Winning the West—One Stump at a Time

By Gordon Stowe—February 10, 1968

View from the farm property, overlooking Coeur d’Alene Lake, Kootenai County, Idaho

I remember of Dad clearing the field north of the house. I think the orchard area had been cleared before – but to this land clearing – I only wish I had the words to explain the hard, manual labor involved. 

It was my job to bring Dad a drink of water (in a 2 quart lard bucket) mid-way in the morning and again in the afternoon. He was grubbing out the brush, small trees and etc. Not only the brush had to be removed, but the roots as well, (big ones). This land had to be broken with a horse-drawn plow and you didn’t have any other power here, so you had to have it in good shape before you started with the plow. His procedure was to walk backwards into a clump of brush, push hard against it to lean it back a little and so he could stand straight, raise the grub-hoe over his head and swing it sideways and also glance back – to be sure he didn’t take a mighty swing and hook onto a branch behind and get hurt. Then, all set – he sunk the hoe into the ground about 18 inches from the base of the bush. The idea was to cut off the root and then in a prying motion, pull the root loose. He worked around the bush or small tree in this fashion until able to pry it over and out. Native willow and pine trees were the worst. They had a tap root and after you had worked all the way around and it was still quite solid – you pulled the dirt out from around and cut off this root. In real heavy brush, a spot of 20 feet square was a hard day’s work. The brush was left as it fell, later piled and burned.

After it’s been plowed, (known as broken) it is harrowed and this is also a tough job. It’s a mass of small roots and they pile up under the harrow and the harrow must be raised up over the pile. Then these bunches of roots are gathered up and burned and after much hand work of gathering roots, limbs and hauling off the rocks, you were ready to plant. Dad generally planted oats for hay the first few years. They worked as close as they could to the stumps but you didn’t dare plow very close on account of the big roots from the trees. So it ended up that you didn’t have so much land after all, because the stumps took up so much room. This is where the expression, “Stump Ranch” originated.

So now, the big problem is to get rid of the stumps and this could be a long chapter in anyone’s book.

When the brush was burned, it was quite often done on a stump. It would burn for a day or two and then go out – now you have a black stump! Anytime you had any spare time you were supposed to take an ax and chop on these stumps and try to start a fire that would burn it out. It never did work but it sure was a good way to pass the time away and after a few years, got to be sort of a game and there was a real challenge here, “Man Versus Stump”. You chopped the south west side bare—(the wind came from here) and gathered the chips and other wood from outside the field and got a good fire burning and you pile on the wood real good and soon, old Mr. Stump is just a mass of flames and you know this time you have won the battle. When you return several days later, you expect to find a big, black hole where the stump was, but instead, there’s Mr. Stump standing straight as ever, a little smaller perhaps, and a little blacker. The title of the game is now “Stump vs. Man”.

Some farmers had stump pullers; long poles for leverage, chains, cables and pulleys and strong horses. I never heard of a stump being pulled with this contraption but it was a good way to rid the farmer of much built-up tension and gave him a good reason to do some good, old down-to-earth “cussin.”

Finally, someone came up with the idea of blowing them out with dynamite and this idea was good-except nobody had the money to buy the dynamite. Sometime later, they came out with a cheaper and better stump dynamite, known as Stump Powder. It’s lower in Nitro-glycerin and slower and better for stumps. They could afford a box or two of this a year; and man started winning the fight but not very fast. Mr. Stump was a hard fighter and most farmers would put about one-half of the box un-der one stump and blow it all over the neighborhood and were soon out of powder.

But our Dad was smarter than most and after some experimenting worked out a way to beat old Mr. Stump!

He would punch a hole in the ground under the stump and try to get to the middle if possible, and put in the dynamite – never enough to blow out the stump but just enough to split it open. Sometimes it would be in 3 or 4 sections, still solid in the ground, however. The shot had blown much of the dirt away from the base of the stump and here you started a fire again. But this time it was much different, for the fire worked all through and had a good draft. Of course, the wood was dry by now and fire took hold and (you won’t believe this) there would be fire in some of these big stumps for a month, sometimes even longer. The roots would get on fire and burn way back under the ground.

I remember one time of walking along about 15 feet from a stump that we had burned out a month or two before—and the ground gave way under one of my feet and I went down – clear up to my hip in a mass of ashes and hot coals!

Children of George M. and Flora Kinney Stowe, c. 1911  Gordon is on the far left

Excerpt from Stowe Memories of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; the memories of some of the children of Charles A. and George M. Stowe who, with their father Solomon Asaph Stowe, settled in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, in 1888. Gordon Stowe, son of George M. Stowe, was born in 1903.

Submitted by MaryLynn Strickland, niece of Gordon Stowe