The Duel

 William P. Vandevert did not buy his ranch in a single transaction.  He assembled it in pieces.  The first two eighty acre parcels, east of the Little Deschutes River, were land that his brother Charlie bought to entice Bill back to Central Oregon from New York State.  Bill Vandevert had fallen in love with this land when he had surveyed it earlier.  Charlie sold the two parcels to him for $600. 

One of the eighty acre parcels had belonged to a homesteader named Scoggin and the other had belonged to a man remembered only as “Dutch John”.  Scoggin had a small house on his land and at least five acres in farmland.    

There used to be a spring on the hillside about fifty yards above where the Homestead guest house is now (see photo).  The spring once gave rise to stream that was six feet wide and six inches deep down to the river.  No one knows why the spring itself disappeared.  Even dynamiting the area has failed to bring the spring back to life.

The border between the two eighty acre parcels went right near the spring.  Scoggin and Dutch John both thought they owned the spring or perhaps one of them owned the land below the spring and felt entitled to the water flowing from it.  The more they thought about using the land, the more important the spring became.  There being a scarcity of law enforcement, courts, and judges in the area, the two decided to settle their dispute by fighting a duel.

We don't know the details of the duel but Scoggin wound up shooting and wounding Dutch John.  Scoggin decided he needed to get help for his bleeding neighbor.

In the version of the story told by Claude Vandevert the younger,  Scoggin rode fifty miles to Prineville and to bring a doctor back.  In another version, Scoggin and his horse dragged Dutch John into Bend on a sled used for moving stones.  In either case Dutch John recovered and both men decided to sell or abandon their properties and the spring.  Scoggin moved to the Willamette Valley.

Dutch John later built a cabin near the future site of Bend.  One day in the early 1900’s he simply disappeared.  There were no lawmen in the area and the matter was never investigated.  Perhaps a new argument did not turn out as well as the first one.

More than a hundred years later a relative of Scoggin bought a lot and built a house on the new Vandevert Ranch.  The house overlooks the meadow where the spring once ran.

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  Phantom Cattle

 While most of William P. Vandevert’s children eventually left to pursue medicine, teaching, or other occupations, two of the boys decided to stick with ranching.  The oldest son, Thomas William (called Bill), started his own ranch and a younger son, Claude, took over the original ranch.  The two brothers worked together closely and ran the two ranches as a single business.

Claude was called into the army when the United States entered World War I in 1917.  He was twenty-five years old and not yet married.  That left his older brother Bill, thirty-one at the time, behind to run both ranches.

While Claude was away, a local banker came to Bill and asked him to take a hundred head of cattle the bank had acquired in a foreclosure.  Bill said he didn’t want the cattle but the banker offered him a good price and encouraged him to take them on to help provide meat for the soldiers.  Bill finally agreed but said he was much too busy to handle them right away and the bank would have to pasture and feed them over the summer.  The cattle were on the other side of Bend and Bill couldn’t even spare enough time to go look at them.   

When Bill went to pick up the cattle in the fall there were only twelve head left out of a hundred.  Bill couldn’t sell the cattle for anywhere near enough to pay for the hundred cattle he had bought.  He took out a loan from the same bank to make up the difference.  When Claude came back from the war he found that the two ranches were almost bankrupt. 

The repercussions of the missing cattle rippled through the Vandevert family history for a full generation.  As Claude’s son, also named Claude, said, “Dad paid on that loan all through the depression.  The family would have gotten through the depression OK except for the debt to the bank.  Every fall Dad would sell cattle, pay the interest on the loan, pay the grocery bill, and pay the taxes.  Then he was broke.”  The family sold milk, butter, and eggs and the younger Claude cut wood and did odd jobs just to get some cash for the family.  Sometimes his father could make four dollars a day hiring out himself and two horses to do “Fresno work” on the Dalles-California Highway.  This was before the widespread use of bulldozers and earth movers.  The team moved dirt and rocks using a patented Fresno Scraper.  But the family was never hungry because they had the cattle to eat. 

Claude says that some of the principal was paid in the 1920’s when times were better.  But during the depression the price of live beef was only twenty cents a pound and all they could pay was the interest.  When the price of beef went up in 1938 it had a dramatic effect on the family.  They finally paid off loan completely.  In 1941 the family bought its first good car, an almost new 1941 two door Chevrolet Sedan that someone had traded in.  The elder Claude loved the fact that his wife finally got to ride in a nice car.  He drove his two daughters, Gracie and Marie Jean, over to the Willamette Valley to pick fruit and they thought that was quite a treat.

 The banker had entrusted the herd to brother-in-law who may have sold most of it over the summer and pocketed the money.  Much later, in the 1950’s, the banker told the family that if they had gotten a lawyer they would have broken the bank.

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Sheep

“We ate a lot of mutton,” says Claude Vandevert.  “Dad wouldn’t kill cattle.  Cattle were his crop.” 

The Vandeverts kept a flock of sheep on the ranch from sometime in the 1920’s to 1940 or 1941 when all the livestock was sold off.  There were thirty to forty ewes and a few rams.  Income from the sheep helped tide the family over during the depression of the 1930’s.  The family sheared the sheep in the spring, garnering one to two sacks of wool.  A wool sack, designed to ride in a truck was about eight feet long and three feet in diameter.  When full it weighed about five hundred pounds.

The other income from sheep was selling the lambs in fall for slaughter.  The new lambs came in February and by fall they weighed eighty to ninety pounds each.  A ewe that hadn’t lambed was sold as well, though no one would pay much for a ewe.  Unlike the cattle, that went to range near Spring River in the summer, the sheep stayed on the ranch year-round. 

The economic advantage of sheep was that they would eat almost anything.  They ate the bunch grass that grew in the woods.  Like deer they browsed the ends of branches on bushes.  In the winter they were fed the rye that was stored in the barn.  They stayed outside year round but received double their usual feed if the weather was particularly cold.  If it snowed all night the sheep would walk around in the morning with a foot of snow piled on their backs. 

The sheep had to be kept together and watched over to keep the coyotes from attacking them.  They were penned up near the Homestead at night.  During the day they went to pasture in the woods or most often to an area of the ranch that the family called Cox’s Bend.  It was the low land near where the current barn is.  Claude says there was a family named Cox in the area and speculates that they had once camped in that place.  The sheep did not pasture on the rye fields after the rye was harvested because the cattle would not eat pasture that sheep had gone through.  The sheep would eat the pasture unevenly and leave their smell on the ground.              

The job of shepherd fell to Claude (the younger).  Claude carried a fishing pole much more often than he carried a rifle.  The coyotes would stay hidden when Claude was around and he rarely saw them.  But once when he forgot his lunch and went back to the house for thirty-five to forty minutes the coyotes killed four sheep.  

The sheep were not branded because the wool would cover up the brand.  They were painted with a “turkey track” design – three prongs in the front and one prong behind.  The paint was easy to see through the spring and sometimes lasted into the fall.  The paint washed out after the wool was sheared.  It was important to paint the sheep in case they got mixed up with one of the large flocks that went by the ranch every year.   

The big flocks came from as far away as Grass Valley, Grant County, and Maupin.  They were on their way to summer range in the high lakes area of the Cascades.  Some turned west toward the mountains on South Century a mile and a half south of the ranch.  Others went further south to Crescent and Davis Lake.  When Claude was six or seven (in 1929 or 1930) about twenty to twenty-five flocks went by the ranch entrance on South Century (what the family called “The Old Highway”).  Flocks were as big as 1,800 sheep.  The smallest had 900 sheep.  Every once in a while a shepherd would leave a ewe at the ranch that was struggling to keep up with the flock.

Claude Vandevert (the older) sold off all the cattle in 1940 or 1941 when the army took over the Spring River range to build Camp Abbot.  All the sheep were sold at the same time.  Claude went back into cattle in a minor way after World War II ended in 1945 but chose not to raise any more sheep.   

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Heat and Light

The Homestead was heated by four stoves and had no running water.  If a fire had started in the house the family would have dashed to the river for water.  Naturally, fire was a constant concern. 

Where each stovepipe went through the first floor ceiling, the hole it went through was four inches wider than the pipe.  If the pipe was six inches in diameter the hole would be nine to ten inches.  The pipe went through the second floor ceiling and into the attic the same way.  The top of the pipe was covered to keep the rain from coming down it.

The younger Claude Vandevert says he can’t remember his father ever lighting a fire without looking up the pipe to check that nothing was catching fire and no smoke was leaking.  Only once did the son have to pour a pitcher of water on something that was smoking on the second floor.  Attention to detail and perhaps the intercession of a higher power are the reasons Claude gives for the absence of a house fire during the long life of the Homestead.

The Vandeverts bought a generator in 1939 or 1940 and had electricity for the first time.  The generator was surplus Kohler system from a school in Tumalo.  It was expensive to run and the batteries needed to start it were especially dear.  It cost about a dollar to have electricity for an evening so they didn’t run it that often.  Pearl Vandevert used the electricity to run a flat iron – a big improvement over heating irons on the stove.  Because electricity was so expensive the family preferred to use gasoline lanterns for light. 

In about 1949 the elder Claude was active in establishing an electrical co-operative in an area that extended all the way to Silver Lake.  Having inexpensive power constantly available was a big change for the family.  For the first time they could have refrigerators. 

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  The Dance Pavilion

Neighbors from as far away as La Pine came to the ranch to go swimming in the Little Deschutes in the summer.  At the north end of the ranch, below the schoolhouse, the river made a turn to the left where the inside of the turn was shallow and warm.  This area had a grassy meadow behind it and was easy to reach from the dirt road that ran down from the front of the schoolhouse and over a small bridge. 

On the other side of the river the current was faster and cut a deeper channel.  The Vandeverts built two diving boards there, one close to water level and the other about eight feet high.  The swimming area was especially popular in the 1920’s and 1930’s when the Shevlin lumber camp was only about two miles away on the east side of the Dalles-California Highway.

Claude Vandevert senior was running the ranch at that time.  His brother, J.C., was a doctor in Bend.  (Dr. J.C. Vandevert’s desk is now in the Deschutes County Historical Society Museum.)  J.C. had a nurse named Dorothy Veach whose husband was George Veach. 

Scrambling for money in the depression, Claude and George Veach thought they would put in a dance floor near the swimming area and reap a little profit.  Claude and Pearl were good dancers and they liked to dance very much themselves.

The band consisted of four musicians.  They didn’t practice together very much but they were good amateurs.  The pick-up band also played at the Grange in La Pine and elsewhere in the area.  They played currently popular tunes for ballroom dancing.  Claude Vandevert, the younger, says he doesn’t remember any square dancing.

The dance floor was about fifty yards northeast of the shallow part of the river.  It was about thirty-five feet on a side.  The Vandeverts ran a concession stand that sold hot dogs, candy, and gum.  They stamped the hands of those who had paid for admission to the dance floor.  Most people came as couples and then changed partners when the band played a new tune.

People would come to swim in the afternoon and stay to dance.  Sometimes they would go back and forth between swimming and dancing.  As the evening grew cooler people warmed themselves at bonfires set around the dance floor.  They stayed until around eleven or twelve at night.

The ranch saw three to four dances each summer and people had some memorable times.  But some of the attendees drank so much they spoiled the fun for themselves and others.  The dances were only held for two years.  The Vandeverts may have brought in enough to pay musicians and pay back the cost of building the dance floor. 

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  The Younger Claude Vandevert

 Claude Vandevert, born in 1923, lived and worked on the ranch until he was twenty-five.  He married in 1948 and moved to Bend where he worked for companies in the automobile business, including Automotive and Industrial Supply. 

In the late 1960s Claude’s father sold the ranch to Leonard Lundgren, the owner of Lelco Mill and Lumber Company in Bend.  Leonard was a customer of Automotive and Industrial Supply.  Claude switched companies and worked for Leonard for about twelve years.

Claude took classes in electronics and in 1961 went to work for Tektronix in Beaverton.  When Claude joined the company it had 6,000 employees.  When he left twenty years later it had 20,000.  It was known as a good company to work for and a good company to do business with.  Claude now lives in Forest Grove, about thirty miles west of Portland.

Claude says he had a good life growing up on the ranch.  He missed it after he left and the ranch was sold.  When Jim Gardner took a big interest in the history of the ranch Claude was finally able to let go.

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  Dogs

 W.P. Vandevert kept bear hounds for hunting but, over the history of the ranch, the primary dogs were shepherds bred for herding cattle.  The family generally had one dog at a time and the working dogs also became pets.  The first was Tippy, a little brown and black female.  The second was Nick, a black and white male.  The photo to the right shows Nick with David Vandevert.  The barn is in the background and part of the garage is to the right.  There was an Australian Shepherd after that whose name is lost to history.

The dogs worked mostly in the summer and were particularly important driving the cattle to and from their summer range at Spring River, west of Sunriver.   Claude Vandevert senior moved the cattle to the summer range in May.  Some of the cattle didn’t want to leave the ranch, especially the younger ones who didn’t know where they were going.   As the herd moved along, individual cows started to wander off on their own.  The men on horseback would sic the dog after them.  Tippy or Nick got in front of the cow, barking and snapping, until the cow turned its head and ambled back to the herd.  It meant the men on horseback could direct the herd without having to chase after the errant cows. 

In the fall some of the cows headed for the ranch early on their own.  But cows with calves were reluctant to make the move. 

There wasn’t a lot of need for the dog in the summer because the cattle were free-ranging.  At the ranch in the winter, with the cattle fenced in, there was almost no work for the dog at all. 

The dogs were not allowed in the house, though they sometimes stuck their noses in the door.  They lived off table scraps and what they could find on their own - often deer and other animals that had died.  The dogs liked chasing sage rats but they were not very successful at catching them.  When they couldn’t find things to eat Pearl made up some coarse bread with bacon fat or cracklings from rendering fat out of beef. 

Tippy and Nick were the "doorbell" to the ranch.  Anyone coming through the front gate set the dogs barking.  The family was usually gathered in the back of the house near the kitchen and dining room and would not be aware of a car driving into the ranch without the dogs.  

The dogs were never on a leash and enjoyed the freedom to go and do what they pleased.  They had a good life.

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  Music

 Claude Vandevert, son of W.P. Vandevert, worked in Portland for a few years before marrying Pearl Catlow.  He loved music in general and opera music in particular.  He and Pearl brought lots of twelve-inch 78 RPM records with them when they moved to the ranch.  Claude influenced his family with his love of music. 

A friend and neighbor who lived near where the Harper Hotel had been, Lois Maker Gompert, came to the house in the 1930’s for an evening of music.  Her father played a banjo and other instruments while Lois played the piano.  Johnny Brasel (Dorothy Vandevert’s brother) played the saw.  He placed a regular cutting saw across his knee and used a bow to play it.  Lois could and did play up a storm. She still plays piano for the Kiwanis Club in Bend every week.

Music was always around the house either from the battery radio, the phonograph or someone playing the piano.  The records included Hawaiian music and Sousa marches.  Grace was partial to the music of the late 30's & 40's (Como, Sinatra, etc.) and the big bands of the day.  At first the family had a tall phonograph that had the turntable in the top and a big lid that came down. In the bottom part, there were shelves for records.  In later years - in the 30's – Claude’s brother gave the family his phonograph that was built like a table and also had room in the bottom for records.  It is still in the family.

Sometimes on Sunday evenings Pearl played the piano.  The family would gather around and sing songs.  Claude Vandevert says it was a great way to grow up.  The kids had good relationships with each other and with their parents.  They were poor as church mice but didn’t know it.  The family piano was acquired by the Vandevert Ranch Association and has a place of honor in the meeting room on the second floor of the barn.

The Hashknife Brand

Bill Vandevert brought the Hashknife brand to Oregon and used it for all his cattle because he had previously worked for the famous “Hashknife Outfit” in Arizona.

The Hashknife brand was originally established by three cattle ranchers in Weatherford, Texas, in the 1870’s.  By the mid 80’s the men had tired of the realities of the cattle business and run out of land to graze their herd on.  Fortunately for them, the nation was swept up with the romance of cattle and cowboys.  Back in New York, a Bostonian named Edward Kinsley and some other men had founded Aztec Land and Cattle Company in 1884.  The company bought a million acres in Arizona and New Mexico from the newly built Atlantic and Pacific Railroad.

The newly formed Aztec Company bought the Texas cattle and acquired the Hashknife brand along with the animals.  It took four hundred railroad cars to bring the cattle to Arizona.  The cars were unloaded all along the line from the New Mexico state line to Flagstaff.  Aztec had become the third largest cattle company in North America and was known as “the Hashknife Outfit”.

The Hashknife brand was an adaptation of the knives used by the cooks in the cattle camps to cut beef and vegetables into cubes to make hash.  The blade was a 180 degree curve with tails on the ends of it.  A straight shaft connected the middle of the blade to a handle set perpendicular to the shaft so the cook could rock the blade back and forth easily.  The Hashknife brand, with the “blade” pointing up instead of down, was placed on the cow’s ribs, not on its rear haunch.  The shape was unusual enough to make it difficult for rustlers to superimpose another brand on top of it.  With the vast lands and spread-out herds, rustling was a popular occupation in Northern Arizona.  One outlaw, who obviously didn’t have a heart for the cattle, cut the brand off entirely and sewed the skin back together.  Zane Grey, the prolific western novelist, immortalized the roughness of Northern Arizona cattle ranching in his book, The Hash Knife Outfit, published in 1933.  In the book, however, the Hash Knife Outfit, led by Jed Stone, was a band of outlaw cattle rustlers.     

By the end of 1887 Aztec imported between 33,000 and 40,000 cattle that grew into a herd of 60,000.  But Kinsley had judged Northern Arizona from a train window in one of the greenest summers it had ever experienced.  The next thirteen years saw exceptional droughts, overgrazing, falling cattle prices, rustling, and starving cattle.  Aztec went bankrupt in 1900. 

Overgrazing continued well into the twentieth century, resulting in erosion and the replacement of grasslands with bare land, grasses unpalatable to cattle, snakeweed, and juniper.  Juniper germinates only after the seeds have passed through an animal. Cattle and sheep therefore help juniper germinate while eating the grasses that keep juniper from growing once it has germinated.  Even today, the land around the Little Colorado River in northern Arizona will only support one-third to one-half the number of animals, domestic and wild, that it supported before 1880.

In the late 1880’s Aztec probably still looked like a promising enterprise.  Bill Vandevert, brought his wife, Sadie, and their first three children to live in Holbrook, Arizona (Aztec headquarters) while he worked for the company as a mail courier and range rider.  Two more of their children, Clint and George, were born in Holbrook.  Bill wasn’t a “cowboy” in the traditional sense because he didn’t work with the cattle every day.  He took the cattle to the range and brought them back.  When Bill and Sadie left Arizona it may have been partly because Bill could foresee Aztec’s bleak future. 

Bill’s granddaughter, Grace Vandevert McNellis, writes, “We never knew for sure why they left Arizona except family I've talked to suggest Sadie was homesick to see her sister in New York City (Great Aunt Mittye whose husband was a druggist in the city).  The family believes she was just plain tired of the chaos of the fights amongst the sheep-men and cattlemen and whatever else there in Arizona.  I understand that she and Grampa would actually go out in the street from their home and drag in the wounded men and doctor them.  Didn't matter which side they were on - - just did it!  I'm sure Sadie, by then, with five children, needed to get away from that kind of atmosphere.  She was raised a rather genteel lady in Kentucky and I'll bet she never dreamed of ending up like that in Arizona. She must have matured rather rapidly after marrying Grampa.

“They actually left Arizona in 1889, or so, because they had Kathryn Grace in New York on May 26, 1890, and they left there in 1891 when Sadie was pregnant with my Dad, Claude.  They arrived in Powell Butte, Oregon, approximately December, 1891, and had my Dad in January 1892. It was always said that they only lived in New York for one year – in Spring Valley, Rockland County.”

The Hashknife name and brand appear here and there around Vandevert Ranch, most prominently in Hashknife Road, the longer of the two roads on the ranch.

Sources for The Hashknife Brand:  Grace Vandevert McNellis – family history related verbally and by E-mail.  Jo Baeza – Founding of Aztec Land and Cattle  in Holbrook Tribune News/The Winslow Mail Centennial Edition March 31, 1995.  The Handbook of Texas Online.  Abruzzi, W. S. 1995. The Social and Ecological Consequences of Early Cattle Ranching in the Little Colorado River Basin

Christmas at the Ranch, 1930’s
By Claude Vandevert and Grace Vandevert McNellis

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