Shaniko was a jumping-off place. It was the end of the Columbia Southern railroad, which began at Biggs—and if a road can have a worse recommendation than that I know it not! Biggs, under the grassless cliffs beside the Columbia, baked by sun, lashed by wind, and blinded with sand, was impossible; and had it not been for the existence of Biggs one truthfully might call Shaniko the least attractive spot in the universe! The transcontinental train deposited me at Biggs and the Columbia Southern trainlet received me, after a brief interval dedicated to bolstering up the inner man with historic ham sandwiches and coffee innocent of history, served in a shack beside a sand dune.
Seventy miles separates Biggs from Shaniko, and a long afternoon was required to negotiate the distance. For an hour the diminutive train panted up oppressive grades, winding among rain-washed coulees, where the soil was red adobe and the rocks were round and also tinged with red. Stunted sagebrush clothed the hillsides scantily, their slopes serried by cattle trails as evenly as contour lines upon a map. Then, the rim of the Columbia hills gained, away we rattled southward, more directly and with some pretense of speed, across a rolling plateau of stubble fields and grain lands, dotted here and there with homes and serried by rounded valleys where the gold of sun and grain, and the gray of vagrant cloud shadows, made gorgeous picturings. Westerly, beyond the drab and golden foreground and the blue haziness of the middle distance, the Cascade Range silhouetted against a sky whose tones became richer and more cheerful as evening approached.
In the dry-farms lands of Central Oregon. "Serried by valleys, where the gold of sun and grain, and vagrant shadows, made gorgeous paintings."
With the evening came Shaniko. "The evil that men do lives after them," said Mark Antony, "the good is oft interred with their bones." So let it not be with Shaniko, for then in truth, of this town whose brightest day has gone little indeed would survive.
Shaniko was the railroad point for all Central Oregon when I first made its acquaintance, and from it freighters hauled merchandise to towns as far distant as two hundred miles. Stages radiated to the south, and, in 1909, a few hardy automobiles tried conclusions with the roads. The sheep of a sheepman's empire congregated there, giving Shaniko one boast of preëminence—it shipped more wool than any other point in the State. With streets of mud or dust, according to the season, a score or so of frame shacks, its warehouses, livery barns, corrals, shipping pens, and hotels, Shaniko in its prime was a busy lighting place for birds of passage, a boisterous town of freighters, cowmen, and sheep herders. It, like its stagecoaches, was typical, I suppose, of the town found a decade or so ago upon our receding frontiers, and still encountered in the fancies of novelists whose travels are confined to the riotous territory east of Pittsburg.
"Where are you bound?" my table neighbor asked me at supper.
"I'm not sure," said I truthfully.
"Oh, a land seeker. Well, when it comes right down to getting something worth while—something for nothing, you might say—the claims down by Silver Lake can't be beat. They—" and he launched into a rosy description of the land of his choice which lasted until the presiding Amazon deftly transferred the fork I had been using to the plate of pie she placed before me, a gentle lesson in domestic economy. My informant was a professional "locator" whose business it is to combine the landless man and the manless land with some profit to himself, in the shape of a fee for showing each "prospect" a suitable tract of untaken earth hitherto the property of Uncle Sam.