Part 22
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
When white men in Africa make long desert journeys on camel-back, they follow the example of the Arabs and wind themselves tightly from chest to hips with bandages like those with which trainers wrap the legs of race-horses. This, to put it inelegantly but plainly, is done to prevent their bursting from the violent and sustained shaking to which they are subjected by the roughness of the camel’s gait. When I said good-bye to the Sudan, taking it for granted that I would have no further use for my spiral corselet in the presumably civilised country to which I was going, I left it behind me in Khartoum. How was I to know that I would need it far more than I ever had in Africa while journeying in so essentially Occidental a conveyance as a motor-car through a region where camels are confined to circuses and Turkish-rug advertisements? But long before we had traversed the forty atrocious miles which make the distance between Portland, Ore., and Kalama, Wash., seem more like four hundred, I would have given a good deal to have had my racked and aching body snugly wrapped in it again. I have had more than a speaking acquaintance with some roads so bad that they ought to have been in jail—in Asiatic Turkey and in Baja California and in other places—but to the Portland-Kalama road I present the red-white-and-blue championship ribbon. Roll down a rocky hillside in a barrel; climb into an electric churn and tell the dairyman to turn on the power; ride a bicycle across a railroad trestle and you will have had but the caviare course of the dinner of discomfort that was served to us. As, after five hours of this sort of thing, we bumped our way down a particularly vicious bit of hill road, every joint and bolt in the car squealing in agonised complaint, I saw a prosperous-looking farmer in his shirt-sleeves leaning comfortably over the front gate, interestedly watching our progress.
“St-t-t-op a m-m-m-inute,” I chattered to the chauffeur, as we jounced into the thank-ye-marms and rattled over the loose stones, “I w-w-want to t-t-t-t-ell this m-m-m-an-n-n w-what I think of the r-r-r-oad.”
As we drew up in front of the gate, the farmer, taking a straw out of his mouth, drawled:
“Say, stranger, you might like to know that you’ve just come over the most gol-damnedest piece of road north o’ Panama.”
So, unless the gentlemen who have the say in this portion of the State of Washington have repaired the road since we passed over it, I would advise those automobilists who are Seattle-bound to keep on the Oregon side of the Columbia as far as Goble (I think that is the name of the tiny hamlet), where they can put their car on a barge and hire the ferryman to tow them across the river to Kalama. This will cost them five dollars, but it’s worth it.
[Illustration: A road near the Columbia as it was.
A road near the Columbia as it is.
WHAT THE ROAD-BUILDERS HAVE DONE IN WASHINGTON.]
Were one to prejudge a country by the names of its villages and towns and counties he would form a peculiar conception of Washington, for I do not recall ever having heard anything quite so outlandish as the names which some one—the Siwash aborigine, presumably—has wished upon it. How would you like to get this sort of a reply to your question as to some one’s antecedents? “Me? Oh, I was born near Wahkiacus, down in Klickitat County, and I met my wife, whose folks live up Snohomish way, in Walla Walla, and later on we moved to Puyallup, but I’ve a sort of notion of goin’ into the cannery business at Skamokawa, over in Wahkiakum County, though the wife, she’s been a-pesterin’ me to buy an apple orchard up in the Okanogan.” Still, it’s more interesting to motor through a country like that, always wondering what bizarre, heathenish name is going to turn up next, than to tour through a region sprinkled with Simpson’s Centres and Cranberry Crossroads and New Carthages and Hickory Hollows until you feel as though you were an actor in “The Old Homestead.”
Throughout our trip through Washington we were caused untold annoyance, and in several instances were compelled to travel many weary and needless miles, because of the wanton destruction of the sign-posts by amateur marksmen. Up in that country every boy gets a gun with his first pair of pants, and, when there is nothing else to shoot, he makes a target of the enamelled guide-posts which have been erected for the benefit of tourists. More than once, coming to a crossroads in the forest, we found these placards so riddled with bullets that we were compelled to guess which road to take—and we usually guessed wrong. “I wish to goodness,” said my friend in exasperation, after we had gone half a dozen miles out of our way on one of these occasions, “that they would declare a close season on sign-posts, just as they have on elk, and then give the man the limit who is caught shooting them.”
It would be a grave injustice to place undue emphasis upon the crudities and inconveniences which annoy the traveller in certain portions of Washington, for, when you get down to bed-rock facts, its farmers are still wrestling with the wilderness—and in most instances they have had to put up a desperate resistance to keep the wilderness from shoving them off the mat. We passed through many a community, far removed from the railway (for the railway builders have done little more than nibble at the crust of the Washington pie) where the people were living under conditions almost identical with those which confronted the Pilgrim settlers of New England. Many a farmstead that we passed was chopped out of the virgin forest, the house being built from the trees that had grown upon its site. Cleared land, as an Eastern or Middle Western farmer knows the term, seemed almost non-existent. Black and massive stumps rose everywhere, like gravestones to the dead forest. “There’s so danged many stumps in this country,” one of these pioneer farmers remarked, “that sometimes I think that the Lord never intended for it to be cleared at all.” The problem of getting rid of these stumps is one of the most perplexing with which the Northwestern farmer has to contend, the expense of clearing land averaging in the neighbourhood of seventy-five dollars an acre. So inimical to colonisation has the question of land clearing become, indeed, that the State has found it necessary to step in and finance the stump-pullers in districts established in accordance with recent legislation. Though Washington is a country of hustle and hard work, no one who spends any length of time in it can fail to be impressed with the belief that it has a promising future. The climate is, as a whole, attractive. Though the cold is never extreme, the climate does not lack vigour, and, as a result of the Oregon mists, there is plenty of moisture. “We call ’em Oregon mists,” a farmer explained to me, “because they missed Oregon and hit here.” They are really more of a fog than a rain, and no one pays the slightest attention to them, even the womenfolk scorning to use umbrellas. These mists, taken with the verdancy of the vegetation and the pink-and-white complexions of the women, constantly reminded me of Ireland and the south of England. In striking contrast to the _arroyos secos_ to which we became accustomed in many parts of California are the streams of Washington, which flow throughout the year, enough water-power going to waste annually to run a plant that would supply the nation.
As the Pacific Highway goes, it is close to a hundred and fifty miles from Portland to Tacoma, but we made a slight detour so as to see Olympia, which is the capital of the State. Beyond its rococo State-house, which is surmounted by a statue of a female—it might be Justice and it might be Mrs. Pankhurst in her peignoir—there is nothing to distinguish Olympia from any one of a score of other pretty little towns whose back doors open onto the primeval forest. Because there was a moon in the heavens as big and yellow as a Stilton cheese, we decided to push on to Tacoma, which is thirty miles from Olympia, that night. I’ll not soon forget the beauty of that ride. With our engines purring like a contented cat we boomed down the radiant path that our headlights cut out of the darkness; the night air, charged with balsamic fragrance, beat in our faces; the black walls of the forest rose skyward on either hand, the tree tops bordering with ghostly hedges a star-sprinkled lane of sky. I wish you might have been there ... it was so enchanting and mysterious.