BREAD-MAKING BY AMATEURS.If any friends of yours think of coming out, send them to the school of cookery, I implore you. It is the greatest possible quandary to be in, to be set down with flour, water, and a tin of saleratus or baking-powder, and to have to make the bread or go without. Then, to convert chickens running about your house into food for man is not so easy as it looks; nor is cooking beans or potatoes a matter of pure instinct, I assure you. Shall I ever forget riding up at nearly three in the afternoon, to one of our Englishmen's farms, to find the proprietor standing, coat off and sleeves turned up, before a huge, round tin of white slush? When he saw me come in, he lifted out his hands and rubbed off the white dripping mess, saying: "I'll be hanged if I'll try any longer; since eleven o'clock have I been after this beastly bread! Can you make it? Is this stuff too thin or too thick, or what?" It is true that he makes fine bread now; but if you could but know the stages of slackness, heaviness, soddenness, flintiness, that he and his friends passed through, you would see that I was giving a useful hint, and one that applies to the feminine emigrant quite as much as to the masculine. Another thing strikes us out here, namely, the waste that pervades an average Oregon farmer's household. Does he kill a deer? He leaves the fore half of the creature, and all the internals, in the wood where he killed it, taking home only the hind-quarters and the hide. If he kills a hog, the head is thrown out, to be rolled round and gnawed at by the dogs; the same with a sheep or a calf.
Half of them will not even take the trouble to have butter, letting the calves get all the milk, but just a little for the meals. You rarely see eggs on the table, though there may be scores of hens about.
You will hardly believe that large quantities of butter and cheese are imported into this valley, both from California and from Washington Territory, and cheese even from the East, though there can not be a finer dairy country than this, if they would but look a little ahead and provide some green food for the cows for the interval between the hay-crop off the timothy-grass and the fresh growth of the same from the autumn rains.
It is still more inexcusable among the hills, where the grass keeps green all the year round. The exclusive devotion to wheat is what will very shortly and most surely impoverish the country; and therefore it is that, in the interests of Oregon, I am so anxious that many farmers should come here who are familiar with mixed farming, and will apply it to our deep, rich, stoneless soil, and will thus avert the inevitable consequences of wheat, wheat, wheat, continuously for fifteen, twenty, ay, and thirty years.
It is not that other crops and other pursuits do not answer here. Sheep, cattle, and horses thrive and multiply. Oregon valley wool ranks among the very best. The Angora goat takes to Western Oregon as if it were his native home, and produces yearly from three to four pounds of hair, worth from sixty to eighty cents a pound. Beans, peas, carrots, parsnips grow as I have never seen them elsewhere. Swedish turnips have succeeded well in this valley, and nearer the coast the white turnips I have seen nearly as big as your head, and good all through. I saw a large heap of potatoes the other day that averaged six inches long, and perfectly clean and free from all taint. Carrots we grew ourselves that weighed from one and a half to two pounds all round. Barley thrives splendidly, with a full, round, clear-skinned berry. Oats I need hardly mention, as the export of this cereal is very large, and the quality is undeniable.
The common red clover grows in a half-acre patch in my neighbor's field waist-high, and he cut it three times last year. We have the humble-bee (or, at any rate, a big fellow just like the English humble-bee—for I never handled one to examine it closely) to fertilize the clover. The white Dutch clover spreads wherever it gets a chance.
WHEAT-GROWING.But the temptation to grow wheat is very strong. It is the staple product of the State, and hardly ever fails in quality. The farmers understand it; their system of life is organized with a view to it. A thousand bushels of wheat in the warehouse is as good as money in the bank, and is in reality a substitute for it. There is a clear understanding of what it costs to plant, harvest, and warehouse, and it involves the lowest amount of trouble and anxiety.
Therefore, Oregon grows wheat, and will grow it; and men will grow nothing else until the consequences are brought home to them.
CHAPTER III.