The Kozy Kamp, open and shut.
Sam and Beulah Strachan outside the folding house Sam built.
ARCHIBALD MITCHELL STRACHAN was born in Stevenston, Scotland, on June 17, 1850. His wife, CATHERINE WELSH, was born in Kilmarnock, Scotland, on January 10, 1852. Stevenston was a closely associated community to Kilmarnock. They married July 25, 1873, in Kilmarnock, Scotland. They had four children: Samuel S. Strachan (b. 1875); Jean Gillis Strachan (b. 1877), Jessie Mitchell Strachan (b. 1879) and Thomas Welsh Strachan (b.1892).
“Gillis,” “Mitchell” and “Welsh” are all family names. The S in Sam’s name doesn’t stand for anything. He wasn’t given a middle name, so added the S. because many businessmen at the time used double initials.
While the Strachan family was forming in Scotland, the American prairies were being cleared of the indigenous people. Smallpox did most of the work. They say Archibald was a proud man who subscribed to the thoughts of Thomas Jefferson. He wanted the pride of being a landowner, a “gentleman farmer”. He was also a skilled finish carpenter, which was good to fall back on when homesteading wasn’t paying enough.
I do not know the date of their emigration to the US, but it had to be between the birth of Jessie in Scotland and the birth of Thomas in South Dakota, so it was in the Eighties. The economy of Stevenston was dependent on coal mining, which tuckered out in the Eighties. By that time the Sioux were confined to reservations and their range was opened for homesteading. In DeVoe and Faulkton, where the Strachans staked their claim, the Sioux band had been Brulé Teton, "Brulé" meaning "burnt", perhaps because of prairie fires.
Sam was well-educated in Scotland and became a Faulkton, SD, school superintendent. His wife, Beulah Swan Finney (b. 1871) was a teacher born in Quincy, Michigan, which was platted in 1870. She told about walking with her mother on a path through the great forests of the times. They met a group of Indian men who stood aside to make way for them. Beulah claimed they said, “Squaws heap brave.” I don’t believe they said that, but I believe the men stood aside and it took a little nerve to walk past them.
Sam and Beulah married September 19, 1901, after proving up individual but adjacent homesteads. They moved to Swan River, Manitoba, in 1919. Their first child, Samuel Archibald, was premature and died. (b. 1902). Then came Bruce Bennett (1903), Glenn Gordon (1905), May Alice (1907) and Seth Stevens (1910). Sam named his boys with double initials, but not his girl. Maybe Beulah chose her name.
In Manitoba the family raised potatoes and then become distributors of Kovar Farm Machinery, especially a cultivator designed to pull up crabgrass, which was shipped to them in pieces and assembled by the family. This taught them the skills for both the construction and the marketing of the Kozy Kamp, which was often done at fairs. The family moved to Brandon where they bought the house of Martha Ostenso, author of “Wild Geese,” a famous and favorite Canadian novel about a tyrant in a farming family and the school teacher who boarded with them. In the movie version Sam Shepherd plays the overbearing patriarch. The Strachan children took college training in Winnipeg at the very new Manitoba Agricultural College, which would become the University of Manitoba. When Bruce finished his BS, he went to Oregon State University to earn his MS in agriculture. The family followed to Portland. By that time import tariffs on the machinery had destroyed the Kovar business in Canada, but the Kozy Kamp business seemed hopeful until WWII started and steel, rubber and gas were all rationed.
True to their careful Scots heritage, Sam and Beulah lived quietly in Portland until his death in 1951 and hers in 1953. All four of their children are gone now, and two of their grandchildren have died. There are two more generations, all urban, mostly professionals.
One of the fulfilling ways to work on these family events is in terms of world events. For instance, the Industrial Revolution that exhausted the coal deposits of Scotland and supported the Victorian middle class and public education, or the sequence of the clearing of American indigenous people from the prairie in order to replace nomadic hunters with agricultural families, are macro-history that the world shares. It’s impossible to overestimate the consequences of two world wars and the economic forces that fed them and followed them. Seth, who began by pasture-hopping in an open fabric one-person airplane, was a bomber pilot at the very heart of WWII and then a TWA pilot in the dawn of overseas tourism.
Sam Strachan was of a class of worker (after his brief career in education) once called “mechanics.” He constantly tinkered with inventions, not so much in order to make money but because he liked to have tools in his hands. The Kozy Kamp, the folding tent trailer, was remarkably fitted for traveling the West in the days before the highways became so dangerous and commercialized. The Strachan boys had set out on bicycles to make road trips when they were young, but as adults they took their families with them. When Sam and Beulah were scouting Portland, they built a wooden version of this camper on the back of a “Ranger” truck, an early RV. For a month (December) they lived on a parking lot in downtown Portland, where it poured rain constantly. In the afternoon, for a little relief from the Ranger, they went to the reading rooms of the YMCA and YWCA respectively and separately. Occasionally they went to a music hall or lecture. Others from South Dakota were there and also some business prospects had been made by mail.
I'll close with a quick twist. https://vimeo.com/43939405 The Sam Strachan in this video is not my grandfather but I’ll sure claim the guy. Same genes, I think. (He’s a surfer!!!) Maybe a bodyboard is a far cry from a crabgrass cultivator -- maybe not. Maybe surfing is a far cry from homesteading on prairie -- maybe not. Takes guts, vision, respect for tools. Traveling.
No comments:
Post a Comment