❖ NO ROADS? With June Burn ❖

 

CHICKAWANA
San Juandering with writer June Burn on 
Orcas Island, San Juan Archipelago, WA.
Click image to enlarge.
From the archives of the 
Saltwater People Historical Society©

In the old days, there were no roads. Many now living can remember when the first wagon was driven from Olga to East Sound. "No limousine ever looked so bright and beautiful and luxurious," said one of those early settlers.
      I suppose the earliest settlers boiled over from the Fraser River goldrush into this section as they had come to the Olga neighborhood. Mr. King, who settled here over 45 years ago, said he came to Orcas instead of to Whatcom county because it was so easy to get here. There were no roads back into the vacant land of Whatcom in the early 1880s, but the road to the islands has always been clear. Somebody had told him he ought to come to see the islands. He came, he saw and was conquered, and he and his wife live yet in the cedar log house which he built down by the bay way back yonder in 1885 or '86.
      We drove in the 75-cent moon down to the King Ranch, going on up first to see the moon path across Cascade Lake and saw instead the long white tracks where the skaters had been.
      This beautiful house, built of squared cedar logs, stands as securely as it stood forty years ago, the very same mortar perfectly solid in the chinks. Mr. King and a helper got the cedars out of the woods, squared them with an ordinary ax, set them up, and finished the house in two months. Logs go all the way to the points of the gables and inside the house, the walls are whitewashed logs, very attractive. Even the cracks in the logs (not between them) are interesting, and the huge fine old square piano set against one of these handmade walls books perfectly at home, as if music were no hifalutin' snob.
      On the wall inside the piano hangs a panel on which five pairs of deer horns are mounted. Mr. King killed them all one night thirty years ago, though he says he shares the honors with his wife. "Yes," she agrees," I held the lantern while he shot them and I stumbled over one dead deer after another following after him and I got my skirts bloody." The deer these days ate the gardens faster than the settlers could eat the deer. The Kings were raising strawberries and blackberries for the market. Also, there was road work. These two slender sources of income plus the garden and the deer made up their living. The schools lasted only three or four months, Mrs. King used to teach the school at Doe Bay for $23 a month and her board. When the three-month term was out then she would come over to East Sound and teach for another four months. At Doe Bay, she used to board around between the Vierecks, the Moores, and the Greys, walking to school of course--walking, if need be, all the way to East Sound.
      The mailman used to walk, too, with his pouch of mail on his back, following that long road three times a week. Sometimes he rode what Mr. King calls a cayuse.
      

Eastsound, Orcas Island, 
San Juan Archipelago, WA.
Click image to enlarge.
Original photo from the archives of the 
Saltwater People Historical Society©

      There used to be a lime quarry near East Sound and the limerock is still there in paying quantities. But a syndicate bought up the land, stopped work for some reason, and so we still have as much limerock as ever. Shattuck kept store in the old days. He had a bolt of calico, a strip of bacon, and a pair of overalls," and what else was there to want?
      The Kings have lived off the land a good deal trying to keep up with their children in their goings and comings. But now that the children are all settled the two young old people have come back to the log house where they spent their first years together. Mrs. King is busy piecing a quilt of the pattern "glittering star," her stitches tiny and many. There are the flowers, too, and the grapes, the garden, the wood-getting, the canning and a swarm of things to keep them as busy as they used to be, and I declare they seem as happy as any young couple I ever saw just starting out. I tell you, there is some magic about this pioneering way of life which for the right people makes the most real happiness anybody can know.
      It was the gayest, warmest sunniest morning of the "cold spell" when I took the Chickawanna once more to go on to Orcas another village at which I had never stopped. East Sound slipped back against the bright background of island green as the little boat clicked off down the bay and disappeared as we rounded the west prong of the big island. There are worlds of interesting things and people at Olga and East Sound which I have not mentioned but there will be times again to come San Juandering. See you tomorrow. June.

June Burn 

Puget Soundings

22 January 1930