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Grass Is Gold: One Family's Part In Settling the State of Washington
Book by Miller, Thelma Kay
171 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1969
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January 5, 2025
This is not a well/written book but the subject, European settlement of the Palouse is important to me and the contributions this book makes to providing insights into that history are appreciated.
The book provides an abundance of place names around the Palouse as well as names and some description of the people giving a picture of what their lives were like and what mattered to them as well as an overview of where they had come from and lived previously, both in Europe and America.
The writing is sometimes bizarre. For example they often, when needing a verb, pick a second or third cousin to what be the most obvious choice which often ends in head scratching, very unnatural sounding prose. They also sometimes try to provide flowery embellishment to the scenes they are describing and this often ends up sounding like a Cheech and Chong parody of 18th century English poetry.
There are a lot of interesting details provided and in that sense the book is a little like the Laura Ingalls Eilder books. There are, for example, details provide on how to process flax for use, how to make beer and moving from the home front to the farmers fields, there are lots of insights on how to harvest wheat with horse teams and how to contend with the steep slopes that required ingenuity and specialized equipment to manage. Some of these details may be more than the average reader wants, even learning what many of the tools and components described requires effort, but these descriptions may well be a gold mine for someone studying folk arts and the commonplace knowledge of people from that era.
The book provides a lot of details about what engineers, politicians and area farmers hoped would result from the soon-to-be-built Snake River dams. Lots of interesting information but it is presented as a dialogue between parents and children. The “dialogue” reads like excerpts from a report - complicated, technical - not remotely credible as an actual conversation, especially one involving children.
There is also a section on the steamboats built and active on (mainly) the Snake River. This comes at the end of a Chapter titled along the Susquehanna River which is in the eastern United States (Pennsylvania) which became a transit point for immigrants that started in Europe and eventually moved on to the Palouse. There is almost no transition from ancestry origin to steamboats on the Snake but what there is is apparently contained in a couple of paragraphs on federal policy regarding how restrictions on the acreage on the amount of land that can be put into growing wheat are applied.
The final chapter appeared to have little to do with the Palouse and instead was mostly about the Vietnam War, still underway at that time, and the NASA space program that was just short of landing on the moon at publication time. This provided interesting history but it is not really explained how this fits with the rest of the book…
It was a best book for me because I grew up in the Palouse and it makes me happy to find something that connects me to the people who settled there and allows me to see the places settled as they saw them at the time. It also provides some important history although most all of what is provided should be double/checked. And lastly, it provides a lot of some of the best examples I’ve ever seen of what NOT to do as a writer.
The book provides an abundance of place names around the Palouse as well as names and some description of the people giving a picture of what their lives were like and what mattered to them as well as an overview of where they had come from and lived previously, both in Europe and America.
The writing is sometimes bizarre. For example they often, when needing a verb, pick a second or third cousin to what be the most obvious choice which often ends in head scratching, very unnatural sounding prose. They also sometimes try to provide flowery embellishment to the scenes they are describing and this often ends up sounding like a Cheech and Chong parody of 18th century English poetry.
There are a lot of interesting details provided and in that sense the book is a little like the Laura Ingalls Eilder books. There are, for example, details provide on how to process flax for use, how to make beer and moving from the home front to the farmers fields, there are lots of insights on how to harvest wheat with horse teams and how to contend with the steep slopes that required ingenuity and specialized equipment to manage. Some of these details may be more than the average reader wants, even learning what many of the tools and components described requires effort, but these descriptions may well be a gold mine for someone studying folk arts and the commonplace knowledge of people from that era.
The book provides a lot of details about what engineers, politicians and area farmers hoped would result from the soon-to-be-built Snake River dams. Lots of interesting information but it is presented as a dialogue between parents and children. The “dialogue” reads like excerpts from a report - complicated, technical - not remotely credible as an actual conversation, especially one involving children.
There is also a section on the steamboats built and active on (mainly) the Snake River. This comes at the end of a Chapter titled along the Susquehanna River which is in the eastern United States (Pennsylvania) which became a transit point for immigrants that started in Europe and eventually moved on to the Palouse. There is almost no transition from ancestry origin to steamboats on the Snake but what there is is apparently contained in a couple of paragraphs on federal policy regarding how restrictions on the acreage on the amount of land that can be put into growing wheat are applied.
The final chapter appeared to have little to do with the Palouse and instead was mostly about the Vietnam War, still underway at that time, and the NASA space program that was just short of landing on the moon at publication time. This provided interesting history but it is not really explained how this fits with the rest of the book…
It was a best book for me because I grew up in the Palouse and it makes me happy to find something that connects me to the people who settled there and allows me to see the places settled as they saw them at the time. It also provides some important history although most all of what is provided should be double/checked. And lastly, it provides a lot of some of the best examples I’ve ever seen of what NOT to do as a writer.
Displaying 1 of 1 review