This is one of four signs in a kiosk at the Brothers Rest Area.
Marker Name: Early-Day Legends & Lore
Marker Text: RAVENOUS RABBITS WREAKED RUIN
Dry-farming seldom succeeded here. Even when homesteaders managed to coax a few tender sprouts from their desert fields, jackrabbit hordes caused widespread havoc.
Desperate farmers organized rabbit drives, often killing thousands. But the slaughter provided little relief.
Some settlers even tried selling pelts to a New York hatter. Unfortunately, rabbit-fur top hats never became popular.
The desert is still home to jackrabbits, but their numbers are now greatly diminished, the result of natural habitat changes.
SOMEWHERE OUT THERE A LOST CRYSTAL CAVE MAY AWAIT EXPLORERS
Ranch hands first stumbled onto it in 1904 - a cavern that sparkled in their torchlight like diamonds. The men broke off a few samples, then showed them around town on their return to Bend.
But no one expressed much interest. The finds weren’t diamonds after all, but most likely calcite crystals, and presumably of little commercial value.
Bend hardware merchant Nicholas P. Smith recognized this to be an unusual geologic feature, however - especially in volcanic terrain. So he set out to see for himself.
Remarkably, he managed to find the mens’ trail, and then the cave. But his explorations were cut short by an early snowstorm. And when he returned the following spring the landscape seemed puzzlingly changed.
Smith could never find the place again. Some believe that mysterious cave is out there, somewhere, still waiting to be found - again.
BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THIS TINY ONE-MAN TOWN ONCE GAINED NATIONAL NOTICE
In 1912, Millican’s future looked bright. Some 60 homesteaders had moved to the area, eager to farm these new lands. But droughts and repeated crop failures doomed their dreams. By the early ‘20s virtually everyone had abandoned this desertland.
Highway 20 was relocated in 1930. The sole remaining Millican resident also moved, establishing a new location along the highway, about half a mile north of the hamlet’s original site.
This flinty holdout, WIlliam A. Rahn, even gained fleeting fame in 1940 after he was included in Ripley’s “Believe It Or Not,” a popular syndicated newspaper feature of the time.
KLONDIKE KATE - SAGEBRUSH SIREN
Her name was “Klondike Kate” Rockwell - surely one of the Yukon’s most flamboyant gold-rush entertainers. But in 1914, at the age of 38, fate beckoned Kate from those rowdy theaters and dance halls to a remote homestead just three miles northeast of Brothers.
It must have been a rude change for the colorful celebrity. But Kate persevered, and “proved up” on her 320 acres over the next three years.
She spent much of the rest of her life in Bend, but never lost her love for the High Desert. One of Kate’s final requests was that her ashes be scattered at her old homestead site, following her death in 1957.
HOW DID BROTHERS GET ITS NAME?
Some think it was because so many related males - brothers - lived in the area.
Others say its nameske was a nearby sheep camp, called the Three Brothers, which had been named after a trio of similarly shaped hills, possibly in contrast with the Cascade’s snowy Three Sisters skyline.
But the official 1913 post office name offered no clue. It was, simply, Brothers
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