Chapter XV: The Map That Is Half Unrolled 419 (9)

Roughly speaking, it is a hundred miles from Shaniko to The Dalles, over a road most of which is back-breakingly rough and all of which is so intolerably dusty that we felt as though we were covered with sandpaper instead of skin. But the scenery of the last half dozen miles caused us to forgive, if not to forget, the discomforts and the monotony of those preceding, for in them we dropped down through the wild and winding gorge which the Deschutes follows on its way to join hands with its big sister, the Columbia. The nearer we drew to the mighty river the higher our expectations grew, and every time we topped a rise or swung around a granite shoulder we searched for it eagerly, just as our migrating predecessors must have done. But, owing to the high, sheer cliffs that wall it in, we caught no glimpse of it whatever until, our road emerging from the cañon’s mouth upon the precipice’s brink, we suddenly found ourselves looking down upon it as it lay below us in all its shimmering and sinuous beauty, its silvery length winding away, away, away: eastward to its birthplace in the country of the Kootenai: westward to Astoria and its mother, the sea. Far below us, so far below that it looked like the little wooden villages you see in the windows of toy stores, the white houses of The Dalles were clustered upon the river’s banks.

* * * * *

The highroad, which had been palpably ailing for some time, took a sudden turn for the worse a few miles south of The Dalles, so that, when it found the great, peaceful, silent-flowing Columbia athwart its path, the temptation became too great to resist and it ended its misery in the river, leaving us, its faithful friends, who had borne it company all the way from Mexico, disconsolate upon the bank. Thus it befell that we were compelled to put the car and ourselves aboard a boat and trust to steam, instead of gasoline, to bear us over the ensuing section of our journey. It was a humiliating thing for motorists to have to do, of course—but what would you? There were no more roads. We were in the deplorable position of the man who told his wife that he came home because all the other places were closed. And think how keenly the veteran car—

“Me that ’ave been what I’ve been,
Me that ’ave gone where I’ve gone,
Me that ’ave seen what I’ve seen”

—must have felt the disgrace of being turned over to a crew of stevedores and a ruffianly, tobacco-chewing second mate, who unceremoniously sandwiched it between a pile of milk-cans and a crate of cabbages on the lower deck of a chug-achug-chugging stern-wheel river boat.

But before the rickety deck chairs had ceased their creaking complaints about the burden we had imposed on them we were congratulating ourselves on the circumstance that had forced us to exchange a hot and dusty highroad for a cool and silent waterway. To me there is something irresistibly fascinating and seductive about a river. I always find myself wondering where it comes from, and what strange things it has seen along its course, and where it is going to, and I invariably have a hankering to take ship and keep it company. And the greater the stream, the greater its fascination, because, of course, it has travelled so much farther. Now the Columbia, as that friend of our boyhood, Huck Finn, would have put it, is no slouch of a river. If its kinks and twists were carefully straightened out it would reach half-way across the continent, or as far as from New York to Kansas City. It is somewhat disturbing for one who visits the valley of the Columbia for the first time, with the purpose of writing about it, to have these facts suddenly thrown, as it were, in his face, particularly if, like myself, he has been brought up in that part of the country where the Hudson is regarded as the only real river in America—doubtless because it washes the shores of Manhattan—and where all other waterways are looked upon as being not much better than creeks. I felt like apologising to somebody, and when, on top of all this, I was told that the Columbia and its tributaries drain a region equal in area to all the States along our Atlantic seaboard put together, I had a sudden desire to go ashore at the next landing and take a train back home.

Though of British birth, for it has its source above the Canadian line in the country of the Kootenai, the Columbia emends this unfortunate circumstance by becoming naturalised when it is still a slender stripling, dividing its allegiance, however, between Oregon and Washington, for which it serves as a boundary for upward of four hundred miles. It is not only the father of Northwestern waters, but it is the big brother of all those streams, from the Straits of Behring to the Straits of Magellan, which call the Pacific Ocean “grandpa.” By white-hulled river steamer, by panting power-boat, by produce-laden barge, by bark canoe, by the goatskin raft called _kelek_, I have loitered my leisurely way down many famous rivers—the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Mississippi, the Fraser, the Skeena, the Rio Balsas, the Rhine, the Danube, the Volga, the Euphrates, the Ganges, the Zambesi, the Nile—and I assert, after having duly weighed my words, that in the continuity and grandeur of its scenery the Columbia is the superior of them all. If you think that I am carried away by enthusiasm you had better go and see it for yourself.

It was Carlyle—was it not?—who remarked that all great works produce an unpleasant impression on first acquaintance. It is so with the Columbia. We saw it first on a broiling August day from the heights above Celilo—the great, silent, mysterious river winding away into the unknown between banks of lava as sinister and forbidding as the flanks of Etna, and with a sun beating down upon it from a sky of molten brass. There were no grassy banks, no trees, no flowers, no vegetation of any kind, none of the things that one usually associates with a river. But when the steamer bears you around the first of those frowning cliffs that rise sheer from the surface of the river below The Dalles—ah, well, that is quite another matter.

Since Time began, the sheets of lava which give The Dalles its name, by compressing the half-mile-wide river into a channel barely sixscore feet across, have effectually obstructed continuous navigation upon the Upper Columbia. But, as towns multiplied and population increased along the upper reaches of the great river and its tributaries in Washington and Oregon, in Montana and Idaho, this hinderance to the navigation of so splendid a waterway became intolerable, unthinkable, absurd. At last the frock-coated gentlemen in Congress were prodded into action, and the passage of a bill for the construction of a canal around The Dalles, at Celilo, was the result. Came then keen-eyed, self-reliant men who, jeering at the obstacles which Nature had heaped in their path, proceeded to slash a canal through eight miles of shifting sands and basalt rock, so that hereafter the fruit growers and farmers and ranchers as far inland as Lewiston, in Idaho, can send their produce down to the sea in ships.

“The trouble with the Columbia,” complained the Lady, “is that it’s all scenery and no romance. It’s too big, too prosaic, too commercial. It doesn’t arouse any overwhelming enthusiasm in me to be told that this river irrigates goodness knows how many thousand square miles of land, or that the top of that mountain over there is so many thousand feet above the level of the sea, or that so many thousand barrels of apples were grown last year in the valley we just passed and that they brought so many dollars a barrel. Facts like those are all well enough in an almanac, because no one ever reads almanacs anyway, but they don’t interest me and I don’t believe that they interest many other visitors, either. If a river hasn’t any romance connected with it, it isn’t much better than a canal. Don’t you remember that rock in the Bosphorus, near Scutari, to which Leander used to swim out to see Hero, and how when we passed it the passengers would all rush over to that side of the deck, and how the steamer would list until her rail was almost under water, and how the Turkish officers would get frightened half to death and shove the people back? You don’t see the passengers on this boat threatening to capsize it because of their anxiety to see something romantic, do you? I should say not. Do you remember Kerbela, that town on the Euphrates, where all Persians hope to be buried when they die, and how, long before we reached there, we could smell the Caravans of the Dead which were carrying the bodies there from across the desert? And those crumbling, ivy-covered castles along the Rhine, with their queer legends and traditions and superstitions? That’s what I mean by romance, and you know as well as I do that there is nothing romantic about apple orchards and salmon canneries and sawmills. Is there?”

“Pardon me, madam,” said a gentleman who had been seated so close to us that he could not help overhearing what she said and who had been unable to conceal his disagreement with the views she had expressed, “but do you see that island over there near the Washington shore? The long, low one with the little white monument sticking up at the end of it. That is Memaloose—the Island of the Dead. It is the Indian Valhalla. Talk about the Persians whose bodies are borne across the desert to be buried at Kerbela! Did you happen to know that on the slopes of that island are buried untold thousands of Chinooks, whose bodies were brought on the backs of men hundreds of miles through the wilderness or in canoes down long and lonely rivers that they might find their last resting-places in its sacred soil? And the monument that you see marks the grave of a frontiersman who was as romantic a character as you will find in the pages of Fenimore Cooper. His name was Victor Trevet; he knew and liked the Indians; and he asked to be buried on Memaloose that his bones might lie among those of ‘honest men.’ Is it legend and tradition that you say the river lacks? A few miles ahead of us, at the Cascades, the river was once spanned, according to the Indian legend, by a stupendous natural bridge of rock. The Indians called it the Bridge of the Gods. The great river flowed under it, and on it lived a witch woman named Loowit, who had charge of the only fire in the world. Seeing how wretched was the lot of the fireless tribes, who had to live on uncooked meats and vegetables, she begged permission of the gods to give them fire. Her request was granted and the condition of the Indians was thus enormously improved. So gratified were the gods by Loowit’s consideration for the welfare of the Indians that they promised to grant any request that she might make. Womanlike, she promptly asked for youth and beauty. Whereupon she was transformed into a maiden whose loveliness would have caused Lina Cavalieri to go out of the professional beauty business. The news of her beauty spreading among the tribes like fire in summer grass, there came numberless youths who pleaded for her hand, or, rather, for the face and figure that went with it. Among them were two young chieftains: Klickitat from the north and Wiyeast from the west. As she was unable to decide between them, they and their tribesmen decided to settle the rivalry with the tomahawk. But the gods, angry at this senseless waste of lives over a pretty woman, put Loowit and her two gentlemen friends to death and sent the great bridge on which she had dwelt crashing down into the river. But as they had all three been good to look upon in life, so the gods, who were evidently æsthetic, made them good to look upon even in death by turning them into snow peaks. Wiyeast became the mountain which we palefaces call Mount Hood; Klickitat they transformed into the peak we know as Mount Adams; while Mount Saint Helens is the beautiful form taken by the fair Loowit. Thus was the wonderful Bridge of the Gods destroyed and the Columbia dammed by the débris which fell into it. In a few minutes we will be at the Cascades and you can see the ruins of the bridge for yourself. And, if you still have any lingering doubts as to the truth of the story, why, there is Klickitat in his white blanket rising above the forests to the right, and Wiyeast is over there to your left, and ahead of us, down the river, is the Loowit lady disguised as Mount Saint Helens. So you see there is no room for doubt.

“You assert that the Columbia is lacking in romance because, forsooth, no Leander has swum across it to see a Hero. Good heavens, my dear young lady, I can tell you a story that has more all-wool-and-a-yard-wide romance in it than a dozen such Hellespontine fables. Did you never hear of Whitman the missionary, who, instead of crossing a measly strait to win a woman, crossed a continent and won an empire?

“In the early forties Whitman established a mission station near the present site of Walla Walla. Hearing rumours that our government was on the point of accommodatingly ceding the Valley of the Columbia to England in return for some paltry fishing rights off the banks of Newfoundland—the government officials of those days evidently preferred codfish to salmon—he rode overland to Washington in the dead of winter, through blinding snow-storms, swimming icy rivers, subsisting on his pack-mules and his dogs when his food ran out, facing death by torture at the hands of hostile Indians. Gaining admission to the White House in his dress of furs and buckskin, with his feet and fingers terribly frozen, he so impressed President Tyler and Secretary of State Webster by his vivid description of the richness and fertility of the region which they were on the point of ceding to England that he saved the entire Pacific Northwest to the Union. If that isn’t sufficient romance for you, then I’m afraid you’re hard to please.”

“I surrender,” said the Lady. “Your old Columbia has plenty of romance, after all. The trouble is that tourists don’t know these interesting things that you’ve just been telling us and they _do_ know all about the Danube and the Rhine.”

“That’s easily remedied,” said I. “I’ll tell them about it myself.”

And that, my friends, is precisely what I have just been trying to do.

* * * * *

“Next stop Hood River!” bawled the purser.

“That’s where the apples come from,” remarked our deck acquaintance, who had turned himself into a guide-book for our benefit. “In some of the orchards up the valley you’ll find apples with paper letters pasted on them: ‘C de P’ for the Café de Paris, you know, and ‘W-A’ for the Waldorf-Astoria, and ‘G R & I’ for Georgius Rex et Imperator—which is _not_ the name of the restaurant. They paste the letters on quite carefully when the apples are still green upon the tree, and when they ripen the paper is torn off, leaving the yellow initials on the bright red fruit. Those are the apples that they serve at royal banquets and that they charge a dollar apiece for in the smart restaurants in Europe. I don’t mean to imply that all of the Hood River apples are thus initialled to order, but some of them are. The average value of the land in that valley, cultivated and uncultivated, is three hundred and forty dollars an acre, and if a man wanted to purchase an orchard in bearing he would have to pay at least four thousand dollars an acre for it. Some people think that it was the original Garden of Eden. If it was, I don’t blame Eve for stealing the apple. I’d steal a Hood River apple myself if I got the chance.”

Had the second mate been a little more obliging, and had there not been so formidable a barricade of crates and milk cans about the car, I would have had it run ashore then and there and would have taken a whirl through the famous apple orchards which cover the lower slopes of Mount Hood and have kept on up the zigzag mountain road as far as the cosy little hostelry called Cloud Cap Inn, which some public-spirited Portlander has built upon the snow-line. Perhaps it was just as well we didn’t, however, for I learned afterward that the famous valley is only about twenty miles long, so, if we had not put on the emergency brake before we started, we would have run through it before we could have stopped and would not have seen it at all. Nowhere in Switzerland do I recall a picture of such surpassing splendour as that which stood before us, as though on a titanic easel, as, from the vantage of the steamer’s upper deck, we looked up the vista formed by this fragrant, verdant valley toward the great white cone of Mount Hood. It is, indeed, so very beautiful that those Americans who know and love the world’s white rooftrees can find scant justification for turning their faces toward the Alps when here, in the upper left-hand corner of their own country, are mountains which would make the ghost of the great Whymper moan for an alpenstock and hobnailed boots. This startlingly sudden transition from orchards groaning with fruit to dense primeval forests, and from these forests to the stately, isolated snow peaks, is very different from Switzerland, of course. Indeed, to compare these mountains of the Pacific Northwest with the Alps, as is so frequently done, seems to me to be a grave injustice to them both. The Alps form a wild and angry sea of icy mountains, and we have nothing in America to which they can be fittingly compared. The Cascades, on the other hand, form a great system of lofty forest-wrapped ranges surmounted by the towering isolated peaks of snowy volcanoes, and Europe contains nothing to equal them. I am perfectly aware, of course, that the very large number of Americans who spend their summers in the ascent of the orthodox Swiss peaks—more often than not, if the truth were known, by means of funicular railways or through telescopes on hotel piazzas—look with scorn and contumely upon these mountains of the far Nor’west, which they regard as home-made and unfashionable and vulgar and not worth bothering about. Perhaps they are not aware, however, that no less an authority on mountaineering than James Bryce (I don’t recall the title that he has taken now that he has been made a peer, and no one would recognise him if I used it) said not long ago, in speaking of these sentinels that guard the Columbia:

“We have nothing more beautiful in Switzerland or Tyrol, in Norway or the Pyrenees. The combination of ice scenery with woodland scenery of the grandest type is to be found nowhere in the Old World, unless it be in the Himalayas, and, so far as we know, nowhere else on the American continent.”

Which but serves to point the truth that foreigners are more appreciative of the beauties and grandeurs of our country than we are ourselves.

* * * * *

At the Cascades the Columbia takes a drop of half a hundred feet and we had, perforce, to bide our time in the locks, by means of which the rapids have been circumvented, until the waters found their level. It is not until the Cascades are passed that the scenery for which the Columbia is famous begins in all its sublimity and grandeur. The Great Artist has painted pictures more colourful, more sensational, perhaps, as the Grand Cañon, for example, the Yellowstone, and the Sahara, but none which combines the qualities of strength and restfulness as this mighty river, flowing swiftly, silently between the everlasting hills. From the shores the orchards and the gardens rise, terrace above terrace, until they become merged in the forest-covered ranges, and above the ranges rise the august snow peaks, solitary, silent, like a line of sentries strung along the horizon. At times, particularly in the early morning and again at sunset, these snow mountains present that singular appearance familiar to the traveller in the Himalayas and the Cordilleras, when the snowy cone seems to be floating ethereally upon a sea of mist which completely shrouds the hills and forests at its base. Immediately below the Cascades commences the series of waterfalls for which the lower reaches of the Columbia are famous, the granite cliffs which, for nearly twoscore miles border the Oregon shore with a sheer wall of rock, being scored at frequent intervals by what seem, from a distance, to be ribbons of shining silver. As the boat draws nearer, however, you see that what looked like ribbons are really mountain streams which are so impatient to join their mother, the Columbia, that, instead of taking the more sedate but circuitous route, they fling themselves tempestuously over the brink of the sheer cliff into the arms of the parent stream. First come the Horsetail Falls, whose falling waters, blown by the wind into silvery strands, are suggestive of the flowing tail of a white Arab; then, in quick succession, the Oneonta Falls, at the end of a narrow gorge which penetrates the cliffs for a mile or more; the nine-hundred-feet-high Multnomah, the highest falls in all the northwest country if not, indeed, on the entire Pacific Coast; the Bridal Veil, as radiantly beautiful as its namesake of the Yosemite; and finally, just below the great monolith rising from the river known as Rooster Rock, the Falls of Latourelle. On the opposite shore the mighty promontory known as Cape Horn rises five hundred feet above the surface of the river, and, a few miles farther up-stream, Castle Rock, whose turreted crags bear a striking resemblance to some stronghold of the Middle Ages, attains to twice that height. By the time the steamer reaches the mighty natural gateway known as the Pillars of Hercules, the traveller is actually surfeited with grandeur and is quite ready for the simple, friendly, pastoral scenes again, just as one after a season of Wagnerian opera welcomes the simple airs and the old-fashioned songs.

The Columbia from Saint Peter’s Dome, with Mount Adams in the distance. “The Great Artist has painted pictures more colorful, more sensational, perhaps, but none which so combine the qualities of strength and restfulness as this mighty river.”]

As I do not chew popcorn, peanuts, gum, or candy, nor munch dripping ice-cream cones, and as I have an unconquerable aversion to other people doing those unpleasant things in my immediate vicinity, I left the others, who did not seem to mind such minor annoyances, among the excursionists upon the upper deck and made my way below. After clambering over great piles of crates, sacks, and barrels filled with Columbia River produce, I finally succeeded in finding a secluded spot in the vessel’s bows, whence I could watch, undisturbed by sticky-fingered youngsters or idle chatter, the varied commerce of the mighty water road. Stern-wheel, twin-funnelled passenger boats zigzagged from shore to shore to pick up the passengers and freight that patiently awaited their coming; rusty freighters scuttled down-stream laden with fruit for the coast towns and salmon for the Astoria canneries; spick-and-span pleasure craft, with shining brass work and graceful, tapering spars, daintily picked their way through the press of river traffic as a pretty girl picks her way along a crowded street; grimy fishing craft, their sails as weather-beaten as the faces of the men that raise them, danced by us, eager for home and supper and the evening fire; great log rafts wallowed by, sent down by the forests to propitiate the greedy sawmills, whose sharp-toothed jaws devour the sacrifice and scream for more.

Perhaps the most interesting and characteristic feature of the landscape along the lower Columbia are the fish-wheels—ingenious contrivances, twenty to forty feet in diameter and six to eight feet across, which look like pocket editions of the passenger-carrying Ferris wheel at the Chicago Exposition. The wheels, which are hung in substantial frameworks close to the banks, where the salmon run the thickest, are revolved by the current, which keeps the wire-meshed scoops with which each pair of spokes are fitted for ever lifting from the water. The great schools of salmon are guided toward the wheel by means of a lattice dam which reaches out into the river like the arm of a false friend, and, before the unsuspecting fish know what has happened to them, they are hoisted into the air in the wire scoops and dumped into an inclined trough, down which they slide into a fenced-in pool, where the fishermen can get them at their leisure. They are then strung on wires and attached to a barrel which acts as a buoy, the barrel, sometimes with a ton of fish trailing behind it like the tail to a kite, floating down-stream to the nearest cannery, where a man in a launch is on the lookout and tows them ashore. Months later, in Pekin or Peoria, in Rome or Rumford Falls, or wherever else you may happen to be dining, you will see the item “Columbia River Salmon” on the hotel menu.

As I hung over the steamer’s bow, with the incomparable landscape slipping past me as though on Burton Holmes’s picture screen, and no sound save the muffled throbbing of the engines and the ripple of the water running aft along the hull, I unconsciously yielded to the Columbia’s mystic spell. I closed my eyes and in a moment the surface of the river seemed peopled with the ghosts of the history makers. Nez Percés, in paint and feathers, slipped silently along, in the shadow of yonder wooded bank, in their barken war canoes. Two lean and sun-bronzed white men, clad in the fringed buckskin of the adventuring frontiersman, floated past me down the mighty stream which they had trekked across a continent to find. Half-breed trappers, chanting at the paddles, descended with precious freights of fur. A square-rigged merchantman poked its inquisitive bowsprit around a rocky headland, and as she passed I noted the words _Columbia, of Boston_, in raised gilt letters on her stern, and I remembered that it was from this same square-rigged vessel that the river took its name. A warship, flying the flag of England and with the black muzzles of guns peering from its rows of ports, cautiously ascended, the leadsmen in the shrouds sounding for river bars. Log forts and trading-posts and mission stations once again crowned the encircling hills. Forgotten battles blew by on the evening breeze. A yellow dust cloud rose above the river bank and out of it emerged a plodding wagon-train. The smoke of pioneer camp-fires spiralled skyward from those rich valleys where in reality the cattle browse and the orchards droop with fruit. From the vantage of a rocky promontory a ghostly war party peered down upon me—a paleface—taking a summer’s holiday along that mighty stream upon whose bosom of old went forth the bepainted fighting men. The furtive twilight slipped behind night’s velvet curtain. The mountains changed from jade to coral, from coral to sapphire, from sapphire to amethyst. The snow peaks gleamed luminously, like sheeted ghosts, against the purple velvet of the sky. The night-breeze rose and I shivered. The steamer swung silently around a bend in the river and, all suddenly, the darkness ahead was sprinkled with a million blinking fireflies. At least they looked like fireflies.

“Portland!” shouted a raucous voice, far off somewhere, on the upper deck. “Portland! All ashore!”

I felt a hand upon my shoulder. It was the Lady.

“Where on earth have you been?” she asked. “We have been hunting for you everywhere.”

“I’ve been on a long journey,” said I.

XI

A FRONTIER ARCADY

“Oh, woods of the West, I am sighing to-day
For the sea songs your voices repeat,
For the evergreen glades, for the glades far away
From the stifling air of the street.

“And I long, ah, I long to be with you again,
And to dream in that region of rest,
Forever apart from this warring of men—
Oh, wonderful woods of the West.”

XI

A FRONTIER ARCADY

“_Arcady—the home of piping shepherds and coy shepherdesses, where rustic simplicity and plenty satisfied the ambition of untutored hearts and where ambition and its crimes were unknown._”

Some pamphlet writer with a gift for turning phrases has called Oregon “The Land That Lures.” And, so far as home and fortune seekers are concerned, it is. Whether it is the spirit of romance that our people have always associated with the great Northwest; whether it is the glamour of its booming rivers and its silent, axe-ripe forests or the appeal of its soft and balmy climate; or whether it is the extraordinary opportunities it offers for the acquirement of modest fortunes before one is too old to enjoy them, I do not know, but the undeniable fact remains that no region between the Portlands exercises so irresistible a fascination for the man who knows the trick of coaxing a fortune from the soil as this great, rich, hospitable, unfenced, forest-and-mountain-and-stream, meadow-and-orchard-and-home land that stretches from the Columbia south to the Siskiyous. It may be that California holds more attractions for the man who has already made his fortune, but certainly Oregon is the place to make the fortune in. No Western State is essentially less “Western” in the accepted sense of the term. This is due in part, no doubt, to the fact that it has been longer settled by Americans than any other portion of the Pacific Coast. Portland was a thriving city, remember, when St. Paul and Minneapolis were little more than trading-posts on the frontier. Settlers from the Atlantic seaboard and from the Middle West find themselves, upon reaching Oregon, in the midst of “home folks” and all the friendly, kindly, homely things that the term implies: ice-cream sociables and grange meetings and church picnics and literary societies and debating clubs and county fairs. The name of the State capital is inseparably associated with Puritan New England, one of its largest cities is named after the Massachusetts town which gave its name to rum, and I can show you a score of towns whose peaceful, elm-shaded streets and white-porticoed, red-brick houses might almost—but hot quite—deceive you into thinking that you are in Cooperstown, N. Y., or Newburyport, Mass., or Biddeford, Me. Almost, as I have said, but not quite, for all of these Oregonian towns, despite the staidness and sobriety of their appearance, are animated by an enthusiasm, an up-to-dateness, by an unshakable faith in their future, that is essentially a characteristic of the West.

The orthodox way of entering Oregon from the south is by way of Ashland, Medford, and Grant’s Pass, and so northward, through Roseburg and Eugene and Albany and Salem, to Portland. But, as I have related in the preceding chapter, we deliberately chose the back-stairs route, crossing the California-Oregon line at Klamath Lake and motoring northward, along the trail of the Lewis and Clark expedition, via Crater Lake and the valley of the Deschutes to The Dalles, and thence down the Columbia to Portland. We prided ourselves on having thus obtained an extraordinarily comprehensive idea of the State and its resources, not to mention having traversed a region which is quite inaccessible to the tourist unless he travels, as we did, by motor-car, but when we came to talk with some people from western Oregon we found that we didn’t know nearly as much about the State as we thought we did.

“How did you find the roads in the Willamette Valley?” inquired a friend with whom we were dining one night in Portland.

“We haven’t seen the Willamette Valley,” I explained. “You see, we came round the other way.”

“I suppose you’ve been down to Salem, though—nice city, Salem.”

“No,” I was forced to admit, “we haven’t been to Salem.”

“What did you think of the Marble Halls? Many people claim they’re finer than the Mammoth Cave.”

“The Marble Halls? Where are they? What are they? I never heard of them.”

“I suppose you had some fine fishing in the Grant’s Pass country. I hear that the trout are running big down there this season.”

“No, we didn’t come through Grant’s Pass.”

“Well, you surely don’t mean to tell me that you didn’t visit the Rogue River Valley—the apple-cellar of the world?”

“Sorry to say we didn’t.”

“Nor the valley of the Umpqua?”

“No.”

“Well,” after a long and painful pause, “what in the name of Heaven _have_ you seen?”

“I think,” said I, turning to the others, “that the thing for us to do is to turn the car south again and see Oregon. Else we shall never be able to hold up our heads and look an Oregonian in the eye. The thousand miles or so of the State that we’ve just come through apparently don’t count.”

Though I made the remark facetiously, it contained a good-sized germ of truth. Just now the back country of Oregon, the hinterland, as our Teutonic friends would call it, doesn’t count for very much. It is going to count tremendously, mind you, in the not far distant future, when the railroads now under construction have opened it up to civilisation and commerce and when it is settled by the European hordes that will pour into it through the gateway of Panama. As things stand at present, however, the wealth and prosperity of Oregon are concentrated in that comparatively narrow but incredibly fertile zone which lies between the sea and the mile-high mountain wall formed by the Cascades, and whose farms and orchards are watered by the Willamette, the Umpqua, and the Rogue.

It was one of those autumn days so characteristic of the Pacific Northwest, which seem to be a combination of an Italian June and a Devonshire September, when we slipped out of Portland’s rush and bustle and turmoil and turned our front tires toward the south and the open country. For a dozen miles or more our road, built high on the hill slope above the broad reaches of the lower Willamette, commanded as entrancing a vista of beautiful homes as I have ever seen. For six solid miles south of Portland the banks of the Willamette are bordered by country houses of shingle, stone, and stucco, rising from the most beautiful rose gardens this side of Persia (Portland, you know, is called “The City of Roses”) and with shaven lawns sweeping gently down, like unrolled carpets, to the river’s edge. Through gaps in the screen of shrubbery which lines the highway we caught fleeting glimpses, as we whirled past, of vine-covered garages housing shiny motor-cars, while along the river front were moored lean power-boats, every line of them bespeaking speed, for those who are fortunate enough—and wealthy enough—to own homes upon the Willamette are able to run in to their offices in the city either by road or river. Far in the distance the Fujiyama-like cone of Mount Saint Helens rose above the miles of intervening forest, and, farther to the southward, the hoary head of Mount Hood. About this portion of residential Portland which lies along the banks of the Willamette there is a suggestion of the Thames near Hampton Court, a hint of the Seine near Saint Cloud, a subtle reminder of those residences which have been built by the rich of Budapest along the Danube, but most of all it recalls Stockholm. This is due, I suppose, to the proximity of the forests which surround the city, to the snow-capped mountains which loom up behind them, and to the ever-present scent of balsam in the air.

It is fifty miles or thereabout from Portland to Salem, which is the capital of the State, and when the roads are dry you can leave one city after an early dinner and reach the other before the theatre curtains have gone up for the first act. After a rain, however, it is a different matter altogether, for the roads, which leave a great deal to be desired, are for the most part of red clay, and so slippery that a car, even with chains on all four wheels, slips and slides and staggers like a Scotchman going home after celebrating the birthday of Robert Burns. Salem is as pleasing to the eye as a certified cheque. It is asphalted and electric-lighted and landscaped to the very limit. Though the residential architecture of the city shows unmistakable traces of the influence of both Queen Anne and Mary Anne, their artistic deficiencies are more than counter-balanced by the pleasant, shady lawns and the broad, hospitable piazzas, which seem to say to the passer-by: “Come right up, friend, and sit down and make yourself to home.” That’s the most striking characteristic of the place—hospitality.

The gates of the State Fair were thrown open the same day that we arrived in Salem, though I do not wish to be understood as intimating that the two events bore any relation to each other. Now, a fair is generally a pretty reliable index to the agricultural condition of a region. The first thing that strikes the visitor upon entering the gates of a New England fair is the extraordinary number of ramshackle, mud-stained, “democrat” wagons lined up along the fence, the horses munching contentedly in their nose-bags. The first thing that struck me as we entered the grounds of the Oregon State Fair was the extraordinary number of shiny new automobiles. Save en route to a Vanderbilt Cup Race, I don’t recall ever having seen so many motor-cars on one stretch of road as we encountered on our way to the fair-grounds. They made a noise like the droning of a billion bumblebees. Though there was, of course, a preponderance of little cars, there were also any number of big six-cylinder seven-passenger machines, for your Oregonian is nothing if not up to the minute. Instead of jogging in from the farm in rattletrap wagons, they came tearing down the pike in shiny, spick-and-span automobiles; pa at the steering-wheel, hat on the back of his head and whiskers streaming, ma in her new bonnet sitting proudly beside him, and grandma and the youngsters filling up the tonneau. It did my heart good to see them. There is an intangible something about a motor-car that seems to give the most hidebound old farmer in the community a new lease of life. A year or so ago a weekly magazine published a picture of a group of cars at some rural gathering in the Northwest, and unwisely labelled it: “Where the old cars go to.” It elicited a wave of indignant letters from automobile dealers and automobile owners in that section of the country that made the editor feel as though he had stepped on a charged wire. That gentleman learned, at the cost of several cancelled subscriptions, that, wherever else the second-hand cars go, they certainly do not go to the Northwest, whose people might well take as their motto: “The best is none too good for us.”

Your Oregonian farmer, unlike his fellows in the older, colder States, 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.