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American Women and Change: Promoting Economic Development
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18575 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1991 |
4,792 Words |
| Author
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Shelley Dreyer Green
Shelley Dreyer Green is a writer and economic development
consultant based in Seattle. She has been an associate of
Boston University's Institute for the Study of Economic
Culture and is the coauthor, with Paul Pryde, of Black
Entrepreneurship in America, Transaction Books, 1990. |
I remember once asking my mother what it was like to live in the covered wagon days. Bemused, she explained those days were a little before her time. I did learn, however, that my great-grand-mother had indeed crossed plains and mountains by covered wagon during the early 1850s.
Cynthia Henderson McComber was born in Indiana in 1849. At age three she traveled with her family from the flat farmlands of Indiana to the rugged Cascade Mountains of Northern California. Along the way, so the story goes, a friendly Sioux chief proposed to exchange her for twenty of his best horses. The offer was refused, and she continued on to Mount Shasta where, some years later, she met and married my great-grandfather, John Fletcher McComber.
Once proprietor of several hundred fertile acres in the rich Napa Valley, John McComber decided the area had become overpopulated and overregulated. He sold his tract in Napa and moved to a new 150-acre homestead on Round Mountain some twenty miles southeast of Mount Shasta. There winters proved rough, growing seasons short, and the terrain rocky and unyielding. But firewood was plentiful and the water was free.
He brought his bride to Round Mountain and for twenty years they eked out a living with a small herd of cattle and a large vegetable garden. Then, one particularly harsh winter, he fell ill and died, leaving behind his 44-year-old widow and their eight children. The following summer, recalled my grandmother, the family packed most of their belongings onto a horse-drawn wagon and made their way down the mountain to the nearby railroad hub of Dunsmuir. Grandma was seven, her oldest sister eighteen. With the money she had made from selling most of the homestead, Cynthia McComber bought and ran a boardinghouse for railroad men. She raised her children and managed to hang onto twenty acres of Round Mountain. Her grandson, Marion Hull, lives there today with his family.
My grandmother, Maude McComber Green, met and married one of the young railroad men who boarded with her mother. Maude and Frank Green moved to Tacoma, then Malden, Washington, where my father was born in February of 1916. He was her third child, the only son to survive in fancy and one of seven children to live to adulthood. At the time of my father's birth and for several years after, Grandma Green ran the large two-story boarding and rooming house next to the family home. During the Depression, Grandpa lost his job as a boilermaker for the Milwaukee Railroad. He spent long periods away from his family including one two-year stretch working in the
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