Bulletin E-Edition:
Snake River oasis
Treasure Valley was home to Japanese in wartime
By John Gottberg Anderson
For
/ The Bulletin
Published: May 17. 2009 4:00AM PST
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ABOVE: Fields of onions flank the highways between Ontario and Vale, on Oregon’s eastern border with Idaho. Although the Treasure Valley is better known for its crops of potatoes and sugar beets, onions are a major element in the local agricultural economy.
Photos by John Gottberg Anderson For The Bulletin
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PARMA, Idaho — The first Japanese man I ever knew well was a gentleman farmer from this small western Idaho community.
Yoshio Takahashi was my Scoutmaster when I attended the World Scout Jamboree in 1967. He was probably about 50 at the time. At once gentle and tough, “Yosh” filled his khaki uniform with a sun-weathered complexion that spoke to many years in the sugar beet fields.
As a teenager, I had no concept of the difficult times that Takahashi must have endured. I now understand, at least to some degree. Born and raised in the United States, he was one of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry to be “evacuated” with his family to an internment camp during World War II.
But a decision by the War Relocation Authority to allow Japanese-American volunteers to be released from the internment camps to work in agriculture gave “Yosh” and other young men, fit and eager to prove their patriotism, a modicum of freedom. By the end of the war, more than 5,000 Japanese — more than anywhere else in the United States — were living in Parma, Idaho, as well as Ontario, Ore., and elsewhere in the Treasure Valley region along the Snake River, on the Oregon-Idaho border.
Many of them, like “Yosh,” remained here and raised families of their own. And today, many third- and fourth-generation Japanese continue to live in the area.
I made the five-hour drive east from Bend on U.S. Highway 20 to this corner of the northwest a couple of weeks ago. Using Ontario, the area’s largest town with about 11,000 residents, as a base, I traveled in all directions: south to Nyssa, Ore., and Parma, Idaho; east to Fruitland and Payette, Idaho; north to Weiser, Idaho, and Farewell Bend State Park, Ore.; and west to Vale, Ore. All were within 25 miles of my hub. Only a side trip to Lake Owyhee, Ore., 48 miles southwest, took me more than a half-hour from Ontario.
Exploring Ontario
Ontario was born with the arrival of the railroad in 1883. Even today, its most honored building is the Union Pacific Depot that was built of sandstone and brick in 1907. During the World War I era, according to the local chamber of commerce, more wool was shipped through this station than any other in the United States. Its solid appearance hasn’t changed a lot since, and the depot is still in active use.
I found it a little confusing to get around Ontario, as all city streets, north and south, east and west, are numbered. The intersection of Southwest Second Avenue and 10th Street is a good distance away from Southwest 10th Avenue and Second Street. The same is true of blocks to the northwest, northeast and southeast. It found it helped to keep in mind that east and west are divided by the railroad tracks; north and south are split by Idaho Avenue (U.S. Highway 30).
Somehow, I found my way to the Idaho-Oregon Buddhist Temple of the Jodo Shinshu sect, the only such temple between Portland, Spokane and Salt Lake City. Members are already making plans for their annual Japan Nite O-Bon Festival on July 15.
The Festival of Joy honors ancestors with Japanese food, taiko drumming and folk dances. Non-Buddhists are invited to take part in the festival. The 2009 celebration will be its 50th at the Ontario temple, which opened in 1959.
Before O-Bon, the Treasure Valley’s Japanese community reaches out to the public at an annual multicultural event sponsored by the local chamber of commerce the first weekend of June. America’s Global Village Festival begins with a Friday night concert and continues with a Saturday morning parade and international flag ceremony. Besides Japanese, the event features African, Basque, German, Hawaiian, Mexican, Native American, pioneer and Scottish “villages,” each offering visitors unique food, crafts and cultural demonstrations. It’s held in Lions Park, in the heart of Ontario, on Southwest Fourth Avenue between Southwest Seventh and Ninth streets.
Not wanting to wait that long for good Japanese food, I was delighted to discover Ogawa’s restaurant and its adjoining Kanpai cocktail lounge. Chef Collin “Taro” Tolman, a Treasure Valley native whose mother, he said, is full-blooded Japanese, proved to be a master of the art of sushi making. The fish was fresh and the menu featured plenty of other Japanese dishes as well, including bento, tempura and yakisoba noodles.
Four Rivers
Ontario’s most significant attraction for visitors is the Four Rivers Cultural Center and Museum. It’s only a block off the town’s main drag, on the campus of Treasure Valley Community College. An exhibition of history and culture, the museum looks into the settlement of Northern Paiute, Basque, Hispanic, Chinese and Japanese peoples, along with Euro-Americans, in the area where the Malheur, Owyhee and Payette rivers join the Snake.
A short film sets the scene by providing historical context for visitors. Another museum exhibit backgrounds the history of irrigation in the Treasure Valley, highlighted by the construction in the 1930s of the Owyhee Dam, then the highest dam in the United States.
I was especially moved by the gallery describing the Japanese experience. It included a re-creation of a cabin at the central Idaho internment camp of Minidoka, on a hot lava plain, and personal recollections of individuals affected by the period. Although my old friend Takahashi was not personally represented, I felt I could sense his frustration and wounded pride through the words of others.
Here’s what the exhibits taught me: On Feb. 19, 1942 — about 10 weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that launched the U.S. into World War II — President Franklin Roosevelt signed an order banishing all people of Japanese heritage, whether citizens or not, from the West Coast. Regardless of age, occupation or social status, they were given one week to wrap up their affairs and leave behind their homes and most of their possessions. They were then moved inland and sequestered in makeshift camps, behind barbed wire, in desolate places like Minidoka and Tule Lake, Calif.
But with so many young Americans going to serve in a foreign war, farms were left without sufficient labor to harvest crops. The Treasure Valley was hit particularly hard. This heavily irrigated stretch of the Snake River region, where it’s joined by the Boise, Payette, Owyhee and Malheur rivers along the Oregon-Idaho border, had fields of potatoes, onions and sugar beets designated for Allied troops in Europe and the Pacific. The only way the region could meet its quotas was to close its schools and businesses early so that non-farming residents could pitch in and help.
Elmo Smith, the mayor of Ontario and publisher of the Eastern Oregon Observer newspaper, had a better idea. He proposed to the War Relocation Authority that volunteers be released from the internment camps to work in agriculture. An initial experiment with 17 Japanese-American citizens was so successful that these men were encouraged to sponsor additional family and friends for work release. They worked long, hard hours, but they proved their commitment to the Allied war effort.
Elsewhere in Oregon
Sixteen miles west of Ontario, in Vale — in the heart of the onion fields — a colorful mural honors the memory of the Japanese farmworkers. It’s one of about 30 professional murals, painted on the walls of century-old buildings, that celebrate the history of this town of 2,000 people, the first in Oregon on the old Oregon Trail. Oldest of the buildings is Rinehart’s Stone House, built in 1872 as a private home; later a stage stop and community center, it is now a local museum with occasional hours.
A National Historic Oregon Trail interpretive site at Keeney Pass, five miles southeast of Vale on Lytle Boulevard, preserves a section of original wagon ruts from the 1840s and 1850s. But I was more impressed by the displays at expansive Farewell Bend State Park, 22 miles northwest of Ontario via Interstate 84. This was the point at which the Oregon Trail departed the Snake River country to climb over the Blue Mountains, leaving behind a hot and dusty road but also a waterway that provided ample fish and drinking water.
Thirteen miles south of Ontario is Nyssa (pronounced NISS-uh), whose economy since 1937 has been staked to sugar beets. The Amalgamated Sugar Co., a grower-owned cooperative on the west bank of the Snake River, is the top employer in this town of 3,200. But Nyssa nevertheless fashions itself as the “thunderegg capital of the world” for the nearby wealth of Oregon’s state rock, noted for its crystallized core.
Nyssa’s Oregon Trail Agricultural Museum occupies a 1930s feed-and-seed store near downtown. It displays early farm and ranch equipment, restored Basque sheep wagons and vintage photographs of the region’s farms. Next door, the old Hotel Western has also been restored; it’s on the National Register of Historic Places, along with the distinctive Green Lantern Saloon down the block.
Another 12 miles south, tiny unincorporated Adrian is notable for two reasons. Although it doesn’t have a gas station, it does have the Mirage, a restaurant famed far and wide for the prime rib it serves on Friday and Saturday nights. And it has the tongue-in-check “Adrian City Hall” and “Far-Eastern Oregon State Capitol Building”: an abandoned outhouse sitting by the side of State Highway 201 with an American flag flying on a pole above it.
Nyssa and Adrian are gateways to the Owyhee Dam and Reservoir. A narrow paved road follows the Owyhee River south (upstream) to the dam, providing access for scores of ambitious fly fishers. The dam itself rises 417 feet above the river; a visitor information center is located near its foot. The long, narrow reservoir, framed by canyon walls, backs up 52 miles behind the dam.
Idaho communities
The point at which the Boise River flows into the Snake, between Adrian and Nyssa, was the original site of Fort Boise. This Hudson’s Bay Co. trading post, built of adobe on the Oregon Trail in 1834, was destroyed by flood in 1853; a ferry service across the snake operated from the same location between 1864 and 1902, but there was never an effort to reconstruct the fort, and the site today has been taken over by a wildlife refuge.
Today, a replica known as Old Fort Boise stands at the east end of Parma, five miles up the Boise River on U.S. Highway 95. Open summer afternoons, it has a pioneer cabin and historical museum inside its concrete walls.
From Parma, Highway 95 follows the Snake north through tiny Fruitland, an apple-growing center since the early 20th century, to Payette, at the mouth of the Payette River. One of the region’s oldest communities, Payette was founded in 1867 and named for Francois Payette, a French-Canadian trader who ran Fort Boise in its early years. Eighty historic buildings, dating from as early as 1885, mark a distinctive downtown that flanks broad Eighth Street north and south of Center Avenue.
A block east of the central thoroughfare, the Payette County Historical Museum has taken over an old Methodist Episcopal church, designed in Gothic Revival style in 1904. The collection features the usual antiques and local memorabilia, but baseball fans might be drawn to a corner devoted to Harmon Killebrew, a Payette farm boy who was one of Major League Baseball’s greatest sluggers in a 22-year career that ended in 1975, mostly with the Washington Senators and Minnesota Twins.
Weiser, another 15 miles north via Highway 95, is identified with another Senators’ baseball great, a charter member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Walter “Big Train” Johnson, rated by some as the greatest pitcher ever, was a 19-year-old Kansas kid who came to Idaho in 1907 to play for the Weiser Kids of the old semi-pro Idaho State League. (Among the other teams in the league were the Payette Melon Eaters and the Nampa Beet Diggers.) Johnson went straight from Weiser to Washington, where he won 416 games — second most all-time — in a 21-year career.
You may find a photo of Johnson in the Snake River Heritage Center, located in the central building of the old Intermountain Institute, a college prep school that operated from 1899 to 1933. Recently reconstructed, the museum has exhibits on regional history and Native American culture.
Across the road is Weiser High School, in which gymnasium the National Old-Time Fiddlers Contest and Festival is held the third week of June each year. If you can’t make it to this spirited event, you can check out displays and its own “hall of fame” in Slocum Hall, at the Intermountain Institute next to the Snake River Heritage Center.
Make a short drive to downtown Weiser, a town of about 5,300, to see some intriguing architecture. Especially notable is the 1904 Pythian Castle, a cut-stone manor with a Tudor facade, pressed-tin ceiling and stained-glass windows.
This was the landscape where Yoshio Takahashi made his home. It was a place that gave a young man a chance to prove himself, and he rewarded the Treasure Valley by staying. After the war, he purchased his own farm, specializing in beets for sugar production. And he devoted much of his free time to youth volunteerism, specifically with the Boy Scouts.
Once an American, always an American, he believed.
John Gottberg Anderson
can be reached at janderson@bendbulletin.com.
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