Even among those who have devoted their lives to the study of
sociological problems, there is much difference of opinion as to the
quantitative and qualitative influence of certain social conditions in
producing the generally admitted bad or adverse phases of human
society.
At one time we read that poverty degrades men morally, and we peruse
carefully prepared and apparently veracious tables showing that in the
older countries there is an unfailing correspondence between criminal
statistics and the price of bread; the per cent of offenses against
persons and property increasing with the cost of the necessaries of
life and diminishing with the amount of human exertion required to
obtain them. Such is the generally received opinion of the common
people, and we hear from the political platform and see in the
publications of reform parties the assertion that it is useless to
preach morals to those whose minds are mainly occupied in devising
means to keep the wolf from the door.
Those of our citizens who have given special attention to the
debauching effects of the drink habit, call upon all to come to the
rescue of American homes and American institutions, by banishing the
American saloon, to which comes the response that poverty is the
principal cause of intemperance and its incidents, and that the first
duty of patriots is to remove poverty.
Equally certain and circumstantial, on the other hand, are those who
affirm that there is no necessary connection between poverty and
criminality, and that, as a general rule, debauchery and consequent
decadence of moral faculty go hand in hand with material prosperity;
and if mixed coincidence can establish casual connection, they are
not at fault, for long before Goldsmith wrote of the time "When wealth
accumulates and men decay," keen eyed observers had connected a
general laxity of morals with the abundance and diffusion of wealth.
The failure of intertropical countries to furnish high grade men of
morals and intellect, Doctor Draper attributes, not more to the
enervating influence of heat, than to the ease with which human beings
supply themselves with the necessaries of life. Coming down to the
present period, it is common knowledge--the expanding profligacy and
criminality of the mining camps where men could obtain extravagant
wages in gold for services which in other pursuits would yield them a
scanty living.
Probably from such lump comparisons and crude observations, under
complex conditions, have arisen two schools of social economists, one
whose principal and primary aim is to abolish poverty as the chief
obstacle in the way of human progress, and the other whose purpose is
not definitely stated, but which conservatively clings to the _laissez
faire_ doctrine of letting every man's condition depend upon his
individual exertion; and as so far, in the world's history, poverty
has been the condition of the great mass of mankind, in spite of
individual exertion, the anti-poverty school of necessity, must resort
to collective or state control of the industries of men, and thus
relieve them from want and the fear of want, which are thought to be
so depressing upon their energies.
Just how or to what extent the state is to interfere with the
individual's management of himself, or to what extent or in what
manner he shall be relieved when he has failed to provide for his own
wants and the wants of those depending upon him, are at present
outside of any satisfactorily practical programme, and hence
collectivism may be held to include all socialistic schemes from
Bellamy up or down.
In fact, collectivism is entered upon the moment the state is
organized, for in the rudest criminal code there is a manifest attempt
to relieve the individual from the otherwise caution and care
necessary to defend his person and property; and in truth, as
government has advanced, so has collectivism advanced, until now in
the United States of America the commonwealth is giving children
primary education, supporting and caring for the deaf, blind, idiotic,
insane, and criminal classes, beside stimulating certain industries
with bounties upon production or relieving them from the disastrous
effects of free competition, by levying taxes upon competing products.
It does much more. Commerce and agriculture have been relieved of
their old time dread of the elements, for government now keeps watch
and ward over the wind and waves, and gives timely notice of
approaching disaster by land and sea. In the endeavor to pass benefits
around, hatcheries for fish, experiment stations, laboratories, and
various commissions have been organized and conducted at public
expense; likewise the mails are carried, the public lands distributed
to actual settlers or given to railroad companies, patents issued to
inventors, bounties paid for the destruction of wild animals, noxious
weeds exterminated, public officers appointed to examine food
products, to conduct experiments upon flocks and herds, and to destroy
those infected with contagious diseases.
All this and much more are the results of collectivism, and there
seems to be a constant tendency, as well as a constant demand, for
more in the same direction. Individualism is alarmed and socialism
hopeful; the former, at the encroachments upon personal liberty and
the discouragement of personal exertion, and the latter, from the
prospect of a complete disappearance of the competitive principle from
social life.
Here are two violent antagonisms, while there is no line of
demarcation between them, as well defined as the most tortuous
isothermal crossing the American continent. There is no scientific
boundary of government. As between the two disputants it is a blind
push and pull, in which neither party is satisfied with the result.
There are gradations upon either side, and long ago Herbert Spencer
became alarmed at the coming slavery, and that good man Gerritt Smith
thought government should have nothing to do with the education of
children; that it is altogether a private function and can not be
usurped by the state without serious injury to those most nearly
interested.
While, however, doctrinaires have been groping for the scientific
boundary, government has gone forward experimentally, with no chart
but experience, sometimes right and sometimes wrong, no doubt, in its
endeavors to follow the line of least resistance and do that which
seemed likely to promote the general welfare.
Granting the evident natural law that development is the result of
activity of faculty, and, as a consequence, that individual
improvement must come from individual exertion, it may be safe to say
that the scope of government should be such as to give or permit the
greatest normal and harmonious activity to the units of population, in
order to bring about the greatest amount of aggregate excellence and
happiness; and still it appears to be a matter of experience and
experiment, in which science and altruism play but a subordinate part.
Nevertheless, there should be investigation of governmental
experiments, and the great and ever recurring question is, What do
these show?
Has government help promoted individual competence, and has it
promoted the general welfare? In answering this question it will not
do to look at it as a whole; each experiment must be taken by itself,
and there must be an elimination, so far as may be, of complicating
and conflicting elements. Of course there will be no attempt in this
paper to do more than report upon a single phase of government help,
and one, too, which to my knowledge has never been utilized for
throwing light upon the great economic question. I refer to the
settlement of Oregon and Washington under government auspices. It
would seem as though there never existed more favorable conditions for
a successful experiment in planting a model colony than were found
here upon this Northwest coast. Certainly nature was lavish and the
government munificent, and if these are chiefly instrumental in
putting a community on its feet to stay, here should be found the
living proof. Let us see; and first as to the country.
The Cascade range of mountains, a high ridge bearing north and south,
nearly parallel to the eastern shore of the Pacific Ocean and about
one hundred miles therefrom, divides the states of Oregon and
Washington into two unequal parts, popularly known as Eastern and
Western Oregon and Washington. Bordering the coast of both states is
another ridge, much lower, and between these two mountain ridges, are
cross mountains connecting them, and forming valleys with independent
river systems. These western valleys are but little above the sea
level, have moist, equable climates, abundant timber, and rich soils;
while the country east of the Cascades is an elevated table-land,
sparsely wooded, quite arid, is subject to greater extremes of heat
and cold and possessed of a strongly alkaline soil.
It is to the western valleys I wish to refer in this connection, as in
these the donation land law chiefly operated until its expiration in
the year 1855. Under that law every adult male citizen and his wife,
immigrating to this coast before the year 1851, were entitled to six
hundred and forty acres of land selected by the donees in such shape
as they chose, and those coming after that time, were entitled to
three hundred and twenty acres taken by legal subdivisions. Never
before or since have such magnificent inducements been offered to
settlers, and by the close of the year 1855 nearly all of the good
lands in the Willamette, Umpqua, and Rogue River valleys were occupied
by the donees who came from every State in the Union, but chiefly from
the Mississippi Valley.
Saying that these lands were taken by families, in section and
half-section tracts, gives but a faint idea of what was acquired.
Doctor Johnson's description of the happy valley in Rasselas would be
rather too poetical to adopt for this country, as this is too far
north for people to depend upon the spontaneous productions of the
earth, but in many respects there is much similarity. The great
Doctor's fancy had not been expanded and enlightened by the vast
accomplishments of modern science and invention, whereby the forces of
nature have been utilized, and, as a consequence, his happy valley was
constructed more to gratify an indolent and dreamy æstheticism than to
promote economic industry.
In these western valleys, however, is everything that should stimulate
men to the use of all their faculties, if steady and sure returns for
exertion are better than unearned gratification of human wants and
desires. Let the reader picture to himself an evergreen valley one
hundred and fifty miles long and forty miles wide, a navigable river
running the whole length, through its middle, with numerous branches
on each side, the smaller rising in the foothills, the larger emerging
from the forest covered mountains, the rich agricultural surface of
the valley interspersed with timber and prairie in profitable
proportions, and rising in gentle hills, among which are innumerable
springs of pure, soft water, or subsiding into lowlands, here and
there dotted by buttes, and he has the Willamette Valley, said by Saxe
of Vermont to be the best poor man's country on the globe. This
picture does not represent all its advantages by any means.
Probably no farming country known has water power so abundant and
diffused as here. Niagara is unrivaled for power, but the principal
question there is one of distribution. Here the problem of
distribution is reduced to small proportions, for no village or city
is far away from water power.
The Cascade Mountains, through their whole extent, are resonant with
the clamorings of unused force, and likely, in their dark fir forests
will first be realized Edison's dreams of the application of electric
power,--trees felled, cut into saw logs and conveyed to the mill, with
little of man's help except intelligent superintendence.
To be sure the first settlers of Oregon had no such anticipations as
these, but they were not slow to perceive the advantages everywhere
around them; sawmills were erected in advance of the great bulk of the
immigration, so that immigrants were not required to go through the
experience of the first settlers of Ohio and Indiana, housing one or
two generations in log cabins.
No description of soil or surface or scenery can give an adequate
presentation of this country, as upon the climate depends nearly
everything which makes it, pre-eminently, a never failing supplier of
man's wants. In this latitude, countries east of the Rocky Mountains
have long cold winters and short hot summers, while west of the
Cascades no such extremes are ever known.
The Kuro-shiwo of Japan, a broad, deep, and warm current of ocean
water flows along our western shore, tempering the mountain air and
covering the valleys with perpetual verdure. At this writing, the
twenty-fifth of January, the fields have been once whitened with
snow, cattle are pasturing upon unfrosted grass, and wild daisies are
in bloom. Occasionally a cold wave from the north pushes seaward the
tropical warmth, when for a few days the inhabitants get a mitigated
sample of the arctic regions, but such incursions are few and far
between,--say once in ten years, and not to be compared with the
winter climate of Idaho, Montana, or the Eastern States. So seldom and
short are the periods, when the ground is frozen, that agriculture is
continuous through the whole year. In every winter month plowing is
done and grain sown.
In what country, between the parallels forty-two and forty-nine north
latitude, would cattle live through the winter upon grass, which was
the dependence of those who crossed the great plains to this coast in
the days of the pioneer? Arriving in these western valleys during the
months of September and October, their teams worn and impoverished,
were turned out upon the prairies and by midwinter were fat enough for
beef.
Such was the country and the climate of the west coast to which the
immigrants came, a land flowing with milk (no honey), beautiful and
grand beyond description, rich beyond expectation, healthful beyond
comparison; its streams abounding with fish, and its mountains with
game; a country where there has been no failure of crops, and where
blizzards, hurricanes, and cyclones are unknown.
Now a few words as to the character of the people who settled it, and
in this examination I shall try to steer clear of the poetry and
romance which are beginning to dehumanize them. It is not necessary
for the purpose of this paper to show that the pioneers were more
moral or more intelligent than those they left in the enjoyment of the
peace and comforts of well regulated society, but it is important to
know that they were a fair average in all respects as human beings,
and as this question can not be determined by a personal examination,
we must resort to the environment they voluntarily chose, or, in other
words, to the objects and conditions which impelled them to the
undertaking. The indolent and cowardly are not attracted by dangers,
and hence we infer that volunteers make better soldiers than
conscripts, and this inference is borne out by experience. Enterprises
of great danger, forlorn hopes, are not chosen by those who love ease
and quiet pleasure, but by the courageous and venturesome; those who
take pleasure in overcoming resistance, surmounting obstacles, and
braving dangers. The former are inclined to remain upon the old
homestead, under the protection of law and the restraining influence
of conservative public opinion; the latter push for the frontier, with
apparent relish for the kind of life found only on the fretful edge of
civilization. Some have assumed, therefore, that the borders are
chiefly peopled by the reckless and immoral, those who would not be
subject to proper restraint in the older communities; such an
assumption, however, is wide of the mark. Under our flag there are no
penal colonies; people go where they choose to go, and the currents of
population are determined by self-selection. Places of trial and
danger are taken by those who are not dismayed by such incidents, and
unless we are willing to admit that there is a necessary connection
between courage and criminality--that the enterprising and resolute
are as a consequence tinctured with immoral tendencies--we shall
believe what is more reasonable and in full accord with our
experience, that the manly virtues are quite compatible with the moral
attributes. I lived on the frontier, the Platte Purchase in Missouri,
right among the people who contributed in men and money to the
invasion of Kansas a few years afterwards, and I must say that I
never lived in a more hospitable and law-abiding community. The
forceful faculties were more prominent than in New England, but for
personal honor, honesty, and brotherly feeling it would compare
favorably with any portion of the United States. I had left that
country when the Kansas troubles began, and was somewhat puzzled to
reconcile the doings of the Border Ruffians with the character of the
people as I knew them, but when I considered that a large majority of
them were from the South, and, being born to the institution of
slavery, were inheritors of all that such a state of society implies,
I ceased to wonder.
Notwithstanding the great advance in biological science, the human
being is very much of an enigma, and, however well disposed he may be
from natural endowment, we can not guess what he may do until his
previous environment has been examined. Suppose John Brown had been
born and raised in the South, and had read his Bible through Southern
spectacles, and had heard the Word expounded by devout defenders of
the patriarchal institution, would he not have been found praying and
fighting with Stonewall Jackson when the time came for war?
A large proportion of the pioneers were from Missouri, and at the time
of the adoption of our constitution, which submitted the question of
slavery to a popular vote, much solicitude was felt by anti-slavery
men as to the result. Argument and inquiry were on the wing, and there
was eminent opportunity, not only to learn the opinions and wishes of
men but how those opinions and wishes came to be formed. Some of the
ablest and best advocates of a free state were from the South and some
of those who voted to fasten the relic of barbarism upon this free
soil were from the North. One solid, earnest, but uneducated free
state man, born and raised in Kentucky, and a resident of Missouri
for several years just before coming to the Oregon Territory, was
asked as to the evolution of his opinion and answered "that when
living in his native State, a doubt as to the rightfulness of slavery
had never crossed his mind; that he regarded abolitionists the same as
horse thieves, and would have meted out to them the same punishment;
that when he got to northern Missouri, where there were but few
slaves, he was struck with the difference he felt and saw, as respects
social conditions; people were more on an equality; that conservative
deference paid to slaveholders was conspicuous by its absence, and
when he got to Oregon, the spirit of abolitionism was in the air." He
thought that if the good people of Kentucky could experience what he
had they would clear slavery from that state in a year. I was
intimately acquainted with that man for thirty years, and I am
confident that I never saw one more honest and truthful, or one more
ready to assist in reforms or more willing to be informed. Ignorance
was his sin, as it was of the majority of those subject to the malign
influence of slavery, and yet in his native State he was a possible
border ruffian. What an honest, earnest man believes to be right he
will defend, and for his convictions there is always a higher law to
which he will appeal, notwithstanding the limitations of statutes and
constitutions.
Though a Webster might lose himself in adoration of the Federal Union
and an Everett offer up his mother a living sacrifice to preserve it,
it is to the credit of human nature that human rights, human
interests, human convictions and affections stand nearer and dearer to
the people than any mere machinery of human government. The
abolitionists believed the Constitution of the United States was a
covenant with Death and a league with Hell, and they protested with
all their soul and strength; to those Southerners reared to believe in
the divinity of slavery, the Constitution was a worthless rag, for it
did not protect them in their supposed rights. To the men of earnest
convictions on both sides we owe our present disenthrallment.
The foregoing apparent digression has been indulged for the reason
that the Oregon people were severely criticised and denounced in
connection with our Indian wars, spoilation claims, and the votes cast
in favor of slavery upon the adoption of our free constitution; and
also for the reason that the aspect of character has a sociological
bearing.
Advanced evolutionists include with their scientific shibboleth, "the
survival of the fittest," an ethical element, when applied to
civilized society. The early settlements here were singularly free
from transgressors. There was no criminal code and no courts of law up
to the time of the provisional government. Every man was a law unto
himself, and it is said there was no offense against person or
property of sufficient importance to require them. These were halcyon
days, often referred to by old Oregonians, who say that crime and
criminals were unknown until society was put under the tantalizing
reign of law. I have heard not a few, in referring to the good old
times, express the opinion that mankind are governed too much by
statute and thereby released, in a great degree, from moral restraint.
There is occasionally an old settler so impressed with pioneer
equality, fraternity, and purity, that he lays all subsequent social
disturbance to the provoking interference of legal machinery with
natural rights, and he longs "for a lodge in some vast wilderness"
where he can end his days in peace, away from penalties and penal
institutions and the temptations which civil government offers to the
predatory instincts of men.
Such logical metonomy is not mentioned here except to show that the
pioneers were lovers of peace and good order, and fully subject to
enlightened moral restraint. As before mentioned, they were peculiar
in one respect, that is, in the possession of a large share of the
executive or heroic qualities.
The Great American Desert, with its sand stretches, waterless wastes,
unbridged rivers, Rocky Mountains, and predatory savages, loomed up
deterrently to the spiritless. A four to six months' journey in
wagons, exposed to all the vicissitudes of travel and climate and the
forays of more dreadful foes, ever on the alert to dispossess
travelers of their only means of conveyance, was not to be considered
a pleasure trip.
No doubt that to a certain but undefinable extent and in numerous
ways, the circumstances and incidents to be expected on the overland
journey were selective, and yet the Oregon Pioneer, as pictured by his
eulogists, is rather a fanciful personage. Not that the incidents from
which the picture is drawn are to any unusual degree false, but that
there is too much of the commonplace left out, and so the typical
pioneer, like the typical Yankee, is a caricature. The pioneers, as a
body, were only a little different from those who were too
affectionate or diffident to start, and among them were all sorts of
people; but looking only to those who endured extraordinary
privations, to those who developed an uncommon degree of strength,
courage, and virtue, there have grown up the poetry and romance of the
pioneers, and to none is this more evident than the pioneers
themselves. At one of their annual gatherings, when an eloquent
speaker was narrating the trying incidents of the overland journey,
one of the earlier immigrants inquisitively remarked "I wonder if I
ever crossed the plains?" I was querying the same; still we must not
neglect to state that the speaker was dealing in facts. He was leaving
out so much that those who had passed the ordeal wondered if they had
ever been there. Indeed, the speakers and writers who have been called
to the task of perpetuating pioneer history have had the usual
inducements to false coloring, which has been the curse of all history
in all times.
Striking incidents, battles, sieges, marches, insurrections,
revolutions, and the leading actors in them, of such is the warp and
woof of history, until man is understood to be a mere fighting animal,
although the greater part of his life has been spent in peaceful
avocations and the greater exertion of his force and faculties has
been devoted to constructive industry.
Out of such partiality has inevitably grown the great man theory of
human progression. The student of history passes along from point to
point in the bloody trail of the historian, stopping at such
characters as Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, etc., until
these great destroyers are looked upon as the prime factors of the
evolutionary state. Of course, these and such as these must not be
ignored or left out, for history would cease to be history without
them, but it is equally important to know that man, judged only by
them, ceases to be man. Of late an improved philosophy of history
assigns them their proper place and significance as an index of
evolution, and gives us the hopeful sign that notwithstanding the
occasional irruption of man's destructive faculties, his progress is
principally due to the subordination of the militant spirit. And now,
while the principal part of our early history, territorial and state,
is devoted to our really insignificant Indian wars and the principal
characters on both sides, it is well enough to think that the greater
constructive works of peace have been going forward with hardly a
halt, and the more sober tints are yet to be given the picture of
early Oregon times.
With such coloring as we now have of pioneer life and the passage of
the great plains, posterity will wonder, as did the pioneer before
quoted, if the pioneers ever did cross, and also what kind of people
they must have been to undertake, with such slender means, so perilous
a journey. Samuel R. Thurston, Oregon's first delegate under the
Territorial Government, advertised his constituents as "fellows who
could whip their weight in wildcats," very good electioneering taffy,
no doubt, but rather strong and really degrading language to apply to
the earnest men and women who so patiently toiled to the Northwest
coast.
Of a higher type and tone was the poetical exaggeration "only the
brave started, only the strong got through." The facts are different.
Some arrant cowards and many more physically weak persons, by some
sufficient means, found their way here. The emigrant train was not a
forlorn hope; no such test was made for membership. Neither was it a
test of patriotism; albeit every citizen is a quixotic propagator of
his republican faith. Various were the inducements in the minds of
those who left the older states for the Pacific Slope. Many, like
ex-Senator Nesmith, did not really know, as they had no well defined
purpose, but might answer in his language, and with probable truth,
that they were "impelled by a vague spirit of adventure." Restless
spirits are always ready for any move, promising unusual scope for the
exercise of their faculties. Many were along to enjoy the exhilaration
of travel, in a new, strange, and truly wonderful country. Many, long
wasted by the miasmatic fevers of the overrich and productive
Mississippi Valley, sought immunity in the untainted mountain air of
the Far West. A few of the Daniel Boone stripe were too much crowded
where inhabitants exceeded one to the square mile, and took one more
move with the hope that the hum drum of civilization would never
overtake them. A few of a poetical turn of mind, tired of the
monotony of the greater East, sought fresh inspiration and a home upon
the picturesque shores of the sunset seas.
But while all of the foregoing and many other inducements might have
been present in varying degree, the great incentive to immigration was
free land. Not only land for the landless, but land for all, and in
unstinted quantity. The scenes at Oklahoma divest the emigration to
Oregon of all mystery, and while there was probably small difference
in kind or degree of virtue between those who came and those who
remained, of one fact pioneers are cognizant, namely, that the
incidents and trials of the overland journey were a wonderful
developer and equalizer. The fictitious gloss of so-called society was
abraded, and the shams of character in which human beings had invested
themselves, like weakly oxen, were left on the road. Everywhere this
is observable, and it is often remarked that the true pioneer is never
afterward subject to an undue self-inflation. It seems as though a few
months' practice of sincere brotherhood is fatal to an offensive
amount of arrogance and egotism.
Now let us inquire as to the use and the tenacity of hold the pioneers
had for their unbought possessions. There was no sign of indolence on
their part upon arriving. The same pushing qualities which enabled
them to surmount all difficulties in getting here were not wanting
when homes were to be made and farms to be cultivated. To all
appearances the older community, with an infusion of vigor born of
success and adventure, had been transplanted upon virgin soil. Of
necessity population was sparse. In large districts, principally
settled by immigrants before 1851, there was but one family to the
square mile, and in other portions were those arriving afterwards and
settling two to the square mile. In this way a few people cover, or
rather appropriate, a large country, and their improvements, though
considerable, appear very meager. Every thing, however, was at hand;
rail timber ten cuts to the tree; cedar for shingles and shakes; poles
straight enough for rafters without hewing, and fir trees, seemingly
grown for the special purpose of house frames. The soil was favorable.
Though producing a good growth of the most nutritious native grass, it
was easily plowed, two good horses being sufficient to turn over two
acres of sod in a day, and, unlike the sward in other countries, was
mellow from the first harrowing. Many a family coming as late as
October plowed and fenced forty acres and raised from twelve hundred
to sixteen hundred bushels of wheat the next harvest, working their
cattle that hauled them across the plains and feeding them nothing but
the bunch grass upon which they pastured through the winter months.
After the discovery of gold in California, the market for all farm
products was at almost every man's door and at marvelous prices.
Butter from fifty cents to a dollar a pound; bacon from twenty-five to
fifty cents a pound; chickens from $5 to $10 per dozen; eggs from
twenty-five to fifty cents per dozen; sheep from $5 to $12 per head;
cows, $50; horses, $200; oxen from $100 to $200 per yoke; wheat from
$1 to $7 per bushel, and labor from $2 to $5 per day. Of course, such
prices gradually wore down, but the opportunity for large profits in
farming and stock raising continued for a quarter of a century. Our
public disbursements, however, were not on the same scale. Up to the
year 1859 Uncle Sam paid a good share of the governmental expenses,
and at that time our state government was organized under a
constitution that has often been called parsimonious.
The sixteenth and thirty-sixth sections of each township, or lands in
lieu thereof, were devoted by Congress to common schools; land was
also given to found a state university and agricultural college, and
five hundred thousand acres along with five per cent of the sales of
public lands were given to an internal improvement fund to be used by
the state. Add to this the swamp lands, amounting to several hundred
thousand acres of the most valuable, all given without cost, and one
might well ask, "in the name of common sense what more should a
paternal government do for a people?" And yet it has done more. Coast
defenses and lighthouses have been built, the rivers dredged, harbors
improved, something near a million dollars appropriated to cut a canal
around the cascade falls, and military roads and posts established to
protect our inhabitants from the aborigines.
In common with all the other inhabitants of the United States, we have
been suffering for the last few years from an aggravating increase of
our great American industry, politics, but until the discovery was
made, that people can grow rich by taxing themselves, the people of
Oregon were contented with small levies for public purposes. Indeed,
we have done little in the way of public improvements to create
expense. With the exception of county roads, which are mainly ungraded
dirt ways, and the bridging of streams, nothing of importance has been
attempted.
In view of all the foregoing comes the sharp contrast of the present
condition of the pioneers and their immediate descendants. In the
absence of any reliable census reports, I have been obliged to rely
upon regional inspection, taking a township here and there and tracing
up the career of the first white inhabitants. For this purpose I have
selected, for an average, one hundred square miles on the east side of
the Willamette Valley, in Marion County, which contains the state
capital, and an examination shows that sixty-six per cent of the
donation claims have passed out of the possession of the donees and
their descendants, another fifteen per cent are mortgaged for all
they are worth, and for practical purposes may be considered as lost
to them. Not more than fifteen per cent of the whole have been
ordinarily successful in holding and improving a part of their
possessions and are now free from debt. Only five of all of them have
increased their holdings and are thrifty. Eighty-seven per cent held
section claims, and it may be mentioned that the half-section
claimants were more successful in holding their own, and add very much
to the favorableness of this report. In the better part of this
county, a hundred square miles in a body might be selected where the
per cent of loss would be greater, but this was settled chiefly by
French, Scotch, and English Canadians, mountain men and trappers of
nomadic habits, who married Indian women of the whole or half-breed,
and of whose descendants less is expected, as they are passionately
fond of ardent spirits. A teetotaler of mixed blood would be a rare
sight. Neighborly, clever people, of lax business habits, and of
necessity trustful, they were soon beat out of their landed
possessions. Probably in no American community has the credit system
been so much in vogue as on this Northwest coast, and likely for the
reason that in no other place are crops so sure, and certainly in no
other place was a broad basis of credit so much at the disposal of
debtors. A family with a section of land that produces unfailing crops
at small cost, can get credit anywhere; and what a harvest it has been
for merchants and middlemen in these western valleys until recently.
Ah, man! you are, indeed, a wanting animal, one whose wants are ever
multiplying and exacting. Only a few of the race are securely
provident by immediate self-denial, and this truth applies equally to
the pioneers, those resolute men and women--
Who kept step with the patient ox,
And toiled by the rolling wheel,
Drew success from the sand and rocks,
As sparks from the flint and steel.
The heads of families did not so readily depart from their early
habits of economy, but the children soon reveled in their magnificent
possessions. Girls and boys alike became semi-nomads, or properly
speaking, fell into the ways of the baronial English or the planter
class of the South. As a consequence of their newly found competence
and leisure "they took to horse," and strange, what a fascination
comes over a human being when he takes to horse. In truth, that boy
who did not admire the splendid aboriginal equestrians of the Great
Plains and get filled with the spirit of the wild and free, as he saw
them scurrying along the mountain side or sweeping down into the
valley with the speed of the wind; that boy must have been an
unchangeable clodhopper or a born philosopher.
Very few of them escaped the uncivilizing contamination, and many a
youth, fresh from an unfinished course at school, had his book
education cut sadly short by bestriding a cayuse and becoming a
practical cowboy. The infatuation was not confined to the boys. The
girls, too, had as much fondness for the noble brute, and were as
expert and graceful in his management. Some of them have ridden
seventy-five miles in a day. As a means of social communication at
that time it had no equal; and for stock raising and the round-up in
such a country, the horseman was unapproachable. Still, with all such
advantages, and they were many, which could have been turned into
permanent profit, the cowboy generation, though having a "heap of
fun," and no doubt genuine pleasure, let the earth slip from under his
feet. How could it be otherwise? Who could deny them? A party of boys
and girls on their favorite steeds, the former in leggings, bell
spurs, and the graceful sirrapa; the latter in the freshness of
physical beauty and bedecked with flowing skirts and scarlet streaming
sash--when such a cavalcade went galloping over the prairies with a
speed that put to shame a Sheridan's ride, what parent could or would
deny them.
Well, the parents did not deny them this and other diversions from
gainful industry, and, little by little, the princely donations of
land went into the till of the shopkeeper or the safe of the money
changer. Landless and moneyless, they scattered over the country, and,
as it were, dropped into all kinds of callings. Many of them have gone
east of the Cascades and taken homesteads and pre-emptions in the arid
regions, and there upon the bunch grass lands have gained a living and
some a competence by stock raising and wool growing. Others followed
up the streams into the mountains and in some narrow valley made a
home away from the every day temptations of the lowlanders. Others
went to the coast. Many of the young have found ample success in other
avocations and do not regret the loss of the parental donations. They
are found on the bench, at the bar, in the pulpit, in the governmental
employ, in college faculties, and in all honorable pursuits. Only a
few have ignobly failed, and those few do not invalidate the maxim
that "where there is a will there is a way" for falling into the drink
habit they lost their wills.
In conclusion, I am not willing to assert that the policy of the
general government, in donating land as a reward for taking possession
of this Northwest coast, was not a wise policy or that it was an
injury to the donees, though in the main they failed to keep the gift,
but the lesson is none the less valuable; and what is it but a
confirmation of the general truth that "necessity is the mother of
invention," the spur to exertion, and that success in this life is to
be obtained only through the school of experience as the reward of
continued and temperate effort. As there is no royal road to knowledge
so there is no royal road to wealth or any other valuable acquisition;
and it is not proper to confine this edict of fate to mere material
things, although to be fed and clothed is the first and most imperious
demand of nature. Man in all of his successful undertakings is an
evolutionary being. Whether intellectually, morally, or physically
considered, he keeps best what he has produced, what he has earned. As
a hard and fast donee, he is not a success; as a beggar, he is
disgusting even to himself. Sometimes he needs charity, but always
justice.