HOME MADE CORN MEAL

WE had not been in Klickitat County but a year or two when Mother cousin, Frank Lee and wife, came to our neighborhood to live. They brought with them Mrs. Lee two small brothers, Peter and Maurice Binford. The years were hard ones. Food was scarce and hard to get, as very little land was as yet under cub tivation. To get money to buy supplies for the winter, my Father and Frank Lee would go away from home to work, at least part of the summer. Mother, Mrs. Lee, Pete and Maurice, we three small Tates, Lola, Revvie, and Need all lived together during the men absence. We lived at our house as it was larger, and water was more convenient. (If you can call carrying it by bucketfuls a couple of blocks, convenient.) At least, we all lived together — two women and five children. One summer, when the men were away, we ran out of flour. We could not go to town to get flour, nor, indeed, did we have money to buy it, if we could have gone. But these undaunted pioneer women were not defeated. We took the horse and went to the small corn field, some half mile from the house, filled sacks with corn, slung the sacks across the pony back, and carried the grain to the house. But corn kernels are not meal! Bread could not be made from whole corn. Again, the ingenuity of the pioneer women! They took a large piece of tin from a coaloil can, made holes in it by driving nails through it, making one side of the tin rough. This they used for a grater, and grated the corn into meal. It made delicious bread. At least it was fresh, and didn have to be hauled from The Dalles by team and wagon. So we had an abundance of bread until the men returned in the fall.