New West Book Review

Hard Times: “Child of Steens Mountain”

By Jenny Shank, 1-12-09

Child of Steens Mountain
By Eileen O’Keeffe McVicker with Barbara J. Scott
Oregon State University Press, 160 pages, $16.95

Child of Steens Mountain is Eileen O’Keeffe McVicker’s fascinating chronicle of her depression-era childhood on Steens Mountain in southeast Oregon and her adolescence spent in the nearby town of Burns.  Her Irish immigrant father was a sheep rancher, and her story has a lot to teach readers about not just surviving, but getting the most out of life during hard times. Written with homey eloquence, it reads like a collection of a grandmother’s most memorable stories, and Barbara J. Scott, McVicker’s writing partner, has structured it into a compelling coming-of-age narrative.

McVicker writes, “I was an outdoor child all my life,” and the beauty of her surroundings and her unfettered access to nature was in part why she felt little deprivation despite her family’s spartan lifestyle.  The small house in which the family of five lived lacked indoor plumbing, necessitating daily treks of a half-mile roundtrip to fill buckets with water from a mountain spring. 

On the return from one such trip, a swaying, rabid coyote confronted McVicker’s father.  McVicker’s mother rushed the kids inside and brought out the shotgun.  The moment is tense, because there wasn’t much margin for error for people living in such an isolated place; McVicker writes, “There was no sure cure for rabies than, and even if there had been, the closest hospital to give the series of painful shots was in Winnemucca, Nevada.”

McVicker’s father ("a gentle man to whom no one was a stranger” who took no joy in killing animals) dispatches the coyote with a shot between its eyes, and throughout the book there are many such occasions where McVicker and her family must meet challenges with ingenuity, bravery, and stiff upper lips.  At one point the grammar-school-aged McVicker is herding the family’s sheep on horseback and coyote takes a lamb.  Though she is afraid, she dismounts and chucks rocks at the coyote, then beats it with a juniper stick until it releases the lamb, who survives. 

When McVicker starts high school, she and her younger brother are sent to live in a cabin in town by themselves while their parents continued their ranch work.  The kids have to run the household, feed themselves, do their homework, and arrive on time to school every day with no adult help, and on one occasion an uncle brings them three bushels of ripe tomatoes that they must figure out how to can.  “We had stayed up until midnight Sunday night finishing the tomatoes, because we knew they would be too far gone to use the next day with no refrigeration.” Worried about drunken soldiers carousing in the area, the McVicker children sleep little that night, and when their Aunt Gladys drops by and finds an entire room filled with canned tomatoes, she exclaims, “I can’t believe your uncle Ormond would do this to you kids.”

McVicker writes, “Everyone was just amazed to see what we had accomplished, and we felt rather proud and happy at the attention, but it had never occurred to us not to figure out how to do it.  We couldn’t waste the tomatoes, not out there in that desert country.”

Some of the daily domestic feats that the McVicker family accomplishes would seem to require superpowers.  As my two-year-old ran around naked with a dirty face and uncombed hair through piles of toys and clothes and my six-week-old sat in pajamas that he’d worn for 48 hours straight, I read a passage about McVicker’s mother with awe:  “Mom kept us all in line, fed, bathed, and disciplined, and she lined out our chores every day…The house was always spotless, and when we kids went to school we started out clean and neat.” This section prompted me to ask my mother, who grew up on a Nebraska farm as one of nine children, how her mother managed to keep the family and home presentable.  My mom said that for one thing, they generally started preparing for nine a.m. Sunday mass at six o’clock on Saturday nights, queuing up for weekly baths (without benefit of indoor plumbing), setting out their best clothes and shining their shoes.  Okay kids, next Saturday we shine shoes at dusk.

Child of Steens Mountain moves from one striking anecdote to the next, gradually revealing its larger themes.  McVicker was the first child of loving, hard-working parents who perhaps expected too much of her at too young of an age (though she harbors no bitterness toward them), forced as they were to use the only source of free labor available to them—their children.  As McVicker grows up, she falls in love with a well-liked ranch hand and mechanic, but her strict parents forbid the match.  The story culminates in a secret elopement, McVicker’s estrangement from her parents and eventual reconciliation, an ending that is surprising and touching.

Child of Steens Mountain should prompt other readers to investigate how their own families coped during lean times, and it’s a story that should give courage to anyone who has to live on reduced means.  As Eileen O’Keeffe McVicker’s memoir demonstrates, Westerners used to manage it with aplomb.

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