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Washington Women’s Heritage Project records, 1900-2000 
University of Washington Libraries Special Collections 
Florence Miller Baggarley 
March 7, 1981 
Cassette 1, Side 1 
 
 
Winona Weber  00:02 
You lived with your grandmother?  
 
Winona Weber  00:04 
Yeah. 
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  00:04 
Yeah, we lived with our grandmother. I think I must have been about three. We must have lived 
there for about a year. Yeah, I think we must have lived there for about a year with Grandma. 
And she was one of those type of people that I always remember always having enough time to 
sit down and talk to you, and she taught me how to knit and if there was someone that was 
teasing me or giving me a bad time, you know, she'd always come to my rescue. I don't know. 
She was just a person that I always felt really comfortable with. Always felt at home. Her house 
was warm, inviting. [Inaudible] And there was always a lot of people that were in the house. 
Every weekend, I think, we had big dinners with all of the relatives, sister in laws, you know, 
aunts, uncles, all of her kids, grandchildren. And everybody brings food, or else, we'd all get 
together and we'd wash wool, you know, after they sheared the sheep [inaudible] we'd have these 
great, big, huge pots. They were just gigantic.  
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  00:19 
And then they'd be hanging across a couple of rocks and with fires built under them, steaming 
hot water. I could still remember the steaming hot water. And then scrub the wool, put it in the 
next pot, you know, and then scrub it again. I don't know, I think it went through about seven-- 
was it five? Five washings and rinsings. 
 
Winona Weber  02:10 
Would you just use just hot water? 
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  02:12 
No, they used lye, they used lye, a kind of a lye soap. It was a real hard soap. And that was 
something, I think that they made themselves. When the wool came out it was just soft and 
fluffy. They hung it on-- a lot of times they hung it on the fence, bushes, things like that. That's a 
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lot of fun. We could really-- I don't know, I think those are some of my more-- the-- my fonder 
memories. 
 
Winona Weber  02:48 
Oh, yeah, I can imagine. Did you ever see her spin the wool?  
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  02:56 
Oh yes.  
 
Winona Weber  02:57 
Did you ever do it?  
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  02:58 
Oh, yeah. 
 
Winona Weber  02:59 
How do you do it? I've never seen anybody spin. Did you do it by hand or did you do it with a 
machine?  
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  03:06 
No, we had one of these machines. It had the foot pedal, just like the old fashioned sewing 
machines. 
 
Winona Weber  03:13 
Treadle. 
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  03:13 
Yeah, put your feet on this flat piece and just pushing forward and backward, and then the wheel 
would spin around. You'd have your hands out in front of you, and you'd be twisting and pulling 
the yarn as the wheels spun, you know, and pulling back on it as you twist it. And yeah, I got 
pretty good at it until I found out I was allergic to wool.  
 
Winona Weber  03:41 
Oh, no.  
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  03:41 
[Laughs] Well, the fine particles that would fly up and [inaudible] you. 
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  03:47 
No, I couldn't, so I couldn't knit. The yarn was so-- would be so rough on my hands that they 
would break out in eczema. [Inaudible] blisters. Water blisters, huge water blisters.  
 
Winona Weber  03:47 
[Laughs.]  
 
Winona Weber  04:05 
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How old were you when your grandmother taught you to knit? Nine? [Inaudible] ten? 
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  04:12 
Maybe I was younger than that. I was really quite young. We'd go over there, and she always had 
my knitting needles and always have extra yarn for me to start in. And I-- at first, I would just do 
the beginning, the top of the sock, and then gradually she [?completed?] until I got down to the 
toe, learn how to make the heel, and then the toe. And then after that, she really got complicated, 
and decided to teach me how to knit designs with the brown, dark brown wool, but I never did 
get to the hat. We always wanted to. We didn't stay around that long. 
 
Winona Weber  04:55 
How old were you moved away from your-- when your mother moved you away from your 
grandmother? 
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  05:06 
I really don't remember. I know we moved into Marysville, and Eleanor started going to 
kindergarten, and I'd run away to go to kindergarten with her. Oh, and she went to the first grade, 
I'd run away and go to kindergarten by myself, and the teachers never sent me home. And my 
mother finally got discouraged, and she wouldn't come to school to pick me up anymore. And 
then the year I was supposed to go to school, they changed the rules and said that they couldn't-- 
anyone born after November first or something, couldn't go to school. And I was born November 
seventh.  
 
Winona Weber  05:44 
So what happened?  
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  05:46 
Well, by that time, we'd moved down, way down to Tulalip, at the end-- Mission Beach, and I 
had-- I couldn't run away, go to school, it was too far to walk, too far to run, and they wouldn't 
let me on the school bus. [Laughs.] I'm still running away to go to school [laughs]. Now I'm 
running away from my husband [laughs]. 
 
Winona Weber  06:17 
I'd like to know more about your grandmother. 
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  06:25 
Physical description? 
 
Winona Weber  06:27 
Oh, no, just just kind of what you did when you were with her, besides washing wool.  
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  06:33 
Oh, we went blackberry picking. She had these gooseberry vines on-- on her place and raspberry, 
we canned and-- mostly my job was washing jars, because my hands were always so little, I 
could get in inside of the jars. And Eleanor always got-- she was lucky. She got to go out in on 
field trips, you know, with the folks, but I was an asthmatic. If I went up into the mountains, and 
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I got-- I'd get sick, and my mother couldn't stop and take care of me, so I was always sat behind 
with my brothers-- with our three brothers. When they went strawberry picking, I was 
babysitting in the house with the three, two or three year old. And I was only six myself. Can you 
imagine? I can't imagine doing that. I would never do that. Would never have done that with my 
kids. When I went strawberry picking with my kids, I would-- when the babies were little, I 
would have the little-- the little kid playpen, and I would set it at the end of my row, and I would 
watch them, you know, and I'd bring plenty of toys that take me half an hour to get from the car 
to the end of the row. I only remember a few times in my whole life, when I was raising my 
children, that I ever had a babysitter. It's only about three or four times, I always found it just 
wasn't successful. My oldest son could take care of the kids better than any babysitter. 
 
Winona Weber  08:16 
Was your grandmother around when you were doing babysitting-- three or two-- three little 
brothers. Or were you by yourself?  
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  08:25 
Well, at that one particular time, we were by ourselves. We lived in a cabin out by the strawberry 
field. Or if we went, if my mom went apple picking, or anything like that, well, we always had a 
cabin close to where they were picking . And then we had our Great Aunt Lizzie. If they went 
blueberry picking up in the mountains, our Great Aunt Lizzie would stay with the boys and I. I'll 
never forget one time waking up and mom was trying to sneak out of the house so she wouldn't 
have to hear me raise a fuss [laughs]. She didn't quite make it [laughs]. My Aunt Lizzie would 
sit, and she would tell us a lot of stories, and she would-- she kind of took the place of my 
grandmother, because they were sisters. 
 
Winona Weber  09:25 
Step sisters, right? [?Real?] sisters? 
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  09:32 
And-- I don't know, their personalities, in some ways, were quite different because our 
grandmother was a very organized person. She knew exactly what had to do, what had to be 
done, who could do it, and she put certain ones to work at certain jobs. And where money was 
concerned, she always seemed to have money in the bank-- be able to help those who needed 
help. And for my Aunt Lizzie just didn't have that ability. She lived in a little house next to her 
daughter and-- out in Tulalip, where my grandmother's house was just gigantic, really a huge 
ranch house. Well, you can imagine raising 13 children, 13 children, all  in that great big house 
[laughs]. And when my aunt-- in my Aunt Lizzie's house, they had a pump. For years and years 
and years they had to pump all of their water in while my grandmother had all of the modern 
facilities and the conveniences. She had one of the first washing machines. [Knock.]  
 
11:05 
Is anyone home? 
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  11:08 
Hi. [Knock.] [Door opens.] Hi. Here. [Rustling.] [Inaudible] make sure it's moving. Yeah, it's 
moving. Got everything.  
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Winona Weber  11:24 
[Yawns.] Was your-- how well did you know your father then, the Creek? 
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  11:35 
Well, we lived there for five years, and he was a very social individual, well known, well liked, 
and well-read. He loved classical music, and he read everything from the encyclopedias, 
anything he could get his hands on. He'd talk politics for hours over the backyard fence when he 
was supposed to be mowing the lawn or something. And I think he knew everyone in the whole 
neighborhood. He wasn't the most ambitious person in the world. You know, he always wanted 
nice things, but my stepmother wasn't very good with money, so they didn't end up with very 
much. They ended up just-- just a kind of a three room shack, more or less, when he died. But he 
was pretty proud of it, because he built the whole thing by himself. His own two hands and his 
own imagination. 
 
Winona Weber  12:48 
He had his wife-- his wife managed-- 
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  12:52 
--at first. For the first few years, she ended up putting them through bankruptcy. The second 
time, things got pretty bad. So they separated, and after that, he never would let her handle the 
money again. Yeah, and then his only son, after we came back from Oklahoma, after he grew up, 
he got into dope and alcohol, the whole works. Bad crowd. Ended up getting into a lot of trouble, 
selling and having dope in his possession. Seemed to straighten out for quite a bit, but after dad 
died, I guess he kind of slipped back a little bit. I haven't heard him since then, because I was 
kind of on the bitter side, because he got everything. Eleanor and I didn't get anything. He got the 
land, money, all of his tools and belongings, personal and private belongings. Dad had given 
Eleanor a CV. He wouldn't even give that to her for memory-- momento. And then after he went 
through all the money, which was about $10,000 that was supposed to be his mother's to take 
care of her for the rest of her life, because she's about 75, he went through all of her money. Then 
he started calling Eleanor and called my daughter. And after that, I would never speak to him, 
and he knew better than call me. 
 
Winona Weber  14:35 
Oh, I see. Did you know your grandparents on your father's side very well?  
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  14:40 
Not too well. I remember going down to Okmulgee the first two or three years, Dad would send 
us off every weekend so he could go play shuffleboard and have his little social life. And, we had 
a lot of fun. We'd usually end up at Newtown, which is a kind of a-- there was quite a few 
cabins, and the church was right in the middle. And all of the Indian people that-- who owned the 
cabins would come there every weekend for the, kind of a revival type church and-- it was a 
Methodist Church, and we just get together and play and go to church and have a good time. One 
of the foods that we had most down there was this soupy corn. It's a hot corn, it's a hot drink. 
And it was almost like a whiskey type thing.  
 
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Winona Weber  15:50 
Oh, really?  
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  15:51 
It made me feel pretty good [laughs]. And the kids got to drink it. The older people got to drink 
it. My grandmother, [?Effie?], was very quiet, tiny little lady that-- my dad was kind of the apple 
of her eye because he was the baby. And she never really said too much. She kept more with the 
older people. You know, she's-- had been a widow for quite a while, and I never had the 
relationship with her that I had with my grandmother, Sarah. 
 
Winona Weber  16:30 
Yeah. I wouldn't think you were closer, you spent so much time with your-- 
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  16:30 
--Yeah. Well, I never did really have the relationship with any of my dad's people, that I had with 
my mother's people, or that I have with my mother's people, which was one of the things that 
made my father rather bitter toward me, because I renounced his tribe for our tribe. At least, 
that's the way he felt about it. But in actual-- in actuality, you can't belong to two tribes, you 
know. And I didn't live in Oklahoma. I lived here. It's pretty hard to participate in a government 
when you live so many miles away. So, mom used to take us to all of these political meetings, 
and we got to know who was who out here at the Tulalip reservation. Ever since I was 18, I've 
been voting out there and participating in tribal government, including [?fireworks and fishing?]. 
[Laughs.] 
 
Winona Weber  17:42 
Yeah, I know. 
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  17:43 
Yeah. And I just can't feature myself ever going to Oklahoma and having-- participating in the 
political activities of those tribes, even though I probably know as much about them, you know, 
as I do about these people here. They do send us the minutes, two or three times a year, tell us 
what's going on, and they still want us to vote, even though we don't belong to the tribe down 
there. We can still receive money from the trust account that has been established. Certain 
amount of monies were paid for the lands put in trust. And now the only money that's given out 
every, I think it's 10 years, is the interest. The main amount of money remains in trust, and 
anyone that's 25 percent is allowed to draw that money every 10 years. It's about due to come up 
again.  
 
Winona Weber  19:03 
[Inaudible.]  
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  19:03 
Yeah. 
 
Winona Weber  19:04 
[Inaudible.] Your mother and your father, where did-- where did they meet?  
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Florence Miller Baggarley  19:14 
I understand they met with Haskell. My dad didn't go to school until he was about 12. In fact, my 
grandmother nursed him until she-- he was seven-- till he was seven years old. If you can believe 
that. 
 
Winona Weber  19:33 
Was that-- was that a-- 
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  19:34 
--In Oklahoma? 
 
Winona Weber  19:38 
--custom down there? 
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  19:38 
I don't know whether it was a custom or not, but he was just her baby, and she didn't want him to 
grow up. I was a bit too young to know about customs then, but Mom and Dad met in Oklahoma, 
and he was a sophomore, junior, and senior class president, and she was going to Haskell 
College, the college part of it, and then she went to the University of Kansas for two years. So 
she's had about four years of college. I hope I have that right, okay, something like that, yeah. 
 
Winona Weber  20:28 
You don't have to be exact. 
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  20:31 
Yeah. But before that, I guess Mom went to Chemawa. I think that she graduated from Chemawa 
in the ninth or 10th grade, then she went to Haskell and graduated from high school there, I think 
the 10th, 11th and 12th grade at Haskell. And then she went to the Haskell College, and then to 
the University. She's had kind of an interesting life. At the age of 16, she-- she wanted to go to 
Chemawa. She just wanted to be like everyone else and that was-- not too many girls really went 
on to higher education then. And I remember my grandfather always said, How in the world can 
you want to go on to school when all your girlfriends are here? And why do you always have to 
be better than everyone else? W hy do you-- does everything that you want have to be better than 
what your brothers and sisters and the rest of your family have? But I-- as I understand it, you 
didn't compete. You all tried to stay-- stay uniform, and if you got too uppity, then it was always 
somebody there to slap you down. But if you got too far down in the bottom, there's always 
somebody to help you up. 
 
Winona Weber  22:11 
Do you think that's the way the Indians were here? They were very noncompetitive? 
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  22:18 
I think that's the way it looked to me, just from, from what I remember, you know, of my 
grandmother. Check the thing's still running. 
 
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Winona Weber  22:34 
[Inaudible.] I can't-- I can't see it from over there. But it's there. Do you think that your 
grandmother really encouraged your mother to go to school?  
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  22:50 
Oh no, no. She encouraged the boys because the boys had to make the living.  
 
Winona Weber  22:56 
Oh, yeah.  
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  22:57 
But for a girl to go against what was expected of women at that time, to be a housewife, to have 
children, to take care of the home, was pretty tough. I mean, everyone ridiculed you, made fun of 
you, and my mother was just always a very competitive person, and she wanted to learn. She 
enjoyed learning, and it really didn't help her any until see-- what was she-- she came back from 
Oklahoma in 1936 when I was-- before I was born,and I-- they just did-- They just, they just 
never did accept her out here again, and she couldn't break enough from her-- away enough from 
her family, to go to, going to Everett and live and-- to be competitive in like the Bureau of Indian 
Affairs, I don't-- I imagine they had them then, and the laws were a lot different. In order to live 
off the reservation, then you had to find some kind of a form, giving up your heritage, and she 
couldn't do that, so her education didn't do her any good. And then when I was born, she couldn't 
even-- I had to stay in the hospital for the first six months of my life. And people had-- some 
people had cars, and they wouldn't even recognize her enough to take her down to hospital. It 
didn't seem like a very long way down now to where the hospital was, but we've got nicely paved 
roads now and everything and then, you know, in 1936 it was a lot of-- 
 
Winona Weber  25:00 
[Inaudible.] Probably. [Laughs.]  
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  25:04 
Yeah, and so people just wouldn't take the time. And people were still recovering from the 
Depression too, although my mother remembers my grandmother trying to learn how to drive, 
and she drove right straight through the back of the garage. [Laughs.] She forgot where the-- 
where the break was. She never would-- she never would get behind the wheel again. That was 
enough for her. So mom had to drive-- drive her after that.  
 
Winona Weber  25:38 
[Sneezes.] Oh, jeez.  
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  25:45 
Okay, you were going to ask me the question, do I think that Indian women have changed?  
 
Winona Weber  25:50 
Yeah. How, if you [inaudible], have you changed in your mind?  
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  25:57 
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How have I changed? 
 
Winona Weber  25:59 
Yeah, and how have you changed according to other individuals?  
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  26:04 
Well, the way I've changed was being able-- is being able to accept all different nationalities into 
my social and personal life. Last night, we have-- there's a Black represent-- sales representative 
working where we work, we've become pretty good friends in the last four months, just friends 
now, and he's worked very hard to educate himself. He's the head of the other five sales 
representatives that we have, which I just found out today, by the way [laughs], he's been 
keeping a deep, dark secret from me. I said, I just found out about you today, but I invited him 
here. My mother was here, Lawrence, my aunt and uncle, Arnold, and my daughter and her 
boyfriend, who's also a Tulalip Indian, and their children, and we had dinner together, and then 
they sat and played backgammon, Art and this young man, Eddie. Now I was-- when I grew up 
in Oklahoma, my dad said, If you see a Black man on the sidewalk, you cross the street. You 
don't stay on the same side of the sidewalk. And when I came to Oklahoma and I got married and 
I lived in Seattle for the first time, when I was 16, Blacks were allowed to sit in anywhere in the 
bus. In Oklahoma, they weren't. They had to go to the back of the bus. So I was extremely 
prejudiced. And then in the 60s, we had a Black family, two Black families lived within two 
blocks of us out in Everett, and the girls and my daughter are still just the best, very best of 
friends. In fact, my daughter is sharing rent, expenses, welfare is cutting everybody off and down 
and stuff, so she has to. They had to move in together for them to make it. So, I never thought 
that would ever happen. And that's just like I never thought that I'd ever invite this young man 
into my home to meet my family and, you know, my circle of f-- friends. It just-- just wasn't 
done. A year ago, it wouldn't have been done. As long as those other two Black families lived in 
our neighborhood, I never did have them up for dinner. So that's great, big change. And my 
mother keeps saying, Oh, Florence, I wish you wouldn't do that, because Blacks don't-- or 
Indians don't need to intermingle.  
 
Winona Weber  29:03 
Oh, I'm just going to [inaudible] [rustling]-- Was there a lot of prejudice? I know that there 
always has been a lot of prejudice in South against Blacks. But how much of it did you see up 
here when you were small? 
 
Florence Miller Baggarley  29:26 
Not-- none of it, when I was small. We never had any Black families on at Tulalip. We'd never 
had any until 1960, we never had any out at Silver Lake. And then when all the big rebellion in 
the colleges started and people were going for equal rights for women and for all minority groups 
and everything just came to the front and, all of a sudden, your children were best friends with 
Mexicans, Blacks, Italians, the whole bit, they're just-- wasn't any prejudice and-- except in the 
older people. Maybe my [?Jana?], but I see it out on the reservation. I still see it. There was 
young woman that is married to a young Black man, or was married to a Black-- young Black 
man, but he just couldn't comprehend her way of dealing with children, loving them, you know, 
being with them a lot, caring a lot about them, being tender with them. You know, to him, he 
just-- you know, if you don't do what I say, you get a great big old swat. 
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Florence Miller Baggarley  31:02 
And of course, a lot of our young men, do that, but it's only because they've seen other people do 
it, and we don't have anymore elders. 