Asleep in the Palouse

When my family came over from Selbu, Norway in 1922, it joined a group of immigrants from the same part of Norway who all ended up in Washington State's Palouse country. This is a region in southeast Washington State characterized by bosomy rolling hills, covered with as much as 250 feet  of wind-shaped volcanic loess, a type of silty sediment that's a byproduct of the Northwest's age of volcanoes. The soil is made to order for wheat culture, and everyone from the family spent at least some time as wheat farmers. (Most of Washington's wheat is so called ``soft wheat,'' and is exported to Asia where it becomes Cup o' Noodles and the different flat breads that are eaten by people in places like India and Pakistan. Only about 10 percent of the state's wheat crop is used domestically). 

``Palouse,'' incidentally, is a word of uncertain origin. Some scholars say it's derived from the name of Palus, a nation of Sahaptin-speaking people who once inhabited the region. Others say it's from the French ``pelouse,'' which means ``lawn'' or  ``short grass.'' In any case, the term is used for the wheat country which stretches roughly from the small town of Rosalia in the north all the way down to the northern bank of the Columbia River. Some scholars even include parts of eastern Oregon. The Palouse also stretches across the Washington-Oregon border as far east as Idaho's town of Palouse. Here's a photo I shot  last week that can give you an idea of the contours of the Palouse.

 

The next photo is shot from Steptoe Butte, the highest point of land in the Palouse. The  brown fields you see are ``summer fallow,'' left unplanted to ``rest'' and soak up the rain for the following year's crop. As you can imagine, irrigation in the conventional senses is impossible on these hilly slopes.

Life for the new immigrants was hard. My family arrived before tractors and self-propelled combines were in use. My dad used to have to hitch up as many as 24 mules to pull the combine -- a piece of farm machinery used to harvest the wheat --and then sew shut and toss the 130 lb. sacks of wheat into railroad boxcars. Here's an early-day photo of the mule rig that pulled the combines.

When the family first arrived, the children were all too young to help all that much, but as soon as they grew tall and strong enough, my grandfather put them all to work, hard, backbreaking work. Here's a photo of my dad and his five older siblings in that first summer of their arrival from Norway. And no, they're not camping out. That tent was home.

Many of the new immigrants never got that far from the Palouse. They joined with other Selbu immigrants and founded a small church, called, perdictably, the Selbu Church.  They thought of it as a daughter church to the historic 800-year-old  Selbu Church back home in Norway where my father, grandparents and many many generations of my family were baptized. 

The church was the center of their lives, and one of the mechanisms by which the new immigrants assimilated into American life. Services initially were in Norwegian only, but my father was in the last confirmation class taught in Norwegian.  Today much of the family has scattered -- mainly to Western Washington -- in search of better jobs, education, and a lifestyle that no longer includes backbreaking farm work. But when they died, many members of my family chose to come ``home'' to the Selbu church's small cemetery that lies amid the wheat fields of the Palouse. Here you can see how the wheat fields verge on the cemetery.

I checked the online records from the cemetery and see the family names I've known forever. Probably at least 20 members of my extended family are buried in this cemetery, and soon the ashes of my Uncle Ole and Aunt Bertha Slind will be placed there, too.  I suppose the Norwegian family names on the tombstones sound like an immigrant's role call: Aune, Baaken, Carleson, Emerson, Garberg, Guldseth, Gunderson, Gustafson, Kjosness, Klegseth, Kyllo, Nervig, Ronsberg, Sather, Solem, Torgeson, Walli and Wigen. And of course there are lots and lots of Slinds.

My grandfather Ole G. Slind is buried there between his first two wives, both of which were named Ingeborg. My grandmother is the Ingeborg O. Slind who died of von Willebrand's Disease in 1930 at the age of 41. Of course I never had a chance to know here. I did meet Ingeborg #2, when she was elderly and frail.  Grandpa's third wife, Anna Walli, is buried beside her first husband Johan Walli.

My Aunt Magna and Uncle Gilbert share a tombstone that is carved with the Selburose about which I wrote a posting last month. In addition to being a common knitting pattern, the Selburose is also found on the municipality of Selbu's coat of arms.

 

My great uncle Jorgen Klegseth (brother of grandmother Ingeborg O. Slind) is buried there, too. He died when I was only one year old, but his reputation as a kind and gentle man lives on in my family, so much so that my brother named one of his children Nicholas Jorgen Slind in his honor. (Jorgen is the Norwegian equivalent of George).

 

Also buried there is my Aunt Johanna Slind Bryant, another victim of the von Willebrand's that plagues my family. She died in 1946, leaving a one-year-old daughter. I think hers was the last in a long line of von Willebrands-related deaths. The disease is still handed down in my family, but modern medicine has made it much more manageble.

 

I don't know how many other family members will be buried here. Today, with our vogue for cremation and the scattering of ashes hither and yon, I don't see a lot of Selbu Church burials happening. While I do support our modern ways of dealing with death, I think cemeteries are invaluable genealogical records. What, I wonder, will be the modern equivalent of simply walking through the cemetery with a camera and notebook?

Comments

[Adam]

Great blog!