Know Your Homesteading Roots: The Story of Gertrude Colley

In honor of Mother’s Day, I would like to dig down to my roots and tell you a little about one of my homesteading ancestors. My Great Grandma Gertie was an amazing, lively figure in my childhood. I knew her in her nineties, living alone in a house up on a hillside in Bremerton among her flower gardens, orchids and cats. I was always very intrigued by her. I have this photo of her that I love in my dining room, with her catch of the day from a trip to Canada when my father was little. She was a gardener, crafter, traveller, mountain huckleberry picker, fisherwoman, and spunky gal who refused city garbage service, hauling her own garbage to the dump clear until she passed away from a stroke in 1996.

Back in 1994, she gave an oral history to a relative, of which I am grateful to have a copy in a family history album. Gertrude was born on a berry farm in Starlight, Indiana in 1902, and moved with her parents and four siblings to a homestead in Rapelje, Montana when she was 8 1/2 years old. Her father and brother each took up homesteads and combined them to start a cattle ranch. She recalled, “It was very hard starting out in a strange place. The winters were hard. It was all prairie, and very few settlers…My brother just younger than me and I were most compatible. Our first playthings on the homestead were a pair of pigeons and a cat. We were around horses much of the time, and as time went on, we broke the colts to ride. Our dad gave us two calves to play with. He made a yolk out of wood as for oxen. He helped us hook them up, and as we tried to start them to go, they became frightened and ran away into my dad’s new spring wagon, damaging it. (I can’t help but interject here that this is sounding very much like Laura Ingall’s Wilder’s “Farmer Boy”, don’t you think?) My younger brother and I spent many days riding cattle and horses. There was a lot of riding to do. There was wheat and hay to harvest too…Much of my mother’s shopping was done by catalogue. We lived on the prairie, so all building materials and heating materials had to be hauled from a railroad station. The nearest railroad station was twenty-three miles away.” Gertrude’s family sold the homestead and moved to Washington following a wave of illness, drought, dust and grasshoppers.

There she met her husband, Richard Colley, in Fruitland Washington at the age of nineteen. She says, “We had a simple wedding, as times were hard and we were plain people.” They homesteaded on a farm with a little lake where they raised six children, including my grandfather. He recalls good memories of the Fruitland farm, even though there were hard times. “Our house was on a hill. It only had one bedroom, so we were very crowded. We had no electricity at that house. We used a cistern to store water, that we pumped with a hand pump to get it into our house. It flowed out of a faucet once it was inside the house. We had a lake on our property near our house called Newbill lake. We had good times swimming in the lake, and ice skating on it in the winter. There were two occasions when cars rolled into that lake. We grew hay, grain, and cattle on our place. My dad worked out so we would have enough money. He worked on county roads and hauled supplies into mines by horse and buggy. We had a big summer garden, and a root cellar where we stored the food we grew.” He told me they raised a huge garden to feed all those kids, and his mother canned hundreds of quarts of food. They milked cows and separated the cream, which they sold each week. They also made their own butter. Clothes were washed by hand on a washboard for all six kids! They caught fish in the lake and picked huckleberries in the summer. They would all go up into the mountains with horses and wagons and stay for 2 to 3 days at a time picking gallons of huckleberries. My great grandmother canned the huckleberries in a simple syrup. The kids always had to pick so they would have enough for the year. My grandfather joked that all they ever had to eat were potatoes and huckleberries.

They sold the farm in 1944 and moved to Bremerton to give their children more opportunities. There, Gertrude worked at nursing home and then a Veterans home until she retired at the age of seventy. After her husband died in 1961, she continued to live a full life of independence and adventure. “Since retirement, I have been to Alaska four times on fishing trips and sightseeing. I have been to Arizona, Yellowstone National Park and others. I have elk hunted with horses, done much local fishing and huckleberry picking all the years. I am still looking for more of the same.” Two of those fishing trips were made in her early nineties, and my grandfather recalls her actively fishing every day. She continued to make huckleberry picking trips every year near Mt. Saint Helens and outpicked everyone. They couldn’t get her to stop picking at the end of the day. She worked tirelessly on her flower gardens on the terraces around her house. When anyone showed up for a visit, she would walk them around the house to see every flower and plant. She put her compost directly on the soil around the plants, so eggshells, fruit peels, and coffee grounds would be piled in these little circles around them. You could always tell exactly what she had been eating by looking at her garden. She remained healthy and physically active right up until her stroke. I still remember her ninetieth birthday and what a fun time that was.

Sometimes you have to wonder how much of who you are just runs in your blood. There are times I have felt a lack of a strong cultural identity, or a heritage with traditions rooted in an ancestral home ground. I am coming to realize that this is the experience of North American settlement. My ancestors were settlers, pioneers, homesteaders and farmers. They travelled across the seas, and across the country to live in new places. They married partners from other countries and backgrounds, breaking away from their own cultural traditions. They might have moved several times and started all over again in each place. They cleared land, built homes and grew and put up food. Then, many of them moved into towns and cities and left the homesteads and farms behind. There aren’t many of the traditions steeped in the land that you see in cultures and families living in the same place for centuries or even generations. They must have been diluted by all the moves, marriages, industrialization, urbanization, and time. But sometimes I think to myself, that in working the soil, in canning food, in making my own butter, in camping in the mountains and in picking huckleberries, I am placing myself within a family heritage and cultural identity. I don’t feel like I can really call myself German, Russian, Swedish, Dutch, French, Canadian, or Irish. I suppose I’m an American, I’m an Oregonian, I’m myself. Here I am, a century later, trying in many small ways to live a little more like my great grandmother did. I am tilling fields, planting gardens, filling my pantry and freezers with food, and putting down my roots. It’s comforting to know where those roots come from, and to think that in some ways I am carrying on a heritage of homesteading traditions.