Annie Pike Greenwood Read online

  This edition is published by Papamoa Press – www.pp-publishing.com

  To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – [email protected]

  Or on Facebook

  Text originally published in 1934 under the same title.

  © Papamoa Press 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

  Publisher’s Note

  Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

  We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

  WE SAGEBRUSH FOLKS

  BY

  ANNIE PIKE GREENWOOD

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Contents

  TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

  DEDICATION 5

  A KEY FOR THE READER 6

  ILLUSTRATIONS 7

  I—WILDERNESS 8

  II—EDUCATION 42

  III—BIRTH 83

  IV—DEATH 118

  V—RECREATION 124

  VI—OUTDOORS 166

  VII—SEX 202

  VIII—WAR 212

  IX—POLITICS 248

  X—FAITH 285

  XI—ECONOMICS 320

  REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 344

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to all children everywhere gratitude for my beloved four

  Walter

  Charles

  Rhoda

  Joe

  A KEY FOR THE READER

  SOME NAMES IN this book are fictitious. North has sometimes been called south, and south, north. Measles have been called mumps, and mumps the bots. Or at least there have been similar unimportant substitutions paralleling these, which, perhaps, after all are not to be found in the book. Such modifications are for the bewilderment of the folks they will bewilder. But the face of Truth shines free of covering for those who have eyes that yet see.

  I have written only the truth. Everything in this book happened either to me, myself, or to someone else living in that country of the last frontier in the United States.

  A. P. G.

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Miles of sagebrush, stretching to the Minidoka Mountains Frontispiece

  Annie Pike

  The bride

  The first baby

  The old wooden bridge at Milner

  Hazelton Main Street

  My first school, “Pleasant View”

  The new “Greenwood” school, church, and Grange hall

  Sagebrush children

  The Milner Dam, diverting the water of the Snake to the desert

  When we killed a steer, the cattle bawled

  A grave in the sagebrush cemetery

  Far neighbors

  Cabbages were our first crop

  Wheat came many years later

  The cañon of the Snake

  Charles O. Greenwood, Senior, farmer

  The toothpick-pillared porch

  My girlhood home

  Irrigation water leaving the Milner Dam

  Irrigation furrows from heading ditch in newly cleared land

  After fifteen years of it

  The road out and away

  The Greenwoods grown

  I—WILDERNESS

  I SUPPOSE, to be just, I should have laid the whole thing at Daisy’s door. I never knew her, yet probably but for her I should never have been a farmer’s wife. Even a cow may influence the lives of others, and that long after her death.

  I shall say right here, while there is a good chance, that nothing on earth could have induced Annie Pike to marry a farmer. I was not crazy enough for that. Rather would I have married a burglar, or a gambler, or a saloon-keeper—people whom my Boston school-ma’ams (who taught me in the Western mission school) assured me were lost, an expression so vague as to be terrifying.

  My childhood was spent in Utah, where I was born, my Gentile father having been Medical Superintendent of the Territorial Insane Asylum; and I recall the cold revulsion with which, seated, as I often was, in our fringed-top phaëton, I observed the jangling, rattling, bumping farm wagons that came into town from Provo Bench, dark genii of dust rising like evil spirits from the hoofs of the great, discouraged-looking farm horses.

  With indifference I watched each farmer tie his team to one of the hitching-racks standing before every store in town, next to the unpaved sidewalk, beside the water shining and trickling through our Main Street, just as it shone and trickled through all the streets of Provo, invited from the mountain streams rising in the nearby cañons to water the home gardens and lawns and provide culinary water for all except a very few citizens, among them Dr. Pike, who had the water from three artesian wells piped through his twenty-room mansion.

  The farmer’s wife was particularly the object of my contempt as I watched her lower herself over one of the wide-rimmed wheels—grasping the iron rod that fenced the end of the high seat, then the green-painted side-board of the wagon-bed, passing, as she did so, one red, raw, coarse hand over the other. Her foot, encased in its heavy, hideous shoe, hovered for safe purchase over the hub of the wheel. The things she wore were of different style-periods—to my superior taste, ugly in the extreme.

  I regarded this woman with scornful pity, never suspecting that her condition should be altered. I myself was of finer clay, not by the Grace of God, but by the Divine Right of Kings. I took for granted that farming and laboring people were to serve such as I. This grotesque woman was born into the world my natural serf. The cosmic intention was clear, in having given me a quick brain and little hands and feet, while she had bunching muscles and a great, awkward frame of large and knobby bones.

  Celestial Taurus, the starry bull, is said to affect the destiny of mortals born in April; but, probably because I was born in November, it was the cow Daisy who changed my astrological future, with results which could not have been surpassed had the Pleiades and Hyades, led by the mighty Aldebaran, marched in the procession of my years.

  They had named her Daisy probably because of the current popular song,

  Daisy! Daisy! give me your answer, do!...

  ending with the fatuous prophecy that she would look sweet (in those burlesque long bloomers they used to wear)

  ...on the seat

  Of a bicycle built for two.

  Or it may have been because that was the era introducing the new expression, “It’s a daisy” to express utter approbation.

  Howsomever, as we say in the sagebrush, Daisy did look sweet on that handkerchief of land which Charley’s father purchased on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, the visible hope of a farm which never materialized; for Daisy put an end to everything by eating something that indigested in one of her seven stomachs...or is it five?...and dying before the last of them got a chance to see what it could do. If it had ever reached the last of her stomachs, there might have been some chance for her. And then this story of a sagebrush farm woman might never have been written.

  The Greenwoods of Columbus, Ohio, also had a fringed-top phaëton, and at the very time I was sitting in the Pikes’ fringed-top phaëton in Utah and regarding contemptuously the farmer’s wife, Charley, my future husband, was riding from his city home, out to that handkerchief of land on the outskirts of Columbus, to feed Daisy handfuls of hay and to stroke her neck. And at the sa
me time that I was scorning the farmer and his life, Charley was yearning to be a farmer and to live that life. Daisy’s untoward death only increased that yearning. Most men long for the soil. Adam, I am sure, regretted the lost Garden of Eden, but I suspect that Eve fed him the apple in order to get off the farm.

  My husband Charley’s great-grandfather was a German baron...though the name was not Münchausen. The Elector of Brandenburg distinguished one of Charley’s ancestors by giving him his Junker title and something like a hundred and sixty acres of German estate, together with a possible army of one general, one captain, one sergeant, and two privates, the usual dominion and fighting-force of barons of that day. But what they lacked in territory and armament, they more than made up in Junker pride, which, once met, can never be forgotten.

  The boy Charley looked like his good old German grandmother, who had run away to America with a man beneath her station but with plenty of money, and whose English vocabulary consisted almost entirely of the word orange, which she pronounced o-ornge. She was a wonderful, psychic old lady, who was sent for, far and wide, because she could take the fire out of burns, and heal them instantly, by saying a few words. This gift descends from the first daughter to the first son to the first daughter, and so forth, generation after generation. Little Charley, who for some reason she always called “Johnny,” was her favorite, though not the first son of her daughter’s family. He looked like that Grossmutter and should have been named Karl; but because of his handsome face and figure and noble manners, and because of his misleading surname, he was often referred to as “Prince Charley.”

  When I married Prince Charley, or the Baron Karl, and made my home with him in three different states, I had not the faintest idea that the cow Daisy was browsing around in the Elysian fields of his subconscious mind. I did not even suspect that the ghost of a cow was trampling all over our dining-room table, out there in Kansas, where my brother-in-law Fred was describing, with his forefinger, the boundaries of the farm in Idaho to which he wanted Charley to go. I suppose if I had been clairvoyant I should have seen Daisy, but probably I should have considered it a warning that I had overpaid the milkman that morning, a thing I was likely to do, all arithmetic being transcendental to me.

  When Charley actually announced his decision to give up a perfectly good salary from the million-dollar sugar-factory in Garden City, Kansas, to go to a perfectly unknown, sight unseen, undeveloped wilderness farm in Idaho, I almost went on a hunger-strike, through horror. I loved the pretty house I was having such fun furnishing, one of my passions being interior decorating, inherited, no doubt, from my ancestors who interior-decorated Windsor Castle, and painted pictures on the side.

  But Charley brought home a certain magazine published for city farmers, who love to make fortunes on the imaginary acres in their heads. Only the one-in-a-thousand who succeeds ever gets written up in this really most attractive weekly. The issue that decided me not to stand in Charley’s way to success sported a crowing chanticleer in full color on the cover. Inside, Charley showed me, there was an article about a man who made enough to buy a farm from six hens and a rooster in only two years; and if the eggs from those hens and their offspring had been lying end to end, they would have been lying end to end, and the man who wrote that article would have been lying from end to end.

  The last thing in the world I wanted to do was to go on a farm. It was an utter absurdity even to think of such a thing. When I married, all I knew of housework was what I had learned from looking in the dumb-waiter that brought all our food to our dining-room in what the Salt Lake Tribune called our “luxurious apartment” at the Insane Asylum, during my father’s years of service as resident medical superintendent. After we returned to our twenty-room home on half a city square, I concluded my education by learning to make salad-dressing. The gap between bothered me not at all.

  Charley taught me to fry a steak, and he thought he was teaching me to fry fish; and so I regarded it, as I admiringly watched him take those little fish and fry and fry and fry them. They tasted a good bit like a piece of balsa-wood, but I was filled with wonder that Charley could cook them, and I did not then know that fish should be cooked only about seven minutes.

  I wanted to surprise him by cooking the next meal myself, and I did. I decided to cook a quart of rice as a side-dish. When Charley came from his work, I had everything in our apartment but the bathtub filled with the cooked rice, and it was still boiling over on the gas-stove. It was in Los Angeles, where delicatessen stores were handy. A flustered bride and her man ate their dinner out of cartons that night.

  So out there in Kansas, where we had gone from California by way of Colorado, Charley was preparing to go on the farm in Idaho. When I married him, several wealthy girls had coveted him; and therefore I must play the noble part of being a real helpmate—where-thou-goest-I-will-go kind...so that he would not have to stay at work with the million-dollar sugar-factory until some day his salary would be only a thousand a month, and he would say, bitterly, to me, “If you had been willing to go, by now I could have been independent on the farm!”

  Charley considered that there were probably no cows, nor horses, nor wagons, nor buggies, nor anything else for a farm in Idaho, so he set out to do his buying right in Kansas. First he bought a team of horses and a buggy horse named Buttons. I liked that name. It was so crazy, suggesting anything on earth but a horse. Probably nowhere else in the world could he have bought a horse named Buttons. That much was fairly certain. But its value to our future farm was debatable.

  The next thing Charley did was to buy a second-hand narrow-gage buggy and a second-hand narrow-gage wagon, never dreaming that in the Far West nothing is ever used but wide-gaged vehicles. The consequence was that when we reached Idaho, we were forced to ride the road with two wheels always down in a rut and two cocked up on the high middle ridge.

  The land was Fred’s. It was a sort of partnership agreement, we to own the farm ultimately. I was to stay in Kansas with my two little ones—Walter, five, and Charles, seventeen months—until a house was built on the farm, Fred taking a carpenter along to do the job. These two were to meet Charley when he passed through Colorado Springs with the freight cars in which would be our household goods, our horses, a cow, a calf, the buggy and wagon, and a dog.

  All the Kansas farmers assured Charley that he could not well farm without a good big dog, which is indeed a fact. Charley had heard that splendid dogs were being killed every day at the dog-pound, masters not appearing to claim them. He took Walter with him to the pound, and such a massacre had just taken place in the presence of the other dogs, who were shivering and crouching against the high wire netting of the inclosure.

  One little fellow was particularly terrified, shaking all over and crying like a baby. The hearts of both Walter and Charley yearned with pity over the little mongrel, Charley sickening at the reek and sight of the blood-soaked ground. I saw them stop Buttons before our pretty bungalow and ran out to the buggy with little Charles. There on the seat was the little homeless tike whom I christened, at once, Tylo, having just finished the reading of Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird—at that time we were all going around wearing enameled bluebird pins.

  You could never make me believe that Tylo did not realize what had happened to him. He fairly worshiped Charley and continually proved his gratitude in every way possible. One of the ways was by grabbing Fred’s ankle between his teeth when my brother-in-law attempted to enter one of Charley’s freight cars, unannounced, at Colorado Springs. Charley considered that act a striking evidence of intelligence on the part of Tylo, but Fred was not so much impressed. I think Fred expected a good deal when he thought Tylo should discriminate between a thief and a banker. I am not casting any reflections on bankers—they are like Christians, all right if they are all right; but the name means nothing, except, in these latter days, to damn them rather than to accredit them. Of course, Fred could hardly be blamed for his depreciation of Tylo, because it was Fred’s ankle t
hat Tylo had tattooed.

  WHEN THE HOUSE was ready, Charley wrote us to come. He did not write of his wearing experiences, such as trying to take his cargo of freight by night along the bank of the Jerome Canal, in danger of its waters, with the calf falling out of the wagon every little way and Charley getting down from his driver’s seat to boost it back into the wagon. He met us at Minidoka; and he was no longer Prince Charley, nor was he the Baron Karl, but a red-leather-necked farmer who looked so much a stranger to me that for the first two or three minutes my heart quailed.

  The train stopped at Milner solely to allow us to leave it, Charley’s patient team of work horses, harnessed to the narrow-gage wagon, having been left standing at the hitching-rack beside the ugly dark-red station at Milner, a tiny town breathing its last gasp. The raison d’être of Milner had been the building of a dam for diverting the waters of the Snake River into canals that should slake the thirst of the fertile volcanic-ash desert, before the flowing of the man-made streams the property of others than farmers—first the long-vanished Shoshones; next the trappers; following them the cattlemen and the sheep-men, disputing the land and murdering each other, but finally grumblingly sharing their public domain. And now, at last, sheep-men and cattlemen were viewing the canals with dismay and were preparing to join forces against the interloping farmers, that hated class who would most surely drive these magnates farther and farther into the desert, nibbling away a little land here, a little land there, and fencing it against the flocks and herds.

  Past four empty stores our wagon rattled; past the bank, run by Gundelfinger; past the general store run by Longenberger and Belmont; past the general store run by Jake Solomon, the only Jew in that part of the country, whose store sold everything from saddles to cheese. The town was a cluster of houses, almost all of them empty.