remember.html

The Grandview Herald, Grandview, WA., October 26, 1978, page 9 & 11
This article included several photographs.
By Ruth Bardwell.
Permission granted by Mrs. Bardwell for use here.

YEARS BEFORE GRANDVIEW BECAME A TOWN PIONEERS SETTLED IN THE BICKLETON AREA. THERE, ON THE HORSE HEAVEN HILLS, THEY WORKED, PLAYED, AND DIED.

EIGHT SMALL CEMETERIES IN THE AREA HOLD THEIR REMAINS. FOR YEARS MANY OF CEMETERIES WERE LEFT UNTENDED, AND TODAY MANY GRAVES REMAIN LOST TO ETERNITY.

A BICKLETON WOMAN DECIDED THIS WAS WRONG, AND SHE HAS LOCATED GRAVES AND ERECTED MONUMENTS. SHE HAS RESEARCHED THE STORIES OF THESE PIONEER, AND IN HER WAY SHE IS….

REMEMBERING THE PIONEERS

Death trailed the early Bickleton settlers, and only a step behind them, it seems, according to information salvaged by Ada Ruth Whitmore, a lifetime Bickleton resident.
In the broad expanse of the Bickleton area there are eight smaller pioneer cemeteries. In these lonesome, windswept cemeteries lie the people who made the history of the area.
Mrs. Whitmore walks among the two stones, many tipped by the wear of time and wind, and recalls the stories. Some are heart-rending with the details of early death from disease or terrible accident that befell the struggling farmers and their families. Some are humorous, if that could be said of death; more realistically, the circumstances that surrounded the death or its aftermath.
"For a long time I was concerned with the many unmarked graves in the little cemeteries around here, " Mrs. Whitmore said. "Many of the people buried in them I had known, or have known their descendants. Many I did not know and their unmarked graves were being lost a little further into the past with each passing year. Each year, as more of the old timers died, a little more of the Bickleton history was lost forever.
"It was in the back of my mind for a long time, and finally in 1970 I knew it was something I must do. My family understood. In January, 1970, I began my project," Mrs. Whitmore said. "My family took care of the house and for one month I spent many hours in my office each day writing letters and formulating a system of records."
From that month's work evolved several huge volumes recording families and their records. Each volume records the burials in one of the eight cemetery that hold the remains of a valiant and stalwart group of pioneers who dedicated their lives to eking a living from the dry lands of the Bickleton area.
Cleveland Cemetery, west of Bickleton and near the Bickleton Pioneer Association's rodeo grounds at Cleveland, is probably the best known of the cemeteries in the area. There are 284 burials there. The first market grave was in 1882.
Cleveland cemetery lies on the south slope of a hill on the Bickleton to Goldendale highway and is visited by many people traveling the area.
Ripley Dodge, founder of the town of Cleveland, is buried there. He was born in 1818 and died in 1895. The large, white stone that denotes his burial spot is almost obscured by a large wild bush. Dodge homesteaded the area in 1879. He is the one who formally laid out the town and operated a hotel there in 1880 or 1881. He named the town Cleveland after his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. A Mr. Lowenberg established a store on the land before Dodge established the town. He had called it Dodgetown.
From the entrance gate, a visitor goes uphill past stones tilted by the elements and some by vandals. All are overgrown to some degree by the native grasses. Many stones are almost obscured by shrubs that were planted long ago.
Mrs. Whitmore guides a visitor to stones with special histories and soon the pathos of the times becomes apparent.
Jacob Grant Barrett died in April of 1911. Beside him are two of his daughters who also died the same month of flu and complications. Buried in the same plot are four daughters, his father, grandmother and one granddaughter.
Another headstone reads Lucy Matildy Ann Barrett, born Oct. 28, 1889, died Nov. 23, 1901. She was 12 years of age and had 10 brothers and sisters.
Illness and disease took a terrible toll of the early settlers, Mrs. Whitmore said. Paul Beck lived from 1825 until February, 1919. During his lifetime the Bickleton area, he fathered six children. More of his children died in infancy in Kansas before the family came west.
John L. Beck, son of Paul Beck, was born in Kansas and came west to Bickleton with his the family. His life ended at 25 years, 11 months and 19 days when he was murdered at a dance at Cleveland.
The story as told to Mrs. Whitmore by Ed Kutch, now deceased, was as follows:
It was a custom to have masquerade parties and to award a prize to the best costume.
An area man went masqueraded as a woman. His disguise was so complete that he was awarded first prize. This so angered Frank Castile that a fight began inside the hall.
The men were herded outside into complete darkness. There Castile, who had a stiff, crippled arm, slipped a knife from its storage alongside the arm. In the darkness he slashed out Wildly and split Beck from hip bone to hip bone, causing his death.
Castile then dashed wildly back through the lighted hall to escape on the fastest horse that was tied outside.
Sometime in the darkness his sanity returned and he rode to Goldendale and turned himself in. He was later freed and, as Kutch told the story, finally lost his mind from guilt.
Beck has a tall, white stone in Cleveland Cemetery and it says he was murdered. Beck was the father of one daughter, Hattie R. Beck. Tragedy came again to this family when the little girl died of pneumonia at the age of four years and nine months.
Two other stories of tragedy come to light at the headstone of John Lund and Marvin Mason. Lund was born in 1842 and was 76 years old. His son-in-law, Marvin Mason was about 33. The two men were involved in a car train wreck about one mile west of Satus.
Mason was driving a new 1918 Chevrolet car and, the story from a paper of the times state, he had handled the car only once before.
In our terminology of the present times, handling refers to managing an animal. In 1918 cars were so new that words common to our day had not been brought into use.
The paper stated that the Northern Pacific passenger train number 333 was traveling at the rate of 50 miles per hour and that the car was demolished. The investigation later found the car to have been in neutral, with its brakes on. Lund was visiting at the Masons home on the day of the accident.
Another stone locates the body of Harold Floyd Hackley. His death was caused when he was thrown from a horse and his head struck frozen ground. It was said that he died in the school yard where his father was a teacher, and that he died within 20 minutes after his fall.
Leslie L. Paine lived from 1857 until 1887. He was the twin brother of Wesley Paine. The brothers were hand digging a well. Leslie was in the well and Wesley dropped the bucket used to pull the dirt out down to Leslie. A rock was used as a weight in the bucket to cause it to fall straight to the bottom of the well. The rock struck Leslie on the head, causing his death.
Later in the same year, Wesley's wife died. Death came often to residents of the dryland country.
Julia Ann (Turley) Powers Nowlin Shannon Carpenter lived from 1821 until 1899. She was married four times and was the mother of 11 children. Mr. Powers was the father of 10 of her children and Mr. Nowlin was the father of her 11th.
A woman whose first name was Clara was the first fruit picker to come to the area and stayed until she died. She lived from 1896 until 1926. A resident recalled that she and her husband, Bill, arrived in the area and an old model A Ford truck. Their main possession was a bulldog. She died of tuberculosis.
Virgil Owen Seely died of ptomaine poison. He lived at Six Prong and lived only a few hours after having eaten contaminated food. He lived from 1919 until 1925, only five short years.
Centrally located in Cleveland Cemetery are too large stones. The final markers in the lives of William and Mary L. Weir. He lived from 1825 until 1912, she from 1831 until 1918.
Standing on the west side of the two large white markers, a visitor looks south east through the cedar trees and a few oak shrubs and sees the home where these people once lived out of their lives. They are but the first of four generations of their family buried here.
Their daughter, Alice Augusta Gaines, and their son-in-law, A.T. Gaines, are second generation burials. Julia May Thane and Harry and Della Gaines are third generation burials and Della Alice Gaines buried in 1917 is the fourth.
Anders William Rasmussen, 1892-1902, spent his 10 short years on a farm. Death came when he and a neighbor boy were sent out to shoot a dog. The gun accidentally went off, killing him. He was one of the nine children of John and Emily Rasmussen. They were pioneers from Sweden and the grandparents of Mrs. Whitmore.
East of Bickleton, just off the highway, is the old Methodist Episcopalian Cemetery, better known to the area folks as the old M. and E. This is the first cemetery east of Rock Creek in Klickitat County. The land was donated by a Mr. Graham. The first burial was an eight-year-old boy, the son of Hutchinson Allen South and Maria Graham South. The burial was about 1876.
Here, too, is buried a Civil War veteran, Samuel Traster. He lived his 68 years from 1828 to 1896. A flu epidemic claimed the lives of many settlers.
There are about 107 burials in the M. and E. Very few markers are to be found; however, Mrs. Whitmore has a list of burials there and the list rings with the flavor of the melting pot that America is: Alexander, Anderson, Bickle (for whom the town was named), Bromley, Clevenger, DeWald, Eckhardt, Embree, Emigh, Ganders, Gotfredson, Graham, Harris, Heimbigner, Hoisington, Holbrook, Jensen, Johnson, Larsen, Lockey, Lunceford, Nielson, Oestrich, Petersen, Robertson, Schaeffer, Schafer, Shattuck, Skiller, Smith, Wommack, Stegeman, Stegman, Stumpf, Tredwell, Walling, Ziff, Zyph and Stuhr.
Charles Nathaniel Bickle, founder of the town of Bickleton came to Goldendale in 1876. He was born in 1850 and died in1931. He was one of 20 children.
Mr. Bickle married Fanny Eliza Bacon in 1869 in Iowa, and they were the parents of 17 children.
The Bickles built a store, a hotel and farmed and raised livestock in the area for 17 years. During that time they did much to build up the area. They took families into their home and helped them get started in the community, Mrs. Whitmore reported.
In 1897 Mr. Bickle moved to Prosser and built a home about four miles from there, on the banks of the Yakima River. In 1910 Mr. Bickle moved to Seattle. He died at the age of 81 and is buried in Prosser.
Buried in the M. and E. Cemetery is Eliza (Bunting) Bromley. Her death was attributed to the kick from a cow that she had been milking. She was pregnant at the time.
Death seemed to take its toll so terribly among the young children and the women. Eugenis L. (Story) Emigh died at the age of 24 years, six months and eight days. She died in childbirth. She lived from 1856 until 1881. Her son lived until 1939. Her husband, Jarvis, remarried and raised four of his six children.
A clipping from the Goldendale Sentinel, describing the times in the 1900s, read, "Diphtheria has broken out in the Beck section, in the Joe Hooker family, resulting in the death of their oldest child. It appears the family stayed all night at the house of Bud Zyph, whose family had the disease last winter. In nine days they were all ill."
Eunicia Frances (Holbrook) Silvers Walling is buried in this cemetery. She lived from 1828 until 1889 and bore 10 children, one by Mr. Silvers and nine by Mr. Walling.
Her first husband, Norris Silvers, was a sailor and he stayed away so long that she thought he was dead, so she married Jasper Walling. Silvers, upon his return home, heard of this and intended to kill Walling. Jasper Walling, with his family, fled across the United States. Somewhere along the way Silvers tired of the chase and returned east.
Arad Wesley Silvers, the first child of Mrs. Walling, was left on the Atlantic coast to be raised by his grandmother. The rest of her children came west and were raised in the area.
Mary Christina (Stumpf) Shafer Cash was born in 1861 in Russia. She died in 1954 in Montana. During her 96-year lifetime, she mothered 17 children. In December, 1896, she buried her first husband, Jake Shafer, in the old M. and E. Cemetery. She then married John Cash in Klickitat County in 1897.
In 1899, they lost five of their children in a flu epidemic. Previous to that she had lost twins in 1893. In 1898 she lost a four-months-old child fathered by Cash.
John Conrad Cash lived to be 102. He died in 1965.
In her search for relatives of Mrs. Cash, Mrs. Whitmore located the tenth child, a daughter, living m Spokane. She had not known about several of the older children.
In her own quiet way this woman from Russia had not only buried her children in the soil of Bickleton, she had buried them in her mind and never mentioned them to younger children. Grief and the ever-present necessity of struggling to care for a growing family in a harsh land often wrought its mark on pioneer women.
Mrs. Cash's 17th child died at birth. Her 16th child had polio at five years of age and lived a long life confined to a wheelchair.
South and east of Bickleton lies Six Prong Cemetery. It sits atop a rolling hill in the prairie grasses. Circle irrigation is beginning to creep near it and the 57 graves there may, in time, be mostly surrounded by lush green. Until now, the green was seen only in early spring before the winds and heat dried the grasses and turned this final resting place to shades of tans and browns.
This cemetery is surrounded by a barbed wire fence The same method has been used to enclose all the others in the area. Money was always in short supply and the wire kept grazing horses and cattle on the outside.
The land for the cemetery was donated by Arthur W. Gilbert. He was the third person to be buried there. His short life went from 1877 to 1909. Charley Johnstead and Austin Wilson are buried here, too. They died in a car wreck at the Wood Creek Bridge near Roosevelt in 1926.
From Ellensburg came this list of the burials at Six Prong. It was given to Mrs. Whitmore to aid in her research. It also tells the cause of many of the deaths.
Tony Rigo, body found by railroad crew. No one knew him. Death was a mystery. An addition to this story tells that the railroad crew was so anxious to make a burial in the new cemetery that they buried Rigo without first having the county coroner examine the body. Later they found themselves in a slight amount of trouble with the Klickitat County laws.
The list further states that Moss was kicked by a horse. Dennis Berry died from tuberculosis. Bob Martin hanged himself. John Wollen shot himself. Wollen had been run over by machinery in a runaway with a team of horses and could not face the struggle of trying to farm when he was a cripple.
The Holden baby froze to death. The Peterson baby and Frank Peterson died from whooping cough. Charles Stone died from a heart attack. Anna Stone died from cancer. Minnie and William Warner both died from strokes. Allen. John, Emogme and Willoma Warner, children of William and Cleome Warner, all died at birth, Turkey Martin simply died of old age. So did Grandpa Paulson and Mrs. Voss. Mrs. Voss has a fence around her lot and part of it remains standing.
Others listed are baby Werner, baby Myrtle Smith, twin sister to Mabel, baby boy Smith, baby Allbritton and Daise Allbritton. Others mentioned are Lyle Saling, Johnstead (I think there are more than one), Frank Hugo, Landon Smith and his wife; Grandma Lock, Grandma and Grandpa Allbritton, Elizabeth Allen and Partlow (body moved from Six Prong), and Mrs. Kershaw and Frank Eckman, both may have been moved from the cemetery.
The note said that Tony Rigo's body is in an unmarked grave in the northeast corner of the cemetery, by itself, and so it is today, lonely in an overgrown section visited by no one.
Huit Cemetery at Juniper Canyon is the burial spot for 17 people. The cemetery is named for Mrs. Huit who had a post office a short distance away. She was born in Maine in 1844, and died in September, 1917. She is buried in the cemetery.
This, too, is the resting place of Mrs. Frank Alexander, 1887-1908. She died on Dec. 23, a few days after giving birth to a baby girl. She was buried on Christmas Day.
Here Freeman Lightfoot Parker is buried. He lived from 1868 until 1914, and the story of his life as given to Mrs. Whitmore is as follows:
One of his practices was to give strychnine to his chickens to see them stagger around. He also was unable to find a wife in the area, so he sent for a mail order wife. She arrived, took one look at him, and married a neighbor man.
The next attempt at marriage was more successful. Parker went to Portland and married a woman with four children.
They returned to his home. At the end of two months, an argument developed. In order to scare her, Parker placed some of the poison on his tongue and accidentally swallowed it. He rushed to a neighbor's home where huge doses of lard were to be administered - but to no avail. Parker died on their doorstep.
The I.O.O.F. Cemetery located on a hill north and west of a Bickleton has fared fairly well over the years. There the headstones tell the tale of the grimness of the diseases that struck the area.
Buried in a large plot enclosed by a concrete border are six children of Conrad Grover Wattenbarger and his wife, Mary Roberts (Brophy) Wattenbarger.
The Wattenbargers buried the six children in February, March and April of 1900. They were all the victims of diptheria.
Of the total 11 children the Wattenbargers bore, they saw only four grow to adulthood. The story of multiple deaths from diptheria is to be read in many of the cemeteries.
A sad result of the rampant diseases is told on one death certificate, found by Mrs. Wattenbarger. It lists a child death as neglect, an aftermath of the death that raged through one family and left the mother unable to cope with the struggle for survival.
Chapman Creek Cemetery at Sundale Orchards, overlooking the Columbia River, has 11 or 12 white burials there and an unknown number of Indians.
Among those known to be resting beneath the native grasses are: A. Landstrom, single male, about 30 years old. He was run over by a train.
The first burial there was Ada J. White on April 19, 1894. Others there are James Prickett, 1829-1902, Blanche Bosshardt, 1905, Charlie Furman, 1923, Earl Rodger Hatch, 1821-1894, Mrs. Sarah Jane Kelly, about 1910, the Peters children, Jennie C. C., May 8, 1903, and Claude, May 19, 1903. These two children died 11 days apart. Loretta Floyd White was buried there in the 1900. It is known that she had a twin brother.
The last burial there was an 11-year-old boy who had drowned in the Columbia River.
There are two cemeteries not covered in this story, Dorothy Cemetery in Yakima County and Bluelight Cemetery.
Mrs. Whitmore noted that information has come to her about persons buried there. In time that she will probably research the histories in them and will add them to her growing volumes on the pioneers of the area.
In conclusion: the stories told herein are as accurate as possible, allowing for human error and the change that time has wrought on memories. Many of the tales of the persons involved came to Mrs. Whitmore from relatives or from people that she personally contacted. Many came from death certificates that she purchased, and many more came from research in Goldendale. The Whitmores are lifetime residents of the area.
This story has not been written to bemean a way of life, but rather to tell of the struggle and the hardships and the heart-breaks of a valiant people, who in many instances were closer to death than they were to life.
This will also, I hope, point to a dedicated woman and her family who have spent uncountable hours and contributed funds to place more than 100 concrete markers over graves designating a name and the dates belonging to a human being who, in days gone by, gave his soul and left his small mark on the land that we call Bickleton and the Horse Heaven Hills.