By Linda Driskill

To the Blue Mountain Eagle

“If there is a heaven, I hope it looks like the Steens,” says author Eileen O’Keeffe McVicker in her volume of photos and memoirs, “Child of the Steens.”

Steens Mountain, along with the interesting Frenchglen Hotel (no keys, no TV, family style meals, etc.), was a destination point for me during three decades on a fire lookout at the south end of the Prairie City Ranger District.

Of course, that experience may not be for everyone; I remember a fellow tourist once asked me at one of the spectacular viewpoints if this was “all there is to see … scenery?” I said yes and he hopped on his “hawg” and roared off.

The O’Keeffe family arrived on the Steens Mountain from Ireland in 1930, a time of serious drought when most people trying to work small homesteads were giving up. The massive spread belonging to one of the cattle barons still hanging on was purchased by the federal government, and the public is fortunate to now own the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, stopping-off spot to literally hundreds of thousands of birds on their traditional migration routes.

“Child of the Steens” is a little girl’s story of being totally in love with the outdoors, the mountain and everything around her. Her family, making their livelihood raising sheep, lived there contentedly until the time came to move to Burns for schooling of the three children.

This Steens Mountain child claims she was “never bored once in her life.” She loved it all – and that included the dangerous time when her mother shot a rabid coyote stalking her dad near their homestead. Another time, her father was extremely ill during one isolated winter. They not only survived it all but incorporated their mother’s dictum that the word “can’t” doesn’t belong in any vocabulary.

McVicker regards her formative years as a continued educational experience: birds, wildlife, geology, Native American culture, personal responsibility with the sheep, etc.

Life was always interesting and occasionally amusing – like the time the kids playing outside a family dance hall one evening decided to bury a passed-out Basque sheepherder. Just in case he wasn’t dead, they planned to put a stovepipe over his face.

Then there was their ultra-dependable “Old Johnny Mule,” who had a peculiar quirk: at exactly 5 each evening he stopped work and wouldn’t move until they removed his harness.

McVicker tells a fun story of a happy childhood in a place of exceptional interest and beauty; worth reading by those who visit Steens Mountain often or those who might put it on their list of places to experience.

Other resources are a coffee table book, “Steens Mountain in Oregon’s High Desert Country,” with commentary and photos, as well as “Great Basin Country” by local authors Nancy and the late Denzel Ferguson, available in the Grant County Library’s Oregon room.

Linda Driskill is a Grant County writer and volunteer at the Grant County Library.