My family began growing watermelons in the Hermiston area in 1934 when my great grandfather relocated his family to Boardman from Idaho after a fire had burned down his farm and mule teams. No one is exactly sure who is in depicted in the photo, or what year it was. My dad found it in my grandfather's stuff, and we can only guess. Both my great grandfather and grandfather farmed melons with horses. Family lore says that my grandfather was adamant that he had no use for those tractors. Especially when he had perfectly good horses to use. That all changed one summer day as he was plowing a 40 acre field that was covered in sand burs. He had a real spunky horse, and at the end of each row, he would unharness the horse and let him run for a minute, before starting down the next row. That was working okay, until at the end of one row, he got the horse unhooked from the plow, but he hadn't yet gotten himself unhooked from the horse—that horse dragged him over square inch of the sandbur invested field. When he finally was able to extract himself from the horse, the story says that he hauled the horse directly to town and brought home one of those new fangled tractors. And that was how the Walker family made the transition between horse and horse power. That still doesn't answer the question of who was pictured. But it was likely someone in the Walker family in the Hermiston area somewhere between 1930 and the sand burr incident
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