Westing in America

The Hop King
By the end of the Civil War in 1865, Ezra Meeker had finally found good farmland and settled on a 320-acre homestead on the Puyallup River in southern Puget Sound. There he eventually became a very successful farmer and a wealthy man, selling his hop crops to breweries all over America and Europe. From the beginning, Ezra’s relationships with the Native people of Puget Sound were positive and productive. Several hundred worked on his hop farm, and they spoke affectionately of their employer. Ezra also adopted an orphaned Native boy and raised him along with his own children. That boy became a lawyer, and his descendants are still living in the Puget Sound area.

Early in their marriage, Ezra and Eliza had agreed that all their earnings would be shared equally, so Eliza was also a wealthy woman. Eliza was in love with Victorian architecture. She wanted to build a grand house in Puyallup, but Ezra was happy in the log cabin he had built for them. He suggested that Eliza could build a big house for herself if she wished, so she did. In 1887, she commissioned a seventeen-room mansion that was not completed until 1890. There they lived until Eliza’s death in 1909. With Eliza gone and the children grown, Ezra walked away from the mansion and never returned to it. Today it is the home of the Ezra Meeker Historical Society and the repository of many records and relics from Northwest history.

Ezra’s wealth did not last long. Pests and fungus destroyed his crops, and the economic crash of 1893 wiped out most of his investments. But Ezra was resilient. He kept his head above water by selling provisions to goldseekers during the Klondike Gold Rush in Alaska. He also began to write books about the Oregon Trail, Puget Sound, the Leschi trial, and even children’s stories. He also began a national campaign to mark the Oregon Trail as an historical monument. He persuaded Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge to give endorsements, but no funds. To raise money and support for the project, he drove an ox team and wagon from Puyallup to Washington, DC, thus reversing his earlier journey.

An article in the North American Review of 1930 describes Ezra as a lobbyist some years earlier in Washington DC, there to support legislation memorializing the Oregon Trail. The author says that Ezra had crossed the country by ox team, by railroad, by automobile, and by airplane in his lifetime. Ezra thought he might have been the only person who had done that, and he was never challenged in that claim. The ox team makes it a hard story to top.

Ezra was on the road storytelling and beating the drum for pioneer history during the last twenty years of his life. He was in Detroit when illness struck him and he returned to Seattle, where he died in 1928 at age 98. He and Eliza are buried side by side in Puyallup, where their inscription reads, “They came this way to win and hold the West.” That epigram was on the plaques that were placed along The Oregon Trail as part of the Oregon Trail Memorial Association that was founded by Ezra in 1926.

“To win and hold” can be understood in several different ways. For Governor Stevens, winning meant defeating the Native people and holding them confined to a reservation. For Nathan Meeker, it was a matter of winning western Natives to an agricultural way of life and holding them as assimilated participants in white society. For Ezra Meeker, winning meant winning the love and respect of others and holding the western land as one does in a marriage, to have and to hold dear. Leschi and Ouray had the land from birth, and they held it as best they could. All of the character types in this story and all of the attitudes remain with us in twenty-first century America, and we see them regularly in our newspapers and on television. I often wish that we had a few more like Ouray, Leschi, and Ezra, and not so many like Isaac Stevens and Nathan. But all of these people, and all of this land, have brought us to our time and have had their influence on who we are.

Many Americans can tell a story like this, though perhaps not with the luxury of so many documented details. Westing has been a way of life for Americans for about four centuries. Ken Keigley, the Meeker family genealogist, now lists about 50,000 names in his database of Meeker descendants since 1635. I was born to one of those fragments of the Meeker molasses left in Iowa when Ezra took to the trail in 1852. My birthplace was Council Bluffs, Iowa, eighty years after Ezra began his journey to the Pacific Northwest from that city. When I moved from Iowa to Seattle in 1948, my route followed the Oregon Trail that Ezra traveled, though at higher speed on pavement. I have also lived a significant part of my life in Alaska. My two sons and their children live in western Washington and coastal California. Now I live on an island in Puget Sound west of Seattle.