Homestead on the Trask

By Harvey Maddux

As the World enters the 20th century, a young boy and his widowed family survive...and thrive...in the primitive wilds of the Oregon Coast. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, always enlightening, this is how our ancestors once lived. A vivid personal account, enriched by detailed ink sketches and photos by the author.

Republished and distributed by Nancy Maddux Thornton, his daughter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nancy Maddux Thornton
• Release date: Jan 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781938619007

Book preview

Homestead on the Trask

By Harvey Maddux

Sketches and photos by author, original book handset in moveable type over a period of two-and-a-half years, wearing out two fonts of lead type.

Original Letterpress and Lithography by Maddux Engraving Company, Portland, Oregon

Copyright 1976 by Harvey Maddux

Exclusive rights of republication and distribution in 2013

Published by his daughter, Nancy Maddux Thornton, at Smashwords.com

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author, now deceased, and his daughter and surviving family.

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Chapter One-A Boy and a Homestead

So often, my thoughts go back to the homestead on the Trask where I was born, more than seventy years ago. To spend your boyhood out where it was really wild; what was it like, living ‘way back then?

Mere words cannot recapture the mood, nor the setting of that bygone period. There were hardships aplenty; there were problems almost insurmountable. Yet most homesteaders wouldn’t have exchanged their parcel of land for a crown and riches.

There was a freedom of spirit then that comes from living on the doorstep to a vast wilderness. There was happiness in knowing that the land would sustain you from day to day; all it required was a bit of imagination, and the will to work.

There was satisfaction in tilling the land; watching things grow. And there was a deep contentment in seeing the changing seasons paint lively colors over the countryside.

The Wells’ place on the Trask River was typical of many homesteads along the Oregon Coast; a great deal of it in hills and timber, but enough level land along the river for farming. Bit by bit, Grandfather had cleared the ground, put up buildings, and made the place livable, before any of us grandchildren were born.

Mother said Grandfather would toil from daybreak until dark, and then sometimes would get up again in the middle of the night and slash and burn brush, so eager was he to get ground cleared.

Tragically, death took him from his family, long before his work on the homestead was completed.

There could never be another homestead, anywhere, quite to compare with the one on the Trask!

The old house where I was born, September 9, 1902, seemed a living thing, full of warmth and love and friendliness. Its mantle of love endeared it to all of us; it remained The Old Home Place long after we’d all gone our separate ways.

How do you describe something so familiar in your mind that you can shut your eyes and paint pictures of it?

Nestled in its own tiny valley, with high, picturesque mountains rising all around it, the homestead was twelve miles east of Tillamook, Oregon. A corridor of big alder trees traced the course of the beautiful Trask River through the southeast corner of the homestead.

Everything about the place gave you a homelike feeling: the mountains and the river; the old two-story house facing out across sun-swept meadows.

Ah, to run barefooted through those meadows again; to feel once more the wild, vigorous freedom of youth!

Never was there air so fresh and clean, a sky so blue.

In springtime, patches of violets splashed the new grass with rich hues of blue; while buttercups and bachelor’s buttons and daisies wove in their own variety of color. Along the rail fences, clusters of foxglove stood with their purple, tapering blossoms looking like tall-stemmed sentinels brooding over the past.

Large hazelnuts bushes grew everywhere, providing both kids and chipmunks with enough tasty nut eating to last the entire summer.

Three creeks flowed across the place, though two were small, they were lots of fun for a boy to explore.

The middle creek, flowing right near the house, served for drinking and washing, but every drop had to be carried by bucket. No running water or tiled bathrooms in those days!

Clear, clean water collected in a tub-sized pool, from which you had to dip carefully to avoid roiling, then the overflow went into the barnyard for the livestock, and then on into the Trask.

Washdays took a lot of water-carrying.

Samson Creek was the only one of the three creeks to have a name. It was a good-sized stream, with trout in it. Besides the magic appeal of fishing to a boy, there was always something exciting and mysterious about Samson Creek that was rivaled only by the romance of the Trask River itself.

A county road ran through the homestead, between the barn and the house, and for many years the stage from Tillamook, across the mountains to Yamhill, rolled right past the front door. To a boy in those days, watching the stage go by was quite a thrill.

In memory, there comes to my mind the melodious tinkle of a cowbell on the clear mountain air; I can even imagine that I hear the ho-up call used to herd the cows into the barnyard at milking time.

The soft whiny of a horse in yonder pasture; the distant sound of dogs barking at some varmint they’d treed; all bring back memories of ‘once upon a time.’

Right after morning milking in the summertime, the poles which served as a gate would be lowered, and the cows headed out onto the county road, where they would browse on wild grass, foliage and tender brush-shoots, sometimes foraging as far as two miles up the road by the end of the day.

There were lots of open, unfenced lands above Grandma’s where the cows could feed-and be kept from wandering too far by the river on one side, and mountains on the other.

Going after the cows in the evening on foot was mostly a fun-thing for a boy, because, accompanied always by at least one shepherd dog, you could get in a bit of rabbit-hunting, or hazelnut gathering, or just do some plain exploring around.

I remember one occasion when a neighbor kid named Kenneth Chance went with me to get the cows. We were allowed ample time to get back by evening, but on this day they’d gone unusually far--and, as two boys will do, we must have fiddled away a lot of time.

All of a sudden it dawned on me that it was getting dusk; the cows were due in the barnyard at the moment--and we were a couple of miles up the road yet.

Kenneth and I really got at it then and tried to hurry things along, but all we succeeded in doing was getting the cows excited, and there’s nothing more contrary than a stirred-up cow.

We’d get them out of the thick brush and onto the road with the bell-cow, and some critter would take off again. Finally, we had them all headed down the road together-when one old trouble-maker broke away, and headed back for the brush.

It was practically dark now, and if that old beast ever got to the wide area where she was headed, Ken and I might as well forget about getting home at all that night.

In desperation, I took out after her as hard as I could run. Dodging hazel brush and brambles, I succeeded in heading her back to the road, but in the near darkness, I didn’t see a two-foot deep dry creek-bed which lay squarely in my path.

Running right off into space isn’t the best way to stay in one piece. But, if running into space is a funny feeling, it’s nothing, compared to what it’s like when you come back down to solid earth again. With the breath knocked out of me, my first thought as I got painfully to my feet was that I probably didn’t have a whole bone left in my body.

But, though hurting in places, most of me seemed intact, and I got up and limped down the road to overtake Kenneth.

While I limped along beside Kenneth, explaining what had happened, I could feel him eying me sympathetically in the darkness. You look like you’ve tangled with a bobcat, or somethin’.

I sure felt like I’d had a bout "with worse than a bobcat.’

Before we’d gone very far down the road, we were met by some of the folks from the house, who had gotten plenty worried and had come looking for us.

I had to admit that I hadn’t paid attention to the business of getting the cows like I should have. I didn’t get a lecture--although I knew I had it coming. I think they felt that I knew the score well enough that I wouldn’t let it happen again, and they were right.

I think that the simple chore of going after the cows was a good way to teach a youngster responsibility. It also was a storehouse of learning not to be found in textbooks. You could stuff your pocket with curious objects; you could study animals, birds, frogs, and whatnot. One time I thought I’d found a horned snake, but it turned out to be a snake that had partially swallowed a big toad, and the thing’s hind legs protruded a good inch, to give the snake the appearance of a pair of horns.

There was even a lesson to be learned from the cows you were driving-from the dependable old bell-cow leader, to the aggressive three-year-old, to the shy heifer that always bore the brunt of the older cows’ displeasure.

Looking back, I can’t help feeling a deep regret; whatever happened to the leisure time kids used to have to grow up in?

There were so many interesting things every day, you could hardly keep track sometimes, but I think it was a close toss-up between fishing and hunting. It’s almost unbelievable the number of cottontail rabbits there were--and they were the finest things you ever tasted.

Whenever I went hunting, I was made to clean whatever game I brought in, and this rule applied to the fish I caught, too. I ate so much rabbit, it’s a wonder I didn’t go hopping around like one.

When you had your tummy full of fried rabbit and your lungs full of that fresh mountain air, you’d feel you could just about whip your weight in bobcats.

Then there were lots of places to explore. I remember one time of going up Samson Creek when I was around ten, and there was a heifer with her head and shoulder bloody, and I thought for sure she’d been attacked by a bear.

I didn’t waste any time around there, but took off for the house at top speed, probably setting some kind of Trask River half-mile sprinting record.

That area of Samson Creek was used as pasture, and still had the old rail fence around it-and that fence lay between me and the house. I don’t recall if I dived through the bars, or just sailed over the top. It’s a good thing a tree didn’t get in my way.

It turned out a couple of heifers got to fighting, and one had her horn broken off in the fracas. But how was I to know?

***~~~***

Chapter Two-Early Tillamook

The Trask River was named after Elbridge Trask, pioneer settler, who in 1853 took up a Donation Land Claim of 640 acres on the lower river.

With an abundance of water, a moderate climate, and fertile soil, it was the answer to the homesteader’s prayer; isolation was to be its greatest drawback.

In time, a wagon road would follow the Trask River, cross the rugged Coast Range to Yamhill, and provide a way to the outside, but this route wouldn’t be opened until the mid-1870’s, so Trask and the earlier settlers had to bring their families and supplies in by boat.

When you tell of the Trask River, you need to start with Tillamook, for that’s where it all really began.

Tillamook, until the 1850’s, had been a primitive fishing village of perhaps two or three hundred Killamuk Indian inhabitants, under the leadership of Chief Kilchis, a big, towering, stern-faced man.

Trask expressed the way most of the half-dozen or so other white men felt;

"Thank God, Kilchis is a friendly, fair-minded man. If he wasn’t, there’s times I’d