The Valley of Content
REGON—the old Oregon Territory of yesterday and the State of to-day—is our very own. It was neither bought, borrowed, nor stolen from another nation. It is of the United States because our fathers came here first, carved out homes from the wilderness, and unfurled their flag overhead; through the most fundamental of rights—that of discovery, coupled with possession and development.
The New England States we inherited from Britain, although the will was sorely contested. For Louisiana we paid a price. Texas and California we annexed from Mexico, and purchased New Mexico and Arizona. Alaska was bought from Russia for a song. Alone of all the United States the old Oregon Territory became ours by normal acquisition.
Thence, perhaps, is the compelling attraction for the native-born of Oregon to-day. Mayhap a touch of historic romance clings about the country; or it may be simply the feeling of bigness, the broad expansiveness of the views, the mightiness of mountains, the splendor of the trees, and the air's crisp vitality that make Oregon life so worth while.
Whatever the explanation, it is assuredly a pleasant place in which to live, this land of Oregon, and the transplanted Easterner cannot but be conscious of its attractions, just as he is of the myriad delights of the entire Coast country. A land of delight it is, from Puget Sound to the riviera of California, from the snow mountains to the sagebrush plains, where rose the dust of immigrants' "prairie schooners" not so many years ago.
The guardian of Oregon's southern gateway is Shasta, and close beside its gleaming flanks rolls the modern trail of steel whereon the wayfarer from San Francisco passes over the Siskiyous into the valleys of the Rogue and the Umpqua.
Shasta displays its attractions surpassingly well. An appreciative nature placed this great white gem in a wondrously appropriate setting of broken foothills and timbered reaches that billow upward to the snow line from the south and west, with never a petty rival to break the calm dominance of the master peak, and nothing to mar the symmetry of the cool green woodlands. For Shasta stands alone, and from its isolation is doubly impressive. One sees it all at once, as the train clambers up the grades towards Oregon, not a mere peak among many of a range, but an individual cone, neighborless and inspiring. Shasta has a volcanic history, and but a few hundred years ago bestirred itself titanically, casting forth balls of molten lava which to-day are encountered for scores of miles roundabout, weird testimonials to the latent strength now seemingly so reposeful beneath the calm crust of the earth.
Up and still up, into the timbered mountains, you are borne, until the very heart of the tousled Siskiyous is about you. Then all at once the divide lies behind and with one locomotive instead of several the train swings downward and northward into Oregon, winding interminably, and twisting and looping along hillsides and about the heads of little streams, which grow into goodly rivers as you follow them. Slowly the serried mountains iron out into gentler slopes dimpled with meadows, and here and there are homes and cultivated fields, and steepish roads of many ruts. Then the rushing Rogue River is companion for a space, and orchards and towns dot the wayside. More rough country follows, the Rogue and the Umpqua are left behind in turn, and the rails bear you to the regions of the Willamette.
Along the Willamette
Mount Shasta
From a photograph by Weister Co., Portland, Ore.
A broad valley, rich, prosperous, and beautiful to look upon, is the Willamette, and a valley of many moods. Neither in scenic charms nor agricultural resourcefulness is its heritage restricted to a single field. There are timberland and trout stream, hill and dale, valley and mountain; rural beauty of calm Suffolk is neighbor to the ragged picturesqueness of Scotland; there are skylines comparable with Norway's, and lowlands peaceful as Sweden's pastoral vistas; the giant timber, or their relic stumps, at some pasture edge, spell wilderness, while a happy, alder-lined brook flowing through a bowlder-dotted field is reminiscent of the uplands of Connecticut. Altogether, it is a rarely variegated viewland, is this vale of the Willamette.
You have seen valleys which were vast wheat fields, or where orchards were everywhere; in California and abroad you have viewed valleys dedicated to vineyards, and from mountain vantage points you have feasted your eyes upon the greenery of timberland expanses; all the world over you can spy out valleys dotted with an unvaried checkerboard of gardens, or green with pasture lands. But where have you seen a valley where all of this is mingled, where nature refuses to be a specialist and man appears a Jack of all outdoor trades? If by chance you have journeyed from Medford to Portland, with some excursioning from the beaten paths through Oregon's valley of content, you have viewed such a one.
For nature has staged a lavish repertoire along the Willamette. There are fields of grain and fields of potatoes; hop yards and vineyards stand side by side; emerald pastures border brown cornfields; forests of primeval timber shadow market garden patches; natty orchards of apples, peaches, and plums are neighbors to waving expanses of beet tops. In short, as you whirl through the valley, conjure up some antithesis of vegetation and you must wait but a scanty mile or two before viewing it from the observation car.
As first I journeyed through this pleasant land of the Willamette, a little book, written just half a century ago, fell into my hands, and these words concerning the valley, read then, offered a description whose peer I have not yet encountered:
The sweet Arcadian valley of the Willamette, charming with meadow, park, and grove! In no older world where men have, in all their happiest moods, recreated themselves for generations in taming earth to orderly beauty, have they achieved a fairer garden than Nature's simple labor of love has made there, giving to rough pioneers the blessings and the possible education of refined and finished landscape, in the presence of landscape strong, savage, and majestic.
Then Portland. Portland, the city of roses and the metropolitan heart of Oregon, stands close to where the Willamette, the river of our valley of content, meanders into the greater Columbia. Were this a guidebook I might inundate you with figures of population, bank clearings, and land values, all of them risen and still rising in bounds almost beyond belief. I might narrate incidents of the city's building—how stumps stood a half dozen years ago where such and such a million dollar hostelry now rises, or how so-and-so exchanged a sack of flour for lots whose value to-day is reckoned in six figures. But these are matters of business, and business was divorced years ago from the simple pleasures of the out-of-doors.
Portland is a city of prosperity. That fact strikes home to the most casual observer. Blessed above all else—especially in the eyes of an Easterner—is its freedom from poverty. There are no slums, no "lower east side" like New York's rabbit warrens, no Whitechapel hell holes. It is a clean, youthful city, delightfully located on either side of its river and rising on surrounding hills of rare beauty. Its metropolitan maturity, indeed, is all the more remarkable for its youth, as seventy years ago the site of the town was a howling wilderness, set in the midst of a territory peopled at best by a few score whites.
It was in 1845 that the first settler, Overton by name, made his home where now is Portland. Close after him came Captain John H. Couch, who located a donation land claim where is now the northern portion of the city. And from that beginning gradually grew the city of to-day which in the California gold rush of the early fifties received her first notable impetus through her position as a commanding supply point for the fast-crowding and lavishly opulent sister State to the south.
Born at the hands of pioneers and weaned with the gold of California, the city was sturdily founded, and to-day the strength of the pioneer blood and the glow of the golden beginnings are still upon her.
The fairest of fair Portland is seen from her show hilltop, Council Crest. The days are not all sunny, but when they are and neither "Oregon mist"—which is a local humor for downright rain—nor clouds obscure the outlook, the easterly skyline from Council Crest is a superbly pleasing introduction to the State. Over the mists of the lowlands you see Mount Hood, and to have seen Mount Hood, even from afar, is to have tasted the rarest visual delight of all the Northwest land. Shasta, to the south, was an imposing welcomer to the empire of surpassing views, but Hood outdoes Shasta and its snow-crowned neighbors of the old Oregon country as completely as the pinnacles of Switzerland overshadow their lesser companions of the Italian Alps. Hood, somehow, breathes the very spirit of the State it stands for; its charm is the essence of the beauty of its surroundings, its stateliness the keynote of the strength of the sturdy West. It is a white, chaste monument of hope, radiantly setting for its peoples roundabout a mark of high attainment.
A city of destiny its friends call Portland, and a mountain of destiny surely is Hood—its destiny to diffuse something of the spirit of healthful happiness and fuller ideals for those, at least, who will take time from the busy rush of their multiplying prosperity.
And here again, on Council Crest, I venture to turn back to 1860; venture at least again to quote from the literary heritage of Theodore Winthrop, who saw Oregon's mountains then and wrote of them and their influences these lines:
Our race has never yet come into contact with great mountains as companions of daily life, nor felt that daily development of the finer and more comprehensive senses which these signal facts of nature compel. That is an influence of the future. The Oregon people, in a climate where being is bliss,—where every breath is a draught of vivid life,—these Oregon people, carrying to a new and grander New England of the West a fuller growth of the American Idea, under whose teaching the man of lowest ambitions must still have some little indestructible respect for himself, and the brute of most tyrannical aspirations some little respect for others; carrying there a religion two centuries farther on than the crude and cruel Hebraism of the Puritans; carrying the civilization of history where it will not suffer by the example of Europe,—with such material, that Western society, when it crystallizes, will elaborate new systems of thought and life. It is unphilosophical to suppose that a strong race, developing under the best, largest, and calmest conditions of nature, will not achieve a destiny.
Be that as it may, no man, seeing Hood from Portland for the first time, could but experience a longing to answer the call of the beckoning mountain, and to find for himself the secrets of the land that lies beyond it. And so Hood was the piper which called us to the hinterland of Oregon, where, quite by chance, we stayed, until now we find we are Oregonians, by adoption and by choice.