Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

All day long they kill time in the saloons. The nights they spend on the water, flinging and trolling and drawing in their nets, which often burst with the weight of the captured salmon. It is a strange life, and one sure to foster a man's worst traits rather than his best ones. The fishermen who have homes and families, and are loyal to them, industrious and thrifty, are the exception.

The site of Mr. Astor's original fort is now the terraced yard of a spruce new house on the corner of one of the pleasantest streets in the old town. These streets are little more than narrow terraces rising one above the other on jutting and jagged levels of the river-bank. They command superb off-looks across and up and down the majestic river, which is here far more a bay than a river. The Astoria people must be strangely indifferent to these views; for the majority of the finest houses face away from the water, looking straight into the rough wooded hillside.

Uncouth and quaint vehicles are perpetually plying between the old and the new towns; they jolt along fast over the narrow wooden roads, and the foot-passengers, who have no other place to walk, are perpetually scrambling from under the horses' heels. It is a unique highway: pebbly beaches, marshes, and salt ponds, alder-grown cliffs, hemlock and spruce copses on its inland side; on the water-side, bustling wharves, canneries, fishermen's boarding-houses, great spaces filled in with bare piles waiting to be floored; at every turn shore and sea seem to change sides, and clumps of brakes, fresh-hewn stumps, maple and madrone trees, shift places with canneries and wharves; the sea swashes under the planks of the road at one minute, and the next is an eighth of a mile away, at the end of a close-built lane. Even in the thickest settled business part of the town, blocks of water alternate with blocks of brick and stone.

The statistics of the salmon-canning business almost pass belief. In 1881 six hundred thousand cases of canned salmon were shipped from Astoria. We ourselves saw seventy-five hundred cases put on board one steamer. There were forty eight-pound cans in each case; it took five hours' steady work, of forty "long-shore men," to load them. These long-shore men are another shifting and turbulent element in the populations of the river towns. They work day and night, get big wages, go from place to place, and spend money recklessly; a sort of commercial Bohemian, difficult to handle and often dangerous. They sometimes elect to take fifty cents an hour and all the beer they can drink, rather than a dollar an hour and no beer. At the time we saw them, they were on beer wages. The foaming beer casks stood at short intervals along the wharf,—a pitcher, pail, and mug at each cask. The scene was a lively one: four cases loaded at a time on each truck, run swiftly to the wharf edge, and slid down the hold; trucks rattling, turning sharp corners; men laughing, wheeling to right and left of each other, tossing off mugs of beer, wiping their mouths with their hands, and flinging the drops in the air with jests,—one half forgave them for taking part wages in the beer, it made it so much merrier.

On Sunday morning we waked up to find ourselves at sea in the Columbia River. A good part of Oregon and Washington Territory seemed also to be at sea there. When a river of the size of the Columbia gets thirty feet above low-water mark, towns and townships go to sea unexpectedly. All the way up the Columbia to the Willamette, and down the Willamette to Portland, we sailed in and on a freshet, and saw at once more and less of the country than could be seen at any other time. At the town of Kalama, facetiously announced as "the water terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad," the hotel, the railroad station, and its warehouses were entirely surrounded by water, and we sailed, in seemingly deep water, directly over the wharf where landings were usually made. At other towns on the way we ran well up into the fields, and landed passengers or freight on stray sand-spits, or hillocks, from which they could get off again on the other side by small boats. We passed scores of deserted houses, their windows open, the water swashing over their door-sills; gardens with only tops of bushes in sight, one with red roses swaying back and forth, limp and helpless on the tide. It seemed strange that men would build houses and make farms in a place where they are each year liable to be driven out by such freshets. When I expressed this wonder, an Oregonian replied lightly, "Oh, the river always gives them plenty of time. They've all got boats, and they wait till the last minute always, hoping the water'll go down."—"But it must be unwholesome to the last degree to live on such overflowed lands. When the water recedes, they must get fevers."—"Oh, they get used to it. After they've taken about a barrel of quinine, they're pretty well acclimated."

Other inhabitants of the country asserted roundly that no fevers followed these freshets; that the trade-winds swept away all malarial influences; that the water did no injury whatever to the farms,—on the contrary, made the crops better; and that these farmers along the river bottoms "couldn't be hired to live anywhere else in Oregon."

The higher shore lines were wooded almost without a break; only at long intervals an oasis of clearing, high up, an emerald spot of barley or wheat, and a tiny farm-house. These were said to be usually lumbermen's homes; it was warmer up there than in the bottom, and crops thrived. In the not far-off day when these kingdoms of forests are overthrown, and the Columbia runs unshaded to the sea, these hill shores will be one vast granary.

The city of Portland is on the Willamette River, fourteen miles south of the junction of that river with the Columbia. Seen from its water approach, Portland is a picturesque city, with a near surrounding of hills, wooded with pines and firs, that make a superb sky-line setting to the town, and to the five grand snow-peaks, of which clear days give a sight. These dark forests and spear-top fringes are a more distinctive feature in the beauty of Portland's site than even its fine waters and islands. It is to be hoped that the Portland people will appreciate their value, and never let their near hills be shorn of trees. Not one tree more should be cut. Already there are breaks in the forest horizons, which mar the picture greatly; and it would take but a few days of ruthless wood choppers' work to rob the city forever of its backgrounds, turning them into unsightly barrens. The city is on both sides of the river, and is called East and West Portland. With the usual perversity in such cases, the higher ground and the sunny eastern frontage belong to the less popular part of the city, the west town having most of the business and all of the fine houses. Yet in times of freshet its lower streets are always under water; and the setting-up of back-water into drains, cellars, and empty lots is a yearly source of much illness. When we arrived, two of the principal hotels were surrounded by water; from one of them there was no going out or coming in except by planks laid on trestle-work in the piazzas, and the air in the lower part of the town was foul with bad smells from the stagnant water.

Portland is only thirty years old, and its population is not over twenty-five thousand; yet it is said to have more wealth per head than any other city in the United States except New Haven. Wheat and lumber and salmon have made it rich. Oregon wheat brings such prices in England that ships can afford to cross the ocean to get it; and last year one hundred and thirty-four vessels sailed out of Portland harbor, loaded solely with wheat or flour.

The city reminds one strongly of some of the rural towns in New England. The houses are unpretentious, wooden, either white or of light colors, and uniformly surrounded by pleasant grounds, in which trees, shrubs, and flowers grow freely, without any attempt at formal or decorative culture. One of the most delightful things about the town is its surrounding of wild and wooded country. In an hour, driving up on the hills to the west, one finds himself in wildernesses of woods: spruce, maple, cedar, and pine; dogwood, wild syringa, honeysuckle, ferns and brakes fitting in for undergrowth; and below all, white clover matting the ground. By the roadsides are Linnæa, red clover, yarrow, May-weed, and dandelion, looking to New England eyes strangely familiar and unfamiliar at once. Never in New England woods and roadsides do they have such a luxurious diet of water and rich soil, and such comfortable warm winters. The white clover especially has an air of spendthrifty indulgence about it which is delicious. It riots through the woods, even in their densest, darkest depths, making luxuriant pasturage where one would least look for it. On these wooded heights are scores of dairy farms, which have no clearings except of the space needful for the house and outbuildings. The cows, each with a bell at her neck, go roaming and browsing all day in the forests. Out of thickets scarcely penetrable to the eye come everywhere along the road the contented notes of these bells' slow tinkling at the cows' leisure. The milk, cream, and butter from these dairy farms are of the excellent quality to be expected, and we wondered at not seeing "white clover butter" advertised as well as "white clover honey." Land in these wooded wilds brings from forty to eighty dollars an acre; cleared, it is admirable farm land. Here and there we saw orchards of cherry and apple trees, which were loaded with fruit; the cherry trees so full that they showed red at a distance.