The Goldendale Sentinel, Goldendale, WA., October 20, 1960, page 9

EARLY DAYS AT DOT RECALLED BY BELLINGHAM WOMAN
By Lenore Macy Hooper, Bellingham, Washington

     My father was born at Georgetown, Ill. in 1844 and came to Oregon in November, 1853 with his parents when nine years of age. They came with ox team and covered wagons and located near Brownsville about 14 miles north of Eugene. My mother's parents came to Oregon by covered wagon the same year and she was born the next October, 1854. Their youthful years were spent in the same locality and were married in 1871 in Albany and lived on a farm between Brownsville and Harrisburg where we four older children were born. Following eight years of trying to live in the rain and mud they decided to move to Washington Territory and homestead. They came to Washington to a drier climate where they would no longer be victims of malaria. Mother suffered with ague but was cured in Washington. "The prairie bunch grass grew a foot high and looked like a field of grain," mother said, the reason it looked so attractive to the pioneers.
     In the spring of 1879 father hauled lumber from Goldendale for the three-room house. What is now the living room was divided into a small bedroom and a living room. The bedroom was just large enough for a double bed and a trundle bed, where I slept. The kitchen was both kitchen and dining room, and the boys slept upstairs where you could stand straight only in the center of the room, but were warm and cozy because the stove pipes from the rooms below ran through to the roof. A cow and a few chickens provided milk and eggs for the first year, and a team and little pony that my brother Charlie and I could ride, comprised the livestock. We would take a little salt on an old iron ladle to coax Baldy, the horse, near, so we could get a rope around his neck, then onto his back we'd scramble for a ride.
     The third winter we were there, in 1883, old Baldy wandered away and died in a snow drift down in Squaw Creek. Father hunted for him and when it grew dark, with the snow falling thick and fast, mother was worried and hung the lantern on the corner of the house to guide him home; there were no fences built at that time to help keep directions. He came home safely and we were all very happy, back to that security we felt when father was there.
     No water was available except that hauled from Cold Spring down the gulch from the school house (built later), so it wasn't long until father dug a well, not far from the road, west and a little north of the house. The well, 20 feet deep, furnished cold, pure water so that many a traveler going north, or going south, used the water for themselves and for their horses, and many a meal was served on short order to friend and stranger. Mother and I never knew when we would be putting on an extra plate and adding another potato to the pot. Father just couldn't resist inviting anyone to share our meals. Both parents were generous of heart, a characteristic of the pioneer, who shared trials and sorrows with his neighbor and helped him in his need. Mother went night and day in cases of sickness and death, when called upon and saved many a life with her faithful, efficient care. I remember when Hattie Snodgrass had scarlet fever - they came for mother because Mrs. Snodgrass wouldn't take her medicine and the doctors said she would die if she didn't take it. Mother told Mrs. Snodgrass to stay out of the room and called Joe Job, the hired man. He held Hattie's hand, mother held her nose, and she swallowed the medicine. She caused little trouble during the illness from that time on, recovered, and I think is alive today.
     Before winter set in the first year father built a small barn. As the years progressed, he added a granary, chicken house, pigsties, wood shed, a bigger barn, a smoke house, a hopper for making oak-wood ash lye for making soap and to hull the corn for hominy. Finally, two bedrooms were added; also a room for the post office. Last, but not least, was a necessary milk and fruit house with the walls a foot thick, filled with sawdust hauled from the Noblet sawmill near Cleveland. How well I remember how cool it was on a hot summer day, and never freezing in winter. I can still see the candle molds, the shot and bullet molds for the double-barrel shotgun; coffee mill and big sausage grinder, the old sad-iron I used many a day for the starched shirts, petticoats and dresses; we made our own starch and everything had to be ironed to a fine finish. I still have one of the sad-irons and little gallon brass kettle mother used to began housekeeping. When we lived at Dot we had coal oil lamps for which we bought the oil in five-gallon cans. However, in the beginning, father and mother began with candles. I have the old brass candlestick holder they used. They are precious relics of pioneer days. Oh yes, our mattresses for the beds were ticks filled with clean, sweet-smelling straw, filled two or three times a year.
      There were many good times with the neighbors - all-day visits on Sunday, spelling school, church basket dinners, Fourth of July celebrations, sleigh rides (sometimes over the tops of the fences, when the snow would draft, then freeze) quilting bees, barn raising, etc.
     My parents were civic-minded and helped in all community affairs. There were no facilities for education until the men banded together and built a school house. My father was a school director for years. The church was also built by contribution work by the man at Dot. After my oldest brother finished at the grammar school he went to the University at Seattle where he played on the university's first football team, pictured in a clipping I have from an 1888 or 1889 newspaper. Our schooling was limited to three months in the spring after the snow had melted and we could walk the mile and a half from home
     The general occupations of my parents were farming and stock raising at Dot. At one time they had a herd of dairy cattle, a band of sheep and many nice horses. They also served in county offices and community enterprises to improve and aid in the development of the western county. That was a time when we produced all the food we ate and made all and the clothes we wore. One good coat, hat and dress lasted several years. No one had a summer coat, rain-coat or tweed coat. That was the time we did without what we couldn't earn or produce. That was the time of the "the survival of the fittest" - when there was no government aid, when families were linked by adversities and tragedies and the primitive life of the pioneer. They lived in a time when the vast area we call the Pacific Northwest extended from the Canadian line to California, and from the Pacific ocean to the summit of the Rocky mountains. It was prior to the building of railroads, or the stringing of telegraph and light wires -- before telephones, automobiles, radio and TV. Their lives encompassed the history of four sovereign states before there was an Idaho and Montana and all the transforming miracles that science and progress have brought into a land that was savage and lonely for the young pioneers of Oregon and Washington.

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©  Jeffrey L. Elmer