Sagebrush Homesteads

Book excerpt: The pioneers who took up homesteads on the raw sagebrush land of the great Columbia Basin were men and women of real fortitude and courage. Their struggles to make homes and raise crops, with the great scarcity of water which then existed, is an epic to match that of other earlier Western pioneers. Laura Tice Lage (1896-1985) was a child of ten when the Joseph W. Tice family moved to a homestead north of the present town of Othello, Washington. Other homestead lands nearby were being rapidly taken up. She retained vivid memories or those early years, and in Sagebrush Homesteads she recounts many of the experiences of her parents and other homestead families between 1906 and 1914. With these pioneers, the reader will again walk those dusty roads, through both humor and pathos, and a wealth of homestead lore.