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Early Non-Native Settlement . . . As a young lad, hardly old enough to do much on the farm yet, my dad still farmed with horses. . . around the time I got a little older to help, well then we graduated to tractors, which . . . now, would be almost considered a garden tractor. . . We raised a lot of potatoes and alfalfa hay and corn and quite a bit of livestock. . . before the irrigation project came in there was a lot of vacant land we ran our livestock on, and round them up in the winter. . . and turned them back out on the range in the summer months. In those days, we'd put the potatoes up, and picked them all by hand in burlap bags. Don Goodwin Beginning in the 1870s non-Native peoples began trickling into the area around Moses Lake. A few cattle and horse ranches lined the creek valleys through the late nineteenth century. The large lake, with its irrigation possibilities, attracted others. In the early 1900s, several settlers pumped water from the shallow Moses Lake to irrigate orchards and hay fields. By 1910, most of the land around the lake was taken up by homesteaders whose efforts at farming were encouraged by several wet years. But dry years soon returned and drove many of these farmers away.   forward Table of Contents <> Photo Archive Oral History Archive <> Documents Archive <> Bibliography To Top of Moses Lake Exhibit