By George Palmer Putnam

The Southland of North America

(See Announcement at Back of this Volume)

The Columbia River Valley and Mount Adams
Copyright, Gifford, Portland, Ore.

In the
Oregon Country

Out-Doors in Oregon, Washington, and California
Together with some Legendary Lore, and
Glimpses of the Modern West in
The Making

By

George Palmer Putnam

Author of "The Southland of North America" etc.

With an Introduction by

James Withycombe

Governor of Oregon

With 52 Illustrations

G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1915
Copyright, 1915
BY
GEORGE PALMER PUTNAM
The Knickerbocker Press, New York

Dedicated to
THE EMBLEM CLUB

INTRODUCTION

HEN one has lived in Oregon for forty-three years, and when one's enthusiasm for his home increases year after year, naturally all that is said of that home is of the most vital interest. Especially is it acceptable if it is the outgrowth of a similar enthusiasm, and if it is well said.

For a considerable span of time I have been reading what others have written about the Pacific Coast. In the general western literature, it has seemed to me, Oregon has never received its merited share of consideration. Just now, with the Expositions in California attracting a worldwide interest westward, and with the Panama Canal giving our development a new impetus, it is especially appropriate that Oregon receive added literary attention. And it is reasonable to suppose that the stranger within our gates will find interest in such literature, provided it be of the right sort, just as Oregonians must welcome a sound addition to the State's bibliography, written by an Oregonian.

So, because I like the spirit of the following pages, admire the method of their presentation, and deeply desire to promote the success of all that will tend toward a larger appreciation of Oregon's possibilities, I recommend this book to the consideration of dwellers on the Pacific Coast, and those who desire to form acquaintance with the land it concerns.

Governor of Oregon.

Salem, Oregon,
January 20th, 1915.

PREFACE

FTEN enough a preface is an outgrowth of disguised pretentiousness or insincere humility. Presumably it is an apology for the authorship, or at least an explanation of the purpose of the pages it introduces.

But no one is compelled to write a book; and, in truth, publishers habitually exert a contrary influence. It is a fair supposition, therefore, when a book is produced, that the author has some good reason for his act, whether or not the book itself proves to be of service.

Among many plausible apologies for authorship, the most reasonable is, it seems to me, a genuine enthusiasm for the subject at hand. If one loves that with which the book has to do the desire to share the possession with readers approaches altruism. In this case let us hope that the enthusiasm, which is real, and the virtue, which is implied, will sufficiently cloak the many faults of these little sketches, whose mission it is to convey something of the spirit of the out-of-door land they picture—a land loved by those who know it, and a land of limitless welcome for the stranger who will knock at its gates.

The Oregon Country, with which these chapters are chiefly concerned, has been the goal of expeditioning for a century and a quarter. First came Captain Robert Gray in 1792, by sea. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, twelve years later, tracked 'cross country from the Missouri to the mouth of the Columbia. In 1810, the Astor expedition, under Wilson and Hunt, succeeded, after hardships that materially reduced the party, in making its way from St. Louis to the Columbia and down the river to the mouth, where was founded the town of Astoria. Finally, after a half-century of horse-and-wagon pioneering, the first railroads spanned the continent in 1869. But the Union Pacific and Central Pacific were more the concern of California than of Oregon, for the Northwest had no iron trail to link it with the parent East until in 1883 the Northern Pacific Railway, under the leadership of Henry Villard, reached Portland.

So Oregon was discovered by sea and land, and finally, as highways of steel replaced the dusty trails of the emigrants, she has come into her own. From within and without she has builded, and what she has done for her sons, and offers to her settlers, has established a place for her in the respectful attention of the world.

Now, in the year nineteen hundred and fifteen, a new era is dawning for Oregon and for all our Western Coast, through fresh enterprise, this time again by sea. The waters of the Atlantic and Pacific have been joined at Panama, our continental coast line, to all intents and purposes, being made continuous, and the two Portlands, of Oregon and Maine, become maritime neighbors. Our East and our West have clasped hands again at the Isthmus, and comparative strangers as they are, there is need for an introduction when they meet.

Not strangers, perhaps; better brothers long separated, each unfamiliar with the attainments and the developed character of the other. The younger brother, the Westerner, has from the very nature of things changed most. His growth, in body, mind, and experience, is at times difficult for the Easterner to fathom. A generation ago, he was such an immature fellow, so lacking in poise, in accomplishments, and even in certain of those characteristics which comprise what the East chooses to consider civilization; and his country, compared with what it is to-day, was so crudely developed.

The Easterner this year is the one who is coming to his brother of the West, because of the Canal, the Expositions celebrating its completion, and an immediate inclination to "see America first" impressed upon our public for the most part by the present war-madness of Europe.

It would be rank presumption for any one person to pretend to speak a word of explanation to that visitor on behalf of the Coast. As a fact, no explanation is required; the States of the Pacific are their own explanation, and their people must be known by their works. Secondly, the Coast is such a vast territory that what might be a reasonably intelligent introduction to one portion of it would be utterly inapplicable elsewhere.

So this little book does not undertake to present a comprehensive account of our westernmost States, or even of the Oregon Country. It is intended simply to suggest a few of the many attractions which may be encountered here and there along the Pacific, the references to which are woven together with threads of personal reminiscence pertaining to characteristic phases of the western life of to-day. For the stranger it may possess some measure of information; it should at least induce him to tarry in the region sufficiently long to secure an impression of the byways as well as of the highways. For the man to whom Oregon, California, or Washington stands for home, these pages may contain an echo of interest—for we are apt to enjoy most sympathetic accounts of the things we love best. But for visitor or resident, or one who reads of a country he may not see, the chief mission of these chapters is to chronicle something of their author's enthusiasm for the land they concern, to hint of the pleasurable possibilities of its out-of-doors, and, mayhap, to offer a glimpse of the new West of to-day in the preparation for its greater to-morrow.

G. P. P.

Bend, Oregon,
December 25, 1914.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Some of the material in this book has been printed in substantially the same form in Recreation whose Editor has kindly sanctioned its further utilization here.

For the use of many photographs I am indebted to the courtesy of officials of the Oregon-Washington, and Spokane, Portland and Seattle railways.

G. P. P.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

In the Oregon Country

CHAPTER I

"Out West"

HAT is the most pronounced difference between East and West?" A Bostonian once asked me that. I was East after a year or two of westerning, and he seemed to think it would be easy enough to answer off-hand. But for the life of me I could find no fit reply. For a time that is—and then it struck me.

"Everyone is proud of everything out West," said I. "Local patriotism is a religion—if you know what I mean."

You who have lived on the Pacific Slope will understand. You who have visited the Pacific Slope will half-understand. Did you ever hear of a New Jersey man fighting because his town was maligned? You never did! Have you yet encountered a York State small-town dweller who would devote hours to proving that his community was destined to outdistance all its neighbors because God had been especially good to it—and ready to back his boast to the limit? No indeed! Yet most of us have seen Westerners actually come to blows protecting the fair name of their chosen town, and I know scores of them who can, and will, on the slightest provocation, demonstrate that their particular Prosperity Center is the coming city of destiny.

"The Palouse dweller pictures wheat fields." The grain country of eastern Washington
From a photograph by Frank Palmer, Spokane, Wash.

"The man from Boisé describes God's country in terms of sagebrush and brown plains"

In short every Westerner is inordinately proud of his town and his country. On trains you hear it, in hotel lobbies, on street corners. The stranger seated at your side in the smoking compartment regales you with descriptions of his particular "God's Country." If ever there was an overworked phrase west of the Missouri, it is that, and the inventor of a fitting synonym should reap royal rewards, in travelers' gratitude if nothing else. The man from Boisé describes "God's Country" in terms of sagebrush and brown plains; the Palouse dweller pictures wheat fields, mentioning not wind storms and feverish summer mercury; the Californian sees his poppy-golden hills; the eyes of the Puget Sound dweller are bright with memories of majestic timber and broad waterways, unclouded by any mention of gray rain; the man from Bend talks of rushing rivers and copper-hued pines, his enthusiasm for the homeland unalloyed by reference to summer dusts; the orchard owner of Hood River or Wen-atchee has his heaven lined with ruddy apples, and discourses amazing figures concerning ever-increasing world market for the product of his acres; he who hails from the Coast cities, whose all-pervading passion is optimism, weaves convincing prophecies of the golden future. And so it goes. Each for his own, each an enthusiast, a loyal patriot, a rabid disciple. Eastern travel acquaintances produce the latest photograph of their youngest offspring, but the Westerner brings forth views and plats of his home town; no children of his own flesh are more beloved.

Yes, truly, it is a bore. The thing is overdone. There is too much of it. And yet—well, it is the very spirit of the West, a natural expression of the pride of creation, for these men of to-day are creating homes and towns, and doing it under fiercely competitive conditions. They have builded upon their judgment and staked their all upon the throw of fortune. They are pleased with their accomplishments and vastly determined to bend the future to their ends. It is arrogance, no doubt, but healthy and happy, and the very essence of youthful accomplishment. And its very insistency and sincerity spell success, and are invigorating to boot.

The old differences between East and West are no more, of course. Except for a trifle more informality under the setting sun, clothes and their wearing are the same. The Queen's English is butchered no more distressingly in California than in Connecticut. Proportionately to resources, educational opportunities are identical. Music and the arts are no longer strangers where blow Pacific breezes, nor have they been for decades. The West is wild and woolly no more, railroads have replaced stagecoaches, fences bisect the ranges, free land is almost a thing of the past. Yet, withal, existence for the peoples of the two borders of our continent is not cast in an identical mold.

"Back East" residents are apt to regard the West as a land of curiosities, human and natural. "Out West" dwellers are inclined to be supercilious when they mention the ways of the Atlantic seaboard.

All statements to the contrary notwithstanding, East is East, and West is West, no matter how fluently they mingle. The difference between them is not to be defined by conversational metes and bounds. It is not merely of miles, of scenery, or of manners, or even of enthusiasm. It is, in fact, quite intangible, and yet it exists, as anyone who has dwelt upon both sides of our continent realizes. Aside from the trivialities—which are wrapt up in such words as "culture," "custom," "precedent," and the like—the fundamental, explanatory reason for the intangible differences is one of years. Most of the West is buoyantly youthful, some of it blatantly boyish. Much of the East is in the prime of middle age, some of it senile. Naturally the East is inclined to conservative pessimism—an attribute of advancing years—and the West to impulsive optimism.

Do not foster the notion that the term "extreme" West really applies, for it doesn't. The West, as I have seen it, is too nervous, socially speaking, to dare extremes. It is too inexperienced to essay experiments, too desirous of doing the correct thing. While it wouldn't for the world admit the fact, socially it is quite content to keep its intelligent eyes on the examples set back East, and even then its replica of what it sees is apt to be a modified one.

A Western mountaineering club on the hike
From a photograph by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.

If this bashfulness holds good socially, it emphatically does not commercially. For in things economic there is far more dash and daring, and bigness of conception and rapidity of realization in Western business affairs than in those of the East. Opportunity is knocking on every hand, and those who think and act most quickly become her lucky hosts. The countries of the West are upbuilding with a rapidity for the most part inconceivable to Europe-traveled Easterners, and affairs move at a lively pace, so that the laggards are left behind and only the able-bodied can keep abreast of the progress. And with all the dangers of the happy-go-lucky methods, the pitfalls of the inherent gambling that lies beneath the surface of much of it, Western business life undoubtedly offers the favored field for the young man of to-day who has, in addition to the normal commercial attributes, the ability to keep his head.

Greeley's advice was never sounder than to-day; revised, it should read: "Come West, young man, and help the country grow."

The start has just been made. Perhaps the days of strident booms are over (let us trust so), and it may be that the bonanza opportunities are for the most part buried in the past, together with the first advent of the railroads, the discoveries of gold, and the exploitation of agriculture, which gave them birth. But the West is getting her second wind. The greater development is yet to come; the Panama Canal, with quickened immigration, manufacturing, and a more thorough-going cultivation of resources than ever in the past, spell that. What has gone before is trivial and inconsequential in comparison with what is to come. Pioneering is along different lines than in the old days, but it still is pioneering, and the call of it is as insistent for ears properly tuned.

I hear the tread of pioneers
Of cities yet to be,
The first low wash of waves where soon
Will roll a human sea.

The waves have wet the shores, but their true advance has scarce begun.

CHAPTER II

The Valley of Content

REGON—the old Oregon Territory of yesterday and the State of to-day—is our very own. It was neither bought, borrowed, nor stolen from another nation. It is of the United States because our fathers came here first, carved out homes from the wilderness, and unfurled their flag overhead; through the most fundamental of rights—that of discovery, coupled with possession and development.

The New England States we inherited from Britain, although the will was sorely contested. For Louisiana we paid a price. Texas and California we annexed from Mexico, and purchased New Mexico and Arizona. Alaska was bought from Russia for a song. Alone of all the United States the old Oregon Territory became ours by normal acquisition.

Thence, perhaps, is the compelling attraction for the native-born of Oregon to-day. Mayhap a touch of historic romance clings about the country; or it may be simply the feeling of bigness, the broad expansiveness of the views, the mightiness of mountains, the splendor of the trees, and the air's crisp vitality that make Oregon life so worth while.

Whatever the explanation, it is assuredly a pleasant place in which to live, this land of Oregon, and the transplanted Easterner cannot but be conscious of its attractions, just as he is of the myriad delights of the entire Coast country. A land of delight it is, from Puget Sound to the riviera of California, from the snow mountains to the sagebrush plains, where rose the dust of immigrants' "prairie schooners" not so many years ago.

The guardian of Oregon's southern gateway is Shasta, and close beside its gleaming flanks rolls the modern trail of steel whereon the wayfarer from San Francisco passes over the Siskiyous into the valleys of the Rogue and the Umpqua.

Shasta displays its attractions surpassingly well. An appreciative nature placed this great white gem in a wondrously appropriate setting of broken foothills and timbered reaches that billow upward to the snow line from the south and west, with never a petty rival to break the calm dominance of the master peak, and nothing to mar the symmetry of the cool green woodlands. For Shasta stands alone, and from its isolation is doubly impressive. One sees it all at once, as the train clambers up the grades towards Oregon, not a mere peak among many of a range, but an individual cone, neighborless and inspiring. Shasta has a volcanic history, and but a few hundred years ago bestirred itself titanically, casting forth balls of molten lava which to-day are encountered for scores of miles roundabout, weird testimonials to the latent strength now seemingly so reposeful beneath the calm crust of the earth.

Up and still up, into the timbered mountains, you are borne, until the very heart of the tousled Siskiyous is about you. Then all at once the divide lies behind and with one locomotive instead of several the train swings downward and northward into Oregon, winding interminably, and twisting and looping along hillsides and about the heads of little streams, which grow into goodly rivers as you follow them. Slowly the serried mountains iron out into gentler slopes dimpled with meadows, and here and there are homes and cultivated fields, and steepish roads of many ruts. Then the rushing Rogue River is companion for a space, and orchards and towns dot the wayside. More rough country follows, the Rogue and the Umpqua are left behind in turn, and the rails bear you to the regions of the Willamette.

Along the Willamette

Mount Shasta
From a photograph by Weister Co., Portland, Ore.

A broad valley, rich, prosperous, and beautiful to look upon, is the Willamette, and a valley of many moods. Neither in scenic charms nor agricultural resourcefulness is its heritage restricted to a single field. There are timberland and trout stream, hill and dale, valley and mountain; rural beauty of calm Suffolk is neighbor to the ragged picturesqueness of Scotland; there are skylines comparable with Norway's, and lowlands peaceful as Sweden's pastoral vistas; the giant timber, or their relic stumps, at some pasture edge, spell wilderness, while a happy, alder-lined brook flowing through a bowlder-dotted field is reminiscent of the uplands of Connecticut. Altogether, it is a rarely variegated viewland, is this vale of the Willamette.

You have seen valleys which were vast wheat fields, or where orchards were everywhere; in California and abroad you have viewed valleys dedicated to vineyards, and from mountain vantage points you have feasted your eyes upon the greenery of timberland expanses; all the world over you can spy out valleys dotted with an unvaried checkerboard of gardens, or green with pasture lands. But where have you seen a valley where all of this is mingled, where nature refuses to be a specialist and man appears a Jack of all outdoor trades? If by chance you have journeyed from Medford to Portland, with some excursioning from the beaten paths through Oregon's valley of content, you have viewed such a one.

For nature has staged a lavish repertoire along the Willamette. There are fields of grain and fields of potatoes; hop yards and vineyards stand side by side; emerald pastures border brown cornfields; forests of primeval timber shadow market garden patches; natty orchards of apples, peaches, and plums are neighbors to waving expanses of beet tops. In short, as you whirl through the valley, conjure up some antithesis of vegetation and you must wait but a scanty mile or two before viewing it from the observation car.

As first I journeyed through this pleasant land of the Willamette, a little book, written just half a century ago, fell into my hands, and these words concerning the valley, read then, offered a description whose peer I have not yet encountered:

The sweet Arcadian valley of the Willamette, charming with meadow, park, and grove! In no older world where men have, in all their happiest moods, recreated themselves for generations in taming earth to orderly beauty, have they achieved a fairer garden than Nature's simple labor of love has made there, giving to rough pioneers the blessings and the possible education of refined and finished landscape, in the presence of landscape strong, savage, and majestic.

Then Portland. Portland, the city of roses and the metropolitan heart of Oregon, stands close to where the Willamette, the river of our valley of content, meanders into the greater Columbia. Were this a guidebook I might inundate you with figures of population, bank clearings, and land values, all of them risen and still rising in bounds almost beyond belief. I might narrate incidents of the city's building—how stumps stood a half dozen years ago where such and such a million dollar hostelry now rises, or how so-and-so exchanged a sack of flour for lots whose value to-day is reckoned in six figures. But these are matters of business, and business was divorced years ago from the simple pleasures of the out-of-doors.

Portland is a city of prosperity. That fact strikes home to the most casual observer. Blessed above all else—especially in the eyes of an Easterner—is its freedom from poverty. There are no slums, no "lower east side" like New York's rabbit warrens, no Whitechapel hell holes. It is a clean, youthful city, delightfully located on either side of its river and rising on surrounding hills of rare beauty. Its metropolitan maturity, indeed, is all the more remarkable for its youth, as seventy years ago the site of the town was a howling wilderness, set in the midst of a territory peopled at best by a few score whites.

It was in 1845 that the first settler, Overton by name, made his home where now is Portland. Close after him came Captain John H. Couch, who located a donation land claim where is now the northern portion of the city. And from that beginning gradually grew the city of to-day which in the California gold rush of the early fifties received her first notable impetus through her position as a commanding supply point for the fast-crowding and lavishly opulent sister State to the south.

Born at the hands of pioneers and weaned with the gold of California, the city was sturdily founded, and to-day the strength of the pioneer blood and the glow of the golden beginnings are still upon her.

The fairest of fair Portland is seen from her show hilltop, Council Crest. The days are not all sunny, but when they are and neither "Oregon mist"—which is a local humor for downright rain—nor clouds obscure the outlook, the easterly skyline from Council Crest is a superbly pleasing introduction to the State. Over the mists of the lowlands you see Mount Hood, and to have seen Mount Hood, even from afar, is to have tasted the rarest visual delight of all the Northwest land. Shasta, to the south, was an imposing welcomer to the empire of surpassing views, but Hood outdoes Shasta and its snow-crowned neighbors of the old Oregon country as completely as the pinnacles of Switzerland overshadow their lesser companions of the Italian Alps. Hood, somehow, breathes the very spirit of the State it stands for; its charm is the essence of the beauty of its surroundings, its stateliness the keynote of the strength of the sturdy West. It is a white, chaste monument of hope, radiantly setting for its peoples roundabout a mark of high attainment.

A city of destiny its friends call Portland, and a mountain of destiny surely is Hood—its destiny to diffuse something of the spirit of healthful happiness and fuller ideals for those, at least, who will take time from the busy rush of their multiplying prosperity.

And here again, on Council Crest, I venture to turn back to 1860; venture at least again to quote from the literary heritage of Theodore Winthrop, who saw Oregon's mountains then and wrote of them and their influences these lines:

Our race has never yet come into contact with great mountains as companions of daily life, nor felt that daily development of the finer and more comprehensive senses which these signal facts of nature compel. That is an influence of the future. The Oregon people, in a climate where being is bliss,—where every breath is a draught of vivid life,—these Oregon people, carrying to a new and grander New England of the West a fuller growth of the American Idea, under whose teaching the man of lowest ambitions must still have some little indestructible respect for himself, and the brute of most tyrannical aspirations some little respect for others; carrying there a religion two centuries farther on than the crude and cruel Hebraism of the Puritans; carrying the civilization of history where it will not suffer by the example of Europe,—with such material, that Western society, when it crystallizes, will elaborate new systems of thought and life. It is unphilosophical to suppose that a strong race, developing under the best, largest, and calmest conditions of nature, will not achieve a destiny.

Be that as it may, no man, seeing Hood from Portland for the first time, could but experience a longing to answer the call of the beckoning mountain, and to find for himself the secrets of the land that lies beyond it. And so Hood was the piper which called us to the hinterland of Oregon, where, quite by chance, we stayed, until now we find we are Oregonians, by adoption and by choice.

CHAPTER III

The Land of Legends

HE nomenclature of the Northwest suffered at the hands of its English-speaking discoverers, for much that was fair to the ear in the Indian names has been replaced with dreary commonplaces, possessing neither beauty nor special fitness.

Two Yankee sea captains tossed a coin to decide whether they would name the city Portland or Boston. The Boston skipper lost, and "Multnomah," which was the old Indian name for the place and means "Down the Waters," became prosaic Portland. Because some Methodist missionaries preferred a name with a Biblical twang to the Indian "Chemeketa," meaning the "Place of Peace," Oregon's capital of to-day became Salem and the title which the red men gave their council ground was abandoned.

The Great River was first known as the Oregon, just why no authority seems to tell us reliably but later became the Columbia when the ship of that name sailed across its bar. Jonathan Carver's choice in names, however, if no longer bestowed upon the river, soon became that of all its lower regions, and they acquired the lasting title of the Oregon Country.

Mount Hood from Lost Lake Copyrighted photo by W. A. Raymond, Moro, Ore.

The old Oregon, the Columbia of to-day, was the gateway to the Pacific for the explorers and the immigrants of yesterday. For Lewis and Clark it opened a friendly passageway through the mountain ranges, and likewise for the human stream of immigration which later followed its banks from the East. So is it too a modern portal of prosperity for Portland, as this greatest river of the West concentrates the tonnage of much of three vast states by water grades at Portland's door, and two transcontinental railroads follow its banks, draining the wealth of the Inland Empire while enriching it, just as the river itself physically drains and adds wealth to the territory it traverses.

To us the Columbia was a gateway to the hinterland, for our pilgrimage upon it was easterly, up into the land of sunshine beyond Mount Hood and the Cascade mountain range, starting, on an impulse, after viewing the snow-covered barriers from the heights of Portland. And as we journeyed easterly up the great river, whose water came from lakes of the Canadian Rockies distant fourteen hundred miles, we found ourselves at once in a region of surpassing scenery and a land of quaint Indian legends.

A great wall of mountains shuts off the coastal regions from eastern Oregon and Washington. The two divisions are as dissimilar in climate and vegetation as night and day. To the west is rain and lush growth; to the east, drought and semi-arid desert. West of the Cascades are fir forests cluttered with underbrush and soggy with springs, while east are dry pine lands, park-like in their open beauty. The high plains of the hinterland are yellow grain fields chiefly, and irrigation is the right hand of agriculture; in the Willamette Valley, nature brings forth all things in a revel of productivity.

The Columbia cleaves this great wall asunder, breaking through the mountains in a gorge some three thousand feet deep. Here was the mythical bridge of the gods, which, legend narrates, once spanned the river from one mountainous bank to the other until ultimately it fell and dammed the stream. You come upon the site of the legendary bridge where Government locks now circumnavigate the cascades, a fall in the river of wondrous beauty, hemmed in on north and south by timbered mountains. Sunken forests hereabout indicate that at one time the river's course was checked by some great dam or volcanic convulsion, and every evidence in the geological surroundings points to stupendous natural cataclysms which distorted the face of nature leaving the sublime formations of the present.

Natives spearing salmon on the Columbia
Copyright 1901 by Benj. A. Gifford, The Dalles, Ore.

Coasting on Mount Hood
From a photograph by Weister Co., Portland, Ore.

As the train or boat bound up the Columbia progresses through this weird portal, fortunate you are if told the myths of this region which so truly is a land of legends, as we were; of the mythical struggle between Mount Hood on the south and Mount Adams on the north, in whose progress Hood hurled a vast bowlder at his adversary which fell short of its intended mark, destroying the bridge; of the quaint fire legend of the Klickitats which later I chanced upon in print in Dr. Lyman's entertaining book The Columbia River.

A father and two sons came from the East to the land along the Columbia, and the boys quarreled over the division of their chosen acres. So, to end the dispute, the father shot an arrow to the west and one to the north, bidding his sons make their homes where the arrows fell. From one son sprang the tribe of Klickitats, while the other founded the nation of Multnomah. Then Sahale, the Great Spirit, erected the Cascade Range as a barrier wall between them to prevent possibility of friction. The remainder of Dr. Lyman's pretty myth is best told in his own words:

But for convenience' sake, Sahale had created the great tamanous bridge under which the waters of the Columbia flowed, and on this bridge he had stationed a witch woman called Loowit, who was to take charge of the fire. This was the only fire of the world. As time passed on Loowit observed the deplorable condition of the Indians, destitute of fire and the conveniences which it might bring. She therefore besought Sahale to allow her to bestow fire upon the Indians. Sahale, greatly pleased by the faithfulness and benevolence of Loowit, finally granted her request. The lot of the Indians was wonderfully improved by the acquisition of fire. They began to make better lodges and clothes and had a variety of food and implements, and, in short, were marvellously benefitted by the bounteous gift.

The Pacific
Copyright 1910 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.

Along the Columbia—"Grotesque rocks rise sheer from the river's edge"
Copyright 1910 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland. Ore.

But Sahale, in order to show his appreciation of the care with which Loowit had guarded the sacred fire, now determined to offer her any gift she might desire as a reward. Accordingly, in response to his offer, Loowit asked that she be transformed into a young and beautiful girl. This was accordingly effected, and now, as might have been expected, all the Indian chiefs fell deeply in love with the guardian of tamanous bridge. Loowit paid little heed to any of them, until finally there came two chiefs, one from the north called Klickitat and one from the south called Wiyeast. Loowit was uncertain which of these two she most desired, and as a result a bitter strife arose between the two. This waxed hotter and hotter, until, with their respective warriors, they entered upon a desperate war. The land was ravaged, until all their new comforts were marred, and misery and wretchedness ensued. Sahale repented that he had allowed Loowit to bestow fire upon the Indians, and determined to undo all his work in so far as he could. Accordingly he broke down the tamanous bridge, which dammed up the river with an impassable reef, and put to death Loowit, Klickitat, and Wiyeast. But, inasmuch as they had been noble and beautiful in life, he determined to give them a fitting commemoration after death. Therefore he reared over them as monuments the great snow peaks; over Loowit, what we now call Mt. St. Helen's; over Wiyeast, the modern Mt. Hood; and, above Klickitat, the great dome which now we call Mt. Adams.

Up through timbered hillsides, from green fields, from the verdure of the western flanks of the Cascades, winds the great river. The banks become steeper, the mountains behind them more rugged. Fairy threads of silver, falling water, flutter down from cliffs. Grotesque rocks, mighty monuments erected by a titan fire god when the world was young, rise sheer from the river's edge. Cumbersome fish wheels revolve sedately where the silver-sided salmon run in the springtime. The railroads cling close to the stream, perforce tunneling where nature has provided no passageway, and the boat ploughs against the current which here and there is swift and swirling as the cascades are approached. Then through the locks you go, or by them if you travel by the steel highways, and quickly the scenes change, these new ones painted in a vastly different vein from those that have gone before.

The lofty, steep-walled hills become more gentle, and their cloak of green timber merges into brown grass. The river rolls between banks of barrenness as we emerge on the western rim of the land of little rain, for the moisture-laden clouds from the Pacific are thwarted in their eastern progress by the mountain barrier, along whose summits they cluster weeping, in their baffled anger, upon the wet westerly slopes, while the dry sunny eastland mocks their dour grayness. Close beside the river is the harshest of all this rainless land; sand blows, the cliffs are bare and black, the hillsides bleak and brown. But ever so little away from the barren valley bottom are rich regions of orchards and green fields, and easterly, in the countries of Walla Walla, Palouse, and John Day, far-reaching fields of grain abound. Farming is upon a bonanza basis, and the bigness of it all is reminiscent of the Dakotas, were it not for the majestic mountain skylines, blessed visual reliefs lacking altogether in the continental mid-regions. The volume then, is bound misleadingly, and those who see naught but its unprepossessing exterior gain no inkling of its charming hidden chapters.

Then come The Dalles of the Columbia, close to the town of the same name, where the river, a sane waterway for a half a thousand miles above, suddenly goes mad for a brief space of lawless waterfall and rock-rimmed cascades. At Walla Walla—whose very name means "where the waters meet"—the two chief forks of the old Oregon River converge, the Columbia proper and the Snake, the one draining a northern empire, the other swinging southerly through Idaho, "the gem of the mountains" as the Indians baptized it. Thence the great stream flows westerly some one hundred and twenty miles until it reaches the outlying ridge of the Cascade chain, there encountering a huge low surface paved with glacier-polished sheets of basaltic rock. These plates, says Winthrop Parker, who saw them as a trail follower in the early 'sixties, gave the place the name Dalles, thanks to the Canadian voyageurs in the Hudson Bay service. A brief distance above this flinty pavement the river is a mile wide, but where it forces tumultuous passageway through the rocks it narrows to a mere rift compressed, if not subdued, by the adamantine barriers it cannot force asunder. Where the sides grow closest through three rough slits in the rocky floor the white waters bore, each chasm so narrow that a child could cast a stone across.

On either hand are monotonous plains, gray with sagebrush and brown with sunburned grass. Rough hills rise northerly, in Washington. Eastward roll lower broadening lands, but turbulent with lesser hills. West is the great ridge of the Cascade Range, with Hood rising majestic guardian over all, and the broad Columbia vanishing into the very heart of the shadowed mountains, unchecked on its seaward quest. The summer sunlight is blinding bright and the sky ethereal blue. An Indian hovel, or a ragged home of a fish-spearer beside the rushing waters, furnishes contrast—that of puny humanity in the face of nature at her mightiest. The view is at once compellingly beautiful and weirdly repelling. Few would live along the great river or thereabout from choice; and yet the view of it—the startling, colorful panorama—is golden treasure beyond the dreams of avarice.

Celilo Falls on the Columbia
Copyright 1902 by Benj. A. Gifford, The Dalles, Ore.

The north abutment of the Bridge of the Gods
Copyright 1902 by Benj. A. Gifford, The Dalles, Ore.

It is this setting which marked the old-time entrance into Central Oregon. Those words "old-time," are characteristic of the swift-moving country; for using them, I refer to but six years ago, when Oregon's hinterland was a wilderness so far as railroads were concerned. These dalles of the Columbia, a milepost on the old transcontinental trail, are a place seen and passed to-day by those who rush on rails in brief hours where the pioneers of fifty years ago labored weeks. Also were these dalles prominent in Indian life in the quiet midyears of the last century, when beavers were more plentiful than palefaces. Indeed, back to the very beginnings of Northwestern Indian lore their story goes, coming to us, like so much else of the misty past of the Oregon Country, in a quaint legend.

In the late 'fifties Theodore Winthrop made his way 'cross country from Port Townsend, on Puget Sound, to The Dalles on the Columbia. His book, The Canoe and the Saddle, describes that pioneer excursion through Indian land, traversing what was in reality an untrodden wilderness. Its charm of literary expression is in no whit less fascinating than the wealth of its adventurous material, but the two, like the writer, are far behind us, and all of the pleasant account I would refer to here is the last chapter, which concerns the arrival at The Dalles, then an outpost of civilization.

Looking down upon the valley of The Dalles, Winthrop writes a half century ago:

Where the Oregon Trunk Railway crosses the Columbia. "The river rolls between banks of barrenness"
Copyright 1912 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.

Columbia River. The land of Indian legends
Copyright 1909 by Benj. A. Gifford, The Dalles, Ore.

Racked and battered crags stood disorderly over all that rough waste. There were no trees, nor any masses of vegetation to soften the severities of the landscape. All was harsh and desolate, even with the rich sun of an August afternoon doing what it might to empurple the scathed fronts of rock, to gild the ruinous piles with summer glories, and throw long shadows veiling dreariness. I looked upon the scene with the eyes of a sick and weary man, unable to give that steady thought to mastering its scope and detail without which any attempt at artistic description becomes vague generalization.

My heart sank within me as the landscape compelled me to be gloomy like itself. It was not the first time I had perused the region under desolating auspices. In a log barrack I could just discern far beyond the river, I had that very summer suffered from a villain malady, the smallpox. And now, as then, Nature harmonized discordantly with my feelings, and even forced her nobler aspects to grow sternly ominous. Mount Hood, full before me across the valley, became a cruel reminder of the unattainable. It was brilliantly near, and yet coldly far away, like some mocking bliss never to be mine, though it might insult me forever by its scornful presence.

Evidently it was while held captive by the "villain malady" that Winthrop learned from the Indians the legend of The Dalles, which he told so well that to paraphrase it would be folly. Here I give it, as extracted from the thumb-marked little book whose publication date is 1863:

The world has been long cycles in educating itself to be a fit abode for men. Man, for his part, has been long ages in growing upward through lower grades of being, to become whatever he now may be. The globe was once nebulous, was chaotic, was anarchic, and is at last become somewhat cosmical. Formerly rude and convulsionary forces were actively at work, to compel chaos into anarchy and anarchy into order. The mighty ministries of the elements warred with each other, each subduing and each subdued. There were earthquakes, deluges, primeval storms, and furious volcanic outbursts. In this passionate, uncontrolled period of the world's history, man was a fiend, a highly uncivilized, cruel, passionate fiend.

The northwest was then one of the centres of volcanic action. The craters of the Cascades were fire-breathers, fountains of liquid flame, catapults of red-hot stones. Day was lurid, night was ghastly with this terrible light. Men exposed to such dread influences could not be other than fiends, as they were, and they warred together cruelly, as the elements were doing.

Where the great plains of the Upper Columbia now spread, along the Umatilla, in the lovely valley of the Grande Ronde, between the walls of the Grand Coulee, was an enormous inland sea filling the vast interior of the continent, and beating forever against ramparts of hills, to the east of the desolate plain of the Dalles.

Every winter there were convulsions along the Cascades, and gushes of lava came from each fiery Tacoma, to spread new desolation over desolation, pouring out a melted surface, which, as it cooled in summer, became a fresh layer of sheeny, fire-hardened dalles.

The Dalles of the Columbia From a photograph by Weister Co., Portland, Ore.

Now as the fiends of that epoch and region had giant power to harm each other, they must have of course giant weapons of defence. Their mightiest weapon of offence and defence was their tail; in this they resembled the iguanodons and other "mud pythons" of that period, but no animal ever had such force of tail as these terrible monster fiendmen who warred together all over the Northwest.

As ages went on, and the fires of the Cascades began to accomplish their duty of expanding the world, earthquakes and eruptions diminished in virulence. A winter came when there was none. By and by there was an interval of two years, then again of three years, without rumble or shock, without floods of fire or showers of red-hot stones. Earth seemed to be subsiding into an era of peace. But the fiends would not take the hint to be peaceable; they warred as furiously as ever.

Stoutest in heart and tail of all the hostile tribes of that scathed region was a wise fiend, the Devil. He had observed the cessation in convulsions of Nature, and had begun to think out its lesson. It was the custom of the fiends, so soon as the Dalles plain became agreeably cool after an eruption, to meet there every summer and have a grand tournament after their fashion. Then they feasted riotously, and fought again until they were weary.

Although the eruptions of the Tacomas had ceased now for three years, as each summer came round this festival was renewed. The Devil had absented himself from the last two, and when, on the third summer after his long retirement, he reappeared among his race on the field of tourney, he became an object of respectful attention. Every fiend knew that against his strength there was no defence; he could slay so long as the fit was on. Yet the idea of combined resistance to so dread a foe had never hatched itself in any fiendish head; and besides, the Devil, though he was feared, was not especially hated. He had never won the jealousy of his peers by rising above them in morality. So now as he approached, with brave tail vibrating proudly, all admired and many feared him.

The Devil drew near, and took the initiative in war, by making a peace speech.

"Princes, potentates, and powers of these infernal realms," said he, "the eruptions and earthquakes are ceasing. The elements are settling into peacefulness. Can we not learn of them? Let us give up war and cannibalism, and live in milder fiendishness and growing love."

Then went up a howl from deviltry. "He would lull us into crafty peace, that he may kill and eat safely. Death! death to the traitor!"

And all the legions of fiends, acting with a rare unanimity, made straight at their intended Reformer.

Along the Columbia River. "A region of surpassing scenery"
Copyright 1912 by Kiser Co., Portland, Oregon.

The Devil pursued a Fabian policy, and took to his heels. If he could divide their forces, he could conquer in detail. Yet as he ran his heart was heavy. He was bitterly grieved at this great failure, his first experience in the difficulties of Reform. He flagged sadly as he sped over the Dalles, toward the defiles near the great inland sea, whose roaring waves he could hear beating against their bulwark. Could he but reach some craggy strait among the passes, he could take position and defy attack.

But the foremost fiends were close upon him. Without stopping, he smote powerfully upon the rock with his tail. The pavement yielded to that titanic blow. A chasm opened and went riving up the valley, piercing through the bulwark hills. Down rushed the waters of the inland sea, churning boulders to dust along the narrow trough.

The main body of the fiends shrunk back terror-stricken; but a battalion of the van sprang across and made one bound toward the heart-sick and fainting Devil. He smote again with his tail, and more strongly. Another vaster cleft went up and down the valley, with an earth quaking roar, and a vaster torrent swept along.

Still the leading fiends were not appalled. They took the leap without craning. Many fell short, or were crowded into the roaring gulf, but enough were left, and those of the chiefest braves, to martyr their chase in one instant, if they overtook him. The Devil had just time enough to tap once more, and with all the vigor of a despairing tail.

He was safe. A third crevice, twice the width of the second, split the rocks. This way and that it went, wavering like lightning eastward and westward, riving a deeper cleft in the mountains that held back the inland sea, riving a vaster gorge through the majestic chain of the Cascades, and opening a way for the torrent to gush oceanward. It was the crack of doom for the fiends. A few essayed the leap. They fell far short of the stern edge, where the Devil had sunk panting. They alighted on the water, but whirlpools tripped them up, tossed them, bowled them along among floating boulders, until the buffeted wretches were borne to the broader calms below, where they sunk. Meanwhile, those who had not dared the final leap attempted a backward one, but wanting the impetus of pursuit, and shuddering at the fate of their comrades, every one of them failed and fell short; and they too were swept away, horribly sprawling in the flood.

As to the fiends who had stopped at the first crevice, they ran in a body down the river to look for the mangled remains of their brethren, and, the undermined bank giving way under their weight, every fiend of them was carried away and drowned.

So perished the whole race of fiends.

As to the Devil, he had learnt a still deeper lesson. His tail also, the ensign of deviltry, was irremediably dislocated by his life-saving blow. In fact, it had ceased to be any longer a needful weapon! Its antagonists were all gone; never a tail remained to be brandished at it, in deadly encounter.

So, after due repose, the Devil sprang lightly across the chasms he had so successfully engineered, and went home to rear his family thoughtfully. Every year he brought his children down to the Dalles, and told them the terrible history of his escape. The fires of the Cascades burned away; the inland sea was drained, and its bed became a fair prairie, and still the waters gushed along the narrow crevice he had opened. He had, in fact, been the instrument in changing a vast region from a barren sea into habitable land.

One great trial, however, remained with him, and made his life one of grave responsibility. All his children born before the catastrophe were cannibal, stiff-tailed fiends. After that great event, every newborn imp of his was like himself in character and person, and wore but a flaccid tail, the last insignium of ignobility. Quarrels between these two factions embittered his days and impeded civilization. Still it did advance, and long before his death he saw the tails disappear forever.

Such is the Legend of The Dalles,—a legend not without a moral.

CHAPTER IV

The Land of Many Leagues

T was a very "typical" stagecoach. That is, it was typical of the style Broadway would have expected in the production of a Girl of the Golden West or The Great Divide. Very comfortably you may still see them in moving picture land—a region where the old West lives far woolier and wilder than it ever dared to be in actual life.

However, this stage was neither make-believe nor comfortable. It was very real and very comfortless. The time was six years ago and the place the one hundred miles of worse than indifferent road between Shaniko and Bend, in Central Oregon.

"Do you chew?" asked the driver.

I who sat next to him, plead innocence of the habit.

"Have a drink?" said he later, producing a flask. And again I asked to be excused.

Central Oregon travel in the old days

A Central Oregon freighter. "You will find them everywhere in the railless land, the freighters and their teams"

"Don't smoke, neither, I suppose?" The driver regarded me with suspicion. "Hell," said he, "th' country's goin' to the dogs. These here civilizin' inflooences is playing hob with everythin'. Las' three trips my passengers haven't been fit company for man or beast—they neither drank nor chawed. Not that I mean to be insultin'"—I assured him he was not—"but times certainly have changed. The next thing along 'll come a railroad and then all this goes to the scrap heap."

His gesture, with the last word, included the battered stage, the dejected horses, and the immediate surroundings of Shaniko Flats. For the life of me I could see no cause for regret even supposing his prophecy came true to the letter! Twenty hours later, when the springless seat, influenced by the attraction of gravitation in conjunction with the passage of many chuck holes, had permanently warped my spinal column, I would have been even more ready to endorse the threatened cataclysm.

Since that day when the old driver foresaw the yellow perils of "civilizin' inflooences" they have indeed invaded the land for which, until a couple of years ago, his four horses and his rattletrap stage formed the one connecting link with the "outside." The "iron horse" has swept his old nags into oblivion, and two great railroads carry the passengers and packages which he and his brothers of the old Shaniko line transported in the past.

The change has come in five short years. Those, who, like myself, went a-pioneering for the fun of it, making for Central Oregon because upon the map it showed as the greatest railroadless land, have seen the warm breath of development work as picturesque changes there as ever in the story-book days when the West was in its infancy. We are young men, we who chanced to Oregon's hinterland a few seasons gone by, yet already can we spin yarns of the "good old days" which have a real smack of romance to them and cause the recounters themselves to sigh for what has gone before and, betimes, to pray for their return—almost!

Almost, but not actually. For who prefers twenty odd hours of stagecoaching to travel in a Pullman? or seriously bemoans the advent of electric lights, running water, cement sidewalks, and other appurtenances of material development? Yet, of course, I realize full well how tame and inconsiderable the "pioneering," if by such a name it can be dignified, of Central Oregon in the last decade must appear in the eyes of Oregon's real pioneers, who came across the plains and staked out the State with monuments of courage driven deep with privation and far-sighted enterprise. Yet, while half our Eastern cousins believe the West utterly prosaic, and half are confident that some of it is still the scene of dashing adventure, and the dwellers of the Coast cities themselves are morally certain that all Oregon conducts itself along metropolitan lines, the fact remains that most of the big land between the Cascades and Blue Mountains was untouched yesterday and is to-day the pleasantest—and the least hackneyed—outdoor playland available in all the West.

Central Oregon occupied an eddy in the stream of Western progress. On the north the Columbia flowed past her doors, and the stream of immigration, first following the water and later the railroads, ignored the uninviting portals. Rock-rimmed toward the Columbia, lined with hills on the east, hedged in by the Cascades on the west, and remote from California's valleys on the south, this empire of 30,000,000 acres has been a giant maverick, wandering at will among the ranges neglected by development. In 1911 the railroads roped the wanderer, when they forced their way southward from the Columbia up the canyon of the Deschutes. But my stage journey was two years prior to that.

Shaniko was a jumping-off place. It was the end of the Columbia Southern railroad, which began at Biggs—and if a road can have a worse recommendation than that I know it not! Biggs, under the grassless cliffs beside the Columbia, baked by sun, lashed by wind, and blinded with sand, was impossible; and had it not been for the existence of Biggs one truthfully might call Shaniko the least attractive spot in the universe! The transcontinental train deposited me at Biggs and the Columbia Southern trainlet received me, after a brief interval dedicated to bolstering up the inner man with historic ham sandwiches and coffee innocent of history, served in a shack beside a sand dune.

Seventy miles separates Biggs from Shaniko, and a long afternoon was required to negotiate the distance. For an hour the diminutive train panted up oppressive grades, winding among rain-washed coulees, where the soil was red adobe and the rocks were round and also tinged with red. Stunted sagebrush clothed the hillsides scantily, their slopes serried by cattle trails as evenly as contour lines upon a map. Then, the rim of the Columbia hills gained, away we rattled southward, more directly and with some pretense of speed, across a rolling plateau of stubble fields and grain lands, dotted here and there with homes and serried by rounded valleys where the gold of sun and grain, and the gray of vagrant cloud shadows, made gorgeous picturings. Westerly, beyond the drab and golden foreground and the blue haziness of the middle distance, the Cascade Range silhouetted against a sky whose tones became richer and more cheerful as evening approached.

In the dry-farms lands of Central Oregon. "Serried by valleys, where the gold of sun and grain, and vagrant shadows, made gorgeous paintings."

With the evening came Shaniko. "The evil that men do lives after them," said Mark Antony, "the good is oft interred with their bones." So let it not be with Shaniko, for then in truth, of this town whose brightest day has gone little indeed would survive.

Shaniko was the railroad point for all Central Oregon when I first made its acquaintance, and from it freighters hauled merchandise to towns as far distant as two hundred miles. Stages radiated to the south, and, in 1909, a few hardy automobiles tried conclusions with the roads. The sheep of a sheepman's empire congregated there, giving Shaniko one boast of preëminence—it shipped more wool than any other point in the State. With streets of mud or dust, according to the season, a score or so of frame shacks, its warehouses, livery barns, corrals, shipping pens, and hotels, Shaniko in its prime was a busy lighting place for birds of passage, a boisterous town of freighters, cowmen, and sheep herders. It, like its stagecoaches, was typical, I suppose, of the town found a decade or so ago upon our receding frontiers, and still encountered in the fancies of novelists whose travels are confined to the riotous territory east of Pittsburg.

"Where are you bound?" my table neighbor asked me at supper.

"I'm not sure," said I truthfully.

"Oh, a land seeker. Well, when it comes right down to getting something worth while—something for nothing, you might say—the claims down by Silver Lake can't be beat. They—" and he launched into a rosy description of the land of his choice which lasted until the presiding Amazon deftly transferred the fork I had been using to the plate of pie she placed before me, a gentle lesson in domestic economy. My informant was a professional "locator" whose business it is to combine the landless man and the manless land with some profit to himself, in the shape of a fee for showing each "prospect" a suitable tract of untaken earth hitherto the property of Uncle Sam.

Another neighbor took me in hand. The odor of gasolene about him—it was even more pungent than the fumes of other liquids, taken internally—proclaimed him an auto driver.

"If you don't know where to go, let me show you," was the offer of this would-be guide and philosopher—I assume him a philosopher on the ground that any pilot in Central Oregon in those days must be one.

In answer to my inquiries he bade me hie straight to Harney County. It was two hundred and fifty miles away. But I lost heart, stuck to my original half-resolve, and declared Bend my objective point. In later experience it was borne home to me that those pioneer auto men of Shaniko always sang loudest the praises of the most distant point; their rate was ten or fifteen cents per mile per passenger, and on the face of it their business acumen is apparent!

One hundred miles of staging—five hundred and twenty-eight thousand feet of dust, if it be summer, or mud, if it be winter; Heaven knows how many chuck holes, how many ruts, how many bumps! The ride, commencing at eight one evening, ended about six the next. No early Christian martyr was more thoroughly bruised and stiffened at the hands of Roman mobs than the tenderfoot traveler on the memorable Shaniko-Bend journey! And there were so many rich possibilities—nay, probabilities—of diversion. Winter blizzards on Shaniko Flats were to be expected, while after thaws the heavy stages "bogged down" with aggravating regularity. The steep villainous road of the Cow Canyon grade upset many a vehicle, and well I recall one January night, when a two-day rain had turned to snow, when the air was freezing but the mud was soft, how the up-stage and the down-stage met in the awful hours where there was no turning out: clothing was ruined that night, and dispositions warped beyond repair, while passengers labored and swore and labored again until at last one stage had been snaked out of the way on a hand-made shelf, so to speak, and a passing effected. Later, we, who were Shaniko bound, were capsized in the mud. Half-frozen, wholly exhausted, we finally reached the railroad one hour after the day's only train had departed! But those were incidents of the road.

I think I never before saw a man lose his eye and recover it. Yet that was the optical antic played by my companion "inside." He was a horse buyer, and I attributed his leer to a cast of character one naturally connects with horse-trading, until all at once he was groping on the floor.

"Lost something?" I inquired politely.

"My eye."

On bank holidays I have heard 'Arry say that to 'Arriet at 'Ammersmith, but as an exclamation, not an explanation. "My eye, he's lost something valuable, and is British in his expression," thought I innocently. So I inquired if I could help him in the search.

"And er—what was it you lost?" I added.

"My eye!" He glowered up at me, and the flicker of the match I held showed a one-eyed face—the eye that had stared at me askew a few minutes before was missing!

Finally the glass optic was recovered, and he explained that the dust, working in about it, irritated him, so that occasionally he slipped it out for cleaning with his handkerchief. During such a polishing it had slipped to the floor. "I never get caught," he added with a touch of pride, "here's number two, in case of accidents," and he fished a substitute from his pocket. That second eye, I noted by daylight later, was blue, while his own was brown. No doubt it is difficult to get eyes that match.

As we bumped along a valley bottom, shrouded in our tenacious cloud of dust, the driver, with whom I rode again, pointed out a couple of ultra-prosperous appearing ranches.

"Millionaires row," he chuckled. "They don't pay interest, but they're real wild and western when it comes to frills. Further up the line you'll see somethin' rich, perhaps."

The promised attraction was a young gentleman in a silk shirt and white flannels following a plow down a furrow, and in turn followed by an aristocratic-looking bulldog. "The dawg," explained my companion, "is blue blood Borston. His pedigree's a heap longer than mine and valued at more thousand dollars than I dare tell. His boss there has a daddy worth a million or so, and when he himself ain't farmin' he scoots around in a five-thousand-dollar ortermobile. But mostly he plays rancher an' makes hay an' beds down the hawses an' all the rest of it. It's a queer game. Crazy's what I call it. There's a whole nest of 'em hereabouts."

So we saw the un-idle rich laboring in the fields. In the nature of things the old-timers regard the species with amusement, figuring, now and then, how many cuttings of alfalfa it would take to pay for the Boston bull, and attempting to determine why anyone with an income should elect such an existence, with the wide world at their beck!

This was my introduction to the land of great distances—twenty odd hours of toil over rolling plains of sagebrush, green-floored valleys, timbered hill lands, always—their indelible influence is the first impression of the newcomer whose outlook is a fraction higher than the earth he treads—always with the mountains of the western skyline dominating whatever panorama presented itself. Peaks turbaned with white, tousled foothills, olive green, their limitless forests of pine surging upward from the level of the sage-carpeted, juniper-studded plains. The land of many miles, and of broad beautiful views, is Oregon's hinterland.

Many miles? Aye, truly. My friend Kinkaid drives his auto trucks to Burns, one hundred and fifty miles to the southeast. Southwards to Silver Lake is another truck line, ninety miles long, which daily bears Uncle Sam's mails to the inland communities, a notable example of the pioneering of this age of gasolene. Each morning automobiles start from Bend, the railroad's end, for paltry jumps of from fifty to three hundred miles, and the passengers drink their final cup of coffee with the indifference a Staten Island dweller accords a contemplated trip across the bay.

Viewed sanely, the contempt for distances is appalling—at least as distance is measured elsewhere. An instance, this: Burns is one hundred and fifty miles from Bend; a year or two ago, through the enterprise of citizens of the two communities, a new road was "opened" between—scarcely a road, but a passageway among the sagebrush navigable with motor-driven craft. It is to celebrate! So some forty citizens of Bend, in a fourth that many cars, make the little jaunt to Burns. They leave at dawn: they reach Burns that night: they are dined and wined and the road-marriage of their town is fittingly celebrated; then, another dawn being upon them, they deem it folly to waste time with trivialities like sleep, they crank their cars, and they are back at Bend, and lo! it is but the evening of the second day!

The past, naturally, was worse than the present, so far as the difficulties of great mileage are concerned. The little town of Silver Lake in south-central Oregon, to-day is in the lap of luxury, transportationly speaking, being but a beggarly ninety miles from a railroad. But in the early 'nineties no one but a centipede would have considered frequent calls at Silver Lake with any equanimity. Then all the freight came from The Dalles, two hundred and thirty miles to the north, and the tariff often showed four cents a pound, which must have contributed fearfully to the high cost of living, not to mention the cost of high living, with wet goods weighing what they do. When the roads were good and teamsters moderately sober the round trip occupied forty days, one way light, the return loaded. In all the two hundred and thirty miles Prineville was the only town, and some of the camps were dry.

"Th' town couldn't help but grow," an oldtimer confided to me. "Yer see, it was such a durn fierce trip, after a feller tried it once he never wanted ter repeat—so he stayed with us!"

Burns, over in Harney County, in the southeastern portion of the State, is another example of what the long haul means. During the summer of comparatively good roads the one hundred and fifty miles to the railroad isn't especially serious, but when winter comes the "outside" is far away indeed, and often for two months no freight at all contrives to negotiate the gumbo, snow, and frozen ruts. So, late in the autumn the Burns merchant lays in a winter stock, while the auto trucks hibernate, and the burdens of such forehandedness, no doubt, are shifted to the shoulders of his customers.

Modernity has not swept the field clean, even to-day, and gasolene scarce yet outranks hay as a fuel for the mile makers. The settler and the land looker move on their restless rounds in the white-canvassed prairie schooner of old, and the great freighting outfits, which have borne the tonnage of the West since there was a white man's West, still churn the dust with the hoofs of their straining horses and the wheels of their lurching wagons. You will find them everywhere in the railless lands, the freighters and their teams. They are camped by the water-hole in the desert, or where there is no water, and they must depend upon barrels they bring with them. The little fire of sagebrush roots or greasewood shows the string of wagons—two, three, or four—strung out by the roadside with the horses, from four to twelve, munching hay. They are in the timber, in the country of lakes to the south, on the grassy ranges. In fact, you find the freighters where there is freight to be hauled, and that is—where men are.

But to-day all of Central Oregon is not railroadless land, the trail of steel has pushed to the heart of the country, and what a contrast to the old Shaniko stage days it is to roll smoothly into Bend over ninety-pound rails! Picturesque, too, was the sudden breaking of the long spell when the transportation kings constructed their lines up the Canyon of the Deschutes. Twice, as they built, I walked the length of that hundred-mile-long defile, seeing the dawn of progress in the very breaking, and viewing what is to me the most stupendously appealing river scenery in all the Northwest—this same Canyon of the Deschutes.

CHAPTER V

How the Railroads Came

HEN the West moves, it moves quickly. The map of Oregon had long shown a huge area without the line of a single railroad crossing it. This railless land was Central Oregon, the largest territory in the United States without transportation. Then, almost over night, the map was changed.

Normal men, if they are reasonably good, hope to go to Heaven. Westerners, if they are off the beaten track, hope for a railroad; and if they have one road they hope for another! You who dwell in the little land of suburban trains and commutation tickets have no conception of the vital significance of rail transportation in the Land of Many Miles.

In Central Oregon the railroad question was one of life and death. The country had progressed so far without them, and could go no farther. Farm products not qualified to find a market on their own feet were next to worthless, timber could not be milled, irrigation development was at a standstill. The people had seen so many survey stakes planted and grow and rot and produce nothing, and had been fed upon so many railroad rumors, that there was no faith in them.

"I think it's a railroad!" gasped the telephone operator as she called me to the booth. Her eyes were bright. It was as if a Frenchman had said, "Berlin is taken!"

But I, a skeptic hardened by many shattered hopes, smiled incredulously. Nevertheless, I took the receiver with a tremor born of undying optimism—the optimism of the railless land.

"It's long distance," whispered the operator, torn between a sense of duty and a desire to eavesdrop.

"Hello!"

The only answer was a grinding buzz; a mile or two of Shaniko line was down—it usually was.

Then Prineville cut in and The Dalles said something cross and a faint inquiry came from Portland, far away. Yes, I was waiting.

Crooked River Canyon, now spanned by a railroad bridge

In the Deschutes Canyon. "The river winds sinuously, seeking first one, and then another, point of the compass"
Copyright 1911 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.

"Hello, Putnam?" The speaker was the managing editor of a Portland newspaper. "Gangs have broken loose in the Deschutes Canyon," said he. "One of 'em is Harriman, we know, but the others are playing dark. Think it's Hill starting for California. You go—" then the buzz became too bad.

Finally The Dalles repeated the instructions. I was to go down the Canyon of the Deschutes and find out all about it. The head and nearest end of the Canyon was fifty miles away, and the Canyon itself was one hundred miles long. Glory be! But it was a railroad, and before I started the town was in the first throes of apoplectic celebration.

I went to Shaniko by auto, and thence by train to Grass Valley, midway to the Columbia. From Grass Valley a team took me westward to the rim of the Canyon of the Deschutes. There were fresh survey stakes and a gang of engineers working with their instruments on a hillside. Very obliging, were those engineers; they would tell me anything; they were building a railroad; it was headed for Mexico City and they themselves were the owners! Below was a new-made camp, where Austrians labored on a right of way that had come to life almost over night. This was a Harriman camp; orders were, apparently, to get a strangle hold on the best line up the narrow Canyon—to crowd the other fellows out. But the mystery surrounding those "other fellows" clung close. From water boy to transit man they knew nothing, except that they were working for a famous contracting firm and that they emphatically were not in the employ of Hill interests.

This, which was no news at all, I 'phoned to Portland, and then set about visiting the suddenly awakened Canyon.

It is the only entrance from the north to the plateaus of Central Oregon, a deep gorge cut by the river through the heart of the hills. So one fine morning in July, 1909, after a generation of apathy, suddenly the two great systems, whose tracks follow opposite banks of the Columbia, threw their forces into the field, attempting to secure control of this strategic gateway. Altogether, it was a very picturesque duel; the quick move was characteristic of the country, and the very unexpectedness of it somehow was half-expected. And in the end, after all the strategy and bluff and blocking tactics with shovels and with law briefs, the duel was a draw, and to-day each railroad follows the waters of the Deschutes.

During my observation of this picturesque battle of the Canyon, I walked its length twice, and saw amusing incidents in plenty.

At one point the Hill forces established a camp reached only by a trail winding down from above, its only access through a ranch. Forthwith the Harriman people bought that ranch, and "No trespassing" signs, backed by armed sons of Italy, cut off the communications of the enemy below. At a vantage point close to the water both surveys followed the same hillside, which offered the only practical passageway. One set of grade stakes overlapped the other, a few feet higher up. The Italian army, working furiously all one Sabbath morning, "dug themselves in" on the grade their engineers had established in most approved military style. But while they worked the Austrians came—these literally were the nationalities engaged in this "Battle of the Hillsides," unrecorded by history!—and hewed a grade a few feet above the first, the meanwhile demolishing it. That angered Italy, whose forces executed a flank movement and started digging still another grade above the hostiles, inadvertently dislodging bowlders which rolled down upon the rival workers below. Then a fresh flanking movement, and more bowlders and nearly a riot! And so it went, until the top was reached, and there being no more hillside to maneuver upon, and no inclination to start over again, the two groups called quits and spent the balance of the day playing seven-up, leaving settlement of their burlesque to courts of law. And there were times when "coyote holes"—which are tunnels of dynamite—exploding on one side of the river, somehow sent shattered rock and pebbles in a dangerous deluge upon the tents across the stream.

The struggle for transportation supremacy was bitter enough, and comic, too, in spots. But the stage set for its acting was superb beyond compare.

Not without reason, the defile of the Deschutes has been called the "Grand Canyon of the Northwest." For a full one hundred miles the river races at the bottom of a steep-walled canyon, its sides here and there pinching in to the water's very edge, and often enough with sheer cliffs towering mightily, their bases lapped by the white foam of rapids. Great rounded hills, green in spring, brown in summer, and white under the snows of winter, climb into the sky a thousand feet and more on either hand. Their sides are ribbed with countless cattle trails, like the even ripples of the wind and tide on a sandy beach. Strange contorted rock formations thrust forth from the lofty slopes, and occasional clutters of talus slides spill down into the water. Rich hues of red and brown warm the somber walls, where prehistoric fires burned the clay or rock, or minerals painted it. White-watered, crystal springs are born miraculously in the midst of apparent drought, offering arctic cold nectar the year around. The river winds sinuously, doubling back upon itself interminably, seeking first one, and then another, point of the compass, a veritable despair for railroad builders whose companion word for "results" must be "economy." Despite the stifling oppressiveness of that canyon bake-oven in July, with breezes few and far between and rattlesnakes omnipresent, the ever-changing grandeur was enough to repay for near-sunstroke and foot weariness.

However, enjoyment of the scenery was not my mission. I was supposed to discover, authentically, who was backing that other road—where the millions were coming from. If it was Hill, it meant much to Oregon, for as yet the "Empire Builder" had never truly invaded the state, and if now he planned a great new line to California the railroad map of the West would indeed be disrupted. But at the end of ten days I knew no more than on the first.

At the farmhouse where they took me in to dinner mine host was highly elated, for the survey crossed the corner of his southern "forty" and he saw visions of a fat right-of-way payment and of a railway station. Later—his optimism was characteristic—surely a city would spring up, with corner lots priced fabulously. "Then," said he to Mandy, "we'll go to Yerrup." It was, of course, long before Yerrup became a shambles.

The old man was reminding me of the growth of Spokane—that universal example of the West!—which expanded from nothing to more than one hundred thousand in thirty years, when Mandy interrupted the universal pastime of counting your lots before they are sold by producing a soiled printed form.

Along the Canyon of the Deschutes
Copyright 1911 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland. Ore.

"Can you tell me if this has any value now?" she asked.

It was a voucher of the Great Northern Railroad.

"Where did you get it?"

She narrated how a crew had laid out the preliminary survey, now followed by the mysterious workers, coming through there secretly the previous autumn.

"They told us they was surveyin' water power," said she. "The papers never said nothing about it, and neither did we. They bought buttermilk here, an' when the Ol' Man cashed in the slips he forgot this one. Wonder if it's too late to get it paid?"

I told her it wasn't. In fact, I bought it myself, paying face value. It was $1.40.

Then I made tracks for the 'phone, eighteen miles away. Here, at last, was positive evidence that the Great Northern, the Hill system, was the power behind the new line. Six months ago while Oregon slept, they had made the secret survey upon which they were now constructing. A very pretty scoop, as western newspapering goes! I offered my driver an extra dollar for haste's sake.

The managing editor listened while I outlined my beat over the wire. His silence seemed the least bit sad.

"Dandy story," said he. "If we'd had it yesterday it would have been fine. But—" There was no need for him to go further; I knew the worst.

An afternoon paper had wrecked my yarn. The emissary of the Hills, who had traveled secretly and under an assumed name all through the Interior determining whether or not the new line should be undertaken, had that morning told his story. The Hills were in the open as the backers of the Oregon Trunk. By a matter of hours a precious scoop was ancient history!

That man built much of the Panama Canal. He is one of the world's best-known construction engineers and railroaders. But I shall never forgive his tell-tale interview—it was premature. And some day I shall present for payment that voucher for $1.40, mentioning also the dollar I gave the driver, to John F. Stevens.

CHAPTER VI

The Home Makers

HE horses are ill mated, the wagon decrepit. Baling wire sustains the harness and the patched canvas of the wagon top hints of long service.

"How far to Millican's?" says the driver.

He is a young man; at least, his eyes are young. His "woman" is with him and their three kiddies, the tiniest asleep in her mother's lap, with the dust caked about her wet baby chin. The man wears overalls, the woman calico that was gaudy once before the sun bleached it colorless, and the children nameless garments of uncertain ancestry. The wife seems very tired—as weary as the weary horses. Behind them is piled their household: bedding, a tin stove, chairs, a cream separator, a baby's go-cart, kitchen utensils, a plow and barbed wire, some carpet; beneath the wagon body swings a pail and lantern, and water barrel and axe are lashed at one side.

We direct them to Millican's.

"Homesteading?" we inquire.

"Not exactly. That is, we're just lookin'."

There are hundreds like these all over the West, "just lookin'," with their tired wives, their babies, their poverty, and their vague hopefulness. They chase rainbows from Bisbee to Prince Rupert. Some of them settle, some of them succeed. But most of them are discontented wherever Fortune places them, and forever move forward toward some new-rumored El Dorado just over the hill.

There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain's crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don't know how to rest.

That, of course, is rather picturesque, and, taken all in all, your average wanderer of the wagon road merits little heroics. His aspirations are apt to be earthy, and too often he seeks nothing loftier than a soft snap. In the final analysis some of our western gypsies desire nothing more ardently than a rest.

The wanderer is the shiftless land seeker, and is to be distinguished from the sincere home seeker who fares forth into strange lands with his family and his penates, and who finds vacant government land and proceeds to "take it up." The best of all the free acres went years ago, along with the free timber and the other compensations for pioneering, but here and there remote areas worth having still remain. About the last of these, and by all odds the greatest, was in Central Oregon when the railroads opened the doors of immigration a few years ago.

Before the railroads came I went from Bend southeasterly through what is now well called the "homestead country," and in all the one hundred and fifty miles traversed we saw three human habitations: the stockman's, George Millican, the horse breeder, Johnny Schmeer, and the sheepman's, Bill Brown. The rest of it was sagebrush and jack rabbits, with a band of "fuzz-tails" stampeding at the sight of us and a few cattle nipping the bunch grass. My companions were a locator and a man who took up one of the first "claims" in all that country, at Hampton Valley, one hundred and thirty miles from a railroad.

To-day there are schools out there, homes, fences, and plowed fields. Some of it is very good land, and the modern pioneers are prospering. Some of it is not so good, and there have been failures and disappointments as in all the homestead districts of all the West, past and present. For there is truth in the old saying that for the most part the first crop of homesteaders fails, and the success of the late comers is built upon the broken hopes of the pioneers. However that may be, the battle against the odds set up by a none too bountiful nature is often enough pitiful, and occasionally heroic.

Picture an unbroken plain of sagebrush. Low hills, a mile distant, are fringed with olive-green juniper trees; all the rest is gray, except the ever blue sky which must answer for the eternal hope in the hearts of the home makers—God smiles there. In the midst of the drab waste is a speck of white, a tent. A water barrel beside it tells the story of the long road to the nearest well—no road, but a trail, for this is well off the beaten path and such luxuries as surveyed highways are yet to come. The tent is the very outpost of settlement, a mute testimonial of the insistent desire to possess land of one's very own.

Irrigation—"First, parched lands of sage; then the flow"
Series Copyright 1909 by Asahel Curtis

Irrigation—"Next, water in a master ditch and countless man-made rivulets between the furrows"

Our car stops to inquire the way, and a woman appears. Yes, it is forty miles to Brookings' halfway house, as we had guessed.

"And to Bend?" We ask what we already know, perhaps because the woman—a girlish woman—so evidently would prolong the interruption to her solitude.

"About one hundred and twenty—a long way!" She smiles, adding, simply, "John's there."

Small wonder she clutches at us! John has been gone a fortnight, and for two days she has not even seen the Swansons, her "neighbors" over the hill, three miles away. Like a ship in the night, we all but passed her—passed with never a greeting for which her heart hungered, never a word from the "outside" to break the hard monotony. She is utterly alone, except for the rabbits and the smiling sky. Her husband is wage earning. And she sticks by their three hundred and twenty acres and does what she can with a mattock and a grubbing hoe. They have a well started, and some fence posts in the ground. Some day, she says, they will make a home of it.

"We always dreamed of having a home," she explains a bit dreamily. "But it never seemed to come any closer on John's wages. So when we read of getting this land for nothing it seemed best to make the try. But of course it isn't 'free' at all—we've discovered that. And oh! it costs so much!"

We commiserate. We would help, and vaguely seek some means.

Help? Yes, gladly she will accept it, says the little woman—but not for herself. "Good gracious, why should I need it?" Nor have we the heart to offer reasons. But if we have a mind to be helpful, she continues, there is a case over in eighteen-eleven—she names the section and township—where charity could afford a smile. She tells us, then, of a half-sick woman with three infants, left on the homestead while the husband goes to town. There, instead of work, he gets drink, and fails to reappear with provisions. But the woman will not give up the scrap of land she has set her heart on, and doggedly remains. When the neighbors find her, she and the children have existed for five days solely on boiled wheat. "And we needed it so for seeding," is her lament.

"It was a very typical stagecoach"

In the homestead country

Our hostess of the desert stands by the ruts, waving to us through the dust of our wake, the embodiment of the spirit of pioneering, which burns to-day as brightly as ever in the past, could we but search it out and recognize it.

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.