We Sagebrush Folks

Annie Pike Greenwood

Description

Narrative about an attempt to farm on land opened up by the new Minidoka Irrigation Project in the sagebrush desert of southern Idaho. The story of an American farm woman, her husband and family. Describes farm life and farm pyschology. This intimate record of an acute mind and sensitive spirit to the joys and sorrows, difficulties and satisfactions, and personalities describes the author's fifteen years as a farm woman on the last American frontier.

Sujets

• Agronomie
• Agronomy for Sustainable Development
• Sciences et techniques
• Agronomy
• Technology
• Engineering
• Agriculture

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 09 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781774644140
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

We Sagebrush Folks
by Annie Pike Greenwood

Firstpublished in 1934
Thisedition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria,BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
[e-mail]
Allrights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced ortransmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage orretrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, whomay quote brief passages in a review.

WE SAGEBRUSH FOLKS



by ANNIE PIKE GREENWOOD

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.

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 same 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 o