Flora May Randle McMahan wrote this in 1930
I was born in the year of 1874, in the state of Tennessee. My father, J. L. Randle, and mother Dicy C. Randle moved to Washington Territory in the fall of 1886, with their family of three children: Matt, May, and Charlie. One sister Minnie, and one brother Walter, and died before this. In 1887 my sister Stella was born, near Mossyrock. In October of 1887 we moved to the Big Bottom country, just across the [Cowlitz] river from what is now Randle. Father had come on ahead and taken his homestead and built a log cabin for us.
We had to go most of the way over a rough, winding Indian trail. The ponies had to jump and climb over logs and fallen trees and go full length around them. When we got to what was called Fulton then, on the Cowlitz river, the ponies were unpacked, the packs taken across the river in dugout Indian canoes. Then we had to swim the ponies, repack and go on. That was the second day. That night we stayed with a bachelor, a Mr. Carlisle in a one room log shack. Next day, the third day, we arrived at our future home. Had to unpack and swim the horses again. I can never forget the first impression I had as a child, of that home, which consisted of a log cabin 10x10 feet with a mud and stick chimney and a fireplace. There was an addition of split cedar started, but not finished so we could use it for a while after we put part of our belongings in it. In the one room we had one home-made bed, with slats for springs, then made the other beds on the floor at night.
The trail was so bad, and winter came so early, with snow between three and four feet deep, bending and breaking over the brush and into the trail, that it was impossible to get our cook stove, sewing machine and so many things that winter; that was so hard to get along without. There were three months at one time that we did not get any mail. An Indian on snowshoes then brought our letters in.
When we moved in, there were about half-a-dozen bachelors, a Mr. and Mrs. Chilocoat with two small children 1/2 mile from us, Mr. and Mrs. R. T. Siler, who were married and moved there in the spring of the same year, one mile from us.
I was the only girl within twenty miles. Of course there were no schools, no churches, no stores or post offices; just a poor trail through the rushes, brush, and woods between these homesteads.
Mother got very sick, I believe it was the following January. Will Davis went horseback to Chehalis after a doctor who would not come, as it took a week to make the trip. She was spared to her family, but what agony to me, while she lay there, not knowing whether she would live or not. I had to learn to cook on the old fireplace and to bake in the Dutch oven—cared for my baby sister, did the washing, mending, sewing, etc.
The next winter I had the most terrible toothache in my back teeth. I could neither eat nor sleep as I should. I suffered so. In the month of March, father went to Mossyrock after some cows, which Mr. Doss let him have to keep for half of the increase. I went along to get my teeth out, as we heard there was a man nine miles below there who had a pair of forceps. I rode the nine miles alone. He broke one off and all to pieces, and left the roots in. I came back home with it in that condition and suffered every minute on the way.
Dode Doss helped father take the cows back. It took three days. I led three pack horses, one of which had only been packed a few times. They were a way ahead with the cattle. The wild, foolish pony got scared as we were going through a slough in a swampy place. The water being half-way on their sides; he got his feet over the rope and bucked and reared, run up to my side and would strike my knees with his feet and nose, until I felt sure he would get me under their feet. To make matters worse, my horse balked, and I could not make it go at all. It was pouring rain with snow mixed in, and with the horses splashing the water over me, I was drenched to the skin. I was getting so cold and numb that I could hardly stay on. I tried to call for help, but they could not hear.
I was so long out of sight that father came back to see what was the matter. He had to wade in to get me. I was almost frozen and could not stand up when he got me off the horse. He rubbed me and put his raincoat on me. We went on to find a place to stay all night. We had to stay with two or three bachelors, in a small one-room shack. I had no clothes to change, so slept in my wet underwear. I didn’t even catch cold, but suffered until the next February with toothache. Then we went to Tacoma, and I kept house there for father, while he worked in the mill and I went to school. While there, of course I had my teeth out.
You will wonder why I have told you this. Just because it was one of many, many instances of the hardships we had to pass through. I worked for my board and went to school in Winlock one term. Mother took us to Mossyrock and sent us to school three months.
My ambition from childhood was to get a good education and to make something of myself, and because I could not, and because of awful loneliness, I used to cry myself to sleep almost every night. Through the day when I had time I would go into the woods and lie down to think and cry. I had no girlhood days. Finally the old timers organized a Sunday School. We would meet in the different cabins in bad weather, and out under the trees in nice weather. Later a local preacher and wife came and took a homestead. So then a Methodist church was organized, which I joined, and the few faithful ones kept it going until it has grown to serve the whole community.
We raised good gardens, and always had good food. The only girls that I ever got to see in those days were Mr. and Mrs. Siler’s sisters, when they came in to visit them. Why! But didn’t we have good times together!
Gradually, of course, more settlers came in. They all had to slash, burn, and grub out a little at a time to make a home. Father kept adding to our house until it was 10x40 feet. All split out of cedar except the first room, 10x10.
There was a happy day, especially for mothers, when the first doctor came with his wife and two children. There was still just a trail. He took a homestead and lived there for several years. The game, especially bear and deer, were plentiful. We had plenty of fresh meat without going far away from the house for it.
When I was about sixteen years old, a talkative, jolly, “happy-go-lucky” young man, Jim McMahan came and took up a homestead just across the river from us. He came to our place quite often. I was so hungry for friends and someone to talk to that we became real friends, and when I was 17-years-and-two-months old we were married, then of course I moved to his home. I didn't want to marry so young, but I was just desperate. I thought if I got married, then I would know I could not go to school any more; I would have to take care of my home and help make a home. Jim carried the mail to and from Mossyrock and packed grub and anything else anyone wanted. First, once a week; and then twice a week. I was alone so much and tried hard to do my part in making our new home. We surely have earned the land we now have many times over. After a few years there was a little school started, which has gradually grown to the wonderful school we now have. Then a little log church was built, from that, the beautiful little church we now have, and a parsonage has been built.
When we were married thirteen months, our son, Clarence was born. Seven years later our other son, Neil, was born. During that time and long after, we only had Indian canoes to cross the [Cowlitz] river in. I could paddle the canoes as good as any man. Many, many times I’ve paddled the canoe while the men held the horses by the side of the canoe to swim them across the river. Sometimes they would rear, plunge, strike, and struggle until they would almost fill the canoe with water, or almost tip it over. I know I am safe in saying that I have ferried people, men mostly of course, hundreds of times, and never received a penny for it. Occasionally one would thank me.
When I had the one boy, I would sit down and hold him between my knees to keep him from falling in the water. After I had the two, Clarence would sit flat in the bottom of the canoe and I would hold Neil between my knees and paddle across. It didn’t matter how high the river, or how much drift was running. My folks living just across the Cowlitz River, I would cross to go there almost every day, too. Many, many times all alone, I've paddled across and back of nights going to church and prayer meetings, when it was so dark I could not see my hand before me. God must have been with me to take care of me.
We worked hard and finally got enough land opened that we raised quite a crop of timothy and oat hay among the stumps, which had to be cut with a scythe. Then, oats and wheats, which had to be cut with a cradle.
Eventually, a wagon road was opened up. The settlers volunteered and slashed it out. The stumps and roots were in it, and it was so muddy that the horses were down every little while. It would take from six to ten days to go to Chehalis, 65 miles for a load of whatever groceries, clothing, etc., we would have to have for at least six months ahead. My father carried the first chairs in the valley, strapped upside down on his back with the best breakable things packed in them.
He owned and brought in the first mowing machine. Mr. R. T. Siler packed the first wagon in on horses; father, the second. After a while we had cattle and hogs to sell, and had to drive them to Tacoma, taking a week to get them there. My dear mother had all the hardships of a woman’s pioneer life, and I believe I did, too.
When we first began to take wagons over the road, there were no ferry boats. So they would unload them, ferry the load over, and then tie two canoes together, put two wheels in each canoe, and take the wagon over, load up, then swim the horses, hitch up, and try it again. Gradually the roads were improved, very gradually until the autos came. Now we can go to Chehalis and back in three hours instead of from six to ten days.
I often wonder what the girls of today [1930] would do if they had to live as we lived. Good boxes for chairs, cupboards, and dressers. The rough walls were papered with newspapers. Maybe one fairly nice dress, and two calico or gingham dresses. But really, with all the hardship there was something fascinating, something satisfying, about the pioneer life. We never worried about what we didn't have or couldn’t have, or what we could or would wear. One felt so free and easy out in God’s great outdoors, with all the beauties of nature. It was inspiring and uplifting.
I feel now that I could not possibly go through it again. But I am proud to know I have had a part in helping to develop this little part of the world from a wilderness to a beautiful little valley, blessed with all the blessings of civilization. Good houses, good roads, good people, schools, churches, etc.. How slowly and gradually it has all come about. I could write a whole book telling of the hardships and thrilling incidents we all went through and had, but I hardly think it is necessary. Just read between the lines; think what would, could, and did happen in all those years. There were many joys, also heartaches and disappointments. We, the old timers, will soon al be gone, and I hope to a better land. We trust our children and grandchildren will appreciate the heritage we leave them.
This is from an essay Flora May Randle McMahan wrote in 1930. She lived from May 19, 1874 to September 1, 1955. Her father was James Lawson Randle (1843-1920) and her mother was Dicy Caroline Erwin Randle (1846-1930). J. L. Randle served in a unit of the Union army in the war against the Rebellion of the Southern Slaveholders, and was part of a unit that chased Morgan’s Raiders through Indiana.
May Randle McMahan’s younger son, Neil (1899-1972) was my Grandma Dorothy’s dad, and my father’s grandfather. I met him briefly when I was not even yet two years old, but I have a vague memory of him, and there is a photograph of me sitting upon his lap, which confirmed that I had met him years later when my parents had forgotten our visit to Randle and I insisted that we had been there when he was alive and I had met him. My grandma Dorthy (Dorothy May, 1922-1998) told me about him, and it seems my dad had a good and close relationship with him (I think my dad’s relationship with his father, my grandfather, was not especially close, but I heard that he spent a lot of time with his Uncle Bob and Grandad Neil). I knew Great Granddad Neil’s wife, my great-grandmother Pearl (1901-1995) very well. She was born in 1901, and so was only in her late 70s and early 80s when I spent a week or two in Randle in the summers of 1978, 1980, and 1981. I learned to drive a car and tractor on the farm that Flora May and her mom (Dicy) and dad (J.L.) settled when they arrived as founders of the town of Randle, and I baled hay on that land about fifty years after May wrote the story. I am glad we had a reaper and baler machine hitched to a tractor, and did not have to do the work with scythe and cradle and pitchfork.
(Neil and Eric, 1969)
The “Big Bottom” area of the Cowlitz River valley is a wide and long flat area that must have been a lake thousands of years ago, and it filled up with silt until it became the lovely valley it now is, full of fairly rich and somewhat sandy soil. The Upper Cowlitz tribe that lived in the valley mostly died off in epidemics and malarial fevers in the 1820 and 30s, with survivors fleeing to the Washington coastal region, and the land was left nearly vacant for a few decades until European-Americans settled. In the 1880s when settlers arrived, there were two native families left in the area, and evidently (from May's story above) one of them worked in mail delivery. The settlers tended to be persons (like my Randle ancestors) from Appalachia (especially eastern Kentucky and Tennessee and the Virginia highlands). You may detect some of the eastern Tennessee folkways in my great-great-grandmother's writing as she uses phrases like “I’ve paddled across and back of nights” or the use of “grub” as a verb to mean “work hard under difficult circumstances” when people had to “grub out a little at at time.”
Uncle Bob’s car, 1980
(the first car I drove)
As May’s story shows, Dicy and J.L. weren’t the first European-Americans to settle the valley. In addition to Carlisle and the Chilocoats and Silers, there were bachelors living in shacks. These early immigrants to the Cowlitz River Big Bottom might have been living from a mix of hunting and trapping and working in tree-felling and lumber, as there was a sawmill established in the Randle area as early at 1866. Actually, that's one of my earliest memories; the smell of sawdust and the loud sound of the saw, and my father trying to help me see bats up in the sawmill building. That first visit of mine to Randle must have been late in 1969, when I was about 22-23 months old. Anyway, she doesn’t mention the German August W. Joerk, who made a land claim in 1883, probably two years before J.L. Randle made the cabin for his family, and three years before they arrived.
I remember hearing one story about the notorious James brothers (the criminal insurrectionists gang) in connection with family emigrating out Appalachia on their way to the Midwest, and then from there on to the Washington Territory. The story goes that the family was in a wagon with their belongings, and a wheel had broken or become mired in the mud, and some men rode up on their horses and helped the family fix the wagon and get it back on the road. The men were Jesse and Frank James, and possibly some others, and the oral history in the family was that they were kindly and polite. This must have been in the mid-to-late 1870s, before the family headed out to Washington and before the James Gang met their demise. Of course in those days the trains would have been carrying wealthy persons around, and the fact that my ancestors were migrating by wagon may say something about their class status, and I believe that the James Gang was motivated not just out of resentment against the Union, but also out of some class animosity against wealthy persons. Oddly enough, coming down from my mom’s side of the family there was also oral history about the James gang, as my grandmother’s step-father’s grandfather was an engineer on one of the trains robbed by the gang, and his story was that that Frank and the other men were polite and calm and friendly as they robbed the passengers and crew, but that Jesse was nervous and rude, and seemed like he needed his older brother Frank to calm him down.
Anyway, the families that settled the Big Bottom of the Cowlitz River Valley (Randle and Packwood) were mostly farming folk from highlands of the eastern mountains, and they enjoyed hunting, fishing, and being independent and free from interference of urbanized white-collar America. I remember such attitudes being expressed by my great-grandmother and her younger son, my dad’s youngest uncle (my Uncle Bob, who when I was twelve taught me on the farm how to drive and how to run a tractor). There was an endearing parochialism to my great-grandmother’s views of people outside her little corner of the world. I remember her wondering with amazement why anyone would want to go out of the region and end up in a big city like Chehalis or Tacoma, and god-forbid, Seattle. And going out of Washington State seemed to her about as wild and reckless as riding a rocket to the moon. I think she expressed her misgivings about people going away from Randle or Washington State in a good-natured way, but that sort of parochialism is something I’ve noticed about the Pacific Northwest. Consider that by car it’s more than a single day's journey to drive to any large city outside of the Pacific Northwest; leaving Portland, Seattle, or Vancouver you can’t get to Salt Lake City, San Francisco / Sacramento, or Calgary in a single day’s comfortable drive. So, there is a bit of isolation up there.
Another issue that may have made my great-grandmother skeptical of the idea that anyone should leave Randle was her own personal story. Her mom and dad came to the Big Bottom from Iowa, I believe, in the first decade of the 20th century, when she was a young girl. Her parents divorced, which was almost unheard of in those days, and as she told me, most of her siblings went back to Iowa with their mom, and she stayed in Randle with her dad (and I think also perhaps her younger brother, Warren Earl). Great-Grandma Pearl told me with some sadness in her voice about her dad’s misery at the end of the summer when her older siblings would come to visit, and then leave in August to go back to Iowa to stay with their mother, Sarah Alice Pixler (1864-1919). She said her dad (Milton Thomas Moriarty, 1858-1925) would become despondent and mope around (sounds in retrospect like he was prone to major depressive episodes), and say that it hurt so much when the other children left and went back to Iowa that he might wish they never came at all. So, such impressions might have given my great-grandmother a bias against people leaving Randle, I guess.
Reading this narrative by my great-grandmother’s mother-in-law I notice something else; I get the impression that my great-great-grandmother was an excellent story-teller and a decent writer. Her aspirations to make something of herself, and her sense that her isolated childhood and early marriage may have thwarted her educational ambitions, may have been increased by her being an especially talented or intelligent person. I had a similar feeling about her daughter-in-law, my great-grandmother, as she impressed my mind (seeing her as a 10-year-old or 12-year-old boy) as a woman with significant intellectual power, but who lived with no particular venue beyond her family for expressing her talents or intellect, and no particular help in developing her abilities. My grandmother was like this as well; an avid reader and a fairly well-informed person with opinions on many topics, and some of those opinions were quite progressive and well-informed; she was a short-order cook, and quite good at her work, but if she had been born in 2002 instead of 1922, no doubt she would be in college now, perhaps studying at the University of Washington in Seattle. And while I think being a short-order cook is just as admirable as any other occupation, and a good deal more admirable than many vocations, at least with more opportunities for her, or her mom, or her grandmother, I think they could have had lives even more enriched. Each could have shared their abilities in a wider field.
I’m often aware of this situation with my students, as my university receives many transfer students coming out of Chicago or small Illinois schools who have gone to third-rate public schools and second-rate community colleges (the students who go to the best Illinois K-12 schools—and there are many good ones—tend to prefer the U of I at Urbana or perhaps Northwestern in Evanston or some other private out-of-state school if not Bradley in Peoria). The thing is, in any cohort of 20-30 students making it through the social work program, there are always a few who are intellectually my peers, and several more who could, I’m convinced, have gone to a more prestigious school if they had received the proper preparation in K-12 or if their families had the money it takes to get a better education (UIS may be the most affordable university in Illinois). My university is not bad, but it’s “one of the best small public universities in the Midwest” and accepts about half of all those who apply to attend. We're selective, but not that selective. Sometimes in these students there is that same spark of awareness that they could have done better if life had given them the opportunity. If not for the barriers placed in their way, they would have attended classes without balancing their studies with part-time (or even full-time) jobs, family responsibilities, and the distractions of worrying about whether I will cut their grades because they missed a class when their boss told them to come in to work or face getting fired.
Around the same time my dad's ancestors were settling the town of Randle, my mom had ancestors who were relocating to Port Townsend, Washington, and their lives were quite different. As I read Flora May's account of the settler life in the Cascades of the 1880s and 1890s I marvel at the contrast between the lives of these ancestors of mine, one family in Port Townsend living a middle-class life (my great-great grandfather in that family was a hotel manager), with a background in the German intellectual tradition (they were Ifflands, allegedly related, although not by direct descent, to their great uncle August William Iffland, the German playwright). Every one of the six girls in that family in Port Townsend went to college or nursing school (in fact, the eldest daughter, Louise, who was born just three years after Flora May Randle, was the first woman in Jefferson County, Washington, to earn a college degree at the University of Washington). But of course the value in life doesn't come from education or whether one lives in material ease or difficulty. As Flora May expresses it, "we never worried about what we didn't have or couldn't have" and "there was something fascinating, something satisfying" about that life along the Cowlitz.
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