When I was 19 years old [1882], before I was married, my future husband's sister, Alice [age 16] and I
were cooking at a sawmill for about 20 men. My six older brothers owned and ran the sawmill and the
rest of the men were working for them. They built one house there which served as the kitchen, dining room,
pantry, and bedroom for Alice and me. The boys slept in tents.
One day after dinner when the work was all done, I stretched myself out on a long bench (we had
one on each side of the table) and said to Alice, "Shall we lie down and take a snooze or go down
and pick some strawberries?" It was June and the wild strawberries were just getting ripe.
The boys had seen a bear up in the timber, but we didn't think it would come that close to the
mill on account of the noise, so we didn't worry about bears. We decided to go.
We thought we could smell cotton burning, so before we left we looked in the stove, went outside
and checked the tents where the boys slept, also looked in a box of cotton wadding, but couldn't
find anything burning. We took our little tin cups and went after the berries which were thick
about half a mile away.
We had just picked enough to cover the bottom of our cups when the mill whistle blew. We knew
something had happened for that wasn't the time of the day for the whistle to blow. We ran toward
the cookhouse. In a little while here came my brother, Joe. He had an awful look on his face.
I thought something had happened to
my brother, Dan, who was the sawyer! The first thing Joe said was, "You girls are goners!" Then
he told us the cookhouse had burned down.
When the men saw the fire, they thought we were in the house and ran and opened the door and saw
that the whole thing was ablaze and we weren't in there. They couldn't go in and get anything
out of the house as there was a gun in each corner and they kept going off. They had all they
could do to keep the mill from burning, so they had to let the house go. Some of
the piles of lumber got on fire.
They had just got in a big load of food stuff the night before and stored it in the house. It all
burned up so we were left without any supper. The first thing to do was to send a man to Benchcreek
to borrow some flour to tide us over until we could get to Kamas for more supplies. While the boys
were decided who would go, along came a tribe of Indians and the boys got some deer meat from
them. The Indians saw the smoke and came to see what happened. They knew about
the sawmill and they knew my brothers.
The boys put the stove up under some trees and plastered the cracks with mud, but we couldn't
make it bake, so had to cook biscuits on top of the stove. We got all the tin dishes, knives,
forks, and spoons and scoured them to eat with. We all had meat and dough gobs for supper.
We had no table so ate in all kinds of positions.
Alice and I had no bedding and only the clothes on our backs. The boys divided their bedding with
us and gave us money donations for clothes. We had to go home to Benchcreek on the next Sunday to make
ourselves a house dress each and get what other things we needed.
The cotton we had smelled burning was the covers on
our bed which was in the corner of the cook house. Somehow a spark got in there and smouldered
till it broke out into a fire. If we had gone to take a snooze instead of picking strawberries,
we would have found that fire!
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