His father was Jackson Vandevert, partner of Thomas Clark, Grace's brother, in the California goldfields of 1849.
[1] Vandevert's ancestor, Michael Pauluzen Van der Voort, was an early settler of Dutch New Amsterdam, now New York City.
When he was 15, Vandevert's uncle, Thomas Clark, persuaded his mother to let William help him drive 29 horses to California.
[2] Aged 17, while traveling to the Silver Lake-Summer Lake area of Oregon with a survey crew, William first saw the land that later became the Vandevert Ranch.
It was a meadow on the Little Deschutes River, surrounded by pine forest, with a view of the Cascade Mountains, particularly Mount Bachelor.
[3] In the 1870s he carried mail from Camp Warner in Oregon to Fort Bidwell in California, riding through the area of the Modoc War as it was in progress.
He appeared in the San Francisco newspapers when, on one trip, he killed a much-feared "Silver Lake Grizzly" that the hunters who had cornered it were afraid to approach.
On his travels between Oregon and Texas he spent a season herding sheep for the Requa family in the hills above Oakland, California.
[5] In 1878, Sadie Vinceheller, well-educated and fluent in French and Spanish, arrived in Fort Griffin, Texas to teach at a school.
Alighting from the stagecoach, she knocked on the door of a nearby house hoping to borrow a lantern to light her way to her arranged lodgings.
They arrived at William's father's ranch in Powell Butte, Oregon, in approximately December 1891, and Claude was born in January 1892.
The post office was established in 1893 and was named after John G. Carlisle, also from Kentucky, who was Grover Cleveland's Secretary of the Treasury.
[8] A visitor in 1898 wrote the area had a "real backwoods" appearance but noted the Vandeverts "had sent their daughter to school in the east."
"[9] The first settler to know the surrounding area well, Vandevert added to his income by guiding hunting trips for bear.
When Drake came to build irrigation canals and develop the city of Bend in the early 1900s, Vandevert helped give him the lay of the land.
Lacking surgeon's tools the local doctor tried sawing through the skull but gave up, leaving Vandevert to finish the job.
The family traveled by wagon over the Santiam Pass, stocked up on fruit and vegetables not available in Central Oregon, and came back via a river barge to The Dalles.