Cook Wagon (not to be confused with Chuck Wagon)

What's so interesting to us about the cook wagon is that Granpa and I worked with the SBTC Disaster Relief Feeding Units during the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustave and Ike.  Cooking on the move in the late 1800's and early 1900's must have been much like Disaster Relief cooking.  One difference would be that they feed upwards of 40 men, and we fed upwards of 4,000... During the Gustave/Ike deployment on Galveston Island, we combined three kitchens and turned out about 40,000 meals a day!

Their cook wagon was 10 feet wide and 16-18 feet long.

Cooking was done on a cast-iron wood or coal-burning stove.  (Don't cha' know that that wagon had to have a reinforced floor!)  They had the doorway screened off, but I think you can still see enough to tell how the interior was set up:

Just like in Disaster Relief, the cook's day began at 3:00 a.m.  These meals were made from "scratch."  Disaster Relief meals were pre-cooked meats and the rest was from scratch.

We cooked breakfast just for our crews, lunch was a hot meal prepared for walk-up lines or served from what's called Cambro's out of Red Cross or Salvation Army vehicles called canteens.

The Cook Wagon folks fed their crews breakfast, lunch, dinner, and sometimes between meal snacks!

Breakfast for them was hot biscuits, pancakes or muffins, applesauce or some other fruit, ham, bacon or sausage with eggs and fried potatoes, butter, jam or honey and lots of hot coffee - all cooked on that one itty-bitty stove!!

Dinner and supper would be meat, potatoes, gravy, vegetable, homemade bread, fruit, and a dessert!  A single meal for a full crew would require 20 pounds of beef roasts or more, 10 pounds of potatoes, literally gallons of gravy, several loaves of homemade bread (did you get that? homemade bread!) 5 or 6 pies, 2 or 3 cakes or dozens of cookies with milk or coffee to drink.

The farmer having his crop harvested would provide the food to be cooked.  With Disaster Relief, food was provided by the Salvation Army, Red Cross, or FEMA - all SBTC had to do was cook and serve.  As with the farmer, if we were given good food to cook it wasn't hard to find a team to do the cooking.

This is what a cook wagon looks like today.  This was the set-up in Port Arthur, Texas following hurricanes Katrina and Rita.  Meal prep was done in the "wagon" (18-wheeler trailer) and we had a walk up serving line.  The "yellow hats" are the SBTC team members. 

After hurricane Rita, SBTC decided the Salvation Army kitchens were too hot and cramped, and they developed a way to roll out cooking equipment under a tent and prepare meals outdoors in an airy, expansive environment. SBTC's purpose in doing disaster relief is to me the needs of people in distress - including the need to have hope when they have lost everything and don't know what to do next or where to turn to.  We share the hope that WE have found for ourselves in Christ Jesus.  You know, when I find something really, really good, I want to share that with all of my family and friends - and even strangers!  And there is absolutely nothing better than eternal salvation through Jesus - and all you have to do is say a simple prayer:

Dear Lord, I thank you for being that bridge to God.  I thank You for giving Your life so many years ago that I may have eternal life in heaven.   Please forgive me for things I've done against Your will in the past.  From now on I will try to live my life using the Bible, Your Word, as my guide.  Lord God, it is in the name of Your Son, Jesus, that I pray.  Amen

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Dallas Cowboys

Woo-hoo!  Granpa's ready!

Thirsty Steam Engines

Remember, Walla Walla was founded on wheat.  In 1899 they raised it for about 25 cents a bushel and the average yield was 25 bushels per acre.  I  tried to discover what wheat prices were back then but didn't find a quick answer.  If  you can discover it, let me know!  The Walla Walla Daily Statesman reported in 1899 that residents:

Babcock had  5,300 acres in wheat
Reser had       4,500 acres
Pickard had    2,800 acres
Upton had      2,200 acres
Bradbury had 2,200 acres
Struthers had  2,000 acres
Crocker had   2,000 acres
Wheeler had  1,500 acres
Wilson had    1,400 acres
Welch had     1,200 acres

Dat's a LOTTA WHEAT !!!  No wonder they need new-fangled machinery, and those steam engines were thirsty beasts.  Some early steam engines were the Case, Advance Rumley, Russel, Minneapolis, Best Gaar Scott...  Lots of competition for the farmer's dollar.

But waggoners were still necessary.  So, someone built a water wagon just for those thirsty steam engines:
 

You drive it down into the nearest body of water and let 'er fill herself up!  (Worst case scenario had the driver using a bucket to fill it - what a major bummer THAT would have been!!!!)

Another specialized wagon was the "header box" wagon that was used in harvesting the wheat:

This baby was enormous.  As long as a wagon's axles were kept well-greased and out of the winter weather, they lasted a long, long time.  Why one side was twice as high as the other I'm not sure.  Maybe it was as wide as a stalk of wheat was tall, and the "head" stacked higher than the base of the stalk so it needed a higher side?  Nowadays agriculture colleges like Texas A&M have downsized crops so that all the growth is in the harvestable part of a plant and the stalk is a very minimum height.  Pretty smart, huh?  I wouldn't know whether to downsize the wagon or just load more crop into it...

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Canning the Harvest

While we were in Walla Walla, our host home asked us to take care of their vegetable garden while they visited their condo in Maui.  Okey-dokey.  (We tended their million rose bushes, too.)

Well, we harvested way too many cucumbers to eat - so I canned a dozen or so jars of Bread and Butter pickles:

My recipe makes for some pr-r-et-ty spicy pickles - with sliced onions, too!

Toward the end of harvest, women, then and now, end up with a bit of this and a bit of that.  I suppose that's how relishes came about.  My momma's recipe calls for apples and onions, colorful red or yellow bell peppers, cabbage...  You grind it and chop it and and cook it, drain it overnight, can it (I don't know why it's called "canning" when WE always put it in jars!) then give it a hot bath for 5 or 10 minutes.  Take it out, wait overnight for them to cool enough for a vacuum to be created and seal the product for a long, long shelf life.  (I think it's neat to sit quietly reading and hear those jars seal themselves with a slight, quiet, metallic "thunk.")  But, this is not the end of the season, and I don't have "a bit of this and a bit of that."  Besides, we have jars of relish (we call it chow-chow) at home from a year or so ago...

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Ox Shoe Chute; Wagons and Sleighs

Again at Fort Walla Walla...

Did you know that oxen have to be shoe'd just like horses?  How would you like to be the ferrier that gets to shoe that ox?  Well, those guys are smarter than you think; they built a chute to hold that critter up and still:

When I study it closely it reminds me of a guillotine.  A pulley system lifts the top panel, the ox puts his head through, and the panel is lowered.  My cousin in Chillicothe used to use a similar contraption to hold his cows for innoculations and spraying their eyes with "purple stuff" to prevent pink eye.  The only difference is that an ox wouldn't lift his foot to receive the shoe and this jobber-do came equipped with a sling that would pass under the ox and then be ratcheted up to literally lift the ox off the ground so that the ferrier could get those shoes on.  (Cows don't need shoeing because all they are ever expected to do is walk around eating.  My father-in-law always wondered how black cows could eat green grass and give white milk...)

This is a "dray" wagon - think 18-wheeler flat bed's of today.  This would certainly load easier than today's 18-wheelers:  look at that itty-bitty ground clearance!  You'd think back then they'd need MORE clearance!  Maybe big stuff gets cross-country in a train car and across town on a dray...

And then there's the sleigh.  (They used to heat bricks, rocks, or put pans of hot coals in the footboards of the sleigh to keep feet warm and toasty.)  This was definitely for people transport.  Not a lot of wagon work done in the winter time.  Winter time was used for repairing harnesses and equipment in order to be ready for spring planting. 

It was time to be carding and spinning and weaving all that wool sheared from the sheep, too.  The kids had time out from a lot of their chores to catch up on school work they couldn't get to because the crops had to be planted or tended or harvested.

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Marilyn Monroe and the Washington State Pen

Inside a Tough Prison

WALLA WALLA'S 

RADICAL REFORMS

 

 Man, I am always surprised at the things we find and where we find them! 

Seems the Washington State Penitentiary was notorious in the 1960's and 70's.  Located in Walla Walla, Washington it was just about 8 miles from Oregon.  Maybe that's where this contraption got it's name:

 

It's called an Oregon Boot, and it was meant to replace the "classic" ball-and-chain.  It was advertised as "the best security for the most desperate criminals."

These guys really were desperate.  Look at some of the things guards managed to confiscate inside the prison:

.22 Caliber Zip Gun

Book Bomb - Built by an inmate to assassinate another convict who testified against him.

The original prison was known as the Washington Territorial Prison because Washington wasn't a state yet.  It was built for $60,000 and opened in May 1887 with 97 convicts from a contract prison (we seem to be going back to those now!) in the Tacoma area of Washington.

There is a list of rules, or duties, that the convicts had to follow.  They're pretty interesting, so if you ever get up Walla Walla way, be sure to go to Fort Walla Walla and find the building that house the prison artifacts.

 

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