Now let us inquire as to the use and the tenacity of hold the pioneers had for their unbought possessions. There was no sign of indolence on their part upon arriving. The same pushing qualities which enabled them to surmount all difficulties in getting here were not wanting when homes were to be made and farms to be cultivated. To all appearances the older community, with an infusion of vigor born of success and adventure, had been transplanted upon virgin soil. Of necessity population was sparse. In large districts, principally settled by immigrants before 1851, there was but one family to the square mile, and in other portions were those arriving afterwards and settling two to the square mile. In this way a few people cover, or rather appropriate, a large country, and their improvements, though considerable, appear very meager. Every thing, however, was at hand; rail timber ten cuts to the tree; cedar for shingles and shakes; poles straight enough for rafters without hewing, and fir trees, seemingly grown for the special purpose of house frames. The soil was favorable. Though producing a good growth of the most nutritious native grass, it was easily plowed, two good horses being sufficient to turn over two acres of sod in a day, and, unlike the sward in other countries, was mellow from the first harrowing. Many a family coming as late as October plowed and fenced forty acres and raised from twelve hundred to sixteen hundred bushels of wheat the next harvest, working their cattle that hauled them across the plains and feeding them nothing but the bunch grass upon which they pastured through the winter months.
After the discovery of gold in California, the market for all farm products was at almost every man's door and at marvelous prices. Butter from fifty cents to a dollar a pound; bacon from twenty-five to fifty cents a pound; chickens from $5 to $10 per dozen; eggs from twenty-five to fifty cents per dozen; sheep from $5 to $12 per head; cows, $50; horses, $200; oxen from $100 to $200 per yoke; wheat from $1 to $7 per bushel, and labor from $2 to $5 per day. Of course, such prices gradually wore down, but the opportunity for large profits in farming and stock raising continued for a quarter of a century. Our public disbursements, however, were not on the same scale. Up to the year 1859 Uncle Sam paid a good share of the governmental expenses, and at that time our state government was organized under a constitution that has often been called parsimonious.
The sixteenth and thirty-sixth sections of each township, or lands in lieu thereof, were devoted by Congress to common schools; land was also given to found a state university and agricultural college, and five hundred thousand acres along with five per cent of the sales of public lands were given to an internal improvement fund to be used by the state. Add to this the swamp lands, amounting to several hundred thousand acres of the most valuable, all given without cost, and one might well ask, "in the name of common sense what more should a paternal government do for a people?" And yet it has done more. Coast defenses and lighthouses have been built, the rivers dredged, harbors improved, something near a million dollars appropriated to cut a canal around the cascade falls, and military roads and posts established to protect our inhabitants from the aborigines.
In common with all the other inhabitants of the United States, we have been suffering for the last few years from an aggravating increase of our great American industry, politics, but until the discovery was made, that people can grow rich by taxing themselves, the people of Oregon were contented with small levies for public purposes. Indeed, we have done little in the way of public improvements to create expense. With the exception of county roads, which are mainly ungraded dirt ways, and the bridging of streams, nothing of importance has been attempted.
In view of all the foregoing comes the sharp contrast of the present condition of the pioneers and their immediate descendants. In the absence of any reliable census reports, I have been obliged to rely upon regional inspection, taking a township here and there and tracing up the career of the first white inhabitants. For this purpose I have selected, for an average, one hundred square miles on the east side of the Willamette Valley, in Marion County, which contains the state capital, and an examination shows that sixty-six per cent of the donation claims have passed out of the possession of the donees and their descendants, another fifteen per cent are mortgaged for all they are worth, and for practical purposes may be considered as lost to them. Not more than fifteen per cent of the whole have been ordinarily successful in holding and improving a part of their possessions and are now free from debt. Only five of all of them have increased their holdings and are thrifty. Eighty-seven per cent held section claims, and it may be mentioned that the half-section claimants were more successful in holding their own, and add very much to the favorableness of this report. In the better part of this county, a hundred square miles in a body might be selected where the per cent of loss would be greater, but this was settled chiefly by French, Scotch, and English Canadians, mountain men and trappers of nomadic habits, who married Indian women of the whole or half-breed, and of whose descendants less is expected, as they are passionately fond of ardent spirits. A teetotaler of mixed blood would be a rare sight. Neighborly, clever people, of lax business habits, and of necessity trustful, they were soon beat out of their landed possessions. Probably in no American community has the credit system been so much in vogue as on this Northwest coast, and likely for the reason that in no other place are crops so sure, and certainly in no other place was a broad basis of credit so much at the disposal of debtors. A family with a section of land that produces unfailing crops at small cost, can get credit anywhere; and what a harvest it has been for merchants and middlemen in these western valleys until recently. Ah, man! you are, indeed, a wanting animal, one whose wants are ever multiplying and exacting. Only a few of the race are securely provident by immediate self-denial, and this truth applies equally to the pioneers, those resolute men and women—
Who kept step with the patient ox,
And toiled by the rolling wheel,
Drew success from the sand and rocks,
As sparks from the flint and steel.
The heads of families did not so readily depart from their early habits of economy, but the children soon reveled in their magnificent possessions. Girls and boys alike became semi-nomads, or properly speaking, fell into the ways of the baronial English or the planter class of the South. As a consequence of their newly found competence and leisure "they took to horse," and strange, what a fascination comes over a human being when he takes to horse. In truth, that boy who did not admire the splendid aboriginal equestrians of the Great Plains and get filled with the spirit of the wild and free, as he saw them scurrying along the mountain side or sweeping down into the valley with the speed of the wind; that boy must have been an unchangeable clodhopper or a born philosopher.