of unemployment between when the lambs were shipped to market and when the ewes gave birth to a new crop of sheep. Although sheep herding paid relatively well, few cared to endure the loneliness involved and the periods of unemployment. Into this niche in Elmore County, and most of the western United States, came the Basques, an early sea people from Europe.
The first Basques in the area were bachelors who saved their money and returned to Europe. The bachelors stayed in hotels, establishments built for sheepherders, where they could feel at home among others speaking their native language. When Basque women came to the area, it was usually as domestic help in the hotels. Some Basque men managed to earn enough to own herds and married the daughters of the hotel owners or the women working in the hotels. Thus the Basques worked themselves into the fabric of Elmore County and Mountain Home.4
Mountain Home’s importance rose during the Spanish-American War of 1898 and World War I. The area helped supply the Army with horses and wool for uniforms, and warehouses for storing wool lined the railroad tracks in Mountain Home. Even after the end of the Great War, the town continued to ship its horses and sheep.5
Richard McKenna was born at his home at 204 East Fourth Street, Mountain Home. His maternal grandfather, Joseph Ertz, had left Germany to avoid the army and settled in Tennessee. Facing further conscription at the outset of the U.S. Civil War, “he walked all the way to Chicago to avoid serving in the Confederate Army.” Joseph married Mary Burkhard while living in Chicago but then moved to the Nebraska sand-hill country near Ogallala to avoid the Union Army. Anna Lucy Ertz, Richard’s mother, grew up in this rugged area when it “was still pretty wild Indian and cowboy country.”6
Richard’s paternal grandfather took land in the John Day Valley in eastern Oregon. The settlers “were still fighting Indians around there” when Richard’s father, Milton, was young. McKenna recalled his father “ran away from home when he was eleven and grew up in cow camps in Eastern Oregon.”7
Milton Lewis McKenna married Anna Lucy Ertz on 18 June 1912 at Mountain Home. Anna, who later in life began using her middle name more frequently, was a devoted Christian Scientist “for most of her life,” and this was the “only religious instruction” Richard received while living in Mountain Home. Richard was the eldest of four boys; Archie, the second son; Donald, the third son; and Roderick, the youngest, made up the rest of the McKenna family. The McKennas lived in Mountain Home but eventually moved to a five-acre farm in Canyon Creek, just outside town. Five acres in the high desert is not a great deal of land in the Mountain Home region, where the controlling factors are water and soil. The soils were calcareous, that is, overloaded with calcium, and crops on the McKenna holdings required “about 22 inches of water.” To put these statistics in perspective and understand the problems Richard’s father faced as a small farmer near Mountain Home, the rainfall records from 1 August 1948 to 31 December 2005 show only a mean of 9.98 inches of precipitation annually. Any farming by Richard’s father would have required irrigation to be successful, but the family had no good access to water. All this indicates the McKenna family would have been living on the edge if their existence depended entirely on the land.8
The realities of a hardscrabble farm may be why in 1917 Milton also worked as a contract freighter “all through . . . [the Owyhee Mountains] in the . . . days of tandem wagons and eight-horse teams on a jerkline.” At the time tall wagons containing a large amount of cargo were coupled together like a modern truck with a trailer. Instead of the driver sitting on the wagon and guiding the horses or mules with reins, as usually shown in western movies, the driver sat on one of the horses and had one line connected to the horses. The driver would jerk the line—thus “jerk line”—with one tug signaling the animal to the left. Richard spent one summer helping his father repair a ten-mile private road “about 30 miles back in the mountains from Horseshoe Bend” to fulfill a contract his father had to “haul lumber out.”9
While McKenna’s parents struggled to support their family, Richard entered the Mountain Home public school system. His daily route to school while he was in the first grade passed a building at 180 South Third Street that he thought of as “something like the courthouse and vaguely associated with God.” The edifice was in fact Mountain Home’s Carnegie Library, established in 1908, five years before Richard’s birth. The young boy had no idea a library contained books, even though books and libraries eventually played an important part in his life. His introduction to libraries had to wait, however, as his family had moved to the farm at Canyon Creek. Living on the farm required Richard to take transportation into Mountain Home for school, and he could see “Old man Beaman’s black, two-horse school bus crawling down what we . . . [called] Gaines Hill,” allowing him and his little brother “plenty of time to walk down the road [with me] carrying my lunch bucket before [the bus] got there.”10
McKenna soon developed “a great thirst for reading,” but his home contained only six books. Richard, however, “read anything,” even the Department of Agriculture’s 1902 Annual Report. This “thirst” became an important part of his character for the rest of his life.11
After his success as a novelist, when older Mountain Home residents were asked to describe the young McKenna, they remembered him always reading and usually walking barefoot, with hands in pockets and eyes cast downward and seemingly in his own world. In a small community, this meant the boy received a reputation as a shy person. If those who classified the young man as shy had delved deeper, they might have learned of Richard’s great interest in the natural world around him. Today, it would probably be more accurate to describe the boy as introspective and imaginative.12 The town and environs of Mountain Home provided another aspect of the young boy’s developing psyche. Richard’s hometown enabled him to move among lumberjacks, miners, cowboys, old Indian fighters, Basque sheepherders, and Mexican section hands. Into this highly diversified group of humanity, McKenna actively sought out elderly men of unusual origins or stories. All this became the foundation for his lifelong search for interesting people, new places, and different cultures.13
In the desert surrounding his rural community, Richard found a “special charm” in viewing nature devoid of humans. Lying on the dark lava rocks and looking out over the desert, he would smell the perfume of sagebrush and watched the rabbit bush turn to yellow in the fall. As he lay among the rocks, he looked out over the land and, like the Basques before him, began thinking of the sea, the mountains serving as islands in the vast “ocean” of the desert. While alone in the desert, he often felt “more purely happy at such times than I think I have ever been since.”14
When he was in either the third or fourth grade, someone finally explained to Richard what a library was. One can only imagine the feelings of an introspective boy from a poor farm family approaching something new. Nevertheless, one afternoon after school, with “much trepidation,” Richard paused before the doors of the library. He gathered his courage and pushed open the door, only to find himself in the Carnegie vestibule, with stairs leading up to another set of doors. Another stairway led down to the basement area. The young McKenna did not know this typical layout of a small Carnegie building, which allowed a library in the upper portion of the building and a community meeting area in the lower; some libraries even had small stages for community gatherings. The librarian could lock the upper doors in the evening and yet have the building open for community events.
As Richard stood in the vestibule looking up the stairs, he was struck by a strong smell “compounded of rubber matting, books and possibly some sort of floor wax.” For the rest of McKenna’s life, he always recalled the library with this “pleasant” smell, which brought with it the memory of the “greatest pleasurable excitement the world had to offer me.” Years later, Richard wrote, “I know now why incense is burned in temples.”15
McKenna continued to put off walking up the stairs from the vestibule by reading a marble plaque with the names of the women’s clubs that had worked to establish the library. He finally summoned up his courage, climbed the stairs, and pushed through the upper doors into the library. Coming from a home with few books, he was now surrounded by books on shelves higher than his