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.

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.

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.

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.

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.