is neither hidebound nor conservative. He has no kinship with the
bewhiskered, bebooted, by-gum and by-gosh hayseed made familiar by the
comic papers and the bucolic dramas. Instead of shying from a new-fangled
device as a horse does from a steam roller, he promptly gives it a trial
and, if it makes good, he adopts it. He milks his cows and makes his
butter by electricity, orders his groceries from the nearest town and
asks for the baseball score by telephone, goes to church and to market
in his motor-car, and passes his evenings with the aid of a circulating
library, a pianola, and a phonograph. It did not take me long to find
out that Oregon is as progressive agriculturally as it is politically.
If the farmer does not succeed in Oregon it is because he has been
hypnotised by those siren sisters, Obstinacy and Laziness; for if he is
ignorant, the State stands ready to educate him; if he is perplexed, it
stands ready to advise him; and if he gets into trouble, it stands ready
to assist him. In other words, it wants him to make good, and it isn’t
the fault of the State if he does not. For this purpose it maintains, in
addition to the State Agricultural College at Corvallis, which is one of
the most completely equipped institutions of its kind in the world, six
experimental farms which are geographically distributed so as to meet
practically every condition of agriculture found in Oregon. Two extensive
demonstration farms are maintained, moreover, by business interests, and
there is an enormous amount of agricultural co-operative work among the
farmers themselves, so that if a man is in doubt as to whether he had
better go in for Jerseys or Holsteins, for White Wyandottes or Plymouth
Rocks, for Spitzenbergs or Newtown Pippins, all he has to do to obtain
expert advice is to ask for it.
It is an undeniable fact that at most fairs in the
East, and at a great many in the West, for that matter,
the wheel-of-fortune, the ring-and-cane, and the
three-balls-for-a-dime-and-your-money-back-if-you-hit-the-coon
concessionaires, the fat woman, the living skeleton, the bearded
lady, and the wild man from Borneo, to say nothing of the
raucous-voiced venders of ice-cold-lemonade-made-in-the-shade and
red-hot-coney-islands-only-a-nickel-half-a-dime, serve to distract both
the attention and the shekels of the rural visitors from the legitimate
exhibits. It seemed to me that the farmers and fruit growers who came
pouring into the Salem fair were there for purposes of education rather
than recreation. They seemed to take the fair seriously and with the
idea of obtaining all the information and suggestions that they could
from it. Eager, attentive groups surrounded the lecturers from the State
Agricultural College and constantly interrupted them with intelligent,
penetrating queries as to soils, grafting, fertilisers, insect sprays,
and the like, while out in the long cattle sheds the men who are growing
rich from milk and butter talked of Aaggie Arethusa Korndyke Koningen
Colantha Clothilde Netherland Pietertje’s Queen of the Dairy IV and of
Alban Albino Segis Pontiac Johann Hengerveld’s Monarch of the Meadows
(the bearer of this last resonant title proving, upon investigation, to
be a wabbly-kneed three-weeks-old calf) as casually as a New Yorker would
refer to Connie Mack or Caruso or John Drew.
We went to the fair, as I have already intimated, for the primary
purpose of getting a line on rural conditions as they exist in
Oregon; but that did not prevent us from doing things which visitors
to county fairs have done ever since county fairs began. We tossed
rings—three-for-a-dime-step-right-this-way-and-try-your-luck-ladies-and-
gents—over a bed of cane heads so temptingly thick that it seemed it
would be only by a miracle that you could miss one, and after spending
a dollar in rings the Lady won a bamboo walking-stick which she could
have bought for ten cents almost anywhere and which she didn’t have the
remotest use for, anyway. We tried our luck at breaking clay pipes in
the shooting-gallery, and, in spite of the fact that the sights on my
rifle had been deliberately hammered a quarter of an inch out of line, I
succeeded in winning three dubious-looking cigars, to the proprietor’s
very great astonishment. Had I smoked them I should not have survived
to write this story. Then we leaned over the pig-pens and poked the
pink, fat hogs with the yard-sticks which some enterprising advertiser
had forced upon us; in the art department we gravely admired the
cross-stitched mottoes bearing such virtuous sentiments as, “Virtue Is
Its Own Reward,” and “There’s No Place Like Home,” and the water-colour
studies of impossible fruit perpetrated “by Jane Maria Simpkins, aged
eleven years.” Then we went over to the race-track and hung over the rail
and became as excited over the result of the 2.40 free-for-all as we used
to be in the old days at Morris Park before the anti-racing bill became
a law. In fact, I surreptitiously wagered a dollar with an itinerant
book-maker on a sixteen-to-one shot, on the ground that, as the horse had
the same name as the Lady, it would surely prove a winner—and lost. Not
until dark settled down and the lights of the homeward-bound cars had
turned the highway into an excellent imitation of the Chicago freight
yards did we climb into the tonneau again, sticky and dusty and tired,
and tell the driver to “hit it up for the nearest hotel.”
From Salem to Eugene, down the pretty and well-wooded valley of the
Willamette, is seventy odd miles as the motor goes, and the scenery
throughout every mile of the distance looks exactly like those pictures
you see on bill-boards advertising Swiss chocolate or condensed milk—I
forget which: black cows with white spots, or white cows with black
spots, grazing contentedly on emerald hillsides, with white mountains
sticking up behind; rivers meandering through lush, green meadows; white
farmhouses with red roofs and neat, green blinds peering out between the
mathematically arranged orchard rows. But always there are the orchards.
No matter how wide you open your throttle, no matter how high your
speedometer needle climbs, you can’t escape them. They border the road on
both sides, for mile after mile after mile, and in the spring, when they
are in blossom, the countryside looks as though it had been struck by a
snow-storm—and smells like Roger & Gallet’s perfumery works.
When I visited the Southwest the horny-handed farmer folk would meet me
when I stepped from the train and whirl me incredible distances across
the desert to show me a patch of alfalfa—“the finest patch of alfalfa,
by jingo, in the whole blamed State!” In Oregon they did much the same
thing, except, instead of showing me alfalfa they showed me apples.
Up north of the Siskiyous, they’re literally apple drunk. They talk
apples, think apples, dream apples, eat apple dumplings and apple pies,
drink apple cider and apple brandy and applejack. Even their women are
apple-cheeked. You can’t blame them for being a trifle boisterous about
their apple crops, however, when you see what the apple has done for
Oregon. I was shown one orchard of forty-five acres whose crop had sold
the preceding year for seventy-five thousand dollars. Another orchard
of but eight acres brought its owner sixteen thousand dollars. Five
hundred trees yielded another man five thousand dollars. And I could
repeat similar instances _ad infinitum_. They assured us in Medford that
the apple cellars at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle always contain
barrels stencilled “Grown in Oregon”—which is, I believe, a fact—and,
though they didn’t say so in so many words, they intimated that when
King George feels the need of a bite after a court ball or some equally
arduous function, he lights a candle and shuffles down the cellar stairs
in his dressing-gown and slippers and gropes about until he finds an
Oregon-grown Northern Spy or a big, green Newtown Pippin.
Oregon’s success in apple growing—a success that has headed the pioneer
northwestward as the gold craze of ’49 started the frontiersman
Californiaward—is the joint product of work and brains. Where New England
has given up all thought of saving her orchards, Oregon, by tincturing
labour with scientific knowledge, has founded an industry which is
doing for the State what wheat did for the Dakotas, what gold did for
California. What happened to the orchards all through New England? There
was enough hard work put into them, Heaven knows. The old New England
farmer and his wife slaved to the bone and were eventually trundled away
to the insane asylum or the cemetery from overwork, from devotion to the
arid soil. The orchards of New England have been watered with blood and
sweat and fertilised with blasted hopes. The young men were away in the
universities acquiring scientific knowledge and learning how to apply
that knowledge on the farms, and it never occurred to the old men that
the wearied soil needed some encouragement, some strengthening, some
vivifying, even as their spirits did, to bring material and spiritual
prosperity. And Oregon has taken to heart and is profiting by the
pathetic example of the New England farmer.
It is approximately four hundred miles as a motor goes from the Columbia
to the California line and, as our object was to see the country, we
spent upward of a week upon the journey, stopping as our fancies dictated
to cast for trout in the swirling rivers, to gossip with village folk and
farmers, and sometimes just to lie on our backs on inviting hillsides and
smoke and chat and throw pebbles at inquisitive squirrels and watch the
sunbeams filter through the foliage of the trees. That’s where the true
joy of motoring comes in: to be able to stop when and where you please,
without the necessity of having to give any why or wherefore, and, when
you grow weary of one place, flying on again until you find another that
tempts you. I have never been able to comprehend why those speed maniacs
who tear through the country so fast that the telegraph-poles look like
palings in a picket fence bother with automobiles at all; they could
travel quite as fast in a train and ever so much more comfortably.
From Eugene our course lay south, due south through a bountiful and
smiling land. We tore down yellow highroads between orchard rows as
precisely placed and uniform as ranks of Prussian grenadiers; we flashed
past trim farmhouses overshadowed by huge hip-roofed barns which seemed
to be bursting with produce, as, in fact, they were; we rolled through
villages so neat and clean and happy that they might have served as
models for the street-car advertisement of Spotless Town; we spun along
the banks of sun-flecked rivers whose waters were broken by trout jumping
hungry for the fly; we boomed down forest roads so dim and silent that we
felt as though we were motoring down a cathedral nave; Diamond Peak and
the white-bonneted Three Sisters came into view and disappeared again;
until at last, churning our way up the tortuous road that climbs the
Umpqua Range, we looked down upon the enchanted valley of the Rogue.
Imagine a four-hundred-thousand-acre valley, every foot of which is
tilled or tillable, protected on every side by mountain walls—on
the east by the Cascades, on the west by the Coast Range, on the
north by the Umpqua chain, and on the south by the Siskiyous; and
meandering through this garden valley, watering its every corner, the
winding, mischievous, inquisitive Rogue. It is indeed a beckoning
land. But mind you, it is not a get-rich-quick land. It is a
work-like-the-devil-and-you’ll-become-prosperous country. The soil and
the climate will do as much for the farmer, perhaps more, than anywhere
else in the world, but he must do his share. And no one should buy a
ticket to Oregon expecting to find immediate employment in any line.
Jobs are not lying loose on the streets, waiting for some one to come
along and pick them up, any more than they are in Chicago or New York.
I doubt very much, indeed, if the workingman with no other capital than
his two hands has much to gain by emigrating to Oregon. Large projects,
it is true, require many labourers, and these openings often present
themselves; but the means of bringing in workmen are just as cheap and
rapid as in other sections of the country, so it need not be expected
that there would be any great difference in wages. The chief advantages
that Oregon offers to labouring people without sufficient accumulations
to give them a start are: a mild and equable climate, an absence of
damaging storms, a certainty of crops, and opportunities as good, though
perhaps no better, than any other State. If, however, he has been able
to accumulate anywhere from a thousand to three thousand dollars, he is
then in a position to avail himself of the innumerable opportunities
which exist for men of small capital. Such men will find their best
opportunities in buying a few acres of land, building a modest home upon
it, and then “going in,” as the English say, for fruit growing or poultry
raising or dairying or market-gardening. As sawmills are as plentiful in
Oregon as pretty women are on Fifth Avenue, and as the State contains
one fifth of all the standing timber in the country (you didn’t know
that, did you?) lumber is extraordinarily cheap, the cost of the material
for a comfortable four-room farmhouse, for example, not running to more
than one hundred and fifty dollars. It is a mistake for the intending
emigrant to count on getting a farm under the terms of the Homestead Act,
for, though the total government lands open to homestead entry in Oregon
are greater in area than the entire State of West Virginia, they are,
for the most part, in the least desirable portions of the State and the
settler who occupied them would have to pay the price incident to life
in a remote and semicivilised region. On the other hand, excellent land,
within easy reach of towns and railroads, can be had in the valleys of
western Oregon all the way from fifty to one hundred and fifty dollars an
acre, and this would, I am convinced, prove the best investment in the
end.
There is no space to dwell at any length on the towns of western
Oregon—Salem, Eugene, Roseburg, Drain, Grant’s Pass, Medford, Ashland.
All of these towns have paved streets lined with comfortable and
homelike residences and remarkably well-stocked shops; up-to-the-minute
educational, lighting, and sewage systems; about double the number of
parks, hotels, garages, and moving-picture houses that you would find
in towns of similar size in the East; and boards of trade and chambers
of commerce with enough surplus energy and enthusiasm to make a booster
out of an Egyptian mummy. In most of these towns prohibition reigns,
and, though, to be quite truthful, I am not accustomed to raise an
admonishing hand when some one uncorks a gilt-topped bottle, I repeatedly
remarked the fact that they were cleaner, quieter, more orderly—in
short, pleasanter places to live—than those whose streets are dotted
by the familiar swinging half-doors. That prohibition has done no harm
to business is best proved by the fact that the very merchants who in
the beginning were its most bitter assailants have become its most
ardent advocates. After comparing the “dry” towns of Oregon to the “wet”
ones—say, in the vicinity of Bakersfield, in California—it seems to me
that, so far as the smaller rural communities are concerned, at least,
there is only one side to the prohibition question.
Thirty miles from Grant’s Pass, in the fastnesses of the Siskiyous, are
the recently discovered mammoth caves, which some genius in the art of
appellation has christened “The Marble Halls of Oregon.” It needed an
inspiration to conceive a name like that! Such a name would induce one
to make a trip to see a hole in a sand-bank. As a matter of fact, these
Oregonian caverns are decidedly worth the journey. Though they are very
far from having been completely explored, sufficient investigations have
been made to prove conclusively that they are much superior, both in
size and beauty, to the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, a visit to which was
considered as essential for every well-travelled American half a century
ago as to have seen the Virginia Natural Bridge and Niagara Falls.
[Illustration: Trout fishing in the high Sierras.
Salmon fishing in a Northwestern river.
WHERE RODS BEND DOUBLE AND REELS GO WHIR-R-R-R.]
* * * * *
Oregon, with its fish-filled streams, its game-filled forests, and
its coast-line rich in bays and coves and beaches, possesses all the
requisites for one of the world’s great playgrounds, but some years must
pass before it will possess the luxuries demanded by that class of
summer vacationists who travel with wardrobe trunks. With less than one
fifteenth of its sixty odd million acres under cultivation, it is still
to a great extent a frontier region, with many of a frontier’s crudities
and discomforts and, for a man who knows and loves the open, with all
of a frontier country’s charm. I am perfectly aware, of course, that
the farmers who are growing such amazing quantities of big, red apples
in the valleys of the Hood and the Rogue and the real-estate boosters
who are so frantically chopping town sites out of the primeval forest
within cannon-shot of Portland will resent the statement that this is
still a frontier country; but it is, nevertheless, and will be for a
number of years to come. Barring the system which parallels the coast
from north to south and the one which cuts across its northeast corner,
there are no railways in Oregon; the scantiness of population and the
peculiarly savage nature of a great portion of the country having offered
few inducements to the railroad builders. This condition is changing
rapidly, however, for the transcontinental systems which enter the
State are working overtime to give it population, cities and towns and
villages are springing up like mushrooms along its many waterways, the
vast grants held by the railway and trading companies and by the pioneers
are gradually being cut up into small farms, and a rural situation is
being slowly created which is bound to effect a marked change in the
conditions which have heretofore prevailed. But it has not yet, thank
Heaven, reached that stage of civilisation which is characterised by
summer hotels with miles of piazzas and acres of green lawns and oceans
of red-and-white striped awnings. Taking the place of these sophisticated
and ostentatious summer resorts are the unpretentious inns and camps and
summer colonies which are sprinkled along the Oregon shore from the mouth
of the Columbia to the California line.
The easiest way to reach this summer land is to take the little
jerk-water railroad which meanders eastward from Hillsboro, a main-line
townlet fifty miles or so south of Portland, through Tillamook County
to the sea. For many miles the train follows the tumultuous Nehalem,
stopping every now and then, as the fancy seems to strike it, at
shrieking sawmills or at groups of slab-walled loggers’ shacks set down
in clearings in the forest, where bearded, flannel-shirted men come out
and swap stories and tobacco with the engineer. After a time the woods
begin to dwindle into tracts of stumps and second-growths, and these
merge gradually into farms, with neat white houses and orderly rows of
fruit-trees and herds of sleek cattle grazing contentedly in clover
meadows. Quite soon Nehalem Bay comes in sight and the lush meadows give
way to wire-grass and the wire-grass runs out in beaches of yellow sand
so much like those which border Cape Cod and Buzzard’s Bay that it is
hard to believe that one is not on the coast of New England. From the
names of the towns and from the types of faces that I saw, I gathered
that much of this country was settled by New Englanders, who must have
found in its hills and forests and fertile farm lands and alternate
stretches of sandy beach and rock-bound shore much to remind them of
home. Oregon is, as a glance at the map will show you, in exactly
the same latitude as the New England States and has the same cool,
invigorating summer weather that one finds in Maine, though its winters,
thanks to the warm Japan current which sweeps along its shores, are
characterised by rains instead of snow. From Nehalem to Tillamook the
railroad hugs the coast. On one side the bosom of the Pacific rises and
falls languorously under a genial sun; on the other the line of rugged
hills, in their shaggy mantles of green, go up to meet the sky. Here
and there some placid lake mirrors the crags and wind-bent trees, or a
river, complaining noisily at the delay to which it has been subjected,
finds a devious way through the hindering hill range to the waiting
ocean. Nor are the attractions of the Tillamook country those of the sea
alone, for within a dozen miles of the coast bear, panther, wildcats,
deer, partridge, pheasant, duck, and geese are to be found, while the
mountain streams are alive with trout waiting to be lured by the fly.
It is a storied region, too, for thousands of moccasined feet have trod
the famous Indian trail which was once the only route from the wilds of
southern Oregon to the fur-post which the first Astor established at
the mouth of the Columbia and which still bears his name, and here and
there along the coast are the remains of the forts and trading stations
which the Russians, in their campaign for the commercial mastery of
the Pacific half a century ago, pushed southward even to the Bay of San
Francisco. The lives led by those who summer along this shore would
delight such rugged apostles of the simple life as John Muir and John
Burroughs and Colonel Roosevelt, for there is a gratifying absence of
fashionable hotels and luxurious camps and cottages, though there is an
abundance of unpretentious but comfortable tent colonies and inns. The
people whom I met in Portland and elsewhere apologised profusely for
Oregon’s deficiencies in this respect and assured me very earnestly that
in two or three years more the State would have a complete assortment
of summer hotels “as good as anything you’ll find at Atlantic City
or Narragansett Pier, by George.” All I have to say is that when
their promises are realised, Oregon’s chiefest and most distinctive
charm—its near-to-nature simplicity—will have disappeared, and, so far
as the traveller and the pleasure seeker are concerned, it will be
merely an indifferent imitation of the humdrum and prosaic East. At
present, however, it is still a big, free, unfenced, keep-on-the-grass,
do-as-you-please, happy-go-lucky, flannel-shirt-and-slouch-hat land.
Even as I write I can hear its insistent, subtle summons in my ears: the
whisper of the forests, the chatter of the rivers, the murmur of the
ocean, the snarling of the sawmills, the chunk-a-chunk of paddles, the
creak of saddle gear, all seeming to say: “Cut loose from towns and men;
pack your kit and come again.” And that’s precisely what I’m going to do.
XII
BREAKING THE WILDERNESS
“They rise to mastery of wind and snow;
They go like soldiers grimly into strife
To colonise the plain. They plough and sow,
And fertilise the sod with their own life,
As did the Indian and the buffalo.”
XII
BREAKING THE WILDERNESS