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The Swett Homestead, 1909-79
Dwellings on the Swett homestead, left to right, are: original one-room log cabin, five-room house, two-room log cabin. Unless noted otherwise, all photographs arefrom a U.S. Fewest Service report in the USHS National Registerfiles.
NESTLED IN THE NORTHEAST CORNER OF UTAH, high in the Uinta Mountains near Flaming Gorge Dam, is the area of Greendale Though now mostly National Forest with a sprinkling of private homes, seven decades ago this was a homesteading community of at least six families. Oscar and Emma Swett were among the first homesteaders to arrive and were the last to leave Their homestead is now a visitor site in the Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area, administered by the U.S. Forest Service. Their story of twentieth-century homesteading illustrates the enormous technological changes that have swept this nation during the twentieth century and how people have reacted to those changes.1
The Swett and Green families, related by marriage, began to use the Greendale area in the first decade of this century as pasture for their cattle Coming from the area around Vernal, they were part of the Mormon pioneer heritage of expansion. By this time very little good agricultural land was still available in the public domain. The homesteaders' dream of an agrarian life of independence and self-sufficiency was dying.
Yet there was a final episode to this dream. In an attempt to open up more land Congress passed the Forest Homestead Act in 1906. Greendale was National Forest land, and within three years at least four families, Swetts and Greens, had moved into the area. Their new home encompassed marginal agricultural land. At that altitude, over 7,000 feet, alfalfa will not grow, but the native grasses, when irrigated, serve well as hay. Cattle ranching and sheep herding provided a way to survive.
Oscar Swett and Emma Eliza Osiek were wed in 1912. The next spring, Emma bore a daughter, Mary Elizabeth, the first of seven daughters and two sons. 2 Emma chose the names of all her children, and her husband gave each of them nicknames by which he called them. When their daughter Mary Elizabeth was only three weeks old, the small family moved up to Greendale. Oscar's older brother, Jim, and his family were already homesteaders there.
Four years earlier, in the summer of 1909, Oscar's mother, Elizabeth Ellen Swett, had filed a claim on 151 acres of land for him since he was not old enough to legally do so for himself. When he reached legal age he filed on additional land next to it, and he and his wife began to fulfill their dream of having a small ranch.
Oscar chose a beautiful spot for their new home, locating it at the north end of their homestead next to an aspen grove and East Allen Creek. The hillsides to the south were covered with Ponderosa pine, while to the north and west they enjoyed a commanding view of the meadow that made up most of their homestead. Beyond, in the distance, one could see all the way to Wyoming
Their first home was an abandoned one-room log cabin located in McKee Draw. Oscar disassembled the cabin, hauled the logs to the homestead, and put it back together. It had originally had a dirt roof, but Oscar replaced that with a wood roof which he shingled.
The Swetts and the other homesteaders altered the landscape to suit their needs by pulling sagebrush from the mountain meadows to create hay fields; by dredging a ditch some fifteen miles long—the Greendale Canal—to bring irrigation water to each of the homesteads; and by turning trees into miles of fence. The local economy was based on cattle. The families ran their herds of cattle on the surrounding National Forest land, using the hay on their homesteads for feed during the winter. In the fall they drove the cattle north to Green River, Wyoming, or south into the Uinta Basin to be sold.
During the first few years Oscar and his young family lived on their homestead only during the summer. Oscar's mother, who also lived up there, taught her new daughter-in-law how to cook the dishes Oscar liked. Daughter Irma described this food, much of it cooked in a small black kettle: "We ate good meals . . . potatoes, gravy and meat, bread and butter, and fruit and vegetables."3 During the winter the Swetts stayed on Oscar's mother's small ranch in Vernal, where Oscar helped his younger brothers with the chores. Those first years were rough as the Swetts labored to improve their homestead. They did not have a lot of money, but there were neighbors and relatives nearby to help. Emma did much of the work, pulling up sagebrush by hand while her young children followed her and made a game out of piling up the sagebrush into stacks for burning. It took them about twenty years to finally clear all the fields on their homestead. Emma also "took care of the milk cow, pigs, chickens and other chores as well as washed clothes, cooked, kept house, canned, gardened, and sewed. The children helped as they became big enough."4 When her husband needed assistance Emma helped, and when he was gone she did his chores. During the summer the fields had to be irrigated, so "even while nursing a baby, she would walk to the far fields to change the water, walk home to feed a baby, then head for the fields again."5 In addition to making their clothes, Emma even repaired her children's shoes with her own cobbler equipment
The Swetts present an interesting case study of self-sufficiency and interdependence with the larger economy. Although they made their own clothing, they bought the cloth in Manila or Vernal. Emma had her own garden and bottled incessantly, both fruit and meat, putting up somewhere between five hundred and a thousand quart bottles a year Whenever Oscar found a piece of metal along the road he took it home and added it to a collection of odds and ends in the field around his blacksmith shop. This enabled him to repair the farm implements they used. In the early years, before they owned an automobile, they made a trip by wagon down to Vernal in the spring and in the fall in order to stock up on supplies and foodstuffs. While in town they visited relatives, picked fruit to take back, and went to the rodeo if it was that time of the year.
They bought supplies in bulk. Oscar made a separate trip to buy flour, since he bought it by the ton. Idabell remembered that
Homestead life was not all work The Swett children recalled with fondness the festivities that the Greendale families engaged in with each other, creating a community social life. On holidays, such as Thanksgiving and Christmas, the Greendale families gathered together to celebrate Occasionally they held dances in the one-room Greendale schoolhouse, accompanied by music from Sanford Green's hand-cranked phonograph. The Swetts visited neighbors in their horse-drawn sleigh during the winter and stayed late into the night; the adults talked while the children played.
For several years Oscar, Emma, and three children lived in the cramped quarters of their single-room cabin. All five slept together in the only bed—a large box in the corner filled with straw and covered with blankets. When another daughter, Myrle Augusta, was born in the spring of 1919, Oscar, with the help of relatives and neighbors, built a two-room log cabin to provide more room for his growing family. Yet even in this larger cabin privacy was difficult to come by. As one daughter recalled, "we hardly knew what privacy was until we got older."7
In 1921 Oscar bought a steam-powered sawmill. When an elderly man from Manila came to show Oscar how to run it, the boiler exploded, killing the man. Daughter Irma, who was about four years old, said that the earliest memory she has is of the man's dead body lying "on Mom and Dad's bed."8 Though disturbed by the death, Oscar did not abandon his hope of finding supplemental income for his family. The next spring he took two wagons to Price, Utah, purchased a water wheel, and carried it back to Greendale. He located this new water-powered sawmill north of his home, toward the Green River. During the spring runoff, before anyone needed irrigation water, he diverted the Greendale Canal down to power his sawmill.
The logs for cutting came from trees tagged by the Forest Service ranger on the surrounding National Forest Oscar and his sons cut and stockpiled the logs during the winter when they had the extra time and the logs were easy to drag over the snow. After sawing the logs in the spring, Oscar made several trips a year to Vernal with a wagonload of lumber. Besides selling the lumber, he used it to build more buildings on his homestead, such as a spring house, blacksmith shop, stable, and sheds. In 1929 he hired a carpenter to help him build a five-room lumber house for his family The new home included a kitchen, a living room, and three bedrooms. The older cabins continued in use as bedrooms and storerooms.
Oscar and the other homesteaders also took logs from the National Forest to make fences. Eventually, "approximately seven miles of pole fence . . . enclosed and divided" the Swett homestead.9 Over the years the poles rotted away, and during the lifetime of the homestead some of the fences had to be replaced up to three times. Lewis Swett remembered the excitement of collecting logs for the fences:
To protect the driver from the cold, the wagon had a sheepskin on the front seat The best covering, though, "if you were going to log all winter was a deerskin," because the deerskin would not absorb moisture. "But a sheepskin is nice . . . if it's dry weather . . . anything to keep you off them cold, frozen logs."11
The homesteaders in Greendale were fortunate to get free logs for their fences, since they could barely stay afloat economically Nationwide the agricultural sector suffered a depression throughout the 1920s brought on by low farm prices Many farmers failed to pay their taxes and even lost their farms to foreclosures The county record is filled with Greendale settlers who had difficulty paying their property taxes. Though these homesteading families could subsist on what they raised and grew on their land, actual money was hard to come by.
On December 30, 1922, Oscar failed to pay his property taxes for the fifth year in a row, so Daggett County impounded his land. The tax bill was $41.63. The law allowed Oscar several more years to pay his bill, plus interest, and thus get his land released. During that time he could live on the land and earn a livelihood from it. A little less than a year later, on November 27, 1923, he paid his taxes and his land was released. This was not the last time that Oscar failed to pay his taxes. Coming up with cash continued to be a problem for the next decade as he struggled to increase his economic resources.
The Swetts' isolation from the world outside Greendale was severe by the standards of today's mobile society. The family saw a newspaper only "five or six times during a year." But Emma read to her children a lot. "She used to, in the wintertime, sit by the stove and read, and the rest of us would sit there and listen to her," a daughter recalled.12 They borrowed books from neighbors and from friends and relatives in Vernal.
The isolation of Greendale began to lessen in 1926 when a road was constructed from Manila to Vernal, passing near the Swett homestead At first the road was ungraded and rough, closed during the winter; and "in spring or after a storm, you took your chances on getting mired down in McKee Draw."13 By the mid-1930s, when the road was graded and trucks could make it to Greendale to pick up livestock, the cattle drives of earlier years had disappeared.
Even with the road, the journey to Vernal still took a long time because of the distance. Since the nearest towns, Linwood and Manila, had no more than a few stores, the Sears catalog and other such catalogs were "everything" to the family. The Swetts could look at the "beautiful clothing" pictured in them and order goods not found in Manila or Vernal.14 These catalogs provided a tangible and constant link to the nation and its culture. In the early years Emma had used flour sacks to make clothes for her children. Later, when Oscar went to town, he would buy a bolt of cloth. Using a treadlepowered sewing machine Emma made the clothes from that single bolt, which meant that all the children wore the same color of clothing. As the thirties began the nation's economy foundered. This economic turmoil affected the Swetts relatively little compared to others in the country. Yet the Great Depression intruded even in their isolated location, affecting the family cattle business. Idabell remembered that during the depression.
Another federal government move also affected the homesteaders. On February 18, 1933, the area north of the Green River was added to the Ashley National Forest, further enclosing Greendale. The settlement's few homesteads became islands of private land in a vast sea of national forest. And like islanders, the Swetts and their neighbors continued to take much from the surrounding "sea." Nevertheless, the 1930s saw the decline of Greendale. The original homesteaders had already started to move away during the twenties, discouraged by the economics of ranching and the harsh isolation, and that trend accelerated New people moved in, but more often than not they left after a few years.
The Swetts had always been poor, especially compared to the people in Vernal, where many of their relatives lived. But compared to their Greendale neighbors, the Swetts were relatively prosperous. The Swett children have varied memories regarding their poverty. When asked, "Did you ever feel your family was poor?" one daughter answered, "No, we had all the food we wanted to eat and all the clothes we wanted to wear, so what else is there to worry about."16 Most of the other children felt their poverty more keenly, especially after they left home to attend high school in town, where they could compare themselves to children from more affluent families.
The youngest child, Wilda, retained a vivid memory of the coming of World War II:
The Swett family, apprehensive about the war, prospered in the economic recovery that it created The government needed cattle to feed its troops, and consequently cattle prices went up The family's acquisition in early 1942 of a Dodge pickup truck is the most potent physical symbol representing the Swett's newfound prosperity Without telling his family of his intention, Oscar went into town with a friend and drove back in the pickup. Two decades earlier Oscar and Emma could not have even dreamed of making such a purchase, especially with cash.
The purchase of this pickup truck did not signal a major change in ranching operations, however; the Dodge was the only motorized vehicle on the homestead. Oscar still used a team of horses to work his land and continued to do so up until his death in 1968. He told a forest ranger that "he couldn't afford to" convert to motorized equipment "and still operate."18
The 1950s ushered in another period of considerable change for the family. The children, now adults, moved away, though the youngest son, Lewis, stayed on to help his father and planned to assume running the homestead when Oscar retired. Then, of even greater impact, on April 11, 1956, Congress authorized the construction of Flaming Gorge Dam, a section of the Colorado River Storage Project Part of the continuing reclamation movement in the American West, the dam and its reservoir were designed to provide electricity generation and water storage. Though reclamation had been controversial due to political and environmental conflicts, members of Utah's congressional delegation, such as Sen. Arthur V. Watkins, strongly supported reclamation. The effects of what had been a distant controversy now started to be felt directly in Greendale.
In 1957 hard-topped roads began to snake through Daggett County, following the contours of the rugged mountains. The road going past Greendale was paved. Across the Green River, in Dutch John meadow, construction workers built a small town to house themselves This meadow had been one of the places that Oscar Swett used to winter his cattle—a privilege now denied him. After the dam's completion Dutch John became the headquarters of the Flaming Gorge Ranger District of Ashley National Forest.
Federal government land use policies defined the options the Swetts lived under; the family was greatly affected by the creation of Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area surrounding the new lake. Now that the forest had become an outdoor playground, the Swetts were cut off from a source of their livelihood, and the way of life they yearned for disappeared. When public campgrounds were built near Greendale, mostly around prominent springs, the Swetts could no longer water their cattle at the springs. The loss of such public resources created many problems for them. Rather than wintering his cattle on the National Forest land, Oscar now had to bring them in early and feed them hay grown the previous summer Moreover, his grazing permit was steadily reduced until he was allowed to have only 33 cattle on the National Forest
Cattle ranching was no longer economically viable, even on the small scale that Oscar and his son Lewis practiced. The family did own a small flock of about 150 sheep, from which they sold the lambs and wool. Since they kept the sheep entirely on the homestead they did not need a Forest Service permit for them. In essence, the creation of the Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area took away the economic livelihood of the few and expanded the recreational opportunities of untold thousands.
The isolation of Greendale was gone On November 29, 1957, Orson Burton, the Swetts' neighbor and business partner for over three decades, sold his share of the cattle business to Oscar, increasing the Swetts' ranch to 397 acres. Oscar and Emma were now the only original settlers left in Greendale.
These were the twilight years for Oscar and Emma. All their old friends were gone, and their children were grown and raising their own families elsewhere, with the exception of Lewis, who still lived nearby. Oscar and Emma were quiet people. Wilda recalled that
Several of Oscar and Emma's nephews liked to visit the homestead. They stayed in the log cabins and helped with haying and other chores. Because the ranch was a labor-intensive operation, their help was especially welcome. Capable handymen, they also painted the five-room house white, the first coat of paint ever to cover its lumber walls. During the mid-fifties, one of the nephews who "spent a lot of time up there" persuaded Oscar to install a pipeline to bring running water to the house. So Oscar told them, "to get the pipe and they put it in."20 They failed to bury the pipe deep enough, however, which forced Oscar and Emma to leave the water running during the winter so that the pipe would not freeze. Emma no longer hauled water from the spring but had it running from a tap into her sink. Because the Swett homestead is the only one in the area whose water source, a natural spring, isat a higher elevation than the house, constructing a water system for it was much easier. The Swetts were the first in Greendale to have running water and indoor plumbing.
With running water at last, the family added on a bathroom in the late fifties. Wilda remembered that
On January 27, 1960, electricity from the Moon Lake Electric Company, a benefit of the Flaming Gorge Dam, began to flow, replacing the Delco generator the Swetts had used since 1953 to provide lighting at night. With a steady supply of electricity available, the family soon purchased some electrical appliances such as a refrigerator, a black-and-white television, and an electric clothes washer. The Swetts' decision to adopt modern technology was made on a rational and economical basis not on the whims of fashion or newness.
These appliances eased Emma's household duties in her old age. Oscar did not enjoy television, but Emma liked it, probably because it helped fill the loneliness of those later years. The house once crowded with children was quiet. To have her children far away was hard on Emma. Her youngest daughter, Wilda, recalled that her mother
Oscar accepted the inevitability of change and tried to cope with it, though it was hard for him to see his livelihood whittled away. Lewis had wanted to take over the homestead from his father and run it, but now the grazing permit was too small He looked for another place that he might buy for himself but "never could find the kind of place I could make it on. I couldn't find a place that I could even make interest on the money."23
Oscar decided to sell the homestead and find another small ranch, possibly in Vernal, where he could work a little in his retirement. In those final days in Greendale, it does not stretch the imagination to see the homestead as Oscar and Emma saw it. Standing on the porch of the house they had built with the help of family and friends, Oscar and Emma would have looked over a familiar vista. Around their trio of houses stood other farm buildings, all built by hand Two hundred acres of grassland stretched away toward the north, the result of their labors. A few haystacks and small sheds dotted the fields among the distant dark spots of cattle. They had come to a land little touched by settlement, carved out a life for themselves, and raised a large family. Oscar Swett had lived his dream of being a rancher
Oscar died on September 23, 1968, having worked on his homestead up until the very day he died. That evening he went to bed early, but his wife soon roused him since a porcupine was chewing on their porch post Oscar shot the porcupine The sound of the shot brought Lewis running from his nearby house. Oscar explained "Well, there's a porcupine trying to eat my house up and I couldn't stand for that, so I shot him." His daughter, Mary, said of his death:
Two years later, having sold their homestead, Emma moved to a small house in Vernal. She cared for herself, and nearby children kept an eye on her. She did not like city life and "was homesick for the ranch where she had given so much of her life."25 She passed away in May 1971 on the same night that a couple of her grandchildren graduated from Vernal High School.
Because the homestead lacked indoor running water and electricity during most of its existence and used horse power instead of tractors, many people might characterize it as a mere anachronism. Yet the members of the Swett family were like their neighbors when it came to adopting new technology. They lived on the frontier and were self-sufficient in many ways, yet they were close enough to outside society to receive its benefits, such as manufactured products and an education for their children. Their isolation served as both a barrier and a buffer. They were shielded from many of the disadvantages of urban or suburban society but could take what they wanted from the products of an industrialized society.
Too much emphasis can be placed on the Swetts' self-sufficiency. For instance, they depended on selling their cattle every year to eastern markets. Combined with the sawmill, the cattle business was their only source of hard cash. Another example of this partial dependence on the outside world was in the area of clothing The family bought some clothes through the Sears catalog, but most were made at home from cloth purchased in town. Producing their own cloth would have been too time-consuming.
The children grew up under circumstances that have all but disappeared in the United States today, and most of them view their childhood with fondness. Lewis said, "it was a nice place to live at that time. . . . You have to grow up on your own two feet there. You don't depend on the other person giving it to you."26 This is an attitude his parents would have agreed with. The oldest daughter, Mary, felt that Oscar and Emma "were happy people" and that Oscar "enjoyed every bit" of his life She also thought that "if the kids [today] had to do the things I did when I . . .was their age, they would just drop dead. They wouldn't know how to do it."27 And finally, the youngest daughter saw a fundamental difference in the attitude towards entertainment: "We really didn't have what you would call entertainment. Our entertainment was what we were doing, and you didn't miss it; you enjoyed what you were doing, so you didn't think you needed to be entertained.28
The Swetts lived through an enormous amount of change, especially as this country urbanized and the small subsistence farmer or rancher became an endangered species. Everything the Swetts did as homesteaders and small-scale ranchers was connected to the natural environment and ecology around them When their environment changed with the construction of Flaming Gorge Dam, it wrecked their subsistence economy. The Swetts did not live their lives as hermits; though on the fringe, they were part of growing nation.
In 1972 the U.S. Forest Service purchased the ranch and developed the site into a museum. The Swett Homestead provides an opportunity for tourists to leave their urban warrens and see how their forebears lived. Visitors can gain some insight into the enormous technological changes—and the resource decisions that facilitated those changes—that have altered the American landscape and the American milieu so much in the last century. The Swetts are representative of the caliber of people who homesteaded on fringe agricultural lands in Utah in the early part of this century, and, because of that, the record of their experiences is valuable. Through them, we see the lives of a family that was not influential in any traditional way.
NOTES
Mr. Swedin is a doctoral candidate in history at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
1 This article is based on my M.S thesis, "The Swett Homestead: An Oral History, 1909-1970" (Utah State University, 1991), plus some additional research Research support and funding was provided by the Flaming Gorge Ranger District, Ashley National Forest, U.S Forest Service, and the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies at Utah State University.
2 The children of Oscar and Emma Eliza Osiek Swett, including date and place of birth: Mary Elizabeth, May 24, 1913, Vernal; Alma Thomas (Tom), December 24, 1914, Vernal; Irma Eliza, May 22, 1917, Greendale; Myrle Augusta, May 27, 1919, Greendale; Verla Farnsworth, June 12, 1921, Vernal; Idabell, June 12, 1921, Vernal; Lewis Lyman, October 8, 1929, Vernal; Merne, August 4, 1932, Greendale; Wilda Beverly, August 9, 1936, Greendale A neighbor, Elvira Green, delivered Irma Eliza in the oneroom log cabin on the ranch Whenever Emma gave birth at the ranch Oscar took the other children with him and stayed outdoors during the delivery.
3 Interview with Irma Eliza Swett Toone, Vernal, September 15, 1989, p 4 Copies of all the interviews cited herein are available in Special Collections, Merrill Library, USU, and the Flaming Gorge Ranger District office of the U.S Forest Service in Dutch John, Utah Interviews were conducted by the author unless credited otherwise.
4 Phil Johnson, "A Brief History of the Oscar Swett Homestead: Daggett County, Utah" (Forest Service study, November 1971, Swett Ranch file, Flaming Gorge Ranger District, Dutch John), p 7.
5 Ibid.
6 Interview with Idabell Swett Robinson, Lander, Wyoming, December 21, 1989, p. 24.
7 Irma Eliza Swett Toone interview, p 6.
8 Ibid., p 2.
9 Johnson, "A Brief History of the Oscar Swett Homestead," p 6.
10 Interview with Lewis Lyman Swett (conducted by Phil Johnson), Greendale, Utah, June 14, 1971.
11 ibid.
12 Irma Eliza Swett Toone interview, p. 6.
13 Dick and Vivian Dunham, Flaming Gorge Country: The Story ofDaggettCounty, Utah (1947; 2d ed., Denver: Eastwood Printing and Publishing Co., 1977), p. 321. The 1947 first edition was titled Our Strip of Land.
14 Interview with Merne Swett Moore, Randlett, Utah, September 17, 1989, p 12.
15 Idabell Swett Robinson interview, p 2.
16 Merne Swett Moore interview, p. 19.
17 Interview with Wilda Beverly Swett Irish (conducted by Scott Christensen), Moab, Utah, August 13, 1989, p. 4.
18 Johnson, "A Brief History of the Oscar Swett Homestead," p 5.
19 Wilda Beverly Swett Irish interview, p. 8.
20 Irma Eliza Swett Toone interview, p. 15.
21 Wilda Beverly Swett Irish interview, p 34.
22 Ibid, p. 22.
23 Interview with Lewis Lyman Swett, Vernal, Utah, May 19, 1990, p 6.
24 Interview with Mary Elizabeth Swett Arrowsmith, Vernal, Utah, September 23, 1989, p 28.
25 Johnson, "A Brief History of the Oscar Swett Homestead," p 7.
26 Lewis Lyman Swett interview, p 52.
27 Mary Elizabeth Swett Arrowsmith interview, pp 21-22.
28 Wilda Beverly Swett Irish interview, p 11.
