contract to work on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. With work underway, stock was easier to sell. Harris claimed that two million dollars worth of stock was eventually circulated.In 1935 he worked at the site, designated Donny Boy Number One in honor of one of the boss’s sons. A wooden derrick 122 feet high was erected.

The January 7, 1935, issue of The Wenatchee World ran a front page suite of photographs to commemorate the dedication ceremony attended by around 500 onlookers. The ceremony had taken place nearly a month earlier, when company president William A. Broome broke a bottle of oil (from the Hoh River oil fields) over the derrick. A beefier twenty-two and a half inch steam-driven bit was used to allow installation of twenty inch casing. Company officials bragged that they were drilling the second largest well ever begun in Washington state, and that they were prepared to sink the hole to 6,500 feet. Around ninety feet down they hit hard basalt. Drilling slowed, but continued until 1939, when the well was abandoned. State records show that their final depth was 4,575 feet, and that the product was a slight showing of natural gas and some tar-like oil that a state geologist called “questionable.” “Apparently,” reads my letter from state geologist Vaughn Livingston, “the people who drilled the hole were lax in keeping records.” Or perhaps landholders who were expecting oil revenues needed to be reassured that nobody had tried to bilk them!

Today you can purchase stock certificates from the People’s Gas & Oil Development Company offering online at various auction houses that deal in  ephemera, priced around forty dollars. They are beautiful examples: federal blue curlicues framing a page of tiny print dominated by a grim George Washington’s portrait. Investors must have taken some comfort in the looks of the certificates, even if the shares ultimately proved worthless.

In the 1980s technological advances in oil prospecting led to renewed interest in the Columbia Basin. I watched teams of prospectors work the verges of Highway 26 one hot day, setting up a portable derrick next to their yellow truck, firing off explosive charges and collecting data about the rock strata below our feet. Nothing came of it at that time, although a number of wells were tested throughout the region. Later on I took a hike out to the homestead and found a tangled heap of electrical cables abandoned by the prospectors. It’s still out there, another relic of another stage of human occupation of the Lower Crab Creek.

Exploration for natural gas continues in the Columbia Basin, with the state auctioning leases as recently as 2005. The state drilling depth record was reached by a well on the Saddle Mountains anticline reaching 17,518 feet. That’s more than three miles! It took from 1982 to 1984 to drill and test the well. This well encountered considerable natural gas but not enough to make production profitable. Another Lasmanis circular from 1991 reports that “besides natural gas, the Columbia Basin is also known for deep ground-water circulation bringing heated waters close to the surface. Such waters are being utilized for geothermal heating purposes at Ephrata, Othello, Yakima, and Walla Walla.”

A 2009 USGS report on potential for natural gas production in the basin reports that several tests of the “fracture stimulation” strategy for increasing production have been attempted, concluding that “the results of fracture stimulation have been mixed and indicate that there is a significant risk of connecting gas reservoirs with water-producing zones.” Something like that would be disastrous for industry, agriculture and individuals throughout the region.

A brief stop on a car tour of the Crab Creek Highway in the late 1940s. This is near the location where the Department of Ecology and the Bureau of Reclamation would like to place a dam 250 feet high and a mile and a half wide.

The government is back in the dam building business. This time it looks like they’re going to dam Crab Creek! There are only two sites currently under consideration for a new water storage (and possible power generation) facility off the main channel of the Columbia River in Washington State. The results of the preliminary study favor damming Lower Crab Creek to create a reservoir that inundates the entire valley, from an earth core dam 250 feet high near Beverly to high water shorelines near Taunton. If you’ve spent any time on this blog, you can be sure I have deep reservations about building such a dam and flooding what I consider to be unique historical, cultural and environmental landscapes.

My family is perhaps lucky in this situation. Although the new lake created by the Crab Creek Dam would cover our ancestral homestead and the ranch that succeeded it, the more recent Danielson spread appears to be right about at the shoreline. But when the new lake is created, other infrastructure will have to be altered. It looks as though a massive power line will cut down Danielson Road, looming over the house I grew up in.

This view of the Lower Crab Creek valley, taken in the early 1950s (as my father notes: before irrigation), shows what will be a lake if the dam is built.

Will it happen? I don’t know. In this day of budget crisis funding may be difficult to pry out of the government. But who knows whether a Roosevelt-style public works program might not use the dam project as a solution to the economic slump. It’s the type of program that stands a chance of succeeding: employment of a vast range of professional and working types, new power generation, new irrigation storage, amelioration of a certain habitat (albeit at the cost of destroying other more unique habitat), benefits to local industries and those further afield. It might even help to restore the aquifer depleted by injudicious permission to pump water for irrigation circles.

There is a large coalition of environmental, outdoors and sporting groups opposed to the dam project. Fewer, perhaps, are opposed on the grounds of the cultural destruction. But then the loss of irreplaceable cultural sites has seldom stood in the way of progress. Look what happened to the Marmes Rock Shelter or the petroglyphs that were inundated behind Columbia River mainstream dams.

A view of Lower Crab Creek Canyon from the edge of the Ice Age landslide, showing a plateau that is traversed by at least three identifiable human footpaths. These would be travel routes humans used to move from water to water before horses arrived.

Cultural losses from the dam and lake would include surface scatter like the projectile points we once so happily snatched up on our hikes, homesites of pioneers and Native American peoples, artifacts, temporary camps, corrals, farms, townsites, monuments, roads, trails and fortifications. The damming and flooding of Red Rock Canyon seemed disastrous to those of us who knew of its former uses as an Indian hunting ground and a pioneer corral. Under the new plan, the canyon itself will disappear beneath a new lake.

A short list of some of the sites of historical interest and perhaps archaeological significance that may be destroyed by the Crab Creek Dam project includes:

• Indian hemp fields near the mouth of Crab Creek were thickets of Indian hemp, used by Native Americans for weaving fabrics and making mats to cover their lodges. These resources were important enough to be fought over in inter-tribal conflicts.
• The Columbia National Wildlife Refuge, which isn’t exactly a cultural asset, but which provides naturalists and scientists with fertile ground. It’s ironic that one of the reasons for building the Crab Creek Dam is to enhance salmon habitat, but that its construction would doom the efforts of more than fifty years of conservation and rehabilitation of the desert habitat around Crab Creek.
• Chief Moses’s Winter Camp described by A. J. Splawn in his valuable memoir, Kamiakin. Splawn places the Moses camp at eight miles from the Columbia, where Crab Creek sinks into the sand. This doesn’t happen since the days of irrigation, but the site is identifiable by a rich scatter of rock chips from the manufacture of projectile points and tools over thousands of years of occupation. The archaeological significance of the site is diminished by looting, but the chips are scattered for miles along both sides of the creek, an indication that the area may yet contain surprises.
• The Ice Cave which was located at the base of steep talus slopes near Moses’s camp. Originally, the cave provided natural refrigeration for Native Americans and white settlers. The Milwaukee Road construction crews used it to store their food. Landslides have covered the entrance to the cave. Speculation over the phenomenon includes the idea that a huge chunk of Ice Age glacier remains interred beneath the steep talus, where a landslide covered it during the last Missoula Flood.
• Railroad Properties including miles of track (and presently, trails), sidings, wreck sites, transmission lines and power boosting facilities, artifact scatters and dumps, and town sites of at least three Milwaukee Road stops: Jericho, Smyrna and Corfu. Smyrna is the only one where residents remain.
• Relic Scatters, including artifacts from pioneers and the occasional cartridge belt from a World War II fighter training flight. I’ll write about an interesting rifle that was discovered on our home place another time.
• Pioneer Settlements from isolated sheds and homesteads to highly developed ranch sites. Remains  include wooden, brick, native stone and concrete structures; stone, wood and wire fences and corrals; roads and trails, including the Corfu Highway; wells, barns and dumps. The earliest pioneer site surviving is Ben Hutchinson’s cabin (1884) which is made of driftwood logs on native stone piers with a native stone cellar excavated into the adjacent talus.
• Native American sites such as temporary hunting camps, mines for flint, chert or other glassy rocks for making tools and weapons; footpaths; hunting blinds or refuges on buttes and mesas; lodge sites, caches and tipi rings; ephemeral surface scatter; rock shelters and interments amongst the talus.

A ghostly ring in the soil reveals the remains of a Native American dwelling. It lies in line with and adjacent to a longhouse site just paces from the banks of Crab Creek. The lake will cover this unexcavated and un-looted site.

• Undiscovered archaeological sites Lower Crab Creek was a rare oasis in the deserts of Eastern Washington. Some of Washington’s oldest human artifacts and remains have been discovered within 150 miles of this valley: Marmes Rock Shelter, Kennewick Man, the Lind Coulee artifacts, the East Wenatchee clovis points. With archaeological technology changing so rapidly, it makes sense that new sites might soon be discovered using ground-penetrating radar or lidar imaging.

These are, of course, only a few of the objections to the dam and lake based on cultural or historical interest. There are also profound objections to the project in terms of biology, geology and ecology, not to mention economic principles. The area provides habitat for migratory waterfowl, including the Sandhill Cranes, and for native plants and animals (the endangered pygmy rabbit, for instance). I am certainly not qualified to catalog the environmental losses from the dam, although I would indeed mourn the flooding of the fields where I had so many personal encounters with the wildlife of the region.

Let me encourage my readers to do a little more research on their own, to find out more about the rationale for building the dam and perhaps to read about some of the objections to the project from a variety of organizations. And if you find the time and feel the motivation, perhaps a note to a legislator would be in order.

Danielson boys got around on horseback.

Oscar Danielson found out that making ends meet on his Lower Crab Creek homestead wasn’t the easiest thing to do. From the beginning, Oscar kept meticulous notes about his finances, even before leaving Renton to build his farm. His ledger is filled with minutia, and in addition to mundane expenditures for a growing family, the way the entries are written record Oscar’s assimilation into his new country. In the beginning his notations are mostly in Swedish, but over the course of several years, Oscar adopts more and more English phrases for his entries. Perhaps he had to share the book with a banker who didn’t understand Swedish!

There are a number of local history books that do a great job of describing life on an Eastern Washington homestead. One of them, Laura Tice Lage’s Sagebrush Homesteads actually mentions Oscar and his homestead. Ms. Lage relates a family story, probably learned from my father. In this tale the pioneers have decided they are losing too many crops to a plague of jackrabbits. My grandfather has an experience that demonstrates another unexpected problem concerning rabbits. Out in the field one day, with a young Walter perched on the seat of the buckboard, Oscar spots a jackrabbit. He does what any of his contemporaries would do, he snatches his shotgun and takes aim. Whether he hit the rabbit is not recorded, but the shotgun’s blast spooked the horse and suddenly the five-year-old Walter was on a runaway wagon.

Cattlemen had been using Lower Crab Creek for grazing since at least the 1850s. Army surveys make note of the bunchgrass prairies in the area, a nutritious wild plant which, coupled with a reliable water source, makes for good grazing. By the time the Milwaukee Road was built, though, the heyday of running large cattle herds had passed. Some of Oscar’s photographs testify to the fact that ranching was still going on, though.

Edla's sister-in-law Olga appears uncomfortable even on a draft horse in a photograph Walt dated as 1920.

Cattle contributed to the Danielson family’s income, but the amount they earned was still meager. While the canal was still in operation, cattle could roam the arid hills surrounding the farm, grazing on the native grasses and drinking from pools of standing water near the homestead or from the flowing waters of the creek and canal. Free range cattle were rounded up once a year to check on how the herds were growing. Calves were sorted out and branded, according to which brand the mothers bore. Pioneers in the Lower Crab Creek sometimes used box canyons to conduct their round-ups. Red Rock Canyon, which is now inundated by Red Rock Lake, was sometimes used as a natural corral for the round-ups. Poles or logs were laid across potential escape routes and all the free-ranging cattle of the area were driven into the canyon to be sorted.

Oscar assists in the yearly roundup near the family homestead, around 1930.

After the canal was destroyed in the 1927 flood and irrigation of the homestead fields became impossible, cattle became a far more important part of the Danielson family income. The homestead itself became untenable, so Oscar moved his family to a small frame house in the orchard. There he continued to run  cattle on the land he still owned, and took odd jobs to help pay the expenses. His ledger reports income from selling firewood to the Othello School District.

Oscar's older sons help load a truckload of firewood for sale to the Othello schools.

He took up hunting to provide variety for the family table. Sometime around 1928 Oscar bagged a snow goose with a 72 inch wingspan, then held it up for the camera while some of his admiring youngsters assisted.

Oscar displays a snow goose he shot in 1928 at the orchard after the homestead was abandoned.

This was not an easy place to raise a family. In the beginning, Oscar and Edla and her brother Gustav and his wife Olga tried to import cosmopolitan habits into the country. They posed in a wagon in front of huge lumps of basalt dropped by the Ice Age floods, as if they were only tourists on a vacation.

Neighbors, too, acted as though life on Lower Crab Creek was just like it was elsewhere. On major occasions, like the Fourth of July,  they gathered to celebrate together. This sometimes occurred along Crab Creek, but on at least one occasion, the celebration took place at the Danielson Dam.

A 1927 picnic at the Danielson Dam brought neighbors together for what might be the last time. After the flood, the small community dispersed.

But the reality was that life on a homestead in Eastern Washington was tough. Although he was only crying because he slipped into the irrigation ditch outside their house, Walter’s tears might have expressed the hardships a family faced in such a challenging environment.

Walter Danielson cries for the camera after falling into the irrigation ditch outside the homestead.

Children provided help in the fields, in the barns and around the house. They learned to raise livestock and tend gardens because these were chores that had to be done for the survival of the family.

Neighbor John Simpson joins some of the Danielson children at lambing time in the orchard.

But they found time for pleasure as well. They joined the school band, the baseball team, they spent time with cousins visiting from Seattle, or made the long trip to Seattle to visit their cousins there. They took advantage of the weather to swim in the creek or to build a snowman when winter came.

A neighbor helps the children build a snowman.

As Oscar’s boys grew up, they followed the Crab Creek Road to work, to play (the jazz band Walter played trumpet with was called The Five Jives, and they played dances in many Central Washington towns), and to travel longer distances. In spite of the Great Depression, the family did well enough to allow George, Walter and Elsie to make a trip to the  San Francisco World Fair.

All dressed up, you wouldn't guess that George, Elsie and Walter came from the sagebrush flats of Lower Crab Creek. They visited the San Francisco World's Fair in 1939.

The orchard home was only a temporary location. Oscar’s family purchased a ranch house near the point where Crab Creek runs into Saddle Mountain, where today’s State Highway 26 crosses the creek. Here Oscar revived his farming method, pumping water out of the creek using a single stroke gasoline engine to water fields of alfalfa. The Danielson Ranch was also the headquarters of their cattle business, which continued to operate in the area until Walter moved the family to Glenwood in Klickitat County.

Oscar and Edla receive a visit from Olga and Gustaf in one of Oscar's last photographs. Walter stands to the right. The photograph was taken at the Danielson Ranch on Crab Creek in 1940.

During the Second World War the Army extended the Yakima Firing Range over the Lower Crab Creek valley. Pilots in training for the Army Air Corps flew missions across the countryside. Walter sometimes claimed that the pilots were occasionally trigger-happy, taking strafing runs at grazing cattle. Angry ranchers who confronted officers at Larson Air Field were told to get the tail numbers of the airplanes so the culprits could be identified. A reasonable request, except that the shooting usually wasn’t discovered until long after the plane had landed.

The Danielson children attended elementary school in Taunton and Corfu, where two-room country school houses were built. The former schoolhouse from Taunton was moved into Othello, where it was remodeled into a duplex rental. The Corfu schoolhouse was a beautiful red brick building. One of my uncles rather shamefacedly pointed out the place he’d carved his name onto a door jamb when we visited it when I was a boy. By the 1970s the Corfu school had been torched and its red bricks had disappeared. It wasn’t too much longer before the last of the structures that made up Corfu vanished. Now you notice that people once lived there only if you catch a glimpse of a concrete foundation where the store used to stand. In its day, though, Corfu served a community of ranchers, orchardists, farmers and railroaders. It was a crossroads, served by several highways, including one that struck out up the steep face of Saddle Mountain directly south of the railroad tracks. The zig-zag pattern of the Corfu Switchbacks is still evident, and hardy four-wheelers like to use the road even today.

A photograph from this series of pictures of the Taunton Schoolhouse is missing. My father lent a photograph of the school band to the Othello Outlook for a historical edition, and it has since disappeared. The photograph included a boy who won the Congressional Medal of Honor during World War II.

High School was only available in Othello for the children of Lower Crab Creek. Oscar drove a bus from the creek to the town, nine miles to the east. He also contracted to supply firewood to keep the stoves burning at the Othello School. When I attended high school there, graduation pictures of early classes still hung in the cafeteria. Amongst them I enjoyed picking out my uncles and aunts. The classes were small back then.

Oscar died in 1941, of a disease Walter said would have been curable if he’d had the proper medical care. But it was a long way to a hospital. World War 2 brought about massive changes in the little backwater that was Lower Crab Creek. Walter held onto the ranch and farmed along the creek, which bought him a deferment from the draft: he supported his mother and a number of minor siblings. But the next elder brothers joined the fight. George, Robert and Lawrence were all engineers in the army.

George Danielson, in the 19th Engineers, relaxing on an Italian balcony during the war.

George became a member of the 19th Army Engineers, and he shipped out for North Africa. He told me that he was at Kasserine Pass about an hour before Rommel arrived, but there was more to the story. The 19th Engineers were not trained to fight tanks, but they held the pass against the Germans while the rest of the army escaped.

It was 20 degrees below zero when Lawrence came home on leave.

Lawrence arrived home on leave during a cold snap. Snow covered the valley, but the chores still had to be completed. Heavy coats and gloves were the order of the day. After his leave, Larry was sent to fight the Germans in Europe. Robert was also posted to Europe, but following VE Day, he shipped out for the Philippines before returning to the states.

At home, cattle remained the focus, but the Danielsons retained a certain sense of humor. Like Sam Hutchinson had done before them, the Danielson business plan lay in control of water rights while their cattle grazed large areas of grassland away from the creek. Each year the range cattle would be rounded up and branded, or perhaps ridden!

Herman Danielson rides a bull in a Danielson corral on Lower Crab Creek.

It’s not clear to me what made my father decide to leave Crab Creek. Stories range from competition with other local ranchers over the water rights to being fed up with dust and heat. At any rate, but just after the war, my father was searching for a new home. He toured through the Saint Mary’s River country of Northern Idaho but he ended up buying a farm in the isolated logging and ranching community of Glenwood, at the foot of Mount Adams in Klickitat County.

The Crab Creek Ranch was sold, but the many relics the Danielsons left behind were always considered part of their heritage. As we drove along Highway 26 where it crosses Crab Creek, Uncle Bob would point out the nearly concealed flywheel of the single-stroke gas engine that powered his father’s irrigation pump. The pump had served a term at the Danielson Dam before being hauled to the Creek Ranch. For years it stood neglected in the sagebrush along the highway. The same was true for my father’s Model T, which we would occasionally visit as we drove down the gravel road that was once the Corfu Highway. Our family’s connection to this land was not over, for Walter brought his family back again in the 1950s, opening up farmland to be watered by the new Columbia Basin Project.

A 1971 view of Red Rock Canyon, near Lower Crab Creek. This canyon, which was dry before irrigation arrived, served as a natural corral in pioneer roundups. Today it is flooded and provides sportsmen with fishing opportunities.

The Reading Eagle, Thursday, July 26, 1906. Page 4

EXCITING SPORT.

Rounding Up Wild Range Horses In the State of Washington.

Regarding the last big round-up of horses in Washington State, a correspondent writes that Eastern Washington has for long years been known as the home of the will range horse, and many are the markets of the Central and Eastern States to which these horses have been shipped. Now, with the encroachment of the farmer to till the soil, the day of range riding and horse raising on the open range is about to vanish.

The southern half of Douglass county has heretofore offered an inviting range for horses, and there are thousands still running at large there on the sandy stretches of bunch grass and the deep green sloughs of the canons.

The first realization of the necessity of a complete round-up became known when ranchers began to build homes around Moses Lake and over the top of Frenchman hills, clear south into the canon of Lower Crab Creek. Wire fences were being put up, and the danger of injury to the range horses became every day more threatening.

The natural result of these movements was to show horsemen that there was a market for their property, and they finally got together and agreed to round up all the horses that could be gotten together. They began to realize that the old prices of $2.50 to $10 a head for horses on the range were a thing of the past, and many a man found he was really the possessor of enough horses to amount to quite a fortune.

In order to move concertedly, it was agreed to organize into a legal body and Thomas Burgen, of Ephrata, was elected foreman of the great drive. His plan was for 150 to 200 riders to sweep the entire range country of wild horses. A date was settled to begin the work and Ephrata was the starting point.

On a Thursday morning the first riding for horses began. Towering up to the south was Saddle mountain, or better known among the horsemen as Crab Creek mountain. This range rises from 600 to 1,500 feet above the level of the canon, precipitous on the north side, and gently sloping to the south toward the Columbia. About 75 riders were detailed to ascend the mountain opposite the camp and ride westward toward the mouth of Crab Creek, endeavoring to drive the wild horses before them. This meant some 40 miles of rough mountain riding for them.

The main body of the outfit, augmented here by the addition of another big camp outfit, drawn by six horses, and several white men and Indians, pushed leisurely on down the canon toward the Columbia.

The last five miles of this day’s march were through washed sand along the creek, interspersed with short stretches of basaltic rocks, and it was not until sundown that the Columbia was reached. Here were large corrals, and the result of the ride on the mountain was eagerly awaited by the camp. More men on fresh horses were sent into the mountains to assist the riders there, and about 8 o’clock the pounding of hoofs and the neighing of mares and colts heralded their approach.

Sweeping down the mountain through a narrow ravine, out of the clouds it seemed in the dim light, came the wild band, followed and herded by the riders, down to the water. They were all thirsty, and after a drink it was a short task to place them in corrals. Many of the riders’ horses had given out with the hard work. Some came in on foot and others had to camp on the mountain for the night.

About 400 horses were the result of the day’s work. Fully 1,500 had been started, but in the afternoon, when the riders and horses were tired, it was difficult to hold them and impossible to overtake them when they once got under way in their efforts to escape. This promiscuous gathering resulted in leaving many orphan colts with the band, and fully 50 were shot during the afternoon.

The partial failure of the ride of Crab Creek Mountain necessitated a conference of the horsemen, and it was finally decided to rest the horses and try once more. Accordingly, the next day’s work was taken on the south side of the Frenchman hill, lying to the north of Crab Creek, and a gently rolling country. The drive extends only about 15 miles, and about 600 horses were turned in at 4 o’clock in the afternoon.

The fact that sheep had been through the country near the corrals now necessitated the driving of the saddle horses and wild band some eight miles from camp to forage, and more herders for the days and night wranglers for the saddle horses.

Some fine specimens of saddle horses were found among the wild band and they were speedily roped and saddled.

The following day Foreman Burgen laid a plan for riding the Saddle Mountain again. This time about 40 riders started up the canon to Ben Hutchinson’s ranch, some 20 miles from camp, and spent the night. In the morning they were on the mountain bright and early, and the first bunch of horses sighted was at once rounded up and held, and succeeding bunches run into them during the day. At the camp all were about early in the morning and by sunrise 50 or 60 riders started out around the end of the mountain with a herd of extra saddle horses to meet their comrades about noon and give them all fresh mounts. This plan resulted in nearly 900 horses being added to the wild band, although quite a number still eluded the riders.

One bunch, numbering from 100 to 150, all of the white or gray or spotted black and white and bred from Arabian stallions, could not be captured. It is known locally as the “wild goose band,” from the gray color and the straightaway runs they make. When their leaders decided to pull out, riders had to get out of the way or be run down, and no horses under saddle were able to keep pace with them. It is said that fully half of the band have never been branded nor felt the swish of a rope about them.

In 10 days 3,000 horses had been rounded up, but the big herd did not reach Ephrata, the shipping point, until a week later.