The wanderer is the shiftless land seeker, and is to be distinguished from the sincere home seeker who fares forth into strange lands with his family and his penates, and who finds vacant government land and proceeds to "take it up." The best of all the free acres went years ago, along with the free timber and the other compensations for pioneering, but here and there remote areas worth having still remain. About the last of these, and by all odds the greatest, was in Central Oregon when the railroads opened the doors of immigration a few years ago.
Before the railroads came I went from Bend southeasterly through what is now well called the "homestead country," and in all the one hundred and fifty miles traversed we saw three human habitations: the stockman's, George Millican, the horse breeder, Johnny Schmeer, and the sheepman's, Bill Brown. The rest of it was sagebrush and jack rabbits, with a band of "fuzz-tails" stampeding at the sight of us and a few cattle nipping the bunch grass. My companions were a locator and a man who took up one of the first "claims" in all that country, at Hampton Valley, one hundred and thirty miles from a railroad.
To-day there are schools out there, homes, fences, and plowed fields. Some of it is very good land, and the modern pioneers are prospering. Some of it is not so good, and there have been failures and disappointments as in all the homestead districts of all the West, past and present. For there is truth in the old saying that for the most part the first crop of homesteaders fails, and the success of the late comers is built upon the broken hopes of the pioneers. However that may be, the battle against the odds set up by a none too bountiful nature is often enough pitiful, and occasionally heroic.
Picture an unbroken plain of sagebrush. Low hills, a mile distant, are fringed with olive-green juniper trees; all the rest is gray, except the ever blue sky which must answer for the eternal hope in the hearts of the home makers—God smiles there. In the midst of the drab waste is a speck of white, a tent. A water barrel beside it tells the story of the long road to the nearest well—no road, but a trail, for this is well off the beaten path and such luxuries as surveyed highways are yet to come. The tent is the very outpost of settlement, a mute testimonial of the insistent desire to possess land of one's very own.
Irrigation—"First, parched lands of sage; then the flow"
Series Copyright 1909 by Asahel Curtis
Irrigation—"Next, water in a master ditch and countless man-made rivulets between the furrows"
Our car stops to inquire the way, and a woman appears. Yes, it is forty miles to Brookings' halfway house, as we had guessed.
"And to Bend?" We ask what we already know, perhaps because the woman—a girlish woman—so evidently would prolong the interruption to her solitude.