The Land of Many Leagues
It 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.
"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.
[Illustration: Central Oregon travel in the old days]
[Illustration: A Central Oregon freighter. "You will find them
everywhere in the railless land, the freighters and their teams"]
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.
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.
[Illustration: In the dry-farms lands of Central Oregon. "Serried by
valleys, where the gold of sun and grain, and vagrant shadows, made
gorgeous paintings."]
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 preeminence--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.