By George Palmer Putnam
The Southland of North America
(See Announcement at Back of this Volume)
The Columbia River Valley and Mount Adams
Copyright, Gifford, Portland, Ore.
In the
Oregon Country
Out-Doors in Oregon, Washington, and California
Together with some Legendary Lore, and
Glimpses of the Modern West in
The Making
By
George Palmer Putnam
Author of " The Southland of North America " etc
With an Introduction by
James Withycombe
Governor of Oregon
With 52 Illustrations
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
Zbc "Knickerbocker press
1915
f$
Copyright, 1915
BY
GEORGE PALMER PUTNAM
"Ctx "fcnicfccrbocfccv press, flew Ipotfc
S)eolcateo to
THE EMBLEM CLUB
RO/lfiRQ
INTRODUCTION
HEN one has lived in Oregon for
forty-three years, and when one's
enthusiasm for his home increases
year after year, naturally all that
is said of that home is of the most vital interest.
Especially is it acceptable if it is the outgrowth
of a similar enthusiasm, and if it is well said.
For a considerable span of time I have been
reading what others have written about the Pacific
Coast. In the general western literature, it has
seemed to me, Oregon has never received its
merited share of consideration. Just now, with
the Expositions in California attracting a world-
wide interest westward, and with the Panama
Canal giving our development a new impetus, it
is especially appropriate that Oregon receive added
literary attention. And it is reasonable to suppose
that the stranger within our gates will find interest
in such literature, provided it be of the right sort,
just as Oregonians must welcome a sound addition
vi INTRODUCTION
to the State's bibliography, written by an
Oregonian.
So, because I like the spirit of the following
pages, admire the method of their presentation,
and deeply desire to promote the success of all that
will tend toward a larger appreciation of Oregon's
possibilities, I recommend this book to the con-
sideration of dwellers on the Pacific Coast, and
those who desire to form acquaintance with the
land it concerns.
Governor of Oregon.
Salem, Oregon,
January 20th , 191 5.
PREFACE
FTEN enough a preface is an out-
growth of disguised pretentiousness
or insincere humility. Presumably
it is an apology for the authorship,
or at least an explanation of the purpose of the
pages it introduces.
But no one is compelled to write a book; and,
in truth, publishers habitually exert a contrary
influence. It is a fair supposition, therefore,
when a book is produced, that the author has some
good reason for his act, whether or not the book
itself proves to be of service.
Among many plausible apologies for author-
ship, the most reasonable is, it seems to me, a
genuine enthusiasm for the subject at hand. If
one loves that with which the book has to do the
desire to share the possession with readers ap-
proaches altruism. In this case let us hope that
the enthusiasm, which is real, and the virtue,
which is implied, will sufficiently cloak the many
faults of these little sketches, whose mission it is
vu
VU1
PREFACE
to convey something of the spirit of the out-of-
door land they picture — a land loved by those who
know it, and a land of limitless welcome for the
stranger who will knock at its gates.
The Oregon Country, with which these chapters
are chiefly concerned, has been the goal of expedi-
tioning for a century and a quarter. First came
Captain Robert Gray in 1792, by sea. Meri-
wether Lewis and William Clark, twelve years
later, tracked 'cross country from the Missouri
to the mouth of the Columbia. In 18 10, the
Astor expedition, under Wilson and Hunt, suc-
ceeded, after hardships that materially reduced
the party, in making its way from St. Louis to the
Columbia and down the river to the mouth, where
was founded the town of Astoria. Finally, after
a half -century of horse-and-wagon pioneering, the
first railroads spanned the continent in 1869. But
the Union Pacific and Central Pacific were more
the concern of California than of Oregon, for the
Northwest had no iron trail to link it with the
parent East until in 1883 the Northern Pacific
Railway, under the leadership of Henry Villard,
reached Portland.
So Oregon was discovered by sea and land, and
PREFACE ix
finally, as highways of steel replaced the dusty
trails of the emigrants, she has come into her own.
From within and without she has builded, and
what she has done for her sons, and offers to her
settlers, has established a place for her in the
respectful attention of the world.
Now, in the year nineteen hundred and fifteen,
a new era is dawning for Oregon and for all our
Western Coast, through fresh enterprise, this
time again by sea. The waters of the Atlantic
and Pacific have been joined at Panama, our
continental coast line, to all intents and purposes,
being made continuous, and the two Portlands, of
Oregon and Maine, become maritime neighbors.
Our East and our West have clasped hands again
at the Isthmus, and comparative strangers as they
are, there is need for an introduction when they
meet.
Not strangers, perhaps; better brothers long
separated, each unfamiliar with the attainments
and the developed character of the other. The
younger brother, the Westerner, has from the very
nature of things changed most. His growth, in
body, mind, and experience, is at times difficult
for the Easterner to fathom. A generation ago,
PREFACE
he was such an immature fellow, so lacking in
poise, in accomplishments, and even in certain of
those characteristics which comprise what the
East chooses to consider civilization; and his
country, compared with what it is to-day, was so
crudely developed.
The Easterner this year is the one who is com-
ing to his brother of the West, because of the Canal,
the Expositions celebrating its completion, and
an immediate inclination to "see America first"
impressed upon our public for the most part by
the present war-madness of Europe.
It would be rank presumption for any one person
to pretend to speak a word of explanation to that
visitor on behalf of the Coast. As a fact, no
explanation is required; the States of the Pacific
are their own explanation, and their people must
be known by their works. Secondly, the Coast
is such a vast territory that what might be a
reasonably intelligent introduction to one portion
of it would be utterly inapplicable elsewhere.
So this little book does not undertake to present
a comprehensive account of our westernmost
States, or even of the Oregon Country. It is
intended simply to suggest a few of the many
PREFACE xi
attractions which may be encountered here and
there along the Pacific, the references to which are
woven together with threads of personal reminis-
cence pertaining to characteristic phases of the
western life of to-day. For the stranger it may
possess some measure of information ; it should at
least induce him to tarry in the region sufficiently
long to secure an impression of the byways as
well as of the highways. For the man to whom
Oregon, California, or Washington stands for home,
these pages may contain an echo of interest — for
we are apt to enjoy most sympathetic accounts of
the things we love best. But for visitor or resident/
or one who reads of a country he may not see, the
chief mission of these chapters is to chronicle
something of their author's enthusiasm for the
land they concern, to hint of the pleasurable
possibilities of its out-of-doors, and, mayhap, to
offer a glimpse of the new West of to-day in the
preparation for its greater to-morrow.
G. P. P.
Bend, Oregon,
December 25, 1914.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Some of the material in this book has been
printed in substantially the same form in Recrea-
tion whose Editor has kindly sanctioned its further
utilization here.
For the use of many photographs I am indebted
to the courtesy of officials of the Oregon-Washing-
ton, and Spokane, Portland and Seattle railways.
G. P. P.
xiii
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. — "out west"
II. — THE VALLEY OF CONTENT
III. — THE LAND OF LEGENDS .
IV. — THE LAND OF MANY LEAGUES
V. — HOW THE RAILROADS CAME
VI. — THE HOME MAKERS
VII. — ON OREGON TRAILS
VIII. — UNCLE SAM'S FORESTS .
IX. — A CANOE ON THE DESCHUTES
X. — OLYMPUS .
XI. — "THE GOD MOUNTAIN OF
SOUND"
XII. — A SUMMER IN THE SIERRAS
PUGET
PAGE
I
9
19
37
54
64
76
90
105
116
130
153
XV
ILLUSTRATIONS
}'A(iK
The Columbia River Valley and Mount
Adams Frontispiece
Copyright, Gifford, Portland, Ore.
"The Man from Boise Describes God's
Country in Terms of Sagebrush and
Brown Plains" 2
"The Palouse Dweller Pictures Wheat
Fields." The Grain Country of Eastern
Washington 2
From a photograph by Frank Palmer, Spokane,
Wash.
A Western Mountaineering Club on the
Hike 6
From a photograph by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.
Along the Willamette . . . .12
Mount Shasta . . . . . .12
From a photograph by Weister Co., Portland, Ore.
Mount Hood from Lost Lake . . .20
Copyrighted photo by W. A. Raymond, Moro, Ore.
Natives Spearing Salmon on the Columbia . 22
Copyright 1901 by Benj. A. Gifford, The Dalles, Ore.
xviii ' ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Coasting on Mount Hood .... 22
From a photograph by Weister Co., Portland, Ore.
The Pacific 24
Copyright 1910 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.
Along the Columbia. "Grotesque Rocks
Rise Sheer from the River's Edge" . 24
Copyright 1910 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.
Celilo Falls on the Columbia . . .28
Copyright 1902 by Benj. A. Gifford, The Dalles, Ore.
The North Abutment of the Bridge of the
Gods 28
Copyright 1902 by Benj. A. Gifford, The Dalles, Ore.
Where the Oregon Trunk Railway Crosses
the Columbia. "The River Rolls be-
tween Banks of Barrenness" . . . 30
Copyright 1912 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.
Columbia River. The Land of Indian
Legends ....... 30
Copyright 1909 by Benj. A. Gifford, The Dalles, Ore.
The Dalles of the Columbia ... 32
From a photograph by Weister Co., Portland, Ore.
Along the Columbia River. "A Region of
Surpassing Scenery " . . . .34
Copyright 1912 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.
Central Oregon Travel in the Old Days . 38
ILLUSTRATIONS xix
PAGE
A Central Oregon Freighter. "You will
Find them everywhere in the Railless
Land, the Freighters and their Teams " . 38
In the Dry-Farm Lands of Central Oregon.
"Serried by Valleys, where the Gold of
Sun and Grain, and Vagrant Cloud
Shadows, Made Gorgeous Picturings" 42
Crooked River Canyon, now Spanned by a
Railroad Bridge ..... 56
In the Deschutes Canyon. "The River
Winds Sinuously, Seeking First One, and
then Another, Point of the Compass" . 56
Copyright 191 1 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.
Along the Canyon of the Deschutes . . 62
Copyright 191 1 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.
Irrigation — "First, Parched Lands of Sage;
then the Flow" ..... 68
Series Copyright 1909 by Asahel Curtis
Irrigation — "Next, Water in a Master
Ditch and Countless Man-made Rivulets
between the Furrows" .... 68
"It Was a very Typical Stagecoach" . 70
In the Homestead Country ... 70
A Valley of Washington. "The Big West-
iLAND Smiles and Receives them All " . 74
From a photograph by Frank Palmer, Spokane, Wash.
xx ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
A Trailside Dip in a Mountain Lake . 78
" Sliding down Snow-fields Is Fun, though
Chilly" 78
On the Trail in the Highlands of the
Cascades ...... 80
"A Sky Blue Lake Set like a Sapphire in
an Emerald Mount" .... 80
The Trails Are not all Dry-Shod . . 84
" Our Trail Wound beneath a Fairy Forest" 84
An Oregon Trail 86
From a photograph by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.
"Packing Up" at a Deserted Ranger
Station 96
Using the Forest Fire Telephone at a
Ranger Station . .... 96
An Oregon Trout Stream . . . .100
From a photograph by Raymond, Moro, Ore.
Canoeing and Duck Shooting may be
Combined on the Deschutes . .108
On a Backwater of the Deschutes . .108
Along the Deschutes, the " River of Falls."
"It Roars and Rushes, in White-watered
Cascades" . . . . . .112
Copyright 191 1 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.
ILLUSTRATIONS xxi
PAGE
"Canoeing is the most Satisfactory Method
of Travel Extant " 118
The Pack Train above Timber Line . .118
From a photo by Belmore Browne
"The Humes Glacier, over which we Went
to Mount Olympus" .... 128
"Our Nature-made Camp in Elwha Basin" . 128
The " God Mountain " of Puget Sound . 132
Copyright 1910 by L. G. Linkletter
"The Live Oaks of Berkeley's Campus" . 156
From a photograph by Wells Drury, Berkeley, Cal.
Looking across the Clouds to Mount
Adams from the Flanks of Rainier . 156
Copyright 1909 by L. G. Linkletter
"We Gloried in the Sheer Mightiness of
El Capitan " 158
"A Vast Flower Garden Maintained En-
ticingly by Dame Nature" . 160
Copyright 19 1 2 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.
Light and Shadow in Yosemite . . .160
Sunrise at Hetch-Hetchy . . . .164
The Government Road that Leads to
Mount Rainier . . . . .164
In the Oregon Country
CHAPTER I
"Out West"
|HAT is the most pronounced dif-
erence between East and West?"
A Bostonian once asked me
that. I was East after a year
or two of westerning, and he seemed to think
it would be easy enough to answer off-hand.
But for the life of me I could find no fit reply.
For a time that is — and then it struck me.
"Everyone is proud of everything out West,"
said I. "Local patriotism is a religion — if you
know what I mean."
You who have lived on the Pacific Slope will
understand. You who have visited the Pacific
Slope will half -understand. Did you ever hear of
a New Jersey man fighting because his town was
OUT WEST
maligned? You never did! Have you yet en-
countered a York State small-town dweller who
would devote hours to proving that his community
was destined to outdistance all its neighbors be-
cause God had been especially good to it — and
ready to back his boast to the limit ? No indeed !
Yet most of us have seen Westerners actually come
to blows protecting the fair name of their chosen
town, and I know scores of them who can, and
will, on the slightest provocation, demonstrate
that their particular Prosperity Center is the
coming city of destiny.
In short every Westerner is inordinately proud of
his town and his country. On trains you hear it,
in hotel lobbies, on street corners. The stranger
seated at your side in the smoking compartment
regales you with descriptions of his particular
"God's Country/' If ever there was an over-
worked phrase west of the Missouri, it is that, and
the inventor of a fitting synonym should reap
royal rewards, in travelers' gratitude if nothing
else. The man from Boise describes " God's
Country" in terms of sagebrush and brown plains;
the Palouse dweller pictures wheat fields, men-
tioning not wind storms and feverish summer
"The Palouse dweller pictures wheat fields." The grain country of
eastern Washington
From a photograph by Frank Palmer, Spokane. Wash.
The man from Boise describes God's country in terms of sagebrush and
"OUT WEST
mercury; the Calif ornian sees his poppy-golden
hills; the eyes of the Puget Sound dweller are
bright with memories of majestic timber and
broad waterways, unclouded by any mention of
gray rain; the man from Bend talks of rushing
rivers and copper-hued pines, his enthusiasm for
the homeland unalloyed by reference to summer
dusts; the orchard owner of Hood River or Wen-
atchee has his heaven lined with ruddy apples,
and discourses amazing figures concerning ever-
increasing world market for the product of his
acres; he who hails from the Coast cities, whose
all-pervading passion is optimism, weaves con-
vincing prophecies of the golden future. And so
it goes. Each for his own, each an enthusiast,
a loyal patriot, a rabid disciple. Eastern travel
acquaintances produce the latest photograph of
, their youngest offspring, but the Westerner brings
forth views and plats of his home town ; no children
of his own flesh are more beloved.
Yes, truly, it is a bore. The thing is overdone.
There is too much of it. And yet — well, it is
the very spirit of the West, a natural expression
of the pride of creation, for these men of to-day
are creating homes and towns, and doing it un-
OUT WEST"
der fiercely competitive conditions. They have
builded upon their judgment and staked their
all upon the throw of fortune. They are pleased
with their accomplishments and vastly de-
termined to bend the future to their ends.
It is arrogance, no doubt, but healthy and
happy, and the very essence of youthful ac-
complishment. And its very insistency and
sincerity spell success, and are invigorating to
boot.
The old differences between East and West are
no more, of course. Except for a trifle more in-
formality under the setting sun, clothes and their
wearing are the same. The Queen's English is
butchered no more distressingly in California than
in Connecticut. Proportionately to resources,
educational opportunities are identical. Music
and the arts are no longer strangers where blow
Pacific breezes, nor have they been for decades.
The West is wild and woolly no more, railroads
have replaced stagecoaches, fences bisect the
ranges, free land is almost a thing of the past.
Yet, withal, existence for the peoples of the two
borders of our continent is not cast in an identical
mold.
-OUT WEST
"Back East" residents are apt to regard the
West as a land of curiosities, human and natural.
"Out West " dwellers are inclined to be supercilious
when they mention the ways of the Atlantic sea-
board.
All statements to the contrary notwithstanding,
East is East, and West is West, no matter how
fluently they mingle. The difference between
them is not to be defined by conversational
metes and bounds. It is not merely of miles, of
scenery, or of manners, or even of enthusiasm. It
is, in fact, quite intangible, and yet it exists, as
anyone who has dwelt upon both sides of our
continent realizes. Aside from the trivialities —
which are wrapt up in such words as "culture,"
"custom," "precedent," and the like — the fun-
damental, explanatory reason for the intangible
differences is one of years. Most of the West is
buoyantly youthful, some of it blatantly boyish.
Much of the East is in the prime of middle
age, some of it senile. Naturally the East is
inclined to conservative pessimism — an attribute
of advancing years — and the West to impulsive
optimism.
Do not foster the notion that the term ' ' extreme"
"OUT WEST"
West really applies, for it doesn't. The West, as
I have seen it, is too nervous, socially speaking,
to dare extremes. It is too inexperienced to
essay experiments, too desirous of doing the correct
thing. While it wouldn't for the world admit the
fact, socially it is quite content to keep its intel-
ligent eyes on the examples set back East, and
even then its replica of what it sees is apt to be a
modified one.
If this bashfulness holds good socially, it em-
phatically does not commercially. For in things
economic there is far more dash and daring, and
bigness of conception and rapidity of realization
in Western business affairs than in those of the
East. Opportunity is knocking on every hand,
and those who think and act most quickly become
her lucky hosts. The countries of the West are
upbuilding with a rapidity for the most part in-
conceivable to Europe-traveled Easterners, and
affairs move at a lively pace, so that the laggards
are left behind and only the able-bodied can keep
abreast of the progress. And with all the dangers
of the happy-go-lucky methods, the pitfalls of
the inherent gambling that lies beneath the surface
of much of it, Western business life undoubtedly
3 -o
§ £
I <5:
« o
a £
•C o*
8 3
6 2
e *
4) O
*■* .e
w -
* H
-< 2
"OUT WEST
offers the favored field for the young man of
to-day who has, in addition to the normal
commercial attributes, the ability to keep his
head.
Greeley's advice was never sounder than to-
day; revised, it should read: "Come West, young
man, and help the country grow."
The start has just been made. Perhaps
the days of strident booms are over (let us
trust so), and it may be that the bonanza
opportunities are for the most part buried in
the past, together with the first advent of the
railroads, the discoveries of gold, and the ex-
ploitation of agriculture, which gave them birth.
But the West is getting her second wind. The
greater development is yet to come; the Pan-
ama Canal, with quickened immigration, manu-
facturing, and a more thorough-going cultivation
of resources than ever in the past, spell that.
What has gone before is trivial and incon-
sequential in comparison with what is to come.
Pioneering is along different lines than in the
old days, but it still is pioneering, and the
call of it is as insistent for ears properly
tuned.
OUT WEST "
I hear the tread of pioneers
Of cities yet to be,
The first low wash of waves where soon
Will roll a human sea.
The waves have wet the shores, but their true
advance has scarce begun.
CHAPTER II
The Valley of Content
REGON— the old Oregon Territory
of yesterday and the State of to-day
— is our very own. It was neither
bought, borrowed, nor stolen from
another nation. It is of the United States be-
cause our fathers came here first, carved out homes
from the wilderness, and unfurled their flag over-
head; through the most fundamental of rights —
that of discovery, coupled with possession and
development.
The New England States we inherited from
Britain, although the will was sorely contested.
For Louisiana we paid a price. Texas and Cali-
fornia we annexed from Mexico, and purchased
New Mexico and Arizona. Alaska was bought
from Russia for a song. Alone of all the United
States the old Oregon Territory became ours by
normal acquisition.
Thence, perhaps, is the compelling attraction
9
io THE VALLEY OF CONTENT
for the native-born of Oregon to-day. Mayhap
a touch of historic romance clings about the coun-
try ; or it may be simply the feeling of bigness, the
broad expansiveness of the views, the mightiness
of mountains, the splendor of the trees, and the
air's crisp vitality that make Oregon life so worth
while.
Whatever the explanation, it is assuredly a
pleasant place in which to live, this land of Oregon,
and the transplanted Easterner cannot but be
conscious of its attractions, just as he is of the
myriad delights of the entire Coast country. A
land of delight it is, from Puget Sound to the
riviera of California, from the snow mountains
to the sagebrush plains, where rose the dust of
immigrants' " prairie schooners" not so many
years ago.
The guardian of Oregon's southern gateway is
Shasta, and close beside its gleaming flanks rolls
the modern trail of steel whereon the wayfarer
from San Francisco passes over the Siskiyous into
the valleys of the Rogue and the Umpqua.
Shasta displays its attractions surpassingly well.
An appreciative nature placed this great white
THE VALLEY OE CONTENT u
gem in a wondrously appropriate setting of broken
foothills and timbered reaches that billow upward
to the snow line from the south and west, with
never a petty rival to break the calm dominance
of the master peak, and nothing to mar the sym-
metry of the cool green woodlands. For Shasta
stands alone, and from its isolation is doubly
impressive. One sees it all at once, as the train
clambers up the grades towards Oregon, not a
mere peak among many of a range, but an individ-
ual cone, neighborless and inspiring. Shasta has a
volcanic history, and but a few hundred years ago
bestirred itself titanically, casting forth balls of
molten lava which to-day are encountered for
scores of miles roundabout, weird testimonials
to the latent strength now seemingly so reposeful
beneath the calm crust of the earth.
Up and still up, into the timbered mountains,
you are borne, until the very heart of the tousled
Siskiyous is about you. Then all at once the
divide lies behind and with one locomotive instead
of several the train swings downward and north-
ward into Oregon, winding interminably, and
twisting and looping along hillsides and about the
heads of little streams, which grow into goodly
12 THE VALLEY OF CONTENT
rivers as you follow them. Slowly the serried
mountains iron out into gentler slopes dimpled with
meadows, and here and there are homes and culti-
vated fields, and steepish roads of many ruts.
Then the rushing Rogue River is companion for
a space, and orchards and towns dot the wayside.
More rough country follows, the Rogue and the
Umpqua are left behind in turn, and the rails
bear you to the regions of the Willamette.
A broad valley, rich, prosperous, and beautiful
to look upon, is the Willamette, and a valley of
many moods. Neither in scenic charms nor agri-
cultural resourcefulness is its heritage restricted
to a single field. There are timberland and trout
stream, hill and dale, valley and mountain; rural
beauty of calm Suffolk is neighbor to the ragged
picturesqueness of Scotland; there are skylines
comparable with Norway's, and lowlands peaceful
as Sweden's pastoral vistas; the giant timber, or
their relic stumps, at some pasture edge, spell
wilderness, while a happy, alder-lined brook
flowing through a bowlder-dotted field is remi-
niscent of the uplands of Connecticut. Altogether,
it is a rarely variegated viewland, is this vale
of the Willamette.
•
Along the Willamette
Mount Shasta
Prom a photograph by Weister Co., Portland, Ore.
THE VALLEY OF CONTENT 13
Ycu have seen valleys which were vast wheat
fields, or where orchards were everywhere; in
California and abroad you have viewed valleys
dedicated to vineyards, and from mountain van-
tage points you have feasted your eyes upon the
greenery of timberland expanses; all the world
over you can spy out valleys dotted with an un-
varied checkerboard of gardens, or green with
pasture lands. But where have you seen a valley
where all of this is mingled, where nature refuses
to be a specialist and man appears a Jack of all
outdoor trades? If by chance you have jour-
neyed from Medford to Portland, with some
excursioning from the beaten paths through
Oregon's valley of content, you have viewed
such a one.
For nature has staged a lavish repertoire along
the Willamette. There are fields of grain and
fields of potatoes; hop yards and vineyards stand
side by side ; emerald pastures border brown corn-
fields; forests of primeval timber shadow market
garden patches; natty orchards of apples, peaches,
and plums are neighbors to waving expanses of
beet tops. In short, as you whirl through the
valley, conjure up some antithesis of vegetation
14 THE VALLEY OF CONTENT
and you must wait but a scanty mile or two before
viewing it from the observation car.
As first I journeyed through this pleasant land
of the Willamette, a little book, written just half
a century ago, fell into my hands, and these words
concerning the valley, read then, offered a descrip-
tion whose peer I have not yet encountered:
The sweet Arcadian valley of the Willamette,
charming with meadow, park, and grove ! In no older
world where men have, in all their happiest moods,
recreated themselves for generations in taming earth
to orderly beauty, have they achieved a fairer garden
than Nature's simple labor of love has made there,
giving to rough pioneers the blessings and the possible
education of refined and finished landscape, in the
presence of landscape strong, savage, and majestic.
Then Portland. Portland, the city of roses and
the metropolitan heart of Oregon, stands close to
where the Willamette, the river of our valley of
content, meanders into the greater Columbia.
Were this a guidebook I might inundate you with
figures of population, bank clearings, and land
values, all of them risen and still rising in bounds
almost beyond belief. I might narrate incidents
THE YALLEY OF CONTENT 15
of the city's building — how stumps stood a half
dozen years ago where such and such a million
dollar hostelry now rises, or how so-and-so ex-
changed a sack of flour for lots whose value to-day
is reckoned in six figures. But these are matters
of business, and business was divorced years ago
from the simple pleasures of the out-of-doors.
Portland is a city of prosperity. That fact
strikes home to the most casual observer. Blessed
above all else — especially in the eyes of an East-
erner— is its freedom from poverty. There are no
slums, no "lower east side" like New York's
rabbit warrens, no Whitechapel hell holes. It is
a clean, youthful city, delightfully located on
either side of its river and rising on surrounding
hills of rare beauty. Its metropolitan maturity,
indeed, is all the more remarkable for its youth,
as seventy years ago the site of the town was a
howling wilderness, set in the midst of a territory
peopled at best by a few score whites.
It was in 1845 that the first settler, Overton
by name, made his home where now is Portland.
Close after him came Captain John H. Couch, who
located a donation land claim where is now the
northern portion of the city. And from that be-
16 THE VALLEY OF CONTENT
ginning gradually grew the city of to-day which
in the California gold rush of the early fifties
received her first notable impetus through her
position as a commanding supply point for the
fast-crowding and lavishly opulent sister State to
the south.
Born at the hands of pioneers and weaned with
the gold of California, the city was sturdily
founded, and to-day the strength of the pioneer
blood and the glow of the golden beginnings are still
upon her.
The fairest of fair Portland is seen from her show
hilltop, Council Crest. The days are not all
sunny, but when they are and neither "Oregon
mist" — which is a local humor for downright rain
— nor clouds obscure the outlook, the easterly
skyline from Council Crest is a superbly pleasing
introduction to the State. Over the mists of the
lowlands you see Mount Hood, and to have seen
Mount Hood, even from afar, is to have tasted the
rarest visual delight of all the Northwest land.
Shasta, to the south, was an imposing welcomer
to the empire of surpassing views, but Hood out-
does Shasta and its snow-crowned neighbors of the
old Oregon country as completely as the pinnacles
THE VALLEY OF CONTENT i7
of Switzerland overshadow their lesser companions
of the Italian Alps. Hood, somehow, breathes
the very spirit of the State it stands for; its charm
is the essence of the beauty of its surroundings,
its stateliness the keynote of the strength of the
sturdy West. It is a white, chaste monument of
hope, radiantly setting for its peoples roundabout
a mark of high attainment.
A city of destiny its friends call Portland, and
a mountain of destiny surely is Hood — its destiny
to diffuse something of the spirit of healthful
happiness and fuller ideals for those, at least, who
will take time from the busy rush of their multi-
plying prosperity.
And here again, on Council Crest, I venture to
turn back to i860; venture at least again to quote
from the literary heritage of Theodore Winthrop,
who saw Oregon's mountains then and wrote of
them and their influences these lines :
Our race has never yet come into contact with great
mountains as companions of daily life, nor felt that
daily development of the finer and more comprehen-
sive senses which these signal facts of nature compel.
That is an influence of the future. The Oregon people,
in a climate where being is bliss, — where every breath
is a draught of vivid life, — these Oregon people,
18 THE VALLEY OF CONTENT
carrying to a new and grander New England of the
West a fuller growth of the American Idea, under
whose teaching the man of lowest ambitions must still
have some little indestructible respect for himself,
and the brute of most tyrannical aspirations some
little respect for others; carrying there a religion two
centuries farther on than the crude and cruel Hebraism
of the Puritans; carrying the civilization of history
where it will not suffer by the example of Europe, —
with such material, that Western society, when it
crystallizes, will elaborate new systems of thought
and life. It is unphilosophical to suppose that a
strong race, developing under the best, largest, and
calmest conditions of nature, will not achieve a
destiny.
Be that as it may, no man, seeing Hood from
Portland for the first time, could but experience
a longing to answer the call of the beckoning
mountain, and to find for himself the secrets of
the land that lies beyond it. And so Hood was
the piper which called us to the hinterland of Ore-
gon, where, quite by chance, we stayed, until now
we find we are Oregonians, by adoption and by
choice.
CHAPTER III
The Land of Legends
;HE nomenclature of the Northwest
suffered at the hands of its English-
speaking discoverers, for much that
was fair to the ear in the Indian
names has been replaced with dreary common-
places, possessing neither beauty nor special
fitness.
Two Yankee sea captains tossed a coin to decide
whether they would name the city Portland or Bos-
ton. The Boston skipper lost, and " Multnomah/'
which was the old Indian name for the place and
means "Down the Waters," became prosaic
Portland. Because some Methodist missionaries
preferred a name with a Biblical twang to the
Indian "Chemeketa," meaning the "Place of
Peace," Oregon's capital of to-day became Salem
and the title which the red men gave their council
ground was abandoned.
The Great River was first known as the Oregon,
19
20 THE LAND OF LEGENDS
just why no authority seems to tell us reliably
but later became the Columbia when the ship
of that name sailed across its bar. Jonathan
Carver's choice in names, however, if no longer
bestowed upon the river, soon became that of all
its lower regions, and they acquired the lasting
title of the Oregon Country.
The old Oregon, the Columbia of to-day, was
the gateway to the Pacific for the explorers and
the immigrants of yesterday. For Lewis and
Clark it opened a friendly passageway through the
mountain ranges, and likewise for the human
stream of immigration which later followed its
banks from the East. So is it too a modern portal
of prosperity for Portland, as this greatest river
of the West concentrates the tonnage of much of
three vast states by water grades at Portland's
door, and two transcontinental railroads follow
its banks, draining the wealth of the Inland
Empire while enriching it, just as the river itself
physically drains and adds wealth to the territory
it traverses.
To us the Columbia was a gateway to the
hinterland, for our pilgrimage upon it was easterly,
up into the land of sunshine beyond Mount Hood
n
THE LAND OF LEGENDS 21
and the Cascade mountain range, starting, on an
impulse, after viewing the snow-covered barriers
from the heights of Portland. And as we jour-
neyed easterly up the great river, whose water
came from lakes of the Canadian Rockies distant
fourteen hundred miles, we found ourselves at
once in a region of surpassing scenery and a land
of quaint Indian legends.
A great wall of mountains shuts off the coastal
regions from eastern Oregon and Washington.
The two divisions are as dissimilar in climate
and vegetation as night and day. To the west is
rain and lush growth ; to the east, drought and semi-
arid desert. West of the Cascades are fir forests
cluttered with underbrush and soggy with springs,
while east are dry pine lands, park-like in their
open beauty. The high plains of the hinterland
are yellow grain fields chiefly, and irrigation is
the right hand of agriculture; in the Willamette
Valley, nature brings forth all things in a revel of
productivity.
The Columbia cleaves this great wall asunder,
breaking through the mountains in a gorge some
three thousand feet deep. Here was the mythical
bridge of the gods, which, legend narrates, once
22 THE LAND OF LEGENDS
spanned the river from one mountainous bank to
the other until ultimately it fell and dammed the
stream. You come upon the site of the legendary
bridge where Government locks now circum-
navigate the cascades, a fall in the river of won-
drous beauty, hemmed in on north and south by
timbered mountains. Sunken forests hereabout
indicate that at one time the river's course was
checked by some great dam or volcanic convulsion,
and every evidence in the geological surroundings
points to stupendous natural cataclysms which
distorted the face of nature leaving the sublime
formations of the present.
As the train or boat bound up the Columbia
progresses through this weird portal, fortunate
you are if told the myths of this region which so
truly is a land of legends, as we were ; of the mythi-
cal struggle between Mount Hood on the south
and Mount Adams on the north, in whose progress
Hood hurled a vast bowlder at his adversary which
fell short of its intended mark, destroying the
bridge; of the quaint fire legend of the Klickitats
which later I chanced upon in print in Dr. Ly-
man's entertaining book The Columbia River.
A father and two sons came from the East to
Natives spearing salmon on the Columbia
Copyright iooi by Benj. A. Gifford. The Dalles. Ore.
Coasting on Mount Hood
From a photograph by Weister Co., Portland, Ore.
THE LAND OF LEGENDS 23
the land along the Columbia, and the boys quar-
reled over the division of their chosen acres.
So, to end the dispute, the father shot an arrow
to the west and one to the north, bidding his
sons make their homes where the arrows fell.
From one son sprang the tribe of Klickitats, while
the other founded the nation of Multnomah.
Then Sahale, the Great Spirit, erected the Cascade
Range as a barrier wall between them to prevent
possibility of friction. The remainder of Dr.
Lyman's pretty myth is best told in his own words :
But for convenience' sake, Sahale had created the
great tamanous bridge under which the waters of the
Columbia flowed, and on this bridge he had stationed
a witch woman called Loo wit, who was to take
charge of the fire. This was the only fire of the
world. As time passed on Loo wit observed the
deplorable condition of the Indians, destitute of fire
and the conveniences which it might bring. She
therefore besought Sahale to allow her to bestow fire
upon the Indians. Sahale, greatly pleased by the
faithfulness and benevolence of Loo wit, finally granted
her request. The lot of the Indians was wonderfully
improved by the acquisition of fire. They began to
make better lodges and clothes and had a variety of
food and implements, and, in short, were marvellously
benefitted by the bounteous gift.
24 THE LAND OF LEGENDS
But Sahale, in order to show his appreciation of the
care with which Loo wit had guarded the sacred fire,
now determined to offer her any gift she might desire
as a reward. Accordingly, in response to his offer,
Loowit asked that she be transformed into a young
and beautiful girl. This was accordingly effected,
and now, as might have been expected, all the Indian
chiefs fell deeply in love with the guardian of tamanous
bridge. Loowit paid little heed to any of them, until
finally there came two chiefs, one from the north
called Klickitat and one from the south called Wiy-
east. Loowit was uncertain which of these two she
most desired, and as a result a bitter strife arose
between the two. This waxed hotter and hotter,
until, with their respective warriors, they entered upon
a desperate war. The land was ravaged, until all
their new comforts were marred, and misery and
wretchedness ensued. Sahale repented that he had
allowed Loowit to bestow fire upon the Indians, and
determined to undo all his work in so far as he could.
Accordingly he broke down the tamanous bridge,
which dammed up the river with an impassable reef,
and put to death Loowit, Klickitat, and Wiyeast.
But, inasmuch as they had been noble and beautiful
in life, he determined to give them a fitting com-
memoration after death. Therefore he reared over
them as monuments the great snow peaks; over
Loowit, what we now call Mt. St. Helen's; over
Wiyeast, the modern Mt. Hood; and, above
Klickitat, the great dome which now we call Mt.
Adams.
!2f&r&*
The Pacific
Copyright iqio by Kiser Photo Co., Portland. Ore.
Along the Columbia — " Grotesque rocks rise sheer
from the river's edge "
Copyright 1910 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.
THE LAND OF LEGENDS 25
Up through timbered hillsides, from green fields,
from the verdure of the western flanks of the
Cascades, winds the great river. The banks
become steeper, the mountains behind them more
rugged. Fairy threads of silver, falling water,
flutter down from cliffs. Grotesque rocks, mighty
monuments erected by a titan fire god when the
world was young, rise sheer from the river's edge.
Cumbersome fish wheels revolve sedately where
the silver-sided salmon run in the springtime.
The railroads cling close to the stream, perforce
tunneling where nature has provided no passage-
way, and the boat ploughs against the current
which here and there is swift and swirling as
the cascades are approached. Then through the
locks you go, or by them if you travel by the steel
highways, and quickly the scenes change, these new
ones painted in a vastly different vein from those
that have gone before.
The lofty, steep- walled hills become more gentle,
and their cloak of green timber merges into brown
grass. The river rolls between banks of bar-
renness as we emerge on the western rim of the land
of little rain, for the moisture-laden clouds from
the Pacific are thwarted in their eastern progress
26 THE LAND OF LEGENDS
by the mountain barrier, along whose summits
they cluster weeping, in their baffled anger, upon
the wet westerly slopes, while the dry sunny east-
land mocks their dour grayness. Close beside the
river is the harshest of all this rainless land ; sand
blows, the cliffs are bare and black, the hillsides
bleak and brown. But ever so little away from
the barren valley bottom are rich regions of
orchards and green fields, and easterly, in the
countries of Walla Walla, Palouse, and John Day,
far-reaching fields of grain abound. Farming is
upon a bonanza basis, and the bigness of it all is
reminiscent of the Dakotas, were it not for the
majestic mountain skylines, blessed visual reliefs
lacking altogether in the continental mid-regions.
The volume then, is bound misleadingly, and
those who see naught but its unprepossessing
exterior gain no inkling of its charming hidden
chapters.
Then come The Dalles of the Columbia, close
to the town of the same name, where the river, a
sane waterway for a half a thousand miles above,
suddenly goes mad for a brief space of law-
less waterfall and rock-rimmed cascades. At
Walla Walla — whose very name means "where
THE LAND OF LEGENDS 27
the waters meet" — the two chief forks of the old
Oregon River converge, the Columbia proper and
the Snake, the one draining a northern empire,
the other swinging southerly through Idaho,
"the gem of the mountains" as the Indians
baptized it. Thence the great stream flows
westerly some one hundred and twenty miles
until it reaches the outlying ridge of the Cascade
chain, there encountering a huge low surface
paved with glacier-polished sheets of basaltic
rock. These plates, says Winthrop Parker, who
saw them as a trail follower in the early 'sixties,
gave the place the name Dalles, thanks to the
Canadian voyageurs in the Hudson Bay service.
A brief distance above this flinty pavement the
river is a mile wide, but where it forces tumultuous
passageway through the rocks it narrows to a
mere rift compressed, if not subdued, by the
adamantine barriers it cannot force asunder.
Where the sides grow closest through three rough
slits in the rocky floor the white waters bore, each
chasm so narrow that a child could cast a stone
across.
On either hand are monotonous plains, gray with
sagebrush and brown with sunburned grass.
28 THE LAND OF LEGENDS
Rough hills rise northerly, in Washington. East-
ward roll lower broadening lands, but turbulent
with lesser hills. West is the great ridge of the
Cascade Range, with Hood rising majestic guardian
over all, and the broad Columbia vanishing into
the very heart of the shadowed mountains, un-
checked on its seaward quest. The summer
sunlight is blinding bright and the sky ethereal
blue. An Indian hovel, or a ragged home of a
fish-spearer beside the rushing waters, furnishes
contrast — that of puny humanity in the face
of nature at her mightiest. The view is at once
compellingly beautiful and weirdly repelling.
Few would live along the great river or there-
about from choice; and yet the view of it — the
startling, colorful panorama — is golden treasure
beyond the dreams of avarice.
It is this setting which marked the old-time
entrance into Central Oregon. Those words
"old-time," are characteristic of the swift-moving
country; for using them, I refer to but six years
ago, when Oregon's hinterland was a wilderness
so far as railroads were concerned. These dalles
of the Columbia, a milepost on the old trans-
continental trail, are a place seen and passed to-
Celilo Falls on the Columbia
Copyright 1902 by Benj. A. Gifford, The Dalles, Ore.
The north abutment of the Bridge of the Gods
Copyright 1902 by Benj. A. Gifford, The Dalles, Ore.
THE LAND OF LEGENDS 29
day by those who rush on rails in brief hours
where the pioneers of fifty years ago labored
weeks. Also were these dalles prominent in In-
dian life in the quiet midyears of the last cen-
tury, when beavers were more plentiful than
palefaces. Indeed, back to the very beginnings
of Northwestern Indian lore their story goes,
coming to us, like so much else of the
misty past of the Oregon Country, in a quaint
legend.
In the late 'fifties Theodore Winthrop made
his way 'cross country from Port Townsend, on
Puget Sound, to The Dalles on the Columbia.
His book, The Canoe and the Saddle, describes
that pioneer excursion through Indian land,
traversing what was in reality an untrodden
wilderness. Its charm of literary expression is in
no whit less fascinating than the wealth of its
adventurous material, but the two, like the writer,
are far behind us, and all of the pleasant account
I would refer to here is the last chapter, which
concerns the arrival at The Dalles, then an outpost
of civilization.
Looking down upon the valley of The Dalles,
Winthrop writes a half century ago :
30 THE LAND OF LEGENDS
Racked and battered crags stood disorderly over
all that rough waste. There were no trees, nor any
masses of vegetation to soften the severities of the
landscape. All was harsh and desolate, even with
the rich sun of an August afternoon doing what it
might to empurple the scathed fronts of rock, to gild
the ruinous piles with summer glories, and throw long
shadows veiling dreariness. I looked upon the scene
with the eyes of a sick and weary man, unable to give
that steady thought to mastering its scope and detail
without which any attempt at artistic description
becomes vague generalization.
My heart sank within me as the landscape compelled
me to be gloomy like itself. It was not the first time
I had perused the region under desolating auspices.
In a log barrack I could just discern far beyond the
river, I had that very summer suffered from a villain
malady, the smallpox. And now, as then, Nature
harmonized discordantly with my feelings, and even
forced her nobler aspects to grow sternly ominous.
Mount Hood, full before me across the valley, became
a cruel reminder of the unattainable. It was bril-
liantly near, and yet coldly far away, like some mock-
ing bliss never to be mine, though it might insult me
forever by its scornful presence.
Evidently it was while held captive by the
"villain malady' ' that Winthrop learned from
the Indians the legend of The Dalles, which he
told so well that to paraphrase it would be folly.
Columbia River. The land of Indian legends
Copyright 1909 by Benj. A. Gifford, The Dalles, Ore.
here the Oregon Trunk Railway crosses the Columbia. " The river
rolls between banks of barrenness "
Copyright 19 12 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.
THE LAND OF LEGENDS 31
Here I give it, as extracted from the thumb-
marked little book whose publication date is 1863:
The world has been long cycles in educating itself
to be a fit abode for men. Man, for his part, has been
long ages in growing upward through lower grades of
being, to become whatever he now may be. The
globe was once nebulous, was chaotic, was anarchic,
and is at last become somewhat cosmical. Formerly
rude and convulsionary forces were actively at work,
to compel chaos into anarchy and anarchy into order.
The mighty ministries of the elements warred with
each other, each subduing and each subdued. There
were earthquakes, deluges, primeval storms, and fu-
rious volcanic outbursts. In this passionate, uncon-
trolled period of the world's history, man was a fiend,
a highly uncivilized, cruel, passionate fiend.
The northwest was then one of the centres of
volcanic action. The craters of the Cascades were
fire-breathers, fountains of liquid flame, catapults
of red-hot stones. Day was lurid, night was ghastly
with this terrible light. Men exposed to such dread
influences could not be other than fiends, as they were,
and they warred together cruelly, as the elements were
doing.
Where the great plains of the Upper Columbia now
spread, along the Umatilla, in the lovely valley of the
Grande Ronde, between the walls of the Grand Coulee,
was an enormous inland sea filling the vast interior
of the continent, and beating forever against ramparts
of hills, to the east of the desolate plain of the Dalles.
32 THE LAND OF LEGENDS
Every winter there were convulsions along the
Cascades, and gushes of lava came from each fiery
Tacoma, to spread new desolation over desolation,
pouring out a melted surface, which, as it cooled in
summer, became a fresh layer of sheeny, fire-hardened
dalles.
Now as the fiends of that epoch and region
had giant power to harm each other, they must
have of course giant weapons of defence. Their
mightiest weapon of offence and defence was their
tail ; in this they resembled the iguanodons and other
"mud pythons" of that period, but no animal ever
had such force of tail as these terrible monster fiend-
men who warred together all over the Northwest.
As ages went on, and the fires of the Cascades began
to accomplish their duty of expanding the world,
earthquakes and eruptions diminished in virulence.
A winter came when there was none. By and by
there was an interval of two years, then again of three
years, without rumble or shock, without floods of fire
or showers of red-hot stones. Earth seemed to be
subsiding into an era of peace. But the fiends would
not take the hint to be peaceable; they warred as
furiously as ever.
Stoutest in heart and tail of all the hostile tribes
of that scathed region was a wise fiend, the Devil.
He had observed the cessation in convulsions of
Nature, and had begun to think out its lesson. It was
the custom of the fiends, so soon as the Dalles plain
became agreeably cool after an eruption, to meet
there every summer and have a grand tournament
Q 2
THE LAND OF LEGENDS 33
after their fashion. Then they feasted riotously,
and fought again until they were weary.
Although the eruptions of the Tacomas had ceased
now for three years, as each summer came round this
festival was renewed. The Devil had absented him-
self from the last two, and when, on the third summer
after his long retirement, he reappeared among his
race on the field of tourney, he became an object of
respectful attention. Every fiend knew that against
his strength there was no defence; he could slay so
long as the fit was on. Yet the idea of combined
resistance to so dread a foe had never hatched itself
in any fiendish head; and besides, the Devil, though he
was feared, was not especially hated. He had never
won the jealousy of his peers by rising above them
in morality. So now as he approached, with brave
tail vibrating proudly, all admired and many feared
him.
The Devil drew near, and took the initiative in war,
by making a peace speech.
"Princes, potentates, and powers of these infernal
realms," said he, "the eruptions and earthquakes are
ceasing. The elements are settling into peacefulness.
Can we not learn of them? Let us give up war and
cannibalism, and live in milder fiendishness and
growing love.*'
Then went up a howl from deviltry. "He would
lull us into crafty peace, that he may kill and eat
safely. Death ! death to the traitor ! "
And all the legions of fiends, acting with a rare
unanimity, made straight at their intended Reformer.
34 THE LAND OF LEGENDS
The Devil pursued a Fabian policy, and took to
his heels. If he could divide their forces, he could
conquer in detail. Yet as he ran his heart was heavy.
He was bitterly grieved at this great failure, his first
experience in the difficulties of Reform. He flagged
sadly as he sped over the Dalles, toward the defiles
near the great inland sea, whose roaring waves he
could hear beating against their bulwark. Could
he but reach some craggy strait among the passes, he
could take position and defy attack.
But the foremost fiends were close upon him.
Without stopping, he smote powerfully upon the rock
with his tail. The pavement yielded to that titanic
blow. A chasm opened and went riving up the
valley, piercing through the bulwark hills. Down
rushed the waters of the inland sea, churning boulders
to dust along the narrow trough.
The main body of the fiends shrunk back terror-
stricken ; but a battalion of the van sprang across and
made one bound toward the heart-sick and fainting
Devil. He smote again with his tail, and more
strongly. Another vaster cleft went up and down the
valley, with an earth quaking roar, and a vaster torrent
swept along.
Still the leading fiends were not appalled. They
took the leap without craning. Many fell short, or
were crowded into the roaring gulf, but enough were
left, and those of the chiefest braves, to martyr their
chase in one instant, if they overtook him. The
Devil had just time enough to tap once more, and
with all the vigor of a despairing tail.
b£
•j
J
0
'7.
u
hh1
I
c
t
J2
B
E
t/3
B
IM
A
O
c
d
u
o
E
B
g
<
1
3
.
>,
I
s.
>
'«
5
01
m
£1
5
U
£
B
d
c
"o
■^
0
■
|
M
a
o
THE LAND OF LEGENDS 35
He was safe. A third crevice, twice the width of
the second, split the rocks. This way and that it
went, wavering like lightning eastward and west-
ward, riving a deeper cleft in the mountains that held
back the inland sea, riving a vaster gorge through the
majestic chain of the Cascades, and opening a way for
the torrent to gush ocean ward. It was the crack of
doom for the fiends. A few essayed the leap. They
fell far short of the stern edge, where the Devil had
sunk panting. They alighted on the water, but
whirlpools tripped them up, tossed them, bowled them
along among floating boulders, until the buffeted
wretches were borne to the broader calms below,
where they sunk. Meanwhile, those who had not
dared the final leap attempted a backward one, but
wanting the impetus of pursuit, and shuddering at the
fate of their comrades, every one of them failed and
fell short; and they too were swept away, horribly
sprawling in the flood.
As to the fiends who had stopped at the first crevice,
they ran in a body down the river to look for the
mangled remains of their brethren, and, the under-
mined bank giving way under their weight, every
fiend of them was carried away and drowned.
So perished the whole race of fiends.
As to the Devil, he had learnt a still deeper lesson.
His tail also, the ensign of deviltry, was irremediably
dislocated by his life-saving blow. In fact, it had
ceased to be any longer a needful weapon! Its
antagonists were all gone ; never a tail remained to be
brandished at it, in deadly encounter.
36 THE LAND OF LEGENDS
So, after due repose, the Devil sprang lightly across
the chasms he had so successfully engineered, and
went home to rear his family thoughtfully. Every
year he brought his children down to the Dalles, and
told them the terrible history of his escape. The
fires of the Cascades burned away; the inland sea
was drained, and its bed became a fair prairie, and
still the waters gushed along the narrow crevice he
had opened. He had, in fact, been the instrument in
changing a vast region from a barren sea into habitable
land.
One great trial, however, remained with him, and
made his life one of grave responsibility. All his
children born before the catastrophe were cannibal,
stiff -tailed fiends. After that great event, every new-
born imp of his was like himself in character and
person, and wore but a flaccid tail, the last insignium
of ignobility. Quarrels between these two factions
embittered his days and impeded civilization. Still
it did advance, and long before his death he saw the
tails disappear forever.
Such is the Legend of The Dalles, — a legend not
without a moral.
CHAPTER IV
THe Land of Many Leagues
r was a very "typical" stagecoach.
That is, it was typical of the style
Broadway would have expected in
the production of a Girl of the Golden
West or The Great Divide. Very comfortably you
may still see them in moving picture land — a region
where the old West lives far woolier and wilder
than it ever dared to be in actual life.
However, this stage was neither make-believe
nor comfortable. It was very real and very
comfortless. The time was six years ago and the
place the one hundred miles of worse than indif-
ferent road between Shaniko and Bend, in Central
Oregon.
"Do you chew?" asked the driver.
I who sat next to him, plead innocence of the
habit.
"Have a drink ?" said he later, producing a
' flask. And again I asked to be excused.
37
38 THE LAND OF MANY LEAGUES
"Don't smoke, neither, I suppose?" The
driver regarded me with suspicion. "Hell,"
said he, "th' country's goin' to the dogs. These
here civilizin' inflooences is playing hob with
every thin'. Las' three trips my passengers
haven't been fit company for man or beast —
they neither drank nor chawed. Not that I
mean to be insultin'" — I assured him he was
not — "but times certainly have changed. The
next thing along '11 come a railroad and then all
this goes to the scrap heap."
His gesture, with the last word, included the
battered stage, the dejected horses, and the imme-
diate surroundings of Shaniko Flats. For the
life of me I could see no cause for regret even
supposing his prophecy came true to the letter!
Twenty hours later, when the springless seat,
influenced by the attraction of gravitation in
conjunction with the passage of many chuck
holes, had permanently warped my spinal column,
I would have been even more ready to endorse
the threatened cataclysm.
Since that day when the old driver foresaw the
yellow perils of "civilizin' inflooences" they have
indeed invaded the land for which, until a couple
Central Oregon travel in the old days
Central Oregon freighter. " You will find them everywhere in the railless
land, the freighters and their teams "
THE LAND OF MANY LEAGUES 39
of years ago, his four horses and his rattletrap
stage formed the one connecting link with the
* 'outside." The "iron horse" has swept his
old nags into oblivion, and two great railroads
carry the passengers and packages which he and
his brothers of the old Shaniko line transported
in the past.
The change has come in five short years. Those,
who, like myself, went a-pioneering for the fun of
it, making for Central Oregon because upon the
map it showed as the greatest railroadless land,
have seen the warm breath of development work as
picturesque changes there as ever in the story-book
days when the West was in its infancy. We are
young men, we who chanced to Oregon's hinter-
land a few seasons gone by, yet already can we
spin yarns of the "good old days" which have a
real smack of romance to them and cause the
recounters themselves to sigh for what has gone
before and, betimes, to pray for their return —
almost !
Almost, but not actually. For who prefers
twenty odd hours of stagecoaching to travel in a
Pullman? or seriously bemoans the advent of
electric lights, running water, cement sidewalks,
4o THE LAND OF MANY LEAGUES
and other appurtenances of material develop-
ment? Yet, of course, I realize full well how tame
and inconsiderable the "pioneering," if by such a
name it can be dignified, of Central Oregon in the
last decade must appear in the eyes of Oregon's
real pioneers, who came across the plains and
staked out the State with monuments of courage
driven deep with privation and far-sighted enter-
prise. Yet, while half our Eastern cousins believe
the West utterly prosaic, and half are confident
that some of it is still the scene of dashing ad-
venture, and the dwellers of the Coast cities
themselves are morally certain that all Oregon
conducts itself along metropolitan lines, the fact
remains that most of the big land between the
Cascades and Blue Mountains was untouched
yesterday and is to-day the pleasantest — and the
least hackneyed — outdoor playland available in
all the West.
Central Oregon occupied an eddy in the stream
of Western progress. On the north the Columbia
flowed past her doors, and the stream of immi-
gration, first following the water and later the
railroads, ignored the uninviting portals. Rock-
rimmed toward the Columbia, lined with hills
THE LAND OF MANY LEAGUES 41
on the east, hedged in by the Cascades on the
west, and remote from California's valleys on the
south, this empire of 30,000,000 acres has been a
giant maverick, wandering at will among the
ranges neglected by development. In 191 1 the
railroads roped the wanderer, when they forced
their way southward from the Columbia up the
canyon of the Deschutes. But my stage journey
was two years prior to that.
Shaniko was a jumping-off place. It was the
end of the Columbia Southern railroad, which
began at Biggs — and if a road can have a worse
recommendation than that I know it not ! Biggs,
under the grassless cliffs beside the Columbia, baked
by sun, lashed by wind, and blinded with sand, was
impossible; and had it not been for the existence
of Biggs one truthfully might call Shaniko the
least attractive spot in the universe! The trans-
continental train deposited me at Biggs and the
Columbia Southern trainlet received me, after a
brief interval dedicated to bolstering up the inner
man with historic ham sandwiches and coffee inno-
cent of history, served in a shack beside a sand
dune.
Seventy miles separates Biggs from Shaniko,
42 THE LAND OF MANY LEAGUES
and a long afternoon was required to negotiate
the distance. For an hour the diminutive train
panted up oppressive grades, winding among rain-
washed coulees, where the soil was red adobe
and the rocks were round and also tinged with
red. Stunted sagebrush clothed the hillsides
scantily, their slopes serried by cattle trails as
evenly as contour lines upon a map. Then, the
rim of the Columbia hills gained, away we rattled
southward, more directly and with some pretense
of speed, across a rolling plateau of stubble fields
and grain lands, dotted here and there with homes
and serried by rounded valleys where the gold
of sun and grain, and the gray of vagrant cloud
shadows, made gorgeous picturings. Westerly, be-
yond the drab and golden foreground and the blue
haziness of the middle distance, the Cascade Range
silhouetted against a sky whose tones became
richer and more cheerful as evening approached.
With the evening came Shaniko. "The evil
that men do lives after them, " said Mark Antony,
"the good is oft interred with their bones." So
let it not be with Shaniko, for then in truth, of
this town whose brightest day has gone little in-
deed would survive.
THE LAND OF MANY LEAGUES 43
Shaniko was the railroad point for all Central
Oregon when I first made its acquaintance, and
from it freighters hauled merchandise to towns
as far distant as two hundred miles. Stages
radiated to the south, and, in 1909, a few hardy
automobiles tried conclusions with the roads.
The sheep of a sheepman's empire congregated
there, giving Shaniko one boast of preeminence —
it shipped more wool than any other point in the
State. With streets of mud or dust, according
to the season, a score or so of frame shacks, its
warehouses, livery barns, corrals, shipping pens,
and hotels, Shaniko in its prime was a busy light-
ing place for birds of passage, a boisterous town
of freighters, cowmen, and sheep herders. It,
like its stagecoaches, was typical, I suppose, of
the town found a decade or so ago upon our
receding frontiers, and still encountered in the
fancies of novelists whose travels are confined to
the riotous territory east of Pittsburg.
"Where are you bound?" my table neighbor
asked me at supper.
"I'm not sure," said I truthfully.
"Oh, a land seeker. Well, when it comes
right down to getting something worth while —
44 THE LAND OF MANY LEAGUES
something for nothing, you might say — the claims
down by Silver Lake can't be beat. They — "
and he launched into a rosy description of the land
of his choice which lasted until the presiding
Amazon deftly transferred the fork I had been
using to the plate of pie she placed before me,
a gentle lesson in domestic economy. My infor-
mant was a professional "locator" whose business
it is to combine the landless man and the manless
land with some profit to himself, in the shape of
a fee for showing each " prospect" a suitable
tract of untaken earth hitherto the property of
Uncle Sam.
Another neighbor took me in hand. The odor
of gasolene about him — it was even more pungent
than the fumes of other liquids, taken internally —
proclaimed him an auto driver.
"If you don't know where to go, let me show
you," was the offer of this would-be guide and
philosopher — I assume him a philosopher on the
ground that any pilot in Central Oregon in those
days must be one.
In answer to my inquiries he bade me hie straight
to Harney County. It was two hundred and fifty
miles away. But I lost heart, stuck to my origi-
THE LAND OF MANY LEAGUES 45
nal half -resolve, and declared Bend my objective
point. In later experience it was borne home to me
that those pioneer auto men of Shaniko always
sang loudest the praises of the most distant point ;
their rate was ten or fifteen cents per mile per
passenger, and on the face of it their business
acumen is apparent !
One hundred miles of staging — five hundred
and twenty-eight thousand feet of dust, if it be
summer, or mud, if it be winter; Heaven knows
how many chuck holes, how many ruts, how many
bumps! The ride, commencing at eight one
evening, ended about six the next. No early
Christian martyr was more thoroughly bruised
and stiffened at the hands of Roman mobs than
the tenderfoot traveler on the memorable Shaniko-
Bend journey! And there were so many rich
possibilities — nay, probabilities — of diversion.
Winter blizzards on Shaniko Flats were to be
expected, while after thaws the heavy stages
"bogged down" with aggravating regularity.
The steep villainous road of the Cow Canyon
grade upset many a vehicle, and well I recall one
January night, when a two-day rain had turned
to snow, when the air was freezing but the mud
46 THE LAND OF MANY LEAGUES
was soft, how the up-stage and the down-stage
met in the awful hours where there was no turning
out: clothing was ruined that night, and disposi-
tions warped beyond repair, while passengers
labored and swore and labored again until at last
one stage had been snaked out of the way on a
hand-made shelf, so to speak, and a passing
effected. Later, we, who were Shaniko bound,
were capsized in the mud. Half -frozen, wholly
exhausted, we finally reached the railroad one
hour after the day's only train had departed!
But those were incidents of the road.
I think I never before saw a man lose his eye
and recover it. Yet that was the optical antic
played by my companion "inside." He was a
horse buyer, and I attributed his leer to a cast
of character one naturally connects with horse-
trading, until all at once he was groping on the
floor.
"Lost something?" I inquired politely.
"My eye."
On bank holidays I have heard 'Any say that
to 'Arriet at 'Ammersmith, but as an exclama-
tion, not an explanation. "My eye, he's lost
THE LAND OF MANY LEAGUES 47
something valuable, and is British in his expres-
sion," thought I innocently. So I inquired if I
could help him in the search.
"And er — what was it you lost?" I added.
"My eye!" He glowered up at me, and the
flicker of the match I held showed a one-eyed face
— the eye that had stared at me askew a few
minutes before was missing !
Finally the glass optic was recovered, and he
explained that the dust, working in about it,
irritated him, so that occasionally he slipped it out
for cleaning with his handkerchief. During such a
polishing it had slipped to the floor. "I never
get caught," he added with a touch of pride,
"here's number two, in case of accidents," and
he fished a substitute from his pocket. That
second eye, I noted by daylight later, was blue,
while his own was brown. No doubt it is difficult
to get eyes that match.
As we bumped along a valley bottom, shrouded
in our tenacious cloud of dust, the driver, with
whom I rode again, pointed out a couple of ultra-
prosperous appearing ranches.
1 ' Millionaires row, ' ' he chuckled . ' ' They don't
pay interest, but they're real wild and western
48 THE LAND OF MANY LEAGUES
when it comes to frills. Further up the line you'll
see somethin' rich, perhaps."
The promised attraction was a young gentleman
in a silk shirt and white flannels following a plow
down a furrow, and in turn followed by an aristo-
cratic-looking bulldog. "The dawg," explained
my companion, "is blue blood Borston. His
pedigree's a heap longer than mine and valued at
more thousand dollars than I dare tell. His boss
there has a daddy worth a million or so, and when
he himself ain't farmin' he scoots around in a five-
thousand-dollar ortermobile. But mostly he plays
rancher an* makes hay an' beds down the hawses
an' all the rest of it. It's a queer game. Crazy's
what I call it. There's a whole nest of 'em here-
abouts."
So we saw the un-idle rich laboring in the fields.
In the nature of things the old-timers regard the
species with amusement, figuring, now and then,
how many cuttings of alfalfa it would take to
pay for the Boston bull, and attempting to deter-
mine why anyone with an income should elect
such an existence, with the wide world at their
beck!
This was my introduction to the land of great
THE LAND OF MANY LEAGUES 49
distances — twenty odd hours of toil over rolling
plains of sagebrush, green-floored valleys, timbered
hill lands, always — their indelible influence is
the first impression of the newcomer whose out-
look is a fraction higher than the earth he treads
— always with the mountains of the western sky-
line dominating whatever panorama presented
itself. Peaks turbaned with white, tousled foot-
hills, olive green, their limitless forests of pine
surging upward from the level of the sage-car-
peted, juniper-studded plains. The land of many
miles, and of broad beautiful views, is Oregon's
hinterland.
Many miles? Aye, truly. My friend Kinkaid
drives his auto trucks to Burns, one hundred
and fifty miles to the southeast. Southwards
to Silver Lake is another truck line, ninety miles
long, which daily bears Uncle Sam's mails to
the inland communities, a notable example of the
pioneering of this age of gasolene. Each morn-
ing automobiles start from Bend, the railroad's end,
for paltry jumps of from fifty to three hundred
miles, and the passengers drink their final cup of
coffee with the indifference a Staten Island dweller
accords a contemplated trip across the bay.
50 THE LAND OF MANY LEAGUES
Viewed sanely, the contempt for distances is ap-
palling— at least as distance is measured elsewhere.
An instance, this : Burns is one hundred and fifty-
miles from Bend; a year or two ago, through the
enterprise of citizens of the two communities, a
new road was "opened" between — scarcely a road,
but a passageway among the sagebrush navigable
with motor-driven craft. It is to celebrate! So
some forty citizens of Bend, in a fourth that many
cars, make the little jaunt to Burns. They leave
at dawn: they reach Burns that night: they are
dined and wined and the road-marriage of their
town is fittingly celebrated; then, another dawn
being upon them, they deem it folly to waste time
with trivialities like sleep, they crank their cars,
and they are back at Bend, and lo! it is but the
evening of the second day !
The past, naturally, was worse than the pre-
sent, so far as the difficulties of great mileage
are concerned. The little town of Silver Lake
in south-central Oregon, to-day is in the lap of
luxury, transportation^ speaking, being but a
beggarly ninety miles from a railroad. But in the
early 'nineties no one but a centipede would have
considered frequent calls at Silver Lake with any
A trailside dip in a mountain lake
" Sliding down snow-fields is fun, though chilly "
THE LAND OF MANY LEAGUES 51
equanimity. Then all the freight came from The
Dalles, two hundred and thirty miles to the north,
and the tariff often showed four cents a pound,
which must have contributed fearfully to the high
cost of living, not to mention the cost of high living,
with wet goods weighing what they do. When the
roads were good and teamsters moderately sober
the round trip occupied forty days, one way light,
the return loaded. In all the two hundred and
thirty miles Prineville was the only town, and
some of the camps were dry.
"Th' town couldn't help but grow," an old-
timer confided to me. "Yer see, it was such a
durn fierce trip, after a feller tried it once he never
wanted ter repeat — so he stayed with us!"
Burns, over in Harney County, in the south-
eastern portion of the State, is another example
of what the long haul means. During the summer
of comparatively good roads the one hundred
and fifty miles to the railroad isn't especially
serious, but when winter comes the "outside"
is far away indeed, and often for two months no
freight at all contrives to negotiate the gumbo,
snow, and frozen ruts. So, late in the autumn the
Burns merchant lays in a winter stock, while the
52 THE LAND OF MANY LEAGUES
auto trucks hibernate, and the burdens of such
forehandedness, no doubt, are shifted to the
shoulders of his customers.
Modernity has not swept the field clean, even
to-day, and gasolene scarce yet outranks hay as a
fuel for the mile makers. The settler and the land
looker move on their restless rounds in the white-
canvassed prairie schooner of old, and the great
freighting outfits, which have borne the ton-
nage of the West since there was a white man's
West, still churn the dust with the hoofs of their
straining horses and the wheels of their lurching
wagons. You will find them everywhere in the
railless lands, the freighters and their teams.
They are camped by the water-hole in the desert,
or where there is no water, and they must depend
upon barrels they bring with them. The little
fire of sagebrush roots or greasewood shows the
string of wagons — two, three, or four — strung out
by the roadside with the horses, from four to
twelve, munching hay. They are in the timber,
in the country of lakes to the south, on the grassy
ranges. In fact, you find the freighters where
there is freight to be hauled, and that is — where
men are.
THE LAND OF MANY LEAGUES 53
But to-day all of Central Oregon is not rail-
roadless land, the trail of steel has pushed to the
heart of the country, and what a contrast to the
old Shaniko stage days it is to roll smoothly into
Bend over ninety-pound rails! Picturesque, too,
was the sudden breaking of the long spell when
the transportation kings constructed their lines
up the Canyon of the Deschutes. Twice, as they
built, I walked the length of that hundred-mile-
long defile, seeing the dawn of progress in the very
breaking, and viewing what is to me the most
stupendously appealing river scenery in all the
Northwest — this same Canyon of the Deschutes.
CHAPTER V
How the Railroads Came
HEN the West moves, it moves quick-
ly. The map of Oregon had long
shown a huge area without the line
of a single railroad crossing it . This
railless land was Central Oregon, the largest
territory in the United States without transpor-
tation. Then, almost over night, the map was
changed.
Normal men, if they are reasonably good, hope
to go to Heaven. Westerners, if they are off the
beaten track, hope for a railroad ; and if they have
one road they hope for another! You who dwell
in the little land of suburban trains and commu-
tation tickets have no conception of the vital
significance of rail transportation in the Land of
Many Miles.
In Central Oregon the railroad question was
one of life and death. The country had progressed
so far without them, and could go no farther.
54
HOW THE RAILROADS CAME 55
Farm products not qualified to find a market on
their own feet were next to worthless, timber
could not be milled, irrigation development was
at a standstill. The people had seen so many
survey stakes planted and grow and rot and pro-
duce nothing, and had been fed upon so many
railroad rumors, that there was no faith in them.
"I think it's a railroad!" gasped the telephone
operator as she called me to the booth. Her eyes
were bright. It was as if a Frenchman had said,
"Berlin is taken!"
But I, a skeptic hardened by many shattered
hopes, smiled incredulously. Nevertheless, I took
the receiver with a tremor born of undying
optimism — the optimism of the railless land.
"It's long distance," whispered the operator,
torn between a sense of duty and a desire to
eavesdrop.
"Hello!"
The only answer was a grinding buzz; a mile
or two of Shaniko line was down — it usually was.
Then Prineville cut in and The Dalles said
something cross and a faint inquiry came from
Portland, far away. Yes, I was waiting.
56 HOW THE RAILROADS CAME
"Hello, Putnam?" The speaker was the man-
aging editor of a Portland newspaper. " Gangs
have broken loose in the Deschutes Canyon, "
said he. "One of 'em is Harriman, we know, but
the others are playing dark. Think it's Hill
starting for California. You go — " then the buzz
became too bad.
Finally The Dalles repeated the instructions.
I was to go down the Canyon of the Deschutes
and find out all about it. The head and nearest
end of the Canyon was fifty miles away, and the
Canyon itself was one hundred miles long. Glory
be! But it was a railroad, and before I started
the town was in the first throes of apoplectic
celebration.
I went to Shaniko by auto, and thence by train
to Grass Valley, midway to the Columbia. From
Grass Valley a team took me westward to the
rim of the Canyon of the Deschutes. There were
fresh survey stakes and a gang of engineers work-
ing with their instruments on a hillside. Very
obliging, were those engineers; they would tell
me anything; they were building a railroad; it
was headed for Mexico City and they themselves
were the owners! Below was a new-made camp,
M
a
3
3 08 V
O O. i:
2 6°.
.5 o -a
w o c
« a 5
1 2 *
v. C =
l* 1
Si {
P 1 I
a 2 ~
8-2 :
3 S §
8 • I
i 2
a*
5
HOW THE RAILROADS CAME 57
where Austrians labored on a right of way that
had come to life almost over night. This was a
Harriman camp; orders were, apparently, to get
a strangle hold on the best line up the narrow
Canyon — to crowd the other fellows out. But
the mystery surrounding those "other fellows"
clung close. From water boy to transit man
they knew nothing, except that they were working
for a famous contracting firm and that they em-
phatically were not in the employ of Hill interests.
This, which was no news at all, I 'phoned to
Portland, and then set about visiting the suddenly
awakened Canyon.
It is the only entrance from the north to the
plateaus of Central Oregon, a deep gorge cut by
the river through the heart of the hills. So one
fine morning in July, 1909, after a generation of
apathy, suddenly the two great systems, whose
tracks follow opposite banks of the Columbia,
threw their forces into the field, attempting to
secure control of this strategic gateway. Al-
together, it was a very picturesque duel; the
quick move was characteristic of the country,
and the very unexpectedness of it somehow was
half-expected. And in the end, after all the
58 HOW THE RAILROADS CAME
strategy and bluff and blocking tactics with
shovels and with law briefs, the duel was a draw,
and to-day each railroad follows the waters of the
Deschutes.
During my observation of this picturesque
battle of the Canyon, I walked its length twice,
and saw amusing incidents in plenty.
At one point the Hill forces established a camp
reached only by a trail winding down from above,
its only access through a ranch. Forthwith the
Harriman people bought that ranch, and "No
trespassing" signs, backed by armed sons of
Italy, cut off the communications of the enemy
below. At a vantage point close to the water
both surveys followed the same hillside, which
offered the only practical passageway. One set
of grade stakes overlapped the other, a few feet
higher up. The Italian army, working furiously
all one Sabbath morning, "dug themselves in"
on the grade their engineers had established in
most approved military style. But while they
worked the Austrians came — these literally were
the nationalities engaged in this "Battle of the
Hillsides," unrecorded by history! — and hewed
a grade a few feet above the first, the meanwhile
HOW THE RAILROADS CAME 59
demolishing it. That angered Italy, whose forces
executed a flank movement and started digging
still another grade above the hostiles, inadvertently
dislodging bowlders which rolled down upon the
rival workers below. Then a fresh flanking move-
ment, and more bowlders and nearly a riot ! And
so it went, until the top was reached, and there
being no more hillside to maneuver upon, and
no inclination to start over again, the two groups
called quits and spent the balance of the day play-
ing seven-up, leaving settlement of their burlesque
to courts of law. And there were times when
"coyote holes" — which are tunnels of dynamite —
exploding on one side of the river, somehow sent
shattered rock and pebbles in a dangerous deluge
upon the tents across the stream.
The struggle for transportation supremacy was
bitter enough, and comic, too, in spots. But the
stage set for its acting was superb beyond compare.
Not without reason, the defile of the Deschutes
has been called the "Grand Canyon of the North-
west." For a full one hundred miles the river
races at the bottom of a steep- walled canyon, its
sides here and there pinching in to the water's
very edge, and often enough with sheer cliffs
60 HOW THE RAILROADS CAME
towering mightily, their bases lapped by the
white foam of rapids. Great rounded hills, green
in spring, brown in summer, and white under
the snows of winter, climb into the sky a thousand
feet and more on either hand. Their sides are
ribbed with countless cattle trails, like the even
ripples of the wind and tide on a sandy beach.
Strange contorted rock formations thrust forth
from the lofty slopes, and occasional clutters of
talus slides spill down into the water. Rich hues
of red and brown warm the somber walls, where
prehistoric fires burned the clay or rock, or minerals
painted it. White- watered, crystal springs are
born miraculously in the midst of apparent
drought, offering arctic cold nectar the year around.
The river winds sinuously, doubling back upon
itself interminably, seeking first one, and then
another, point of the compass, a veritable despair
for railroad builders whose companion word for
" results" must be " economy.' ' Despite the
Stirling oppressiveness of that canyon bake-oven
in July, with breezes few and far between and
rattlesnakes omnipresent, the ever-changing
grandeur was enough to repay for near-sunstroke
and foot weariness.
HOW THE RAILROADS CAME 61
However, enjoyment of the scenery was not
my mission. I was supposed to discover, authenti-
cally, who was backing that other road — where
the millions were coming from. If it was Hill, it
meant much to Oregon, for as yet the "Empire
Builder" had never truly invaded the state, and
if now he planned a great new line to California the
railroad map of the West would indeed be dis-
rupted. But at the end of ten days I knew no
more than on the first.
At the farmhouse where they took me in to
dinner mine host was highly elated, for the survey
crossed the corner of his southern "forty" and
he saw visions of a fat right-of-way payment and
of a railway station. Later — his optimism was
characteristic — surely a city would spring up,
with corner lots priced fabulously. "Then,"
said he to Mandy, "we'll go to Yerrup." It
was, of course, long before Yerrup became a
shambles.
The old man was reminding me of the growth of
Spokane — that universal example of the West! —
which expanded from nothing to more than one
hundred thousand in thirty years, when Mandy in-
terrupted the universal pastime of counting your
62 HOW THE RAILROADS CAME
lots before they are sold by producing a soiled
printed form.
"Can you tell me if this has any value now?"
she asked.
It was a voucher of the Great Northern Railroad.
"Where did you get it?"
She narrated how a crew had laid out the
preliminary survey, now followed by the mysteri-
ous workers, coming through there secretly the
previous autumn.
"They told us they was surveyin' water power, "
said she. "The papers never said nothing about
it, and neither did we. They bought buttermilk
here, an' when the 01' Man cashed in the slips
he forgot this one. Wonder if it's too late to get
it paid?"
I told her it wasn't. In fact, I bought it myself,
paying face value. It was $1.40.
Then I made tracks for the 'phone, eighteen
miles away. Here, at last, was positive evidence
that the Great Northern, the Hill system, was
the power behind the new line. Six months ago
while Oregon slept, they had made the secret
survey upon which they were now constructing.
A very pretty scoop, as western newspapering
Along the Canyon of the Deschutes
Copyright 191 1 by Kiser Photo Co.. Portland, Ore.
HOW THE RAILROADS CAME 63
goes! I offered my driver an extra dollar for
haste's sake.
The managing editor listened while I outlined
my beat over the wire. His silence seemed the
least bit sad.
"Dandy story," said he. "If we'd had it
yesterday it would have been fine. But — "
There was no need for him to go further; I knew
the worst.
An afternoon paper had wrecked my yarn. The
emissary of the Hills, who had traveled secretly
and under an assumed name all through the
Interior determining whether or not the new line
should be undertaken, had that morning told his
story. The Hills were in the open as the backers
of the Oregon Trunk. By a matter of hours a
precious scoop was ancient history !
That man built much of the Panama Canal.
He is one of the world's best-known construction
engineers and railroaders. But I shall never for-
give his tell-tale interview — it was premature.
And some day I shall present for payment that
voucher for $1.40, mentioning also the dollar I
gave the driver, to John F. Stevens.
CHAPTER VI
The Home MaKers
HE horses are ill mated, the wagon
decrepit. Baling wire sustains the
harness and the patched canvas of
the wagon top hints of long service.
"How far to Millican's?" says the driver.
He is a young man ; at least, his eyes are young.
His "woman" is with him and their three kiddies,
the tiniest asleep in her mother's 1 i, with the dust
caked about her wet baby chin. The man wears
overalls, the woman calico that was gaudy once
before the sun bleached it colorless, and the
children nameless garments of uncertain ancestry.
The wife seems very tired — as weary as the weary
horses. Behind them is piled their household:
bedding, a tin stove, chairs, a cream separator,
a baby's go-cart, kitchen utensils, a plow and
barbed wire, some carpet; beneath the wagon
body swings a pail and lantern, and water barrel
and axe are lashed at one side.
64
THE HOME MAKERS 65
We direct them to Millican's.
1 ' Homesteading ?" we inquire.
"Not exactly. That is, we're just lookin'."
There are hundreds like these all over the West,
"just lookin'," with their tired wives, their
babies, their poverty, and their vague hopefulness.
They chase rainbows from Bisbee to Prince
Rupert. Some of them settle, some of them
succeed. But most of them are discontented
wherever Fortune places them, and forever move
forward toward some new-rumored El Dorado
just over the hill.
There's a racr nf men that don't fit in,
A race thai can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain's crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don't know how to rest.
That, of course, is rather picturesque, and, taken
all in all, your average wanderer of the wagon
road merits little heroics. His aspirations are
apt to be earthy, and too often he seeks nothing
loftier than a soft snap. In the final analysis
66 THE HOME MAKERS
some of our western gypsies desire nothing more
ardently than a rest.
The wanderer is the shiftless land seeker, and
is to be distinguished from the sincere home
seeker who fares forth into strange lands with his
family and his penates, and who finds vacant
government land and proceeds to "take it up."
The best of all the free acres went years ago,
along with the free timber and the other compen-
sations for pioneering, but here and there remote
areas worth having still remain. About the last
of these, and by all odds the greatest, was in
Central Oregon when the railroads opened the
doors of immigration a few years ago.
Before the railroads came I went from Bend
southeasterly through what is now well called
the "homestead country," and in all the one
hundred and fifty miles traversed we saw three
human habitations: the stockman's, George
Millican, the horse breeder, Johnny Schmeer, and
the sheepman's, Bill Brown. The rest of it was
sagebrush and jack rabbits, with a band of "fuzz-
tails" stampeding at the sight of us and a few
cattle nipping the bunch grass. My companions
were a locator and a man who took up one of the
THE HOME MAKERS 67
first "claims" in all that country, at Hampton
Valley, one hundred and thirty miles from a
railroad.
To-day there are schools out there, homes,
fences, and plowed fields. Some of it is very good
land, and the modern pioneers are prospering.
Some of it is not so good, and there have been
failures and disappointments as in all the home-
stead districts of all the West, past and pre-
sent. For there is truth in the old saying that for
the most part the first crop of homesteaders fails,
and the success of the late comers is built upon the
broken hopes of the pioneers. However that may
be, the battle against the odds set up by a none
too bountiful nature is often enough pitiful, and
occasionally heroic.
Picture an unbroken plain of sagebrush. Low
hills, a mile distant, are fringed with olive-green
juniper trees ; all the rest is gray, except the ever
blue sky which must answer for the eternal hope
in the hearts of the home makers — God smiles
there. In the midst of the drab waste is a speck
of white, a tent. A water barrel beside it tells
the story of the long road to the nearest well — no
road, but a trail, for this is well off the beaten
68 THE HOME MAKERS
path and such luxuries as surveyed highways are
yet to come. The tent is the very outpost of
settlement, a mute testimonial of the insistent
desire to possess land of one's very own.
Our car stops to inquire the way, and a woman
appears. Yes, it is forty miles to Brookings'
halfway house, as we had guessed.
* * And to Bend ? " We ask what we already know,
perhaps because the woman — a girlish woman — so
evidently would prolong the interruption to her
solitude.
"About one hundred and twenty — a long way!"
She smiles, adding, simply, "John's there."
Small wonder she clutches at us! John has
been gone a fortnight, and for two days she has
not even seen the Swansons, her "neighbors"
over the hill, three miles away. Like a ship in
the night, we all but passed her — passed with
never a greeting for which her heart hungered,
never a word from the "outside" to break the hard
monotony. She is utterly alone, except for the
rabbits and the smiling sky. Her husband is
wage earning. And she sticks by their three
hundred and twenty acres and does what she can
with a mattock and a grubbing hoe. They have
Irrigation — " First, parched lands of sage ; then the flow
Series copyright 1909 by Asahel Curtis
rrigation — " Next, water in a master ditch and countless man-made
rivulets between the furrows "
THE HOME MAKERS 69
a well started, and some fence posts in the ground.
Some day, she says, they will make a home of it.
"We always dreamed of having a home," she
explains a bit dreamily. "But it never seemed
to come any closer on John's wages. So when we
read of getting this land for nothing it seemed best
to make the try. But of course it isn't 'free' at
all — we've discovered that. And oh! it costs so
much!"
We commiserate. We would help, and vaguely
seek some means.
Help? Yes, gladly she will accept it, says the
little woman — but not for herself. "Good gra-
cious, why should I need it?" Nor have we the
heart to offer reasons. But if we have a mind to
be helpful, she continues, there is a case over in
eighteen-eleven — she names the section and town-
ship— where charity could afford a smile. She tells
us, then, of a half-sick woman with three infants,
left on the homestead while the husband goes to
town. There, instead of work, he gets drink, and
fails to reappear with provisions. But the woman
will not give up the scrap of land she has set her
heart on, and doggedly remains. When the
neighbors find her, she and the children have
70 THE HOME MAKERS
existed for five days solely on boiled wheat.
"And we needed it so for seeding, " is her lament.
Our hostess of the desert stands by the ruts,
waving to us through the dust of our wake, the
embodiment of the spirit of pioneering, which
burns to-day as brightly as ever in the past, could
we but search it out and recognize it.
Such as she are home makers. However, the
free lands are overridden with gamblers in values,
with incompetents, with triflers. They are the
chaff which will scatter before the winds of adver-
sity. The others will succeed, just as they have
succeeded elsewhere on the forefronts of civiliza-
tion; the pity of it is that their lot may not be
made easier, surer.
Returning from that trip I read a chapter in a
book, newly published, dealing with this selfsame
land. Concerning the homesteader I found these
words:
I have seen many sorts of desperation, but none
like that of the men who attempt to make a home
out of three hundred and twenty acres of High Desert
sage. ... A man ploughing the sage — his woman
keeping the shack — a patch of dust against the
dust, a shadow within a shadow — sage and sand and
space !
THE HOME MAKERS 71
The author is a New Englander, who had seen
Oregon with scholastic eyes. The harsh frontier
had no poetry, no hope, for him — only hopeless-
ness. But the woman in the tent, the Swansons
over the hill, and the hundreds of other Swan-
sons scattering now, and for many years gone by,
over the lands of the setting sun, know better,
though their grammar be inferior and their
enthusiasm subconscious. Men saw and spoke
as did the New Englander when Minnesota was
being wrested from the wilderness, when people
were dubbed insane for trying conclusions with the
Palouse country, when the Dakotas were con-
sidered agricultural nightmares. In the taming
of new empires unbridled optimism is no more
prevalent than blinded pessimism.
Closer to home I know another woman, a
farmer, too. Hers is an irrigated ranch, and she
works with her shovel among the ditches as
sturdily as the hired man. Poor she is in wealth,
as it is reckoned, and her husband poorer still in
health, for he was rescued from a desk in the nick
of time. He is fast mending now, and confesses
to a rare pleasure in making two blades of grass
grow where none at all grew in the unwatered
72 THE HOME MAKERS
sands. And in truth, simply watching the ac-
complishments of irrigation is tonic enough to
revive the faint. First, parched lands of sage;
the grub hoe and the mattock clear the way, and
then the plow. Next, water, in a master ditch
and countless, man-made rivulets between the
furrows. Finally — presto! the magic of a single
season does it — green fields of clover and alfalfa
smile in the sun !
But Heaven forbid that this should smack of
"boosting"! (There, by the way, you have the
most-used, and best-abused, word in all the West.)
It is not so intended, for the literature of profes-
sional optimism is legion, and needs no reinforce-
ment. The Oregon country is no more wedded
to success than many another, nor is it a land
where woman can wrestle with man's problems
more happily than elsewhere. The incidents of
these pages mean simply that beneath the dull sur-
face may be found, ever and anon, a glow of some-
thing stirring; prick the dust, and blood may run.
The West, which is viewed here chiefly as a
playland, is a mighty interesting workaday land,
too, and numberless are the modern tragedies and
comedies of its varied peoples at their varied
THE HOME MAKERS 73
tasks. Rules and precedents are few and far
between; it is each for himself in his own way.
The blond Scandinavian to his logged-off lands,
the Basque to his sheep herding; the man from
Iowa dairies, and the Carolinian, who never before
saw alfalfa, sets about raising it; the Connecticut
Yankee, with an unconscionable instinct for
wooden nutmegs, sells real estate; the college man
with poor eyes or a damaged liver, as the case may
be, becomes an orchardist at Hood River or Med-
ford. Somehow, some place, there is room for each
and every one, and the big Westland smiles and
receives them all, the strong to prosper and the
weak to fail, according to the inexorable way of life.
Some come for wealth and some for health —
a vast army for the latter, were the truth always
known. The highness and the dryness of the
hinterland draw many to it in their battle against
the White Plague, and while victory often comes,
there comes, too, defeat.
An empty shack I know could tell such a tale —
the tragedy of a good fight lost. They were
consumptives, both of them, and they lived in a
lowland city, west of the mountains. The Doctor
gave the old, old edict: the only chance was to get
74 THE HOME MAKERS
away from the damp, to live out of doors in a
higher, sunnier climate. The boy — he was
scarcely more than that — bade farewell to his
sweetheart and came over the mountains, where
he found land and built the shack that was to be
their home and their haven — where they were to
become sun-browned and robust. The self-evi-
dent conclusion outruns the tale, I fear. The
girl, who smilingly sent her lover eastward, dream-
ing of the happiness so nearly theirs, was distanced
in her race for the sunny goal by Death. To-day
the shack stands vacant.
A friend, who knew the girl and the story, and
loves the land she hoped to see, wrote this to
hearten her when the doctors realized that the home
upon whose threshold she wavered was far, far
distant from the one her lover fashioned "over
the eastern mountains":
Over the eastern mountains
Into a valley I know,
Into the air of uplands,
Into the sun, you go.
Warm is a day in the upland;
Warm is the valley, and bright;
Glittering stars are shining
Over the valley at night.
8 -5
* c
(A rt
■ .
« .c
e «
> i
o
. .c
d o.
d o
3 £
THE HOME MAKERS 75
Here in the western lowland
Patiently I remain,
Under the clouds, in darkness,
Under the dismal rain.
Patient I wait, well knowing
The joy that is to be:
Into the east you're going
To build a home for me.
Rather would I go with you,
But, staying, I smile and sing,
For winter is almost over,
And soon will come the spring.
Then to the home you have made me,
Singing, still singing, I'll go
Over the eastern mountains
Into a valley I know.
CHAPTER VH
On Oregon Trails
T Shaniko I denied being a land
seeker. Yet such I actually was,
although seeking
Oregon, a land of plenty
Where one dollar grows to twenty
not because of the financial fruitfulness the verse
implies, but rather because it was a land where
outdoor pleasures are readily accessible. The
logical outcome of land seeking is home making,
and so in due course we became Oregonians; and
now from our Oregon home we pilgrimage along
the varied trails of the Pacific Playland, whose
beginnings are but across our doormat, when
fancy leads and the exchequer permits.
All of us read with envy of the "big trips, " the
splendid outings to the ends of the earth, made
76
ON OREGON TRAILS 77
by scientists and sportsmen, and those who are
neither but possess the instincts, income, and the
inclination. Simply because we cannot follow
such examples is no reason to suppose they appeal
to us less than to the fortunate adventurer de luxe
for whom African expeditioning, Labrador or
Alaskan game trails, mountain scaling in Peru, or
hunting along the Amazon are matters of every-
year routine. Some day, we, too, hope for such
mighty vacationing — when our ship comes in, or
the baby gets big enough to be left behind, or the
boss lengthens our vacation, as the case may be.
But for the present there is a "when" or an "if"
not to be ignored.
So we content ourselves with lesser adventures
in contentment, which after all, for solid pleasure-
able happiness, are perhaps the best. And we who
live in the Pacific Play land find mountain, forest
and river, fish and game, to our hearts' content;
with a modicum of enterprise it is no trick at
all to devise trips worth taking, whether viewed
from the standpoint of woodsman, mountaineer,
hunter, or fisher, and all within a hundred miles
of home.
Therein, indeed, lies the answer to this query,
78 . ON OREGON TRAILS
which a transplanted Easterner hears ever and anon :
Why do you live in the West ?
For when it comes right down to the truly
important things of life, like fly-fishing, moun-
taineering, and canoeing, the Pacific Coast is a
region of unsurpassed satisfaction. Out-of-doors
is always on tap, and when the hackneyed call of
the red gods comes, it is easily answered.
Adventures in contentment truly — the utter
content of simplicity and isolation. Also, ven-
tures in optimism, for where the trails wind moun-
tainward there is just one place for the pessimist,
and that is at home.
The infallible Mr. Webster defines success as
"the prosperous termination of an enterprise.' *
Mr. Webster is wrong, however, when it comes to
camping, as my friend Mac and I recently de-
monstrated beyond possibility of argument. The
prime object of the trip in question was game.
We were out ten days and returned with no game;
the venison we counted ours still roams the hills,
and the grouse are sunning themselves — except
the half-dozen the puppies ate ! It came about in
this wise. We started in sunshine and forthwith
ON OREGON TRAILS 79
encountered the business end of a storm, com-
prised, in about equal parts, of blizzard, tropical
downpour, and tornado. It continued for four
days, soaked and half-froze us, and swept the high-
lands clean of game, in preference for sheltered
valleys, far away and inaccessible to us. We
hunted persistently, however, and walked count-
less miles. Incidentally, we lost our horses, and
spent one strenuous day tracking them. Finally
Fortune relented a trifle and we bagged a half-
dozen grouse, which we treasured and bore home-
ward for our family tables. But a persistently
unkind fate elected that we sleep beside a forest
ranger* s cabin where also reposed a litter of spaniel
puppies, who forced an entrance to our packs in
the night and devoured every vestige of grouse
except a few of the less nutritious feathers.
Assuredly that enterprise had no prosperous
termination; yet, somehow, in the illogical way of
the woods it seemed to us a success — we had en-
joyed it so!
After all, camping is a queer game, totally in-
explicable to the uninitiated. As with some kinds
of sinning, the more you do the more you desire.
Assuredly it is a madness — a species of midsummer
80 ON OREGON TRAILS
madness, in whose throes the sufferer renounces
most of the comforts of civilization, assuming in-
stead all the discomforts of the wilderness. These
campers are lovers of the Open, and like lovers
the world over, there is no reason in them. In
the wooing season they hie in pursuit of their
beckoning mistress, who permits closest approach,
seemingly, where the trails are the least trodden,
the timber the tallest, and the mountains the
mightiest.
There are many delightful methods of taking
such pilgrimages, but none more alluring than a-
horseback, with all one's worldly goods lashed to the
back of a packhorse, so that freedom of movement
is limited only by one's will and one's woodcraft.
Typical of western mountain lakes is Cultas,
which nestles on the eastern flanks of the Cas-
cades not far from the summit. A wooded moun-
tain of its own name rises from its southern rim,
and elsewhere it is bordered by sandy strands as
white as Cape Cod beaches, by stretches of marsh
and meadow and by higher banks studded with
giant pines, whose trunks nature painted golden
copper and the sun burnishes each day. There we
cast adrift from civilization; the trail ended and
On the trail in the highlands of the Cascades
A sky blue lake set like a sapphire in an emerald mount "
ON OREGON TRAILS 81
our riding horses took to the water at the lake-
side, knee-deep wading over round, slippery rocks
being preferable to battling through the thickets
of lodgepole pine which cluttered the bank.
A lake of trout and sky-blue water is Cultas,
where the leisurely may pitch permanent camp to
their hearts' content, and revel in the luxuries of
perfect outdoor loafing, tempered to suit the taste
with fly-casting excursions 'round on rafts, and
hunting tramps through the timber, where one
need go no great way to spy the tracks of deer
and occasional bear, or surprise grouse perched
fatally low. Further westerly, though, the grouse-
shooting is better, and an average rifle-shot can
bag a plenty of the big fat birds in September.
Poor grouse! "The good die first," said Words-
worth, and so with birds; for the good are the fat,
who, through an excess of avoirdupois, lag in
flight and alight on lower branches and are easiest
shot.
From Cultas there was no trail other than such
a one as mother sense advised and the compass
indicated was properly directioned. Our objec-
tive point was the north and south trail reputed
to follow the summit of the Cascade Range, up
82 ON OREGON TRAILS
whose eastern flanks we were laboring. Finally
we found it, though of trail worthy of the name
there was none; a scattered line of aged blazes
alone indicated where the trail itself once had
been. With some floundering over down logs,
many a false start and mistaken way, and a deal
of patient diligence, we contrived to hold to the
blazes, winding beneath a fairy forest of giant fir,
tamarack, spruce, and pine, here and there skirt-
ing a veritable gem of a sky-blue lake set like a
sapphire in an emerald mount, and occasionally
tracking across a gay little mountain meadow,
until at last we hunted out tiny Link Lake, where
we camped beneath trees whose trunks were
streaked with age wrinkles long before Astor
pioneered his way down the Columbia.
And so it went for several days; there were miles
of pleasant trails, each mile unlike its predecessor
and each holding in store some of those always
expected unforeseen surprises which make trails,
fly-fishing, and (reportedly) "matrimony, so fasci-
nating. There were camp places by lake, stream,
and meadow, each and every one delightful, all
entirely attractive either by the glow of the camp-
fire or viewed in the dawn light as one peered out
ON OREGON TRAILS 83
from the frosted rim of the sleeping-bag — frosted
without, but deliciously warm within. Trails
and camps, indeed, so satisfying that any one of
them might merit weeks of visitation, instead of
hurried hours.
A word concerning trails, here — offered with
the diffidence of an ardent amateur! Primarily,
I suppose, trails are made to be followed; that,
at least, seems the logical excuse for their exist-
ence. Yet my advice is to lose them as speedily
as possible — temporarily, at least. So long as
there is grass and water (there is always fuel, and
your food is with you) no harm can befall, and
assuredly losing the trail, or letting it lose you, is
an admirable way to drop formality and get on
an intimate footing with the country traversed.
One method is like rushing along the highways
of a strange land in an auto; the other approxi-
mates a leisurely following of the byways on your
own two feet. The comparison is overdone, no
doubt, but it has the virtue of fundamental truth.
People who "never lose the trail" and always
proceed on schedule are to be regarded with suspi-
cion and pity; suspicion because they probably
prevaricate, and pity because they don't know
84 ON OREGON TRAILS
what they miss! A schedule should be left be-
hind, in the world of business appointments, time-
tables, and other regrettable impedimenta of
civilization. So long as you know when meal-
time comes, to plan further is folly.
Maps, also, are not to be taken over-seriously,
or followed too religiously. Despite their neat
lines, and scale of miles and inherent air of author-
ity, they are deceivers ever, and apt to prove
hollow delusions and snares when given the acid
test of implicit confidence. Sometimes only
annoyance results, but occasionally the outcome
of misplaced trust is serious.
Every one who has been above the snow line,
under his or her own power, so to speak, under-
stands that there is no satisfaction quite like that
of getting to the top of a mountain. The most
leisurely and unambitious mortal, once he finds
the 500-foot contour lines slipping away behind
him, acquires something of the true mountaineer-
ing itch. We inherited that itch from previous
attacks of the mountain malady. So standing
knee-deep in the rank grass of the Sparks Lake
prairies, and seeing the snow fields crowding down
close to us, seemingly just behind the timber
The trails are not all dry-shod
11 Our trail wound beneath a fairy forest
ON OREGON TRAILS 85
which fringed our meadow camping place, we
realized full well that to-morrow's work held for
us some five thousand feet of climb.
Once, in Central America, I stood upon a peak
whence were visible both the Atlantic and the
Pacific. Again, in western Washington, from
the summit of Mt. Olympus, I have seen the silver
waters of Puget Sound to the east and the Pacific
Ocean westward. From the South Sister we saw
no ocean — no water other than the myriad lakes
nestling broadcast among the foothills. No water,
but two seas — eastward a brown sea of sagebrush
and grain lands, the plateau of Central Oregon,
and westward the billowing sea of smoky Willa-
mette Valley lowlands, blue and hazy and softly
tinted as any soberer canvas of the color-master
Turner. Two vast panoramas of land reaching
to the horizon, the one bounded by the truly blue
Blue Mountains that marked the whereabouts of
Idaho, the other by the low cloud banks hovering
over the coast hills flanking the Pacific: — those
we gazed down upon to the east and west, while
north and south straggled the great ridge of the
Cascade Range, cleaving the old Oregon country
into two astonishingly dissimilar halves.
86 ON OREGON TRAILS
South we glimpsed the pride of California's
mountains, glorious Shasta. North, a filmy white
spectre, harassed by a turmoil of darker cloud, was
the peak of Mt. Adams, some two hundred and
fifty miles distant. Nearer — yet scarcely close
at hand, for almost two hundred miles separated
us — stood Hood, guardian of the Columbia, whose
valley could be guessed by the shadowed depres-
sions in the hill lands. Nearer were Jefferson,
Squaw Mountain, Broken Top, and lesser peaks.
As mountain views go, it was perfection — and all
mountain views are perfect.
We ate our snack of lunch, drank our canteen
dry, smoked our pipes, and reveled in viewing
the world below us. Then, like the hackneyed
army of the Duke of York, we marched right
down again. Only be it noted that the descent
was a marvel of rapid transit, especially where
the long snow slopes were concerned. If you
have done it, you know. If you haven't, suffice
it to say that one sits upon a portion of one's
architecture designed for general repose, and
upon it slides to lower altitudes with a speed that
often takes breath away and always materially
dampens that afore-mentioned anatomical por-
An Oregon Trail
From a photograph by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.
ON OREGON TRAILS 87
tion, if not one's ardor. Snow sliding, however
negotiated, is exhilarating and great fun — even
if the slider becomes tangled with the attraction
of gravitation, completing his descent head fore-
most!
At dusk, we reached the camp, with tired legs
and a mighty hunger. It was late — too late to
attempt much in the way of an elaborate meal,
even as "elaborateness" is reckoned when you
have been on the trail for a fortnight. So we
compromised on a "light" repast, which included,
if I remember aright, such infinitesimal items as a
couple of quarts of coffee, a panful of bacon, a can
of peaches, a package of raisins, and sundry other
lesser matters.
"To-morrow, " we agreed, "we will have a feed.
A real feed, worthy of the name. A feed that
will go down in campers' history. A feed, in
short, that will make us feel that we have been
FED."
With that resolution we set to work. It was
tiresome and sleepy work, to be sure, but thorough
for all that. It was, indeed, as if we made our
gastronomic will before ending the trip, for ere
we clambered into our blankets the pride of the
88 ON OREGON TRAILS
larder, the best of what was left in the pack-saddles,
was placed in our biggest pot.
It was to be a mulligan — a mighty mulligan.
In it there were venison, ham, bacon, potatoes,
onions, a dash of corn, a taste of tomatoes, rem-
nants of bannocks, some persistent beans, and a
handful of rice; it was freckled with raisins and
seasoned to the king's taste. Almost devoutly we
laid it to rest, placing the big pot upon the fire
and reinforcing the dying blaze with lasting knots.
Then, with contented sighs, we dove into sleeping-
bags and blankets, and forthwith passed into the
land of dream-mountains, where one coasted for
eons down comfortably warm snow slopes, and
venison mulligan flowed in the streams instead
of water.
Alas for dreams! Like the proverbial worm,
the log turned — and with it the pot, bottom up.
In the wee small hours the sound of sizzling
ashes waked us, and we roused to discover the
fragrant juices of our precious mulligan oozing
into the hungry ground.
Tragedy? Truly yes; a sad, sad campers'
tragedy. But what could we do? It avails
nothing to cry over spilt mulligan. So once more
ON OREGON TRAILS
89
we nestled in the blankets and drifted off into the
Land of Nod, dreaming sadly of wrecked mulligan
and gladly of future excursions in the wondrous,
pleasant mountain land of Oregon.
CHAPTER Vm
Uncle Sam's Forests
NCE we reached a certain ranger
station after sundown. It was the
end of a long trail day, our horses
were tired, we were fagged, and
darkness was hard upon us. The only good grass
in sight was the forty-acre fenced pasture sur-
rounding the Forest Service cabin. So opening
the gate we entered the forbidden land, unsaddled,
and turned the horses lose.
Just as we had the fire started and the coffee
boiling, up came the ranger, with a star on his
shirt and an air of outraged authority about him.
"You can't make camp here, " said he.
My partner had a legal turn of mind, and came
back quickly with the observation that we had
already done so.
"Well, you'll have to unmake it, then," con-
tinued Uncle Sam's representative. "This here
isn't for campers; it's reserved for the Service."
90
UNCLE SAM'S FORESTS 91
And thereafter, with considerable bluntness, he
told us to "git," and quickly. Our arguments
were in vain. The fact that it was dark, that we
were played out, that there was no other horse
feed near, availed not at all. With him it was no
case for logic. Like a good and faithful servant he
always came back to the beginning with the state-
ment, "Them's the rules and I gotter enforce 'em. "
But in the meantime the coffee boiled and the
horses wandered farther from us. The ranger
became exasperated.
"You're trespassing," he expostulated. "This
is private property and "
"Whose property?" My partner hit the nail
on the head. But the ranger didn't see the rocks
ahead.
"Property of the Forest Service, of course,"
said he.
"And who is the Forest Service?"
"Why, it's — it's — " the ranger stuttered a bit,
seeking adequate explanation. "It's the Govern-
ment, of course. "
The ranger swelled with pride — after all, hadn't
he demonstrated himself the representative of our
omnipotent nation? But pride precedeth falls.
92 UNCLE SAM'S FORESTS
"And who is the Government?" persisted my
partner, as he poured his cup full of coffee from
the battered pot.
But before an Armageddon of violence was
reached I interrupted and dispelled the threatened
storm. For as it happened we were privileged
characters, of a sort, and our note from the District
Supervisor extending the special courtesies of the
Service turned the rising wrath of our ranger into
the essence of hospitality. We never again heard
of the rules from him.
However, my friend had expressed a monumen-
tal conclusion. Our pasture was the property of
the Forest Service, the Service was a part of the
Government, and the Government is of and for
the people — us common people. Therefore that
pasture was ours — Q .E . D . ! Of course the principle
doesn't work out in practice, because the Service,
in the proper conduct of its affairs, must have
strict property rights like any other organization
or individual. But, broadly speaking, that is the
truth of the matter. And in justice to the new
spirit of the Forest Service, and the aims and
methods of its employees of to-day, it is well to
state that the ranger in question was of the old
UNCLE SAM'S FORESTS 93
school, which regarded its reserves as its own sacred
property and operated somewhat on the antedated
motto of some railroads of the past, "The public
be damned."
For whatever one's feeling regarding the eco-
nomic phase of national forests, from the casual
camper's standpoint there is no doubt that their
conduct to-day is admirable. Viewed from this
angle they are great playgrounds, and as in Oregon
alone the national forests embrace an astounding
total of more than sixteen million acres, their
importance to the recreationist is evident. On the
doors of the ranger stations are signs which read :
"Property of the United States. For the use of
officers of the Forest Service." Leaving off the
trespass warning which concludes the text of the
cloth notices, one might change the other sentence
thus: "For the use of whomever enjoys out-of-
doors"; then you would have the meaning of the
Western forest reserves in a nutshell, so far as
campers are concerned.
If you are a settler who unsuccessfully seeks
elimination " of a homestead on the ground that it
is "more valuable for agricultural purposes than
for timber," or a timber speculator, or even a mill
94 UNCLE SAM'S FORESTS
owner desirous of cheap logs, your enthusiasm for
"conservation" may be a negligible quantity.
Certainly if you are a vote-seeker you will damn
it whenever opportunity affords, for that is poli-
tically fashionable, and always safe — unlike
woman suffrage, prohibition, and tariff questions;
conservation is an architectural phenomenon, for
it is a fence with only one side in a West whose
people consider themselves robbed of their heritage
of natural wealth, which most of them are all for
turning into dollars as fast as logging-roads and
band-saws can contrive. "To-day for to-day; let
the morrow care for itself," they say. But if you
are merely a foolish camper, with a secret dread
of the time when the old earth will be divested
totally of her timber covering, you may actually
be grateful for the manner in which the reserves
are administered. Your playground is cared for
and guarded and improved. Maps, often accurate,
are obtainable. The trails are well blazed and
well kept, and new trails and roads are constantly
being installed for the double purpose of making
the forests more accessible to the public and to
simplify fire fighting.
For above all, of course, the great good work is
UNCLE SAM'S FORESTS 95
the ceaseless battle against fire — now far more
one of prevention than of extinction. Visible and
arresting signs of the fire-war are encountered
everywhere — notices warning against the risks and
losses of forest fires, exhortations on the criminal
dangers of leaving camp-fires burning, reminders
to the smokers about forgotten cigarettes. These,
and a score more, stare the trail follower in the
face at intervals upon his way, until hostility to
the plundering fire god is so thoroughly drummed
home as to become a sort of second nature.
The more frequented trails, as I have said, are
plastered with fire warning signs. Once one of
them all but broke up a contented camping trip,
in this wise :
After a two days' ride in a driving rain storm and
a night in wet blankets, we came to a deserted
ranger station, and in it found a welcome refuge.
Our blankets spread in a dry corner, we set to
work upon a fire, just beyond the overhang of what
had once been a porch roof.
That fire was a task! If we were soaked, the
woods were wetter still, and everything normally
inflammable seemed as water-logged as a dish-
rag. However, Mac fared forth with his double-
96 UNCLE SAM'S FORESTS
bitted axe, and in due course secured some
near-dry chips from the sheltered side of a dead
tree. However, the chips showed no overweening
desire to ignite, despite Mac's most tender efforts.
The rain beat on his face, mud plastered his
knees, water from the shake roof trickled down
his neck, and matches and temper approached
exhaustion while he struggled coaxingly with the
stubborn fire god.
On a tree just behind the would-be fire maker was
a Forest Service sign, whose large letters read:
" Beware of Setting Fires!" Glancing up from
Mac at his sodden task to that sign a latent sense
of humor somewhere within my damp person
overbalanced discretion, and I burst into up-
roarious laughter.
Somehow Mac took my levity quite to heart.
"Well," said he — or something with the same
number of letters — "if you think you can make
this dodgasted fire burn better'n I can, come out
and try — the water's fine. "
There were embellishments, too, not fit to
print in a modest book, regarding a loafer
who would hang back in the dry places while
the only intelligent member of the party, etc. But
Using the forest fire telephone at a ranger station
%i
Packing up " at a deserted ranger station
UNCLE SAM'S FORESTS 97
when he saw the sign even irate Mac had to
laugh, too.
"Whoever posted that warning,' ' said he,
"ought to be compelled to come in September
and try to set a fire hereabout! He'll get a
medal for incendiarism if he succeeds!"
At all events the National Forests occupy an
all-important place in the Pacific Play land, if
mountains and woods figure at all in your itinerary.
The Calif ornian Sierras are in the "reserves," as
are the Cascades and much of the coast mountains
of Oregon and Washington. There are countless
other outing places in the three States, of course,
for many prefer the automobile to the pack-horse,
and the beach to the highlands, and for such, the
road maps of the automobile associations and the
shore line of the Pacific open an endless field of
pleasure.
In hunting and fishing, too, the sportsman need
not confine himself to the mountain regions, and
whether the hunter use gun or camera there are
regions throughout the three States where his
rewards for patient diligence will be ample. Ducks
and geese abound, from the Sacramento marshes
to the sloughs of the Columbia and the myriad
98 UNCLE SAM'S FORESTS
shooting grounds of Puget Sound, and there are
deer and bear and occasionally a cougar or cat
scattered through the hills. Coyotes roam the
sagebrush plains, devastating neighbors to the
sage hens and rabbits, grouse lurk in the timbered
foothills, and gay Chinese pheasants are prosper-
ing— where they have been "planted" by the
State game authorities.
With all the rivers, and all the lakes, of the three
States to choose from, it would be folly to list
any special ones of marked piscatorial virtue, even
if one were able where superlatives are appro-
priate in describing so many. Suffice to say that
from actual experience I know that there are
streams in the Sierras, in the Oregon Cascades, and
in the Olympics of Washington whose very con-
templation would make Izaak Walton long for
reincarnation. Back East — in New Brunswick
and Cape Breton, for instance — one often catches
as many and as large trout, and sometimes more
and larger, than in the Western streams. But
after all, the fish are a small part of the fishing.
The tame sameness of the surroundings of the
down-east waters compares ill with the theatrical
bigness and infinite variety of setting of most of
UNCLE SAM'S FORESTS 99
the Western rivers, where half the delight is the
recurring glimpses of snowy peaks and the majestic
companionship of colossal trees.
Beside a little lake not far from the summit of
the Cascades is a small cabin. It is squatty in
appearance and strongly constructed, but has
neither the earmarks of a ranger's station nor of a
trapper's winter home. A few yards away, where
a little creek enters the lake, a rather elaborate
dam adds to the mystery.
11 It's a fish station, " explained Mac cryptically.
Later I heard arrangements made for the trans-
portation of half a ton of grub to the cabin — a
matter of fifty miles of wagon haul, twelve by
pack-horse, and five by boat. The supplies were to
be brought in before the snows came in the Fall,
and buried beside the cabin so that the canned
stuff and the potatoes would not freeze. Then the
occupants who were to eat the rations would put
in their appearance about April 1st, when the
trails were hidden beneath many feet of snow and
packing would be nearly an impossibility.
For the cabin represented the first link in the
work of trout propagation, as conducted by the
State Fish and Game Commission. Two experts go
ioo UNCLE SAM'S FORESTS
to it when the first spring thaws attack the drifts
and the little creek grows restless beneath its
winter quilt of snow and ice. The first year they
waited too long, and when they came and built
their dam the female fish already had gone up the
creek to lay their eggs. But this year they dared
the rear-guard of winter, and arrived in time to
trap hundreds of trout fat with roe. For six weeks
they labor collecting the eggs which later are sent
to the State hatchery at Bonneville to be hatched.
Later the fingerlings are distributed where most
needed throughout Oregon.
The fisherman who pays his license fee often
enough knows next to nothing of the good work
that is being done for him by those who aim not
only to keep the streams from being "fished out, "
but also to improve the fishing. This cabin by the
lakeside represents the start of the work, and bitter
hard work some of it is, too.
The fish car, " Rainbow,' ' with its load of cans
filled with trout fry, reaches the railroad point
selected for distribution. There the local warden
has gathered a legion of volunteer automobiles in
which the cans are rushed to the streams and lakes
near by and their contents planted. That is the
t
o
d
! I
II
•m >»
a -°
O X
bfl c.
s &
o s
d c
< a
£
8
UNCLE SAM'S FORESTS 101
easy simple "planting." The difficulties come
when the streams or lakes are scores of miles from a
railway or even a road, and the carrying must be
done by pack-train. In 191 2 and 191 3, for instance,
one hundred and sixteen lakes scattered throughout
the Cascade Mountains were stocked; that is,
waters suitable for trout culture but hitherto
without fish were prepared for the fisherman of
next summer, and an ever-increasing number of
desirable fishing places provided. And in the
cases numbered here, every can of fry used was
carried many miles on pack-horses; one trip
occupied eight days, and even then, thanks to
many changes of water, out of ten thousand fry
only fifty died!
Hunting is an out-of-door pursuit all to itself.
The man who at home would lift a beetle from his
garden walk rather than crush it becomes an
ardent murderer when he camps. Probably there
are no adequate apologies. And yet we all get the
fever at some time or another, and taste the fas-
cination of pitting our wits and woodcraft against
the native cunning of the wild thing we stalk.
Your ethical friend — who probably is a vegetarian
to boot! — here at once objects. He says the con-
102 UNCLE SAM'S FORESTS
test is cruelly uneven; that the odds of a high-
powered rifle spoil the argument. Which, in a way,
is quite true. But Heaven knows we would never
taste venison or have bear rugs before our den fires
if their capture was left to our naked hands !
However, this is dangerous ground, and most of
us brush past it when vacation time comes, and
take out our hunting license as automatically as
we make up our order for corn-meal and bacon.
From our rods we expect full creels, and hope for
game from the guns.
"Any luck?"
That is the first question when you get home,
and a negative answer implies defeat. Unless you
get something, be prepared for the I-thought-as-
much expression when your friend sympathizes
with you. An incentive and a temptation it is —
some of the worst of us and some of the best of us
have nearly fallen (nearly, I say) and offered gold
to a small boy with the basket which was full of
fish when ours was empty. And the game laws —
there, in truth, is where sportsmanship at times
is forced into tight corners!
We had hunted deer for two solid, leg- wearying
days. But the woods were very dry, and the deer
UNCLE SAM'S FORESTS 103
heard us long before we saw them, except for a
doe or two, uncannily aware of the safety of their
sex. On the morrow we hit the homeward trail,
and were disconsolate at the prospect of a venison-
less return.
Crackle!
Something moved in the thicket below me.
Another stir and the "something" resolved itself
into a deer. Up came the light carbine — the
weapon par excellence for saddle trips — while I
sighted across seventy yards of sunshine at the
brown beast moving gracefully about, nipping at
hanging moss and oblivious of danger.
But the carbine did not speak. Conscience and
familiarity with the game laws battled for some
thirty seconds with inclination and desire for
venison. Then conscience won, and the doe
continued her dainty feeding, undisturbed.
In days gone by, our copy-book mottoes told us
that "Virtue is its own reward.*' As a general
thing such automatic recompense is unsatisfactory,
so when really first-class examples of more tangible
returns for virtue arise, they deserve recording.
And this was one of them. For no sooner had I
formed the good resolve, and acted on it, venison
104 UNCLE SAM'S FORESTS
or no venison, than there came another soft crack-
crackle of dry twigs, and a second brown animal
appeared.
Bang!
The first shot hit just abaft the shoulder and the
fine buck lay dead before he knew his plight.
And if that was not immediate reward for virtue,
I defy explanation !
CHAPTER IX
A Canoe on the Deschutes
HERE are larger rivers than the
Deschutes, and wilder, and some
better for the canoe; many shelter
more ducks, and a few more trout
than does Oregon's " River of Falls. M But if there
are any more beautiful or varied I have yet to
make their acquaintance.
The Columbia is, of course, a continental stream
whose very mightiness prevents any adequate
comprehension of its entity; it must be enjoyed
by sections, in small potions. The Willamette is
almost pastoral, a sterner Western edition of the
English Thames, with a score of rollicking tribu-
taries, rough as the mountains that breed them.
The Sacramento, like linked sweetness, is long
drawn out, and the boisterous brooks of the Sierras
seem rather upland freshets than substantial
rivers. Superlatives are risky tools on the Pacific
Slope where they appear appropriate so often, but
105
106 A CANOE ON THE DESCHUTES
even so, with no apologies to the Pitt, the Snake,
the Williamson, the Rogue, and other neighbors,
greater and lesser, the Deschutes appeals to me
as the richest of them all in scenery and pleasur-
able attractions. From the snow banks of its birth
to the Columbia I have played companion to its
waters on horseback, in canoe, in automobile, driv-
ing, afoot, and on a train, and with familiarity has
come no contempt, but ever-increasing admiration.
The Deschutes is a river of many r61es : it roars
and rushes in white-watered cascades, it sparkles
gently in a myriad rippling rapids, it is sedate as a
mill pond; sometimes its banks are fields flanked
with flowers, sometimes steep slopes with black
pools below and great trees above, sometimes lined
with alders or with the needle-carpeted forest
marching out to the very water's edge. Such it is
for the first hundred miles. Below, leaving the
land of trees and meadows, it plunges for a second
century of miles through a spectacular canyon,
walled in by cliffs and abrupt hillsides, often rising
almost sheer a thousand feet. "The Grand Can-
yon of the Northwest, M those who know it call this
stretch of the Deschutes. Above, billowing back
from the rim, is a great golden-brown land of wheat
A CANOE ON THE DESCHUTES 107
fields, with a marvelous mountain westerly skyline.
On the river's western flank, between it and
the Cascade Range, is a play land of beautiful pine
timber, crystal lakes, and mountained meadows,
bounded on one hand by snow-capped peaks and
on the other by the broad plains that sweep
eastward to Idaho.
One August we foregathered in this happy
hunting ground with our canoe and our grub, near
the headwaters of the Deschutes, in the heart of a
region of sunshine, mountain prairie, glorious trees,
and laughing water. One hundred miles of liquid
highway lay before us, and we envied no one.
Crane Prairie is a broad mountain meadow,
hemmed in by timbered foothills that climb to the
snow mountains, glimpsed here and there from the
prairie land. The Deschutes divides into three
streams, each meandering down from little lakes
tucked away in the timber at the base of the snow
slopes that feed them. All around the prairie is
a delightful region intersected by trails, dotted
with lakes and meadows; altogether a pleasant
place for ramblings, either on foot or horseback,
with fishing, hunting, and mountain climbing as
tangible objectives.
io8 A CANOE ON THE DESCHUTES
The first stage of our outing was a stationary one,
so far as the canoe was concerned, for a week was
devoted to expeditioning here and there upon and
around Crane Prairie. There was excellent fishing,
and we saw just enough of the trails and the moun-
tains to realize something of their possibilities.
Then one morning, before the sunlight had
filtered over the hills and down through the
pine boughs, we launched the Long Green, our
canoe which had made the transcontinental trip
from Oldtown, Maine, and started it upon a more
venturesome, if less lengthy trip. Ours, by the
way, was an equal suffrage outing. Its feminine
better-half paddled as strenuously, cast a fly as
optimistically, and " flipped" hot cakes as dili-
gently as did the male member. Altogether, she
demonstrated beyond a doubt that the enjoyment
of an Oregon canoe trip need not depend upon
one's sex or previous condition of servitude.
Comfortable canoeing is the most entirely
satisfying method of travel extant. It is noiseless,
it is easy, and there is enough uncertainty and risk
about it to lend a special charm. Just as the best
of fishing is the unknown possibility of the next
cast — your biggest trout may rise to the fly! — so
Canoeing and duck shooting may be combined on the Deschutes
On a backwater of the Deschutes
A CANOE ON THE DESCHUTES 109
it is when you drift down stream in a canoe, for
every turn discloses a fresh vista and behind
every bend lurks some rare surprise. It may be an
unsuspected rapid, requiring prompt action; per-
haps a tree has fallen across the river, necessitating
a flanking portage or a hazardous scurry beneath
it ; mayhap a particularly inviting pool will appear,
when one must "put on the brakes" and "full
speed astern" ever so hastily before a fatal shadow
spoils the fishing chances. There are other possi-
bilities without number, some of them realities for
us, as when we came face to face with a deer, to
our vast mutual astonishment, or, quietly drifting
down upon a madam duck and her fluffy feathered
family, gave them all violent hysterics. The little
birds were unable to fly, and the mother, who
would not desert them and lacked courage to hide
along the bank, herded her family down stream
for many miles with heartbreaking squawks and
much splashing of wings.
A portage is either one of the interesting events
of a canoe trip or its most despised hardship,
according to the disposition of those concerned —
not to mention the length, breadth, and thickness
of the portage itself! Regarded in its most pessi-
no A CANOE ON THE DESCHUTES
mistic light, a portage is a necessary evil, and, like
a burned bannock, is swallowed with good grace
by the initiated. In Eastern Canada, the land of
patois French, a portage is a portage. In Maine,
and elsewhere, it is apt to be a " carry." West of
the Rockies, one neither "portages" nor "carries,"
but "packs" the canoe, for on the Pacific Slope
everything borne by man or beast is "packed,"
just as it is "toted " south of the Mason and Dixon
line. But portage, carry, or pack, the results are
the same. Reduced to their lowest equation, it
usually means a sore back and a prodigious appe-
tite— there should be a superlative for prodigious,
as all camping appetites are that; dare one say
" prodigiouser " ?
Our hundred miles of river included but two
portages of consequence, both around falls. For-
tunately in each instance the packing was across a
comparatively level stretch, free from underbrush,
as is almost all of this great belt of yellow pine
that follows the eastern slopes of the Cascades
from the Columbia to California. There were
minor carries, once over a low bridge, where the
bands of sheep cross to the mountain summer
ranges of the forest reserves, and several times an
A CANOE ON THE DESCHUTES in
easy haul, with canoe loaded, around the end of a
fallen tree or crude forest ranger's bridge made of
floating logs held together for the most part with
baling wire.
Now and again the river was bordered by nature-
made fields, knee-deep with flowers; there were
purple lupin everywhere and vermilion Indian
paint-brush, and a score of other gay blossoms.
Often for the pleasure of tramping through this
pretty outdoor garden, we would let the canoe
follow its own sweet will at the end of a rope, while
we walked down the bank, perhaps intimately
investigating the households of beavers or casting
a royal coachman along the shadowed water close
beside the edge.
The special delight of camping, as anyone knows
who has tried it, is that life all at once becomes
so simple away from the high-pressure world of
telephones, time-tables, dinner engagements, and
other necessary evils. That is the essence of outing
pleasure. The fishing, the canoeing, the hunting,
climbing, or what-not are really relegated to ob-
scurity in comparison with this one great boon.
When our physical system runs down, we take
medicine ; when our mental system gets out of gear,
ii2 A CANOE ON THE DESCHUTES
we crave a dose of the open, which means of
simplicity.
A canoe trip is simplicity personified. In the
first place, you are launched into the wide world
of out-of-doors with your entire household, from
dining table to bed, concentrated in a couple of
bundles that repose amidships in the craft which is
the beginning and the end of your transportation
possibilities. The rest is "up to you." If you
would get somewhere, it is necessary to paddle,
always exercising due diligence to keep the craft
right side up and escape fatal collisions with vexa-
tious rocks and snags. In that department —
— locomotion — there is just enough active re-
sponsibility to keep it thoroughly worth while,
and more than enough relaxation, as the current
carries the canoe along with only now and then a
guiding dip of the paddle, to make it all a most
pleasurable loaf.
Every stopping place was a new experience, and,
it should be said, each seemed even more beautiful
than its predecessor.
"There's a bully place. See — there under the
big pine."
With a stroke or two of the paddles the Long
Along the Deschutes, the " River of Falls." " It roars and rushes,
in white-watered Cascades "
Copyright 191 1 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland. Ore.
A CANOE ON THE DESCHUTES 113
Green arrived gently at the bank beneath that
pine, and out would come the box of grub, the
gunny sack of pots and frying pans, and the rolls
of bedding. Then the canoe was drawn from the
water, and, inverted, pressed into double service
as a table and a rain shelter, in case of need. Our
waterproof sleeping-bags were supposed to do as
much for us, and on two occasions showers damp-
ened our slumbers, if not our spirits.
The important work of camping, which is not
work at all, but play, is in the commissary depart-
ment. It has four stages : lighting the fire, cooking,
eating, and cleaning up; the third is, by all odds,
the most popular.
Concerning fire making, volumes have been
written. It is quite possible to learn from these
incendiary publications exactly how to prepare
the proper, perfect kind of a fire under any and all
circumstances. Study alone is required to master
the art — on paper ! But in reality, making a quick
and satisfactory camp-fire, like creating frying-
pan bread, is a subtle attainment that can be
mastered only by practice. No two people agree ;
it is easier to start a dispute over the details of a
camp-fire than about anything imaginable, not
ii4 A CANOE ON THE DESCHUTES
even excepting the "best trout fly made" — and
that, every fisherman knows, is a matter of pisca-
torial preference that has disrupted humanity
since the days of Izaak Walton.
Camp cooking is another art. There, again,
place not all thy faith in books, for they are de-
ceivers when it comes to a bit of bacon, a frying
pan, some corn-meal and flour, and a pinch of
baking powder. The only satisfactory rule is to
have as few ingredients as possible and to have
plenty of them. Flour, corn-meal, bacon, dried
apples, butter, hardtack, sugar, salt, coffee, baking
powder, beans — those form the essential founda-
tion. There is an endless list of edibles that may
be added, which run the gastronomic gamut from
molasses to canned corn. But the way to learn real
camp cooking, and by all odds the best procedure
for happiness in transportation, is to take a small
variety and keep each article in a cloth bag, which
insures few troublesome packages and no disas-
trous leaks.
"Cleanin' up" is no trick at all, when there is a
river full of water a dozen feet from the fire, and
it is simply a matter of two pots and two tin plates.
There, indeed, the joys of camp life come home to
A CANOE ON THE DESCHUTES 115
the feminine member of the expedition most
forcibly of all.
" Isn't it heavenly ! Only two plates to wash I"
expressed the essence of her satisfaction.
Two plates to wash, two paddles to manipulate,
two healthful, happy weeks of out-of-doors, all as
enjoyable for a woman as for a man — that was our
Deschutes River canoe trip. And there are a score
or more of other Oregon outings as delightful.
CHAPTER X
Olympus
N the hilly residential section of
Tacoma is a studio-workshop. On
a certain September morning its
inward appearance indicated the
recent passage of a tornado — a human tornado of
homecoming after a long campaign of camping.
From dunnage bags, scattered about the floor,
showered sleeping-bags, ruck sacks, a nest of cook
pots, "packs, " the rubber shoes of the north coun-
try, belts, knives, ammunition, and a thousand
and one odds and ends. In a corner was an oiled
silk tent, the worse for wear. Elsewhere, a clutter
of ice axes, snowshoes, glacier spikes, guns, photo-
graphs, and hides occupied the available space.
The room and its contents smacked of the
regions that lie about the Arctic circle, and thence,
indeed, they had just come. For Mine Host was
barely back from Mt. McKinley and many months
of venturesome exploration in Alaska.
116
OLYMPUS 117
Next to watching the other fellow prepare his
camping kit and discuss plans for the Big Trip,
when you yourself are to stay at home, I think the
most exasperating experience is to hear the good
tales told by the man fresh returned from some
thrilling expedition. As you listen to the story of
the big untrodden places, the routine of your
everyday life seems woefully petty, and you are
all at once distracted with a mad resolve to go and
do likewise. It is a dangerous symptom, and
should be prescribed for immediately — though the
only real remedy I know is to close one's eyes and
ears and flee from the place of temptation. For
this is the Wanderlust, the joyful plague of the
sinner who has lost all count of time and ties in
following some wilderness trail, and desires nothing
more than to lose them again.
If McKinley and Alaska were out of reach, across
Puget Sound lay a closer land of mountains and
little-trodden trails. "Why not try Olympus?"
The suggestion was no sooner made than ac-
cepted. Before I entered the room six months
of stay-at-home was my unquestioned outlook,
but all at once a hike to Olympus appeared the
most reasonable thing in the world.
n8 OLYMPUS
Mine Host, upon whom the blame rests, was
out of the running, for he started East the next
day. But his companion, the Mountain Climber,
although scarcely yet with a taste of civilization
after months in the wilderness, was in a receptive
frame of mind. It took us two minutes to decide
definitely upon the excursion. Twenty minutes
more and we had picked outfits from the wealth
of paraphernalia all about us, and at midnight we
saw the lights of Seattle's water front vanish
astern as a Sound steamer bore us toward Port
Angeles on the Olympic peninsula.
At times on our journey the Mountain Climber
reminded me that on his inland voyaging Steven-
son traveled with a donkey. Inasmuch as our
pack animal was a horse, that rather hurt my
feelings; the inference was so obvious. However,
that horse was more than half mule, so far as dis-
position is concerned. We hired him at Port
Angeles and Billy was his name.
"And when I walk, I always walk with Billy,
For Billy knows just how to walk, "
chanted the Mountain Climber as we started out
blithely. But long ere we crossed the divide
OLYMPUS 119
separating the town from the valley of the Elwha
River we realized that if Billy knew how to walk
he emphatically refused to put his knowledge into
practice. For Billy was a stubborn loafer until it
came to night time, when he bent his pent-up
energy to getting as far from camp as possible
between dusk and sun-up.
There are three distinct methods of travel on the
trail. You may ride horses and carry your supplies
on a pack-horse. You may walk and let the pack
animal do the burden bearing. Or you may be a
host unto yourself and bear your entire household
on your back, with your own legs supplying locomo-
tion. On this trip we chose the middle course, and
walked, while Billy was our common carrier. Back
packing is a strenuous undertaking where many
miles are to be covered, and yet a superfluity of
horses is a nuisance if the going is rough and in-
stead of gaining speed with many animals you
actually lose it. So it seemed to us the best way
was to go afoot, with a single pack-horse.
The brawling Elwha was our guide to Olympus,
for its headwaters spring almost from the base of
the mountain, and our trail wandered up the bank
of the stream until, perhaps a dozen miles beyond
120 OLYMPUS
our departure point from the highroad, we came
to an appetizing meadow, and the pleasantest
mountain home imaginable.
It was the log house of the "Humes Boys, " who
seem as much of an institution in the Olympics as
the mountains themselves. Bred in the Adiron-
dacks the Humes migrated westward and hit upon
this isolated homestead in the corner of Washing-
ton, where a growing influx of hunters and fisher-
men finds them out and they are kept busy during
the summer months as guides and packers to the
many vacationists who know them and their
knowledge of the surrounding regions. In the
winter they trap and — I imagine from the evident
tastes of Grant Humes — read good books on out-
of-door subjects, close to the glowing stove, while
the winds whistle up and down the valley and the
snow piles high. Gardeners, too, they are in a
modest way, raising all their vegetables. And
cooks! What cooks! In years gone by some
pioneer settler had planted plum trees, and when
we first saw Grant Humes no housewife was busier
with jelly-making than he.
"It's a bother now, and I don't suppose I enjoy
it more than any other man likes such work,"
OLYMPUS 121
said he. "But when we're here in January and
February, pretty well shut off from the world, and
there's a great sameness about the food, I tell you a
hundred glasses of plum jelly look almighty good —
not to mention tasting!"
I can vouch for the taste of it in September; if
the midwinter season improves the flavor I'm in a
most receptive mood for a Christmas invitation
to the cabin on the Elwha !
For those who have the right sort of taste,
existence such as the Humes's must seem quite
Utopian. Their garden and their rifles, supple-
mented by importations from the store "down
below," feed them; their meadows supply hay for
their stock; fuel of course is everywhere, and a
little captivated stream brought to the house in a
hand-hewed flume supplies an icy approximation of
"running water." Hemming in the meadowland
oasis are giant hills, their neighboring flanks hidden
by mighty timber, their summits gray and brown
beneath mantles of brush and berry, closing in the
valley so resolutely that its hours of sunlight are
almost as meager as in the cavernous fjord lands of
Norway.
After Humes's the trail wound through abysmal
122 OLYMPUS
forest depths, skirting fir and pine and cedar of
unbelievable girth, or making irksome detours
where some fallen monarch blocked the way.
Needles and ferns there were underfoot, a drapery
of moss overhead, and everywhere a penetrating
silence. The most silent woods imaginable are
those of the wet coast country, where the trees are
enormous and set close together, thickets and ferns
clutter the ground beneath them, and moss clings
to the lower limbs; sunlight, if not a total stranger,
at best is but an itinerant acquaintance.
When the whim seized it the fickle trail deserted
one bank of the Elwha for the other, one of us
leading Billy across while his companion, in vain
effort to keep dry-shod, essayed perilous crossings
on logs, often as not resulting in disaster.
Toward evening of the fourth day we dragged
Billy up a final hill. Except for scattered and
weather-beaten blazes, all vestiges of the trail had
vanished, and, in fact, Grant Humes had told us
that no one had been that way for two years, a
fact testified by fallen trees and the unrepaired
destruction of spring freshets. Hidden at the
base of giant Douglas firs was all that remained of
the Elwha, now scarcely more than a brook, its
OLYMPUS 123
waters opaquely white with the silt of glaciers
close at hand. Suddenly we emerged upon a
hillock and below us lay Elwha Basin, where the
river has its birth.
A cup, carpeted with grass, walled with crags;
an amphitheater studded with trees, hemmed in
by banks of snow, and roofed by blue sky — such
is the basin of the Elwha. At the far end is a wall
of rock, over which tumbles the jolly little infant
river in a silvery cascade, and beyond is a snow
bank jutting into the greenery of an upper meadow.
From a dark cave at the glacial snowbank's base
the river seemed to have its start, though beyond
the snow, from still loftier cliffs, fluttered another
ribbon of water coming from unseen heights be-
yond. Westerly a few jagged snow peaks peered
down upon us over the nearer cliffs, and great
shadows reached across the pleasant valley to the
very base of our little hill of vantage.
At the near end of the basin we found a wonder-
ful camp place all prepared by our thoughtful
nature hostess. It was a cave at the foot of a cliff,
whose ceiling of overhanging rock protected
admirably against the vagaries of the elements,
while wood and water were close at hand, and
124 OLYMPUS
ferns and flowers made Elysian setting. We
turned Billy loose in the knee-high grass, where he
spent a week of loafing, unable, for once, to escape,
thanks to the cliffs and a back trail easily blocked
by felling a few small trees. Happily, then, we
sprawled upon our blankets, with the sweet-
smelling spruce boughs beneath us and the warm
light of the fire playing odd pranks with the danc-
ing shadows in our rock-roofed resting place.
Beyond the ghostly circle of the firelight were the
jet outlines of trees, and, farther, reaching up to a
million stars, the mountains. And beyond those
mountains lay Olympus, for whom we had come so
far and now must go still farther.
The few unessentials of our commissary we left
at the cave, and with grub for five days and bed-
ding on our backs, and the ice axes in our hands,
like the bear of the song, we started over the
mountain to see what we could see.
A steep snow chute called the Dodwell and
Rickson Pass was our way of passage over the
divide to the Queets Basin, where the river of that
name commenced its journey to the Pacific, while
behind us the melting snows that formed the
Elwha found outlet eastward in Puget Sound. As
OLYMPUS 125
we trudged up the steep slopes of the Pass it was
soon apparent that other travelers beside ourselves
used the snowy route, for broad tracks showed
where bruin on his own broad bottom had coasted
down the incline but a few hours previously, a
recreation youthful bears seem to enjoy about as
thoroughly as men cubs. There was indeed a
goodly population of bear in the upper regions of
the Queets, and the hide of one of them is at my
fireside now. It would have been no trick at all
to kill several, for we saw them daily foraging
among the blueberry uplands, with their pink
tongues snaking out first on one side, then on the
other, garnering in the fruit from the low bushes.
But we could pack only one skin, so we left the
others warming their owners, where they most
properly belonged.
Queets Basin is a rough mountain valley,
covered for the most part only with berry bushes,
and with rocky gorges cutting its surface where the
river's several branches had worn away deep
courses. Overshadowing the basin were the out-
posts of Olympus itself, with the snout of Humes's
glacier thrusting its icy seracs almost into the
berry land, and the pinnacled peaks behind rising
126 OLYMPUS
majestically against the northern skyline. West-
ward, the roaring Queets vanished down a canyon,
through a country of the roughest kind, and, we
were told, one hitherto unexplored. A journey to
the sea following the white-watered Queets would
be a worth-while experience, we thought, seeing
the first mile of it; but like many another, the
Mountain Climber and I, unless we live to the
age of Methuselah and devote all our years to
outings, will never be able to take one half the
trips we have planned and secretly long for; ex-
clusive of our cherished ramble down the Queets!
The packs slipped from our backs at the base of
a giant fir, and we called it camp. Next to the bear
who almost thrust his nose into my bed next morn-
ing, my most vivid recollection of that camp was the
blueberry bread we concocted in the frying-pan,
which was fit for the very gods of old Olympus.
Then we climbed Olympus.
Coming on the heels of Mt. McKinley, it was no
great feat of mountaineering for the Mountain
Climber, but nevertheless it combined happily
all the varied attractions of climbing. The ascent
of Olympus does, indeed, entail almost every sort
of mountaineering, and some of it reasonably
OLYMPUS 127
difficult and dangerous. In the first place, the
approach to the mountain is perhaps its crowning
feature; it is a man's sized trip to get within
striking distance, and to its inaccessibility is due
the fact that up to 1907 it was unsealed. When
once reached, there are goodly glaciers to be con-
quered, vast snow fields to be negotiated, some
hard ice work, and a lot of stiff climbing, all at
long range from the nearest practical base camp.
By daybreak we were under way. Through
bushes, across a ravine, up a narrow tongue of
snow in a "chimney, " and then over a shoulder of
rock debris, an outshoot of the lower lateral
moraine of the Humes's glacier, and we found
ourselves on the seracs of the glacier's snout,
with no choice but to take to them. By the time
we had found a way over the broken green ice,
with its sudden chasms, the sun was warm at our
backs and the chill of the dawn was forgotten.
Then we emerged from the ice hummocks which
mightily resembled a storm-tossed sea suddenly
petrified, and commenced the leg- wearying ascent
of the long snow field above, which clothed the
glacier and stretched toward a rim of dark cliffs,
the summit of the divide between us and Olympus
128 OLYMPUS
proper. Toward the lowest saddle in this rocky
wall we set our course.
From the top of this new divide we gazed upon
the clustering peaks of Olympus across the huge
glacier of the Hoh River. Jagged peaks they were,
half -clothed, at times, with clouds, their ragged
rocky pinnacles showing black in contrast to the
dazzling fields of snow which stretched away below
us as in some Arctic scene.
Getting down to the Hoh glacier proved difficult
work, nearly every foothold of the descent being
cut with our axes in the steep ice wall down which
we worked, while yawning crevasses below our
course were distinctly unpleasant reminders of
what might happen should the leader slip and the
rope man be insecurely anchored with his ice axe.
Then a mile up steep snow slopes, and detours
around the base of lesser piles of rock rising almost
perpendicularly from the floor of snow, and we
were at the foot of the final climb. A last wild
scramble up a chimney, the way made risky by
slipping stones and treacherously rotten rock, a
tug of the rope, a helping hand, and we were on
the summit of Olympus !
From no peak that either of us had ever climbed,
" The Humes glacier, over which we went to Mount Olympus
Our nature-made camp in Elwha basin "
OLYMPUS 129
in the Pacific play land, Alaska, or Northern
Europe, had we looked upon more picturesquely
rugged, varied, or altogether fascinating mountain
scenery. Olympus stands at the dividing of the
ways of a half-dozen watersheds, and from its
summit one sees canyons radiating in all directions
from the glaciers that cluster on its flanks and
those of its lesser neighbors, in whose depths are
growing streams that rush away to Puget Sound
and the Pacific. All about, west, northeast, and
south, are snow-clad, saw-tooth peaks, lined with
glaciers. Billowing over these wild summits and
hiding them each in turn, were wondrously tinted
cloud banks, whose overhanging effects of light
and shadow, and freakish alteration of the view
made of the broad panorama a titanic kaleidoscope.
For an hour we sat there, our sweaters about
us, munching raisins and reveling in the scenic
wonders of the world below us. From a metal tube,
well protected in a rock monument, we took and
read the records of previous climbers, left since
the first ascent in 1907. And then, after the habit
of our kind, we added the story of our own expedi-
tion to the others and started on the homeward
trail toward our cave and patient Billy.
CHAPTER XI
"THe God Mountain of Puget
Sound M
ESS than fifty years ago what is now
Seattle numbered scarce a thousand
inhabitants, and the present city
of Tacoma was a cluster of shacks
about a sawmill. Puget Sound, to-day a highway
of commerce, was an almost unknown inland sea,
its waters furrowed only by the prows of Indian
canoes.
But for centuries beyond number the great
mountain of Puget Sound has been as it is to-day,
the mountain beautiful, dominating all the Sound
country. In Seattle its name is Rainier, and
Tacoma insists the city's title is the mountain's as
well. Call it what you will to-day, yesterday, in
the talk of the Indian fishers of Whulge, it was
known as Tacoma, a word generically applied to
snow mountains.
No truly great mountain in America is as readily
130
41 THE GOD MOUNTAIN " 131
accessible and as widely enjoyed as Tacoma-
Rainier. To Seattle and Tacoma it is an ever-
present companion, and all the Puget Sound
country basks in its shadow. A most excellent
automobile road winds through its forests up to
the snow fields, the only highway on this continent
which actually reaches a living glacier. Railroads
go close to the mountain, and a delightful hotel
and several camps supply every inducement and
comfort for luxurious stays in close proximity to
the final peak. From these places as headquarters
one may make countless excursions round about
the mountain, over magnificently beautiful trails,
seeing its glaciers, its forests, its flowers, and its
surpassing views, and there are always guides
ready to lead the way to the top, an ascent which
offers all the thrills and most of the experiences of
the most arduous mountaineering in the Alps.
In short, there is an almost limitless field of recrea-
tion round about Tacoma-Rainier, and it is but
for you to choose the mode of your enjoyment.
Seeing this "Mountain that was God," and
climbing it, are matters of almost normal routine
to the residents of the Puget Sound country and
the visitors to its sister cities. It is the accepted
i32 " THE GOD MOUNTAIN "
thing to do — and one supremely worth while —
but to add another account of an ascent of Tacoma-
Rainier, or detailed description of its wonders, to
the many already in print, would be indeed carry-
ing coals to Newcastle.
So, recommending you to the several excellent
books on the subject, instead of essaying further
description of the mountain to-day I'll venture to
repeat what appeals to me as the best of the many
Indian legends relating to it. The wording of the
story is that of Theodore Winthrop, in his book The
Canoe and Saddle, from which in a previous chap-
ter I borrowed the delightful legend of the Dalles.
The story, says Winthrop, was told to him by
Hamitchou at Nisqually, presumably about i860,
and here is his interpretation :
"Avarice, 0 Boston Tyee, " quoth Hamitchou,
studying me with dusky eyes, " is a mighty passion.
Now, be it known unto thee that we Indians anciently
used not metals nor the money of you blanketeers.
Our circulating medium was shells, — wampum you
would name it. Of all wampum, the most precious is
Hiaqua. Hiaqua comes from the far north. It is a
small, perforated shell, not unlike a very opaque quill
toothpick, tapering from the middle, and cut square
at both ends. We string it in many strands, and hang
3
O .
CO fc
11
«4-l •
o O
0 ~
3 »
o -
o >.
O §■
0)
H
" THE GOD MOUNTAIN " 133
it around the neck of one we love — namely, each man
his own neck. We also buy with it what our hearts
desire. He who has most hiaqua is best and wisest
and happiest of all the northern Hiada and of all the
people of Whulge. The mountain horsemen value it ;
the braves of the terrible Blackfeet have been known,
in the good old days, to come over and offer a horse
or a wife for a bunch of fifty hiaqua.
14 Now, once upon a time there dwelt where this fort
of Nisqually now stands a wise old man of the Squally-
amish. He was a great fisherman and a great hunter;
and the wiser he grew, much the wiser he thought
himself. When he had grown very wise, he used to
stay apart from every other Si wash. Companionable
salmon-boilings round a common pot had no charms
for him. ' Feasting was wasteful,' he said, ' and revel-
ers would come to want,' and when they verified his
prophecy, and were full of hunger and empty of salmon,
he came out of his hermitage and had salmon to sell.
44 Hiaqua was the pay he always demanded; and as
he was a very wise old man, and knew all the tideways
of Whulge, and all the enticing ripples and placid
spots of repose in every river where fish might dash or
delay, he was sure to have salmon when others wanted,
and thus bagged largely of its precious equivalent,
hiaqua.
11 Not only a mighty fisher was the sage, but a migfey
hunter, and elk, the greatest animal of the woods, was
the game he loved. Well had he studied every trail
where elk leave the print of their hoofs, and where,
tossing their heads, they bend the tender twigs. Well
134 " THE GOD MOUNTAIN "
had he searched through the broad forest, and found
the long-haired prairies where elk feed luxuriously ; and
there, from behind palisade fir-trees, he had launched
the fatal arrow. Sometimes, also, he lay beside a pool
of sweetest water, revealed to him by gemmy re-
flections of sunshine gleaming through the woods,
until at noon the elk came down, to find death await-
ing him as he stooped and drank. Or beside the
same fountain the old man watched at night, drow-
sily starting at every crackling branch, until, when
the moon was high, and her illumination declared the
pearly water, elk dashed forth incautious into the
glade, and met their midnight destiny.
" Elk-meat, too, he sold to his tribe. This brought
him pelf, but, alas, for his greed, the pelf came slowly.
Waters and woods were rich in game. All the Squally-
amish were hunters and fishers, though none so skilled
as he. They were rarely absolutely in want, and, when
they came to him for supplies, they were far too poor
in hiaqua.
"So the old man thought deeply, and communed
with his wisdom, and, while he waited for fish or
beast, he took advice within himself from his demon —
he talked with Tamanous. And always the question
was, ' How may I put hiaqua in my purse? '
"Tamanous never revealed to him that far to the
north, beyond the waters of Whulge, are tribes with
their under lip pierced with a fish-bone, among whom
hiaqua is plenty as salmonberries are in the woods
that time in midsummer salmon fin it along the
reaches of Whulge. '
" THE GOD MOUNTAIN " 135
"But the more Tamanous did not reveal to him these
mysteries of nature, the more he kept dreamily prying
into his own mind, endeavoring to devise some scheme
by which he might discover a treasure-trove of the
beloved shell. His life seemed wasted in the patient,
frugal industry, which only brought slow, meager
gains. He wanted the splendid elation of vast wealth
and the excitement of sudden wealth. His own pecu-
liar tamanous was the elk. Elk was also his totem, the
cognizance of his freemasonry with those of his own
family, and their family friends in other tribes. Elk,
therefore, were every way identified with his life; and
he hunted them farther and farther up through the
forests on the flanks of Tacoma, hoping that some day
his tamanous would speak in the dying groan of one
of them, and gasp out the secret of the mines of hiaqua,
his heart's desire.
11 Tacoma was so white and glittering, that it seemed
to stare at him very terribly and mockingly, and to
know his shameful avarice, and how it led him to take
from starving women their cherished lip and nose
jewels of hiaqua, and to give them in return only
tough scraps of dried elk-meat and salmon. When
men are shabby, mean, and grasping, they feel re-
proached for their groveling lives by the unearthliness
of nature's beautiful objects, and they hate flowers
and sunsets, mountains and the quiet stars of heaven.
"Nevertheless," continued Hamitchou, "this wise
old fool of my legend went on stalking elk along the
sides of Tacoma, ever dreaming of wealth. And at
last, as he was hunting near the snows one day, one
136 " THE GOD MOUNTAIN "
very clear and beautiful day of late summer, when
sunlight was magically disclosing far distances, and
making all nature supernaturally visible and proxi-
mate, Tamanous began to work in the soul of the
miser.
"'Are you brave?' whispered Tamanous in the
strange, ringing, dull, silent thunder-tones of a demon
voice. ' Dare you go to the caves where my treasures
are hid ? '
"'I dare,' said the miser.
"He did not know that his lips had syllabled a
reply. He did not even hear his own words. But all
the place had become suddenly vocal with echoes.
The great rock against which he leaned crashed forth,
'I dare.' Then all along through the forest, dashing
from tree to tree and lost at last among the murmuring
of breeze-shaken leaves, went careering his answer,
taken up and repeated scornfully, ' I dare.' And after
a silence, while the daring one trembled and would
gladly have ventured to shout, for the companion-
ship of his own voice, there came across from the vast
snow wall of Tacoma a tone like the muffled threat-
ening plunge of an avalanche into a chasm, 'I dare.'
" ' You dare ! ' said Tamanous, enveloping him with a
dread sense of an unseen, supernatural presence;
1 you pray for wealth of hiaqua. Listen ! '
V This injunction was hardly needed; the miser was
listening with dull eyes kindled and starting. He was
listening with every rusty hair separating from its
unkempt mattedness, and outstanding upright, a
caricature of an aureole.
" THE GOD MOUNTAIN " 137
"'Listen,' said Tamanous, in the noonday hush.
And then Tamanous vouchsafed at last the great
secret of the hiaqua mines, while in terror near to
death the miser heard, and every word of guidance
toward the hidden treasure of the mountains seared
itself into his soul ineffaceably.
"Silence came again more terrible now than the
voice of Tamanous, — silence under the shadow of the
great cliff, — silence deepening down the forest vistas, —
silence filling the void up to the snows of Tacoma. All
life and motion seemed paralyzed. At last Skai-ki,
the Blue-Jay, the wise bird, foe to magic, sang cheerily
overhead. Her song seemed to refresh again the
honest laws of nature. The buzz of life stirred every-
where again, and the inspired miser rose and hastened
home to prepare for his work.
"When Tamanous has put a great thought in a
man's brain, has whispered him a great discovery
within his power, or hinted at a great crime, that
spiteful demon does not likewise suggest the means of
accomplishment.
"The miser, therefore, must call upon his own skill
to devise proper tools, and upon his own judgment to
fix upon the most fitting time for carrying out his
quest. Sending his squaw out to the kamas prairie,
under pretense that now was the season for her to
gather their store of that sickish-sweet esculent root,
and that she might not have her squaw's curiosity
aroused by seeing him at strange work, he began his
preparations. He took a pair of enormous elk-horns,
and fashioned from each horn a two-pronged pick or
138 " THE GOD MOUNTAIN "
spade, by removing all the antlers except the two top-
most. He packed a good supply of kippered salmon,
and filled his pouch with kinnikinnick for smoking
in his black stone pipe. With his bows and arrows and
his two elk-horn picks wrapped in buckskin hung at
his back, he started just before sunset, as if for a long
hunt. His old, faithful, maltreated, blanketless,
vermilionless squaw, returning with baskets full of
kamas, saw him disappearing moodily down the trail.
" All that night, all the day following, he moved
on noiselessly, by paths he knew. He hastened on,
unnoticing outward objects, as one with controlling
purpose hastens. Elk and deer, bounding through the
trees, passed him, but he tarried not. At night he
camped just below the snows of Tacoma. He was
weary, and chill night-airs blowing down from the
summit almost froze him. He dared not take his
fire-sticks, and, placing one perpendicular upon a
little hollow on the flat side of the other, twirl the
upright stick rapidly between his palms until the
charred spot kindled and lighted his 'tipsoo,' his
dry, tindery wool of inner bark. A fire, gleaming
high upon the mountainside, might be a beacon to
draw thither any night-wandering savage to watch in
ambush, and learn the path toward the mines of
hiaqua. So he drowsed chilly and fireless, awakened
often by dread sounds of crashing and rumbling among
the chasms of Tacoma. He desponded bitterly, almost
ready to abandon his quest, almost doubting whether
he had in truth received a revelation, whether his
interview with Tamanous had not been a dream, and
" THE GOD MOUNTAIN " 139
finally whether all the hiaqua in the world was worth
this toil and anxiety. Fortunate is the sage who at
such a point turns back and buys his experience with-
out worse befalling him.
" Past midnight he suddenly was startled from his
drowse and sat bolt upright in terror. A light ! Was
there another searcher in the forest, and a bolder
than he? That flame just glimmering over the tree-
tops, was it a camp-fire of friend or foe ? Had Taman-
ous been revealing to another the great secret? No,
smiled the miser, his eyes fairly open, and discovering
that the new light was the moon. He had been waiting
for her illumination on paths heretofore untrodden
by mortal. She did not show her full, round, jolly
face, but turned it askance as if she hardly liked to be
implicated in this night's transactions.
" However, it was light he wanted, not sympathy,
and he started up at once to climb over the dim snows.
The surface was packed by the night's frost, and his
moccasins gave him firm hold; yet he traveled but
slowly, and could not always save himself from a
glissade backwards, and a bruise upon some projecting
knob or crag. Sometimes, upright fronts of ice
diverted him for long circuits, or a broken wall of
cold cliff arose, which he must surmount painfully.
Once or twice he stuck fast in a crevice and hardly
drew himself out by placing his bundle of picks across
the crack. As he plodded and floundered thus
deviously and toilsomely upward, at last the wasted
moon paled overhead, and under foot the snow
grew rosy with coming dawn. The dim world about
140 " THE GOD MOUNTAIN "
the mountain's base displayed something of its vast
detail. He could see, more positively than by moon-
light, the far-reaching arteries of mist marking the
organism of Whulge beneath; and what had been but a
black chaos now resolved itself into the Alpine forest
whence he had come.
" But he troubled himself little with staring about;
up he looked, for the summit was at hand. To win
that summit was well-nigh the attainment of his hopes,
if Tamanous were true; and that, with the flush of
morning ardor upon him, he could not doubt. There,
in a spot Tamanous had revealed to him, was hiaqua —
hiaqua that should make him the richest and greatest
of all the Squally amish.
" The chill before sunrise was upon him as he reached
the last curve of the dome. Sunrise and he struck the
summit together. Together sunrise and he looked
over the glacis. They saw within a great hollow all
covered with the whitest of snow, save at the center,
where a black lake lay deep in a well of purple rock.
1 ■ At the eastern end of this lake was a small irregular
plain of snow, marked by three stones like mountains.
Toward these the miser sprang rapidly, with full
sunshine streaming after him over the snows.
M The first monument he examined with keen looks.
It was tall as a giant man, and its top was fashioned
into the grotesque likeness of a salmon's head. He
turned from this to inspect the second. It was of
similar height, but bore at its apex an object in shape
like the regular flame of a torch. As he approached, he
presently discovered that this was an image of the
11 THE GOD MOUNTAIN " 141
kamas-bulb in stone. These two semblances of prime
necessities of Indian life delayed him but an instant,
and he hastened on to the third monument, which
stood apart on a perfect level. The third stone was
capped by something he almost feared to behold, lest
it should prove other than his hopes. Every word of
Tamanous had thus far proved veritable; but might
there not be a bitter deceit at the last? The miser
trembled.
" Yes, Tamanous was trustworthy. The third monu-
ment was as the old man anticipated. It was a stone
elk-head, such as it appears in earliest summer, when
the antlers are sprouting lustily under their rough
jacket of velvet.
"You remember, Boston tyee," continued Hamit-
chou, "that elk was the old man's tamanous, the
incarnation for him of the universal Tamanous. He
therefore was right joyous at this good omen of pro-
tection; and his heart grew big and swollen with hope,
as the black salmonberry swells in a swamp in June.
He threw down his 'ikta'; every impediment he
laid down upon the snow; and unwrapping his two
picks of elk-horn, he took the stoutest, and began to
dig in the frozen snow at the foot of the elk-head
monument.
" No sooner had he struck the first blow than he
heard behind him a sudden puff, such as a seal makes
when it comes to the surface to breathe. Turning
round much startled, he saw a huge otter just clam-
bering up over the edge of the lake. The otter paused,
and struck on the snow with his tail, whereupon an-
i42 " THE GOD MOUNTAIN "
other otter and another appeared, until, following their
leader in slow solemn file, were twelve other otters,
marching toward the miser. The twelve approached
and drew up in a circle around him. Each was twice
as large as any otter ever seen. Their chief was four
times as large as the most gigantic otter ever seen in
the regions of Whulge, and certainly was as great as a
seal. When the twelve were arranged, their leader
skipped to the top of the elk-head stone, and sat there
between the horns. Then the whole thirteen gave a
mighty puff in chorus.
11 The hunter of hiaqua was for a moment abashed
at his uninvited ring of spectators. But he had seen
otter before, and bagged them. These he could not
waste time to shoot, even if a phalanx so numerous
were not formidable. Besides, they might be taman-
ous. He took to his pick, and began digging stoutly.
" He soon made way in the snow, and came to solid
rock beneath. At every thirteenth stroke of his pick,
the fugleman otter tapped with his tail on the monu-
ment. Then the choir of lesser otters tapped together
with theirs on the snow. This caudal action produced a
dull muffled sound, as if there were a vast hollow below.
" Digging with all his force, by and by the seeker for
treasure began to tire, and laid down his elk-horn
spade to wipe the sweat from his brow. Straightway
the fugleman otter turned, and swinging his tail, gave
the weary man a mighty thump on the shoulder;
and the whole band, imitating, turned, and, backing
inward, smote him with centripetal tails, until he
resumed his labors, much bruised.
" THE GOD MOUNTAIN " 143
11 The rock lay first in plates, then in scales. These
it was easy to remove. Presently, however, as the
miser pried carelessly at a larger mass, he broke his
elk-horn tool. Fugleman otter leaped down, and,
seizing the supplemental pick between his teeth,
mouthed it over to the digger. Then the amphibious
monster took in the same manner the broken pick,
and bore it round the circle of his suite, who inspected
it with purls.
" These strange magical proceedings disconcerted
and somewhat baffled the miser; but he plucked up
heart, for the prize was priceless, and worked on more
cautiously with his second pick. At last its bows and
the regular thumps of the otters' tails called forth a
sound hollower and hollower. His circle of spectators
narrowed so that he could feel their panting breath
as they bent curiously over the little pit he had dug.
" The crisis was evidently at hand.
" He lifted each scale of rock more delicately. Fi-
nally he raised a scale so thin that it cracked into flakes
as he turned it over. Beneath was a large square
cavity.
" It was filled to the brim with hiaqua.
" He was a millionaire.
" The otters recognized him as the favorite of Tam-
anous, and retired to a respectful distance.
" For some moments he gazed on his treasure, taking
thought of his future grandeur among the dwellers by
Whulge. He plunged his arm deep as he could go;
there was still nothing but the precious shells. He
smiled to himself in triumph ; he had wrung the secret
144 " THE GOD MOUNTAIN "
from Tamanous. Then, as he withdrew his arm, the
rattle of the hiaqua recalled him to the present. He
saw that noon was long past, and he must proceed to
reduce his property to possession.
" The hiaqua was strung upon long, stout sinews of
elk in bunches of fifty shells on each side. Four of
these he wound about his waist ; three he hung across
each shoulder; five he took in each hand; — twenty
strings of pure white hiaqua, every shell large, smooth,
unbroken, beautiful. He could carry no more; hardly
even with this could he stagger along. He put down
his burden for a moment, while he covered up the
seemingly untouched wealth of the deposit carefully
with the scale stones, and brushed snow over the
whole.
" The miser never dreamed of gratitude, never
thought to hang a string of the buried treasure about
the salmon and kamas tamanous stones, and two
strings around the elk-head ; no, all must be his own,
all he could carry now, and the rest for the future.
" He turned, and began his climb toward the crater's
edge. At once the otters, with a mighty puff in
concert, took up their line of procession, and, plunging
into the black lake, began to beat the water with their
tails.
"The miser could hear the sound of splashing water
as he struggled upward through the snow, now melted
and yielding. It was a long hour of harsh toil and
much back-sliding before he reached the rim, and
turned to take one more view of this valley of good
fortune.
" THE GOD MOUNTAIN " 145
"As he looked, a thick mist began to rise from the
lake center, where the otters were splashing. Under
the mist grew a cylinder of black cloud, utterly hiding
the water.
"Terrible are storms in the mountains; but in this
looming mass was a terror more dread than any hurri-
cane of ruin ever bore within its wild vortexes. Ta-
manous was in that black cylinder, and as it strode
forward, chasing in the very path of the miser, he
shuddered, for his wealth and his life were in danger.
" However, it might be but a common storm. Sun-
light was bright as ever overhead in heaven, and all the
lovely world below lay dreamily fair, in that afternoon
of summer, at the feet of the rich man, who now was
hastening to be its king. He stepped from the crater
edge and began his descent.
" Instantly the storm overtook him. He was thrown
down by its first assault, flung over a rough bank of
iciness, and lay at the foot torn and bleeding, but
clinging still to his precious burden. Each hand still
held its five strings of hiaqua. In each hand he bore a
nation's ransom. He staggered to his feet against the
blast. Utter night was around him — night as if
daylight had forever perished, had never come into
being from chaos. The roaring of the storm had also
deafened and bewildered him with its wild uproar.
"Present in every crash and thunder of the gale was
a growing undertone, which the miser well knew to
be the voice of Tamanous. A deadly shuddering
shook him. Heretofore that potent Unseen had been
his friend and guide; there had been awe, but no
146 " THE GOD MOUNTAIN "
terror, in his words. Now the voice of Tamanous was
inarticulate, but the miser could divine in that sound
an unspeakable threat of wrath and vengeance. Float-
ing upon this undertone were sharper tamanous voices,
shouting and screaming always sneeringly, 'Haha,
hiaqua, — ha, ha, ha!'
"Whenever the miser essayed to move and continue
his descent, a whirlwind caught him and with much
ado tossed him hither and thither, leaving him at last
flung and imprisoned in a pinching crevice, or buried
to the eyes in a snowdrift, or gnawed by lacerating
lava jaws. Sharp torture the old man was encounter-
ing, but he held fast to his hiaqua.
The blackness grew ever deeper and more crowded
with perdition, the din more impish, demoniac, and
devilish; the laughter more appalling; the miser more
and more exhausted with vain buffeting. He deter-
mined to propitiate exasperated Tamanous with a
sacrifice. He threw into the black cylinder storm his
left-handful, five strings of precious hiaqua."
"Somewhat long-winded is thy legend, Hamitchou,
Great Medicine-Man of the Squallyamish, " quoth L
"Why didn't the old fool drop his wampum — shell out,
as one might say, — and make tracks? "
"Well, well!" continued Hamitchou, "when the
miser had thrown away his first handful of hiaqua,
there was a momentary lull in elemental war, and he
heard the otters puffing around him invisible. Then
the storm, renewed, blacker, louder, harsher, crueller
than before, and over the dread undertone of the
voice of Tamanous, tamanous voices again screamed,
" THE GOD MOUNTAIN " 147
'Ha, ha, ha, hiaqua!' and it seemed as if tamanous
hands, or the paws of the demon otters, clutched at the
miser's right-handful and tore at his shoulder and
waist belts.
" So, while darkness and tempest still buffeted the
hapless old man, and thrust him away from his path,
and while the roaring was wickeder than the roars of
tens and tens of bears when a- hungered they pounce
upon a plain of kamas, gradually wounded and terri-
fied, he flung away string after string of hiaqua, gaining
never any notice of such sacrifice, except an instant's
lull of the cyclone and a puff from the invisible otters.
"The last string he clung to long, and before he
threw it to be caught and whirled after its fellows, he
tore off a single bunch of fifty shells. But upon this,
too, the storm laid its clutches. In the final desperate
struggle, the old man was wounded so sternly that,
when he had thrown into the formless chaos, instinct
with Tamanous, his last propitiatory offering, he sank
and became insensible.
"It seemed a long slumber to him, but at last he
awoke. The jagged moon was just paling overhead,
and he heard Skai-ki, the Blue-Jay, foe to magic,
singing welcome to sunrise. It was the very spot
whence he started at morning.
" He was hungry, and felt for his bag of kamas and
pouch of smoke-leaves. There, indeed, by his side
were the elk-sinew strings of the bag, and the black
stone pipe-bowl, — but no bag, no kamas, no kinni-
kinnick. The whole spot was thick with kamas plants,
strangely out of place on the mountainside, and over-
148 " THE GOD MOUNTAIN"
head grew a large arbutus tree, with glistening leaves,
ripe for smoking. The old man found his hardwood
fire-sticks safe under the herbage, and soon twirled a
light, and, nurturing it in dry grass, kindled a cheery
fire. He plucked up kamas, set it to roast, and laid
a store of the arbutus leaves to dry on a flat stone.
" After he had made a hearty breakfast on the chest-
nut-like kamas-bulbs, and, smoking the thoughtful
pipe, was reflecting on the events of yesterday, he be-
came aware of an odd change in his condition. He
was not bruised and wounded from head to foot, as he
expected, but very stiff only, and as he stirred, his
joints creaked like the creak of a lazy paddle upon the
rim of a canoe. Skai-ki, the Blue-Jay, was singularly
familiar with him, hopping from her perch in the
arbutus, and alighting on his head. As he put his
hand to dislodge her, he touched his scratching-stick
of bone, and attempted to pass it, as usual, through his
hair. The hair was matted and interlaced into a net-
work reaching fully two ells down his back. ' Taman-
ous, ' thought the old man.
" Chiefly he was conscious of a mental change. He
was calm and content. Hiaqua and wealth seemed to
have lost their charms for him. Tacoma, shining like
gold and silver and precious stones of gayest luster,
seemed a benign comrade and friend. All the outer
world was cheerful and satisfying. He thought he had
never awakened to a fresher morning. He was a
young man again, except for that unusual stiffness and
unmelodious creaking in his joints. He felt no appre-
hension of any presence of a deputy tamanous, sent
" THE GOD MOUNTAIN " i49
by Tamanous to do malignities upon him in the lonely
wood. Great Nature had a kindly aspect, and made
its divinity perceived only by the sweet notes of birds
and hum of forest life, and by a joy that clothed his
being. And now he found in his heart a sympathy for
man, and a longing to meet his old acquaintances
down by the shores of Whulge.
11 He rose, and started on the downward way, smiling,
and sometimes laughing heartily at the strange croak-
ing, moaning, cracking, and rasping of his joints. But
soon motion set the lubricating valves at work, and the
sockets grew slippery again. He marched rapidly,
hastening out of loneliness into society. The world of
wood, glade, and stream seemed to him strangely
altered. Old colossal trees, firs behind which he had
hidden when on the hunt, cedars under whose droop-
ing shade he had lurked, were down, and lay athwart
his path, transformed into immense mossy mounds,
like barrows of giants, over which he must clamber
warily, lest he sink and be half stifled in the dust of
rotten wood. Had Tamanous been widely at work in
that eventful night? — or had the spiritual change the
old man felt affected his views of the outer world?
"Traveling downward, he advanced rapidly, and
just before sunset came to the prairies where his lodge
should be. Everything had seemed to him so totally
altered, that he tarried a moment in the edge of the
woods to take an observation before approaching his
home. There was a lodge, indeed, in the old spot, but
a newer and far handsomer one than he had left on the
fourth evening before.
150 " THE GOD MOUNTAIN11
"A very decrepit old squaw, ablaze with vermilion
and decked with countless strings of hiaqua and costly
beads, was seated on the ground near the door, tend-
ing a kettle of salmon, whose blue and fragrant steam
mingled pleasantly with the golden haze of sunset.
She resembled his own squaw in countenance, as an
ancient smoked salmon is like a newly dried salmon.
If she was indeed his spouse, she was many years older
than when he saw her last, and much better dressed
than the respectable lady had ever been during his
miserly days.
"He drew near quietly. The bedizened dame was
crooning a chant, very dolorous, — like this :
1 My old man has gone, gone, gone, —
My old man to Tacoma has gone.
To hunt the elk, he went long ago.
When will he come down, down, down,
Down to the salmon-pot and me?'
1 He has come from Tacoma down, down, down, —
Down to the salmon-pot and thee,'
shouted the reformed miser, rushing forward to supper
with his faithful wife. "
"And how did Penelope explain the mystery?" I
asked.
" If you mean the old lady," replied Hamitchou,
"she was my grandmother, and I'd thank you not to
call names. She told my grandfather that he had
been gone many years ; — she could not tell how many,
having dropped her tally-stick in the fire by accident
*' THE GOD MOUNT AW " 151
that very day. She also told him how, in despite of
the entreaties of many a chief who knew her economic
virtues, and prayed her to become the mistress of his
household, she had remained constant to the Absent,
and forever kept the hopeful salmon-pot boiling for his
return. She had distracted her mind from the bitter-
ness of sorrow by trading in kamas and magic herbs,
and had thus acquired a genteel competence. The
excellent dame then exhibited with great complacency
her gains, most of which she had put in the portable
and secure form of personal ornament, making herself
a resplendent magazine of valuable frippery.
"Little cared the repentant sage for such things.
But he was rejoiced to be again at home and at peace,
and near his own early gains of hiaqua and treasure,
buried in a place of security. These, however, he
no longer overesteemed and hoarded. He imparted
whatever he possessed, material treasures or stores of
wisdom and experience, freely to all the land. Every
dweller by Whulge came to him for advice how to
chase the elk, how to troll or spear the salmon, and
how to propitiate Tamanous. He became the Great
Medicine Man of the Siwashes, a benefactor to his
tribe and his race.
" Within a year after he came down from his long nap
on the side of Tacoma, a child, my father, was born to
him. The sage lived many years, beloved and revered,
and on his death-bed, long before the Boston tilicum
or any blanketeers were seen in the regions of Whulge,
he told this history to my father, as a lesson and a
warning. My father, dying, told it to me. But I,
152
THE GOD MOUNTAIN "
alas! have no son; I grow old, and lest this wisdom
perish from the earth, and Tamanous be again obliged
to interpose against avarice, I tell the tale to thee, O
Boston tyee. Mayest thou and thy nation not disdain
this lesson of an earlier age, but profit by it and be
wise."
So far Hamitchou recounted his legend without
the palisades of Fort Nisqually, and motioned, in
expressive pantomime, at the close, that he was
dry with big talk, and would gladly wet his whistle.
1X&&-
CHAPTER XII
A Summer in tKe Sierras
UR Western literary disciple, Bret
Harte, is responsible for some such
statement as this, through the
mouthpiece of one of his lively
mountaineers :
"'Tain't no use, you ain't got good sense no
more. Why, sometimes you talk jest as if you
lived in a valley I11
Doesn't that epitomize the contempt of the
highlander for the lowlander?
A lover of the Californian Sierra reasonably
would be expected to originate such a philosophy.
For while all mountains approach perfection, exis-
tence in the California cordillera is as near Uto-
pian as this old earth offers. That, of course,
applies only to the out-of-door lover. For the
others I dare venture no judgment ; in their blind-
ness they love best their cities and their rabbit-
warren homes, and the logical desires of sunshine
i53
154 A SUMMER IN THE SIERRAS
and forest are dried out of them by Steam heat
and contaminated by breathing much-used oxygen.
Humans, generally speaking, have their chief
habitat in the lowlands. Compelling reasons,
aside from choice, are responsible for this state of
affairs. For instance, there are not enough high-
lands to go around. Then, too, valleys and plains
are better adapted to the customary occupations
of the genus homo, especially that obsessing mania
for the accumulation of cash. But despite their
habits and their environment, a satisfactory pro-
portion of the valley dwellers love the hill country,
and when they have mountains for neighbors revel
in the opportunities thereby afforded.
In California the lot of the lowlander is blessed
beyond compare, for the most enticing playland
imaginable is at his beck, and he is offered a
scenic menu & la carte, so to speak, which includes
about everything the Creator devised in the way
of out-of-door attractions. There is sea beach
and forest, poppy-gilded plain and snow-quilted
mountain. From a semi-tropical riviera, with the
scent of orange blossoms still in his nostrils, he
may mount above the snow line in a few brief
hours. One day he bathes in the Pacific, inhaling
A SUMMER IN THE SIERRAS 155
the dank, sea-smelling fog, and the next finds
himself in the grandest forests of America, breath-
ing the crisp air of lofty altitudes. Revel in the
gentle south of France or Alpine Switzerland;
enjoy the mildness of Florida or the rugged moun-
taineering of the Rockies; drink Chianti in an
Italian vineyard or cast a trout fly in a brawling
Scottish stream; view fragments of Canton within
gunshot of the Golden Gate and then glimpse
utter desert by the shores of the Salton Sea — in
short, choose what you will, and in California it
awaits you.
The breezy bay of San Francisco, blue Tamal-
pais, and the live-oaks of Berkeley's campus we
left behind, swinging easterly and south through
the hot, rich valley of the San Joaquin until the
railroad ended and our trail began. Before us lay
a summer in the Sierras; a summer in no wise
definitely organized in advance, but ninety days
of wandering at will unburdened by itinerary and
guided chiefly by the whim of the moment.
A wonder of the world supremely worth seeing is
Yosemite and when you see it, if the possibility
offers, avoid the hackneyed methods. The best
156 A SUMMER IN THE SIERRAS
way ever devised to get acquainted with the
Wonder- Valley, or any other of Nature's master-
pieces, is the simplest: it consists in progressing
upon your own two feet. So it was that we entered
the Yosemite Park, and under our own power, so
to speak, we negotiated many scores of miles over
trails good and bad, and often guided by no trail at
all.
To add even a modest description of Yosemite
Valley to the far-reaching bibliography already in
existence would be indeed carrying coals to a
literary Newcastle. If you want guidebooks,
history, or information upon its flowers and its
trees, simply whisper the word "Yosemite" in any
west-coast bookstore and you will be led to shelves
bulging with volumes that are authoritative,
comprehensive, attractive, and, many of them,
interesting. It is suggested, however, that the
wonders of the Valley will break upon you with all
the greater splendor if reading about them is post-
poned until after you have made visual acquain-
tance with what Nature has written under the
blue California sky in characters of trees, cliffs,
rushing rivers, giant trees, and myriad flowers.
Go, then, as did we, with a pack on your back
" The live oaks of Berkeley's campus "
From a photograph by Wells Drury, Berkeley, Cal.
IH
Looking across the clouds to Mount Adams from the flanks of Rainier
Copyright 1909 by L. G. Linkletter
A SUMMER IN THE SIERRAS 157
and without plans. Or, if needs be, patronize the
hotel or one of the luxurious camps, and thence
see the sights of the Park at leisure through the
medium of the stage-coaches which go nearly every-
where over the excellent roads.
As for us, we had a scrap of a tent and a box of
provisions which we trundled, after a deal of
vexatious bargaining, a mile or so in a borrowed
wheelbarrow to an enchanted camping spot beside
a brimful brook, shaded by primeval trees and
sheltered from the welter of humans who prome-
nade promiscuously by a convenient arboreal jungle.
There we made our headquarters, by extending our
fragmentary canvas fly between our blankets and
the heavens and establishing a megalithic fire-
place at arm's reach from the running water, where
we cooked three or more times a day.
For a happy fortnight we did those things which
Yosemite visitors are supposed to do. We gloried
in the sheer mightiness of El Capitan from below,
and reveled in the views from its crest. From
Inspiration Point, on the road to the Big Trees, we
were inspired beyond expectation by the magnifi-
cent panorama of the cliff-encompassed canyon,
with the silver waterfalls lighting its shadowed
158 A SUMMER IN THE SIERRAS
walls like threads of gossamer against the gray-
background of the rocks. Close at hand we were
deafened by the thundering waters of Bridal Veil
and Nevada, and we clambered up the trails to see
the highland rivers that gave them birth. A glad
summer day was devoted to the Mariposa Grove
pilgrimage where discreet soldiers watched lest
we abscond with a flower or treelet, or, I suppose,
commit that universal sin of American self-
publicity, scratch our puny initials upon the
gnarled columns of the most ancient and the
grandest monuments Nature has erected on our
continent — the Sequoias.
Then, having reveled in the prosaic recreations
of Yosemite — and the first view of the Valley
alone is worth the entire pilgrimage, remember —
we picked up our beds and walked. That is, the
blankets were strapped on our backs, and the
rudiments of a commissary stowed in our ricksacks.
So equipped, with our creature comforts provided
for to the extent of about fifty pounds per man, we
" cached* ' the balance of our provender and equip-
ment in a rocky cave (where a bear subsequently
effected destructive inroads) and struck out for
Tuolumne Meadows and Hetch-Hetchy.
We gloried in the sheer mightiness of El Capitan "
A SUMMER IN THE SIERRAS 159
In the course of our unplanned wanderings we
followed up the Merced River, past Nevada Falls
and through the meadowed beauties of the Little
Yosemite. Ultimately, by ways uncharted, so far
as we were aware, we viewed the Merced Canyon
where Lakes Washburn and Merced nestle in the
heart of a little- traveled fairyland, and thence
struck 'cross-country to the upper regions of the
other great river of the Park, the Tuolumne.
All the Tuolumne Meadow country is sheer
delight, for mountaineer, fisherman, naturalist, and
lover of the out-of-doors whose tastes are unspeci-
fic ; well has John Muir called it " the grand central
camp-ground of the Sierras. " It is a vast meadow,
hemmed in by a mountain region beyond compare
for expeditioning, with legions of royal trout ready
for the fly, and a vast flower garden maintained
enticingly by Dame Nature during the summer
sunshine season.
The trip we took from the Meadows, again
without trail, was down the Tuolumne to Hetch-
Hetchy Valley. The journey's start literally was
flower-strewn, and we tramped carefully lest we
crush over-many of the purple daisies and tiny
violets dotting the dewy grass, while lupin offered
160 A SUMMER IN THE SIERRAS
gentle resistance to our progress. First came the
canyon of Conness Creek, shaded with groves of
hemlock, and neighbored by three falls, the first
of the countless cataracts which mark the wild
river's course through the rockbound gorge, to the
valley of our destination, miles below.
Beyond the falls the stream flows quietly for a
space, between banks lined with pines and decidu-
ous trees. As Marion Randall Parsons has quoted,
here,
Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver
Thro' the wave that runs forever
By the island in the river
Flowing down to Camelot.
And standing beside the white waters with the
ground shaking underfoot to the tune of their
mighty onrush, with the meadows, trees, and
flowers round about, the awesome cliffs for guar-
dians, and the bright blue sky over all, it requires
no visionary to conjure up legendary cities at this
river's end, for but half lend yourself to the notion
and the glorious Sierran stream becomes a beckon-
ing highway to a land of pleasant dreams.
Of the Tuolumnic canyon journey this same
f
"f
*
(BTr
1 ■
6*7- >
1
. r, ft*
IIIHI
K^te:
" A vast flower garden maintained en-
ticingly by Dame Nature "
Copyright 191 2 by Kiser Photo Co., Portland, Ore.
Light and shadow in Yosemite
A SUMMER IN THE SIERRAS 161
lover of the Sierras, Mrs. Parsons, has sketched
the following description :
It is impossible to do justice to the canyon after one
brief journey through it; impossible to set down in
order the details of that day's travel and the next,
confused as they were by the consciousness of tired
muscles and eyes bewildered by the all too hurried
succession of interests. Little more than impressions
remain — memories of cliffs rising from three to five
thousand feet above us; of a walk of half a mile on
stepping stones along the river ; of more talus-piles ; of
the entrance into the rattlesnake zone; of a walk
through a still forest of tall firs and young cedars,
where our voices seemed to break the silence of ages;
of more talus-piles ; of a camp beneath the firs among
deep fern-beds, and of the red ants that there con-
gregated; of more brush and more talus-piles; of a
look down Muir Gorge and a hot climb up a thousand
feet over the rocks to the cairn of stones containing
the precious register; of a cliff extending to the river's
edge which presented the alternative of edging across
it on a crack or climbing a five-hundred-foot hill to get
around it.
The Tuolumne is one of the largest of our Sierra
rivers, much greater in volume than its quieter neigh-
bor, the Merced. Its falls, often of an imposing
height, are none of them sheer, none of them giving
that impression of pure joy of living with which the
Merced waters leap into the great Nevada abyss.
For the Tuolumne's is a sterner, stormier course,
162 A SUMMER IN THE SIERRAS
beset with giant rocks against which even its splendid
strength is impotently hurled, and its joy is the joy of
battles. But it is a strange thing, standing beside one
of these giant cataracts where the ground shakes
with the impact and where every voice of wind or
living creature is silenced in the roar of the maddened
waters, to see under what a delicate fabric this Titan's
force is veiled — a billowing, gossamer texture, iris-
tinted, with jeweled spray flying high upon the wind.
Then came Hetch-Hetchy, after two days of
strenuous pursuit of the Tuolumne's galloping
waters.
When we were there Hetch-Hetchy was a valley
untrammeled, carpeted with grass and flowers,
walled by mighty cliffs, traversed by the unfettered
Tuolumne. Of late, as all the outdoor world
knows, its freedom has been bartered and its fate
sealed — the fate of being drowned beneath a
reservoir whose waters are to quench the thirst of
San Francisco. Probably, from an engineering
standpoint, the knell of Hetch-Hetchy is a master-
piece; perhaps economically it is wisdom; but none
who have delighted in the valley's hospitality but
deem it tragedy of the darkest die.
Be that as it may, the waters are yet unstored
and Hetch-Hetchy is still a camp-ground, and for
A SUMMER IN THE SIERRAS 163
the city-bred or the city-weary it offers panacea
beyond compare as it has since the beginning of all
things, when cities were as little thought of as
reservoirs. Regarding the horrors of industrial
civilization, William Morris once urged humani-
tarian effort "until the contrast is less disgraceful
between the fields where the beasts live and the
streets where men live." And Hetch-Hetchy,
even in a region of loveliness, is perhaps Nature's
strongest sermon in her wordless arraignment of
the physical follies of civilization — at least that
so-called civilization which is wound around with
unashamed artificialities and the ugliness of urban
existence.
Our week in Hetch-Hetchy we wished might
have been a month, but the calendar moves re-
lentlessly in the Sierra as elsewhere, and only too
soon the days were numbered until we must
abandon Yosemite Park and strike southward into
other mountain regions, with other companionship.
So back we "hiked" to our valley base camp, res-
cued what the bears had left of our stored property,
and renewed acquaintance with the railroad at
Merced.
During the rest of that most excellent summer
i64 A SUMMER IN THE SIERRAS
my fortunes were thrown in with those of the
Sierra Club, the Calif ornian member of the Coast's
trio of notable mountain-climbing organizations,
the other two being the Mazamas of Portland and
the Mountaineers of Seattle.
This organized back-to-naturing, so to speak,
deserves a large measure of attention and a vast
deal of praise. The official purpose of the Sierra
Club is "to explore, enjoy, and render accessible
the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast." Its
aim, like those of its brother organizations of the
West and East, is to "publish authentic informa-
tion concerning the mountain regions and to
enlist the support and cooperation of the people
and the Government in preserving the forests and
other natural features of the Sierra Nevada Moun-
tains." With such a platform these clubs of the
Pacific accomplish much real good and often are
the sponsors for forward-looking movements of
wide importance. Also, their experience and their
organized methods each summer make possible
lengthy excursions into the mountain regions whose
scope would be beyond the individual means of
many who join forces with the club on these
community outings. Hundreds of miles of new
~4 •"<
P S
B
>
o
O
v
6
A SUMMER IN THE SIERRAS 165
trails are laid out and old ones improved, peaks are
climbed and records left, often trout are planted
in barren lakes, and everyone is given an educa-
tional experience in the ways of the Open. Also
— and primarily — all hands have a royal good
time.
At Tracy, in the San Joaquin Valley, where the
Sierra Club special train stopped for supper, I
joined the party. That night I felt conspicuous,
for six weeks of tramping in the Yosemite had
removed the last traces of presentability from my
costume ; however, when at dawn the hikers of the
morrow emerged from the sleeping-cars at Porter-
ville, white collars, low shoes, long skirts, and all
the other impedimenta of civilized apparel were
replaced by workaday garments, while khaki
and flannel shirts were much in evidence.
For two days the long line struggled along the
trail leading into the canyon of the Kern. From
oak and chaparral to pines and bear clover, silver
fir, and nature-made gardens of columbine, red
snow plant, and cyclamen we mounted, and then
still higher to a silent tamarack country. Then
down interminably to Fish Creek, and camp, and
Charlie Tuck, who was — and no doubt still is —
166 A SUMMER IN THE SIERRAS
the Celestial ruler of the club's all-important cul-
inary department.
Fishing, minor side trips, some fish-planting, and
all the attractions of outdoor camp life occupied
a week in the lower Kern Valley. Then camp was
removed ten miles up the canyon to the junction
of the Big Arroya and the Kern, whence were
engineered ascents of the Red Kaweah and of
Whitney, highest of all the mountains in the
United States, each reached through side trips
of several days' duration, and each opening up a
fresh, new field of highland delights.
The trails of the Sierra, like trails the world over,
are endlessly appealing — only the Sierran foot-
ways seem somehow richer in variety than others
known to me. The entire mountain world unfolds
from the shifting vantage points of these ribbons,
threading its most sacred temples, clear and strong
through the valleys, distinguishable only by the
presence of many blazes upon the tree trunks where
pine needles plot their obliteration, zigzagging
dizzily up steep slopes, crossing rivers on perilous
logs or buried knee-deep beneath the rushing
waters of the ford, skirting sky-reflecting lakes,
hiding beneath summer snowbanks, or traversing
A SUMMER IN THE SIERRAS 167
waste highlands, marked only by the cairns that
lift their welcome heads against the sky. Under-
foot there is the needle carpet, springy ground,
shoe-cutting rocks, or deep-trodden dust, where
the wayfarer comes to the journey's end a monu-
ment of ghostly gray. Overhead is always the
tender blue of the summer California sky, with
here and there a snowy cloud, for contrast's sake.
Most impressive is the trail that clambers among
the snow-clad heights, where the chilling air of the
peaks makes the blood run fast and the heart
rejoice; its beauty most appreciable where it
follows brawling brooks and shadowed valleys, or
meanders among woods, pillared with great trees
and roofed with swaying boughs, ever and anon
emerging into tiny, exquisite glades. Such is the
Sierra trail, each mile a thing of individual charm
and happy memory.
The physical ways and means of the outing are
as near perfect as may be where one hundred and
twenty humans are turned loose in the wilderness.
The perfection is, of course, the outgrowth of long
experience and careful planning. Pack-trains take
in the provisions well in advance; the day's "hike"
is laid out, and "grub" is in waiting when the
168 A SUMMER IN THE SIERRAS
allotted number of miles lie behind; side trips are
arranged, and when there is climbing of conse-
quence, experienced leaders pilot the way. And
yet, withal, the month-long holiday is far from
being disagreeably "cut and dried/ ' and there
seems always sufficient opportunity for freedom
to satisfy individual tastes. Nor, because of the
numbers, need one lack privacy ; on the trail and
at camp the excursionist may restrict himself to
his own unimpeachable society, he may join a
small group of chosen spirits, or associate with the
general unit. In short, there is opportunity to
satisfy every taste on a Sierra Club outing, which
holds equally true of the other mountain organiza-
tions of the Coast, each of which conducts ad-
mirable activities in its chosen field.
The last bright recollection of that Sierra
summer is the camp-fire which closed the final day
— and all camp-fires are pleasant memories. It
was beneath the mighty trees of the Giant Forest
that we spent the final night, the light of our
blaze insignificant 'midst the shadows of these
huge trunks, the quiet summer night all about.
The inner circle of faces showed ruddy in the
reflected firelight, the outer edges of the group
A SUMMER IN THE SIERRAS
169
were deep in shadow. In the center, close to the
fire, his figure outlined by its glow, stood John
Muir, president of the Club, naturalist, explorer,
lover of the Sierras, and loved by all. That night
he shared with us, as often he had done before, his
knowledge of those intimates of his, the Califor-
nian mountains, with whom he had lived so long
and so understandingly. And now, in this Decem-
ber, six years since that evening in the Giant
Forest, comes the news that John Muir has been
gathered to his fathers, and that this splendid
apostle of the out-of-doors will never again share
its treasured secrets at Sierran camp-fires.
c?
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY
BERKELEY
Return to desk from which borrowed.
This book is DUE on the last date stamped below.
JAN 6 1943
25W
SO* '
aft
2Dec'56HJ
REC'D CD
DEC 2 1956
REC'D LD
REC'D LD
F£B 2 8 1958
J954yj MAR 141957
I2Apr'56F?p
MAR 2 9 1956 10
>ff/W
261
Iau>
RECD LD
WAV 12 1951
Rl&^8i<b
FEB l o 1958
■v.-
EC'D LD
7»59
80JUL'60AR
KECD Lu
SEP 10 I960
< 3 I960
LD 21-100m-9,'47(A5702sl6)476
P?
THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY
Live Music Archive
Librivox Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Internet Arcade
Console Living Room
Books to Borrow
Open Library
TV News
Understanding 9/11