The Valley of Content
Oregon--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.
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.
[Illustration: Along the Willamette]
[Illustration: Mount Shasta
From a photograph by Weister Co., Portland, Ore.]
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.