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MABEL SANDERSON
In 1904 my family, Al Armbruster Jr., moved to grandfather's where my son Jim and Zee Sanderson now live.
Waite Steveson's mother, Rebecca Steveson, had the post office and store at Barry at the time. It was there we got our mail and groceries.
When we first went out there, the roads were trails and very few fences.
The Rex School was built and we would get our mail from a post office run by the Whited family who lived on the place where Bob and Delbert Rice live now.
A two-horse hack was the way one traveled in the summer. We put a big umbrella over the seat and drove all day to get out to either Wilbur or Almira from Barry. "Ha! The good old days."
Mabel Sanderson
I REMEMBER - -
when our schools were so crowded that high school classes had to be held in the halls, and there were double sessions; going to a supper at the Grand Coulee Community Church in 1935 and kerosene lamps were used for light; the thrill when we saw the first books placed on the library shelves in 1938; the high school basketball team had no gym and practiced on a platform down by the City Hall, and in 1939, under those trying conditions, they almost won the championship; organizing the Women's Civic Club in 1947 and selling chances on a Willys car and clearing $1100 with which we started the Grand Coulee City Park. AND I CAN NEVER FORGET the excitement when the water first rushed over the Grand Coulee Dam.
Lucy B. Heidt
PAUL FILION
"My folks, Magloire Filions, came in 1909 with the Gus Meyer family from Chicago, Illinois on the train in a box car. It held all our household goods and livestock too. My brother Pete and I got off at Missoula, Montana and bought our ticket on a passenger train to Coulee City, Washington. When we arrived there we found we had to walk out to our father's place (homestead) north of Grand Coulee, about 12 miles.
I took up a squatters right to a piece of land and later filed for a homestead. The delay of filing was because of a resurvey of the country. Cattlemen had destroyed all the markers of the first survey.
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Usually my brother and I worked out across the coulee in the Almira and Hartline country during the harvest season. Once I remember putting in 75 days of work. Also I worked for Ed Shrock for $30.00 a month and room and board. At one time I worked for a dollar a day for F. H. Wallace bringing supplies in for his store and freight station. Sometimes we brought supplies in for my folks for the winter. Once I brought ten barrels of flour (four sacks - 50 lbs. to the barrel) and 15 pairs of shoes at one time.
Later I hauled wheat out of the country down Wallace Canyon to Almira. My load was generally 75 sacks of wheat on a sled drawn by eight mules. When I went out to Mansfield I hauled 60 sacks with four mules. I would leave home before daylight and get there just at dusk.
One time, I drove F. H. Wallace's pigs to Coulee City on foot. I drove them down to Osborne's and took theirs also. We drove them to Coulee City together. It took us around three or four days. We camped out each night and would have to find the pigs each morning.
Winnie M. Sanderson
ALEX SANDERSON
Alex Sanderson came to the country in 1890, several years before he bought or homesteaded. He returned from his home in Wrexeter, Ontario, Canada. In 1899 he bought the Mert Smith place. He had also taken out a homestead about a mile above this place. He had lived there in a cabin and had a dug out for his other building. Alex began his start with a mare, a colt, a couple of cows and a team of horses.
The Mert Smith place which he bought (where his son Donald Sanderson lives) had 13 acres of orchard. It had apples, pears, apricots and peaches. There is a creek which flowed through this place, from Smith Lake on top to Barry and to the Columbia River at the bottom. Along this creek were groves of trees - willow, aspen, birch, and a few cottonwood. It was from this grove that the homestead house of Mert Smith was built. It is still part of the main house today.
During the winter of 1899 which was so long, freezing and severe, Alex and two men he had helping, cut willows from these trees for food for the cattle. Alex also made trips out to Wilbur on horseback and with team and sled to bring back oats which he fed to his stock. Most of the old cows were lost but the heifers made it through the winter.
The need for hay for cattle feed during the winter brought the cattlemen to planting crops. Alex took out a water right from Smith Lake in 1904, with Ed Armbruster, to irrigate alfalfa in the canyon. The water was brought down a mile and a half in an open ditch from which they still irrigate about 50 acres.
Alex and his neighbors would drive the cattle herds to Ellensberg. Other times they were taken to the Columbia River and pushed across to the other side. They were then trailed to Tonasket and sold to the army for the Indian's beef.
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At one time there were 40 sows and their pigs grazing on the alfalfa. The country nicknamed the canyon "Hog Avenue" because of this.
In the winter of 1910 Alex Sanderson married Mabel Armbruster. They lived in the log cabin, with one room downstairs for cooking and eating and one room above for sleeping. Later as the family increased they added on three rooms. In this family there are two boys and three girls - James and Donald; Doris, Nadine, and Gretis.
One time, in a roundup by Barker Canyon, some of the neighbors were branding and sorting the cattle. As the cattle were brought in, the yearlings which weren't branded were identified by the brand on the cow it was following. Sometimes the yearling's mother could not be found so the yearlings were put in a pen by themselves and were called "slick ears". it was these "slick ears" that the men would divide and eat while working.
One of the neighbors always brought in too many "slick ears" so the men decided to play a joke on him. One dark night Alex and Al Armbruster waited until the men were asleep, then they jumped astride their horses and rode to this man's ranch. They took his milk cow's calf, which was unbranded, and drove it back to the bunch in Barker Canyon. This took most of the night. At dawn they called on the man to come and shoot the calf for meat for dinner. He jumped up and shot the animal. The rest of them quickly skinned it before it was bright daylight and he could recognize it. After all had had a couple of meals from the calf, they told the man he had shot his milk cow's calf. He immediately loaded up what was left of it in his wagon and lit out for home.
FRANK SANFORD
My parents, Mr. and Mrs. Liberty Sanford, came from North Dakota in 1887. They settled 13 miles northwest of Almira. I was born at Almira and lived with my parents until I was 17. Then I started farming over here for my mother and my uncle Tilford Sanford.
In 1917 I married Mabel Adair and moved to Fiddle Creek in 1929. I have lived here ever since.
In Almira, the lumber they built my father's house of, was hauled in from Sprague. It was there that my father and uncle and neighbors went to get groceries, twice a year.
MABEL ADAIR SANFORD
I was born at Manateau, Colorado. I lived in Colorado until I was three years old. We then moved to Gallup, New Mexico where my mother worked as a milliner and dressmaker. My father worked on the railroad. My father was injured in a fall from the tender of a locomotive engine and was not able to railroad anymore. Then we moved to Texas and went into the cattle business. In 1910 we moved west to Washington where I lived with my parents on the place now occupied by Frank Sanford Jr. My folks raised sheep, cattle, and also farmed.
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In 1917 I was married to Frank Sanford. I then moved 13 miles northwest of Almira, where we lived until 1929. At that time we moved to back here in Fiddle Creek.
Our entertainment in the pioneer days was mostly dances. A store and hall owned by George Cooley at Alameda Flats, a store and post office in Delrio run by Mr. and Mrs. Wagoner, and the old Fiddle Creek Schoolhouse and Nespelem were generally where the dances were held. When it was too cold and snow to deep to go very far we danced at neighbors houses, some of which were Mr. and Mrs. Lange - father and mother of Mrs. J. D. Evans, and Mr. and Mrs. Sherman Scott who also lived in the coulee.
We went to the dances with team and sled in the winter. At the dances, which lasted until morning because it was to cold to go home during the night, we ate our supper and when morning came made coffee and finished up the food and then left for home.
There were family picnics, and neighborhood ones too with large crowds and everyone bringing plenty of food for the day.
They tried to hold Sunday School at Fiddle Creek with a picnic afterwards.
My mother and I were out building a fence one day and killed seven rattlesnakes in the short time we were there. My mother thought it was time we went home by then.
Fiddle Creek neighbors in 1910 were Delahy, Dave Lawson, Verd Wilson, Charles Duncan, O'Brien, Wallace, Jim Slee, Charlie Bigler, McElroy, Blackenberg, Forester, Ruby Ford, Clark, Jim Wilson, McCamel, Robison. These people left during the first world war and the hard times following this war. They sold out to neighbors. Right now it is all owned by Frank Sanford Sr.
Winnie M. Sanderson
JOHN J. SELLERS
I first came to this country on December 3, 1904. My father Harry J. Sellers, my brothers, L.L., Gorden Sellers, and I soon took adjoining homesteads not far from or on the Columbia River. I squatted on my homestead in May 1905; it was then unsurveyed. At that time there were few fences anywhere. Web Buck owned a two-wire fence with willow posts across the middle of my place. My near neighbors then were the John K. Victors and sons Guy and Cyrus, Guy and Webb Buck, Wash Rinker, Phil Rinker, Alex Trefry, and Wallace Davis. The O'Flahertys were running the Condon Ferry then.
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I planned to work into the horse business and owned about 50 head when Henry Ford shot the market. I traded them for land and thus gained the George Henderson, Jess Hobart, and Jim Vaughn places. I raised wheat, corn, and oats, and had some real good crops with wheat making 40 bushels an acre, corn a ton to the acre, and oats 60 bushels.
I gave 35 acres for a warehouse site at Sellers Landing for grain shipment by steamboat; this land reverted back to me.
One of my most terrifying experiences was the ride I took through Box Canyon on a log. I was working for Captain McDermot on the steamer Bridgeport and the Captain invited me into the pilot house to show him my route through Box Canyon when I lost my boat at White Caps. As we talked the rapids smoothed off with little curls. The Captain said "I believe I can run this first stretch without a line." I said, "You can if it stays that way, but will it stay that way?" McDermot started up the canyon about 100 yards. The steamboat was caught in a mighty whirlpool about 40 feet across it, and into it we slid. The Captain was unable to hold the wheel with a boy helping him. He ordered 150 pounds of steam. Snap! the wheel was slack! The engineer called up, "Two rudders gone, Captain. All three gone, Captain!"
The shafts were about 8 inches in diameter, yet one was broken squarely off. All the planks were torn out of the flanges of one, and the other one of the three had about a square foot of planking left; though they had been bolted, braced and drift pined, two monkey rudders were left. The steamer turned around and bumped the Douglas County side. That gave the Bridgeport a bad raking on a rock wall but didn't break the planking. The steamer drifted until she pointed northeast. McDermot ordered full steam ahead and we got her tied up. In three days repairs came up from Pateros. Yes mam! It was bad water!
Another time we were lining up. We were on the third line - about a 300 yard line; and using 1 1/2 inch steel cable left by the government's steamboat the Yakima, under Captain Hill. This cable broke about 200 yards upstream from the capstan windlass. The recoil shot it aboard. A loop hit on the side and shoulders and knocked John Wire, Sr. of Leahy six or eight feet south to the very edge of the boat. And at the very edge of the boat (below him) was a hissing well like whirlpool eddy. Bad water!
I guess it was after the Bridgeport was tied up at Brewster that the government sent in the steamboat Yakima and two barges to dynamite rocks and better the channel for navigation. One barge was across the river from my barn. The work was being done under the supervision of Captain Hill. Part of the crew were local men -- Harry Vaughn, John Schweighardt, and Matt Carpenter all lived near Webers; George Stout of Alameda was the cook. Bob Brown came with vegetables for the Yakima and I rowed across to the steamer anchored at Parsons Rapids. The
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river was very low. When we arrived three men were drilling a black basalt rock (haystack). There were about 20 men in the crew. We stayed a couple of hours, visited and watched them load the hole with about 50 sticks of high powered dynamite. The steamboat was about 30 yards below the rock. A young man took the electric wire and dynamite to the men on the rock in a rowboat. As soon as the wire was connected to the dynamite it exploded! The switch was on; they were very careless; the man who was supposed to care for it was doing something else. The young fellow in the boat was not hurt too much, but the three men were all killed. Two of them practically blown to bits. The dynamite was blamed. I went up the next day, and the rest of the powder was exploded -- about 50 boxes and 30 half sacks. it made quite a water spout!
J. J. Sellers
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