Child of Steens Mountain by Eileen O'Keeffe McVicker, Barbara J. Scot

Abstract

would-be communities? and in describing the source documents themselves ? ashe isby the actual communities and their residents. In chapter 5, for instance, Kopp explores the dream of Rev. John Sellwood to create Hopeland, an austere settlement where quar reling, dancing, and theatrical eventswould be forbidden and domestic animals were tobe strictlyconfined.Not surprisingly,the dream went nowhere. Later in the chapter,he details a desultory and futileattemptbyRalphWhite head to establish anArts and Crafts colony at Alsea inabout 1900. In chapter 6, thegrandiose plans of an early twentieth-centuryChristian cooperative community take up numerous pages, though this venture also never comes to life. These projects are intriguing,certainly, in the sense that they reflectsimilar religious, artistic, and cooperative initiatives thatwere actually taking shape elsewhere in theUnited States at roughly the same time.Readers may find it strange, though, that the author has decided to emphasize somany schemes that never came anywhere near realization. Itwas in the 1960s and 1970s thatUtopian effortstruly blossomed inOregon. Kopp iden tifies more than 250 intentional communities formed in the state since 1965, including a few ? such as Alpha Farm and Breitenbush ? that still exist today. The author devotes two chapters to developments since 1965 and wisely chooses to focusmainly on just a few distinctiveor long-lastingcommunities? and on ones that were representativeof significant or unusual social trends. His discussion of lesbian and feminist communal groups, for instance, is especially informative. Oregon, apparently, is a center for women-only communities, with ten listed in a 2007 census, more than anywhere else in the United States. While Kopp offers no specific explanation for this phenomenon, he does suggest that farsighted early land acquisitions by theOregon Women's Land Trust and the Older Women Network helped bringwomen together and foster a broad sense of com munity. Kopp also provides a brief but useful description of groups such as Crabapple and Cerro Gordo, which practiced groupmarriage or "polyfidelity,"and theHoedads, aworkers' cooperative for treeplanters that lastedmore thana decade andmay have hadmore than 500 members in 1978. Eden Within Eden's resource guide appen dix is quite extraordinary and includes both general works on Utopian experience and almost 300 community listings.Each listing provides, where available, a location, dates of operation, formernames, and complete bibli ography. Many individual listingscover several pages (especially forAlpha Farm, Aprovecho Research Center,Aurora Colony, Cerro Gordo, Lost Valley Educational Centre, New Odessa, and Rajneeshpuram). The voluminous notes section helps direct researchers tonoteworthy archival and libraryholdings. Inhis conclusion, Kopp refrainsfrom mak ing any particular judgments about Oregon's Utopian heritage. He merely notes that early newcomers to the territory saw Oregon as Eden, "and efforts continue to achieve that paradise" (p. 186). Andrew Scott Sechelt,BritishColumbia CHILDOF STEENS MOUNTAIN byEileenO'Keeffe McVicker with Barbara J.Scot forwardbyRichard W. Etulain Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2008. Photographs. 160 pages. $16.95 paper. "I was an outdoor child all ofmy life" is the opening forChild of SteensMountain, Eileen O'Keeffe McVicker's reminiscence of growing up in southeasternOregon's Harney County. The author's childhood home was a small cabin that only served as the center for an upbringing where the family'sdaily activities Reviews 637 and seasonal round unfolded in a landscape of rimrock and sage, and thedesert panorama from their Steens Mountain homestead encompassed a view greater than some New England states. Homesteading theAmerican West is often viewed as the rush to theGreat Plains in the years immediately after the Civil War. Less well known is the homestead era of the early twentiethcentury in the High Desert of eastern California and Nevada, eastern Oregon and southeastern Idaho. Even today,this isarguably themost remote and empty landscape in the United States outside ofAlaska. It is therefore not surprising that it still offered land and opportunity to Ben O'Keeffe and his family when they started their small sheep outfit on the southern slope of SteensMountain in 1930. McVicker's memories of her childhood are a valuable addition to the catalog of literature that chronicles the West's homestead era. At firstglance, the accounts of the chores to be done, of tending to livestock, and of the one room school and meager collection of build ings thatmade up...