Such as she are home makers. However, the free lands are overridden with gamblers in values, with incompetents, with triflers. They are the chaff which will scatter before the winds of adversity. The others will succeed, just as they have succeeded elsewhere on the forefronts of civilization; the pity of it is that their lot may not be made easier, surer.
Returning from that trip I read a chapter in a book, newly published, dealing with this selfsame land. Concerning the homesteader I found these words:
I have seen many sorts of desperation, but none like that of the men who attempt to make a home out of three hundred and twenty acres of High Desert sage.... A man ploughing the sage—his woman keeping the shack—a patch of dust against the dust, a shadow within a shadow—sage and sand and space!
The author is a New Englander, who had seen Oregon with scholastic eyes. The harsh frontier had no poetry, no hope, for him—only hopelessness. But the woman in the tent, the Swansons over the hill, and the hundreds of other Swansons scattering now, and for many years gone by, over the lands of the setting sun, know better, though their grammar be inferior and their enthusiasm subconscious. Men saw and spoke as did the New Englander when Minnesota was being wrested from the wilderness, when people were dubbed insane for trying conclusions with the Palouse country, when the Dakotas were considered agricultural nightmares. In the taming of new empires unbridled optimism is no more prevalent than blinded pessimism.
Closer to home I know another woman, a farmer, too. Hers is an irrigated ranch, and she works with her shovel among the ditches as sturdily as the hired man. Poor she is in wealth, as it is reckoned, and her husband poorer still in health, for he was rescued from a desk in the nick of time. He is fast mending now, and confesses to a rare pleasure in making two blades of grass grow where none at all grew in the unwatered sands. And in truth, simply watching the accomplishments of irrigation is tonic enough to revive the faint. First, parched lands of sage; the grub hoe and the mattock clear the way, and then the plow. Next, water, in a master ditch and countless, man-made rivulets between the furrows. Finally—presto! the magic of a single season does it—green fields of clover and alfalfa smile in the sun!
But Heaven forbid that this should smack of "boosting"! (There, by the way, you have the most-used, and best-abused, word in all the West.) It is not so intended, for the literature of professional optimism is legion, and needs no reinforcement. The Oregon country is no more wedded to success than many another, nor is it a land where woman can wrestle with man's problems more happily than elsewhere. The incidents of these pages mean simply that beneath the dull surface may be found, ever and anon, a glow of something stirring; prick the dust, and blood may run.
The West, which is viewed here chiefly as a playland, is a mighty interesting workaday land, too, and numberless are the modern tragedies and comedies of its varied peoples at their varied tasks. Rules and precedents are few and far between; it is each for himself in his own way. The blond Scandinavian to his logged-off lands, the Basque to his sheep herding; the man from Iowa dairies, and the Carolinian, who never before saw alfalfa, sets about raising it; the Connecticut Yankee, with an unconscionable instinct for wooden nutmegs, sells real estate; the college man with poor eyes or a damaged liver, as the case may be, becomes an orchardist at Hood River or Medford. Somehow, some place, there is room for each and every one, and the big Westland smiles and receives them all, the strong to prosper and the weak to fail, according to the inexorable way of life.
Some come for wealth and some for health—a vast army for the latter, were the truth always known. The highness and the dryness of the hinterland draw many to it in their battle against the White Plague, and while victory often comes, there comes, too, defeat.
An empty shack I know could tell such a tale—the tragedy of a good fight lost. They were consumptives, both of them, and they lived in a lowland city, west of the mountains. The Doctor gave the old, old edict: the only chance was to get away from the damp, to live out of doors in a higher, sunnier climate. The boy—he was scarcely more than that—bade farewell to his sweetheart and came over the mountains, where he found land and built the shack that was to be their home and their haven—where they were to become sun-browned and robust. The self-evident conclusion outruns the tale, I fear. The girl, who smilingly sent her lover eastward, dreaming of the happiness so nearly theirs, was distanced in her race for the sunny goal by Death. To-day the shack stands vacant.