“In the hills close to Grants Pass the sportsman finds grouse, quail, pheasants, and grey squirrels to his hearts content, whilst along the river and creeks the angler forgets all care when casting his fly to the invitation of the rainbow, salmon, and speckled trout, which abound along the numerous riffles and in the deep pools; farther out in the timber-clad mountains the huntsman may find deer, bobcat, bear, and mountain lion. A poor hunter is he who does not have venison for dinner the first day.
“The standing timber of Josephine County is conservatively estimated at nine billion feet of fir, sugar pine, spruce, cedar, and yellow pine. A score or more sawmills are operated in the immediate vicinity of Grants Pass; the product of these mills is manufactured into fruit boxes and building material at the two large factories in the city, which employ several hundred men. Mining for gold and copper is carried on extensively in all parts of the county to a distance of forty miles; the Grants Pass district supplying at the present time over one-half of the gold and copper output of the state. Marble, lime, platinum, fire clay, and asbestos are among the many lesser mineral products.
“The homeseeker looking for an ideal location and an opportunity to become independent in a really charming city and valley should not fail to investigate the merits of Grants Pass and vicinity.”
The completion of a million-dollar sugar factory in the past year had still farther added to the optimism of Grants Pass people. This, we were assured, would mean the distribution of perhaps five hundred thousand dollars annually in the community and reclamation of some six thousand acres of land with an assured income of at least fifty dollars per acre. Irrigation is necessary to grow sugar beets in this section and, fortunately, the water supply is practically unlimited. Naturally, Grants Pass is exceedingly anxious to have an outlet to the sea, which is less than one hundred miles distant across the Cascades—and a bond issue to begin work on a railroad to Crescent City in California has recently been voted. All of which goes to show that Grants Pass is honest in its belief of a great future and that no effort will be omitted by its hustling citizens to realize said future at the earliest possible moment.
VIII
GRANTS PASS TO EUREKA
We may admit that it was with considerable misgiving that we left Grants Pass in the early morning for Crescent City on the sea. We had been discouraged in the attempt by the best posted road authorities in San Francisco, who declared that the trip was too difficult to be worth while, and the pleasant young lady who was all there was in sight when we called at the Portland Automobile Club was even more emphatic in her efforts to dissuade us.
“Don’t try it,” she said. “The road by the way of Crescent City and Eureka is a rough mountain trail, with grades as high as thirty-eight per cent and the rains are likely to catch you at any time from now on,”—all of which, we may remark parenthetically, proved true enough.
Over against this was the assurance of a veteran motorist whom we met at Crater Lake Lodge and who had just come from San Francisco over this route, that there was nothing to give the driver of a Pierce Forty-eight a moment’s uneasiness; though the road was very heavy and rough, a staunch, powerful car would have no difficulty. We were also reassured by the garage owner at Grants Pass, who declared that the natives thought little of the run to Crescent City and that a motor stage made the trip nearly every day in the year, though sometimes in bad weather, he admitted, the nearly obsolete but always reliable horse had to give them a lift.
We learned enough, however, to feel sure that considerably heavier work in mountaineering than we had as yet done awaited us, and this naturally caused us some uneasiness. At times when such feelings seized us concerning roads traveled by some one almost daily, we tried to realize the sensations of the pioneers, who confronted these awful solitudes without road or chart and at best with only treacherous savages to guide them over well-nigh impassable trails through mountain and forest. Such reflections made our misgivings about roads and routes seem little short of cowardly, and perhaps at times rather coerced our better judgment.