"Th' town couldn't help but grow," an oldtimer confided to me. "Yer see, it was such a durn fierce trip, after a feller tried it once he never wanted ter repeat—so he stayed with us!"
Burns, over in Harney County, in the southeastern portion of the State, is another example of what the long haul means. During the summer of comparatively good roads the one hundred and fifty miles to the railroad isn't especially serious, but when winter comes the "outside" is far away indeed, and often for two months no freight at all contrives to negotiate the gumbo, snow, and frozen ruts. So, late in the autumn the Burns merchant lays in a winter stock, while the auto trucks hibernate, and the burdens of such forehandedness, no doubt, are shifted to the shoulders of his customers.
Modernity has not swept the field clean, even to-day, and gasolene scarce yet outranks hay as a fuel for the mile makers. The settler and the land looker move on their restless rounds in the white-canvassed prairie schooner of old, and the great freighting outfits, which have borne the tonnage of the West since there was a white man's West, still churn the dust with the hoofs of their straining horses and the wheels of their lurching wagons. You will find them everywhere in the railless lands, the freighters and their teams. They are camped by the water-hole in the desert, or where there is no water, and they must depend upon barrels they bring with them. The little fire of sagebrush roots or greasewood shows the string of wagons—two, three, or four—strung out by the roadside with the horses, from four to twelve, munching hay. They are in the timber, in the country of lakes to the south, on the grassy ranges. In fact, you find the freighters where there is freight to be hauled, and that is—where men are.
But to-day all of Central Oregon is not railroadless land, the trail of steel has pushed to the heart of the country, and what a contrast to the old Shaniko stage days it is to roll smoothly into Bend over ninety-pound rails! Picturesque, too, was the sudden breaking of the long spell when the transportation kings constructed their lines up the Canyon of the Deschutes. Twice, as they built, I walked the length of that hundred-mile-long defile, seeing the dawn of progress in the very breaking, and viewing what is to me the most stupendously appealing river scenery in all the Northwest—this same Canyon of the Deschutes.
CHAPTER V
How the Railroads Came
HEN the West moves, it moves quickly. The map of Oregon had long shown a huge area without the line of a single railroad crossing it. This railless land was Central Oregon, the largest territory in the United States without transportation. Then, almost over night, the map was changed.
Normal men, if they are reasonably good, hope to go to Heaven. Westerners, if they are off the beaten track, hope for a railroad; and if they have one road they hope for another! You who dwell in the little land of suburban trains and commutation tickets have no conception of the vital significance of rail transportation in the Land of Many Miles.