Part 21

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.