K TSUKAMAKI FAMILY AND FRIENDS “GO EAST - NOT WEST” AS NEW PIONEERS
May
17
Part of the caravan in 1937
The youngest pioneer was a three-week-old premie
The completion of the Owyhee Dam in 1932 provided irrigation for row crop faming in Eastern Oregon and Western Idaho in an area called the Treasure Valley. A quote from a covered wagon pioneer woman’s diary, passing through the area in the 1850s states: “A desert so rugged and dreary that thousands of years would not render it livable nor supportive of human life.”
This was November 1937. At age 51, Grandpa K started over after losing his once thriving dairy business in Kent, WA, due to discriminatory laws and practices. Racial tensions were strong and everyone was having hard times with the depression. Mr. E.K. Saito (Saito’s Kent house is now the Kent Museum), started a packing shed for gathering and shipping vegetables in Ontario. He promised free onion seed and acceptance of the harvest. Grandpa K and his two teenage sons had gone ahead, a month earlier, to find places to farm and housing for the six families to live.
The caravan group, with vehicles and possessions, made sure they stuck together because of potential vehicles trouble or discrimination problems. My father, Sago Miyamoto, drove their black International Truck loaded with all the worldly possessions of three families as they left the Renton farm (which is now Renton Boeing), for the 500-mile trip to Eastern Oregon. Mary, my 19-yr-old mother, was specially concerned about her most prized possession, the washing machine they had gotten for a wedding present the year before. Sago, age 29, led the group because he was the oldest Nisei and the only one who could speak English fluently.
The youngest and the biggest concern of the trip was a premie, just three-weeks-old. She had been cradled in a shoe box and had been kept warm with an electric light bulb. This day, the warmth of the mother and the two-year-old in the back seat surrounded the shoe box. Oldest son, four-years-old, sat proudly in the front seat with his dad.
The S Tsukamaki family, with three preschoolers, followed in another sedan. Mr. N Goto and Mr. T Nakano, having formed a partnership, drove their truck and possessions in another truck. The rest of of the Goto family of three children with their mother went on the train with the Nakano’s mother and three children through Portland to Ontario, Oregon. The caravan drove windy roads around trees as they went over Snoqualmie Pass. It was cold in November. It was already dark, but they made it to Pasco, Washington, where the Yamauchi family owned a business. They all crowded into a couple rooms to stay overnight.
All the families found places in the Vale, Oregon, area to start their new lives. About ten miles west into the sage brush from town, in a place called Bully Creek, I was born, a year later. We were cast into this inland desert before the mass Japanese relocation and incarceration with WWII.
