Mr. Duncan’s family consisted of his wife and daughter, a dear, good girl, who will forgive me, I am sure, if I tell a story at her expense. George and I were sent to bed in a lean-to, and as our bedroom was next to that of the Duncans and the stoppings had fallen out of some of the chinks in the wall between, we could hear everything that was said in their room. In the middle of the night I woke up and heard the old gentleman talking to his wife about their daughter.
“Mother,” he said, “I think John will be a good husband for Mary, don’t you?”
Before she could answer, Mary, who had a bed at the other end of the parents’ room, called out with great energy, “I think so too, father!”
In an instant all was still, while George and I, in our efforts to keep quiet, stuffed the bedclothes into our mouths until we were almost suffocated.
We unloaded our weary pack horse, and the next day brought our supplies, and loaded them into Mr. Duncan’s wagon. Then taking him with us for guide, we started on our long drive to the boneyard, fifty-six miles through the great sage-brush desert of eastern Oregon.
On we journeyed, through what seemed an interminable expanse of sage-brush, greasewood, and sand. The bunches of sage-brush topped conical mounds of sand, whose sides were scoured and polished by the winds that howled in and out through the labyrinth of hills, laden with drifting sand. If one could have gained an elevation above the level of these sandhills, and looked out over the landscape, one would have gazed upon a scene of even greater desolation than that afforded by the parched short-grass plains of western Kansas,—a dreary, monotonous waste of olive green, stretching away north, east, and south, as far as the eye could reach, and shut in on the west by the great ranges of the Sierras, whose flanks, dark below the timber line with heavy forests, were deeply scarred above with glistening white glaciers.
We followed the California road to Oregon, for in those days Oregon was practically an unknown territory, with the exception of the Willamette Valley. And I suppose that it is still so, for that moist, fertile valley differs as widely from the vast semi-desert east of the Cascade Range as the Santa Clara Valley from the cactus-covered sandhills of southern California.
At night, after a day’s journey through sand and sage-brush, we came to a ranch beside an alkaline lake in the very heart of the desert. Here, in a cabin built of logs from the neighboring mountains, lived the hermit of this region, a man named Lee Button. Had it not been that the road passed his door, he would have seen only a hunter now and then, out after the deer which abounded in the desert, or perhaps the cattlemen when in winter they turned their cattle loose in the desert to look out for themselves. On all the neighboring ranches, the cattle were turned into the desert for food and shelter in winter. Here, protected from storms, they fed upon the alkaline grass and sweet sage and upon the thick leaves which fell in handfuls from the greasewood bushes. These cattle had cut innumerable paths at every conceivable angle, and one unaccustomed to the country might easily become confused and lose himself in the labyrinth of trails. There was horror in the thought of being lost in that solitude.
Mr. Duncan put up his horses in the barn of the ranch, which was well stocked with hay and oats, and we picketed our ponies on a flat covered with alkaline grass on the borders of the lake. Then from under a certain post which he knew of, Mr. Duncan dug up a tin can containing the key of the cabin. Past experience had taught Mr. Button caution. He had gone to California once, after a herd of horses, leaving his door unlocked, and some prowling immigrant had abused his hospitality and robbed his cabin of its store of food and blankets. So now, when he left home, he locked the door and hid the key, giving, however, the secret of its hiding-place to his neighbor, Mr. Duncan.
His cooking utensils, consisting of a camp kettle, a frying pan, a Dutch oven, and a coffee pot, were brought out and cleaned, and the larder searched for food. It was the custom of the country at that day to consider food and shelter free to all. I was offered the next year a house, blankets, flour, and bacon, as much as I could use for nothing, if I wanted to spend the winter on a ranch in eastern Oregon. I was only expected to cut my own wood and cook my own food.