A Walk Through Ardoyne

A British Army patrol on the streets of South Belfast in 1981. Patrols that visited Ardoyne typically showed up in armored vehicles, wearing protective gear. This photograph courtesy Jeanne Boleyn, who released it to the public domain through Wikipedia.

(Continued from Wheatfield Gardens)

The morning after my arrival in Belfast, my predecessor Ryan took me for a get-acquainted stroll through my new neighborhood. The two of us were from totally different backgrounds. He was an affable city boy from Philadelphia, while I was a somewhat naive and laconic westerner who had only a couple of years experience living in Seattle. Perhaps he sensed that I would need to be shown the ropes, introduced to key people who would take me under their wings to keep me safe and make me useful.

There had already been one surprise awaiting me at Wheatfield Gardens: it turned out I was to share responsibility for running the house with another American volunteer, Len. He was much like Ryan, charming and friendly, and he seemed like he already knew his way around the area although he had only arrived a week or two before. I was a little jealous. While I had taken months to arrange my term as a volunteer, sending letters, making phone calls and doing interviews, Len had simply showed up in Belfast and been given a job!

The three of us left the Glencree house together on that bright morning, waving at the only neighbors who cared to mix with us, the Scotts next door. The street was lined with brick garden walls with little iron gates on pavements that led to semi-detached brick houses. The houses looked like they’d all been built from the same plans, and there was very little individuality to any of them. It seemed odd that all this urban landscape was crammed together so tightly around us and yet a short distance away the green slopes of vacant mountainsides soared above the city. Ryan saw me looking and took the time to point out Napoleon’s Nose, a peak with an Iron Age hill fort on it, within walking distance from my new home. He couldn’t have given me a greater blessing. Later on, when things seemed particularly bleak, I did like I did back home, but instead of climbing Saddle Mountain, I scaled Napoleon’s Nose.

We hadn’t gotten to the end of the street before Ryan stopped us and us listen. There had been a constant sound in the background of our conversation, and he pointed out the helicopter stationed over the west end of the city. During the year I spent in Belfast, the British army kept up an almost constant aerial patrol of the Catholic communities of West Belfast. Sometimes the copters hovered over Ardoyne instead.

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.

A Train Ride to Eternity

This article is full of mistaken assumptions, a lesson waiting for recovery beneath the ice of ignorance. For instance, I always assumed that Stevens Pass was named by good old George McClellan, as if he took time out from his trout fishing ever to really explore ways to get across the Cascades when Washington Territory’s first governor (and railroad route scout), Isaac Stevens, ordered him into them hills to locate a pass for a railroad to use. (By the way, if you’re interested in what the fishing was like around Yakima in the 1850s, McClellan’s journal will tell you. McClellan never got far. He glanced at the frowning cliffs above the Tieton River and turned around, reporting that a pass didn’t exist.) I started the article by claiming that a plaque memorialized the Reverend James M. Thomson in the basement Scout Room of St. James Presbyterian Church in Bellingham, Washington. But in a fact checking expedition this weekend, I discovered that I was mistaken: no such plaque exists. Now, I wonder why.

A grainy portrait of Reverend James M. Thomson was found in the 1909 history of the local Presbyterian Synod.

James Thomson was not a Boy Scout, and the Stevens for whom the pass was named was a railroad surveyor working for entrepreneur James J. Hill, whose Great Northern Railroad fearlessly scraped out a series of  switchbacks on the faces of seemingly impassible peaks. A bit of fear might have been in order.

A Picnic to End the Dustbowl

Farmers and ranchers and their families mingled with promoters and dignitaries to hear about the progress being made. From the top of the mountain they gazed north on the desert lands that Grand Coulee Dam would make into a garden.

They gathered on top of Saddle Mountain in the heat of August, 1927, on a patch of sand and basalt at the top of the cliffs that form the western edge of the landmark that gave the mountain its name. Every car and truck that arrived ground the powdery soil in the road into a finer dust that hung in billows over the hillside before drifting slowly away. As they arrived, the cars were directed to a makeshift parking lot, a vacant hillside spotted with small sagebrush. But the passengers were dressed in their finest clothes, as if coming to a wedding. And in a sense, they were.

The State of Washington would look a lot different today if Grand Coulee Dam hadn’t been built…something that probably couldn’t happen today. My purpose here isn’t to debate whether or not it was right to so dramatically alter the environment of the Eastern Washington desert (indeed, because my family has been so closely tied to the enterprise, I’m not exactly sure how I feel about it). To get a brief history of the dam, you can find this excellent, pretty well balanced, article on HistoryLink.org.

It’s hard to imagine what the farmers who attended that picnic on Saddle Mountain were feeling. Over the years many of them had watched their neighbors and friends give up or fail on the lands they had invested so many years of labor to develop.

The Forgotten Train Wreck

News of the wreck was suppressed. It is not known how many GIs lost their lives when this troop train derailed.

World War II brought many changes to the bucolic way of life people were used to living in Eastern Washington. A huge chunk of sandy real estate south of Saddle Mountain had been condemned and occupied by the government, and nobody knew what they were doing there–and if you got too nosy, they’d shoot at you. On the north side of the mountain, the Yakima Firing Range had been extended into the Lower Crab Creek valley. Fighter and bomber pilots flew missions in the skies above the canyons and scablands that used to stand silent in the blistering heat.

Yet below the mock combat, farmers and ranchers continued to plant crops and herd livestock to feed the country. Oscar Danielson died early in the war, leaving the running of his Crab Creek ranch to his eldest son, Walter. Because he had a job farming, Walter was excused from serving in the armed forces. Not so the next younger sons.

George, the second son, joined the Army and received training as an engineer. His unit was shipped off to North Africa in 1942. Years later, George would tell me that he had “passed through Kasserine Pass about an hour before Rommel took it.” A year or so ago I read Rick Atkinson’s book about Americans in North Africa, An Army at Dawn. In it, I learned that the engineers had been left to defend Kasserine Pass against Rommels Panzerkorps. My uncle was too modest to admit the role he had played in buying extra time for the American retreat through Kasserine Pass.

Lawrence, the third son, also served in the Army in Europe in World War II. His stories I never heard, and indeed, his own family heard little about what he witnessed in Italy until very late in his life. War is hell, so they say.

Even the only daughter, fourth child in the family, was fated to marry a man who served as a Chief Petty Officer in the Navy during the war. But somehow, they all came home alive and whole.

My father told me once about the problem Crab Creek ranchers had with the flyers during the war. Bomber pilots trained with dummy bombs–casings filled with powder (flour, most often) so that their strikes could be noted from the air. But the fighter pilots used live fifty-caliber ammunition, interlaced with tracers so that they could see what they hit. Some of the pilots used to strafe cattle along the creek. Ranchers, howling their protests at Moses Lake Army Air Base in Moses Lake (later, Larson Air Force Base), were told that the pilots would be disciplined as soon as their plane’s tail number was reported. Of course, by the time ranchers came across the decaying corpses of their cattle, the planes were long gone.

It seems the ranchers contributed to the war effort in unexpected ways. But everybody was involved in fighting that war. The Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, known as the Milwaukee Road carried freight and passengers from the Midwest to Seattle, or in the opposite direction. During this era the company was introducing the Hiawatha trains, designed to run at speeds up to 100 miles an hour. The Hiawatha that ran to Seattle wouldn’t be introduced until 1947 (inspiring the Othello School District to name their newest Elementary School Hiawatha), but nonetheless, the Milwaukee Road was of paramount importance to the people of Central Washington. It’s hard for us to recognize what importance railroads had during those days, but the road to Seattle at that time was what now passes as the narrow gravel road along the foot of the north slope of Saddle Mountain: a road that at one point descends a scree on the edge of a canyon, so narrow that only one car can pass at a time.

During the Second World War, train travel was virtually the best way to go. Air transport was extremely limited, and the public viewed it as dangerous. But trains like the Hiawathas, traveling up to 100 miles an hour, matched or exceeded the best speeds that racing cars could achieve.

The Army, the Navy and the Marine Corps could care less–and the Air Force didn’t yet exist. Nonetheless, when soldiers (sailors or Marines) had to be transferred from one port of call to another place, the railroad was the way they were dispatched. So it was that sometime during the course of the war (I don’t know when, because these photographs are not dated), a number of soldiers and sailors were provided passage on the Milwaukee Road.

I suppose that this was around 1943…not because I have any firm evidence, but because it falls within the parameters of the wartime traffic. My father owned these photographs, and  he seems to appear in one of them, although I’m told that it is not really him. But that is the way he dressed as he tended his farm when I was a boy. The photographs were taken sometime during the war, and they come from a small town in Eastern Washington, Warden (which is something my father told me). I have never been able to find information about this forgotten train disaster beyond what my father told me, and this is perhaps because the government didn’t want this event to be known.

In the summertime, the extreme heat of the Eastern Washington desert causes the rails on train tracks to expand. If insufficient space for expansion has been provided between the rail segment, a rail can buckle, causing a locomotive to derail. Evidently this is what happened to a troop train in World War II at Warden, Washington. The locomotive left the tracks, plowing into the loess at the side of the rails. The cars it was pulling continued along the tracks until suddenly halted. One car kept going, slicing through the car ahead, and killing a number of soldiers, sailors or Marines as it accordioned to a halt.

The wreck probably happened when a locomotive ran off the tracks.

Investigators combed the wreckage where the locomotive buried itself in the Eastern Washington sand.

A number of servicemen died where one car accordioned into another.

A farmer dressed the way my own father dressed inspected the wreck.

News of the wreck was suppressed. It is not known how many GIs lost their lives when this troop train derailed.

Curious visitors mingled with investigators and servicemen in the hours after the fatal crash occurred.

I have offered copies of these photographs to a couple of museums in Washington State, but without response. So now, I release them to you. The government didn’t allow this train wreck to be publicized during the Second World War, so the deaths that occurred here never made the news. But not all casualties in wartime occur on the battlefield. It’s never to late to mourn the dead. Click on the following photographs to see an enlarged image.

My family was lucky during the 1940s. We lost nobody. Millions of others died in combat or as victims of an unbelievable policy of extermination…in Europe or in Asia. Some of the Armed Forces died at home, before they ever reached the foreign shores, but I wonder if their families ever knew that they died not of  enemy fire, but of the forces of nature and faulty engineering.

All content, including photographs, music and graphics

Copyright 2009, Mark E. Danielson

The Horse and Me

Oscar Danielson on his Crab Creek farm in Grant County, WA, circa 1920

“FIDDLE, n. An instrument to tickle human ears by friction of a horse’s tail on the entrails of a cat.”
Ambrose Bierce (1842 – 1914) American journalist and short-story writer: The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911

My father’s claim to fame is that an incident in his life made it into a book, Sagebrush Homesteads, by Laura Tice Lage. In this passage, Lage describes how my grandfather was working in his hay field when he spotted a pesky wabbit. At that time, rabbits were destroying crops so completely that many farmers near Crab Creek were being ruined. Grandpa Oscar was prepared, though. He snatched up his twelve gauge shotgun and fired at the bunny. The book doesn’t say if he hit the thing, or not. The most dramatic result of that shot was that Oscar’s horse was spooked. It galloped away, towing the wagon along with it…and my child father in the wagon.

My father always detested horses.

I’m wondering if that trait isn’t hereditary. Not that I detest horses, but that horses seem to have a thing about me! I first noticed that problem when I was a teenager. Years before, I had blithely told my mother who it was that I someday hoped to marry. Let’s call her Julie. As a teenager, I would never have revealed such a secret, but the feeling remained. Julie was still the woman I most wanted to impress. She was my age, so I knew her well, since all the children in that end of Adams County attended the same schools. I had been, for a time, her brother’s best friend–had even spent some sleepovers at her house. So when I ran across this beautiful, statuesque blond at the local fair, I considered it a matchless opportunity to impress her. But Julie was on horseback, and as I stood close by, chatting her up (as the Northern Irish lads would have described it), Julie’s horse decided to dispose of the suitor: it took a deliberate step in my direction, and it landed on my foot. Have you ever had eight hundred pounds dropped on your toes? My courtship ended suddenly and dramatically.

Narcolepsy and the Haunted Concertina

Some may call it odd, but I prefer to think of my skill at playing the English Concertina as merely quirky. This is an unusual instrument, to be sure, but it certainly fulfills my need to be unique…most of the time. And who was to know that the instrument was so well suited to me?

The English Concertina has an ancient history and a noble, scientific modern descent. It was invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone, whose accomplishments in the field of electricity continue to influence electronics to this day. Have you ever heard of the Wheatstone Bridge? Not unless you are an electrician or a concertina player. I am the latter.

Let nobody disparage the influence of music in your life. For many, music is a sedentary or second-hand pursuit. For me, as well as for most musicians, it plays a crucial role in my state of being, and it has directed the course of my living.

When I returned from Ireland in 1982, I brought home my first English concertina. It was the product of one night’s lodging at the Youth Hostel in Glasgow.