Originally published in Oregon Quarterly
Winter 2002

So when exactly was it that the Pioneer Mother sat down to read a book?The woman who sat — emphasis on the sat — for Alex Proctor’s statue of the Pioneer Mother was an anonymous New Jersey lady undoubtedly grateful for the model’s fee she earned during the worst days of the Great Depression. But the statue, installed on the UO campus in 1932, was meant to honor a real Oregon pioneer, Lucinda Cox Brown, the sainted grandmother of university vice president Burt Brown Barker. Mrs. Brown came across the Oregon Trail in 1847, when the going was the toughest, traveling with her children and husband. Mr. Brown died and was buried along the way, leaving his wife to fend for herself. She laid claim to and worked a section of Willamette Valley farmland, raised her children, and survived the rigors and perils of pioneer life alone. It is ironic that the prolific sculptor choose to honor this hard-working woman by casting her as a sedentary figure. It is unlikely that Lucinda – or her composite compatriot below – spent much time relaxing in a chair. A Pioneer Mother’s life was not about sitting.A Pioneer Mother — we’ll call this one Sarah — awoke an hour before dawn on a mid-summer day in 1858. Sarah’s mother used to say that a decent woman is in bed only between the hours of 7 p.m. and 4 a.m. unless she is in labor or dead. Sarah was neither, so it was time to start the day. Anyway, Lucy, the baby, was awake. She had the croup and was coughing that terrible barking cough.So Sarah left the warmth of the bed that she shared with Henry, her husband of ten years, left him snoring softly in a nest of quilts, lit the kerosene lamp, scooped up the baby from her flannel-lined apple crate and, cradling Lucy to her breast with one arm, started a small fire in the cook stove with her free hand. Then she took a dipper of water from the barrel by the side of the stove, ladled it into a pot, and sprinkled in the elderberries and black elder stems she’d gathered the day before. She stood before the stove, swaying gently side to side to comfort the baby as the water boiled. She would make an infusion with the berries and add it to a tincture of purple coneflower. It was good medicine. It had seen all of her children — Lucy, her three sisters and her brother Charles — through many illnesses. The nearest doctor was a half-day’s ride away.She finished nursing Lucy as the infusion cooled, then fed the baby several spoonfuls and put her back in the crate with a rag doll. Now there was just enough light to see into the corners of the cabin, and Sarah saw that the big wood box was almost empty. It was Charles’ chore to keep it full. She’d have to talk to him about that. He was only eight years old, but he was the oldest, and she needed his help. For now, though, she would take care of it herself. She wanted to get a good fire going in the stove so she could do her baking early in the day before it got too hot.By the time she’d chopped the wood and restocked the box and stoked the fire and gone to the hen house for eggs and mixed and kneaded the dough for bread, Henry and the children were awake. Jane, the six-year-old, set the table for breakfast and then went to play with the baby. Sarah cooked eggs and oatmeal mush and put out buttermilk, slabs of coarse bread, and her last jar of Oregon grape jam. It was time to put up more preserves. She dreaded the long hours she would have to spend in front of simmering pots in the heat of summer, but it was worth the effort. There was nothing like that burst of sweetness on the tongue on a dank, gray January day. But summer meant more than putting up jellies, jams, and preserves. It meant weeks of canning corn, tomatoes, beets, peas, and carrots, applesauce and apple butter, wild blackberries and pears, chicken and venison, cabbage and pickles. Hundreds of jars would line the shelves of the root cellar by the end of September.She’d have to make time for the jam soon. Maybe after the beans. They had to come first. There were two bushels waiting for her in the root cellar plus whatever else was still on the vine. She’d been lucky with the kitchen garden this year. Well, luck was part of it, anyway. Mostly it was stoop labor. And this year had been tougher than most. There had been no rain through most of June and all of July, and she’d carried hundreds of buckets of water from the well to keep the garden going.She punched down the pillows of dough rising on the table by the stove, covered them with a cloth, and gave Henry a quick kiss. He was off to the hayfields with Charles in tow. Sarah was off to the chicken coop and the barn. She called for Mary Anne, her three-almost-four-year-old to come along and bring with her the sack of chicken feed. Mary Anne was old enough to take over the chore of feeding the chickens, but she was afraid of them, of their quick movements and sharp beaks and loud squawks. On the way to the barn, Sarah talked to Mary Anne softly about the chicks and the eggs they laid and how much they all loved those eggs. She opened the gate for Mary Anne and watched her daughter stick a tentative hand into the feed sack and then throw a tiny handful of seeds on the ground. The chickens came running, and Mary Anne, suddenly surrounded, panicked and began to cry. She would have to learn, but today wasn’t the day. There was already too much to do. Sarah sent her back to the house and finished the chore. Then she made her way to the barn, where the two cows waited.She liked milking, the sweet smell of the hay, the stillness of the barn, Clover’s warm flank against her cheek, Bessie’s watchful brown eyes. The cows were good producers, too. The family had all the milk and cream and buttermilk they could drink, more than they needed, in fact, so Sarah used some of the cream to make butter to sell in town. They needed the money for all those things they couldn’t grow or make themselves, for sacks of sugar, bolts of fabric, and iron skillets. She walked back to the house carrying two heavy pails that sloshed with milk, setting them in the root cellar so the cream could rise to the top. The milk would sour, too. These summer days were warm, and the cellar was never cooler than sixty degrees. That’s what she wanted. Sour cream made the best sweet butter. But the butter would have to wait. For now, she formed loaves from the risen dough, placed the pans in the oven, and called to Jane to help her fetch water from the well. Jane’s bucket would be only a quarter full, but it would help.Today wasn’t normally her wash day, but with the two youngest in diapers, and one of them sick, it was hard to wait a week between washings. She and Jane carted pails of water from the well and filled four large pots on the stove. Sarah carried at least sixteen buckets of water a day from the well to the house, and that’s when no one was taking a bath. While the water heated, she took the bread out of the oven, then nursed the baby and gave her a few more spoonfuls of medicine. Still, the water wasn’t hot enough, so she wrapped a light shawl around the baby and took her out to the garden to have a look around.The deer had learned to stay away — Henry and his shotgun had seen to that — but she saw that the rabbits had eaten the tops of the beets. She smiled. Let them fatten up in the garden, she thought. We’ll get them in the stewpot later. It was the raccoons she was concerned about. They were nasty little animals who tore up everything, whether they ate it or not. Maybe Henry and Charles could go ‘coon hunting tonight.She stopped to weed a row of onions, placing the baby on the soft ground by her side. She’d have to get Jane and Mary Anne out here to do some more weeding, but it was hard to spare Jane for any chores. She was so good with the baby, and she kept Hannah, the two-year-old, happy and occupied while Sarah went from task to task. But little Mary Anne couldn’t do the weeding alone. She couldn’t yet distinguish between weed and plant and would do more harm than good in the garden. Sarah wished, not for the first time, that her children were older and could be of more help. Pioneer life was hard, much harder than she imagined back on her parents’ well-established farm in Illinois.Finally, the water in the pots on the stove was simmering, so Sarah poured it into the big tin basin, added the diapers and a few shavings from a cake of soap. She’d let that soak while she started on the noon meal. There was rabbit stew from yesterday. She added chunks of the first of this year’s potatoes and had Jane and Mary Anne string a few handfuls of fresh beans to put in the pot. Jane carried the meal out to the fields to her father and brother: two covered tins of stew along with a half dozen biscuits and a big jar of buttermilk.Sarah ate quickly with the younger children, then got to the wash. The harsh soap chafed and reddened her hands, the knuckles big and knobby like tree burls. She looked at them as if they didn’t belong to her. I’m only twenty-eight, she thought, and I already have my grandmother’s hands. Then she chided herself for her moment of vanity and went out to the hen house to collect the eggs she hadn’t had time to get that morning. She’d sell the extra eggs, along with the butter.The butter. That was next. She had skimmed cream off the top of the milk pails all week and had enough now to make a fair-sized batch. The cream in the pail had soured — she dipped her finger in to taste it — which meant the butter would separate out more easily, although easily was not a word one used when talking about making butter. She filled the churn half-full with cream, secured the wooden top, and pulled the plunger all the way up, then pushed it down. Up. Down. Up. Down. The plunger needed to move quickly — the more agitation, the faster the butter separated out. As she found her rhythm, she felt the muscles in her shoulders and back start to complain. She had no idea how long she’d have to churn. Her mother used to say that, depending on conditions, it could take from a half-hour to forever. Anything more than ten minutes felt like forever anyway. This time it took an hour. The cream must have been just a little too warm.Finally, she lifted the lid to the churn and saw the butter floating on the surface. She ladled it out into a bowl, pouring in a small amount of cold well water and working the butter with a paddle. When the water discolored, she poured it out and poured more water in, working the butter again and again until the water remained clear. If she didn’t do that, the butter would go rancid. Then she sprinkled it with salt, added more fresh water, and began working it again into smoothness. She packed the butter tightly into molds, working quickly now because the air inside the cabin was warm enough to make the butter run. She’d finish the job tomorrow morning while it was cool. For now, the molds could sit in the cellar.She’d almost forgotten about the diapers soaking in the tub. She scrubbed them on the washboard, rinsed them in a pail of clean water, and sent Jane out to hang them on the line. Sarah nursed the baby again and then set up Mary Anne to shell peas for dinner. They’d have chicken tonight, which meant Sarah had to go grab one of the older hens from the coop. She took the cleaver with her. Killing the bird was the easy part. Plucking it was another matter. Finally, she put the bird in the stew pot surrounded by onions and potatoes from the garden. Tonight’s dinner would also be tomorrow’s noon meal.The girls were dirty from making mud pies by the well. Sarah heated a large pot of water on the cook stove so she could at least wash their faces and hands. Bodies would have to come later. She tried to give her children a bath a week, but sometimes that just wasn’t possible. Henry and Charles came in from the fields, hot and sweaty and hungry. They all ate together at the big table, Sarah cradling the baby in one arm. Lucy was still fussy. Although the elderberry medicine seemed to be helping her cough, she needed to be held. The hen was a little stringy but no one complained.Tonight Charles cleared the table and scraped and washed the plates because Sarah had one more big chore to do before dark, and she needed Jane’s help. They had to get at least some of those green beans in jars and process them before they lost their snap. Later in the week, Maggie, her nearest neighbor, would come by for a full day of canning, but some of the beans just couldn’t wait that long. She grabbed a bushel basket from the cellar, and while Jane snapped the ends off the beans, Sarah fetched a pail of water from the well and began heating it on the stove. First she’d boil the canning jars. Then she and Jane would pack them tight with beans, secure the lids and boil them again.When the last batch was on the stove, Sarah remembered the cows. They needed to be milked again. Henry was tending to their workhorse, who’d been limping lately, and Charles was chopping wood, so Sarah headed out to the barn to do her last chore. That is, if she didn’t count nursing the baby once more and bringing all the jars of beans down to the cellar and taking the wash down from the line and laying a fire in the cook stove for tomorrow morning and fetching a fresh pail of water and putting the children to bed.She wished she could just sit for a moment in the big oak chair that she’d brought with her over the trail from Illinois. It was a silly piece of furniture. It looked more like a throne than a chair, and she was certainly no queen, but it reminded her of home, and she loved it. She would have liked to sit there as the last of the summer light faded. Just sit. She might daydream for a while, or take a moment to read to her children from the big Bible. Maybe tomorrow, after she’d done the baking and put up the jam, after she’d made the trip to town to sell her eggs and butter, after she’d milked the cows and fed the chickens. If Lucy was feeling better. Maybe tomorrow.Lauren Kessler MS ’75 is the author of ten books, including the upcoming Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley’s Life In and Out of Espionage (HarperCollins, Summer 2003). She directs the literary nonfiction program at the UO’s School of Journalism and Communication, and believes indoor plumbing is a gift from the gods.Pullquotes: A decent woman is in bed only between the hours of 7 p.m. and 4 a.m. unless she is in labor or dead.I’m only twenty-eight, she thought, and I already have my grandmother’s hands.Sarah wished, not for the first time, that her children were older and could be of more help.Churning butter could take from half an hour to forever.Killing the chicken was the easy part. Plucking it was another matter.She tried to give her children a bath a week, but sometimes she just couldn’t.