From Mud Huts To
Tent Cities
by Ed Keenan

Sometimes, it is good to take a moment to reminisce about our family’s pioneer past and humble beginnings, and how they got to where they are today. Their primitive life in pursuit of free land can have the affect of stirring appreciation for our earthy roots.

Think about it. Before the comfort of log homes and pioneer cabins the early travelers, moving west of the Missouri River in covered wagons during the mid-eighteen hundreds, built life-saving shelters on the vast prairies by any means available. In a practical sense, they were very creative. Dugouts, mud huts and shacks were the first prairie homes in the untamed west. To beat the bitter winter cold, buffalo and cow chips were gathered, stored and burned for heat. Sometimes it was necessary to travel miles around in order to gather enough fuel for the winter. The dung chips came to be known as “prairie coal.”

These one and two room dugouts, just large enough to house a small family, were cradled in an embankment in such a manner as to be protected from the fierce winter winds and summer tornadoes. Most were dug in to an embankment or made of mud blocks, or a wooden framework covered with mud sod, not unlike a Native Indian Hogan. The tree-limbed or board roofs were covered with sod and grass. The mud huts came to be affectionately called “the soddy.” Soddys were the common primitive shelter. Often dry and warm enough to barely survive the winter, they were reasonably cool in the summer. This was the “soddy,” built to withstand the harsh rigors of the prairie until a more substantial dwelling could be built. Blizzards, tornados, prairie fires, and grasshopper plagues were the bane and fear of every prairie pioneer.

And, without question; every pioneer family lived their own, particularly, memorable events and experiences. These stories got re-told and passed on to their families. Here is one from the plains of western Oklahoma. A soddy survivor says that her great-grandmother somehow brought a canary and some flower seeds on their historic trek west. She planted the seeds on the roof of their soddy and they grew into a real colorful roof. It set their soddy apart from every other ordinary mud hut!

As for the canary, a snake came inside, got in the cage and ate it. But, swelled up with the canary now inside him, he could not escape through the wire birdcage. He was doomed to an untimely death by grandma!

Another story told by grandparents is about the winter storage of life-saving corn that had to be burned for fuel to heat their soddy during a deadly blizzard. The story is; “Faced with freezing death, the complete stock of food-corn was burned in the stove to save our lives. The cold wind raged on and on for three days and nights and we burnt all the ears of golden Kansas corn to stay alive. On the third day neighbors shared their food with us, and our two babies. Corn fuel saved our lives from freezing to death!” Think about it, to our great grandparents cheap food-corn served as fuel to save lives. Today expensive food-corn is being sold and used for ethanol to fuel our cars and tractors. The more fuel we demand, the more we may wish for the cheap food-corn of the good old days…just to stay alive!

On the vast cattle spreads that developed from Oklahoma to Wyoming, remnants of the pioneer soddys can still be seen. Some successful cattle ranchers even built their permanent ranch house over their soddy, incorporating it into a cellar.  Imagine taking your grandchildren to the cellar and showing them how their great-great grandparents built their first pioneer house. Down to this day such pioneer roots run deep among those families. They are well grounded to the earth.

 
However, as many of those pioneer dwellers moved farther out west, into the hot dry desert, their means of cover and primitive housing became another story. Housing and shelter took on a different shape and form. Drawn by reports in the late 1800’s that water was being diverted from the Colorado River to the rich Imperial Valley, and that the desert land was available almost for the taking, many pioneers came flooding in.

Back in the earliest times, Spanish and Catholic friars explored the valley, but settlements were not developed until the Colorado River water conquered the arid valley in 1901. That is when Imperial County, the last of California's 58 counties, was formed.

By early spring Imperial Valley is already stifling hot and virtually unbearable in the summer

sun. It also becomes icy cold in the winter— hot and dry but also very cold. Temperatures range from freezing lows in the 30’s in January to highs of 115+ in July and August, with an annual rainfall of less than three inches!

So starting with just a brush arbor for a shelter from the elements, the housing of choice most used by those early western pioneers was not a dugout of adobe-sod and brush, but a tent. Two good-sized tents, about fourteen by sixteen feet with a few poles and some lumber were used to create a livable place for a man and his wife and children.

Since water was, and is still, the life-blood of the desert dweller, the tents were set up near an irrigation canal or ditch and water was carried to the house in a pail. It was this, manmade, water source that made living in the valley possible.

Built about three feet over the tent and extending about four feet out past the canvas walls was a frame constructed of poles covered with wood or other natural materials. This shaded air space in between the tent and the cover provided air circulation that lowered the temperature inside the tent by several degrees. It was truly a primitive, but ingenious, form of air conditioning. Not unlike other original southern California towns, tent cities developed when pioneer tents were set up in rows, approximately twenty feet apart, with the openings or flaps, facing each other. Wetting the floors and tamping the soil down created a hard packed floor surface that could be swept clean. It was said, “a little clean dirt ain’t nasty.” Originally, El Centro, CA grew up out of a tent city.

A clay jug (olla) for drinking water was covered with burlap and kept wet so that the evaporation cooled the water to a refreshing coolness. Desert cooler boxes made of clay and wrapped in burlap, were kept cool in the same manner. They were cool enough to keep butter from melting and kept eggs and milk preserved fairly well.

One of the tent rooms was used for a kitchen and dining area and the other for sleeping quarters. Furnishings were a wood-burning cook stove, a kerosene lamp, a primitive wooden table and chairs and some sleeping mats, stuffed with grass straw or even corn husks, called a pallet. A little wood burning stove made of sheet iron, provided warmth on cold mornings in the bedroom area.

Trees were planted for shade, and modest ranch houses eventually replaced the tents. Today, the tents are gone. In many cases, however, it is the large shade trees that stand as a testimony to those hardy pioneers. Some of the trees are giant palm trees. Successful hay ranchers and produce farmers and can still point out to their grand children, the old trees in the yard, where their great-great grandparents first dwelt in tents, affectionately called “rag-tops.”

For many Southern California pioneers, the Imperial Valley occupies a special place in the hearts of their families and decedents who survived the rigors of that torrid desert valley. Their roots run deep in this desert soil.

Sixty-eight years ago, in the early 1940’s, I too experienced living in tents. It is part of my personal heritage as a child. It was toward the end of the Great Depression when my folks had to start over again from scratch. Somehow, they managed to acquire a piece of raw brush land, in the semi-arid backcountry of eastern San Diego County. It had absolutely no improvements, just a few acres of primitive brush land of chaparral and sage. No shelter, no water, no outhouse!  Like those early pioneers, we survived the experience of living in tents until more suitable quarters could be built.

My father acquired two used army tents, about 12 x 12 feet in size. One was used for a kitchen and sleeping quarters for the folks, and one for bunking the kids. In our case, a heavy rope strung over a large limb of a white oak tree held up the center of each tent, about ten feet above the dirt floor. No center pole or lumber was used. The corners of the tents were secured by short poles about four feet high and double tie ropes were stretched and staked out from the tent, holding the corners tight. This formed the tent walls.

The army tents fit nicely under the oak tree and we benefited from the shade in the hot summer. Even so, one hundred degree days and no breeze, made the tents like baking ovens. Winter was another story, however. The tie ropes had to loosened when it rained because ropes shrink when they get wet and so could, tear the tent apart or, put so much strain on the oak tree limb the tension could break the limb, causing it to come crashing down on the tent. In fact during a heavy Santa Ana wind and firestorm one summer, that did happen! My oldest sister was inside wetting down the dirt floor. Fortunately the heavy limb missed her. A bit stunned, she came crawling out from under the tent flap!

That’s the kind of unique experience that happened to thousands of pioneers who began life in the west in some sort of primitive shelter. The old oak tree is still there to this day, with a broken limb, standing as a testimony to a child-hood experience of times gone by. Our tent was affectionately called “the army tent.” The folks did eventually build a modest house of fired adobe blocks, called Tecate brick. The large, adobe-size, bricks were hand made in Tecate, Mexico. So, like the pioneers of the prairie or the Imperial Valley, our roots run deep in the rugged mountains of eastern San Diego County.

Hence, it is good to reflect on those pioneers of times past, and what they went through to establish a foothold on the land that they acquired. And it is good to review their trials and tribulations— their setbacks and successes— right up to our time. Yes. There is something nostalgic about those mud huts and tent cities that keep us humble and well grounded, especially when our feet are firmly planted on the hard pack of terra firma.

Ed Keenan © 10-08