Sisters and Photos

It's my little sister's birthday tomorrow, so I was trying to remember what might have been going through my head at the time. I was just about to turn six myself, and was the second of three girls at that point. I was comfy in that spot, I believe, at that age, though the previous Thanksgiving must have been the one when I got scarlet fever and an intense dislike for turkey and hospitals. Maybe Mom was pregnant, and that was why they put me in the hospital. Don't remember much except vivid memories of

the separation and the shots. This was undoubtedly the first time I was really apart from my siblings and parents, in my conscious memory anyway.

So it was probably just fine and normal to be getting a new sister, though there was likely some discussion about "it" being a boy this time. I know we were all aware of Dad wanting a son. Getting Paula was terrific in every way, to my mind. She was always the most fun of us, at least until my little brother appeared to steal her spotlight six years later.

But Paula was not in the famous picture I have of the three of us in our matching Easter dresses in 1955, a year before she arrived. My grandmother made us new dresses every Easter, and I so loved those dresses. When I asked Mom about that time, she told me that they had searched for a house throughout that pregnancy (we were living in a semi-row in downtown Wilmington, across from a park and in front of a gas station.) When we moved it was into the country. (Of course it isn't the country now.)

She said they stumbled upon the house, selling by the owner, and it cost $22,500, which was their budget at the time. The house wasn't that special but the yard was divine. And the yard was always my favorite part, for sure.

But we moved that July, right after Paula was born, and right after a vacation at a lake which was probably just another bunch of work for Mom, but a change of places to play for us. I was a big explorer/scientist so was happy in nature anywhere. I'm so glad Mom chose that yard, though. It had a huge effect on me. It was practically a farm. The last photo shows Paula and the sister formally known as "Butterball" (drat that yellow dress) on her first birthday, on the front porch of our new house.

Most of the pictures from that era were of Mom sailing our Lightning, which we did every summer weekend. Imagine that with four little girls. Mom at the tiller was a strong childhood image, even more precious now. My mom was amazing, and she still is, inspiring and supportive and practical and strong. And Paula has grown up to be that way, too.

She runs marathons, even 50-mile races! She fronted bands and did a lot more with her musical abilities than any of us, and still sings wonderful harmony. She is a kick-ass Mom and hard worker and so very dedicated. She can do things that would make me a quivering mess. So it's her birthday, and this isn't a proper shout-out, but I love these photos and thought they would be fun to share. I love my family!

Tension as Divination

I named this blog after a concept I wasn't sure I understood, but felt: being on a tight line of a spiderweb, riding that thin edge of thought, when the pitfalls of taking a stand for a sentence or opinion seem to make the whole web quiver with danger. I felt I often had to take time to ponder the concept, while standing on that line, trying not to fall off of it either way, trying to reach the far, other side, where certainty might live.

Life rarely seems certain; more often we have to continue edging along the line, hoping the fog will clear before we make an irrevocable choice. Mostly the process is messy and the progress is hard to mark. Mostly I sit full with feelings, to which I must apply my powers of organization and articulation. In other words, I work through my dilemmas by writing, and this seemed like the place I would take a moment to look around and find my direction.

Today's subject is the life of a craftsperson at the OCF. The word *life* is the operating one here. I want to try to point out a few of the issues that continue to make trouble in the greater Fair community, from the perspective of someone who has invested my life in it.

I know all Fair Family tend to think we have invested our lives in Fair, at least during the event each year, but it's tough to value that investment in equal terms over all the roles. Each individual has a scale for that, and there is a time for each when they weigh up, maybe many times. Some people weigh up and leave the community, or at least the role they are presently playing. They lose the magic, or they change the role, or they find the balance won't hold and they quit. There is an occasional craftsperson who quits, finding the family isn't interested, the crafts don't sell, the nights are too loud or the times too changed. Mostly we don't quit.

We evolve. It might be difficult to imagine a life where creative decisions are routinely made, many in a day, and *things* are made from nothing over and over and over. Different each time, perhaps, or within a formula that works, but always adapting the current skills and materials to the current conditions and culture. We get a nice space in OCF to bring traditional crafts that may be found in only a few other places, maybe things we have made for decades, or lost skills that aren't economically or culturally that valuable outside the alternative culture. We have carved out a space for handcrafted items that is precious, diminishing in the world, and still vibrant in our corner. It hasn't been luck.

We've invested our lives, and the point of today is that this is indeed different in some vital ways from the ways volunteers have invested their lives. It's not about money. It's not about time on site. It's not about age, or skill level, or love, or fun, either. Everybody involved holds OCF in our hearts. There are significant ways that we do not differ. We all love it, and hate it, and work on it, and keep that weekend and the weeks and months surrounding it protected so that we can attend. We have a lot of common ground emotionally as well as physically.

Probably every crew has a person or two who are seen as elements who could be pruned out. They aren't reliable enough, they don't pull their weight, but they might be fun or nice or for some reason not easy to take out of the picture. They don't go away, they don't retire to the Elders, they keep showing up, and bringing with them what is viewed as inadequate, troublesome, or in the way of what is seen as necessary to thrive.
Every year they get their pass, and eventually most of them get moved out in some way or another, but there isn't a clear way within policy to ask them to step up or leave. Probably on crews this is handled however well or badly by the coordinators, and by circumstance. It's subjective.

Craftspeople, however, apply and pay, are juried if they are new, or might be grandfathered if they are not. There is some scrutiny by Craft Inventory each open morning, but CI has been pressured to be kind and gentle and artisans have been awarded more flexibility within their craft categories, so largely they feel respected and welcomed each year, and as long as they can come up with the fees, they come *home* to their space, where they might have spent thousands of dollars over the years to meet the demands of the event. They feel a lot of ownership, but more is centered on a small piece of ground and not as much on the whole site. All Fair family feel ownership. That's why we care so much and work so hard.

Longterm booth people put in their money, year after year, and are rewarded with the opportunity to work at Fair for the weekend. We're not invited to stay for a month, even if we have work to do, and we feel largely left out of the family events, which are usually held on weekends, by necessity, when we are, by necessity, retailing. We certainly are Family, we certainly play an essential part, but we definitely feel of a different status. We can be seen as opportunists by some: we drop in, collect our cash, and walk away.

Of course the reality is far from that, from my perspective. I produce massive amounts of stock, of which some 80% is there to support the 20% that might sell. I continually invest in materials, tools, skill-building, production efficiency and adaptation to physical needs, so that in fact my entire life is invested in those items you pick through, to love or reject. A bad Fair could quite literally ruin me.

Plus I have to haul enough stuff out there to set up a complete shop, home, and home for my workers and their families. I spend around a thousand bucks each year assuring access and comfort and a healthy and safe experience for those I need to bring with me to meet the demands of what has become a giant Fair. It has gotten harder and more expensive every year, just like everything else in life. I observe that the organizational direction is to continue to grow, so I don't see my investment getting any smaller, or my job any easier.

As I age I have to dial things in or I will be overcome. We all have to do this, streamline our expenses and possessions and options so that we will be able to continue. Any kind of retirement plan, health plan, or random plan is generated by me. Noone else is in place to do it. I am on my own.

I chose it, I will do it, but it comes with me to Fair. I bring my whole life there: my vulnerability, my health, my ability to progress, and my stuff, which represents my life investment. It's as if I bring my whole life there, rest it in place for a weekend, and then haul it all home. My image is of a snail with a shell that is large, awkward, and in danger of being crushed.

I might appear slow, with one foot still in my hippie past. I might not appear as vulnerable as I feel, with my big showy shell. I might be defensive if things start to move more quickly than I can go, which of course they do.

So whenever the concept of *revitalizing* the crafts at Fair comes up, I feel the danger. I don't hear this coming from my fellow craftspeople, who are in the continual process of revitalizing, every day, but from observers who see artisans who don't excite them. This veers into the subjective right away, and I could write many blogs about leather belts and the market for them, types of pottery, shirts people like or don't wear anymore, and on and on. For every booth at Fair there is a roster of fans and detractors. It's a messy concept, evaluating others.

Those who want to explore it struggle for respectful phrases, and at core the desire is to ensure that the life of the handcrafting artisan is protected, as well as the life of our event. The public can be fickle. If the public gets tired of what the event offers, they won't buy their tickets. Talk about investment! While I have my little life invested, the collective investment, with our tracts of land, our vehicles and buildings, our paid staff, our insurance bills, our legal issues, and so on, the Fair Family does have a deep collective vulnerability.

Every piece of that vulnerability needs to be examined, and there are those who work hard on visions for keeping us thriving and important enough to keep it all alive. I'm not so much a visionary, but more of one of those who hang on, resisting change, until it is apparent I have to give something up. Without some other people having visions, I wouldn't have made it, because it does take more than determination and hard work to succeed in the larger realms.

But I'm willing to do the hard work, so I started volunteering, on Scribe Tribe and Craft Committee. Immediately as I start to work together with these other hard workers, with those who are visionary and those who need some enlightenment, with those who have wide, or limited ranges of skills, I see that there is far more commonality than difference among us. It's usually only one or two steps back from our positions to see our commonality.

So in this discussion of revitalizing, or more correctly, continuing to be vital, since we never stopped, we have to step back time and time again to our commonality. We all love the Fair, and in that, we all feel a terrible vulnerability. We all fear we could lose what we have built, or watch it erode.

So the creative problem-solvers look to fix something, something that isn't working as well as it possibly could. There are a small number of booths, fewer than ten, in which the craftsperson, for many reasons, appears to not be doing all that they might to ensure this vital event. They're not keeping up, or they're using the Fair for selfish goals without giving enough back, in the perception of some observer. Possibly many observers.

We've all heard this, about Fair and Saturday Market as well, that the offerings are boring and nothing ever changes. I submit, that whomever the observer who is saying this is, THEY ARE WRONG.

Or at least there is enough doubt in the situation, enough subjectivity, that we can't act on it. Just as Joe Schmoe can't be kicked off Traffic because he is always ten minutes late (Fair time, heh heh) for his shifts, there just isn't enough information available to "weed out" a craftsperson who looks like an opportunist. As an observer you just have no idea what the reasons are for what the person offers at Fair. All you can do is make sure they follow the Fair guidelines, encourage (maybe with your dollars) those you observe doing things your "Fair way," or figure out why you are bored with the lives of these members of your community.

I constantly hear volunteers who brag about staying out of the eight completely, yet the eight is where the whole Fair exists, for me, so I feel rejected. My life expression is boring? I was taught that if you are bored, it is your problem. Look within. If I'm defensive, it is because you are actually attacking me? Are you being defensive because of your own vulnerability? Is there a different way to have the conversation to get around opening up these pools of fears?

The messiness is ours, and we have to work through it. Together. We have to articulate our fears so we can get around them. We absolutely have to understand each other's experiences. We have to stand on our common ground.

So step back, and move more slowly for us snail people. The giant spinning peach is heavy and we are already carrying a huge load. When the fears come up, even if they come up masked in anger, we have to address them.

This has gotten too long and I am still on the wire, not having reached clarity, and not feeling like I've even taken a step forward. What can the Fair organization do to keep the crafts vital and relevant? Is there a way to have evaluation without vulnerability? No, I don't think so.

However, there is a way to work through it. Policy is our protection, guidelines are our tools. Standards have to be spelled out in words; measurement and evaluation have to have concrete metrics. Let's acknowledge our fears, get our vulnerabilities on the table long enough to set them aside, and work together on our common goals. It's a huge and messy task, so we're going to have to do it in little but coherent pieces. We have to have the discussions, but the little hurts and the big fears they bring up don't have to defeat us.

We are stronger than we think. Let's continue to try to do our best, with every piece of stuff we make, every policy we try to craft, every letter we try to write. We have an excellent record, so there is no reason to think we will not find the elegant solutions.

Silver Thaw

The skylight has been covered for days and the dim light is different...we had about a foot of snow complicated by several layers of icy drizzle. I shoveled the walks the first few times until the ice coated the bottom layer and made it easier just to walk on the snow. It just kept coming down. Seems like the drizzle last night finished it off but it may continue today.

Got out my cross country skiis and cruised around the neighborhood a bit; the powder was perfect for it on the first day, but it might be too slippery this morning. I may go try again anyway. It's so rare to be able to ski off the back porch, and pretty darned fun. What I really should do is get the snow off the shop roof before it starts to leak but that would be far too dangerous. Every little thing, including my ladder, is covered with a sheet of ice that will remain until it melts.

Eugene is barely moving this morning, everything cancelled and everyone snowed in. I've been so immersed in the time of the pioneers this seems normal, except being able to walk down to the library and store yesterday before it got too bad. You wouldn't walk far in snow in pioneer days, without knowing a forecast, without the kind of snow gear we now have, unless you had to, or unless you got used to it. I know my Mom walked and rode horses to school in snow in Nebraska, many times, even though one of her actual relatives was lost in a blizzard in 1888. You would certainly rely on the weather knowledge of the old folks, who would know what stage of a storm you were in, and what was likely to come. My young relative and his parents apparently were too new to the country to understand that balminess and sunny weather often foretell a productive storm approaching from the south.

So maybe this thaw we are having means more snow. And this, friends of the Market, is why we don't sell in the winter months. The Fairgrounds has been closed up (tried to ski over there, but no) so not the mess of slipping vehicles and joyriders we had in December. Presumably most of them have tried heading up the mountains.

The pioneers would likely have been more worried about what will happen when all of this snow thaws. The rivers and creeks often overflowed and carried away bridges, houses, livestock, and people, who had of course settled down right next to the waterways for transportation and water supply. It took awhile to get used to the patterns of the landscape. The Davises took claims right along the Willamette, between it and the River Road, which was one of the few trails that were well-used then. That and the County Road, which is now 8th St and heads off on Blair to the northwest, which Huddleston settled on. His property went from the County Road to the Amazon canal, so he had transport on one side and water on the other. Ideal piece of land. One wonders if he knew how valuable it would become as the town was settled. Probably that was what he hoped. I don't think he was really a farmer at heart.

F.G. Vaughan was a farmer though. One of the only newspaper mentions I can find of him is that he brought some watermelons to the newspaper office one day in 1880, and one of them weighed 39 pounds. That's some good farming. James Huddleston was famous for his shooting, though. He was a member of the Eugene Sportsmen Club and they had matches with each other and the Creswell club fairly often. He shot a hawk and some ducks in one. You got points for each type of game you killed, from eagles to cougars to swans, and most animals were fair game. He was later interested in a bill passed by the legislature establishing hunting seasons, according to a letter in his file. Hard to say whether he was a conservationist or interested in it because it might restrict his activities.

There were quite a few mentions of Huddleston in the paper. I think we have some class differences in these people I'm studying, and still more to find out about the stories behind their mentions. Samantha Davis Huddleston left her fortune to the WCTU Children's Home in Corvallis, and it amounted to somewhere between $20-70,000. One of the Evans kid contested her will, so there may have been some public embarrassment surrounding her death. I think she was one of the oldest original pioneers in 1927, and I don't know who was helping her at the end, if anyone. Her son died a year before she did, so that must have been a hard year for her.

F.G. Vaughan died the same year as she did. Instead of my original thought that these people did not know each other, because of their political and class differences, I now think they all knew each other, at least nominally. When Huddleston ran the trading post in the early 1850's, everyone in the area would have stopped in there, including the Vaughans, who were out in Coburg then. I think nearly all of the first transactions of my property were between contemporaries who knew each other, and were sometimes connected by family ties.

And why not? Land transfers were mostly handled within families if possible, to keep the wealth close. I think the Vaughans used the gold they brought back from California to buy land, and that was how they got these west-side properties, farms for the sons who couldn't make it on the one section the father claimed. The Vaughans and the Davises took up adjacent claims with their brothers and sons. They also would have followed the population and the resources. The original Vaughan claims were on land that is now being mined for sand and gravel, and they were farmers, so they would have traded up for better farmland. When F.G. started the dairy, he may not have expected the town to grow up around it so quickly. I haven't yet pinned down the years of his dairy farm at 12th and Van Buren, but by the time my piece was purchased, in 1908, it was probably looking like farming was over in this part of town. Even though streets weren't paved here, it must have been apparent that streets would be coming soon as people flocked to Eugene City to make money. Between 1900 and 1910 the population tripled.

I think both Floyd's dairy farm and Henry Huddleston's bike shop (around 1902) were part of this transition period, when the early residents were trying to keep their footing in the rapid growth of the town, trying to stay alive surrounded by later opportunists, keen to catch some of the riches divided up by the earlier opportunists.

But class issues, racism, and carpet-bagging are probably not going to be themes I will be able to explore in my book. Framing things from our perspective isn't really that fair, which is one reason I'm trying to read a lot of newspapers and primary source material from the time. I think the "characters" did evolve over time (they are characters to me, since they have been gone so long) and I think the combination of Samantha, coming from her Quaker parents Benjamin and Catherine, who seemed to be revered, and James, who came from Virginia, seemed to be comfortable with wealth, and was probably an early racist, is intriguing. I'm fascinated with the items that survived from their lives, each one with some reason for being saved from the scrap pile. Now I wonder if her nephew Evans could have been the person who saved and donated the items. More research!

I didn't get the grant I applied for, which is okay, since I am not that close to publication and it wasn't a polished application with solid theories yet. I am enjoying the research so much I don't care about the eventual publication of it. I stumbled on the concepts of my target audience and the relevance of the research to local history. There could be reasons these folks were somewhat forgotten--maybe I am digging up things that shouldn't see that much light. However, I am persistent, and will keep digging. I have begun looking back at my many journals on the building project, and that is some historical research too.

So let it snow. I have plenty to keep me occupied until I can get back over to the UO to look at the newspapers that aren't online. Have some great books to read on other subjects, too. The stories in The Moth (from the radio program) and in the book We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler are wonderfully compelling. Juggling that great writing with the scrawlings of the diaries from the Meek cutoff wagon train and the letters in the Huddleston file makes me glad I live in a time of excellent writing. I think I would have made a terrible Victorian.

However, I think I would have made a fantastic pioneer. I probably would have been one of those who dressed as a man and kept my secret until they went to bury me. Call me Dan.

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!