http://www.theolympian.com/olyinside/story/751044.html
The Olympian
Published February 08, 2009
'Child of Steens Mountain' a heartwarming tale
Barbara McMichael
Reading "Child of Steens Mountain" this week was like giving myself an early valentine. This memoir by Eileen O'Keeffe McVicker, daughter of an Irish sheep rancher and a plucky schoolteacher, is a captivating tale that weaves together elements of family love, frontier romance, and the end of a remarkable era.
Steens Mountain, a looming presence in arid southeast Oregon, was one of the last areas open to 20th century homesteaders in the continental United States. It was here that Ben and Izola O'Keeffe settled and started a family. Their daughter Eileen, born in 1927 and the oldest of three children, recalls homesteading as "a hard, happy life with layers of riches."
The hardscrabble circumstances of her Depression-era childhood were a defining fact of life, but nothing to complain about. "With a mother who had banished the word can't from our language and a father who recited poetry while herding his sheep, we didn't dare dwell on the negative," McVicker writes.
She matter-of-factly recalls the litany of chores she was expected to perform — carrying water (their house had no indoor plumbing), sewing and mending clothes, gardening and preserving food, cooking meals, herding sheep, milking the goat, chopping firewood.
And then there was walking the five miles to the one-room schoolhouse — that didn't have electricity.
"Little kids who lived on a ranch had to be pretty tough," McVicker says. Both cooperation and self-reliance were cultivated from an early age.
When the children found time to play, it was with rocks and sticks and bullfrogs and whatever else they could get their hands on. The entire landscape was their playground, and they made the most of it. If they got into occasional scrapes with snakes and coyotes and > drunken sheepherders, they came through their misadventures a little smarter every time.
While this is a story about a particular family, time and place, "Child of Steens Mountain" also carries universal themes of family rearing and coming of age.
McVicker's parents had encouraged their children's independence from early on, trusting (probably more than any 21st century parent could conceive of) in their children's abilities to fend for themselves. Yet that trust came to an abrupt halt once their eldest daughter caught the eye of a new hired hand from Portland.
The young couple's love story developed despite parental disapproval, and while the details of her secret courtship and elopement seem quaint by today's standards, it is clear from her telling that it was painful for her to defy her parents.
But all's well that ends well: she has been married to Gene McVicker for more than 60 years.
Now living on Sauvie Island, Eileen McVicker organized this narrative with the help and encouragement of her neighbor, award-winning author Barbara J. Scot ("The Violet Shyness of Their Eyes").
Their collaboration has produced a jewel of a book, which is not just a valuable historical record of a vanished way of life, but also a heartwarming story of resilience, reconciliation and love.
The Bookmonger is Barbara Lloyd McMichael, who writes this weekly > column focusing on the books, authors and publishers of the Northwest. > Contact her at bkmonger@ nwlink.com
For Eileen O’Keeffe McVicker, born in 1927 to an Irish immigrant sheep rancher and a schoolteacher, growing up on a homestead made for “a hard, happy life with layers of riches.” In her memoir of a childhood spent on the southern slope of Steens Mountain, McVicker offers an appealing, personal account of eastern Oregon history.
An “outdoor child” who never knew boredom, McVicker recounts the everyday adventures of life on the high desert. Images of Steens country—rugged vistas of startling beauty in every direction—are woven throughout her recollections. While vividly describing ranch life, Child of Steens Mountain also explores universal issues of parenting, making a living, and coming of age. The homesteading life built a child’s character and confidence, and as she reaches adulthood, McVicker, raised to be independent and responsible, ultimately defies her parents to follow her own path.
In an afterword, McVicker’s friend and neighbor, author Barbara J. Scot, who edited and organized the narration, describes the collaborative process—including a visit to the old homestead site—that led to this book. Historian Richard Etulain, whose own childhood was spent on a sheep ranch in the West, provides an overview of sheep ranching and homesteading in Steens country in his foreword.
“Reading Child of Steens Mountain, I felt as if I was holding a rare gift in my hands—a window into a way of life that although not far in the past has now almost entirely disappeared from our world; and equally, a story of a young girl's coming of age, and the bonds of family, written simply and beautifully, chiming with all our familiar human concerns. I was completely taken with this book from page one.” –Molly Gloss, author of The Hearts of Horses and The Jump-Off Creek
The Author Eileen O’Keeffe McVicker and Barbara J. Scot are neighbors on Sauvie Island, north of Portland, Oregon, who met while walking their dogs.
McVicker, born near Fields, Oregon, in 1927, lives on an acreage with fruit trees and a large shop where she and her husband practice several arts and crafts in an active retirement. They also have a house in Burns, Oregon, where they spend time in the summer.
Scot, a public school teacher for twenty-five years, began to write after a tour with the Peace Corps in Nepal in 1991. She has published three books: The Violet Shyness of Their Eyes: Notes from Nepal (winner of the PNBA Book Award); Prairie Reunion (New York Times Notable Book of the Year); and The Stations of Still Creek. An avid fan of the outdoors, she has spent much of her life climbing mountains, backpacking, running, and bird watching. She and her husband live in a houseboat on the Willamette River.
Richard W. Etulain is professor emeritus of history and formerly director of the Center for the American West at the University of New Mexico, where he taught from 1979 until retirement in 2001. He is the author or editor of more than forty books, most of which focus on the history and literature of the American West. They include Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature and Beyond the Missouri: The Story of the American West.
http://oregonstate.edu/dept/press/c-d/ChildofSteens.html
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Take a look at Steens Mountain ! http://www.ubcbotanicalgarden.org/potd/2007/07/steens_mountain.php
"Child of Steens Mountain" by Jeff Baker, The Oregonian Friday November 07, 2008, 1:18 PM Ben O'Keeffe was an Irishman from County Kerry who passed through Ellis Island in 1920 and got on a train for Lakeview. The morning after he arrived in Oregon he was herding sheep in Lake County. O'Keeffe wound up in southeastern Oregon, near the town of Blitzen. He married the local teacher, and they started a family and moved to a homestead north of Fields, in the foothills of Steens Mountain.
The life they lived there was idyllic and backbreaking: They had no indoor plumbing and hauled their water a quarter-mile from a spring. Six people lived in a 24-by-24-foot house but didn't spend much time inside because there was always work to be done. In the summer they grazed the sheep high in the mountains and lived in a cabin 25 miles from home. The 20th century seemed far away, in Portland or San Francisco or some other place that never touched Steens Mountain. The O'Keeffes were one family among many that settled in southern and eastern Oregon before World War II and tried to hang on. Their story is lovingly told by their daughter, Eileen O'Keeffe McVicker, in "Child of Steens Mountain," a memoir that describes a way of life that ended a short time ago but feels long gone. If you canned all your fruits and vegetables and didn't eat meat in the summer because there was no way to preserve it, you were normal, no different than your neighbors. If there were rattlesnakes hiding in the cellar, you had to try to poke them away with a broomstick. If there was a rabid coyote in the yard, you had to shoot it.
Nobody complained. Everyday details jump out from every page of "Child of Steens Mountain." Ben O'Keeffe was nicknamed Steens Mountain Ben and wrote and recited poetry while tending his sheep. He "could walk faster than a horse," his daughter writes. The one-room schoolhouse in Fields had no electricity, and the teacher or a parent had to build a fire every morning. Sometimes the children kept their coats on all day. A bummer lamb is a lamb that has lost its mother or the mother had twins and not enough milk to feed both. The outside world did reach into Steens Mountain. One year during the Great Depression, Ben O'Keeffe went broke and, his daughter writes, "Dad paid the workers and had to give up the sheep to the bank." Later the family moved to Burns, and McVicker fell in love with a young man who goes off to fight in World War II. "Child of Steens Mountain" is a short, sharply drawn book with a helpful introduction by historian Richard Etulain, who grew up on a sheep ranch in eastern Washington. McVicker's story was greatly aided by her Sauvie Island neighbor Barbara J. Scot, the author of "The Violet Shyness of Their Eyes" and "Prairie Reunion." In an afterword, Scot explains how she helped McVicker organize and expand her sketches into a book. "Memory is kaleidoscopic, not linear," Scot writes, and what the O'Keeffes did on the slopes of Steens Mountain has been preserved like fruit in a canning jar for readers to enjoy.
Details: CHILD OF STEENS MOUNTAIN Eileen O'Keeffe McVicker with Barbara J. Scot Oregon State University Press $16.95 paperback, 138 pages Reading: McVicker and Scot discuss "Child of Steens Mountain" at 7 p.m. Thursday at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St.
http://www.oregonlive.com/events/index.ssf/2008/11/nonfiction_review_child_of_ste.html