My Place
A Paper Presented for Human Ecology and Social Geography
Seattle University, March 1989
by Hannah Kunz
The place I decided to write about is Wilbur,
Washington. This is where my roots are. This is where my ancestors
are buried, this is where I migrate back to at least every two years to visit
the land.
This land that Wilbur, Washington is part of what is called
the Columbia Plateau. The Columbia Plateau had a very dramatic beginning.
The largest volcanic eruption the world has ever known created it. The
Grand Ronde Volcano erupted about 40 million years ago and continued to flow for
four million years in many successive fire floods which left layers of basalt.
This basalt is black, fine-grained and hard. The basalt acts as a
foundation for this flat land. Covering the basalt is a rich top soil.
The soil is yellowish wind blown dust called loess. The loess is silt
dropped by glaciers and blown in from the west by a constant easterly wind.
A second record breaking occurrence happened to the Columbia
Plateau. Glaciers dammed up Missoula Lake. As the glaciers melted,
the lake enlarge to a huge body of water. Eventually the glacier dam broke
apart and a wall of water 2000 feet high with 500 cubic miles of water behind it
came crashing down, heading for Spokane and all points southwest. After a
few years, a glacier dammed the lake again, creating another great flood.
The floods left behind great scablands of basaltic rock and great coulees.
The water pooled up down river. The eventual evaporation from the pools left
basins which had collected much of the washed out soil from up river. The
land in these basins is, therefore, extremely fertile.
The scablands are just as they sound, scabby and non fertile,
yet in the spring time they are beautifully covered with wild flowers.
By this time, perhaps some humans had reached the Columbia
Plateau. Eventually the people who settled here were Salisian speaking
tribes. They lived near the rivers and their main source of food was
salmon. They supplemented their diet with berries and roots, especially
the camas roots which they dug in many of the drier parts of the Columbia
Plateau. They lived in underground lodges for warmth in the winter and in
tents during the summer. The horse was an important part of the changing Indian
life. The Indians were a fairly stable people living near the rivers.
The Spanish introduced the horse to the southwest Indians,
and in turn, the horse came over to the Columbia Plateau Indians. The
white man's horse became the Indians' animal. They became skilled horsemen which
allowed them to hunt further from home for faster animals. They were no
longer confined to an area to which they could walk or row. However, these Salish people worked with the land, changing very little the landscape that they
gathered from. They continued this in spite of the incoming white man who
treated the land differently.
The first whites to come into the area were the fur trappers
traveling up the rivers to hunt the beaver. These trappers rapidly
depleted the stock of beaver which became rare in the area.
Missionaries followed the trappers, relying heavily on the
establishments that the trappers had created. They attempted too "tame"
the Indians, trying to teach them how to farm, but this was mostly unsuccessful.
Differences between the whites and Indians finally erupted into the Whitman
Massacre.
The next migration of people were the gold prospectors and
more settlers. Soon people started settling in and farming. The rich
land covered with grasses began to be ploughed and cultivated. There were
thin strips of willow or cottonwood near creeks or rivers, but mainly wide
open land. Enough moisture allowed them to farm without irrigation.
The climate had low precipitation, the seasonal cycle is one of cool moderately
rainy and snowy winters, wet springs, and hot dry summers with dry, warm
autumns. The land was inhabited by deer, coyotes, rabbits and other small
varmints. But when the farmers came in, they brought cattle and
other domesticated animals.
Typical of the incoming farmers were my great-grandparents.
My great grandmother migrated from California, accompanying her husband
who was building the railroad line from California, through Oregon,
through Walla Walla and into Spokane. We know how long it took to get the
railroad through Washington because their first son was born in Umatilla, their
second son was born in Steptoe and the third child, a daughter, was born on the
homestead in Wilbur.
Thousands of others, like my grandparents came in to
cultivated the land. No longer was the Columbia Plateau a vast, wild
grassland, but a plotted out, geometrically organized, tamed land, growing only
carefully selected grains.
Cultivated as it is, the rural Columbia Plateau has a rural
cultivation. It is not a city where mountains tops are scraped into bays
to make for an easier city. In the Columbia Plateau, the roads follow the
contours of the earth, winding around the landscape. Still today, when you
drive on highway 2, you do not feel as if a bull dozer preceded you.
In the 1930's and '40's another event happened that might
rival the great flood in the degree that it changed the landscape. The
great event was the damming of the Columbia River. The swiftest river in the
world, the mighty Columbia was turned into a series of lakes. Salmon could
not get past the dams, ruining the great resources of the Indian people who
still lived there. Much new land was made available by irrigation for
farming and many new farmers with new crops came into the Columbia Plateau.
And finally the vast, flatland was punctuated with rows and rows of huge towers,
suspending cables for carrying electricity out to a huge area.
In the 1950's the Eisenhower Administration began the
building of the Interstate Highways. One of these, 1-90, crossed the
Columbia Plateau, linking this rather isolated area with the rest of the
country. This highway did not fit the contours of the land. Rather
valleys were filled in and hills were cut through. A huge,
uncharacteristic road trespassed the Columbia Plateau.
At least every two years, my family travels to the places
that make this area to be my place, the land homesteaded by my grandfather and
the place where my father was raised. We walk past the country cemetery
where four generations of my ancestors are buried, then up to a bluff which
overlooks the Columbia River. We look out to see deer, rabbits, and hawks
swooping down. We look over the bluff into the canyon lined with
ponderosa pines, and we always talk about how beautiful it is to us. We
check out the wheat fields and listen to my Uncle Pete, the farmer, tell us
about modern farming and land conservation practices.
