Site founded Sept. 1, 2000. We passed 2.25 million page views on Feb. 10, 2008
The home pages remain free of any charge. We need donations or subscriptions to continue.
Please pass on this website link to your family, relatives, friends and clients.

Skagit River Journal

of History & Folklore
Subscribers Edition
The most in-depth, comprehensive site about the Skagit
Covers from British Columbia to Puget Sound. Counties covered: Skagit, Whatcom, Island, San Juan, Snohomish & BC. An evolving history dedicated to committing random acts of historical kindness

Noel V. Bourasaw, editor

810 Central Ave., Sedro-Woolley, Washington, 98284
Home of the Tarheel Stomp

Mortimer Cook slept here & named the town Bug

Living High, an unconventional
autobiography, and June and Farrar Burn

June Burn, 1941, courtesy of Seattle Times

We are often asked why we say that June Burn's book, Living High, is one of the handful of books we would want if we were marooned on a remote island. So we are writing this introduction to the June Burn series as an explanation and we will quote a few excerpts from the 1941 book to back up our assertion. June Burn was not the most celebrated female writer in Washington state history but she is certainly the most unconventional. In our dream dinner reveries, we would certainly want to dine with June and Betty Bowen, her contemporary in the next generation. Among the many reasons why this book would be on our short list is its unflagging optimism in the face of adversity, proof that love at nearly first sight can prove to be sturdy for the rest of your life and the many details she provides of the non-stop adventure that she and her family lived. The book begins in that other Washington, back east, in 1919:

Up the Potomac River in Maryland, not far north of the District line, there used to be a little log cabin on a knoll in the heart of a hundred-acre place. It had woods all about and clear cool brooks winding by on three sides. Down the trail fro the house was a large tulip poplar tree that spread its huge limbs over a stone-walled spring.
In a Washington [D.C.] newspaper I had placed an advertisement: 'Wanted, a cabin mate. Every country inconvenience. Mile walk from Cabin John trolley, through a pine cathedral. Brooks, spring woods, wild strawberries soon. No bath, no telephone, no neighbors in sight.'

"I guess we'll be amateurs at everything until we die, (but) you know a man can't have any more than this. The earth, this sea, a beach, food, companionship. This is all any man can get." — Farrar Burn.
Thirty girls and women answered my advertisement but I couldn't decide among them. I asked them all to come out to tea and draw straws for it. To that party I invited Ensign [Farrar] Burn. It didn't occur to me that he might not like being the only man among so many women. I had never seen him. One afternoon I had returned to the cabin to find a note on the door. Ensign Burn had discovered the place in his Sunday ramblings. He had taken a few pictures of the cabin and would like to send prints.
He came to tea, ruddy face beaming, merry tongue wagging, his hair reddish in the early spring sunlight. He was the life of the party. He went to the spring for water, cut and brought in wood for the fireplace. He was when sugar was needed and had ideas about where people should sit. He was, in short, the perfect host and from that day to this has been host at all my parties. For, in a little over a month, we were married, and the Glen Echo postmistress said, "well you got your cabin mate, didn't you?'

Their early lives June Burn was born Inez Chandler Harris on June 19, 1893, in Anniston, Alabama; she named herself June as a child. Her father was a circuit-rider minister. As she explains, "I was the eldest, over-responsible child of a Methodist circuit ride in Alabama. I had helped bring up a family of eight. Life for me had been serious enough in one sense, but happy and carefree, too, practically living in the woods, finding all my pleasures there. Hickory saplings for horses, pine needle slopes for toboggan runs. Erosion gullies to play hide-and-seek in. Wild persimmons and plums, sassafras root for tea, hickory nuts, black walnut, chestnuts, chinquapins and muscadines for treasure trove, to say nothing of the fall gathering of tall grass for broom — the only ones we knew for a long time.
"My father was a child of Esau, the wanderer. Not even a Methodist circuit-riding life moved fast enough for him. My shy, gentle-eyed fireball of a mother protested every move and loved them all." June continued. In 1909 the family moved to Oklahoma and she soon enrolled in college. When she was barely 20, she wrote an article that McCall's magazine published and her second career was born. At that time she was enrolled at Oklahoma A&M where she graduated in 1917 with a B.S. degree. Upon graduation she moved to New York and McCall's hired her for $15 per week. Her first career was always rooted in feathering the nest for her family and insuring that the ones she loved the most were happy, adventuresome and always ready to take risks to make their marks on the world.
One source stated that June's maternal uncle was Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908), author of the famous Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit stories and his autobiographical On the Plantation, the title that has become a political metaphor in the last decade. June's granddaughter, Skye Burn, notes that her grandmother never talked about her famous relative, but then again, she talked very little about her Southern family in general. And then Anthony Fisher, June's great-nephew, read our original story and wrote and told us: "June's maiden name was Harris, but to be a maternal uncle, he would have had to have married one of her mother's sisters. Her mother was Ada Floyd, and Joel Harris doesn't appear on the paternal side either." So, we are back to square one and still searching for the ancestral link.
Farrar Burn was born on Sept. 22, 1888, in Greenwood, Arkansas, on the western border with Texas. Two years later his brother Robin was born and the family soon moved to the town of Van Buren, near Fort Smith, in 1893 as the nationwide financial Depression started and as June was born a couple hundred miles away. Like Farrar, Robin served in World War I, he as a marine sergeant. Both brothers showed talent as musicians as boys, but Robin would be the most recognized for it. At age 15 he and Farrar used their woodworking skills to invent a unique horn instrument that he named the bazooka, vernacular word, bazoo, or a "windy fellow." Little did they know that the bazooka would one day make Robin famous and would be the namesake for the weapon soldiers used in World War II.
June's daughter-in-law Doris Burn recalls family stories about how Farrar and Robin performed on the road together before World War II in vaudeville, hopping freights and playing one-night stands from town to town. As an adult entertainer, Robin attracted the attention of both Kraft Foods, which sponsored a long-running variety show, and Bing Crosby. Under his new name, Bob Burns, he and Bing made several popular musical movies together. Along the way, Bob invented the characters Soda Pop and his most famous, Uncle Fud and Aunt Doody. Later in his career, Bob became known as the Arkansas Traveler, the name of another long-running radio show, but he eventually became rich off his investments and retired before TV to a model farm in Canoga Park, California. Farrar never attained his brother's fame but he entertained and regaled both family and friends and people they visited all over the U.S.
Soon after their marriage, Farrar and June decided that he should resign his commission and they consulted an atlas to decide where they should live permanently and start a family. They found photos of the archipelago of Puget sound and immediately applied at the Government Land Office for a homestead, but were told that no islands were left for that. As they would often do, they ignored the answer and set out for the West:

With Farrar's last check, we went to St. Louis to visit my family. They liked Farrar, though they didn't think he would be any great shakes as a wife-supporter. Then we went on to Van Buren, Arkansas, to visit Farrar's family. They liked me, too, but they didn't think I'd be any great shakes as a housewife.

They homestead the last available island in San Juan archipelago

Original Burn cabin at Fishery Point on Waldron island — "the most romantic getaway I've ever seen" — Doris Burn

Both families were right in a conventional way, but they didn't have room in their minds for how the happy honeymooning couple would rewrite the book on marriage in a very unconventional way. Farrar's uncle got him a job with a railroad, which still gave its employees free passes for rail travel, and he worked for two months while June set up life for them in a tent in Delta, Colorado. With his two paychecks, they sped on to Seattle and visited the land office that had sent them the negative letters:

"Our name is Burn," Farrar said to the man in the outer office. "We've come to see about homesteading one of your islands."
Without a word, the man turned and opened a door behind him.
"Here they are!" he yelled, and the whole office force came out to greet us like kinfolks. And — we held our breath — they had found our island! Someone had been buying it — the last homestead island in Puget Sound. But Farrar's two years' naval service gave him priority rights. They would return the man's payments and we were free to move on and file.

For the rest of their journey we refer you to the book itself, which has inspired so many people of both sexes. Their initial island, which is known on maps as Sentinel — "one that keeps guard; a sentry," but which June immediately named Gumdrop, is a tiny island of 15 acres just northwest of San Juan Island and south of Victoria, B.C. To the east is the larger Spieden island, named by Commander Charles Wilkes on his historic charting tour of the early 1840s for William Spieden, purser on the U.S. Sloop-of-war Peacock. June spells it Speiden and she is not the only one. The spelling confusion has continued over the decades, sometimes spelled both ways in the same story, the same confusion that existed through the 1950s for the spelling of Whidbey island, which Wilkes also put on the map, but as Whidby, apparently forgetting the island's namesake, Joseph Whidbey of Capt. George Vancouver's crew of the ship Discovery in 1792. The Burns overlooked the accurate warning that Sentinel and Spieden were piles of rocks and the fact that there were no freshwater springs on Gumdrop. They made do over the next two decades, also living on Johns island and the much larger Waldron. Waldron has became a sort of Walden Pond lodestar for unconventional folks over the years and Gumdrop is a Mecca for kayakers, sailboaters and those
The adventures started immediately as the honeymooners homesteaded, then a gale blew them in a baby, and then they traveled again to the next new frontier, Alaska, where June became immersed in Indian culture, a subject that fascinated her for the rest of her life. In the mid-1920s, Farrar's mother died back in Van Buren and their trip back there led to their famous trip cross-country with the baby in a donkey cart drawn by a jennet mule. That story is one of the most fascinating tale in the book, a long string of vignettes about the churches and villages that welcomed the family to stay for a few days, where Farrar bedazzled them with tunes from his songbook, which grew to include more than 7,000 songs over the next four decades. You will also read heartwarming and instructive tales about their two boys who they named for the points of the compass, North and South, although South went by the name of Bob from the time he was a small boy.

The San Juanderer, which North Burn learned to navigate at age 6

After traveling full circle around the U.S., June took the boys back to the San Juan islands, this time on Johns where they could live off the land, while Farrar went to California, where he managed a market. Mother and sons spent seven glorious months on the island and six-year-old North learned how to run a small motor cruiser they named the San Juanderer, just as he had learned to row a canoe. After that the family set off on a cross-country trip again, to California and Arizona — where Farrar sold some of his own songs without successful brother Bob's help, and then to New Mexico and Texas on a trip June calls the "Burn Ballad Bungalow" in Living High. They continued on to Florida and then New York and then back West many months later, crossing Michigan where the boys adopted a beloved Collie dog. Teenagers of either age or spirit will especially love these travel tales and June's detailed descriptions of the land, flora and fauna that they encountered every time they found a new locale, never knowing quite was around the corner.
In another story of this series, you will learn about their return to the Northwest and their time in Bellingham at the time of the stock market crash in 1929, where June wrote a newspaper column and Farrar played househusband and erected cabins for them to live in and the boys to study. Those cabins still stand and are now called the Outdoor Experiential Learning Site for Fairhaven College, which was born nearly 40 years ago in the spirit of June herself. The cabins have fallen into disrepair, but Tracy Spring of Bellingham is raising funds to restore them and you can still contribute to it. After three years in Bellingham, the nationwide Depression set in again with a vengeance and June's salary was cut instead of increased, as she was originally promised, so in 1932 June and Farrar decided they could live on Waldron island on no income at all. Farrar moved the boys down there in the spring and June stayed until October to fill out her column commitment. When she joined the family, they took her on a walk along the beech and climbed a bluff where they all surprised her with an 8x9-foot cabin they had built for her as a study, with cedar shakes and a fireplace. They all settled in to Sundown Farms, their group of handbuilt structures that included a living cabin built of peeled logs, a barn for their cow and a lean-to for the calves, and a surprise for the boys, their own sleeping cabin. "The boys blinked at the light and color. 'It's our cabin,' shouted North. 'Oh Bobby, it's a cabin for us! See the bunks!' It was the happiest Christmas of their lives."
Back to Puget sound

"Our hearts are always honing for Sentinel. We live for the day when we can feel it is time to retire there once more with a little milk goat, a few chickens, the fish right around us, a world of beauty at our feet." - June Burn, Waldron Island, 1958

After another three years they returned to Bellingham again to launch a magazine that would be an extension of June's original "Puget Sounding" column for the Bellingham Herald. The Puget Sounder magazine, which they published from May 1935 to March 1939, was a labor of love at least at first, but which June finally saw as a very demanding trap from which it would be hard to extricate themselves. Although Farrar sold advertising to pay the bills and circulation climbed beyond a thousand; the magazine ate up their real estate equity as they mortgaged the two acres on Sehome Hill, the strip on Waldron and even Gumdrop itself. They did retain all those properties. North went off to school at the University of Washington, where he would meet and befriend Japanese students and families who would soon be interned at The Tules in northern California, and Bob was in high school at the time. Uncle Bob's growing popularity finally rubbed off on Farrar, who — freed from the magazine's responsibilities, became a great draw on the speaking and entertainment circuit, maybe at first because of his brother's fame but Farrar eventually built audiences on his own talent and merit. That led to a tour cross-country again, as Farrar entertained on the radio until he forgot to drain his aged car's radiator in Minneapolis that winter and the block froze, so the wreck netted a total of ten dollars. He continued on to Chicago and back home, June and teenager hatched another plot of their own.
Settling North into an apartment near the college, June obtained a correspondence course for Bob and "one rainy morning in early March, 1940, Bob and I shouldered our packs and set off down the highway." That leads the reader into another marvelous tableau of mother and son living off the land in Oregon and California, where they meet a new wonderful chain of people who are adjusting to the long awaited recovery from the Depression. And at times June and other mothers wondered if the war news from Europe wouldl eventually fetch away their sons for a war that the U.S. cannot stay out of.
Farrar joined them in New York City and they settled in Greenwich Village, while Bob struck off on his own for Sundown Farm on Waldron island and arrived there six days later. And meanwhile June started the book published it there in 1941 through the house of Duell, Sloan and Pearce of New York City. We recently received a copy of a postcard that gave us some insight into those times for June and Farrar. Barbara Thompson, a descendant of the George Savage family, lives on the property that Catherine Savage Pulsipher owned near Birdsview with her husband. We finally established that she was "Mountain Katy" in June's book. The February 1943 postcard, postmarked New York City, that Barb found amongst Katy's keepsakes refers to the nickname, Mountain Katy, and to the Duell publishing firm.
The Burns pondered their next adventure as empty nesters during that time and June wrote:

The 1992 softback version, with photo of the car/cabin circa the Burn Ballad Bungalow days of the 1920s

Out in Puget Sound, they are doing their spring plowing. We imagine we see the swelling of leaf buds in the parks here and we get restless. When the boys are educated and we don't have to make any money, Farrar and I will go back to our island. We may have to pick sluckus with the Indians. But even if we don't' make any money at all, we have had a grand life. From now on, everything is gravy.

Middle age, empty nest and wandering once again What they did not foresee is that the islands would not be their permanent home. Farrar traveled the lecture circuit cross-country, telling people "How to Be Happy, Anyway," and June taught for a short while at the University of Washington. After New York, they returned to familiar haunts from early years — Washington D.C., California, Florida, and Arkansas, as well as Alaska, where June always loved to visit. North and Bob married. North entered the foreign service and contracted polio while living in the Philippines but persevered and did not let it constrict his life. He later gained fame, after receiving a Ph.D., as a college administrator at both Mills College in Oakland, and as the coordinator of the five-campus program of Amherst in Massachusetts.
Bob fished in Alaska during the summers while his family lived on Waldron island, where he built them a house in the best Burn tradition, and later became a contractor off-island. "He has finally turned to his wood-working hobby, which all my menfolk have, as his way of making a living," June observed. Bob and Doris Burn divorced but they remained friends. He died in 1994, just before I interviewed Doris and her daughter, Skye; I interviewed them both again for this story. Doris is now 82 and still lives on Guemes island. She is from hardy stock. Her mother, Adele "Dottie" (Wilcox) Wernstedt Graham, lived to be 106. Doris's father, Lage Wernstedt, a Swedish immigrant who wound up in Portland and then in North Cascades, is legendary for his ubiquitous work for the Forest Service and hikes in the Cascades, starting in the 1920s. In his 2002 book, Poets on the Peaks, John Suiter wrote: "Lage Wernstedt, who climbed scores of summits in his cartographic work for the Forest Service in the 1920s and named many of them including 'the Pickets.' " Desolation Peak, near Mount Hozomeen where Jack Kerouac served as a firewatcher for a season, was first named on a map in 1931 after Lage climbed it and photographed it from an aeroplane. Harry Majors, author of the 1975 masterpiece, Exploring Washington, logged 77 first ascents by Lage of North Cascades peaks. The Wernstedts bought property on Waldron island in the early 1930s, sometime after the Burns bought property nearby on the island in 1930 and after June interviewed Lage for her column. Bob and Doris met when they were children there.
"Bob was a year younger than I was and there were about eight of us who ran free all over the island," Doris recalled. She still remembers how there were no sounds of the outside world there, just the sound of the water lapping the shore, birds singing and frogs croaking. She grew up in Portland, but spent her summers at their cabin on Waldron. She started college at Oregon State College, then transferred to the University of Washington around the beginning of World War II and that is when her friendship with Bob turned into romance. They got engaged while he was in naval ROTC; then he was commissioned as a naval ensign and they married after he returned from the war.

"I traveled down to the San Francisco Bay area with June and we stayed with June's sister; I met him at the dock. June's mother was elderly by then, long divorced from June's father, who had remarried several times." Doris had graduated from the UW and Bob finished his fourth year for his degree in meteorology after he left the service. After returning to Waldron island together, she and Bob joined June and Farrar in Hawaii for a year and Doris earned her provisional teaching certificate there before Hawaii became a state. I asked her if Bob remembered the early minstrel, traveling days when he was a toddler.
"He was too young to have many memories of the times in the converted car/cabin in 1928, but he remembered and really treasured hitchhiking with his mother, first to California and then cross-country, all the way to New York City. He hated the city and was very homesick for Waldron. He begged them to let him hitchhike back home and soon he was standing on the outskirts of Manhattan, thumbing, when he saw a car with a Washington license plate. They stopped for him and he traveled all the way to Seattle in one ride, arriving there with $5 of the $10 that he started with. He told me that it was one of the most exciting times in his life." We discussed how Doris is the last of the family to have first-hand memories of the Depression and War years on the island. "That original 9x12-foot cabin was the most romantic getaway I've ever seen and I can still hear the family singing around the organ as June played in the place after they expanded it. Doris and Bob divorced in 1960, so she lived on in Seattle as a single mother with Skye and a sister and two brothers who were all in school. Doris earned a living as an illustrator and taught in the Head Start program. In 1965 she published her first of several children's books, Andrew Henry's Meadow. "It is being republished this year," she noted proudly, "and the new version of Twentieth Century Fox is taking an option of it for a possible movie."

June and Farrar decided to take sons North and Bob (South) on a cross-country trip in 1928 and show them both the breadth and depth of the country and the route their parents took to reach the new frontier of Puget sound and the Pacific Northwest. Farrar, a skilled woodworker and general handyman, built a mini-cabin, complete with smokestack and erected it atop their Dodge Brothers automobile.

Bob shuttled back and forth from the mainland to Waldron year-round as he built houses for clients both on the islands and the mainland. "Farrar and North built me a cabin of driftwood and cedar between Bob's and my old place and my parents' place and North's kids and ours spent their summers exploring the island and swimming and rowing just as we had 25 years before. It was heaven. I can remember how I dreaded going back after the summer, just as I did when I was a girl, when I felt I was tumbling back down into the dark after a summer in the bright sun of Waldron. North and his wife also divorced and from then on, Doris only saw North during summer interludes on Waldron. "North was utterly charming from the time he was a boy. I can still remember him walking barefoot on the sand of the beach, playing a flute he had fashioned for himself." Like Pan? "Exactly. Girls were always around him, attracted by his easy-going manner and his verbal, outgoing way, just as women were when he came back permanently." Always very mobile despite the braces that he was required to wear, Bob contracted cancer in the 1970s. "While he and Bob shared so much as boys, Bob was kind of ornery as a child and they drifted apart as adults but became quite close again when they were nearing 50. In his last three years, the cancer forced Bob to retire and come back to Waldron where friends and family — and not just a few women, were close by to help him. He told me that he spent what he considered some of the best years of his life back home despite the illness."

Epilogue In 1958, Living High was republished in a second edition and June wrote a postscript for it, entitled "17 years later." A young man who approached June when she was teaching for the University of Washington told her of his love for the book and convinced her that it should be published in a second edition. A naval officer, the man showed her that he shared her ideas on about conservation and that he had done his homework and research. She also recapped her subsequent wandering with Farrar since 1941. They were back on Waldron that year of 1958: "well, we have managed to live here on occasionally in the summertimes and only this one entire year since 1934." June wrote that her boys went their own ways, philosophically.
North married his Baltimore sweetheart in graduate school, majoring in Foreign Service, after graduating with a Political Science degree from the UW. They had two children, a son who lives in California and a daughter in England. "North used to call himself the white sheep of our family," June wrote, "announced early that he wanted the best possible American 'standard of living' with all the appurtenances." Doris adds that, when North was a young man, his friends and family saw no limits to what he might accomplish, including being president. June noted that Bob, on the other hand, was more grounded to the islands and as an adult turned his word-working hobby into a career and was very happy for doing so. "He built their house here on Waldron so well it might have been carved from a single log, so integrated it is, so stout and tight." Besides Skye, Doris had two other sons and a daughter.
Also in the postscript, June noted how seven young couples had moved to Waldron in the interim and had followed the Burn lead of living off the land and having barn-raising bees and looking out for one another. But she also noted that, whatever the couples' visions had been when escaping from the mainland, they had no time in their busy days of carving out a place on the island to pursue things creative. By then there was airplane service to the island twice daily and a mail boat to transport their groceries and staples, but it had finally refused passengers. Farrar was drawing social security. Back in 1947, June embarked on a new life after they took a vacation to Honolulu and she met a proponent of "good food for health." After they returned and she dove into a pile of books on the subject, she sold a radio program in Bellingham where she shared her newfound interest. She and Farrar agreed that she should go back to college and get a master's degree in the field. Revisiting their days of travel by donkey cart, they rode to the University of Missouri in a covered wagon drawn by mules through Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri. In one year, 1950-51, she earned a double master's in nutrition and agriculture. So that experience dovetails with Catherine's memory, indicating that she must have kept in touch with the Burns through at least the 1950s.
After reading June's postscript, we read the epilogue written for the other subsequent edition I have of Living High, the 1992 paperback published by Griffin Bay Bookstore of Friday Harbor. That epilogue was written in 1992 by Skye Burn. Skye obviously adored her Burn grandparents and I am grateful to her for the confirmation of many biographical details. Skye followed up with a chronology and noted that June and Farrar lived on Waldron at Fishery Point from 1957-62, where they grew nutritious food and a kind of wheat in an area of beach sand and raised prize-winning goats. At the end of that time Farrar developed cancer and he went on what was called the Gerson diet. They soon realized that they needed a longer growing season to cultivate all the foodstuffs he needed, so they moved to Marianna, Florida, where they had visited years before. Farrar's cancer went into remission. They sold their place in Florida, moving back to Sentinel in 1967. But old age was finally catching up with them; the island proved to be too much of a challenge. They soon moved instead to a small farm near Fort Smith and Farrar's hometown in Arkansas. June died there in 1969, followed by Farrar in 1974. Skye last visited him there in 1970, and he sang for her and played his guitar, reminding her of the days when she was a child and Farrar entertained the Burn children around the campfire at Fishery Point with his songs of the Burn Ballad Bungalow era. Those last years for him must have been heart-breaking, but ah, the memories.

"June and Farrar lived full and interesting lives free of materialistic indignities. June wrote, 'The secret of living on so small an income is to not want anything.' Farrar said he was happiest when he was broke and out of work. It gave him complete financial security. They put much trust in life and didn't waste a minute of it." - Skye Burn, Waldron Island, 1992

Skye notes that complete sets of June's columns and copies of the Puget Sounder magazine are now in the Northwest Washington Regional archives in Bellingham and a permanent historical display of their lives and writing is located at Fairhaven College at Western Washington University. June and Farrar's ivory and Eskimo artifact collections are owned by the Museum of the American Indian, New York City, and by the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. Sentinel island is now owned by the Nature Conservancy. The Burns willed their Waldron property to both sons and members of the third and fourth generation of the family still own it between them plus additional purchases nearby. Skye Burn and her family lived on the property until the mid-1990s, when her husband was transferred to the U.S. Post Office in Deming, but she assures us that Waldron is still their permanent home. They now live in Bellingham. Doris Burn shares her daughter's feeling about the island. "The last time I returned was in 1997 for the centennial of the school, in the building where it started. But no matter where I live, Waldron is still home." We were disappointed to learn that Skye does not plan a follow-up book, but her artist and writer mother shared a sweet surprise. "I might have a book in me about the Burns, especially Bob and North," she chuckled. We plan to meet again this summer and sit in front of a tape recorder for an afternoon after lunch at her Guemes home near the Anacortes ferry. Stay tuned . . .

A reader of our original story, who prefers to remain anonymous, found this spectacular photo of the Ballad Bungalow and the Burn family, which was taken sometime in early 1929 on G Street in Washington, D.C. Again, you can see Farrar's handywork, with the mini-cabin and smokestack atop their Dodge Brothersautomobile.

Links and further reading

June Burn's 1931 column series about the 1858 Fraser river gold rush in British Columbia. And her review of the new village of Whatcom where the rush was launched, along with the earliest pioneers there.
A 1977 letter and a 1943 postcard and June Burn and Birdsview pioneer Catherine Savage Pulsipher that reveals Pulsipher's identity as Mountain Katy in June Burn's book, Living High. For more background on these and other upriver families, see Dan Royal's Stump Ranch about upriver history and the Boyd, Savage and Royal families.
Endnotes to June Burn's 1858 gold rush column and capsule biographies of the pioneers and businesses of Whatcom County in the 1850s, A-L.
Endnotes to June Burn's 1858 gold rush column and capsule biographies of the pioneers and businesses of Whatcom County in the 1850s, M-Z.
Our special section about the experience of Frontier women has been updated and includes our introduction to the book, Bold Spirit, about Helga Estby's walk across America from Spokane to Brooklyn in 1896.
Whatcom county history, Bellingham and Fairhaven. Includes extensive section about railroads, pioneers and the days before Skagit county split off from Whatcom in November 1883.

Story posted on July 9, 2005, last updated July 15, 2007, and Feb. 28, 2008
Please report any broken links so we can update them

Return to the new-domain home page

Links for portals to subjects and towns

Newest photo features

Search entire site

See this Journal website for a timeline of local, state, national, international events for years of the pioneer period.

Did you enjoy this story? Remember, as with all our features, this story is a draft and will evolve as we discover more information and photos. This process continues until we eventually compile a book about Northwest history. Can you help?

Remember; we welcome correction & criticism.

Please report any broken links or files that do not open and we will send you the correct link. With more than 550 features, we depend on your report. Thank you.

Read about how you can order CDs that include our photo features from the first five years of our Subscribers Edition. Perfect for gifts.

You can click the donation button to contribute to the rising costs of this site. You can also subscribe to our optional Subscribers-Paid Journal magazine online, which has entered its seventh year with exclusive stories, in-depth research and photos that are shared with our subscribers first. You can go here to read the preview edition to see examples of our in-depth research or read how and why to subscribe.

You can read the history websites about our prime sponsors
Would you like information about how to join them?

Jones and Solveig Atterberry, NorthWest Properties Aiken & Associates: . . . See our website
Please let us show you residential and commercial property in Sedro-Woolley and Skagit County 2204 Riverside Drive, Mount Vernon, Washington . . . 360 708-8935 . . . 360 708-1729

Oliver Hammer Clothes Shop at 817 Metcalf Street in downtown Sedro-Woolley, 86 years.

Joy's Sedro-Woolley Bakery-Cafe at 823 Metcalf Street in downtown Sedro-Woolley.

Check out Sedro-Woolley First section for links to all stories and reasons to shop here first
or make this your destination on your visit or vacation.

Are you looking to buy or sell a historic property, business or residence?
We may be able to assist. Email us for details.

Peace and quiet at the Alpine RV Park, just north of Marblemount on Hwy 20
Park your RV or pitch a tent by the Skagit River, just a short drive from Winthrop or Sedro-Woolley

Did you find what you were seeking? We have helped many people find individual names or places, so email if you have any difficulty.

Tip: Put quotation marks around a specific name or item of two words or more, and then experiment with different combinations of the words without quote marks. We are currently researching some of the names most recently searched for — check the list here. Maybe you have searched for one of them?

Please sign our guestbook so our readers will know where you found out about us, or share something you know about the Skagit River or your memories or those of your family. Share your reactions or suggestions or comment on our Journal. Thank you for taking time out of your busy day to visit our site.

View My Guestbook
Sign My Guestbook

Email us at: skagitriverjournal@gmail.com

Mail copies/documents to Street address: Skagit River Journal, 810 Central Ave., Sedro-Woolley, WA, 98284.

Skagit River Journal

Living High, an unconventional autobiography, and June and Farrar Burn

Living High, an unconventional
autobiography, and June and Farrar Burn