The lore of the Old West creates visions of cowboys and Indians, gunfights, and mining camps with fortunes won and lost at gambling tables. Towns sprung up overnight, but as quickly as they were created, excessive land speculation often resulted in ghost towns when the gold and silver ran out or railroads took a different route. This era had ended before my grandparents came to America in the early 1900s. Therefore, I was shocked when I found a postcard addressed to my maternal grandfather, Abel Haakinson, who lived in St. Andrews, Washington, in 1908. I had been told that he had homesteaded near Sunnyside, Washington, 125 miles south of St. Andrews, but we have not found any records of him homesteading there. He may have been the second property owner in Sunnyside but was not officially a homesteader there.
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