Maurice Hansen

Sagebrush, Watercress, and Chokecherry Jelly: from the Journal of a Homesteader Maurice Hansen

After his father's death, Jean-Pierre Lafontaine's Shoshoni Indian mother told him, "The white man's medicine is strong. It has changed our way of life and it will never change back. Go and live among the white men and become one of them like your father was."Far more an Indian boy than white and with his Shoshoni mother's words burning in his mind the sixteen-year-old mixed-blood reluctantly left her teepee in a small village on the bank of the Snake River near Blackfoot, Idaho. He headed north to Idaho Falls and finally to Ammon. Henry Monson, a farmer found him in the Ammon store and hired him to work for room and board. Uneducated, but handsome and intelligent, he looked little like an Indian. Henry recognized his intelligence and sent him to school where he changed his name to John Fountain . After four years with the Monson family, he struck out alone in a white man's world and staked out a homestead on Bull's Fork. After two serious romances including a near seduction, he married a girl he knew as a homely child but didn't recognize as a pretty grown-up woman. His prospects looked very good, but World War I interrupted his homesteading and he left his pregnant wife to go into the Army. After returning from the war, two crop failures left him discouraged and unsure, and at the urging of both his wife, and his father-in-law's admonition, "Get the hell out of those hills, they'll kill you," he left his precious homestead and entered the University of Idaho to become a lawyer. The story tells not only the heartbreaks and problems of homesteading but the joy of accomplishment, faith in one's self, and neighborliness shared by a rugged, individualistic people with a common destiny.