Grinding Wheat in a Coffee Mill
A pioneer’s recollection of early survival in Western Washington reveals a harsh reality of isolation, lack of basic goods, and the brutal collision of cultures on the frontier.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
In the summer of 1852, Sidney S. Ford and family and Joseph Borst crossed the plains from Missouri, and arrived in Oregon. In the spring of '53, they crossed the Columbia River and came to Ford's Prairie, near Chehalis, where they each took a farm of 640 acres as a donation. Settlers at that time were very few, and the country full of Indians. The nearest place where supplies of any kind could be obtained was Vancouver, 100 miles from here, the trip being made to the Cowlitz River on the Indian trail, and from there by canoe, the time taken to make the trip varying from one to two weeks. Grist mills were unknown in the country, and for several years the only flour had by these and other families was made by the slow and tedious process of grinding wheat in a coffee mill. One of Mr. Ford's sons tells me that he did not have a pair of shoes for ten or twelve years after coming here, the Indian moccasins doing service in their place. This was not from poverty for times were good and money plenty, but shoes could not be had. The Chehalis Indians at that time possessed the country, there being about 500 cedar stockade houses of theirs on Ford's Prairie. Mr. Ford at one time owned a slave; he purchased for a pony a captive that had been held as a slave by a Flathead Indian that had died, thereby saving the slave's life, as the custom was on the death of an Indian to kill his favorite horse and his slaves at his burial.
“Grist mills were unknown in the country, and for several years the only flour had by these and other families was made by the slow and tedious process of grinding wheat in a coffee mill.”
This account of frontier scarcity and the reliance on makeshift tools mirrors the modern 'DIY' ethos of early Seattle startup culture, while the mention of the extreme isolation required to survive in the mid-19th century Chehalis Valley highlights how dramatically the regional infrastructure has transformed.
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