Imagining Myself as a Pioneer

Finally got some rain again, and of course today was the day I had set aside for errands, so I had to suit up and do them in the wet, but that wasn't so bad. Have to remember not to let my pant legs hang out below the rain pants...but thank goodness for rain gear. Those pioneers just got wet.

I spent the entire last three days cleaning and painting the bathroom. It hadn't really been painted properly when we moved in what must be ten years ago now, or almost. I even did a little sanding, though never enough. It was a year ago when I had to finally put down my cat after a messy illness with which he finally ended up in the bathroom, liking the cool of the tile or the warmth of the water heater, not sure which. I had to clean every surface, and I thought I had cleaned them all, but I'm talking door frames, behind the water heater, all of it. I was happy to do it in service to Jake, whom I miss. Hard to believe a year went by, but they do. Fresh white paint on everything is a treat.

The tile floor is particularly satisfying because I scrubbed the grout with cleanser and thought it would never look clean, but it does. I sealed the tile again just in case. It's like having a new bathroom, and I haven't cluttered it up yet with all of my favorite pictures and things. Small pleasures.

I took a break from my research to do that. Reading the Huddleston stuff in the UO Special Collections was just amazing and I made lots of copies of pages and letters and got a few ideas for further research. It was poignant, thinking what Samantha would have thought worthy of saving, and whether she did it shortly after her husband's death or many years later. She outlived him by over thirty years, even outliving her son at the end.

My writing group gave me some good feedback and suggested that I imagine myself as these women (and men) I'm writing about and get some details like the weather on certain days, and I have been reading a lot of context for the settlement and early town era in Eugene and the frontier in general. It's not too hard to imagine their lives but I think they were tougher and more spare than I can even surmise. The journal books James Huddleston left are filled with transactions for the items he sold in his store, and he probably sold just about everything that was available to sell. His future father-in-law, Benjamin Davis, paid in wheat. They had no money, but wheat grew well here so it was the first crop everyone got in, since you could live on it if you had to. You could even feed your animals boiled wheat if you had no hay. As a storekeeper I had assumed Huddleston was relatively wealthy but I don't think he was immediately.

When the gold started to come back with the miners who left their families here while they went off to strike it rich, he must have taken a fair amount of gold dust in trade, but maybe there was a bank for that. I'll have to do a lot more searching, now that I found these lively, amazing details. There was a letter from Catherine Davis to her children, in her own hand. That was thrilling. I can't quite figure out what Samantha's handwriting looks like, but now I know her husband's and her mother's, so I might be able to separate hers out too. Her son Henry has a few items in the files, seemingly from his childhood, which makes me think she put the collection together rather than Henry. He had used some of the space in the journal books (which were tiny, about 4x6 and smaller) to practice writing signatures, his and his father's I think.

The most compelling item is a page from Jim Huddleston's diary, one which notes Benjamin Davis's death and burial "in the garden." Although the Huddlestons were living on 8th Ave at the time, I think the garden they buried him in was most likely his own, out on River Road where the Davis DLC's were located. He is apparently buried in the Masonic Cemetery now, but was likely moved there when the cemetery was formed. Davis died in 1858, at only 50 years old, and his wife Catherine outlived him for a very long time, too.

I could go on, but I'm hungry. I've fallen in love with the multigrain sourdough from Eugene City Bakery, and I have a fresh loaf just calling my name. Bread and cheese is my go-to comfort food but I'm trying hard to eat vegetables more than bread and nuts more than cheese, and succeeding somewhat. Just the little bit of biking I did today reminds me that I love it and don't even care if it's raining.Riding the stationary bike and looking out the windows is just not as good- I really don't have to make the kind of effort I do outside- I get lazy. I even read while I'm on it. Oh well, scrubbing the floor and painting the ceiling were exercise. Maybe I should start on another room.

Or sit on the exercise ball when I am typing. Too wet to prune any trees today. Saw the bushtits all lined up under the eaves on the clothesline I put up when I had the broken foot, so cute. I know we're not allowed to complain about the rain yet, we have to just enjoy it.

Saturday, Saturday...

Yes, I was singing the song when I got up. I listened to that hard, gusty rain early this morning fully aware of how lucky I felt that I did not have to drag myself out of bed, suit up, and go down to the Park Blocks for the day. I so love the sensible people who decided we would not sell during the winter months. I know some of the farmers do (starting in February) but weather is tough on people. It definitely puts the lie to the concept of "homeless by choice" in Oregon. That's just the way some people try to make themselves more comfortable about the overwhelming abundance of their lives. It is not a fun adventure to live outside permanently.

That cute little Yellow-rumped warbler was the first bird I saw this morning on the suet, and I saw the Bewick's Wren yesterday. I love my simple life of watching birds, reading about the pioneers, and looking around online to see what directions I can take my research. Yesterday I was cruising through the online listings for the Special Collections at UO, and I see that they have three folders of James Huddleston's papers!!! This got me so excited there are not enough exclamation points. I will rush over there early next week and see what they have. It may be disappointing (I counsel myself) as they think his wife's name is Jane, and I know better. There may be little trace of Samantha, who interests me much more than her husband, but considering that he died in 1890, these relics will be thrilling no matter the content. Apparently there is a ledger book from his storekeeping (he had the first couple of trading-post stores in Eugene City in the early 1850's) and some letters, presumably hand-written. I want to see Samantha's handwriting. I thought I had her signature but as it turns out, most of the county records were written and signed by the clerks, not the principals in the transactions. Maybe she put some notes on Jim's letters.

I don't know what else I will find there. I spent the day looking through the photos in their digital collection and they are wonderful. John Baugess's collection of the donut shop and tavern that were urban-renewed from next to the Smeede Hotel in the 70's are cool, reminding me how long some of us have known some of the rest of us. There are many photos of important houses during restoration, including the Daniel Christian house which is one of the oldest. I found more evidence of my theories about this place. I didn't even get halfway through the archive. Is it arrogant to think I can add to the research on Eugene's early days?

I applied for a grant from the Historical Society to publish my book, to finish the research and write at least one book of it. I am actually thinking that two might be necessary to avoid the one being too personal and not relevant enough. To quell my self-doubt as I wait a month to hear if I got the grant, I have thrown myself into pinning down details and gathering a lot of background knowledge so I don't say too many stupid things in print. The grant money doesn't really matter so much, it's more the motivation of it, as it is so easy to put the project aside to focus on one of my other projects, of which I have far too many, all a bit too large. I am so passionate about this research, and I know passion fades, so I am trying to really get something on paper and make some tangible progress. I have been filling out the family group sheets for the families I am studying, and it's fun, kind of takes the place of crosswords or sudoku in keeping my brain pliable.

Meanwhile I am getting no physical exercise and have to bring that one higher on the priority list. I couldn't sleep after a day online, started doing that self-recrimination of the late night, which I got out of my brain by thinking about the yellow-rumped and the Bewick's. I love birds, and plants, so that makes things all right in the world. It worked last night, anyway.

So if we get some breaks in the rain today I will get out and look at something, some buildings or some trees. I constantly speculate about what plants Samantha, Miranda, and Grace might have put in this neighborhood. I know Catherine Davis so loved a couple of large firs she insisted they be saved, and I wonder if they could possibly still be there, only 150 years down the road. They were in the River Road area, just off the road, apparently. They'd be huge, so they ought to be visible in the skyline. I could bike out there and try again to pinpoint the boundaries of the Davis land and see. I also have to go to the Creswell cemetery and find Tillie Van Harkin. I realized that she is the person who divided the property into three (or four, depending on where 200 feet from the corner is) so I have to learn more about her. She may get the credit for a lot of the improvements. She lived here (or owned it) for 18 years, until she died in 1942, but she was old, and she certainly didn't do the work herself. It's another effort to check directories and figure out who actually lived in the places, and I want (obsessively) to fully document every year of this place. I want to know exactly where all my people of interest lived, and I even want to know all of the first owners of the Huddleston lots.

I have plenty of directions to keep going, and plenty of ways to distract myself from the main points. The digressions are fascinating. I discovered three of the Vaughan brothers had married women with the last name of Briggs, and it turns out that two were mother and daughter, and the mother's previous husband had been killed for his gold after selling some cattle to the miners, near the Barlow trail. We had a murderous past, Oregon, as most people may know. There's a tombstone in the Coburg cemetery that says "hung by mistake." I think the notorious criminal Hank Vaughan was related to the Vaughans I'm studying...his problem was mostly alcohol. Probably lots of the problems were alcohol. But dead is dead and everyone had rifles, and six guns, and big pieces of wood to club each other with. Not to mention winter fever (pneumonia), cholera, snakebite, and all those other things in that game you maybe played in school. You could trade a set of clothes for food, if there was food. Mules, horses or oxen? I found one person who was maybe the first child buried in our area, Jesse Haskett, son of Jesse Haskett and Miranda Vaughan, who died from a rattlesnake bite, and a report of a time when 7000 rattlers were killed on Rattlesnake Hill (so they could build an early-day subdivision and name it for what they covered up with houses. That went on then just as now. No, most likely they were just trying to protect lives, still an excuse for lots of crimes though.)

There was also a huge problem with racism, and I seem to be uncovering some. The Davises were Quakers, who were often persecuted for their anti-slavery stance, which may be one of the reasons they came here, but I don't know if I will be able to write about it. The attitude toward the native people and any people who were not white was abhorrent, more than criminal, but it's pretty hard to pin attitude down in dead people, unless they wrote about it. I can quote them if they did, so maybe James had some tidbits in his papers. I know there was some scandal with one of Samantha's sisters, and maybe they will shed some light on that. Who knows how many scandals I can uncover? I can link Vaughans to known racists, but I can't call them out from here. It turns out both of the families did have descendants, and it may not be too late to contact them, though people don't always want to talk about charged family secrets. Clearly the history of Oregon was shaped by the issues of slavery and human rights.


So, yes, I am loving the Saturdays off, don't miss Market a bit, and am working hard on the things that make me smile. I mixed up some gelatin, though I didn't make anything from it yet. Maybe that is today's big project. It beats cleaning the bathroom by a long shot. But saying *long shot* makes me want to pick up that book about pioneer women...

Willamette Forks Ride

Before Coburg was a town, the hoped-for town was a couple of miles closer to Eugene, a bit west, and the cemetery I went to today was called West Point Cemetery, and was on the land of William Tyler Vaughan. I will have to go back and check these "facts" to make sure I have it right, but in looking at the land, I felt like I was right there in the minds of those earliest settlers when they pulled their wagons to a halt.

That big hill I passed so many times on the freeway that signaled the entrance to my Eugene home, the one with the columnar basalt surface that looks so interesting, and is probably the result of much mining, overlooks the land in a protective way. The freeway runs through that part of the valley just like a constant river, but in the little graveyard I could hear the kinglets in the incredibly large old Doug fir that sits right in the center of the plots, lying quietly in the shade of the Coburg Hills.

William Tyler Vaughan and his wife Phebe still lie there, buried over a century ago. Uncle Billy's son Thomas J. Vaughan and his wife Elizabeth are there, too, with a bigger headstone. Another of William T.'s sons, John Quincy, is also buried there with his wife, Flora.

John Quincy was interviewed by Fred Lockley and told the very amusing story of his father's original trip out west in 1845. They were living in Missouri when a neighbor asked Uncle Billy to accompany him for a couple of days to help him handle his large cattle herd. Apparently after two days he was tempted to take the whole trip, although he didn't want to leave "the old woman" without any money, so someone was sent back with some money he borrowed to tide her over until he came back. He said he would be back in a couple of years, and if he liked Oregon, they would move there. This train turned out to be the lost wagon train that took the Meek Cutoff, about which much has been written. Despite the difficult journey, he was committed to Oregon.

William Tyler Vaughan

He had nine children at the time, and in farm families all children worked, so with his large group of sons, he may not have been so necessary to the family that they couldn't get along without him, but of course I wonder how Phebe felt about it. Looking at their photos, I wonder if maybe he was irascible and some amount of trouble. In any case, he did return and in 1847 the whole family arrived in the Willamette Valley. According to family history Phebe Hazlett Vaughan was English, and was tall, stately and dignified, wrote a perfect hand, and dressed elegantly in silk and satin. On their trip west he brought the first purebred sheep to the Willamette Valley, though they left Missouri with 258 sheep and had only 100 when they got to Oregon. After less than a year on their 640 acres just over the Lane County line in Linn County, William was off to Sutter's Mill in the Gold Rush of 1849. He returned with a fortune, and went again with his two oldest sons to California, twice. They apparently made almost $20,000 mining gold, which no doubt funded their subsequent land purchases.

The land he chose was a peninsula next to the river, and somewhere I have a map of the donation land claim. Thomas later bought another 320 acres inside Lane County. I have a lot of questions about the Vaughans, and it was exciting in a quiet way to see their graves and imagine all of them there, living and dead. The big fir in the center was most likely one of the original trees on the plot, so all of them stood in its shade as I did. Six hundred and forty acres is a huge tract, so all of the land around the cemetery was theirs, at first.

Angeline Baber Vaughan

Floyd G. Vaughan was another of William T.'s sons,and must have stayed home to farm when the older young men went to California. His wife, Angeline Baber, was blind, and he had a special seat in the wagon for her, but when she was 47 she fell from the wagon and was killed. Her grave is there, and I expected to find some of her children buried there, but there were no other headstones near her. He went on to marry Miranda and have more children, including Grace and Bilyeu, and bought property near the Huddleston DLC, which later included my little piece.

Even though Coburg is only eight or ten miles from Eugene, it was a strenuous ride for me, as I am quite out of shape, but despite the traffic on the way back, I thoroughly enjoyed the day. I didn't even look at any antiques, so I have a reason to go back. I guess they have a Heritage festival in February, so I'll have to see what that's about. There may be a lot of Vaughan heritage still in Coburg, or at least I can imagine it to be so. I can find all kinds of old stuff and imagine it was theirs. There are also many descendants, and other associated families like the Barbers to look at. My aunt Lud used to work for a John Barber, an attorney. Maybe we are closer than we think to our history. I keep running across these family names, shared by people I know, whom I have never asked about their heritage. So many things to investigate!

Ah, the Offseason.

As I write the sun is trying to dispel the fog we've been living in for a couple of weeks, and if the sun succeeds in coming out I will have to get outside myself. No excuses. It's time to start the pruning, which I love, and continue the many small projects in the yard. In the house, it is time for cleaning, writing, slimming down the reading pile, and all of those life maintenance tasks I was happy to put aside for a month or two while I focused on selling.

It takes quite an effort to unhook from the production/marketing/consuming treadmill but I like to make a solid break for at least a few days, before I do the inventory and organizing necessary to move into the next retail year. My piles of shirts are a little smaller, and I will have plenty to start the next season, so I am not pushing myself to resume being productive in the shop. I'd like to clear it out to do some different projects.

I still have a lot of blank silk scarves to paint, and could pick up my interest in that, using the new dyes I bought and steaming the scarves for more luscious results. Maybe someday. I have a few sewing projects I want to finish, but I hesitate to turn my living room into a sewing room again. I put away all the Xmas doodads yesterday and cleaned a few shelves. I am trying to be in the getting-rid-of-things mode and am having some small successes there. I can combine these by taking a pile of books to donate to the library, which gets me outside, walking, and gives me a little goal. Little goals work better for me than big ones.

Mostly I want to re-immerse in my research and writing. I am just on the verge of putting my book into physical form, printing out some essays and starting to make it booklike. I know a lot of what I am interested in writing right now will be backstory in the research files and not be the book, but I still have to write it, and that means investing the time. Now I will have the time.

It is also the beginning of the Jell-O Art quarter, aiming toward the 26th Annual Jell-O Art Show on March 29. Thanks to the powers who set the date not for the first Saturday in April, which is of course Opening Day of Saturday Market (43rd annual? 44th?) It's darn hard to do both on the same day. I won't have to, so I can fully immerse in whatever the show turns out to be, and the process will be as fun as the result. I plan to be much calmer about it this year, now that I know I can sing on stage without any undue attention being paid, can just be a part of it instead of the Queen, with all of her important duties. I will still be the Queen, of course, but after two years I will not have to make it all about me anymore. I have an idea for the piece and am scanning the culture for funny bits to form the show around. Perhaps I should practice twerking, since I have a feeling my hips might need some updated moves for that. It's quite tricky to find cultural issues which are going to last until April. Miley may be old news by then (one can hope.)

I'm putting meetings on my calendar today and seeing how the weeks fill up, but there are still nice long gaps in there to do what I want. I'm considering reading through the 80-some original Lockley notebooks at UO (I suppose one has to read the microfilm nowadays) because I find it unlikely that he did not interview Samantha Huddleston, and maybe even her mother Catharine Davis, and maybe more of the Vaughans. The interview he did with John Quincy Vaughan was delightful and there could be more that didn't make it into the library compilations. Although William Tyler Vaughan was colorful and there are some good stories, he doesn't figure that importantly in my particular interest, but I can speculate how he impacted the lives of his children and grandchildren. I love reading the entries by all of the pioneers, especially the daily-life types of things. People went through hardships we might have been too weak to survive, and of course many of them did not. Big families and multiple marriages were common, and I love going to graveyards, so one of the first items on my list is to go to the Coburg IOOF cemetary, which I believe is actually on Vaughan land in Coburg. I want to see Angeline's grave (F.G. Vaughan's first wife) and see about the children she had with F.G., and the children Miranda had when she married Floyd. Lots of little details I want to get straight.

Writing about the early days of these settlers is practically fiction-writing, so I'm looking forward to it. Guess I had better get to it. The sun seems serious about today, so a bike ride to Coburg could be a fine idea. Certainly cannot stay inside if there is going to be sun. Be right back!