Frontier Life Was Anything But EZ

On a hallway wall in our home hangs a numbered art print, number 66 of 500, originally by Margie Karg, an artist otherwise unknown to me. I don’t know if the piece would be called a drawing, a watercolor, or a Giclee print. The colors are muted. The lines are straight, but not quite photo-realistic. The picture is titled, “Sunday School.” The print displays a solitary, old building, white paint peeling, many broken or boarded windows, and a few missing faded brown shingles on the roof. Only the lava-rock foundation appears to be sound. There is a wire fence held partially aloft by failing poles in front of the building. The ground is depicted as partly snow-covered, partly brown mud, the sky is gray with heavy clouds. A sign over the door of the building reads, “Greenwood Community Sunday School.”

This piece of art, a gift from my sister-in-law, Laurie, is treasured in our home. Allow me to explain why.

Before becoming the “Greenwood Community Sunday School,” this building served as the first and only schoolhouse, known simply as the Greenwood School, for the pioneer farming community of the same name, located just off the north edge of what is now U.S. Interstate Highway 84, five miles east of the small town of Hazelton, Idaho. When it was built, in about 1910, it was by far the largest and served as the keystone structure for the community, supporting much more than school. Weddings and dances were celebrated there. Picnics and family reunions were conducted on the lawn under the towering Poplar trees. It was the polling location for elections and much more.

My family moved to Hazelton when I was twelve. I met Glenda, my wife of 55 years, in Hazelton, and I graduated from Valley High School which served Hazelton and the surrounding area in 1968. By that time, the Greenwood School had long been closed, having held the last classes there the year I started school elsewhere, 1956. After serving as a Sunday School for a few years, the once-proud building sat empty and abandoned, badly battered by the Idaho weather and winds. Most of the trees were gone except for a solitary row of a half-dozen old Poplars that lined the ditch bank dividing the east side of the school property from a gravel county road. This is the Greenwood School I knew and often drove by; the one depicted on my hallway wall. But it still stood. As it does, much unchanged except for continued weathering, today.

Glenda’s grandfather, David Russel Dille owned a farm east of Hazelton where he and Glenda’s grandmother, Leone Ward Dille, raised their family, including Glenda’s mother, Lennie. Their farmhouse sat on a hill just to the northeast of, but very close to, Greenwood School. Entry to the Dille homestead driveway was made through a huge archway made of highly polished pine logs. Farm trucks with alfalfa hay bales stacked 20 feet high could pass through with plenty of clearance. The view from their front yard was of the Greenwood School and its grounds. Glenda’s father, Glenn Baum, also lived with his parents nearby when he was a child. Both Glenn and Lennie started their formal education in the wooden structure that was Greenwood School; Glenn in 1932 and Lennie three years later. In fact, they met there. Lennie, a first-grade child, was playing the part of an angel in the 1935 Christmas pageant when Glenn first noticed her. He later told me, “The first moment I saw her, I thought she really was an angel. I knew then that I would someday marry her.” Although they both in time moved on to different schools, they did marry in January of 1949; Glenda was born a scant 13 months later in February of 1950.

Their elementary school and meeting place, The Greenwood School, was named after one of the pioneer farm women and one of the first schoolteachers of Idaho’s Magic Valley—Annie Amelia Pike Greenwood. Born a doctor’s daughter into a wealthy non-Latter-day Saint, but prominent family in Provo, Utah, in 1879, she and her husband, Charles (married in 1905), were among the first farmers to settle in Greenwood in the second decade of the 20th Century. Charles is my eighth cousin.

Annie was a remarkable woman. She wrote many articles about frontier life that were published in prestigious eastern papers and magazines to supplement their meager farm income and became the first paid schoolteacher in the Greenwood area where she taught for 15 years. In 1934 she published her memoir of breaking the ground, clearing the sagebrush (a notoriously difficult plant with exceedingly strong and deep roots), creating a farm, and raising a family in a book titled, We Sagebrush Folks. That book is available today, as a 2022 reprint, from Rare Treasures Press of Victoria, B.C., Canada, and can be purchased on Amazon for about $20.00. Before this reprint, originals remaining from the original 1934 publication were bringing up to $400.00 on Amazon and eBay. Amazon describes the book as a “Narrative about an attempt to farm on land opened up by the new Minidoka Irrigation Project in the sagebrush desert of southern Idaho. The story of an American farm woman, her husband and family. Describes farm life and farm psychology. This intimate record of an acute mind and sensitive spirit to the joys and sorrows, difficulties and satisfactions, and personalities describes the author's fifteen years as a farm woman on the last American frontier.”

Annie and her book are the topic of a recent 30-minute documentary of the same name available on Idaho Public Television (IPTV) as part of their Idaho Experience series. About 15 minutes into the documentary, the Dille homestead can be seen in an aerial shot of the Greenwood School and its immediate surroundings. The Dille home has since been demolished.

In discussing Annie’s book, the filmmaker states that she wrote about topics that just weren’t discussed in 1934—the hardships of being a woman on the frontier in a man’s world. Sex, birth, abuse, insanity, and heartache, are among the topics Annie wrote of. While receiving a good initial reception and glowing reviews in Eastern papers, her book did not sell well. The maker of the IPTV documentary says that’s likely because of the ‘hardness’ of her message—people didn’t care to know so much. Annie, herself, wrote, “I have written only the truth. Everything in this book happened either to me, myself, or to someone else living in that country of the last frontier in the United States.“ The IPTV documentary includes, from her writing, that the irrigation canals, vital to the life and existence of the farms, were also every mother’s nightmare. Their worries were not ungrounded. Ms. Greenwood says in her writings, “Not a month passed that the canals didn’t claim another drowning victim—most often a beloved child.” Mothers, she says, would tether their children with rope to ensure they didn’t wander off and fall victim—a precaution that was not always 100% effective.

In the late 1940s, before I was born, my parents were raising their family in a home on the bank of a similar irrigation canal near Weiser, Oregon. That canal claimed the life of my brother, Dennis. If I ever get to meet Dennis, it will be in the afterlife.

Glenda was raised in a farmhouse immediately on the bank of one of those canals. When we began dating, I learned that she was deathly afraid of water and would not swim. She wouldn’t even enter a tame pool that was more than knee-deep. I was a water baby; swimming was my absolute favorite activity and I did not understand her behavior around water. I later learned that her fear had been instilled into her by her mother in an attempt to prevent a canal drowning. Glenda, as a young girl, would often walk a hundred yards from her home to the home of her father’s parents, Earl and Livora Baum, as she loved her grandmother. Grandmother always had sweet treats for her. Glenda had to cross a bridge over the canal to make that trip. She and her three sisters were all taught to avoid the canal for fear of severe punishment.

Even before Annie’s family was striving to grub sagebrush and eke a living from 160 acres of dry land, my mother’s family was suffering through the same challenges only a few miles east of Greenwood, in the Springdale community of the Minidoka Irrigation Project, where my grandfather, Niels Peter Rasmussen, working with the help of his older sons, built a one-room log cabin with loft for his family of fifteen. The Rasmussens were in Idaho earlier than the Greenwoods. They had moved there from Utah in the very early years of the 20th Century, having been promised water would flow from the Snake River into the Mindoka canals from the newly-completed (1902) Milner Dam in 1903. There was no water in the canals until 1908. In the meantime, for over four years, the family hand-filled wooden stave barrels and hauled water by horse-drawn wagon more than a mile to sustain their animals, water their few crops and quench their thirst. My mother was born there in 1909. The Greenwoods arrived in Idaho around 1913 with water available in the canals.

Life was hard and farming was unpredictable on the frontier of Idaho. Weather could destroy a crop in moments. Vermin such as deer and jack rabbits could eat an entire crop in a day. Wolves and coyotes killed sheep, goats, and cattle as they pleased. My grandfather’s family made a go of it. Annie and Charles did not. They lost their farm to bankruptcy in 1928, relocating to Twin Falls, Idaho, the city of my birth. The IPTV documentary says that when they lost the farm, they also lost their marriage, divorcing in the 1930s. Before moving to Twin Falls in 1949, my parents lost their farm in Ontario to bankruptcy. Their marriage survived.

Life in the Magic Valley was easy for me in the 1950s and 1960s, in comparison. We had paved roads, automobiles, electricity, telephones, and television. Ample water was easily drawn from the flowing canals or deep wells. The print hanging on my hallway wall reminds me of the deep debt we owe to the pioneers who settled the Intermountain West. Annie’s book and my own family’s history are tokens of the hardships they suffered. My own mother was also a remarkable woman: A writer and a light to many that had lived through much of the hardship that Annie wrote about.

Addendum:

I have learned since this was published, that Glenda's grandmother, Leone Dille, owned the Greenwood School and surrounding properties for a number of years prior to her passing. The property is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Footnotes:

Annie is record number LZVK-LB7 in Family Search online. She died in Sacramento, California in 1956 and is buried in Provo, Utah.

Charles Oliver Greenwood, B 1881 D 1955, is record number 9VPC-FMW in Family Search online.

Amazon link to We Sagebrush Folks: We Sagebrush Folks, Greenwood, Annie Pike - Amazon.com

https://www.amazon.com/Sagebrush-Folks-Annie-Pike-Greenwood-ebook/dp/B09LG3P52J/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1NN32XHTGCBGE&keywords=we+sagebrush+folks+by+annie+pike+greenwood&qid=1694646647&sprefix=We+Sagebrush+fol%2Caps%2C202&sr=8-1&asin=B09LG3P52J&revisionId=500325ff&format=1&depth=1

The documentary: Idaho Experience | We Sagebrush Folks: Annie Pike Greenwood's Idaho | Season 2 | Episode 1 | IdahoPTV

https://video.idahoptv.org/video/we-sagebrush-folks-annie-pike-greenwoods-idaho-85z6rt/