A Toddler’s Three-Hour Trek Through the Sagebrush
A local mother’s panic turned to relief after tracking her two-year-old child through the scrub for miles.
When Mrs. Wm. McKay let her little two-year-old daughter, Ina, out of the house last Sunday morning about 10:30, shortly after her husband had gone hunting, she little knew of the experience in store for her before she saw her baby again. She was missed about a half hour later, and when Mrs. McKay went to look for her she was nowhere in sight, nor would she answer when called. Then began a search by a frantic mother and a few of the neighbors that ended only when the mother found the child about three hours later leaning against a sage brush just a short distance south and west of the Growers Warehouse, and crying “Mamma.” The little tot had traveled about two miles in all.
“The mother had just about given up at 1 o’clock, when she found the child’s tracks in the sage brush.”
The vast, open landscape of the Columbia Basin still presents risks for the unwary, but in 1916, it was an even more isolating wilderness for a family. This story captures the immense relief that defined tight-knit, rural communities where the loss of a child was a shared neighborhood emergency.
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