Crab Creek Ranch

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.

The Crossroads

Lower Crab Creek provided water. In Eastern Washington, that was a godsend. Temperatures on the Columbia Plateau routinely soar to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summertime, and rain is scarce. Cleaning irrigation ditches with a shovel west of Othello as a boy, many were the prayers I sent for even one scanty cloud to shield me from the overbearing sun.

The Sinkiuse Indians who lived there before me probably shared my distaste for the relentless sun. But they didn’t have the benefit of a well of cold water I could retire to, an air conditioner that cooled the house when I took a break. They were stuck with the weather the way it was: hot in the summertime, cold in the winter. They took a more basic approach to living on the Columbia Plateau: they stuck close to water, or if that weren’t possible, they found the shortest route from one water hole to the next.

Over centuries of migration and travel, humans developed routes that guided them along the most direct lines of travel from one pool or stream of potable water to the next.

Crab Creek Homestead

Elmquists and Danielsons near Seattle, ca. 1914 Oscar F. Danielson holds baby Walter, front right. Edla stands near him, wearing the dark skirt.

In an earlier post to this blog (Illegal Immigrants) I introduced my grandfather, Oscar Fritiof Danielson. In this entry, I will sketch out the history of his farm on Lower Crab Creek. But first, a little about his background.

Oscar was born in a small town called Slatthog in southern Sweden in April 1885. A number of his brothers seem to have left the area, and Oscar followed. His arrival in America is shrouded in mystery. I found what appears to be his name on the 1910 census, as a boarder in a lumber camp at Avondale in King County. He is listed as a lumber worker, 29 years old.

An Echo of Their Tunes

If I can find the time, one of the things I like to do every evening is practice the fiddle. I’m not good, but I’m getting better. There’s definitely a calming effect from it, like a walk on a mountain trail. I follow a trace left by someone else, but I never see things exactly the way they did. Sometimes I only find cacophony, and other times the effect is ethereal. It’s something that a psychologist could probably analyze with dramatic and devastating results, but I try not to consider the implications of this habit. It is, at least, constructive and it keeps me from being a complete consumer.

While music has had a continuous influence in my own life, I believe it to have had influences throughout the generations since we became Jewish and before. (If you haven’t read my previous posts, you may not understand that comment: the BRCA gene is passed on through some Jewish family lines. Until my close relative was diagnosed with it, my family had no clue that we shared this Jewish heritage. Now we suspect that the gene was introduced through my great-grandmother, Amelie Von Marquet Kuhnhausen.)

The proud owner of a new piano, purchased from a piano wagon out of Portland, Oregon. Photographs of her wedding to Karl (Charles) Kuhnhausen grace the top of the piano. This piano sits in my music room.

In my music room sits an old piano, which joined our family before 1906 (I have a photograph of the Jewish great-grandmother sitting proudly before it, published on a custom postcard which once carried a postmark of that year). The piano doesn’t get much play now. My daughter had been taking lessons on it before she died, and her music sat on the piano for months before I finally cleared it off into the piano bag she used to carry it to town. Now that music stands by the abandoned piano, both of them artifacts of people who have completed their turns on earth.

Adaptation and Disorientation

My wife bought the land we live on in the 1970s, while she was still in college. The land lies on an eastward slope in the heavily forested hills near Bellingham, Washington. They were logging here in the early part of the 1900s, some of those operations Darius Kinsey loved to photograph.I know they used horses, steam donkeys, trains and trucks to remove the ancient cedars. On our property you can find old stumps with springboard slots hacked into them. The loggers placed springboards several feet up on the trees to avoid heavy sap that would clog up the blades of their two-man crosscut saws.  With ten acres of land, we have a natural preserve that keeps its history wrapped in forest duff.

Not too long after we got married, I began an intense project of trail development. My wife had never really used the land we lived on, but as I crashed through the brush I found enchanting natural attractions. I found those springboard stumps, carpets of wild ginger, fields of ferns, tented clubhouses at the bases of mature fir trees. Even the fallen timber offered enchantment: shelf fungus, tiny mushrooms, cubic rot, lightning strike evidence.

I grew up in the desert of Eastern Washington. Lots of people don’t even realize that such a thing exists in the Evergreen State, but my childhood, cursed with dust, inexorable heat, and merciless sunshine sometimes tortured me. As I labored on my father’s farm, cleaning silt out of the bottom of irrigation ditches, picking up alfalfa bales and stacking them for storage or on trucks, I knew the distant peaks of the Cascades offered somewhere cool, comfortable, unreachable.

Illegal Immigrants

It seems only fair, in these days of tightening the borders, to confess that my family’s immigration was not entirely legal. In fact, on both sides of my family, my ancestors represented some of the worst in violating immigration laws. Let’s start in Sweden.

Perhaps somebody was getting married. The Daniel Jonorson family gathered in their best clothes for what is probably the only family photograph they ever posed for. I am guessing this image was made around midsummer (by the evergreen boughs at their feet and by other photographs which appear to be taken the same day) and in the 1880s or 1890s.

We call him Daniel Jonorson, but his name might as easily be Jonasson or Jonsson…it’s not easy to say, as we’ve never found any legitimate record of his family in Swedish archives. What we do know about the family comes from a typewritten scrap of paper that might have been transcribed from a family Bible, by an unknown family member, at an unknown time. We have traced the birthplaces the record provides to a few hamlets in South Central Sweden, which my father recalled his father speaking of. Here is the entire transcription:

Daniel Jonorson was born 28 Sept., 1844 in Regkelsboda, Sweden. He married Yngri Lira Yonhannerdotter (sic) of Bredhutt Berg Soken, Sweden. Their children are as follows:

Emma Kristina Danieldottor 16 Feb 1868
Carl Amadres Danielson 28 Oct 1873
Nina Caroline Danieldottor 11 Jun 1876
Johan Alfred Danielson 17 Aug 1879
Johan Gustaf Danielson 25 Jan 1881
Salma Elis Danielson 8 Feb 1883
Oscar Fritiof Danielson 25 Apr 1885
Nels Gunnard Danielson 18 Apr 1888

Up until my grandfather’s death in the 1940s, sporadic letters were exchanged between his siblings who still lived in Sweden, and this illegal immigrant who had settled in Eastern Washington.