I first saw Vestal & Rose Abraham when the family filed in and occupied a long pew in the First Congregational Church in Forest Grove, Oregon. Dale was then 3 years old and the family stair stepped up to Ralph and Raul, who had previously enrolled at Pacific University. The arrival of 8 boys created quite a stir and a female flutter.

Vestal was a slight spare man, typically a Scotchman, with blue eyes and a sandy complexion, friendly and business like, very proud of his big family. Rose Abraham was a compact, vigorous, competent woman and truly the queen of her family. She had eyes of a true deep brown and quantities of graying black hair. I think, that in her younger days she might have been very striking in appearance for when I first saw her, she was an unusual looking woman. Her most memorable characteristic was a sharp sense of right and wrong- there were no grays in her moral outlook. A thing was either right or wrong, either white or black. If it was right that was fine, if it was wrong, there was no hedging or shading- out with it.

When Keith and I were married and lived next door to them in the small house which had been built for us on the farm near Gaston, Oregon, Rose’s health had failed and she was subject to serious attacks of asthma and painful swellings all over her body. It seems now that she had some sort of allergy, but such things were unknown. Perhaps it was because she was not able to work in her old style that made her mind turn back to the old homesteading days and that I heard many of the old stories written here. I was much too busy then to write them down, but I have tried to gather together what I can, for this life on a Nebraska homestead was a way of life gone forever.

They were married in Washington County, Iowa in 1882 and when they took up the homestead in Nebraska, Ralph and Raul were small boys and Dick was a baby. Apparently Vestal had gone on ahead in an immigrant cart with their possessions, including a cow which had been given them by his father, for when Rose arrived with the three small boys, the sod house was ready for housekeeping. She told me “Knew we wouldn’t have much. I was prepared for the barren plains, the sod house, the dirt floor, but when I saw the rack of cow chips behind the stove and knew that was what I would have to burn, I just broke down and cried. That was the last straw.” Then when she washed the baby clothes and hung them on the line, the prairie wind promptly whipped them to shreds.

The next years were hard ones. The western Nebraska plains were bitterly cold and keeping warm with cow chips and corncobs was a serious business. On the coldest nights, they took the children to bed with them each keeping one-boy warm while Ralph (poor guy) slept at their feet. Rose often said to me “Helen, I’d like to see you try to get a breakfast like I did in those days. Even the bread was frozen like a rock.”

There was very little money. Many times they were down to 50 cents with no idea whatever where the next 50 cents was coming from. Into this household little Mac was born. There was no telephone and someone had to ride on horseback to Ogalalla to get Doc. Hollingsworth, who then drove the 10 miles in a horse and buggy to be on hand. The baby was named William McLain after his paternal grandfather as Richard Iams had been named for his maternal grandfather.

Somewhere in here, Vestal was elected treasurer of Keith County and the family moved to Ogalalla, which was a small town on the Union Pacific Railroad main line. Before the railroad had built into Kansas City, it had been the westernmost cattle-shipping town on the railroad, shipping cattle from all point’s west and south. An emigrant trail also ran along the South Platte River. There was a well worn trail and mounds along the way where the emigrants had thrown up hasty fortifications against the Indians whose arrowheads were scattered along the way.

Keith was born in Ogalalla in a house a few blocks from the Congregational Church. It was said that he was dropped from a balloon that was in town for a carnival at the time of his birth. When he was a few months old, Keith Little Mac, and Vestal came down with Typhoid Fever. This was a terrible disease in those days and Mac died. Keith had a narrow escape, being carried about on a pillow because he was too weak to be handled in any other way.

At the end of Vestal’s term as treasurer, they moved from Ogalalla to a farm 10 miles from town where they lived until the migration to Oregon. Though this farm had a frame house instead of a sod one, Keith was big enough to go with his father to help build a sod schoolhouse in which he first went to school. These sod houses were built of slabs of sod turned over on the prairie with a breaking plow, chopped into suitable lengths with a spade and piled like bricks to form the walls. The roof was poles or boards covered with sod, the floor, sometimes of boards, sometimes just packed earth. The doors and windows were set in deep embrasures the width of the sod. This made a sill for a seat or plants.

Here things were a little easier than on the first homestead. Living was better and money not so scarce. The procession of boys continued-Paul, Bryan, (named for William Jennings Bryan), Gaius and Dale. Dale was 6 months old before the family could agree on a name for him. By this time, there were too many people to please. Every other year, Rose went back to Iowa to visit and always had a new baby to display. It always was a standing family joke that when any family date was under discussion, she would say “that was when Paul or Bryan or Dale was a baby” and the date was fixed.

With a family this size, food was always a problem. A list of a year’s baking in an old account book sounds like the supplies for a small restaurant. In October 1897 Rose listed 71 loaves of bread, 30 pies, 12 cakes, besides doughnuts, coffeecakes and jars of cookies. In one day she listed 12 pies, 2 cakes and a jar of cookies.

They raised their own pork, beef, and poultry. A real tidbit was a small hunk of dried beef sliced with a jack knife from the chunks hung by the chimney upstairs. And how good were the steaks and roasts from the frozen carcass that hung outside in the natural Nebraska deep freeze! Hog butchering was an important time with its by-products of ham, bacon, sausage, fried down in lard, headcheese, spare ribs, and other delectables.

A favorite winter supper was corn meal mush, cooked in a big black kettle, reappearing the next morning more delicious than ever as fried mush, still a family favorite. A summer favorite was ice cream with lots of home produced cream in it, and made in a big freezer, turned by boy power. The ice was a home product as well, having been hauled from the river and stored in the icehouse for summer use.

At dinner time there was always dessert, cake, pie, or cookies. This was partly because of the scarcity of fruit. All that they had were the wild grapes and small plums that grew wild along the river. When they were ripe a family camping trip was organized and several days devoted to picking them. The year that Paul was the baby (see how easily one falls into this way of counting time) the grapes were unusually good and they brought home a good harvest. But when they got home Paul was sick with an infected ear. Rose was worried about him. Hurrying across the kitchen with a dishpan full of grape juice, some way she tripped and spilled the whole pan of juice on the floor. She said, she was never able to scrub the stain out of the wood floor and the big purple spot always reminded her of how terrible she felt over the loss of that precious juice.

A gala event was the arrival at Christmas time of a barrel of apples and yams from Uncle Kade (Eleazor Kinkade Abraham brother of Vestal) who lived in Kansas.( The first summer they were in Forest Grove, word got around that they were hungry for fruit and they were deluged with it. Rose canned and they ate 900 quarts that first year. In those pre-cannery days everyone in town had surplus fruit rotting on the ground and it was hard for us to imagine a country without fruit.)

Even in those days when food wasn’t too plentiful no one was turned away hungry from the Abraham’s door. Friends and neighbors, people traveling through, peddlers and agents, just plain bums following the U.P. tracks, all were fed. One morning just as they were finishing breakfast, a man came to the door asking for food. Rose baked the rest of the hotcake batter, mixed up another batch, then another. No one kept track of the number he ate, but it was enough to be remembered years afterward.

Fuel was a difficult and ever present problem. There were corncobs and sometimes even full ears of corn, which made a clear hot fire. But there was no wood. Railroad ties discarded from the U.P. right-of-way were so precious that they almost started a small war. They were not usually burned but were used for fence posts, sled runners, or something of the sort. The best fuel was the coal picked up along the railroad track. This was a bitterly cold job. In the morning, the coal pickers set out with team and wagon, following the tracks and picking up the coal which had fallen from the coal cars as they rounded a curve or were loaded too high. At noon, there was lunch frozen solid, to be thawed out over a small fire or in some shack along the way.

One thing always to be reckoned with was the weather. There were blizzards that drove the snow in and around the windows so that it lay across the bed covers in the morning, the same blizzard that made the cattle drift before the wind and huddle in fence corners to freeze to death. Getting cattle out of the fence corners and home to the barn was a risky business. When they had been located during a storm, they had to be turned into the wind and driven against it. Since only the horses knew where home was, they had to be trusted to bring both men and cattle back.

While most cattle were fed on the snow, hay being hauled and scattered for them, many were fed at racks and sheds opening to the south away from the prevailing winds. Sometimes a blizzard would whip the snow over the edge of the roof and completely fill the shed with snow. After one such storm the bull was missing. He had completely disappeared. Five or six days later, Ralph found the bull against the rear shed wall, standing in a space just barely big enough to stand in, completely packed in by the snow. He was “alive but hungry” they said!

The same barbed wire fence that turned the animals in a storm could be fatal if a thunderstorm came up, for if the lightning struck the fence, the electricity ran down the fence to the cattle huddled there and electrocuted them where they stood. But it wasn’t always the fence. On the prairie they found a steer on his knees with a stripe burned straight down his back and down each leg to the ground, killed by on terrible bolt! A letter from Vestal during those days reads “ You wanted to know something about the storm. Well, the reports you heard were not exaggerated any. We had a month of terrible weather. The big blizzard began it and then it just kept on coming, snow and cold rain from two to four days at a time. Cattle and sheep died like flies. I will give you some of the losses:

King Feltz took 58 cattle out to Otto last fall and yesterday We Helped him bring them back, he had only 41 and 2 of those he Had to leave here, and one died before he got them home. Henry Mort 15 of 35 cattle and 200 head of sheep. John Apolius 25 head of cattle. Remington 150 out of 300

There were summer electrical storms too. Each summer, a hay camp was established out on the prairie to put up hay for the winter. There was a make-shift tent of canvas and a castoff stove for getting meals. One night when the boys were in camp, a bad storm came up. The canvas collapsed almost at once and it was decided that the best thing to do was grab blankets and dash for the nearest haystack nearby. So they started out, waiting for the next flash. But Dick had forgotten about the cook stove and, running at full speed, fell over it, reaching the haystack at last-to be greeted with sympathy, certainly not, only with shouts of laughter. These were vicious storms, not distant threats. One summer day when Keith was driving the mower such a storm came up. He unhitched the horses and drove them to the shelter of the haystack when a bolt of lightning struck the mower. So close to him that Keith said, as the smoke curled up he could smell the sulfur and brimstone.

Summer hazards were the hailstorms. When hailstones as big as eggs began pelting down, everybody and everything that could move made for a shelter. Keith said, he could remember his mother standing at the window crying when Dick was caught out in one, because she thought he could never live through it. There was no shelter out in the prairie except your horse. Crops were flattened and shingles torn from roofs. A letter from Rose gives a good description of one: “ I must tell you of a trip Raul and I took. We had been having a dry spell and were wishing it would rain. One day Raul (then about 11) was going to town with the butter, and I thought I would go along, as I wanted to go to the store. So I left the baby with Mac (Vestal’s sister’s boy McLain Morgan) and he told us we would get wet before we got home and I said, “ I don’t care because we need the rain badly.” After we left town, I noticed it looked quite bad and we drove for dear life and we got to Smith’s and it blew a little and we thought the worst was over, and started for home again. But before we got to the schoolhouse, the storm struck us, rain and hail. Just then 2 of the tugs came loose and the horses wanted to run as the hail hurt them so. Raul jumped out but could do nothing with them, so I got out and my hat and shawl blew off and rain was coming down in torrents and I had to stand at the horse’s heads and hold them, and take the rain and hail. I just felt like I was being drowned. The water ran out of my shoe tops and I had not a dry thread on me. Raul finally got the tugs hitched and he led and I walked drove. And he led the horses to the south side of the schoolhouse. By that time, it was dark, we went into the schoolhouse through a window, and I took my dress off and wrung the water out of it. I was afraid to ride home that way so we went to Cook’s and got some dry clothes, when it slacked up a bit, we went home and they laughed at us for not staying at Smith’s. My hat was ruined but it was old and not much loss.”

Also there were cyclones. Many cyclone stories came out of the Iowa-Nebraska days. Tales of straw being driven through oak trees, a lamp left burning in a demolished house, also the one from Iowa, confirmed by my father, who was from Iowa, of the deacon who was borne aloft by the cyclone and never seen again. One day Ralph and Keith were working in the field and saw a cyclone on the way. Quoting from Ralph: “ When I saw the storm upon us. I unhooked the 4-horse doubletree from the lister and hooked the team to the sled (2 railroad ties about 4 foot apart covered with boards). The wind was terrific; we were just out of the center of the twister. The sled hooked onto the wire fence and we dragged it until the wire broke. Keith could not keep his feet even when dandling from the firm grip of my hand. I can still see those lines, the horses bits pulling at one end and I at the other, the lines blown to form a horizontal U. The worst of the storm had passed, by the time we had reached the house. At the spot where we usually unhitched the teams, east of the house, was the roof of the kitchen, a small house that had been moved and attached to the south side, was upside down but intact generally. In the loft of this a turkey hen still sat on her nest of eggs. The rest of the kitchen walls and floor were scattered splinters extending for 2 miles eastward. Had we been 5 minutes earlier, we would probably been under the roof. Keith says he can remember the kitchen floor sailing and tumbling past as they neared the house. And how it rained during the process! Windmills were blown down and other damage done.”

Another hazards were the rattlesnakes, which might be anywhere, especially around the prairie-dog holes on the prairie. Dick said, one day he was coming home on horseback when he saw a rattlesnake and got off his horse to kill it. This was really a moral obligation for anyone who saw a rattler. He took a bridle rein off his horse and began snapping it at the snake. His aim must not have been good for presently in the fracas the snake struck at his shoe. He finally killed it, but he was firmly convinced that the snake had poisoned him. He decided that he would never make it home, so he stopped at a ranch house for the night. He was sure that now he was past help so didn’t mention the snakebite to his hosts. When he took off his shoes to go to bed, he was certain that he would see 2 fatal marks where the fangs had struck, and went to bed sure that he would be dead in the morning. I said “What an awful night that must have been.” He replied “O no, I slept, but I was awfully surprised to wake up and find myself alive in the morning!”

Keith one time found an unusually fine specimen. He managed to fasten a bridle rein around it and bring it home alive, dangling from the rein. For this bit of monkey business he got a good licking from dad. The rattlers usually gave a warning but this could not be depended upon. One summer day, Raul and Keith were driving 2 mowers, Keith’s horses walking on the swath of hay Paul had just cut … presently Raul stopped his team and said, “I think I ran over a rattlesnake, let’s take a look.” As they searched through the new cut grass, Raul yelled “look-out.” Keith leapt aside to see one step behind him the front end of a rattlesnake erect in the grass weaving back and forth ready to strike. It had not been able to rattle because it had been cut in two by the mower!

Appearing on the plains in migratory flocks were the huge sandhill cranes, gray and long legged, standing 3 to 4 feet high. Keith found one on the prairie with a broken wing; he took it home and shut it in the garden until its wing would heal. Because it could not fly it was safe as long as the gate was shut. Some time later every one was gone for the afternoon except Paul, then about 10 years old. When the family returned home the gate was still closed but the crane was gone. Paul swore that while he watched a flock of cranes flying over, circled over the garden, 2 swooped down, each took a leg in its bill and flew away with him!

Paul was involved in another scrape that really rocked the family. On the Sunday after the 4th of July he picked up a giant firecracker in the street in front of the church. These firecrackers were really giants, about 8 inches long and an inch in diameter, and sounded like a dynamite blast. They were common place then but I shudder to think what present day law enforcement officers would say about them or what boys of those days would think of the sissy firecrackers now on sale. Anyway Paul took the firecracker home. He showed it to his father who pointed out to him that it had no fuse and told him to throw it away. This Paul did, by putting it in the stove where the fire had just been lighted. The resulting blast blew every lid off the stove and split the grates wide open. Who knows a small boy’s mind? Did he really think that it would explode or think what would have happened if his mother had started to get dinner?

Growing up in a big family was a discipline in its self. Brothers were apt to take care of any thing over looked by parents. When Keith was 4 years old he still had long yellow curls of hair. There were probably several reasons for this. Small boys in those days often wore long hair, he has a scar on the back of his head which the curls hid, but perhaps it was most of all because his mother had no girls and hated to part with the curls. On his 4th birthday she had just finished for him a little Lord Fauntleroy suit with a wide white collar and full knee britches. She sent him out to show his father and brothers. The sight of Lord Fauntleroy stepping across the barnyard was too much for them. They threw him in the water tank! I have often wondered about Vestal’s part in this escapade. Did he help? Or was he just consenting? I have heard Rose pass some pretty peppery remarks on the doings. One couldn’t blame her when you consider what a dunking would do to a velvet suit, but it doubtless discouraged vanity.

School was an important part of their lives. This was a one-room school whose scholars were the Abraham boys and the Apolius girls. This Polish family lived on a neighboring ranch and was all girls except the youngest. After the Abraham’s came to Oregon, I used to hear the boys tell their mother that she had come west with her family just so her boys wouldn’t marry the Apolius girls. It was said jokingly but I used to think there was more truth than fancy in this. The Apolius standard of living wasn’t very high and it was Mrs. Apolius who gave the classic answer when Rose asked her if it wasn’t hard to bake enough hot cakes for her family. “Oh no, I chush make dem as big as de griddle and as tick as m’ foot!” Perhaps it was because of this cooking that the teacher always boarded at the Abraham’s. There was a steady procession of teachers. Up to the time Keith entered high school in Forest Grove he had 18 different teachers. He said he thought he actually learnt more listening to the older children recite than he did from his books.

Church was another vital thing in the family life. There was a Congregational Church in Ogalalla and the Abraham’s were an important part in its membership. For years Vestal was superintendent of the Sunday school and the family went to church as a matter of course-no discussion as weather they should or shouldn’t go. It was just a foregone conclusion. In the early years the twenty-mile trip was made in a lumber wagon. When the weather was bitterly cold, as it often was, there was straw in the bottom of the wagon and blankets stretched across the top where the boys rode. The Christmas tree program was an eagerly awaited event. Another was the Fourth of July celebration, the like of which is seen no more. It was an exciting and important event.

At home recreations were simple. Horses to ride games to play the Youth’s Companion to be read aloud in the evening. The Youth Companion was a national institution and there was something in it for everyone. It was well written and edited and no literate family would dream of being with out it. Its weekly (Thursday in Oregon) was an event of first importance.

About 1903 or 1904 the telephone arrived to help break the isolation of farm life. The first telephone lines were the barbed wire fences. Where a gate broke into the line poles was put up to carry the line over the gap. This was a many party line of course and helped to bind the whole community together.

There were near calamities in the family, but it seem miraculous that there were never any broken bones until Paul broke his collar bone playing football in college. But there were scars. Keith still has one on his eyelid that came about this way. Dick was riding the old mare and Keith was looking on with envy. He finally found a long stick, which he hastily whittled to pin point sharpness. He hid behind a corner of the barn and when Dick came riding by, he stuck the sharpened point into the mare’s flank. He expected her to buck and throw Dick off, but she let go and kicked with both hind feet, catching Keith on the eyelid and cutting a gash clear across it. The doctor was 10 miles away but something must be done to repair the eyelid that drooped distressingly over his eye. So he was laid on the floor with a brother setting on each hand and foot, while his father and mother fastened the eyelid together with strips of courtplaster. This was the forerunner of adhesive tape and very weak by comparison, but it held well enough so that the eyelid grew back together again.

Precautions against infection were powerful and primitive. Bryan was chasing Paul with a pitchfork one day and, finding that he could not catch him, he threw the pitchfork, catching Paul alright, running a tine of the fork through the fleshy calf of Paul’s leg. Someone ran for the turpentine bottle, which was turned upside down on the hole in Paul’s leg. This was all the treatment it got but it got well. In the neighborhood, a common treatment for this sort of thing was to spit tobacco juice into the wound or lay a quid over the sore effectively paralyzing any germs. The only time Vestal used tobacco was to smoke a cigar long enough to blow a mouthful of hot cigar smoke into an aching ear.

To me one of the most terrifying incidents was one in which Rose was involved. A windmill was to be moved and she was out with the rest of the family to watch. Woman in those days wore wide leather belts. In some way, a steel leg of the windmill caught her belt, and as the windmill slipped while it was being lowered to the ground, she was thrown in an arc over the heads of her horrified family. She remembered flying through the air. The next thing she knew she was lying on the ground with a pillow under her head. This was a few months before Gaius was born, but apparently no harm was done as he arrived on time in good condition.

An escapade that might have ended in disaster was the one that concerned the baby buggy. Baby buggies, in those days were much sturdier than now, a good thing as it turned out. When Dale was a baby some of the older brothers were left at home to baby-sit him. This got to be dull, surely there was something more exciting that they could do! There was! They trundled the buggy to an unsuspecting unbroken colt which in complete terror of the thing racketing at his heels, took off across the prairie at a dead run. There are several things about this story to which I have never had answers. Was the baby in the buggy when they hitched the colt to the buggy? What did mother and dad do when they got home? Anyway the baby and buggy survived.

Rose and Vestal were determined that their boys should have an education and, as Ralph, Paul and then Dick were old enough they went to Franklin Academy on the extreme southern boundary of the state. This was a small church school and represented the sort of training that they wanted. But it was so far from home and got to be so expensive.

Letters of this time contained quotes like this, “ We miss the boys so much, can hardly wait for them to get home.” ‘I have lost my best hands.” Ect. Meanwhile, Uncle Kade Abraham, Vestal’s brother, had moved with his family from Kansas to Bellingham, Washington. Enthusiastic letters from them led Vestal to take a trip west, hoping to find a place to better himself financially, and to have a school where the boys could live at home. Also to get away from the severe Nebraska weather. He went down the coast as far as San Francisco, but finally decided that Forest Grove, with its Congregational College was just the spot. In the fall of 1906 the family once again moved west. As a farewell gesture, while Vestal was gone, Nebraska staged an April blizzard. Perhaps this had something to do with the final decision, but probably not. The fundamental urge which had lured their fathers and grandfathers from the east coast to Pennsylvania - to Ohio-to Iowa and themselves to Nebraska, now pushed them on again to the Pacific coast. To them, the west was opportunity. They were the pioneers!

Jump to: Chapter 1 'Nebraska Days Introduction'

Jump to: Chapter 3 'Abrahams in the Military'

Jump to: Chapter 4 'Final Chapter'


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