# Oregon, End of the Trail

The 1951 revised edition, also out of copyright, is available here
OREGON
End of the Trail
OREGON
END OF THE TRAIL
Compiled by Workers of the Writers' Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Oregon
AMERICAN GUIDE SERIES
ILLUSTRATED
BY THE PACIFIC
Sponsored by the Oregon State Board of Control
Preface
The Oregon Guide is the product of many hands and minds working joyously, without hope of individual reward or recognition, to accomplish something of which by and large they are proud, and diffidently offering it to the public of travelers and scholars and general readers. In contributing this volume to the American Guide Series, the members of the Oregon Writers' Project of the Work Projects Administration, speak collectively and anonymously. Most of them would rather have had some small part in its creation, working as carpenters of language with words as tools, finding facts and fashioning them into sentences and paragraphs and chapters, than to have built a fast highway or an impressive public building. For, generally, the writer believes that long after the best road of his day has been supplanted by a straighter and wider one, and long after the highest building has crumbled with time or been blown to bits by air bombs, this book will remain. And the makers of this Guide have faith, too, that their book will survive; in the future, when it no longer fills a current need as a handbook for tourists, it will serve as a reference source well-thumbed by school children and cherished by scholars, as a treasure trove of history, a picture of a period, and as a fadeless film of a civilization.
It was easy to write about Oregon. The state has something that inspires not provincial patriotism but affection. California has climate; Iowa has corn; Massachusetts has history; Utah has religion; and New York has buildings and money and hustle and congestion; but that "lovely dappled up-and-down land called Oregon" has an ever-green beauty as seductive as the lotus of ancient myth.
It is not only the native son of pioneers who feels this affection for the land. The newcomer at first may smile at the attitude of Oregonians towards their scenery and their climate. But soon he will begin to refer to Mt. Hood as "our mountain"—significantly, not as "The Mountain," as Seattlites speak of Mt. Rainier. Soon he will try to purchase a home-site from which he can view it. And before a year of life in Oregon has passed, the sheer splendor of peaks and pines, the joy of ​shouting trout-filled mountain streams, the satisfying quiet of Douglas firs, the beauty of roses that bloom at Christmas, the vista of rolling wooded hills and meadows always lush and green, the scenic climax of a fiery sun sinking into earth's most majestic ocean—all will have become a part of his daily happiness, undefined and unrecognized in his consciousness, but something so vital that he can never again do without it. And he will even, as do the natives, find merit in the long winter of dismal skies and warm but chilling rains, calling himself a "webfoot" and stoutly proclaiming that he likes it—when all the while he means that he considers it poor sportsmanship to complain, since he knows that this is the annual tax he pays for eternal verdure, for trees and grass and ferns and ivy and hydrangeas and holly, and for the privilege of appreciating by contrast the short bright rainless summer cooled by the softest yet most invigorating northerly winds.
These tributes are generally inspired by only a part, not even a third part, of Oregon. Beyond the wall of the Cascades, which cuts the state into two sections sharply contrasting topographically, stretches a land whose character is that of the plateaus and deserts and mountains of the Rockies country. Yet even the climate of this eastern region has its enthusiasts, and has been thus described by Claire Warner Churchill: "It rains. It snows. It scorches. It droughts. It suspends itself in celestial moments of sheer clarity that hearten the soul. Whatever else it may do, it challenges rather than enervates. Rather than complacency it breeds philosophy."
So Oregon offers, it is claimed, the greatest variety of climate and scenery and vegetation of all the states.
It was this very diversity that occasioned a lively controversy in the selection of a subtitle for the Guide. In a public contest many Oregonians offered titles dripping with ardor. Such phrases as "The Land of Perpetual Spring" and "Land of the Midwinter Rose" were viewed by out-of-state critics with arched eye-brows as either un-factual or over-sentimental. Stolid history lovers suggesting "The Beaver State," were countered with the quip, "Why not call it the Rodent State so as not to discriminate against our rabbits and prairie dogs?" Others argued that the subtitle should derive from the state stone, which is agate, or the state bird, the meadow-lark, or even the state flower, the Oregon grape, which has an unromantic but highly practical history. Geographically-minded persons, aware that Portland is the farthest west of America's large cities, advised "Oregon—Farthest West." Another group wanted "Oregon—Nearest Japan," and their argument was ​political. Finally, an amateur artist drew a dust cover depicting the setting sun and proffered "The Sunset State."
And what of Oregon's future? It is, after all, only a few short years between the time when William Cullen Bryant wrote in one of his greatest poems about the primitive country "Where rolls the Oregon and hears no sound," and the present, when Bonneville Dam has made a great gash in beautiful Columbia Gorge, and when the greatest structure in history, Grand Coulee, looms portentously to the north. Oregon today is still the most unspoiled and most uncluttered spot in America — partly because the gold rushes of California and Alaska left it undisturbed. Soon, perhaps, it will be changed by the coming of Power, the inrolling of immigration from the dust bowl, the devastation of timbercutting and forest fires, and the boosting activities of chambers of commerce. It may be regrettable to see this peaceful beautiful land transformed into a network of highways, clogged with cars and defaced with hot dog stands, the groves littered with tin cans and papers, the hills pock-marked with stumps, and the cities cursed with the slums that seem to accompany industrial progress.
The sons of Oregon today are tall and sturdy, and the complexion of the daughters is faintly like that of the native rose—a hue gained from living and playing in a pleasant outdoors. Will the sons of the impending industrial age be shorter and shrewder, and the daughters dependent for their beauty upon commodities sold in drug-stores; and will Oregonians become less appreciative of nature and rooted living and more avid and neurotic in the pursuit of wealth? These are some of the questions and misgivings in the minds of native Oregonians, including some of those who wrought the Oregon Guide.
Yet the writers of the Guide worked hard and gladly, though aware that their names would never be known. And only here can acknowledgment be made of their zeal and devotion. They were aided and encouraged by many citizens of Oregon who served as consultants, and by many institutions which gladly and courteously opened to them their stores of history and tradition and current fact. Among those who helped are: Leith Abbott, Dr. Burt Brown Barker, J. R. Beck, C. I. Buck, Dr. V. L. O. Chittick. Dr. R. C. Clark. H. L. Corbett, Dr. L. S. Cressman, Dr. H. C. Dake, Wm. L. Finley, George H. Flagg, Dr. James A. Gilbert, Frederick Goodrich, Mr. and Mrs. E. J. Griffith, Mrs. Charles A. Hart, M. T. Hoy, Herbert Lampman, Mrs. Katherine Lawton, Lewis A. McArthur, Roi Morin, Glen W. Neel, J. A. Ormandy, Dr. E. L. Packard, Jamieson Parker, Phil. Parrish, Professor ​Morton E. Peck, Miss Nellie B. Pipes, Alfred Powers, Charles P. Pray, Ralph J. Reed, Professor Wm. A. Schoenfeld, Leslie Scott, Earl Snell, Dr. Warren D. Smith, V. D. Stanberry, Oswald West, F. B. Wire; also the State Library, the Portland Public Library, the Oregon Historical Society, the Portland Art Museum, the State Planning Board, the State Highway Commission, and the U. S. Forest Service.
T. J. EDMONDS, State Supervisor. ​
Contents
PAGE
PREFACE •• -'V Vli
GENERAL INFORMATION . XXl CALENDAR OF EVENTS XXVl'i
Part I. Past and Present
OREGON YESTERDAY AND TODAY 3
NATURAL SETTING 9
RACIAL ELEMENTS .75
SPORTS AND RECREATION * »' * . . . ^: . .. 9^
EDUCATION . . . . • • IO2
RELIGION "."' . . . ..... . . r . . 107
LITERATURE .'. v . * . .. . . . . . . no
THEATER, Music AND ART. .. ... . . . . 118
NEWSPAPERS AND RADIO . * .. . . , .,«, v r^*> . . 135
Part II. Cities and Towns
PAGE
Part III. All Over Oregon
TOUR I (Caldwell, Idaho)—Ontario—Baker—La Grande—Pendleton —
Umatilla— The Dalle*— Portland— Astoria [US 30] . . 249
Section a. Idaho Line to Umatilla 249
Section b. Umatilla to Portland 263
Section c. Portland to Astoria 276
TOUR lA Baker—Hereford—Unity [State 7] 283
TOUR iB Baker— Richland— Homestead [State 86] 286
TOUR iC La Grande—Enterprise—Wallowa Lake [State 82] . . . 290
TOUR iD Arlington—Condon—Fossil—Junction with US 28 [State 19] 294
TOUR lE Hood River—Junction with State 50 [State 35] .... 297
TOUR 2 (Vancouver, Wash.)—Portland—Salem—Junction City — Eugene—Roseburg—Grants Pass—Medford—( Yreka,
Calif.) [US 99E-99] 300
Section a. (Vancouver, Wash.) to Junction City ... 301
Section b. Junction City to California Line 315
TOUR 2A Oregon City—Silverton—Lebanon—Brownsville—Eugene —
[State 215] 332
TOUR 2B Junction with US 99—Gervais—St. Louis—St. Paul—Cham poeg [State 219] and County Roads .... ​.. 336
TOUR 2C Salem—Rickreall—Dallas—Junction with Statt 18 [State 22] 341
TOUR 2D Albany—Corvallis—Toledo—Newport [State 26] . • • . 344
TOUR 2E Philomath Junction—Alsea—Waldport [State 34] . . 347
TOUR 2F Junction with US 99—Blachley—Florence [State 36] . • . 349
TOUR 2G Drain— Elkton— Reedsport [State 38] 351
TOUR 2H Coos Junction—Myrtle Point—Coquille [State 42] ... 354
TOUR 2! Grants Pass—California Line [US 199] 258
TOUR 3 Astoria—Tillamook—Newport—North Bend—Marshfield —
Gold Beach— (Crescent City, Calif.) [US 101] . . . 363
Section a. Astoria to Newport 364
Section b. Newport to California Line 376
TOUR 4 (Maryhill, Wash.)—Biggs Jnct.—Redmond—Bend—Klamath
Falls— (Dorris, Calif.) [US 97] 387
Section a. Washington Line to Bend ...... 388
Section b. Bend to California Line ....... 394
TOUR 4A function with US 97—Maupin—Government Camp—Portland
[State 50] 40i
TOUR 46 Bend— Elk Lake— Junction with US 97 [The Century Drive] 407
TOUR 4C Junction with US 97— Oakridge— Goshen [State 58] . . . 4™
TOUR 4D Klamath Junction— Fort Klamath— Crater Lake National Park
— Medford [State 62] 4'4
TOUR 5 (Wallula, Wash.)— Pendleton— John Day— Burns— Lakeview
—New Pine Creek [US 395] 4'7
Section a. Washington Line to Burns 4*7
Section b. Western Junction with State 54 to California Line 423
TOUR 5A Burns— Crane— Follyfarm— Fields— Denio [State 78 and unnumbered roads] 428
TOUR 58 Burns— French Glen— Blitzen— Fields [State 78 and 205] . 43
[State 31] *'*'-• ' * 435
TOUR 5D Lakeview— Klamath Falls— Ashland [State 66] .... 43?
TOUR 6 Ontario— Vale— John Day— Redmond— Sisters— SpringfieldJunction with US 99 [US 28] . . «•>.- * • • • • 44*
Section a. Ontario to Redmond 443
Section b. Redmond to Junction with US 99 . . • • 453 ​
TOUR 6A Cairo— Jordan Valley— Rome [State 201 j ..... . 458
TOUR 7 Vale—Burns—Bend—Sisters—Albany [State 54] . . . . 464
Section a. Vale to Bend .......... 465
Section b. Bend to Albany ......... 471
TOUR 7A Little Nash Crater Junction—Detroit—Stayton—Salem
[State 222] ............ 475
TOUR 8 Portland— Hillsboro— Forest Grove— Tillamook [State 8-6] . 477
TOUR 9 Junction with State 8—Wolf Creek—Elsie—Necanicum Junc tion [unnumbered roads, State 2] ....... 484
TOUR IO Portland—Newberg—McMinnville—Corvallis—Junction City
[US 99W: ............ 486
TOUR IDA Junction US 99\V—Grand Ronde—Junction US 101 [State 18] 492
MOUNT HOOD RECREATION AREA ....... 496
CRATER LAKE NATIONAL PARK ...... . . 502
NATIONAL FORESTS ........... 511
Part IV. Appendices
CHRONOLOGY 521
A SELECT READING LIST 529 ​
INDEX 53$
Illustrations
Mural, U. S. Post Office, Ontario
Treasury Dept. Art Projects Oregon Trail in 1843
17. S. Bureau of Public Roads Astoria in 1811
U. S. Army Signal Corps Discovery of the Columbia River
Drawn by W. E. Rollins Joe Meek, Mountain Man
Angelus Studio Indian, Pendleton Round-up
Gretchen Glover
Indian Chiefs, Pendleton Roundup
Gretchen Glover Pioneer Homestead (from old print)
Angelus Studio
The Dalles Methodist Mission (old print)
Angelus Studio Providence Baptist Church West Union Baptist Church
Verne Bright St. Paul Catholic Church Tualatin Plains Presbyterian Church
Verne Bright Old Fort Dalles, Historical
Museum
Seth Luelling House, Milwaukie Joel Palmer House, Dayton Ladd and Reed Farm, Reedville
Verne Bright Umatilla, 1864
W. S. Bowman Portland, 1854
Angelus Studio
Cattle Ranch
Alfred Monner Ovvyhee Project Farm
U. S. Department of Interior Main Intake Klamath County Project
U. S. Department of Interior Irrigated Field, Owyhee Project
U. S. Department of Interior Linn County Flouring Mill Pea Harvest
Genevieve Mayberry Klamath Irrigation Project
U. S. Department of Interior Settlers on Owyhee Project
[7. S. Department of Interior Hop Pickers Willamette Valley
U. S. Department of Interior Onion Harvest, Ontario
U. S. Department of Interior Turkeys, Redmond
Oregon Journal Washington County Farm
Alfred Monner Central Oregon Sheep Ranch
Farm Security Administration Central Oregon Sheep Herder
Farm Security Administration Oregon State Capitol, Salem
Frank I. Jones Dayton Farm Family Labor Camp
Farm Security Administration Farm Boy
Farm Security Administration Pioneer Logging
Angelus Studio Cut-over Land, Siltcoos
Farm Security Administration ​
XVI OREGON
Early-day Loggers, Tillamook
Tillamook Pioneer Association Sea-going Log Raft
Angelus Studio Forest Fire in Coast Range
Tillamook County Chamber
of Commerce Paper Mill, Oregon City
U. S. Forest Service Bridal Veil Lumber Flume
Angelus Studio Indians Fishing for Salmon, 1856
Harpers Monthly Magazine Columbia River Salmon Fisheries
Columbia Empire Industries Pilchard Fishing Fleet
Oregon State Game Commission Fish Nets Drying
Angelus Studio Aerial View, Portland
W. C. Brubaker
Aerial View, Oregon State College
W. C. Brubaker Old Administration Building, O.
S. C.
Deady Hall, U. of O. Main Entrance, Timberline Lodge
Atkeson: Photo Art Studio Main Door, Timberline Lodge
Atkeson: Photo Art Studio Main Lounge, Timberline Lodge
Atkeson: Photo Art Studio Newel Post, Timberline Lodge
Atkeson: Photo Art Studio Isaac Jacob House, Portland
Oregon Art Project Entrance Public Library, Portland
Oregonian
Art Museum, Portland Portland Public Market
Oregonian Auditorium, Portland
Oregonian
State Forestry Building, Salem Union Station, Portland
Oregonian
First Presbyterian Church, Portland
Oregonian Temple Beth Israel, Portland
Oregonian
Mount Hood and Interstate Bridge
Angelus Studio Indian Teepees Molalla Buckaroo
Farm Security Administration Warm Springs Indian Boy
Farm Security Administration John Day Country
Oregon State Highway Commission
Basalt Bluffs Along John Day River
Angelus Studio Highway Sign Near Madras
Farm Security Administration Ontario
Oregonian
Old Boones Ferry, Wilsonville Covered Bridge near Dillard
Angelus Studio Battleship Searchlights, Fleet Week, Portland
F. E. Mclntosh Portland and Mount Hood
Angelus Studio Basque Girls, Malheur County
Oregonian Columbia River Indians
Angelus Studio
Indian Burial Ground Memaloose Island
Angelus Studio
Early Day Vehicles, The Dalles Indian Teepees Umatilla Reservation Astor Column, Astoria
Angelus Studio
Coming of the White Man, Portland
Angelus Studio Eliot Glacier, Mount Hood
Oregonian ​
Rogue River National Forest
U. S. Forest Service Timberline Lodge, Mount Hood Punch Bowl Falls, Eagle Creek
U. S. Forest Service Plaque "The Beaver"
Angelus Studio Battleship Oregon ' /
Angelus Studio Mount Hood from Lost Lake
Angelus Studio Bonneville Dam
U. S. Army Engineers Oregon Coast Curry County
Frank I. Jones Wallowa Mountains
Cecil V. Ager
Holland Grass Plantings Oregon Coast
Farm Security Administration Mitchell Point Tunnel Columbia River
Angelus Studio Snake River Canyon
Cecil V. Ager Bonneville Dam and Mount Hood
U. S. Army Air Corps Sheep Mountain
Shell Oil Company Multnomah Falls Columbia River
Angelus Studio Phantom Ship Crater Lake
Sawyer Photo Service Ice Stalagmites in Malheur Cave
Dr. H. C. Dake Bunchgrass Central Oregon
Alfred A. Monner Wheat Fields Grande Ronde Valley
Cecil V. Ager
Mount Hood in Winter
Albert Altorfer La Grande
Oregon Journal Roseburg
Oregon Journal Mount Washington
U. S. Forest Service Game Studies Survey
U. S. Forest Service Indians Fishing at Celilu Falls
Oregon State Highway Commission Surf Fishing Oregon Coast
Shell Oil Company Elk at Wallowa Lake
U. S. Forest Service Salmon Jumping Willamette Falls
Ralph J.Eddy Deer Tracks in Snow
U. S. Forest Service Oregon Beaver
' U. S. Forest Service Black Bear, Fremont National Forest
U. S. Forest Service Coyote
U. S. Forest Service Wild Cat
U. S. Forest Service Proof of a Tall Tale
F. E. Mclntosh Sea Lions Oregon Coast
Sawyer Photo Service Archers' Camp with Deer
U. S. Forest Service One Month's Catch
U. S. Forest Service Fishing in Deschutes National Forest
17. S. Forest Service ​ ​
Maps
STATE MAP .' v . • . i . . back pocket
TRANSPORTATION . ". * . . . . reverse of state map
PORTLAND * . -.'-,.- * • - • • reverse of state map
TOUR KEY MAP . ' . . . . • . front end paper
PAGE
ASTORIA ., „_, W . ....... .154-155
CORVALLIS . .' * • -. • • - • •. .162-163
EUGENE . . . . . . . . . . . . • 172-173
OREGON CITY . , . . . 196-197
SALEM ; , ,- ; . > . . . / . -. . 234-235
THE DALLES . 24 ​2-243 ​
General Information
(State map, showing highways, and maps giving railroad, air, bus, and water transportation routes in pocket, inside back cover.)
Railroads: Great Northern Ry. (GN), Northern Pacific Ry. (NP), Southern Pacific Lines (SP), Union Pacific R. R. (UP), Spokane, Portland & Seattle Ry. (SP&S), Oregon Electric Ry. (OE) (see TRANSPORTATION MAP.)
Bus Lines: Pacific Greyhound Lines, Union Pacific Stages, North Coast Transportation Co., Spokane, Portland & Seattle Transportation Co., Oregon Motor Stages, Mount Hood Stages, North Bank Highway Stages, Boyd's Dollar Lines, Independent Stages, and Benjamin Franklin Line serve all but most remote sections. Pacific Greyhound and North Coast are principal carriers N. and S., operating over US 99 the former S. of Portland into California, the latter to Seattle and points N. Union Pacific Stages and Spokane, Portland & Seattle line (US 30), are chief lines E. and W., the former operating E. and the latter W. from Portland: all lines listed above enter Portland; averag< fare, ac per mi. (see TRANSPORTATION MAP).
Air Lines: United Airlines (Vancouver, B. C, to San Diego) stops at Portland and Medford; United Airlines (Portland, Pendleton, Salt Lake City, Omaha, Chicago, New York) connection at Pendleton fo? Spokane (see TRANSPORTATION MAP).
Waterways: Principal waterways are Columbia and Willamette Rivers. Portland, on the Willamette, is a regular port of call for coastwise vessels between Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle and for combination freight and passenger vessels to the Orient, and to South American, Atlantic Coast and European ports. Freight and passenger river boats operate between Portland and Astoria, and Portland and The Dalles. ​
Highways: Eight Federal highways, six of them transcontinental or with international connections. State highways connect all sections. State police patrol highways. No inspection of cars into Oregon, but cars from Oregon entering California undergo inspection for horticultural diseases. Water or gasoline scarcity possible only in high desert region of southeastern Oregon. Gasoline tax, 6c (for highway routes, see STATE MAP).
Motor Vehicle Laws (digest): No fixed speed limit, but no person shall drive at a speed inconsistent with prudent control of car; "indicated speeds," which are accepted as reasonable, are 45 m. p. h. on open highway, 25 m. p. m. in city residence districts, 20 m. p. h. in business districts and at intersections where vision is obscured, and 15 m. p. h. while passing school grounds. Speed in excess of 45 m. p. h. on open highways permitted, but driver operates at his own risk. State licenses not required of non-residents, but cars must be registered within 24 hrs. after entry into state; registration may be made with secretary of state or his agents, which include chambers of commerce and the American Automobile Assn.; no fee charged. State police supply information; they drive blue cars with state insignia on the doors and are easily recognized by their blue uniforms.
Headlights must conform with 8-point adjustment system. Accidents resulting in injury to person or property must be reported within 24 hrs. to nearest chief of police or sheriff. Minimum age for drivers 15 yrs., unless special permit has been granted. Full stop required while streetcars are loading or unloading passengers, except where safety zones have been established.
Unlawful: To drive while intoxicated, to carry any person on any external part of automobile, to coast in neutral, to park on paved or main-traveled portion of highway, to carry more than three persons over 12 on front seat, to pass streetcars on L., to display windshield stickers other than temporary licenses and registration tags.
Accommodations: Hotel accommodations are adequate; tourist camps along all main highways; U. S. Forest Service camps within forest areas; beach accommodations along US 101 at all seasons; eight dude ranches, the four most elaborate ones being in Baker and Wallowa Counties. At Portland, during Rose Festival in June, and Pacific International Stock Show in autumn; Salem, during State Fair in Septem ber; ​Pendlcton, during Round-Up in September; and at Astoria, during Regatta in late summer, advance hotel accommodations should be arranged.
Climate and Equipment: Moderate temperatures prevail W. of Cascade Mountains; medium weight clothing sufficient the year around; topcoats needed in the valleys in all seasons but summer, and along Pacific Coast even in warmest weather; rain general during fall and winter, when water-proof clothes will be appreciated.
East of the Cascades temperatures are more extreme: summer days hot, nights cool; summer travel equipment should include mediumweight clothing; snow and sub-zero weather in winter.
Special outdoor clothing, cooking utensils, and bedding required for hiking and pack-horse trips; equipment available in any county seat town; drinking water wholesome and plentiful in Cascades and western Oregon, but water from rivers not recommended except in most primitive areas.
Recreational Areas: Thirteen national forests (set STATE MAP) ; of these, Wallowa, Mount Hood, Willamette, and Rogue River have primitive areas, all have recreational areas. Crater Lake National Park and Oregon Caves National Monument, both in southern Oregon, are other National playgrounds.
Recreational areas visited to best advantage in summer; guides available for primitive areas; any U. S. Forest Service headquarters or ranger will furnish information; national forest campers between July i and Sept. 30, except at improved campgrounds, required to obtain campfire permits from rangers and to carry ax, water container, and shovel; all campfires must be put out before camp is abandoned, or campers are liable to heavy fine; smoking while traveling in national forests forbidden except on paved or surfaced highways.
Poisonous Plants, Reptiles f Dangerous Animals f and Insects: Poison oak prevalent E. of Cascades and in valleys between Cascade and Coast Ranges; rattlesnakes only poisonous reptiles, not common but found occasionally E. of Cascades, in southern Willamette Valley, and southern Oregon; none has been found W. of Coast Range; bears, mountain lions, and timber wolves, found in the mountains, generally harmless unless molested.
Poisonous insects are the Rocky Mountain or Spotted Fever tick, ​found in cattle country of eastern Oregon from March to June; Black Widow spiders, active in late summer months, found occasionally around rock and lumber piles; mosquitoes attain pest proportions only in high Cascade forests when snow is melting in early summer.
State Liquor Laws: State controls liquor traffic; hard liquor purchasable only from state stores or agencies; permit, costing 5oc and good for i yr., must be obtained by residents and visitors for purchases; hard liquor sold only in original packages and may not be consumed on premises; beer, ale, and unfortified wine may be purchased without a permit from privately owned and operated depots, licensed by the state, and may be consumed on the premises.
Fishing Laws: Nonresident angler's license, $3; special vacation license for two consecutive days, $i; unnaturalized persons must obtain $25 alien gun license before purchasing angling or hunting license; all persons 14 yrs. and more must have license to hunt or angle; licenses may be obtained from any county clerk, the State Game Commission, or its agents, usually drug and sporting-goods stores; complete copies of state game laws available at any agency.
Open season for trout, fixed by Oregon Game Commission, usually from April to November; bag limit, 15 Ib. and I fish, but not to exceed 20 fish in I day; or 30 Ib. and I fish, but not to exceed 40 fish in 7 consecutive days, except special bag limits for certain lakes and streams (for which see complete state game laws); for trout more than 10 in., season open all year in Pacific Ocean, its tidewaters, and Coast lakes.
Open season for salmon, 15 in. and more, entire year; bag limit salmon 20 in. and more, 3 such fish in any i day, but not to exceed 10 such fish in any 7 consecutive days; bag limit on 15 in. salmon, 15 Ib. and i fish, but not to exceed 20 fish in any i day; salmon under 15 in. classified as trout and may be taken only as such.
Bass season open entire year except in Oswego Lake, where it runs from Apr. 5 to Oct. 31, both inclusive.
Crappies, catfish, perch, and sunfish seasons open all year except in certain waters, for which see complete state laws.
Hunting Laws: Nonresident's license $15 including deer tag; elk tag, $25 additional. Licenses may be obtained in same manner as fishing ​licenses (see above) ; open season for game animals and birds, all dates inclusive:
Bear: Entire year, except in Jackson, Josephine, and Klamath counties, where open season is Nov. i to Nov. 30. Buck deer, Sept. 20 to Oct. 25; bag limit, 2 Columbia blacktail deer or I mule deer having not less than 3 forked horns. Bull elk, having horns: Nov. 8 to Nov. 18. Chinese pheasants: Oct. 15 to Oct. 31 in most counties; bag limit 4 birds in I day, 8 in any 7 consecutive days, with I hen pheasant in bag of 8. Hungarian partridges: Oct. 15 to Oct. 31 in Wasco, Sherman, Morrow, and Wheeler counties; Sept. 15 to Nov. 15 in Malheur, Baker, Wallowa, Union, and Umatilla counties; bag limit 6 birds in I day, 12 in any consecutive 7 days. Quail: Oct. 15 to Oct. 31 in most counties except Klamath, where season is from Oct. I to Oct. 31, bag limit 10 birds in any consecutive 7 days. Grouse, native pheasants: Oct. 15 to Oct. 31 W. of Cascade Range summit, Sept. 10 to Sept. 30 in eastern Oregon, bag limit 4 birds in I day, or 8 in consecutive 7 days. Ducks, geese, brant, coots, Wilson snipe, or jacksnipes; Nov. i to Nov. 30, bag limit on ducks 10 in i day or in possession at any one time, geese and brant 4 in i day or in possession at any one time, snipe 15 in i day or in possession at any one time.
Unlawful: To kill whitetail deer, sage hens, to hunt at night, to hunt on any game refuge, to hunt deer with dogs, to waste game wantonly, to shoot from public highway or railroad right-of-way, to hunt on lands without permission of owner and to lie in wait for deer at or near licks, to possess more than 30 Ib. and i fish (trout) or more than 40 trout at one time. The provision as to trout, permits angler to have i fish in excess of 30 Ib. provided the aggregate does not exceed 40 trout. (In view of frequent changes in regulations tourists should check with latest editions of hunting and fishing laws.)
Picking wild flowers is not forbidden in national forests, and timber may be removed from certain areas under a sustained yield system; but picking flowers along highways in national forests or in dedicated recreation districts is not allowed.
General Service for Tourists: A publication of value is the Oregon Blue Book, an official state publication, available in public libraries, or for sale by the Secretary of State, Salem, 25c per copy; chambers of commerce, state troopers, automobile associations, forest officers will supply information at any time.
No toll bridges or toll ferries within Oregon, but toll charges are ​made for interstate crossings at several points between Oregon and Washington. Three bridges and seven ferries cross Columbia River between Astoria and Umatilla, levying charges varying from 500 for car and all passengers to $i for car and driver (see Tours). Travel over Interstate Bridge at Portland is free. ​
Calendar of Annual Events
Only events of general interest listed: for descriptions consult index. Many opening dates vary with the years and are placed in the week in which they usually occur.
Third week Fourth week Fourth week Fourth week
Second Friday Third week Third week
Fourth week Fourth week
First week Third Sunday No fixed date Easter
No fixed date
First Sunday First week Third week Fourth week
JANUARY
at Kamela La Grande Ski Tournament
at Government Camp Cascade Ski Club Tournament at Portland Olympic Bowman League Shoot
at Eugene Olympic Bowman League Shoot
FEBRUARY
Statewide Arbor Day
at Government Camp Winter Sports Carnival
at Government Camp Pacific Northwest Slalom
Tournament Champion Ski Jumps "El Campo" Celebration
at Government Camp at Vale
MARCH
at Portland at Prineville at Portland at Portland
Salmon Fishing Derby Old Timers' Reunion Dog Show
Easter Services in Mt. Tabor and Washington Parks
APRIL at The Dalles Indian Salmon Feast
MAY
at Champoeg Oregon Founders' Day
at Klamath Falls Flower Show
at Milton Pea Festival
at Klamath Falls Upper Klamath Lake Regatta ​
xxviii OREGON
First week First week First week Second week Second week Second week
Second week Second week Third week Third week
Third or Fourth
week
Fourth week No fixed date No fixed date No fixed date No fixed date No fixed date
JUNE
at Lebanon at Union at Independence at Canyon City at Portland at Salem
at Government Camp at Weston at Brownsville at Portland
at Taf t
at St. Helens at Sheridan at Gold Beach at Beaver ton at Newberg at Florence
Strawberry Fair
Eastern Oregon Livestock Show
Jersey Jubilee
'62 Gold Rush Celebration
Rose Festival
Oregon Trapshooters Association Meet Summer Ski Tournament Pioneer Picnic Pioneer Picnic Oregon Pioneer Assn.
Celebration Redhead Round-Up
St. Hellions Days Phil Sheridan Day Fat Lamb Show Flower Festival Berry Festival Rhododendron Show
JULY
First week First week First week First week First week Second week Third week
(biennial) Third week Third week
(every 3rd yr. Third week Third week
Third week Third week
at Hillsboro
at Molalla
at Bend
at Klamath Falls
at Vale
at Marshfield
at Oregon City
at Portland at Eugene I
at Tillamook at Hood River
at Gearhart at Stay ton
Happy Days Celebration
Buckaroo
Water Pageant
Rodeo
Rodeo
Paul Bunyan Celebration
Frontier Days Celebration
Fleet Week
Oregon Trail Pageant
Tillamook Beaches Jubilee American Legion Mt. Hood
Climb
Oregon Coast Golf Tournament Santiam Spree ​
CALENDAR Third or Fourth at Baker
week
Fourth week at Grants Pass Fourth week at Ocean Lake No fixed date at Corvallis
OF ANNUAL EVENTS
Mining Jubilee
xxix
No fixed date No fixed date
at Tillamook at Portland
No fixed date at Coquille
Gladiolus Show Devil's Lake Regatta Pacific Northwest
Horticultural Show March of Progress Outdoor Portland Symphony
Concerts Flower Show
AUGUST
First week
at Silverton
First week
at Nyssa
First week
at Mount Angel
Second week
at Bend
Third week
at Oregon City
(biennial)
Third Sunday
at Falls City
Fourth week
at Ashland
Fourth week
at Independence
No fixed date
at Portland
Fourth week at Astoria
American Legion Baseball
Playoff
Owyhee Canyon Days Flax Festival Flower Show Territorial Days Celebration
Old Timers' Picnic Shakespearean Festival Hop Fiesta Outdoor Portland Symphony
Concerts Astoria Regatta
SEPTEMBER
First week First week First week First week First week First week First week Third week Fourth week No fixed date No fixed date No fixed date
at Lakeview at Ontario at The Dalles at Heppner at Salem at Caves City at Prairie City at Pendleton at Enterprise at Condon at Siletz at Monmouth
Round-Up
Stampede
Fort Dalles Frolic
Rodeo
Oregon State Fair
Miners' Jubilee
Round-Up
Round-Up
Race Meet and Rodeo
Rodeo
Rodeo
American Legion Hi ​-jinks
First week
No fixed date No fixed date No fixed date No fixed date
No fixed date No fixed date
OCTOBER
at Portland
at Milton-Freewater at Newberg at Merrill at Dufur
Pacific International Livestock
Show
Apple Show Farm Products Show Potato Show Ex-Service Men's Reunion
NOVEMBER
at Coquille Corn Show
at Corvallis State Horticultural Show
DECEMBER
Second week at Oakland Northwestern Turkey Show
No fixed date at Roseburg Turkey Show
No fixed date at Portland Cat Show
Fourth week at Simnasho Indian New Year's Celebration
No fixed date No fixed date Last week Last week Fourth week
First week First week First week First week First week Second week Fourth week Fourth week Fourth week No fixed date No fixed date No fixed date No fixed date
COUNTY AND DISTRICT FAIRS
AUGUST
at Gresham Multnomah County Fair
at Tillamook Tillamook County Fair
at Toledo Lincoln County Fair
at Eugene Lane County Fair
at Hermiston Hermiston Project Fair
SEPTEMBER
at Canby at Ontario at Moro at Dallas at Hillsboro at Lakeview at Redmond at Enterprise at La Grande at Woodburn at Halfway at St. Helens at Myrtle Point
Clackamas County Fair Malheur County Fair Sherman County Fair Polk County Fair Washington County Fair Lake County and 4.H Club Fair Deschutes County Fair Wallowa County Fair Union County Fair Community Fair Baker County Fair Columbia County Fair Coos County Fair ​
CALENDAR OF ANNUAL EVENTS XXXI
No fixed date at Gold Beach Curry County Fair
No fixed date at John Day Grant County Fair
No fixed date at Burns Harney County Fair
No fixed date at Gold Hill Northwest Jackson County Fair
No fixed date at Grants Pass Josephine County Fair
No fixed date at The Dalles Northern Wasco County Fair
No fixed date at Tygh Valley Wasco County Fair
OCTOBER
First week at Prineville Crook County Fair
Fourteenth
PIONEER ASSOCIATION MEETINGS
FEBRUARY
at Portland Sons and Daughters
of Oregon Pioneers
MAY
First Saturday Second week
First week Second week Second week Third week
Third week Third Sunday No fixed date
at The Dalles at Hood River
JUNE
at Tillamook at Canyon City at Burns at Portland
at Brownsville at Hillsboro at Weston
JULY
Last Sunday at Coquille Last Sunday at Dayton Last Wednesday at Enterprise
Wasco County Association Hood River County Association
Tillamook County Association Grant County Association Harney County Association Oregon State Pioneer
Association
Linn County Pioneer Association Washington County Associatior Umatilla County Association
Coos County Association Yamhill County Association Wallowa County Association
AUGUST
First Sunday at Prineville Crook County Association
Third Sunday at Toledo Lincoln County Association
No fixed date at Canyon City Eastern Oregon Pioneer
Association ​
XXXl'i OREGON
SEPTEMBER
No fixed date at Oregon City McLoughlin Memorial
Association
OCTOBER
at Lexington No fixed date Morrow County Ass ​ociation
PART I.
Past and Present
Oregon Yesterday and Today
OREGONIANS pridefully point out that theirs is the only state for which a transcontinental highway is named. It is the Oregon Trail, which began at Independence, Missouri. Even yet there travel along US 30, which in part roughly approximates and ​ ​in part coincides with the original trail, a continuous caravan of folk whose purposes parallel those of the pioneers who sought adventure, profit or release from economic pressure. This third objective they have realized, it is said, because the Trail's End State, although slow to respond to the impetus of prosperity, has been correspondingly resistant to the effects of depression.
Oregon's topography, as well as its location, has importantly affected its development. The ninth largest commonwealth, it is divided physically by the Cascade mountain range, and metaphysically by economic, political, and sociological Alps of infinitely greater magnitude. The Cascades cut the State into two unequal portions from the northern to the southern boundary lines. If the geologists are correct, the mountains owe their eminence to a terrific vulcanism that sent the great peaks hurtling up through the ooze and miasma of prehistoric Oregon. The disturbance gave the modern state a scenic grandeur that has exhausted even the superlatives of the gentlemen who write recreational brochures, but it walled eastern Oregon away from the humid winds, the warm rains of the coast, and turned most of the land, through countless aeons of slow dehydration, into a country of drought and distances, of grim and tortured mountains and high desert grown sparsely with stunted juniper and wind-blown sage.
The mountain range stood as a colossal veto of whatever motions the early eastern Oregon settlers might have made toward economic equality with the pioneers of the lush country west of the Cascades. It turned them, out of sheer necessity, into cattlemen and sheepmen and miners and "dry" farmers, just as more benign circumstances made western Oregon residents into lumbermen, dairymen, fishermen and farmers, and—in the more populous centers—into artisans and politi ​
cians and financiers. At once the hero and the villain of the early Oregon piece, the Cascade Range still imposes a dozen divergent viewpoints upon the modern State; and it is therefore unlikely, if not impossible, that there be any such thing as a typical Oregonian.
The history of the State has been an essay in dramatic counterpoint that did not in itself make for homogeneity. The epochal journey of Lewis and Clark into the wild country still stands as a monumental achievement. The explorers live as shining examples of men who had a difficult job to do, and who did it with resounding thoroughness. But, while they pried open the dark doorway to the unknown West, the reports that they brought back of the Oregon Country's teeming animal life opened the territory also to some precious scoundrels.
The fur traders who came after Lewis and Clark were as realistic in their approach to the country as were Cortez to Mexico and Pizzaro to Peru. They plagued the Indians with whiskey and social diseases, salted the very beaver skins with corruption, and yearned to be quit of the savage land as quickly as possible. The missionaries who followed were, in the main, devout if somewhat severe men who strove mightily to invest the natives in spirituality and trousers; but even among these a few learned to sing upon both sides of the Jordan, and to deal more briskly in real estate than in salvation. While the great overland migration to Oregon has been sanctified by tradition it seems foolish to presume that the covered wagons carried nothing but animated virtues into Oregon.
The great migration, as a matter of fact, contained every sort of human ingredient. Here came craftsmen from the Atlantic seaboard cities, uprooted by cheap labor from troubled Europe, journeying across the yellow Missouri, the great deserts and the towering mountains. So, also, came eastern farmers whose soil had worn thin from the sowings and reapings of two hundred years, doctors who lacked patients, lawyers who lacked clients. They came because they thought that they might better themselves and their families. No sane person would question their courage, or the hardihood of those who survived; but it is barely possible that they were not all either sunbonneted madonnas, or paragons of manhood jouncing westward with banjos on their knees.
The better of those who came may have lived longer. They certainly toiled harder, and they left the stamp of their fierce industry upon everything they touched. Had they been given time, had immigration ceased with them, they might have fused and welded the traits of a dozen eastern localities and produced something—a mode of speech, a ​
YESTERDAY AND TODAY 5
style of architecture, a form of culture, or even a set of prejudices — uniquely their own. Subsequent waves of immigration, however, washed again and again over them, to warp the sober pattern of living that they laid down. The discovery of gold in southwestern Oregon and in the eastern portion of the State in the fifties and sixties brought the living prototypes of Bret Harte's fictions into the country by the thousands during the next two decades. The argonauts, like the Federal troops who came to fight a half dozen bloody Indian wars, had the irresponsibility of men who live lonely and dangerous lives anywhere, and they sowed their seed from Port Orford, on the southern Oregon coast, to the Wallowa foothills, on the State's northeastern boundary line. Veterans of Lee's shattered Army of the Confederacy, spared their horses by Grant at Appomattox, rode the starveling beasts into the country that had irked the Union commander as young lieutenant at Fort Vancouver years before, and men of his own victorious army pushed westward to settle side by side with their vanquished foes.
Then General Howard's troops blew out the last determined Indian resistance with a single gust of black powder smoke at Willow Springs in 1879, and eastern capitalists began to read some significance in the tumultuous Oregon scene. The transportation kings arrived, to wrestle for supremacy like embattled bulls, and while their methods may have shocked students of ethics, the shining rails went down, so that men along the Deschutes might ship some of the largest and finest potatoes in the world, and Jackson County fruit growers might find a market for their golden pears, and the lumber barons might hack at the State's timber resources. Lumberjacks from the thinning pine woods of Michigan swarmed into the Oregon wilds, just as in many cases their fathers before them had come into the Middle West from the hardwood forests of Maine, and the great epoch of Oregon lumbering was begun.
It is an interesting genealogical fact that the grandsons of Maine residents sometimes married the descendants of men who had come from that state a half century before; but there were not enough of these to make a Yankee sampler of Oregon. Swedes had come in too, and Norwegians; German and Bohemian immigrants were planting garden plots and pulling stumps as the forest wall receded. In Astoria Finnish fishermen adapted themselves to a climate less rigorous than that of their native land, while on the hills of southeastern Oregon, Spanish Basques were raising sheep, to the disgust of cattlemen who ruled like feudal lords over ranches larger than the lesser Balkan states.
The ranchers and the cowboys who served them, were as pungent ​
a set of personalities as the North American continent ever knew. Their manner of living was Oregon's last link to the fabulous West that has vanished forever. Many of the cattlemen rode into the unmapped country with no other possessions than their rifles and blankets and the clothing that they wore. Their successful efforts to wring livelihoods from the hostile land is an unwritten epic of the frontier. Although the financial wizard, Henry Miller, might swallow their ranches eventually, they held things with a short rein while they lasted, and were quicker to resort to the rifle than to the courts of law. Some of them were pillars of rectitude who married early, begot large families, and grew gaunt and gray and old in sober monogamy. Others punished their livers with bad whiskey and pursued their amours in the Indian lodges as well as in the brothels of Pendleton and the settlements of the Klamath Basin. A woman tavern keeper on Applegate Creek in Jackson County wrote to her niece in 1854: "Em, I should like to have you here, but a young lady is so seldom seen here that you would be in dangt of being taken by force."
This reckless era wore itself down with its own sheer animal vigor, and died, figuratively, in its tracks, like a spent bull. There followed the homesteading migration of the early igoo's when thousands of easterners settled upon lands that often failed to yield a living. Some of them ultimately beat their way back to the East, many found footholds in the productive soils of the western part of the State, and Oregon cities absorbed the rest. Then the World War was fought and finished, Oregon troops came back from overseas, and the State passed through the golden twenties and the lean nineteen-thirties to immediate time.
The forces of good and evil, as we know them, have hammered one another through every hour of the State's history. Balanced against debaucheries, failures and land frauds are the solid accomplishments of men and women who had honesty of purpose and vision, vast courage and friendliness, and generosity that sprang warm from their hearts.
Politically, the individual Oregonian may be certain that he understands himself, but he cannot always be so sure of his neighbors. Citizens of conservative opinion may declare solemnly that a staunch and inflexible conservatism is the bone and bowel and sinew of the State's body politic, but the body politic has never patiently endured a tightened belt, and there has been no lack of faithful followers to heed the chant of every economic muezzin from Henry George to Dr. Townsend. Throughout the State, a preponderantly conservative press voices at least an editorial approval of the status quo; but there is always a ​play of heat-lightning and a rumble of distant thunder along the political horizon, and champions of new causes emerge each year.
Oregon politics have been matters of both comedy and melodrama. The State was harshly dictatorial in its treatment of Chinese immigrants, with whose descendants the commonwealth now finds no quarrel; but it was also the first to introduce the initiative and referendum, and the breath of liberalism has never entirely failed. Unpredictable as are voters elsewhere, Oregonians sometimes make strange uses of their franchise. The Ku Klux Klan burned its fiery crosses over a hundred hills, and its propagandists sowed racial intolerance in every county of the state, but the Oregon electorate, unmoved by these activities, plodded to the polls and elected a Jewish governor. The voters of Salem enthusiastically accepting a plan for a new courthouse as proposed in a primary measure, marched forth at the general election to reject the tax levy with which the structure was to have been built. The general elections of November, 1938, found the Oregon electorate voting down a sales tax which was intended to have financed an extended old-age pension plan, approved in the preceding primary. The commonwealth's true political picture reads from Left to Right, with all deviations and all shades of opinion represented, and in the very vociferousness of dissenting voices, Oregon may count its democracy secure.
Oregonians have expressed themselves well in the fields of art, letters and music. Although Portland has been called the "Athens of the West," only a few persons are inclined to be disagreeably emphatic about the matter, or to make a fetish of culture. The State's painters and sculptors show strength and imagination and skill, and men and women employed by WPA have executed some of the most forthright work among contemporary artists. Oregon writers delve into a wealth of raw source material, and do well with what they withdraw and refine; and if it is not precisely true that there are more writers in Portland than in any other American city, as has been contended, there are at least an astonishing number of poets and novelists and journalists for so small a municipality. Besides these, there are sailors who come from the sea to write of what they have seen, and former lumberjacks who wade as zestfully into the world of letters as once they did into the Oregon mill-ponds.
All this promises well for a rich and full and native culture in the future, but it should not be supposed that the state has yet abandoned itself utterly to the refinements of the arts. The pulp magazines sell as well in Oregon as anywhere else, the cinema offers as many ineptitudes; ​
and while the Portland Junior Symphony, or the touring Monte Carlo Ballet, may attract large audiences to the Portland Auditorium, the beer halls are filled also with citizens who frankly prefer "swing" rhythms. Perhaps the greatest cultural achievement of the commonwealth is expressed by the fact that only one state, Iowa, has a greater degree of literacy, although higher education in Oregon was long retarded by persons opposed to any institutions more advanced than the most elementary of schools.
Pictorially Oregon is this: tidy white houses and church spires of the Willamette Valley settlements, like transplanted New England towns, among pastoral scenery warm and graceful as the landscapes of Innes; the Alice-through-the-looking-glass effect of a swift incredible geographic change that lifts the motorist out of lush green forests and over the wind-scoured ridgepole of the Cascades, and plummets him into a grim Never-Never land of broken rim-rock and bone-bare plains beyond the range; the lamplit frontier towns of eastern Oregon, the rolling, golden wheatlands, great ranches where booted and spurred men still ride; Crater Lake, with its unbelievably blue waters trapped forever in a shattered mountain peak; Newberry Crater, the Lava Fields and the Columbia Gorge; and the Wallowa Mountains where the last big-horn sheep in Oregon browse among mile-high lakes and meadows of alpine flowers. Or if the bird's-eye view is toward the west coast; a humid, forested, mountainous region, fronting the Pacific, to which it presents, abruptly, a precipitous escarpment, relieved here and there by long stretches of sand beaches, an occasional lumber port or fishing village, or a river mouth. Southward toward California the land rises in a jungle of ranges dented by narrow valleys where live and work miners and lumbermen.
If symbolism may be needed to complete the picture, let there be two symbols for Oregon: a pioneer of the covered wagon epoch, and beside him likewise grim and indomitable, the plodding figure of a modern farmer driven from middle-western soil by years of drought. Thousands of dust-bowl refugees have drifted into Oregon since 1930. If hunger and hardships and uncertainty are the essences of the pioneer tradition, they are a part of it already; and as the bearded early immigrants brought a first cohesion to the territory, these latter day American pioneers may strengthen that cohesion and make their own distinctive contribution to the future state. ​
Natural Setting
~O UGGED coast line, sandy beaches, heavily timbered ranges, snow•**^ capped peaks, broad river valleys, rough drainage basins, lava fields, gigantic geologic faults, and rolling upland plains cut by deep gorges, spread out in changing panoramas in this land of scenic surprises. Rugged masses, but slightly changed from the form of their volcanic origin, stand out in contrast to wide areas with lines softened by erosion.
Oregon is a land divided by great mountain barriers into regions of productive farms and desert wastes; it is a land of crowded habitations and scanty settlements, of lofty eminences and deep depressions, of isolated mountain-hemmed areas and open plains beyond the limit of vision, of deep lakes and barren playas, of rushing rivers and dry water courses, of dense forest undergrowth and park-like stands of timber.
The present State, formerly part of a vast area known as the Oregon country, is bounded on the north by the State of Washington, on the east by Idaho, on the south by Nevada and California, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean. Forming the larger part of its northern boundary line, the historic Columbia River gives the State somewhat the shape of a saddle, with its pommel near the river's mouth. The Snake River, with a rugged gorge deeper than the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, forms more than half of the eastern boundary. These two rivers, with the three hundred miles of coast, make more than two- thirds of Oregon's boundary line.
The state's extreme length, along the I24th meridian, is 280 miles; its extreme width, between Cape Blanco and the eastern boundary line, is 380 miles. Including 1,092 square miles of water surface, its total area is 96,699 square miles, making it the ninth largest state in the Union. With the exception of the far eastern portion, it lies in the Pacific Time Belt; and it embraces 36 counties.
The lofty and frosty-peaked Cascade Range divides Oregon into two unequal parts. To the east is the broad plains-plateau section; to the west, and comprising about one- third of the state's area, lies the ​more fully developed and more densely populated valley and coast section.
Although the dominating mass and altitude of the Cascade Range are responsible for major differences in climate, topography, and much else within the state, geographers subdivide Oregon into eight natural regions, or physiographic provinces, differing in soil, climate, plant life, and other characteristics. From west to east, these are the Coast, Southern Oregon, Willamette, Cascade, Deschutes-Columbia, Blue-Wallowa, Southeastern Lake, and Snake River regions.
The Coast Region, extending from the backbone of the Coast Range to the Pacific Ocean, is a long strip of less than 25 miles in average width. The Coast Range is low and rolling, with a mean elevation of less than 2,000 feet and occasional peaks up to 4,000 feet. Its western foothills leave but a narrow margin of coast plain, varying from a few miles wide to a complete break where precipitous promontories jut out into the ocean. Many streams rise in this range and flow westward into bays and estuaries or directly into the Pacific. Two southern rivers, the Umpqua and the Rogue, penetrate the Coast Range from the western slope of the Cascades. Seven of the streams are navigable for river craft from ten to thirty miles, and were once picturesquely active with steamboat commerce. A little stern-wheeler used to go up the deep but narrowing Coos until passengers on the deck could almost reach out and touch the damp and mossy walls on either side. A pioneer doctor at Florence, on the Siuslaw, owned a motor boat but no horse and buggy. Seven jetties have been built along the coast, but there are few good harbors. The old Spanish mariners passed them by, and Drake claimed that he anchored in a "bad bay." Rainfall averages about seventy-two inches annually, the climate is made mild by the closeness of the Pacific, and luxuriant vegetation, green the year around, affords a natural grassland for dairy farming along the lower valleys. Dairying, fishing, and lumbering are the principal industries. There are few railroads, but the region has a good network of highways, including the scenic Oregon Coast Highway, which roughly parallels the coast line for its entire distance. Astoria, Tillamook, Marshfield, and North Bend are the towns of major importance in this region.
The Southern Oregon Region, extending from the Calapooya Mountains southward to the state line between the Cascades and the Coast Range, is of rough topography, with heavily timbered mountainsides, dissected plateaus, and interior valleys of fine fruit, nut, and vegetable land. Portions of the Rogue River Valley are famous for pears and ​of the Umpqua River Valley for prunes, the former being raised largely with irrigation, the latter without. Game is plentiful in its many wilderness areas, and fish abound in its streams. It is one of the richest mineral regions in the state, and has abundant potential waterpower. Canning and preserving of fruits and vegetables, lumbering, and mining are the chief industrial activities. Roseburg, Grants Pass, Medford, and Ashland are the principal towns. A number of fine highways penetrate the region, but there will long remain many remote and primitive areas. Although the climate is varied, there are no extremes.
The Willamette Region comprises the famous Willamette Valley, a rectangular trough of level and rolling farm and timber lands, about one hundred and eighty miles long from the Columbia River to the Calapooya Mountains, and sixty miles wide from the Cascades to the Coast Range. The Willamette River and its tributaries drain the entire region, which has a widely diversified agriculture, the greatest commercial and industrial development in Oregon, and two-thirds of the state's population. Its particularly favorable soil and climatic conditions, and the availability of the Willamette and its tributaries for water transportation, made it the goal of most of the early immigrants. This early settlement and the region's natural advantages have maintained its position as the most important area of the State. Together with the Coast Region, it contains some of the finest stands of marketable timber now remaining in the United States, making lumbering an important industry. Manufacturing covers a wide variety of products, many of which have a national distribution. The region enjoys a mild climate and abundant rainfall, and has an excellent network of highways, railroads, waterways, and airways. Scenically, it is considered by many travelers to be one of the most beautiful in the West. Portland, Oregon City, Salem, Albany, Corvallis, and Eugene are the principal towns of the Willamette Valley.
The Cascade Region, extending along both sides of the Cascade Range, is an area of rugged grandeur. The western slope is the more precipitous, leading down into the Willamette, Umpqua, and Rogue River valleys. The eastern slope merges into a high plateau, which differs in climate and rainfall from the western slope because of the mountain barrier to the warm moisture-laden winds from the Pacific. Drainage is largely into the Deschutes River. Flora and fauna are distinctly, almost abruptly, different on the two slopes. With its mountain lakes and tumbling streams, the region has tremendous possibilities for irrigation and waterpower. Some irrigation developments have ​already been made, and a number of valley cities have power dams along the water-courses. It is an important grazing area. Lumbering flourishes, and immense stands of timber still await the saw. Of the 13,788,802 acres of national forests in Oregon, more than one-third are in the Cascade Region. The two most important agricultural districts are Hood River County, in the extreme north, with its famous irrigated apple orchards, and Klamath County, in the extreme south, prolific in potatoes, barley, and dairy products. Increasing accessibility has caused extensive use of the region as a playground. Being near to Portland, Mount Hood is the main focus of recreation, although Crater Lake, the Three Sisters, and other attractive natural areas are becoming increasingly popular. The Klamath lakes and marshes are famous shooting grounds, and the Pacific Crest Trail along the backbone of the Cascades is a notable hiking and saddle route. Climate and rainfall vary with the slope and altitude. Klamath Falls and Hood River are the principal cities.
The Deschutes-Columbia Region is a great interior plateau between the Cascade Range and the Blue Mountains. Most of the northern boundary is the Columbia River. The entire course of the Deschutes River and most of the John Day River are within its boundaries. It is a country of rolling hills, interspersed with level stretches of valley and upland. It is situated in the great Columbia lava flow, said to be the largest and deepest in existence. Canyon walls, from fifteen hundred to two thousand feet in height, reveal as many as twenty superimposed flows. The climate is dry and hot in summer, moderately cold in winter, and the region has from ten to twenty inches of annual rainfall. Irrigation is practiced wherever conditions warrant, but dry farming predominates. The wide uncultivated sections support large herds of sheep and cattle. There are some magnificent pine forests, mostly in the foothills, and regional lumbering operations are carried on. The few towns are supported largely by trade in livestock and agricultural commodities, and by the manufacture of flour, lumber, and woolen products. There are several good highways, along with two main railroad lines and a number of branch lines. The Dalles, Bend, and Pendleton are the principal towns.
The Blue-Wallowa Region is an area of about twenty thousand square miles in the northeastern part of the state, with two great mountain masses—the Blue Mountains, with the reverse L of the Strawberry Range, and the Wallowa Mountains. The Blue Mountain section consists of rolling terrain, covered with park-like stands of timber; the ​
other is rugged precipitous country, with beautiful mountain lakes and other striking scenery. The climate is less temperate than in the western part of the State, and the annual rainfall is from ten to twenty inches. The only farms are on the broad river bottoms, with livestock, wool, and hay as the most important products. There is much gold mining, principally by dredging. Parts of five national forests lie within the region. Industrial activity is restricted largely to lumbering, flourmaking, and gold and copper refining. Highways are being extended as the recreational advantages of the region become more widely recognized. There is one main-line railroad. Baker and La Grande are the largest towns.
The Southeastern Lake Region, including the High Desert, gives a first impression of being an immense wasteland of little value for human use, but it has many undeveloped resources. It extends southward from the Blue-Wallowa Region to the southern state line and contains many lakes, some of which dry up altogether or shrink greatly during the summer. Even some of the larger lakes have been known to evaporate entirely, then fill again. A striking example of this is Goose Lake on the southern boundary. For years settlers had seen the weathered wagon ruts of early emigrant trains leading up to the lake shore, and continuing from the water's edge on the opposite shore, although the lake was too deep to ford. One of the emigrant-train pioneers was asked how the wagons got across. They didn't cross any lake, he said, in their journey. The mystery of the tracks remained; but years later the lake dried up, and there were the wagon ruts leading across its bed and connecting with those on the two shores. Precipitation in most parts of this region amounts to about 10 inches annually. Livestock, principally sheep, is the chief product, although some farm crops are raised in scattered sections, and there is some wild hay. Surface streams and underground water are both scanty. Minerals other than salts from the dry lake beds are rare. There are few improved highways and but one branch railroad. Although the area is generally treeless, portions of the Deschutes and Fremont National Forests have fair stands of pine, in which some lumbering is done. The population is sparse. Burns and Lakeview are the chief towns.
The Snake River Region is a strip along the eastern boundary of the State, consisting of an open plateau from thirty-five hundred to four thousand feet in altitude, with narrow and deeply-cut river valleys low ranges of mountains, detached buttes, rim-rock, and sagebrush plains. It is semi-arid, with only about ten inches of annual rainfall ​
The Vale and Owyhee irrigation projects have brought a considerable acreage into high agricultural productivity; and in other sections, such as the Jordan Valley, there are several smaller irrigation projects. The northern portion has a number of adequate highways and railroads, but in the south there has been little transportation development of any kind. The area has considerable mineral wealth, great herds of sheep and cattle, and some horses. Except in the irrigated sections, the population is very sparse. Ontario and Vale are the principal towns.
Altogether, Oregon has a geography of immense diversity and notable contrast. In what is now Lake County, in December, 1843, John C. Fremont ascended to an altitude of seven thousand feet amid snows and howling winds. Suddenly, from a rim, he looked down three thousand feet upon a lake, warm and smiling and margined with green trees and grass. He and his party on that December day picked their way down the declivity, from winter into summer. He named the two points Winter Rim and Summer Lake.
GEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY
Two distinct bodies of land, washed by the primal sea, were the nuclei from which, at an extremely remote period of time, the present state of Oregon was formed. One of these was in what is now the Bald Mountain region of Baker County and the other in the present Klamath-Siskiyou area of southwestern Oregon. The subsequent geological history of the state is chiefly the story of their extension and topographic variation by elevation of the sea bed, by lava flows, by deposits of volcanic ash, and by erosion.
For millions of years these islands alone stood above the water, but during the Triassic period (one hundred and seventy to one hundred and ninety million years ago) the sea, while it still covered most of the present state, had become shallow around the Blue Mountains. Sedimentary beds of this period are found on the northern flanks of the Wallowa Mountains, and typical exposures are seen along Hurricane Creek, Eagle Creek, and Powder River. Rocks of the Jurassic period (one hundred and ten to one hundred and seventy million years ago) are widespread in both the Blue Mountain and the Klamath regions. Fossils of the flora of this period, found at Nichols in Douglas County, and consisting of conifers, cycads and ferns, point to a tropical climate for the region at that time.
At the close of the Jurassic period, or perhaps a little later, there ​
was a great upheaval in the region. The low-lying land and adjacent sea bed were thrust up by forces below the earth's surface, and about the site of Baker became what were probably Oregon's first mountains; while the shallower sea bed, with its lime shales and volcanic rocks, became the Powder River Mountains.
At the opening of the Cretaceous period (sixty-five to one hundred and ten million years ago), sea surrounded the Klamath Mountains, flowing in from California over the site of Mount Shasta to what is now Douglas County and thence to the main ocean by a passage near the mouth of the Coquille River.
The close of the Cretaceous period saw the Blue and Klamath regions, with their accretions, separated by a sea dike that had been slowly rising out of the ocean bed from Lower California to the Aleutian Islands. The elevation of this barrier, the Sierra Nevada Range in California and the Cascade Range in Oregon and Washington, divided the State into two geologically, geographically, and climatically dissimilar parts. It made the region to the west a marine province, in which geologic changes were brought about by agencies existing in and emanating from the sea; it made the region to the east a continental province, the development of which was bound up with the large land mass of the continent.
Rising slowly, the dike shut out the sea from the interior and created three great drainage areas: one to the south, which in time became the Colorado River; one to the north, which in a later age formed the Columbia River Basin; and a third, in what is now southeastern Oregon, whose outlets were cut off and whose waters disappeared through evaporation. At the close of the Cretaceous period, the sea retreated and never again advanced farther than the present axis of the Cascades.
At the dawn of the Tertiary period or age of mammals, fifty million years ago, eastern Oregon was a region of lakes. The Blue Mountains and the Cascade hills were green with forests and beautiful with large flowering shrubs. Magnolia, cinnamon, and fig trees flourished. Sycamore, dogwood, and oak appeared. The Oregon grape, now the state flower, grew densely in the hills. Sequoias towered to imposing heights.
The earliest, or Eocene, epoch of the Tertiary period is represented by the first upthrust of the Coast Range, by the Monroe, Corvallis, and Albany hills, and by the Chehalem and Tillamook coal beds. The development of coal, however, was greatest along the Coos Bay coast. New land was forming in the next epoch, the Oligocene, as shown by ​
the structures in the John Day Valley and in northwestern Oregon. In the former region these are sedimentary rocks known to geologists as the John Day series. Late in the same epoch or early in the Miocene, vast flows of lava, now known as the Columbia lava formation, began to well up from the earth. This was an age of volcanism, when the Cascade hills, later to become mountains, belched clouds of ashes that were carried eastward to take part in filling the great eastern Oregon lakes; when vents opened in hillsides to pour out gigantic rivers of molten rock that filled the lakes and valleys to the east and surrounded lofty mountain peaks with a sea of basalt; when the great plateau now encompassing most of Oregon from the west slope of the Cascades eastward was formed. The Blue and Wallowa Mountain ranges of today rise above the plateau, but the effect of their height is minimized by the thick strata of lava surrounding their bases. Geologists pronounce the formation to be one of the three greatest lava flows of the world. Twenty-five successive flows have been counted in the Deschutes Valley, and as many as twenty in the Columbia River canyon.
Changes other than volcanic were also taking place in the Miocene epoch. The Umpqua Valley was being elevated above sea level. The Calapooya Mountains, which had been rising late in the preceding epoch (as indicated by recovered shell fossils), were extending to join the slowly developing Coast Range, thus excluding the sea from what is now southwestern Oregon. Toward the middle of the epoch comparative quiet returned. The old animal life of the earlier epochs of the Tertiary period had perished, and new types succeeded. Forests blossomed in new glory. By the close of the epoch the Coast Range had formed a solid wall paralleling the Cascade hills, and the Willamette Valley had been elevated above the sea.
During the Pliocene epoch which followed, land was elevated over all the area of western United States. The Oregon coast extended many leagues farther west than it does today. A period of coastal depression followed, and land which once was mainland is now submerged far out at sea. Volcanic activity reappeared in the Cascades, and toward the end of the epoch there was great activity in mountain building both along the coast and in the Cascade region. It was then that the Cascades attained their great height, erected their superstructure of peaks and castles, and were crowned with snow. The barrier thus raised shut out from the interior the warm moisture-laden Qcean winds, and turned the climate colder. By the middle of the following, or Pleistocene, epoch, the glacial age had come on. ​
Oregon was never under a continuous coat of ice during the Pleistocene epoch, as was much of continental North America. At this time glaciers formed on Mount Hood, Mount Jefferson, the Three Sisters, and sky-piercing Mount Mazama in southern Oregon, and were scattered through eastern Oregon and along the Columbia River gorge. Among the largest moraines is a lateral one on the east side of Wallowa Lake, in extreme northeastern Oregon. It is approximately six miles long, one-fourth of a mile wide, and between six hundred and seven hundred feet high.
An event of importance at the close of the ice age was the violent eruption of Mount Mazama, which either blew up, scattering its substance over the surrounding countryside, or collapsed and fell into its own crater. Perhaps both explosion and collapse occurred. This cataclysm resulted in the formation of the huge caldera now occupied by Crater Lake.
Another period of land depression followed, during which Oregon lost still more of its western coastal area. The Willamette Valley became a sound or fresh-water lake formed by the damming of the Columbia by ice, at which time water flowed 300 feet above the present level of Portland, 165 feet above that of Salem, and 115 feet above that of Albany. An important development of this period was the fault ing in the Great Basin area of southeastern Oregon, when the impos ing Steens and Abert Rim Mountains were formed.
During recent time, deposits found in Oregon have included stream gravels, silt washed from the valley sides, dunes along the coast and in the lake region of eastern Oregon, peat bogs in the coastal dune area, volcanic deposits in the Cascade Mountains, shore deposits along the beaches, and many others. The shifting dune sands damming sluggish streams have created a chain of beautiful fresh-water lakes along the ocean shore.
In many parts of the Cascade Mountains there are cinder cones that have the appearance of recent origin. Some of them may be not more than a hundred years old. The Portland Oregonian reported an eruption of Mount Hood as late as 1865.
Since 1862, when Dr. Thomas Condon, Oregon's noted pioneer geologist, discovered and made known to the world the now famous fossil beds of the John Day Valley, Oregon has been an important center for paleontological research. Exploration has been rewarded by yields of a number of the most highly prized specimens of prehistoric plant and animal life uncovered in the United States, and has revealed ​
the fascinating story of Oregon's ancient eons. Plant life of the Pliocene epoch was not represented in Dr. Condon's finds; but in 1936 the discovery of flora fossils of that epoch, in the Deschutes River gorge nine miles west of Madras, filled the one gap existing in the record.
The oreodonts, an interesting group of animals now extinct, were formerly abundant in the lower lake region of the John Day Valley. Oreodonts ranged in size from that of a coyote to that of an elk. These animals had the molar teeth of a deer, the side teeth of a hog, and the incisors of a carnivore. Oreodonts, rhinoceroses, and peccaries are in the Condon collection of fossils. The well defined metacarpal bone of a camel was found in the gray stone of a former lake bed near The Dalles, and fossils found in other regions of the State indicate a probability that the camel once roamed much of the Pacific Northwest.
The fossil head of a seal found in 1906 and that of a giant sea turtle found embedded in sandstone near the Oregon coast in 1939 prove that these primitive species lived in that section when the ocean still covered western Oregon. Seal fossils have also been found in the Willamette Valley. In southeastern Oregon, in the vicinity of Silver (or Fossil) Lake, were discovered the fossil bones of a wide variety of birds. This region has also yielded the remains of a mylodon—a great sloth as large as a grizzly bear—four kinds of camel, a mammoth elephant, three species of primitive horse, and many smaller animals.
A notable fossil recovery was that of the mesohippus, a tiny threetoed horse, found in 1866 by men digging a well near the Snake River not far from Walla Walla in eastern Washington. Taken to The Dalles and given to Dr. Condon, who identified them, these bones brought attention to the "equus beds" of eastern Washington and Oregon.
The mastodon and mammoth have left abundant fossil remains in Oregon. A fine specimen of the broad-faced ox, precursor of the bison, was dredged from the Willamette River. Fossil remains of the ground sloth, though rare, have been found in Yamhill County and in the John Day Valley. Remains of the rhinoceros are plentiful in the large lake beds. The Suidae, or hog family, is represented in the lower lake regions by several species, the largest of which is the entelodont. Fossils of a musk deer and of the head of a primitive cat about the size of the present-day cougar were found in the north fork of the John Day River. This area also abounded in early ages with saber-toothed cats. ​
The dog of the Miocene epoch is represented in fossils indicating an animal about the size of the Newfoundland breed.
In the northeastern part of the state, and in the vicinity of Burns, Canyon City, and Prineville, various groups of important fossil shells of the Jurassic period have been found. In Baker and Crook Counties, and in the Siskiyou region of southern Oregon, the carboniferous rocks have yielded many interesting groups of fossil shells of the Paleozoic era. The trigonia, a bivalve shell of Cretaceous times, is abundant in both southern and northeastern parts of the state.
A group of marine shells of great interest to the geologist and paleontologist is that of the chambered cephalopods. Of highest rank in this group are the ammonites, which became extinct at the close of the Cretaceous period. Both the chambered nautilus and the ammonite have been found widely distributed in the rocks of the Siskiyou region. At Astoria and in the vicinity of Westport, the Columbia River, cutting into the Eocene belt, has exposed specimens of another beautiful shell fossil, the aturia.
Submerged groves of trees in the Columbia River near the Upper Cascades indicate that this river between the Cascades and The Dalles was more than twenty feet lower when these trees were living than it is today. These submerged forests are in a slow process of decay and are not "petrified," although they have been thus termed by some laymen. The upright position of the trees affords evidence that rising water covered them where they stood.
In Columbia Gorge, near Tanner Creek, were found fossil fragments of a leaf of the gingko tree, a beautiful species known previously only in sacred groves around the temples of China and Japan. Since discovery of these fragments, test plantings of gingko trees imported from Japan have been found to thrive in the vicinity of Portland. Near Goshen, on the Pacific Highway, is an assemblage of fossil leaves, entombed in fine-grained volcanic ash, resembling trees of the lower Oligocene epoch, whose counterparts now flourish in Central America and the Philippines. This evidence seems to establish unquestionably the existence of a tropical climate in the Oregon region at some remote time.
FLORA AND FAUNA
In the moist valleys, on the craggy mountains, and on the semiarid deserts of Oregon, grow a multitude of flowers, ferns, grasses, shrubs, and trees. One authority lists more than two thousand species ​and subspecies that flourish within Oregon's 96,000 square miles.
Western Oregon offers a warm and sheltered conservatory for the development of plant growth. A large area is covered with Douglas fir, interspersed with cedar, yew and hemlock, while along the coast grow gigantic tideland spruce and contorted thickets of lodgepole pine. In the southern Cascades and in the Siskiyous, firs give place to the massive pillars of the sugar pine. Near the southern coast are extensive groves of Port Orford cedar, redwood, and the rare Oregon myrtle found nowhere else in America. Eastward of the Cascades are the widely distributed forests of yellow pine, lodgepole pine and Englemann spruce. On the desert uplands grows the western juniper, hardy and sparse, furnishing the only shade. In the valleys and on the adjacent hills of the Columbia, Willamette, Umpqua, Rogue and other rivers, appear numerous hardwoods and deciduous trees—oaks, maples, alders, willows, and those unsurpassed flowering trees, the red-barked madrona and the Pacific dogwood.
Along the sea beaches and on the wave-cut bluffs are verbenas and wild asters, tangled thickets of devil's club, laurel, sweet gale, and rhododendron, and watery sphagnum bogs lush with the cobra-leaved pitcher plant and the delicate sundew. In June, on the windy headland of Cape Blanco, a party of visitors picked sixteen varieties of flowers within a single acre.
In Oregon valleys great fields are seasonally blue with the wild flag, pastures are bright with buttercups, and the moist woods with violets, trilliums, and adder's-tongues. Alpine regions are deeply carpeted with sorrel, and orchids lend their pastel shades. Deeper in the forest grow the waxy Indian pipe, the blood-red snow plant, and the rare moccasin flower. In the Siskiyous are more than fifty plants found nowhere else in the world.
Both on the coast and in the interior valleys Scotch broom glows goldenly, but is regarded by farmers as a pest. In the spring and early summer, the wild currant's crimson flame, sweet syringa, ocean spray, and Douglas spirea form streamside thickets of riotous blossom; and the glossy-leaved Oregon grape, by its omnipresent neighborliness, justifies its selection as the State flower.
Eastward of the Cascades there is a decided topographical and botanical change. A hiker on a mountain trail will sometimes notice an almost knife-edge break between the two floras. A high inland plateau, broken by deep river canyons and small scattered mountain ranges, stretches away to the state's borders. This seeming waste is an empire of fertility ​
Sagebrush and juniper abound, and beneath their branches the sage lily develops in splendor. Along the bluffs of the Columbia, wild clover covers many dry hillsides, and distant fields take on a misty, purplish hue, like wafted smoke. Lupines and larkspurs tint the landscape for miles, while locoweeds, some of them of great beauty though of evil fame, are very abundant. Here, too, are the yellow-belled rice root, the blazing star, and the Lewisia and the Clarkia, named for the adventurers who discovered them.
Among early botanical explorers, besides Lewis and Clark, were Douglas, Nuttall, Pickering, Brackenridge, and Tolmie. Douglas relates that in hunting for cones of the sugar pine, after he had shot three specimens from a 3OO-foot tree, he was confronted by eight unfriendly Indians. By offering tobacco he induced them to aid him in securing a quantity of the cones. As they disappeared to comply with his request he snatched up his three cones and retreated to camp.
The flora of Oregon plays an important part in the Indian lore of the region. Nearly two hundred plants found place in the commercial, industrial, medical, culinary, and religious economy of the Northwest tribes. With the passing of winter, camps became active with preparation for the annual food gathering. Tribes migrated to the camas prairie, the wappato lake, or the wocus swamp, for the yearly harvest. Throughout the State there is a great variety of wild fruit, which formed a principal article of subsistence for the natives. A dozen varieties of berries, wild crab apple, plum, Oregon grape, ripened in their season. Bird-cherry, salal, and wild currant grew in profusion in forests and along the seashore. Nuts of various kinds were stored for the lean months, and seeds of numerous grasses and rushes added the important farinaceous element to the diet.
The Indians also utilized a great many varieties of nutritive roots. Camas, the most extensively used, is an onion-like bulb with a spiked cluster of blue flowers. In some parts of the State, great fields are azure in April with its bloom. Townsend says, "When boiled this little root is palatable, and somewhat resembles the taste of the common potato; the Indian mode of preparing it, however, is the best—that of fermenting it in pits underground, into which hot stones have been placed. It is suffered to remain in these pits several days; and when removed, is of a dark brown color . . . and sweet, like molasses. It is then made into large cakes ... and slightly baked in the sun." Another root is the wappato, a marsh bulb growing in great quantity along the lowlands of the Columbia, on Chewaucan Marsh in Lake County, and in ​
many other shallow lakes. This was one of the chief commercial roots of the tribes, much sought after by those whose country did not produce it. Numerous other roots lent variety to the diet—blue lupine, which, when baked, resembles the sweet potato; Chinook licorice, bitterroot, the tuber of the foxtail, wild turnip, lily bulbs, and onions.
A host of plants was included in the medical kit of the Indians. Roots of the wild poppy were used to allay toothache. The dried ripe fruit and the leaves of the scarlet sumac were made into a poultice for skin disease. A tea from the bark of the dogwood was imbibed for fevers and colds. Wild hops and witch hazel aided in the reduction of sprains and swellings, and rattlesnake plantain was efficacious for cuts and bruises. Oregon grape and sage brush, buckthorn and trillium, death camas and yarrow, false Solomon's seal and vervain, went into the pharmacopoeia of the tribes, while the juice of the deadly cowbane augmented the supply of rattlesnake virus as a poison for arrows.
Mats, baskets, nets, and cords were made of the fibres and leaves of grasses, nettles, Indian hemp, tough-leaved iris, milkweed, dogbane, and scores of other fibrous plants. Cedar was the favorite lumber tree, because of the ease of working the long, straight boles. Canoes, from the small one-man craft to those of sixty feet in length, were wrought from single cedars, while the great communal houses were made of huge slabs split from cedar logs and roofed with the bark. Drawing and casting nets were woven of silky grass, the fibrous roots of trees, or of the inner bark of the white cedar. Bows were usually made of yew or crab-apple wood, while arrows were shaped of the straight shoots of syringa or other tough stems. Fish weirs were made of willow, as were the frames of snowshoes. Fire blocks were of cedar and twirling sticks of the dried stems of sagebrush or manzanita.
Many of the Indians of Oregon still continue in this ancient economy. Each season the Klamaths reap the wocus seed from the yellow water lilies of Klamath Lake, the Warm Springs Indians journey into the mountains for the berry picking, and some tribes still dig the wild roots. On the Warm Springs Reservation a root festival is held in the spring and a huckleberry festival when the huckleberries ripen in late summer. These are thanksgiving feasts bringing out colorful costumes and consisting of dances, speeches, and religious ceremonies that are parts of a well defined ritual, the meaning of which is preserved in the tribal life.
Following the customs of their red neighbors, the pioneers drew a portion of their subsistence from the wilderness. Wild berries and fruits of all kinds went into the frontier larder, as well as many of the ​
wild roots used by the Indians. One comestible of the early Oregon housewife was camas pie, a delicacy dwelt on reminiscently by more than one longbeard at pioneer gatherings. Miners' lettuce took the place of the cultivated vegetable, and so often did our forbears substitute the dried leaves of the yerba buena for "store tea" that the plant has become known by the common name of Oregon tea.
Not only did the pioneer draw heavily upon the floral resources of the State for food and shelter but his modern descendant continues to utilize these products extensively. Wild berries are gathered by the ton, chit tarn bark, digitalis or foxglove, and other medicinal plants are collected for the market, and flowers and shrubs are brought in from forest and crag for rock garden, park, or lawn.
The bird and animal life of Oregon is fully as varied as the plant life. Eliot lists over three hundred species: song birds, game birds, and birds of prey; mountain dwellers, valley dwellers, and dwellers by the sea. Perhaps a third of them are permanent residents, a third part-time residents, and a third transient visitors to the region. Great contrasts are found, for the dry eastern areas are incongruously intermingled with large marshlands and lakes. One may observe the aquatic antics of grebes, cormorants, pelicans (see KLAMATH FALLS), herons and coots, and almost simultaneously, on the high arid lands round about, catch glimpses of the great sage grouse, the sage thrasher, and the desert sparrow.
Best loved by Oregonians is the state bird, the western meadow lark, heard from fence or tree at almost any season of the year. Another favorite is the robin, abundant in field and garden, foraging in winter orchards, lighting the chill gray months with his song. The blackbird lingers through the year, his notes ringing in gay orchestration. Numerous also among the permanent residents are the willow goldfinches, the Oregon towhee, the chickadee, sparrow, and bluebirds.
Less frequently are seen the great blue heron, the killdeer, and the mountain quail; hawks and owls and the Oregon jay; the varied thrush or Alaska robin; the water ouzel of perfect song. Yearlong one may hear the drum of flicker or woodpecker, the hoarse caw of the crow, the screech owl's hoot. Along the seashore curve on swift wings, gulls, fulmers, petrels, and the myriad other dwellers of cliff and marsh. And, climaxing all, the great American eagle still sometimes flies darkly against the sky. A popular children's story is of a log schoolhouse on the Columbia, where, on the Fourth of July, an eagle swooped down, took in his talons the school flag that floated from the summit of t ​
tall fir, and flew away with the banner over mountains, rivers, and valleys.
More than fifty summer residents return to Oregon after southern winters. The more numerous of these are the rufous humming bird, the russet-back and the hermit thrush, the swallows, warblers, and many finches. Among the shyer and less frequently encountered are the bandtailed pigeon and the mourning dove, the lazuli bunting and the western tanager, the Bullocks oriole and the clown-like chat, the horned lark and the magpie of Eastern Oregon, the sandpiper, and the plover, with scores of lesser birds. From the far north come many others for the winter months, including the ruby-crowned and the Sitka kinglet, the cedar and Bohemian waxwing, the junco, and a host of sparrows.
Foremost among the numerous game birds is the China pheasant, which was imported into the state in 1881, when twenty-six birds were turned loose in the Willamette Valley. This hardy stranger now receives the larger part of the sportsman's attention, thus giving the more timid birds—the ruffed and sooty grouse, the sage hen and lesser quails—a greater margin of hope for survival. The aquatic game birds including the Canadian goose, the mallard, canvasback and wood duck and the teal, have greatly decreased but are now protected by stric Federal laws.
With six more names this incomplete roll call must close—tru Stellar jay, mythical demigod of the Chinook tribes, the sand-hill crane, the pelican, the whistling and trumpeter swan, the white heron. Plume hunters visited Malheur and Harney Lakes in 1898 and perpetrated a carnage that amounted almost to annihilation of the white heron, known to commerce as the snowy egret.
Many other winged inhabitants, worthy of description, must go eve.-without mention. Pages would not suffice to list all the myriad swim mers and fliers that make up the vivid pageant of Oregon bird life.
Within the borders of Oregon there now live, or were formerly found, characteristic varieties of almost all North American temperate zone mammals. Of the fur bearers it may be said that the state was founded on the value of their pelts. The sea otter is gone, and land otters are now scarce, but mink, bobcats, foxes, muskrats and racoons are still plentiful; and the beaver, for all the high hats to which he wai; a sacrifice in the old days, also remains. This gnawer, the backbone of the early fur trade, was once so plentiful in Oregon that Franchere, in 1812, took 450 skins of it and other animals on a 2O-day trip up the Columbia from Astoria. In 1824, Peter Skene Ogden said of his ​
seventy-one men equipped with 364 traps: "Each beaver trap last year in the Snake Country averaged 26 beavers. Was expected this hunt will be 14,000 beavers." Two years later in the Harney country, a band of six trappers averaged from fifty to sixty beavers a day. As late as 1860 many of the Eastern Oregon streams were "thronged with beavers," but later the animals were almost exterminated. During the last quarter century, however, due to rigid protective laws, they have increased in numbers until colonies are now found in many counties of the State.
The king of the Oregon forests is the cougar, and in many sections still lives the black bear, venerated by the early Indians and reverently called "grandfather." Some tribal myths taught that the bear was the ancestor of all Indians. In rare instances is found the fierce grizzly or silvertip, the great "white bear" of Lewis and Clark.
Most abundant among the larger animals are members of the deer family—the Columbian black-tailed of mountain and coastal forest; the larger mule deer, an inhabitant of the dryer Eastern Oregon sections; elk or wapiti in the Wallowa region and the coast mountains; and, in the extreme southeast part of the State, some of the largest remaining herds of pronghorns or American antelope, graceful and fleet.
In the southeast, also, numerous skeletal remains of the buffalo have been found, and small bands of bighorn or Rocky Mountain sheep still inhabit the wild crags of the Wallowa Range.
The Cascade timber wolf continues in some numbers, but the chief representative of the wolf clan is the shy and crafty coyote.
Oregon has a number of interesting smaller animals. The porcupineis common in almost all sections at high altitudes, as is the peculiar mountain beaver or sewellel, not a true beaver but a burrowing rodent, which seems to have no very close allies elsewhere in the world. Woodland sections are inhabited by varieties of wood rats, called by the natives "pack" or "trade" rats because of their predilection for carrying off small articles and leaving in their stead a pine cone, a nut, or a shiny pebble as apparent compensation. At very high altitudes lives the pika—little chief hare or cony—rock-inhabiting creatures that gather and dry large amounts of "hay" for winter provender. Chipmunks, squirrels, hares, and rabbits are numerous. Jackrabbits in the sage lands, like the stars above, frustrate all census takers because they "count too high." An Italian settler in Eastern Oregon left the country and gave gastronomic reasons for doing so: "I no like da Eastern Org. No sphagett, no macarone, too mucha jacka-da-rab." ​
The coastal headlands and rocky promontories present many interesting glimpses of the life habits of seals and sea lions, and the rocks, wave-washed and scarred, harbor a marine fauna that is of interest to scientist and common observer alike.
Oregon snakes consist mostly of the harmless garter snakes, the King snakes, and the Pacific bull snakes. The deadly rattler is now confined largely to the dryer eastern counties.
The fishes of the state are of three types—those living entirely within the salt waters of the Pacific; the migratory fish which spend most of their life in the sea but enter the rivers to spawn; and the fresh-water fish living in lakes and rivers. Of the first, the coast fisheries of halibut, herring, pilchards, and other lesser fish add greatly to the wealth of the state. Aside from this, sportsmen find profitable recreation in surf fishing.
Of the migratory fishes, the salmon is of first importance. Myriads of the five great species—the chum, the humpback, the silversides, the sockeye, and the royal chinook—travel up streams for great distances, those of the Columbia deep into the fastenesses of its mountainous watershed. The salmon is the chief commercial fish of the state. In marked contrast to the gigantic salmon is the smelt or eulachon, called anchovy by Lewis and Clark, and also known as candlefish because their small dried bodies, rich in oil, were formerly utilized as torches. Each spring they still run the Sandy River in countless thousands and are taken by Portlanders with bird cages, nets, and buckets.
The prince of all the fresh-water fishes is the great steelhead trout, the fighting spirit of which is so renowned that fishermen have crossed oceans and continents to pit their skill against its strength. All of the cold water streams of the State are well stocked with smaller trout, the principal ones being the rainbow, the cutthroat, the brook, and the Dolly Varden.
Bass, sunfish, and crappies have been introduced into most lowland streams, and give the angler abundant sport. Fishing for catfish furnishes contemplative recreation for whole families, particularly on Sauvie Island, where on Sundays the wooden bridges across the sluggish streams are double-lined with Portlanders. Of the plentiful suckers, especially noteworthy are the multiple varieties inhabiting the Klamath Lakes and river and adjacent waters. To the Klamath and Modoc Indians these were formerly a source of wealth second only to the great salmon runs.
A red fish that abounded fifty years ago in Wallowa Lake and Wallowa River has mysteriously disappeared. In early days white men ​
found this food fish in almost limitless quantities in spawning season. It is said to have existed nowhere else except in one small body of water in Idaho. It was "probably a very small variety of salmon now extinct."
In the summer of 1937, visitors to Bonneville Dam saw the blocked migration of the Columbia River eels—it had never before been conceived that such countless masses of them inhabited this current. The new white concrete, in a wainscot reaching several feet above the water line, was dark and wet with spray, and this damp area was compactly fringed with eels, hanging like extensive drifts of kelp. Driven by their relentless upriver urge and obstructed by the temporarily closed floodgates, they attempted to scale the sheer and massive walls. Side by side and one below the other, they climbed up until they reached the dry portion of the masonry, upon which their bodies had no clinging suction. Then they slid down, leaving the ones below to try, then returning themselves to make the effort again and again. An eastern scholar came away disturbed and sick at the sight, and saying, "It is such a terrible demonstration of futility as to haunt the mind."
Salmon, "netted, hooked, trolled, speared, weired, scooped—salmon taken by various sleights of native skill—" composed the chief diet of the Columbia Indian tribes and was also a principal object of trade. Certain ceremonies were observed with the first fish taken: he was laid beside the water with head upstream and with salmonberries placed in his mouth; his meat was cut only with the grain; and "the hearts of all caught must be burned or eaten, and, on no account, be thrown into the water or eaten by a dog." The catches were cleaned by the women, dried and smoked, and often pulverized between two stones before being packed away in mats for trade or for winter consumption. Lewis and Clark described in great detail the fishing, curing, and packing, at Celilo Falls, where today remnants of the tribes continue to stand on the jagged rocks and spear the salmon in the rapids or dip them out with nets.
The natives also depended much on the sturgeon, and took many smaller varieties of fish to fill the winter larder. They trapped or shot wild fowl, and caught elk and deer in covered pits dug along favorite runways or feeding grounds.
The dress of the Columbia River Indians consisted principally of a robe fastened by a thong across the breast and made, usually, of the skins of cougars, wildcats, deer, bear, or elk. The most esteemed of the women's robes were made of strips of sea otter skin, interwoven with silk grass or the inner bark of the white cedar. The upriver Indians used ​
the hides of elk and larger animals in the construction of their tepees.
The folklore and mythology of the Oregon Indians contains a veritable "key" to the fauna of the State. Their gods and demigods, their spirits of good and evil, took on the forms of birds and beasts, while their own origin was usually explained by naming some tribe of animals as their ancestors. The animal people, they said, were here first, before there were any real people.
The birds were always a source of wonder to the red men because of their musical songs and their ability to soar into the skyey regions where dwell the supernatural beings. The eagle was regarded with veneration and was the chief war symbol. The fierce electric storms raging on the high peaks were personified as incarnations of the mysterious "thunder bird." Bluejay was a mischievous, impish deity among the Chinooks. He was the buffoon of the gods, always playing pranks on others and as often as not becoming the victim of his own folly.
The chief animal deity of the Columbia tribes, however, was the coyote. He was the most important because when he was put to work by the chief Supernatural Being, he did more than any of the other animals to make the world a fit place in which to live.
NATURAL RESOURCES AND THEIR CONSERVATION
The fur of wild animals was the first natural resource of Oregon to be utilized by white men. It was the fur trade that brought this northwest coast region to the attention of the world. A hundred years ago beavers were abundant in every creek, river, and lake in the state. In 1812 it is said that a small group from Fort Astoria returned to the post after a twenty-day expedition with "450 skins of beaver and other animals of the furry tribe." As late as 1860 a traveler on the headwaters of the Deschutes reported that "every stream thronged with beaver."
Although fur was the first natural resource of Oregon it is by no means its most prominent, but the fur trade is still a stable part of the state's industry. Oregon is a green land of forests and grassy wilderness teeming with wild life; a land of rich-soiled valleys maturing to golden harvests; a land of minerals; of streams that hold a vast potential water power; of timbered areas immensely valuable for lumber.
Agricultural lands are the most important on the list of Oregon's many natural resources. Of the state's total land area of 61,188,489 ​
acres, land in farms comprise 17,357,549 acres, according to the U. S. Agricultural census of 1935. There were in that year 64,826 individual farms which, with land and buildings, were valued at $448,711,757.
In 1934, 2,831,742 acres of crop land were harvested, while there was crop-failure on 280,426 acres. Idle or fallow crop land amounted to 1,085,286 acres; 723,585 acres were in plowable pasture; woodland pasture took in 2,778,314 acres; other pasture 8,536,677 acres; woodland, not pastured, 571,630 acres, and all other land in farms, 549,889 acres.
In general, eastern Oregon has the most extensive grain lands and the greatest grazing areas, while western Oregon is devoted to diversified farming and fruit growing. The use of agricultural land is steadily increasing. The growth of all land in farms between the years 1930 and 1935 was about 809,000 acres.
According to the U. S. Census of 1930 (the latest figures available) Oregon's population was 953,786. Persons gainfully occupied numbered 409,645. Of these, 81,879 were workers in agriculture, about 2O% of the whole. The total farm population was 223,667. In 1935, according to the U.S. Agricultural Census, Oregon's total farm population had grown to 248,767, an increase of 25,100 or more than ten per cent. In the same year the value of products for all manufacturing industries was $265,437,000, while the estimated gross income from farm production (crops and livestock) was $99,800,000 and the cash income $89,300,000.
Next to agricultural lands in importance to Oregon are the forests. In 1935 (according to figures of the U. S. Forest Service and the U.S. Agricultural Census) of the state's 61,188,489 acres, a total of 28,217,000 acres were covered with forest. Of these forest areas, 19,278,160 acres were covered with saw-timber—trees of more than 12 inches in diameter inside the bark.
The total volume of saw- timber in Oregon in 1934 was 300,793 million feet, board measure. Of this, 137,043 million feet, or 46 per cent, were privately owned; 112,599 million feet, or 37 per cent, were in National Forests; and 51,151 million feet, or 17 per cent, were on other public or Indian lands. Privately owned saw-timber covered 10.756,447 acres; saw-timber in National Forests 5,481,163 acres; and saw-timber on other public and Indian lands 3,040,550 acres.
Of Oregon's 300,793 million feet of saw-timber, 213,114 million feet grew west of the Cascade mountains and consisted mainly of Douglas fir, West Coast hemlock, spruce and cedar; and 87,679 million ​
feet grew east of the Cascades, with Ponderosa pine, Douglas and White fir, and Western larch the most important species.
Forests furnish the raw materials for Oregon's largest manuf acturies: lumber, shingles, pulp and paper, veneers, plywood, doors, masts, spars and square timbers, besides supplying the special woods used in cooperage plants and for the making of furniture, wooden boxes, automobile bodies, ladders, etc. In 1929 some 50,000 persons were employed in forest industries, or about 12 per cent of all gainfully occupied. An estimated 300,000 people, a large proportion classified as rural non-farm, are directly or indirectly dependent for their living on forest activities and industries. The 1929 value of products from Oregon's forest industries was $181,231,473, while these products provided about two-thirds of the out-going freight tonnage.
In 1937, according to figures of the State Fish Commission, 27,689,805 Ibs. of fish were taken from Oregon waters, of which 26,578,712 Ibs. were salmon, 522,620 shad, 472,121 smelt, 82,207 sturgeon and 24,145 Ibs. bass. Of the salmon more than 16,000,000 Ibs. were of the chinook variety, and the rest silversides, steelheads, bluebacks and chums. Of lesser commercial importance are cod, flounder, black snapper, tuna, crabs, clams, and oysters. The smelt were caught in the Columbia River, as were about 90 per cent of the salmon, while the remainder of the take came from bays and inlets of the Pacific Ocean and Oregon rivers emptying into them. The average yearly yield of Oregon fisheries (according to the U.S. Department of Commerce) is valued at some $2,500,000, while approximately 4,500 persons are employed in catching and handling the product.
Oregon (according to the State Department of Geology & Mineral Industries) produces in metals, gold, quicksilver, silver, copper, lead, zinc, and platinum, important in the order named, and in non-metals, stone, sand, gravel, cement, and clay, besides coal, diatomite, lime, pumice, and mineral waters. Production figures for 1938 were: metals $3,318,000; non-metals $5,500,000; total $8,818,000.
Production of metals in 1936, in detail, amounted to: gold $2,126,355; quicksilver $329,750; silver $65,880; copper $52,808; lead $7,268 ; zinc $6,100; platinum (estimated) $2,100; total $2,590,261.
Oregon is second only to California in the production of quicksilver. Baker County leads in gold production. Next in rank are Josephine, Douglas, Coos and Curry counties. Copper comes from Josephine County. Southwestern Oregon has several chromite properties.
In spite of predatory loss and the 68,612 hunting and fishing licenses ​
issued during 1938 by the State Game Commission (according to report by the U.S. Wildlife Bureau) big-game animals increased in numbers between 10 and 15 per cent.
Of deer ranging the state outside of National Forests there were in 1938 an estimated 135,000 mule and 60,000 blacktail, while in the National Forests there were 141,860 of all species. Elk in the state numbered 22,000 of which 19,000 were in the National Forests.
Predatory animals in National Forests were estimated to number as follows: coyotes 23,200; bobcats 8,500; lynx 1,260; cougar 660 and wolves 130.
According to the State Game Commission there were in Oregon in 1938 some 1 6 state hatcheries for the propagation of game fish, mostly trout of various species. Oregon is an all-year fishing country, meaning that there is an open season for some sort of game fish every month in the year. Game fish, which were threatened with depletion some years ago, are now increasing, through regulation as to catches, and through stocking. Fishing in tidal waters is permitted the year around.
Beside wildlife in National Forests in Oregon in 1938, the range afforded grazing for 82,547 privately owned cattle and 587,000 sheep.
Oregon's greatest power source is the energy of falling water. Accord ing to the report of the State Planning Board of 1936, 16,000 miles of streams hold 4,605,000 horsepower of potential energy available 90 per cent of the time, or third among states in potential electrical energy.
In 1889 the first long-distance transmission line in the world was constructed in Oregon, sending power 14 miles from a hydroelectric plant at Oregon City to Portland. In 1936 there was in the state 254,000 horsepower of installed hydroelectric capacity distributed among some 250 plants, large and small, privately owned and municipal and state. The total share of Oregon from the Bonneville project will ultimately reach 500,000 horsepower.
Besides power, the streams of Oregon furnish water for the reclamation of arid lands. Among the most important irrigation projects are the Owyhee and the Klamath. The Owyhee project, according to the U. S. Reclamation Service, embraces lands near the Owyhee and Snake rivers to the extent of 115,383 acres, of which 48,100 acres were irrigated in 1937.
The Klamath project provides for diversion of water from Upper Klamath Lake for the irrigation of about 40,000 acres east of Klamath Falls and for the reclaiming of 33,000 acres of the bed of Tule Lake ​
and along Lost River. During 1937 about 51,468 acres were irrigated and 50,439 cropped, including pasture.
Oregon's recreational resources are unsurpassed in the United States. The green beauty of the country makes it constantly attractive, while the ever- varying contrasts of mountains, streams, and valleys holds continued surprise. There are in the state more than 1,000 lakes, many in settings that would make them famous for loveliness, were they better known.
The U. S. Forest Service has built trails and roads in all parts of the National Forests and dotted them with pleasant and well-equipped, sanitary camps for the convenience of visitors, campers, and sportsmen.
Conservation with a view to perpetuation of Oregon's natural wealth is the policy of both private and public interests. In the matter of agricultural lands and forest domains, federal and state agencies are working hand in hand with private owners for beneficial regulations as to use and preservation. Farm lands have come under scientific scrutiny as to crop possibilities; the public range has been placed under official control as to grazing; and the method long practiced in National Forests of selective cutting and leaving of seed-trees has been adopted by many private, forest-owning concerns.
A conservation program is being carried out by the Civilian Conservation Corps for the forest service. Among the important work completed by the enrollees of some 17 camps in National Forests from April 1933 to July 1937 were: 3,488 miles of truck trails; 3,593 miles of telephone lines; 227 lookout houses and towers; 1,240,681 acres of rodent control work; 327,691 man-days of fighting forest fires; and 764,775 acres of insect pest control.
A conservation plan of the utmost concern to Oregon is the Willamette River Basin Project, authorized by Congress June 28, 1938. Preliminary mapping was done during the years 1935 to 1939, by U. S. Army Engineers. The project embraces flood control, which is vitally needed, the storage of water for irrigation, the development of water power, and the improvement and deepening of stream channels for commerce. Millions of dollars will be expended over a period of six to ten years; reservoirs will be built to insure water for agricultural lands, and modern locks will be constructed at Willamette Falls near Oregon City. Actual work on three storage reservoirs is planned to begin in 1940, and to be completed before the end of 1941. ​iiniiiiiiDiiiiiiiiiiiiniiiiiiiiiiiiDiiiiiiiiiiiiDiiiiiiiiiiiiniiiiiiuiiiiniiiiiiiiiiiiaiiiiiiiiiiiiDiniiiiiiiiiniiiiiiiiiiiiDiiiiiiiiiiiiniiiiiiiiiiiiDiiiiiiiiJ
Indians
A RCHEOLOGICAL research has revealed evidences of numerous *•*> successive cultures in many parts of Oregon. Surviving the wear of centuries on canyon walls and cliffs are rude designs daubed in red ochre or outlined in primitive carving. Although often the subject of fanciful interpretation, most of these pictographs and petroglyphs are devoid of symbolic or esoteric meaning, being merely the groping efforts of prehistoric man to give graphic expression to his experience. Burial mounds in irregular patterns mark the places where the dead, with theii crude artifacts, lie buried. Along the coast, numerous kitchen middensheaps of shells, bone and stone fragments, and miscellaneous refuse, overgrown with grass and trees—indicate the existence of prehistoric homes. Where the Coast Highway cuts through such a kitchen midden, as it does at several places, varying levels or strata in the heap are revealed, denoting successive occupations of the locality.
Stone and obsidian weapons and bone fragments, frequently discovered beneath layers of lava or volcanic ash, indicate human existence in Oregon at a remote period. Near Abert Lake in Lake County, and at the base of Hart Mountain in Warner Valley, are excellent examples of prehistoric painting and carving. A local legend associates Abert Rim with the retreat of an "Indian army" that ended in a plunge over the cliff, at the foot of which are scattered many relics. Near The Dalles, Arlington, and Forest Grove, and in the Cascadia Caves, are diverse examples of prehistoric pictorial representations. The Linn County mounds, the Deschutes region, the Malheur and Catlow Caves in Harney County, and numerous other sites, have yielded weapons, utensils, and other Indian artifacts.
The Indians who inhabited Oregon at the coming of the first white men were members of twelve distinct linguistic families. Along the south side of the Columbia, from its mouth to the Cascades, the Chinookans held sway. Important branches of this family were the Clatsops, who lived along the river to Tongue Point and along the coast to Tillamook Head, and the Cathlamets, who dwelt a short distance f ​arther up
the river; while numerous bands on Sauvie Island and about the mouth of the Willamette were known by the collective name of Multnomahs. The Clackamas tribe lived in the Clackamas Valley and about the falls of the Willamette. In all, some 36 tribes of the Chinookan family occupied the south shore of the Columbia, and as many others dwelt near the north bank.
The Athapascans occupied two widely separated regions. On the Clatskanie and upper Nehalem Rivers lived the Tlatskanai, a warlike tribe. It is said that the early Hudson's Bay Company trappers did not dare to traverse their lands in a group of fewer than 60 armed men. In southwestern Oregon dwelt the other Athapascans—the Tututni, the Upper Coquilles, the Chastacostas, and the Chetcoes. Also in the southwestern region were the Umpquas and the Siuslaws, who together form a separate family.
The Salishan family, although more numerous north of the Columbia, was represented south of that river by the Tillamooks and the Siletz. The Yakonians, consisting of the Yaquina and the Alseas, lived on the two bays thus named; and on Coos Bay and the lower Coquille dwelt the three tribes of the small Kusan family.
One of the most important families was the Kalapooyan. This numerous people occupied the whole of the Willamette Valley above the falls, practiced flattening of the head, and lived on game and roots. A dozen tribes of this family inhabited the Willamette region at the coming of the white man. The Atfalati or Tualati, numbering more than 30 bands, occupied the beautiful and fertile Tualatin Valley. Other tribes of this group were the Yamhills, the Chemeketas, and the Santiams.
The southern part of Oregon was occupied by divisions of three families: the powerful Klamath and Modoc tribes of the Lutuamians or Sahaptians, the Takelmans of the upper Rogue River, and two "spillovers" from California—the Shastas and Karoks of the Hokan family.
The upper Columbia River country was the home of other Sahaptians. The greater part of this family lived in eastern Washington and the Lewis River district of Idaho; but four tribes, the Willewah branch of the Nez Perces, the Umatillahs, the Teninos of the Deschutes River, and the Tyighs of the Tygh Valley, inhabited the uplands of eastern Oregon. The Waiilatpuan branch was represented by the powerful Cayuse or "horse" Indians, dwelling on the headwaters of the Umatilla, the Walla Walla, and the Grande Ronde Rivers. A small offshoot of this branch had in times past wandered over the Cascades into western ​
Oregon, and under the name of Molallas lived along the Molalla River. Over the high desert country of the southeastern region roamed the nomadic Snake and Paiute tribes of the Shoshoneans.
Intercourse between the various tribes and later with the white men made it necessary for the Indians to supplement their many dialects with a common language. Among merchant Indians at the mouth of the Columbia there grew up a pidgin language based upon Chinook, and later intermixed with French and English words. This language became known as Chinook jargon, and was widely used by all tribes, as well as by thf early settlers, traders, and missionaries. When the Indians were removed to reservations, many who had not adopted the jargon were obliged to learn it in order to speak with their neighbors.
The local customs of Indians in the western valleys and coast region differed greatly from those of the interior. The western tribes, because of the density of the forests, usually traveled by canoe. They subsisted chiefly on salmon, roots, and berries. The opening of the salmon season in June was attended with great formality. The first salmon caught was sacred, and was eaten ceremonially in a long-established ritual intended to propitiate the salmon and insure future runs. Before the arrival of the whites, the coastal Indians were scantily clad. The men went entirely naked in summer, and the women wore a flimsy skirt of cedar bark fiber or grasses. In winter, the men wore a robe made of skins reaching to the middle of the thigh; the women added to their costume a similar robe reaching to the waist; or either might wear a fiber cape.
Among the Chi nooks, distinctions of rank extended to burial. The bodies of slaves were tossed into the river or gotten rid of in some other way, while the free born were carefully prepared for box, vault, tree, or canoe burial, and were honored with rituals of mourning which included periods of wailing during a certain length of time, cutting the hair, and refraining from mentioning the name of the dead. Entombment varied according to the tribe and locality. Columbia River Indians utilized Memaloose Island near The Dalles, Coffin Rock near the mouth of the Cowlitz River, and other islands and promontories, with ceremonial dressing and storing of bones. The coast Indians used canoes supported on decorated scaffolds, and placed the head toward the west so that the departed spirit might more easily find its way to Memaloose lllahee, or the land of the dead, which lay somewhere toward the setting sun. Valley Indians often placed their dead, wrapped in skins, in the forks of trees. ​
The houses of the western Oregon Indians were of the communal type, from 40 to 60 feet long and 20 feet wide, constructed of large cedar planks and roofed with bark or boards. The interior walls of these great lodges, scattered in clusters along the coast, the Columbia, and the lower Willamette, were tiered with bunks. Along the middle of the floor ran a firepit, the smoke escaping through a gap left along the ridgepole of the roof. Men, women, children, and dogs mingled in the dusky interior. These houses were put together with lashings, and when fleas and other vermin became intolerable the houses were dismantled and the planks removed to a new location, supposedly leaving the fleas behind.
The Indians of river and coast were skilled in fashioning canoes. Each of these was made from a single log, their size varying from the small craft capable of sustaining only one person to the great war canoe in which as many as 60 warriors might safely put to sea. For these graceful vessels, cedar and spruce were usually preferred, though fir was also used.
The native bow, like the canoe, was beautifully and skillfully formed. It was generally made of yew or crab-apple wood. The string was a piece of dried seal-gut or deer-sinew, or consisted of twisted bark. The arrows, about a yard long, were made of arrow-wood or cedar. Household utensils included baskets of cedar root fiber or tough grasses often woven so closely as to be watertight, and stone mortars and pestles for pulverizing seeds and wild grains. The principal art displayed was in the carvings on house posts and canoe figureheads, and in the fashioning of woven mats and baskets. Basketry was a highly developed art, many examples of which, richly colored with intricate and pleasing designs, today grace museums or are offered for sale in Indian curio stores.
The culture of the northeastern Oregon tribes had undergone a definite change a few decades before the invasion of the whites. Through the introduction of the horse they had become a more or less nomadic people. The Snakes, Nez Perces, and Cayuses counted their wealth in horses, and because they were thus free to move about they evolved a culture based largely on the chase and warfare. Bucksh-'n ornamented with dyed porcupine quills formed their dress, their moccasins, and their shelters, and skins dressed with the fur intact made their robes and blanketsiGame, supplemented by roots and berries, was their food.
The Shoshonean culture of the southeast plateau was of a lower order, owing to the nature of the barren and forbidding country. The Klamath and Modoc culture, influenced by the same factors but modi ​
fied by the tules (reeds) and wocus (yellow water lily) of the Klamath and Tule Lake marshes, presented a definite departure from the culture in other sections of Oregon. The Klamaths and Modocs have been termed "pit Indians" because their dwellings were little more than roofed-over pits sunk about four feet below the surface of the ground. These houses appeared as mounds of earth about six feet high, with a circular hole two and a half feet in diameter at the top, from which a ladder led down into the circular space below. The interior was 20 feet across, with sleeping bunks and arrangements for storing dried meats, seeds, acorns, and roots. The whole was substantially built, the roof being of poles covered with rushes and with earth taken from the pit beneath. On hooks from the rush-lined ceiling hung bags and baskets, laden with such luxuries as dried grasshoppers and berries. About the bunks hung the skins of deer and other game.
The dress of the women consisted of a skirt of deerskin thongs fastened to a braided beltjfthe men wore breechclouts of deerskin, and the children went entirely naked. When grasshoppers were abundant the Indians scoured the valleys, gathered the insects in great quantities by driving them into pits, and made preparations for a feast. A fire was kindled in one of the pits, and after the latter had been thoroughly heated the harvest was dropped in, covered with damp tules and hot stones, and baked. Prepared in this fashion the insects were eaten with great relish. They were also powdered and mixed with wocus meal in a kind of bread baked in the ashes.
All tribes believed in an existence after death, and in a soul that inhabited the body yet was distinct from the vital principle and capable of leaving the body in dreams, faints, and trances, though if it stayed away too long the body died. Other living things were also similarly endowed. So it was that a canoe builder deferentially addressed the tree from which he obtained his log, as though it were a conscious personality, and a fisherman spoke apologetically to the first catch of the season as he took it from the water.
Creation myths varied from tribe to tribe. The creation of men and animals was ascribed by one to Echanum, the fire spirit, by some to Coyote, the transformer, who is given credit for creating the tribes from the legs, head, belly, and body of his vanquished enemy, the beaver. Stories of Coyote and Thunderbird were common to many tribes. The Thunderbird was ruler of the storm, avenger, originator of numerous taboos, and creator of volcanic activity. Coyote in a hundred grotesque forms was the hero of many roguish stories, emphasizing ​
his trickery, selfishness, and prurience, and the source of rigid taboos regarding foods, domestic economy, and ceremonial observance.
Legends were invented by the Indians to explain the origin and form of many geographic features. The story of Loowit, a beautiful Indian girl, who was the subject of a quarrel between rival lovers, and who dwelt on the natural rock Bridge of the Gods which once spanned the Columbia River at the Cascades, tells of the destruction of the bridge and of Loowit's transformation into Mount St. Helens, while her lovers became Mount Adams and Mount Hood. Another legend has it that Neahkahnie Mountain on the coast reached its present form from a single blow of the hatchet of Coyote, who built a fire on the mountainside, heated rocks and threw them into the sea, where the seething waters grew into waves that have been crashing against the shore ever since. Mitchell Point, once called the "Storm King" by the Indians, was believed by them to have been built to part the storm clouds that hurried up the Columbia.
In 1938, Oregon's surviving Indian population was distributed as follows: Klamath Reservation, 1,201; Warm Springs Reservation, 1,094; Umatilla Reservation, 1,117; Siletz River district, 1,140; and on the public domain, 2,220. The population on the Umatilla Reservation is composed of Cayuse, Nez Perce, and Walla Walla tribes, with many full bloods and many mixed breeds, all of whom speak the Nez Perce language. Wascos, Teninos, and Paiutes are chiefly concentrated on the Warm Springs Reservation. Klamaths, Modocs, Yahooskins, Snakes, Shastas, and Pit River Indians are gathered on the Klamath Reservation. Rogues (or Tututinis), Chetcos, Tillamooks, and other mixed tribal remnants dwell in the Siletz River region. There is an independent village of Paiutes a few miles north of Burns
The Indians living on reservations dress in much the same way as their white neighbors, live in the same kind of houses, and carry on the same domestic and industrial pursuits. Their native handicrafts include tanning and decorating of skins, fabrication of baskets, beadwork on buckskin, and the making of cornhusk bags and mats. Each reservation is served by church mission schools or by the public school system of the State, the only government Indian schools being on the Warm Springs Reservation and at Chemawa near Salem.
Four canneries care for the output from 5,000 acres of upland peas on the Umatilla Reservation, and on the Klamath Reservation contracts between Indian owners and commercial interests have resulted in the cutting and marketing of much timber. Fine horses, cattle, hay, and ​
grain are produced. All land has been allotted, and a business committee for each reservation has superseded tribal government.
Although Oregon Indians have abandoned most of their tribal ways, at times drums still throb above the music and words of tribal songs and busy feet pattern the ceremonial dances. The salmon festival on the Columbia River is generally held in secret each year; but the annual root feast at Simnasho in the spring, and the Warm Springs and Klamath Reservation huckleberry feasts in the fall, are open to the public.
The Umatilla Indians form an encampment at the Pendleton Roundup and participate in the parade and Westward Ho pageant. The Round-up, though colorful, is not a true picture of Indian life, but a dramatized version of what the Indian thinks the white man wants to see. As many as 2,000 natives in ceremonial trappings participate as paid performers. ​iiiiiiiiiiuiiiiii!ii!iiBii!iiiii!iiiu]iimii!!iiuiiiiiii!ii!iaiiiim
History
THE earliest explorers along the coast of what is now the State of Oregon were Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese in the service of Spain, and his chief pilot Bartolome Ferrelo, who are believed to have sailed up from Mexico as far as 44° north in 1542-3. About the same latitude was reached in 1579 by Sir Francis Drake, who there abandoned his search for a northern passage to England and turned the prow of his Golden Hind southward. Whether the Spanish navigator Sebastian Viscaino sailed farther north than the 42nd parallel on his voyage of 1602 is a moot question, though one of his ships under Martin d'Aguilar proceeded another degree or two northward and reported the entrance to a river or strait not far from Cape Blanco.
A century and three-quarters elapsed before further discoveries of importance were made. The Spaniards Perez in 1774, Heceta on two voyages in 1774 and 1775, and Bodega in 1775 sailed along all or most of the present Oregon coast, and on his second voyage Heceta noted evidences of a great river in the northern region. In 1778 the English navigator Captain James Cook, seeking (as Drake had sought) a northern sea passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic, reached from the south what is now Vancouver Island and anchored for several weeks in a fine harbor to which he later gave the name of Nootka Sound. Here he traded with the Indians for furs", and learned much about their life and customs.
Ten years later another Englishman, Captain John Meares, fitted out a naval expedition in search of the great river that Heceta had reported in 1775. Entering the broad mouth of the present Columbia, he decided that this was no more than a large bay and departed after naming the entrance Deception Bay and the promontory on the north Cape Disappointment. It remained for an American sea captain and trader, Robert Gray of Boston, to verify the existence of the hitherto legendary "River of the West." In company with Captain John Kendrick, Gray made a trading voyage to the Pacific in 1788; and the two ships commanded by these men, the Columbia and the Lady Washing ​ton, were
the first American vessels to visit the northwest coast. On a second voyage from Boston, in the Columbia, Gray again visited this region and entered the long-sought river on May n, 1792, sailing for several miles upstream, trading with the natives, and making notes about the surrounding country. Before leaving, he named the river the Columbia, after the first ship to anchor in its inland waters. Five months later, Lieut. William R. Broughton, an English naval officer under Captain George Vancouver's command, explored the river for nearly a hundred miles inland, sighted and named Mount Hood on October 29, and formally clai-red the region for Great Britain on the grounds that (though he knew of Gray's earlier visit) "the subjects of no other civilized nation or state had ever entered this river before."
For a good many years both before and after Gray's verification of its existence, the river was commonly referred to as the Ouragon, Oregan, Origan, or Oregon. As early as 1765, Major Robert Rogers, commanding an English post in the upper Mississippi Valley, petitioned King George III for permission to conduct an exploring party to the Pacific Ocean by way of the river "called by the Indians Ouragon." As now spelled, the name first appeared in Jonathan Carver's Travels in Interior Parts of America, published 1778, in a reference to "the River Oregon, or the River of the West, that falls into the Pacific Ocean at the straits of Anian." Carver states that he got the name from the Indians, and most authorities believe it is derived from the Sautee word oragan, meaning a birchbark dish. It remained unfamiliar to the public at large until William Cullen Bryant popularized and perpetuated it by the reference in his poem "Thanatopsis," published in 1817:
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound Save its own dashings.
As the river was long known as the Oregon, so the vast northwest territory of which it was one of the most prominent geographical features acquired the name of "the Oregon country" or "the Oregon territory." The region thus designated originally comprised all the land between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, from the vaguely delimited border of the great Spanish Southwest to the equally vague delimitations of British America and the Russian possessions on the north. By the Treaty of Florida in 1819, the southern boundary was fixed at the 42nd parallel; and in 1846, Great Britain and the United States agreed to a northern boundary along the 49th parallel. From the area of more than 300,000 square miles within these boundaries ​
were later carved the present States of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho,
in their entirety, and Montana and Wyoming in considerable part.
Into this immense wilderness, inhabited only by scattered tribes of Indians, came the American explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, heading an expedition authorized by President Jefferson and Congress "to explore the Missouri River, & such principal streams of it, as, by its course £ communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce." Starting up the Missouri on May 14, 1804, the party reached the headwaters of the Columbia in October of the following year, journeyed down the river to arrive at Cape Disappointment in November, and passed the winter in a rude log fort which they named Fort Clatsop, after a neighboring Indian tribe. In the spring they began the homeward journey, reaching St. Louis on September 23, 1806.
The accounts of this expedition, the first to be made by white men across the Oregon country, aroused widespread interest, particularly in the immense opportunities for fur-trading offered by the northwest region. In 1806 a British trading post was set up by Simon Fraser of the North West Company, on what later came to be known as Fraser's Lake, near the 54th parallel. But the first post in the Columbia River region was that established by members of John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company in 1811 at Astoria, close to the log fort in which Lewis and Clark had passed the winter of 1805-6. One group of Astor's company sailed from New York around Cape Horn, arriving in March 1811 at the mouth of the Columbia, where eight members of the party lost their lives in an unskilful attempt to enter the river. Another group took the overland route and arrived about a year later. After disembarking the men who built the post at Astoria, the ship in which the first party had arrived proceeded northward along the coast to trade with the Indians, and very soon thereafter was destroyed with a loss of more than 20 lives in a surprise attack by hostile natives.
The fur-trading operations at Astoria were scarcely well under way before war broke out between Great Britain and the United States, and early in 1813 the Astorians received information that a British naval force was on its way to take possession of the mouth of the Columbia. This news was brought by agents of the North West Company, who offered to buy the entire establishment of Astoria at a reasonable valuation. Fearing confiscation if he delayed matters, the American factor ​
accepted this otter, and the post was renamed Fort George by its new owners.
Astoria was restored to American ownership in 1818, and the United States and Great Britain agreed to a ten-years' joint occupancy of the Oregon country. Spanish claims in the nebulous southern area were eliminated a year later, when the southern boundary was fixed at the 42nd parallel; and Russia in 1824 renounced all interests below 54° 40' north latitude. After its purchase of Astoria in 1813, the North West Company continued to control the Oregon fur trade until 1821, when it was merged with its British rival the Hudson's Bay Company. Soon thereafter, American trappers and traders began to push westward beyond the Rockies into the rich domain of the British traffic, and their frequent clashes with men of the Hudson's Bay Company together with the beginnings of organized immigration brought the vexed question of sovereignty over the Oregon country increasingly to the fore. By the late 1830'$ many Americans were demanding in bellicose tone that Great Britain should relinquish all jurisdiction south of 54° 40', and "Fifty-four forty or fight" proved a popular slogan in Folk's compaign for the presidency. The issue was finally settled in 1846, when the two countries compromised on a boundary along the 49th parallel, and the Oregon country between that and the 42nd parallel on the south became undisputed American soil.
The treaty of joint control was in effect when Dr. John McLoughlin destined to be the most powerful individual in the territory for 20 years, came down the Columbia to Fort George. Appointed Chief Factor of the Hudson's Bay Company in 1824, within a year he built Fort Vancouver on the north bank of the Columbia River, a few miles east of the mouth of the Willamette. Six-feet-two, beaver-hatted, already white-haired at 40, McLoughlin knew how to control his half-wild white trappers; he made beaver-hunting vassals of the Indians and foi a long time succeeded in crushing all competition—though many of his competitors were given places in the Georgian mahogany chairs at his table. With Fort Vancouver as the capital, he was king of a vast do main stretching from California to Alaska and from the Rocky Moun tains to the sea.
Jedediah Smith, a Yankee trader, reached Oregon by way of California in 1828. Indians near the i.iouth of the Umpqua had attacked his party, killing all but himself and three companions, and taking his furs. McLoughlin sent an expedition to secure the pelts, which he then ​
bought from Smith with the understanding that the Yankee should
thenceforth stay out of Oregon.
Nathaniel J. Wyeth of Boston came to the Columbia in 1832 with the intention of starting a salmon fishery and packing plant. After returning to the east coast in 1833, he came again to the Oregon country in 1834 and established Fort William on Sauvie Island. With Wyeth's second company were the Methodist clergyman Jason Lee and his nephew Daniel Lee, the first of many missionaries to come to the Northwest. They proposed to educate and Christianize the Indians, and for this purpose they established in 1835 a Methodist mission station and school in the Willamette Valley. The School was taken over in 1844 by the Oregon Institute (now Willamette University), organized in 1842. Other missionaries arrived, among them Dr. Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding in 1836.
Until early in the 1840*8 there was no local government in the Ore gon territory except that of the Hudson's Bay Company which exer cised feudal rights derived from the British Crown. McLoughlin en joyed the protection of British laws in the conduct of his company's affairs, but Americans in the territory were for the most part ignored by successive administrations at Washington. However, the missionaries formulated regulations for themselves as well as for the Indians over whom they assumed charge, and their leadership was accepted in a large measure by the independent American settlers.
The Lees were discouraged by the indifference of the Indians to religious salvation, but in letters to friends in the East they extolled the wild western country, thus supplementing the publicity given to the territory by Hall J. Kelley, a Boston schoolmaster who was one of the first propagandists for Oregon. Jason Lee, on the first of two trips to the Atlantic coast, presented a memorial to Congress asking for the Government's protection of its citizens in Oregon. Meanwhile, American settlers were finding their way into the Willamette Valley. The "Peoria Party" came in 1839, a few more arrived in 1840, and about 40 adults and children in 1841. In 1842 Whitman made a difficult winter ride across the Continent on missionary matters and also to enlist homeseekers and invoke governmental aid in the settlement of the Oregon country. That year a larger immigration came across the plains, and in 1843 the first considerable wagon train made the long and trying journey over the Oregon Trail. Thenceforward the population rapidly and steadily increased.
Despite his misgivings concerning the effect of their arrival on the ​
business of the Hudson's Bay Company, Dr. McLoughlin had aided the newcomers with credit and counsel. In 1845, however, the company forced him to resign and his influence upon the development of the region came to an end.
Life in the Oregon country was crude in the extreme, but despite its difficulties, it was not without its favorable aspects. Pioneers hewed their cabins and barns from the forest, and took their food from the newly tilled ground or from the surrounding wilderness. The climate was mild, and farm animals required little outlay for stabling or winter feeding. The scarcity of money was a great inconvenience, somewhat mitiga:ed by the issue of what were known as "Ermatinger money" and "Abernethy money," the use of wheat and peltry as mediums of exchange, and the coinage of "beaver money" at Oregon City. Chiefly unfavorable to peace of mind in this life of primitive self-sufficiency were the inevitable isolation and ever-present fear of the Indians. Of these, the former was perhaps the harder to endure.
Attempts to form an organized government in Oregon antedated the settlement of the boundary question by several years. When Jason Lee went east in 1838, he carried a paper signed by 36 settlers petitioning Congress for Oregon's admission to the Union. In the next year, the Reverend David Leslie and about 70 others presented a similar petition asking for "the civil institutions of the American Republic" and "the high privilege of American citizenship." Congress, however, was hesitant to act because of possible trouble with Great Britain, and the Americans in Oregon became restless while awaiting a decision. Plans for a provisional government became a matter of active discussion when, early in 1841, Jason Lee made an earnest speech on the subject. Very soon thereafter an event occurred which hastened the efforts to organize. This was the death of Ewing Young, who owned a great part of the Chehalem Valley and a large herd of Spanish cattle which he had driven north from California. In the absence of a will and any legal heirs, arrangements were made at his funeral to call a mass meeting of Oregon's inhabitants south of the Columbia River for the purposes of appointing officers to administer his estate and to form some sort of provisional local government. At this meeting, held February 17 and 1 8, 1841, at the Methodist Mission in the Willamette Valley, a "Supreme Judge, with Probate powers" and several minor court officers were elected, and it was resolved "that a committee be chosen to form a constitution, and draft a code of laws."
At an adjourned meeting held four months later, it was moved "that ​
the committee be advised to confer with the commander of the American Exploring Squadron now in the Columbia river, concerning the propriety of forming a provisional government in Oregon." The naval commander, Capt. Charles Wilkes, and his fellow officers were definitely opposed to the settlers' plans, and assured the people that soon they would doubtless be placed under jurisdiction of the United States government. The arrival in September 1842 of an official sub-agent of Indian affairs, who contended that his office was equivalent to that of Governor of the Territory, served further to retard the movement for setting up a local government.
Several isolated Indian outrages, however, and the threat of a concerted Indian attack upon the American settlement in the Willamette Valley led the inhabitants of that region to meet at Champoeg on May 2, 1843, "for the purpose of taking steps to organize themselves into a civic community, and provide themselves with the protection secured by the enforcement of law and order." On July 5 of the same year the settlers again assembled at Champoeg and adopted "articles of compact" as well as a detailed "organic law" based largely upon the laws of Iowa. The provisional government thus organized was confirmed and came into effect as the result of a special election held on July 25, 1845. George Abernethy was chosen Governor, and remained so by re-election throughout the three years of provisional government.
President Polk attempted to secure a territorial government for the region before his term expired. On August 14, 1848, more than two years after the boundary dispute was settled, and as the climax of a 24hour debate; a dilatory Congress passed the bill admitting Oregon as a territory. President Polk signed the bill the next day and then proceeded to appoint Territorial officers, including General Joseph Lane, of Indiana, as Governor, and Joseph L. Meek as United States marshall. Meek had gone to Washington to report the Whitman massacre, and to function as a self-styled "Envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary from the Republic of Oregon to the Court of the United States." He returned by way of Indiana to inform General Lane of his appointment, and the two hurried to the Northwest, reaching Oregon City by boat and proclaiming the Territorial government on March 3, 1849, the day before Polk went out of office.
The new Territory of Oregon embraced all of the original Oregon country between the 42nd and 49th parallels from the Rockies to the Pacific. It was reduced to the confines of the present State of Oregon in 1853, when the rest of the original area was organized as the Tern ​
tory of Washington. From this latter, in turn, the eastern portion was detached in 1863, to form the largest part of the Territory of Idaho.
With the discovery of gold in California in 1848, Oregon farmers, soldiers, tradesmen, and officials joined in the mad rush to the gold fields. Within a few months two-thirds of Oregon's adult male population had left for California. Many of the stampeders acquired quick and easy fortunes, returning with as much as thirty or forty thousand dollars in gold dust and nuggets. This new-found wealth was badly needed; debts were paid, farms improved, houses built. And in addition to the gold-rushers who became well-to-do, those who remained at home also prospered. The miners in California required food, lumber, and other supplies, and they turned to neighboring Oregon for them. The price of wheat soared to $4 a bushel, flour to $15 a barrel, and lumber to $100 a thousand feet. Oregon began to take on an atmosphere of well-being. Log cabins gave way to comfortable dwellings of the New England and southern type; many of these are still standing today.
The Indian population of the Oregon country, estimated at about 27,000 in 1845, was comparatively peaceful throughout the domination of McLoughlin. But the rising tide of immigration in the 1840*8 filled the red men with apprehension and resentment, increased by wanton invasions of Indian rights by unprincipled whites. In November 1847 a band of Cayuses attacked the Presbyterian mission near the site of Walla Walla, killed Dr. Marcus Whitman, his wife, and 12 others, and burnt all the buildings. The settlers immediately declared war upon the Cayuse tribe, and after several battles the Indians were routed and their villages destroyed. Another campaign, marked by a sharp engagement at Battle Rock and desultory skirmishes in other places, began against the Rogue Indians in 1851. Although Governor Joseph Lane effected a treaty with them at Table Rock, attacks and reprisals continued until 1855, when Jackson County volunteers massacred 23 Indians, including old men, women, and children. This act drove the Indians into a frenzy of resentment; they appeared everywhere, killing the settlers and driving off their cattle. Culminating a year of bitter struggle, the final battle of the campaign was fought at Oak Flat, on the Illinois River, June 26, 1856. Three days later, Chief John surrendered, and was subsequently imprisoned at Alcatraz. Meanwhile a similar war had raged in eastern Oregon, but the defeat of the Spokane nation on September i, 1858, and the execution of 16 Indians by Colonel Wright, brought the hostilities to an end.
During the Territorial period, social and economic conditions in ​
Oregon improved rapidly. Numerous ships discharged and loaded cargoes in the harbors, gold was discovered in several southwestern counties, and roads and bridges were constructed. More than a score of academies and two universities came into existence. A fire destroyed the state house at Salem on December 30, 1855, and the seat of government was moved to Corvallis; but the legislature, meeting in the latter city in 1856, decided to transfer the capital back to Salem, where it has since remained.
The slavery controversy retarded the movement toward statehood, presenting the main obstacle to unity at the constitutional convention in 1857. Finally a determination of the issue was left to a popular vote to be taken concurrently with the vote on the constitution itself. At a special election on November 9, 1857, the people ratified the document and defeated by a large majority the proposal to permit slave-holding. The largest majority of all, however, was given to an article prohibiting the admission of free negroes into Oregon. Though this provision was a dead letter for many years, only in 1926 was it taken out of the constitution.
The bill granting statehood to Oregon was signed by President Buchanan on February 14, 1859, but the news did not reach Portland until March 15. By noon of the next day the announcement found its way to Oregon City, where it aroused little excitement. "A few persons talked about it with languid interest," said Harvey Scott, "and wondered when the government of the state would be set in motion." But Stephen Senter of Oregon City, feeling the news ought to be speeded to Salem, undertook to act as messenger, and like Paul Revere rode over miry roads and through swollen streams, spreading the tidings that Oregon was a State. The legislature was convoked and the organization of the state government completed on May 16, 1859.
The brilliant and ambitious Edward Dickinson Baker came up from California to stump the State for his old friend Lincoln and for himself as United States Senator. Eloquent beyond most Pacific coast public men of his time or since, he caused the congregated pioneers to wonder that such glorious speech could come from mortal mouth. He was elected, but soon joined the Army and made a final dramatic appearance before the Senate in a colonel's uniform. He was killed in the early months of the Civil War while leading a charge at Ball's Bluff. Little Willie Lincoln at the White House commemorated him in a poem, and the city of Baker and Baker County were named for him.
In general, Oregon's part in the Civil War was confined in the main ​
to protecting the frontier from marauding bands of Indians. Governor Whiteaker proved dilatory in responding to President Lincoln's call for volunteers; and after waiting until September of 1861 for the Governor to act, Colonel Wright, who commanded the United States forces within the State, requisitioned a volunteer troop of cavalry for three yearsservice against the Indians in eastern Oregon. By 1862 there were six companies in the field, forming a regiment known as the First Oregon Cavalry. This unit, in addition to its service against the Indians, held in check the Knights of the Golden Circle, a secret order which opposed the war. There was a good deal of secession sentiment in the state, and several seditious newspapers were suppressed during the conflict.
Within a few years after the Civil War, Oregon was plunged into Indian troubles that continued intermittently for more than a decade. The Modocs went on the warpath in 1872, when attempts were made to force them onto the Klamath reservation. A mere handful of warriors, under the leadership of "Captain Jack," they retreated to the lava beds near Tule Lake, California, and there held out against a large force of United States soldiers, upon whom they inflicted defeat after defeat with little loss to themselves. They resisted until the courageous chieftain was captured and hanged, after he and some of his band had treacherously assassinated General E. R. S. Canby and an associate during a parley on April n, 1873.
In 1877, the younger Chief Joseph of the Nez Perces, incensed at the government's attempt to deprive his people of the beautiful Wallowa Valley, refused to be moved to an Idaho reservation. Several regiments of United States troops were dispatched to force him into obedience. After a number of sharp engagements and a retreat of a thousand miles across Idaho and Montana, ending about fifty miles from the Canadian border, Joseph was compelled to surrender. It is reported that he raised his hand above his head and said: "From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever." This great Indian warrior died in 1904 and was buried at the foot of Wallowa Lake, in the heart of the mountains he loved so well.
Soon after the close of the Nez Perce war, the Paiutes and Bannocks spread such terror throughout eastern and central Oregon that in 1878 the white farmers began moving into towns or erecting block houses for protection. This outbreak, however, was short-lived, and by 1880 the Indian troubles in Oregon were for the most part ended.
With the completion of the Union Pacific to Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869, and construction of a connecting line to Portland in the ​
5O OREGON
early 188o's, a new era of population growth and economic expansion began for Oregon. Homesteads were established in the more isolated sections, and the eastern plains and ranges were utilized for large-scale production of wheat and livestock. Industries for processing the materials from forests and farms came into being. Steamship as well as railroad commerce developed at a rapid rate. The Sally Brown, sailing from Portland to Liverpool in 1868, carried the first full cargo of Oregon wheat ever to be exported; since then Portland has become one of the more important wheat-shipping ports of the world. In the three decades between 1870 and 1900, the State's population increased from 90,923 to 413,526. Impressive evidence of a century's advance was presented in the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition, held at Portland in 1905.
The second Regiment of Oregon's National Guard was the first unit of the American expeditionary force to support Admiral Dewey at Manila, in the Spanish- American War of 1898. The regiment took part in several engagements with the Spanish, and remained in the Philippines throughout the campaign against Aguinaldo.
Oregonians were among the first American troops in active overseas service during the World War, taking part with distinction in the engagements at Chateau Thierry, Belleau Wood, St. Mihiel, Cambrai, Argonne Forest, and elsewhere. In the total of 44,166 Oregon men enrolled in the American forces, more than 1,000 deaths were recorded, and 355 were cited or decorated for distinguished service.
In the march of political and social progress, as expressed in legislative enactments and constitutional amendments, Oregon has kept well abreast of her sister States. The Australian ballot system was introduced in 1891, and a year later William S. U'Ren of Portland began an extensive campaign that resulted in adoption by the state of the initiative and referendum in 1902, the direct primary in 1904, and the recall in 1908. Other progressive steps were taken with the adoption of woman suffrage in 1912, workmen's compensation and widows' pensions in 1913, compulsory education in 1921, and a system of people's utility districts in 1930.
Nothing in recent Oregon history is of greater significance for the future than the construction by the Federal government of Bonneville Dam and lock on the Columbia River 42 miles east of Portland. Begun in 1933 and now (1940) nearly completed, this $70,000,000 project will supply hydro-electric power to a huge area in the Columbia River ​
region and will permit navigation by ocean-going vessels as far east as The Dalles.
With only 13,294 inhabitants in 1850, Oregon has developed into a modern State of more than a million population, and its possibilities for future development are as bright as those of any commonwealth in the Union.
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Agriculture
HPHE first independent and successful American farmer in Oregon -*- was Ewing Young, erstwhile fur-trader, who came in 1834 and in the following year had crops growing and cattle grazing on the rich acreage of the Chehalem Valley. Before his arrival, various ventures in agriculture had been attempted, the earliest being by Nathan Winship and his crew of the Albatross, who brought hogs and goats and did some planting along the lower Columbia River bottoms in 1810. This experiment was flooded out, and a year later the Astor expedition brought hogs, sheep, and cattle, and planted vegetables at Fort Astoria. Dr. John McLoughlin, of the Hudson's Bay Company, started a farm at Fort Vancouver in 1825; and three years later he placed Etienne Lucier, one of his trappers, who had become superannuated, on a tract of land at the present site of East Portland. In 1829, James Bates established a farm on Scappoose Plain, and three years later John Ball began wheat growing in the Willamette Valley. These men were share-croppers for the fur company. In 1835, Nathaniel Wyeth brought cattle, hogs, and goats, with grain and garden seeds, to Sauvie Island, but later relinquished the land to Dr. McLoughlin, who established a dairy on the island under the supervision of Jean Baptiste Sauvie.
Favorable reports concerning the fertile valleys of Oregon brought a trickle of eastern farmers into the new and unclaimed country in the late 1830*8. Thereafter, immigration increased rapidly, until the trickle became a stream and then a flood. The cry of "Free land!" echoed back over the Oregon Trail, and the route became crowded with long processions of covered wagons.
Wheat was the pioneers' first and principal crop. Many of the early homeseekers arrived in the Willamette country destitute, and Dr. McLoughlin, partly with an eye to future profit and the enhancing of British influence, staked them to clothing, tools, and seed-wheat, to be repaid in kind, so that thousands of settlers were at length in debt to him. In 1846 more than 160,000 bushels of wheat were produced in the Oregon country. By an act of the provisional government, wheat ​
\vas declared legal tender and had a standard value of $i a bushel. With the rush of the gold-seekers to California, the price soared to $6 a bushel, and by 1849 more than 50 ships had entered the Columbia River seeking supplies of grain. This export commerce provided the economic foundation for building towns and seaports, laying out wagon roads, establishing steamship lines, and constructing railways. For the next half century the Willamette Valley, with its brown loams and silty clay soils, was predominantly "wheat country."
In 1861, gold was discovered in eastern Oregon and backtrailing farmers, attracted by the possibility of finding fertile land near the new diggins, followed the influx of miners to the region. Town sites were staked out and agricultural development began. River steamers plying the Columbia hastened the movement of farmers to the inland plateaus and sagebrush plains. The first wheat grown in this portion of the state, was harvested in 1863 by Andrew Kilgore in Umatilla County. Within a few years, wheat was being sown over a large area of eastern Oregon. Shipping centers sprang up along the river; and when, in the early 188o's, the railroad came through, wheat-growing developed wherever the soil was suitable and shipping possible.
It was inevitable that this extensive single-crop production should make for exhaustion of the light basaltic soils and a consequent decrease in the yield. In time it became necessary to reduce the seeded acreage and to try various plans for restoring fertility. Summer fallowing or dust mulching, a method whereby half of each ranch remains unseeded in alternate years, is now generally adopted, and wheat still remains the principal crop in Oregon. Production in 1937 was 20,424,000 bushels, valued at $18,263,000 or slightly more than 30 per cent of the combined income from all crops in the state. The average yield from the 993,000 acres harvested was 20.6 bushels an acre.
Present-day wheat ranching in the rolling country of eastern Oregon is a highly-mechanized industry. Each spring, tractor-drawn gangplows, harrows, and drills prepare and seed the moist earth. In late summer, great combines move over the vast fields, reaping and threshing, in a golden haze of chaff and straw, and leaving at measured intervals bags of wheat stacked behind them. Day and night, trucks haul the grain to towering elevators in nearby towns, or to freight sidings and warehouses, for shipment by rail or water to flour mills and export markets.
Of other grains than wheat, the principal crops in 1937 were oats, 10,360,000 bushels, harvested from 280,000 acres; barley, 4,160,000 bushels, from 130,000 acres; corn, 2,178,000 bushels, from 66,000 acres; ​
and rye, 600,000 bushels, from 48,000 acres. In the same year, such forage crops as clover, timothy, and alfalfa yielded a combined total of 1,428,000 tons, cut from 806,000 acres. Tame hay is now grown on a much greater acreage than wheat; and 242,000 tons of wild hay were cut in 1937 from 220,000 acres, principally in mountain valleys east of the Cascade range and in the Klamath and Harney basins.
From the time farming began at Fort Astoria until 1828, when enough wheat was raised to support the inhabitants, potatoes were the main substitute for bread. As settlement increased and spread it was found that certain portions of the Oregon country were peculiarly adapted to potato culture, notably the Deschutes region, with a soil of volcanic ash and loamy sand, the Klamath Falls district of fine sandy loam, and the sandy silt and humus of Coos County, on the coast. In 1937 Oregon produced 7,840,000 bushels of potatoes on 49,000 acres, or an average of 160 bushels an acre.
There is scarcely a vegetable known to the temperate zone that does not thrive in Oregon. Every ranch has its home garden and truck farming is an important commercial activity in certain parts of the state, particularly on acreage near large towns. Onions head the list of truck garden products, 660,000 sacks being marketed in 1937. Green celery is a close second, with a 1937 output of 234,000 crates, grown chiefly in the middle Columbia and Willamette Valley. Cantaloupes from Douglas and Wasco Counties are of a superior grade.
Describing the Oregon country as he saw it in 1845, the Reverend Gustavus Hines wrote: "Apples, peaches, and other kinds of fruit, flourish, as far as they have been cultivated; and from present appearances, it is quite likely that the time is not far distant, when the country will be well supplied with the various kinds of fruit which grow in the Middle States." The first extensive planting of fruit trees was done at Milwaukie in 1 847 by William Meek and the Lewelling brothers, %vho brought some 800 seedlings and a few grafted trees over the Oregon Trail in boxes fitted inside their covered wagons. The venture paid well. The first box of apples placed on sale in Portland realized $75," and in 1851 four boxes were sold in San Francisco for $500. Seth Eewdling set out the earliest Italian prune orchard in 1858; and the brothers developed a number of distinctive fruit varieties now well« known -in Oregon—among them the Black Republican, Lincoln, and Bing cherries, the Golden prune, and the Lewelling grape.
Fruit growing has become one of Oregon's major econ&nic activities. Hood River apples, Rogue River pears, The Dalles djer/ies, 4nd Wii ​
lamette Valley prunes are famed throughout America and Europe. Only one other state (California) produces more prunes than Oregon, the 1937 yield being 43,000 tons, valued at $1,414,000. Other principal fruit crops of the same year were apples, 3,763,000 bushels, valued at $3,010,000; pears, 3,621,000 bushels, valued at $2,350,000; cherries, 124,000 tons, valued at $1,525,000; grapes, 2,100 tons, valued at $69,300; and peaches, 241,000 bushels, valued at $2,892,000.
Strawberries, raspberries, currants, youngberries, loganberries, and evergreen blackberries thrive in various sections, though the best crops are prod-ired in the moist western valleys. Strawberries constitute the most important item in this list, the 1937 crop amounting to 1,050,000 crates, was raised on 14,000 acres (an average yield of 75 crates to the acre), and valued at $3,518,000. Cranberries have long grown wild, principally on peat-bog land along the coast, but are now profitably cultivated over a large acreage.
Nuts of various kinds, chiefly English walnuts, and filberts, are raised, especially on the sandy loams and "red hill" lands of the Willamette and Tualatin Valleys, one of the few regions of the world adapted to filbert culture. There are approximately 9,000 acres of filbert orchards in Oregon, or 85 per cent of the national total, and about 14,000 acres of bearing walnut trees.
Hops are among the principal agricultural products of the Willamette Valley. High green-hung hop trellises cover thousands of acres in Marion County. Although over-production in recent years has reduced the value of the crop, Oregon continues to produce more hops than any other state in the Union. The value of the 1937 crop exceeded $4,000,000.
Wild flax grew in Oregon before the first white men came, and has been grown there almost continually from the beginning of settlement, but not until recent years has a consistent effort been made to utilize the product commercially. In 1915 a flax plant was established at the state penitentiary; and recently the Federal Government, through the Works Progress Administration, assisted in constructing scutching plants and mills. In 1935, more than 2,000 acres were planted to flax. About 2,000,000 pounds of fiber are annually produced at the state plant.
Seed production provides the farmers of Oregon with some three million dollars of annual income. Nearly a million pounds of alsike clover seed, sown as a soil-restoring rotation crop in wheat growing areas, are marketed annually; and west of the mountains, vegetable seeds are produced on an extensive scale. ​
Ornamental nursery stock yields almost a million dollars each year for Multnomah County nurserymen alone. Field-grown roses are shipped out of the state in carload lots. Daffodil, tulip, and gladioli farms are numerous in western Oregon, and hothouses with thousands of feet under glass supply cut flowers and bulbs to local and national markets.
Until 1837 the only cattle in the Oregon country belonged to the Hudson's Bay Company, which supplied milk to the settlers but refused to sell any part of its stock to them. With the object of breaking up this monopoly, a group of prominent men in the Willamette Valley, headed by Jason Lee and Ewing Young, organized an expedition to California "to purchase and drive to Oregon a band of neat cattle for the supply of the settlers." The expedition sailed early in February 1837 on the U. S. brig Loriot, commanded by William A. Slacum, and returned overland a few months later with some 600 head of cattle and a number of horses, which were distributed among the settlers. The supply of livestock was considerably augmented in 1841, when Joseph Gale and others built the sloop Star of Oregon and sailed it from the Columbia River to San Francisco, where they traded their vessel for cattle, horses, mules, and sheep, which they drove north over the wilderness trails to Oregon. Soon thereafter the long "cow columns" of the eastern emigrants began to arrive in the Willamette Valley, and the future of one of Oregon's principal economic resources was permanently assured.
By the early 1870*8, cattle ranching had become a firmly established and highly profitable activity in the vast range lands of central and southeastern Oregon. For the next two decades, cattle had almost free run of this semi -arid plateau country, where the bunchgrass grew stirrup-high; and the unfenced area of Harney County in particular contained some of the most extensive ranches and largest herds in the West. But it was not long before sheepmen began to compete for the open range, and violent friction ensued between them and the cattle barons. Sheep were maliciously slaughtered, and their owners retaliated by burning the stacks, barns, and houses of the cattlemen. Into the feud was injected another element inimical to both sheep and cattle ranchers — the invasion of homesteaders with their fences and land-speculators with their townsites. The outcome was defeat for the hitherto dominant cattle kings, restriction of their rights, and a gradual decrease in the size of their herds. However, Harney County has remained a prominent cattle region, and Oregon as a whole is still an important cattle state. ​
In an estimated total of 945,000 head of cattle in Oregon at the beginning of 1937, nearly 260,000 were cows and heifers kept for milk — a notable contrast to the first little herd, owned by the Hudson's Bay Company, which browsed the moist levels of Sauvie Island more than a century ago. Adjacent to the principal cities and towns are many dairy farms and creameries. The Tillamook, Coos Bay, and other coastal areas, with their perennial green pasturage, are ideal dairying regions, and the irrigated Klamath basin is also an important field.
The first sheep successfully driven across the plains were brought to Oregon in 1844 by Joshua Shaw and his son. Saxon and Spanish merinos were introduced in 1848, and purebred merinos in 1851. The earliest herds were confined to the western region, particularly the Willamette Valley, but by 1860 many had been established in eastern Oregon. As the favorable climate and range conditions became better known, sheepmen from California and Australia swarmed into the State, and by 1893 the herds had increased to two and a half million head. After rising to 3,319,000 in 1930, the number declined to an estimated total of 2,245,000 at the beginning of 1937. Besides the marketing of mutton, a large annual clip of wool is sold. The 1937 production was more than 17,000,000 pounds, the average weight per fleece being %l/2 pounds. Shipping of wool began in 1862, when the surplus clip of that year, amounting to 100,000 pounds, was sent from the Willamette Valley to New England. Many settlers brought goats with them across the plains, but commercial goat-raising is a comparatively recent enterprise. The most prevalent breed is the Angora, valued for its mohair wool. Today more than half of the mohair wool produced in the United States comes from Oregon.
Every pioneer farmer raised hogs to provide fat for soap, candles, and cooking, and meat for his table. Purebred swine were brought to the state in 1868, after which the importation of fine hogs became common. The number of hogs on Oregon farms at the beginning of 1937 was estimated at 242,000 as against only 169,000 in 1935.
Poultry has always been indispensable in Oregon farm life, since the first leghorns were introduced in 1834. Not until the present century, however, were eggs and poultry produced on a large scale. The temperate Willamette Valley is a favored area. Commercial turkey raising is comparatively new, but with its favorable summer climate and freedom from disease the state has already become an important producing area.
In 1935 there were 64,826 individual farms in Oregon occupying ​
17,358,000 acres or 28.4 per cent of the state's entire land area, and with a collective value for land and buildings of $448,712,000. Of these farms, 17,206 were under 20 acres each in size, 30,498 were under 50 acres, 40,782 were under 100 acres, and 3,046 comprised 1,000 acres or more; the average acreage per farm being 267.8. In the combined farm area, about 3,100,000 acres were used for crops and about 12,000,000 acres consisted of pasture land. Of the total number of farms, 50,046 were operated by full or part owners, 715 by managers, and 14,065 by tenants. The total farm population numbered 248,767; and of the persons working on farms, family labor accounted for 83,102 and hired help for 15,287. Considerably more than 25,000 farm operators worked part time to pay off their farms during the year. Farms to the number of 29,740 or 45.9 per cent of the total, were carrying a combined mortgage debt of $119,670,000.
Although much sub-marginal land cultivated during boom years in the "high desert" of south central Oregon, and in the remote hill regions elsewhere, is now abandoned, the total acreage of land in farms increased 50 per cent in the quarter-century from 1910 to 1935 and more than 22 per cent in the decade of 1925-35. Yet the total value of land and buildings declined sharply—from $675,213,000 in 1920 and $630,828,000 in 1930 to $448,712,000 in 1935. The number of mortgaged farms decreased from 51.5 per cent of the total in 1930 to 45.9 per cent in 1935, with an accompanying decrease of nearly $2,500,000 in the total farm mortgage debt. The number of farms operated by tenants increased from 9,790 in 1930 to 14,065 in 1935; and in the latter year 21.7 per cent of the total number of farms and 17.1 per cent of all land in farms were under tenant operation.
Government irrigation projects in the Owyhee, Klamath, Umatilla, Vale, and three other districts have done much to increase the agricultural resources of Oregon. More than a million acres are now under irrigation in the state. Summer irrigation is rapidly supplementing normal winter rainfall in portions of the Willamette and Hood Rivet Valleys.
The State Agricultural College at Corvallis, founded 1868, has played a role of incalculable importance in Oregon's agricultural activities. Besides the specialized training given to thousands of young men and women, it conducts experimental farms in various parts of the state, maintains a radio broadcasting station, publishes numerous bulletins, and contributes in numerous other ways to the improvement of farming and the conditions of farm life in general. A state agricul ​
tural experiment station has assisted Oregon farmers for more than 50 years, and the first quarter-century of farm agent work in the state was celebrated in 1937. The State Agricultural Society, founded 1854, was the first of several state-wide organizations of farmers, the most important of which is now the Oregon unit of the National Grange. The annual State Fair at Salem and Pacific International Livestock Exposition at Portland are attended by farmers and stock breeders from every part of Oregon. ​uiiiiiiiiaiiiiiiiiiiiiBiiiiiiiiiiiiamiiiiiiniQiiiiiiiiiiiiDimim
Industry, Commerce and Labor
INDUSTRY AND COMMERCE: Timber is the dominant factor in Oregon's industrial and commercial life, and activities connected with it spread over all but the grasslands and the high plateaus in the southeastern section. So important is timber and its products that there is hardly a comn unity, in western Oregon at least, whose prosperity does not depend upon it. Even the state's tax-supported schools derive a good portion of their income from the forests. The importance of the industry is symbolized in the state shield, which the founding fathers inscribed with a forest and a ship.
Water-powered mills, with up-and-down mulay saws, cut the boards for Oregon's earliest frame houses. The first steam-driven mill, with a circular saw, was built in Portland in 1850, while teams of oxen were busy hauling logs down skidroads which are now Portland streets. Along the shores of the Columbia, inland as far as Hood River, were great stands of timber. Here the lumber industry had its first real beginnings. Skidroads were pushed from the river banks into the dense forest. Over these the bull teams, driven by swaggering bullwhackers, hauled the big butts to water, where they were made into rafts and floated down to the mills.
By 1890, when the exhaustion of the forests of the Great Lakes region was in sight, Oregon began to be prominent as a lumber state. The lumberjacks followed the timber west. It is common to find loggers in Oregon today whose fathers helped cut the pine of* Michigan, and whose grandfathers helped fell and saw the spruce of Maine.
Timber owners and sawmill operators, too, came from the lake states to Oregon and built mills in the Willamette Valley and pushed logging railroads into the foothills. The Coos and Tillamook Bay districts were developed. When, later, lumber operators from the southern states arrived, because the timber there was giving out, they found Oregon forest land mostly taken up.
Shortly after 1900, widespread corruption in the lumber industry was exposed in the great Oregon Timber Fraud cases. Men grew wealthy ​
INDUSTRY, COMMERCE AND LABOR 6l by acquiring forest areas through a system of "dummies", names of nonexistent people or of persons who for a few dollars signed fraudulent homestead applications. A happy outcome was the setting aside later of thousands of acres of forest, formerly public domain and open to homesteading, to form national reserves within the state.
In eastern Oregon the lumber industry was slower in starting but once begun it gathered great speed. There the timber is mainly pine. Some of the largest sawmills in the world are now located at Burns, Bend, and Klamath Falls. Others are near Baker and La Grande.
Waste has marked the lumber industry throughout its history, but today pulp and paper manufacturing, which takes care of much lumber refuse, seems to be developing into a major aspect of the lumber industry. Furniture making, utilizing Oregon oak, alder, maple and walnut, is growing in importance. Several hundred persons in the Coos Bay area are employed in making novelties from myrtlewood. In Marshfield and Coquille the manufacture of battery separators from the acidproof Port Orford cedar is a leading industry. This unique wood is also used in airplane construction. In general, the utilization of forest products is greater in the pine than in the fir regions. One reason is that pine is easier to "work" than fir. Much low-grade pine goes into box "shocks", the pieces from which boxes are made. One pine mill furnishes all the curtain rollers used by a large manufacturer of automobiles. Small pieces of pine are made into toys. One mill specializes in ironing boards.
Until 1930 the tendency was towards larger and larger sawmills. Some of the pine mills in Bend and Klamath Falls have a rated eighthour capacity of 300,000 feet of lumber. A fir mill at Marshfield has a capacity of 650,000 feet in the same space of time. Of late years, however, because of the depression and because of the increased overhead costs in large mills when on curtailed production, and because of the loss of the European market for heavy timbers, few large mills have been built. Instead, many cutting only from 10,000 to 50,000 feet a shift have gone into operation, using logs hauled on trucks which have supplanted logging railroads.
The income from forest products in Oregon is about 177 million dollars annually. Some 40,000 persons are employed who receive in wages and salaries approximately 56 million dollars.
Fishing is still an important industry in Oregon, particularly so on the Columbia River at Astoria, at Warrenton, and at The Dalles; and on the Pacific Coast at Tillamook, Newport, Reedsport, and the ​
cities on Coos Bay. Salmon is the leading catch, with halibut, pilchards, cod, steelhead trout, shad, and oysters important in the order named.
The salmon-wheels in the Columbia River, a few of which are still standing, are reminders of a past made obsolete by law. Formerly thousands of salmon were taken in these ingenious contraptions. However, horse-seining is still done on the lower river, where teams, neck deep in water, pull in nets filled with struggling fish. The animals, most of them old discarded work-horses, seem to be rejuvenated by the brine. Astoria is the largest fish-canning center in the state. From here a fleet of boats puts out to troll or seine in the river, or off the coast. For the past few years the catching and processing of pilchards for oil and fertilizer have become important activities during a two-month season at Astoria and Coos Bay. This industry is so new that no reliable data on it have as yet been collected. However, in 1936, a tax of 50 cents per ton on pilchards taken in Oregon waters netted about $35,000. The annual yield of all Oregon fisheries is about 25,000,000 pounds, valued at over $2,600,000. The pilchard products are used locally and along the Pacific Coast; salmon and allied products, canned, smoked, dried, or kippered, are shipped to all parts of the world.
From mining, Oregon receives a small but steady income. Gold, copper, silver, and lead rank in the order named. Mercury production equals that of gold in value, or about $350,000 annually. Three thousand persons are engaged in the production of minerals in the state, and the total income is approximately $4,500,000 a year. Gold was Oregon's earliest mineral discovery. In eastern and southern parts of the state prospectors are still active in the mountains and along streams. Tales of "lost" mines persist as part of local folklore. In Curry, Baker, Jackson and Josephine counties are many ruins of "ghost towns," built hurriedly and as swiftly abandoned and forgotten.
Manufacturing in Oregon has made slow but steady progress. The lumber industry plays the role of a general stimulant through its demand for logging locomotives, donkey-engines, steel cables, blocks and timber-cutting tools, much of which equipment is made in the state. In Portland a factory, in business since 1887, builds 13,000 stoves and 2,500 furnaces a year. Another plant specializes in automatic stokers that are sold all over the world. Still another makes 2,000,000 tin cans annually to meet the demands of the local fruit and fish-canning industries. Woolen goods have been made since earliest days. Though wool in great quantities and of excellent grade is still produced in the state, the industry has lagged somewhat in late years. ​
Oregon grows a fine grade of flax fiber, yet mills have come and gone for fifty years. In 1935 an Oregon Flax Committee was appointed to investigate the industry and make recommendations. In October of that year the Works Progress Administration consented to earmark money to build three flax-processing plants in the state. In December the Agricultural Adjustment Administration granted a federal subsidy of $5 a ton to flax growers. Committees which were granted WPA funds for plants, furnished land and contributed cash to the enterprise, while farmers and business men, backed by their bankers, organized cooperatives. The state engaged experts to supervise construction of the plants and to help the cooperatives get started. The WPA agreed to construct the plants and run them for one year, whereupon the state assumed responsibility.
Oregon exports, like the state's commerce in general, depend on the activity of the timber industry, which in turn influences agriculture. The bulk of water-borne shipments consists of lumber, flour, wheat, paper, and canned goods, including salmon, in the order named. Next in rank are logs, apples, dried fruits, pulp-wood, hides and leather; then plywood, cereals, doors, milk, vegetables, cheese, and butter. Cattle, sheep, horses, and hogs on the hoof, poultry and poultry products, and wool in the raw, are shipped chiefly by freight car.
The total commerce of the Port of Portland, Oregon's chief commercial terminal, which handles by far the largest share of the state's shipments, was 7,353,378 tons in 1938. Some 1717 vessels entered and cleared, carrying a tonnage of 5,556,535 tons. Total port commerce value in 1938 was $273,258,096. Commerce along the inland waterways and by train, truck and electric line, with shipments from Tillamook and Coos bays, added vastly to the state's commercial figures.
The Bonneville dam on the Columbia, forty miles east of Portland, completed by the Federal Government in 1937, had an immediate capacity of 115,250 horsepower, and foundations for 576,000 additional horsepower. This gave inestimable impetus to Oregon industry and commerce. The largest development to date (1940) is that of the American Aluminum Company that has purchased a 300 acre site and has scheduled the opening of a plant in 1941. Public Utility Districts for use of Bonneville power are being organized in many parts of the state, and many private companies are negotiating for the use of power from the dam.
LABOR: Romantic historians of the great migration to Oregon have woven a stirring tale of a land-hungry yeomanry carving an em ​
pire out of the wilderness. The covered wagons, however, brought with them also a number of mechanics and artisans driven from their homes by chaotic industrial conditions in the East. In Europe the great period of unrest following the Napoleonic Wars set in motion a wave of emigration that flooded America's Atlantic seaboard with thousands of indigent workers. Wage scales toppled and standards of living fell as the Europeans entered every field of labor.
American workers, faced with the specters of unemployment and poverty, chose westward migration. By the middle of the century the trek to the Northwest was under way. in the wagon trains were Oregon's first printers. These men carried pamphlets of craft unionism among their gear, and became the pioneers of the Oregon labor movement. From Oregon and Washington territories they came in 1853 to Portland, then a town of about i,OOO inhabitants, and organized a Typographical Society along the lines of the successful National Typographical Union formed in the East in 1850. Portland soon became an important shipping point, and in 1868 the longshoremen set up their Portland Protective Union. This was Oregon's second labor association.
Meanwhile there had arisen the problem of competitive Chinese labor which was to harry the white workers of Oregon for many years. Driven out of California by anti-Chinese feeling, the Orientals flocked north as far as Portland. The Burlingame Treaty, ratified in 1867, which opened the country to coolies recruited for railroad construction, greatly increased the number of yellow laborers. A crowded labor market resulted, followed by decreased wages, at a time of rising living costs.
White laborers, threatened with the loss of their jobs, responded by boycotting those who employed the Asiatics. Feeling ran high and for the first time in Oregon a line was sharply drawn between those for and against Orientals. Political destinies were shaped by the conflict, which was fought out in the decades following, industry as a whole staunchly favoring the low-wage coolie labor, and the white workers forming organizations to effect its exclusion. In 1886 the anti-Chinese agitation was at its height. Mayor Gates of Portland called a meeting of protest in favor of the Chinese, but Sylvester Pennoyer took over the meeting and declared that the Chinese must go. Partly because of his stand on this question he was elected governor of the state at the following election. Heroic attempts were made to organize a central labor body which might better handle the issue, but a confusion of economic ftnd political aims prevented united action.
Finally, however, labor did draw itself together within a framework
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TEMPLE BETH ISRAEL, PORTLAND ​of united craft associations. These weathered the panic of 1873, and by 1882 were ten in number. The unions learned to make use of the strike, and, although most walkouts were lost, some, among them the strike of the harnessmakers in 1889, gave union labor confidence and a measure of badly needed prestige.
The period between 1880 and 1890 was one of tremendous expansion in Oregon, and alternately harsh and kind to labor. As the Northern Pacific Railroad, completed in 1883, linked the state to the great industrial cities of the East, Portland grew from a town of 25,000 to a marketing and shipping center with three times that many people. Building construction reached unprecedented levels. Commodity prices continued to mount until the minor depression of 1884.
Samuel Gompers visiting Portland in 1883 had to raise his voice to make himself heard above the noise of the building operations in the booming city. But he achieved his purpose, that of leading Portland's 300 organized craftsmen into forming the Portland Federated Trades Assembly, the first central labor body in Oregon with a completely unified membership. The assembly found itself opposed by the Knights of Labor, James Sovereign's organization, established since 1880, which had 600 members. The two bodies, one committed to rigid crafts unionism, the other to the policy of including all craftsmen in the same organization, engaged in a struggle for control of all Portland labor. The Knights were temporarily left in possession of the field, and in 1885 the Portland Federated Trades Assembly was dissolved.
Although Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, this legislation did not affect the Orientals already in the country. Their number was augmented by smugglers, who found the closed immigration channels easy to circumvent. Thus, during the depression of 1884, labor found itself, in spite of the exclusion law, competing with an ever-increasing number of Asiatics. Knights of Labor organizers led Oregon's aroused workers to action and in 1885 a camp of Chinese coolies was attacked by a mob at Albina. Oregon's Governor called the militia, which refused to serve. More riots followed, an anti-Chinese convention was called together, the boycott was again invoked and for the first time in Oregon dynamite was used as a class-war weapon. As the result of these events the Knights of Labor dominated the situation when Samuel Gompers returned to Portland in 1887.
All attempts to revive the Portland Federated Trades Assembly, dead for two years, had failed, but Gompers, now representing the American Federation of Labor (formed the year before) succeeded in bringing ​ringing
the central body back to life. The A. F. of L. had only 250,000 members in the United States to pit against the Knights of Labor's national organization of 700,000 members, but the influence of the Knights was on the wane in Oregon, while that of the A. F. of L. now rose rapidly. In 1889 the Portland Federated Trades Assembly showed its strength through a boycott in favor of locked-out brewery workers. In 1890 the A. F. of L. called a general strike to obtain the eight-hour day, and Portland's union carpenters won their fight, though they had to submit to a wage-cut in return for victory.
The 1 890*8 were not happy years for Oregon workers. The "hard times" of 1893-95 were levying a heavy toll upon the whole country, and the plight of organized labor in general was desperate. Oregon's unemployed grew in numbers, hunger marchers stormed Portland's city hall, and hungry men joined Coxey's Army. The state's railroad workers walked out in sympathy with Gene Debs' great transportation strike and lost their jobs when the strike failed.
In its struggle for existence the Portland Federated Trades Assembly clung to its A. F. of L. affiliation, and fought off the threat of the newly formed Central Labor Council for control of Oregon's workers. It called a state labor congress to devise means of relief, and again obtained undisputed leadership of the battered labor ranks, with new union charters granted.
The need of a state labor body had become apparent and in 1902, when 17 strikes disrupted Oregon industry, 175 delegates, representing about 10,000 workers, met in Portland and formed the Oregon Federation of Labor. The Federation stood for economic and political reform, and was largely instrumental in obtaining legislation for the establishment of the state bureau of labor in 1903. Made strong by the Federation, craft unionism felt more secure. Nothing now appeared to challenge the authority of the A. F. of L.
However, the idea of the One Big Union advocating that labor, to be effective, ought to set aside all distinctions of craft, color, sex and nationality, and unite in one coordinated body began to attract attention. This idea was reaffirmed by the Industrial Workers of the World, a revolutionary organization formed in Chicago in 1905. Soon the world was to hear much of the I. W. W., or the "Wobblies" as members were nicknamed.
The genius of the organization was "Big Bill" Haywood, a former miner who knew conditions in western mining and logging camps. The I. W. W. seemed peculiarly fitted to conditions in the Far West, and ​
among the miners and lumberjacks of Oregon the influence of Haywood's organization was soon paramount. In 1907 that part of the state's lumber industry centering about Portland was paralyzed by the greatest strike in its history. The walk-out was brief, and although no recognition was gained, strikers pointed to increased wages and improved working conditions as results of the dispute.
The I. W. W. remained a power in the lumber industry until war measures in 1917, gave to its members all they were fighting for, including the eight-hour day, better sanitation and working conditions, and beds provided by operators so no man would have to carry his blankets on his back in order to obtain a job. With its objectives gone, the organization lost its militancy and dwindled. However, it came back again after the Armistice, when the threat of lowered wages and the return of the longer working day again menaced. Lumber and logging operators, with the aid of the 4-L, first a war-measure organization and later a "Company Union," made strenuous war on the I. W. W., which in 1919 retaliated with a general strike. This was unsuccessful, and after much violence and bloodshed, and sharp division of sentiment among the lumber workers, the I. W. W. gradually lost footing.
The 4-L—the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen—was formed by the Federal Government through the War Board to do away with unrest and dissatisfaction in the lumber industry of the Pacific Coast, and thus to speed up the production to meet war-time needs. Barring nobody because of previous affiliations, it was organized in the summer of 1917 and soon included all persons in any manner engaged in camps or sawmills. As long as the government ran the 4.L, peace was maintained between the workers and their employers. After the end of the war, however, most of the loggers as well as many of the sawmill workers dropped from the rolls. Members who remained belonged to the better paid categories among the lumber workers. After 1919 the Loyal Legion never possessed the confidence or support of the great mass of workers, and is regarded by many as having taken on the character of a "company union". The 4.L continued to function in some sort of manner until, pressed by changing labor conditions, it reorganized under the name of the Industrial Employees Union, with an influence largely confined to the pine-producing districts.
In recent years only two major strikes have taken place in Oregon — the International Longshoremen's Association strike in 1934, for better conditions, and that of the Sawmill and Timber Workers' Union, in 1934-35. They were settled by the aid of Federal arbitration. Both dis ​
putes were tinged with the passions and prejudices of extremists on the sides of labor and capital alike, but led to improved working conditions and union recognition.
The Oregon Federation of Labor with a present membership of approximately 70,000 represents craft unionism in Oregon, with its corresponding purposes and motives. The idea of industrial unionism, or the vertical plan of organization as opposed to the horizontal, has been powerfully revived through the C.I.O. headed by John L. Lewis; and the late 1930*8 in Oregon have been marked by spectacular struggles between the two union systems. By initiative process a rigid anti-picketing law was adopted at the general election of 1938, ​NUuniimiiiiiiiaimimiiiiQiiimiiiiiiOiiiiiiiiiiiiDiniiiiiiiiimiim
Transportation
IN the late spring of 1837 a little company of men and women, sent out from Boston to reinforce the four lonely brethren at the Methodist mission station in the Willamette Valley, arrived in the lower waters of the Columbia, after a voyage of ten months by way of Cape Horn and the Sandwich Islands. Near the mouth of the Willamette River they were met by Jason Lee, who had made the journey of 75 miles from the mission by canoe, and with him they paddled up the river to the station. In mid-July two women among the newcomers were united in marriage to Lee and his co-worker Cyrus Shepard. "As the sickly season came on," according to a contemporary record, the newlymarried couples "performed two tours through the country, for the benefit of their health." The first was a ten-days' journey on horseback, southward along the Willamette River, eastward to the headwaters of the Molalla, northward to Champoeg, and back to the mission. Very shortly thereafter they set out on foot "to perform a land journey to the Pacific coast," following a trail some 80 miles long from the valley to the ocean that had been used by Indians and by retired Hudson's Bay trappers. Though they found this route "exceedingly difficult, on account of the abruptness of the ascending and descending, and the numerous large trees that had fallen across it," the party arrived at the Pacific in four days; and the same length of time was required "in crossing the mountains, jumping the logs, fording the streams, and traveling over the prairies" on the return. By the end of August they were back at the Willamette station, "better qualified, from the improvement of their health, to pursue the business of their calling."
Most of the common methods of travel available in the Oregon country a century ago are represented in the above brief narrative—by canoe on the waterways, by horseback in the valley bottoms and level open country, afoot through the mountains and other forested areas over narrow trails cut by Indians and trappers. With the coming of the homeseekers, however, the principal trails were rapidly broadened into roads. Thousands of immigrants in ox-drawn wagons, wi ​th their leaders
and guides on horseback, eventually fashioned a main route of travel from the lower Missouri River to the Willamette Valley. In its far western course this route traversed the northeastern corner of what is now the State of Oregon, entering from the valley of the Snake River near the latter's confluence with the Malheur, and continuing past the sites of Baker, La Grande, and Pendleton to the junction of the Walla Walla River with the Columbia. This latter point was the end of the original Oregon Trail, the rest of the journey being accomplished by boat and portage down the Columbia. But in 1843 a roadway was broken along the south bank of that river as far west as The Dalles; and in the following year a route came into use from the site of La Grande over the Blue Mountains to the Umatilla, along the latter to the Columbia, and thence to The Dalles. From this point westward, the river provided the only means of transportation until 1845, when Samuel Barlow and Philip Foster cut a crude wagon road through the forests and over the precipitous slopes south of Mount Hood to Willamette Falls at the site of Oregon City. In 1846 they improved the grades and secured a toll franchise. Travelers using this road of 85 miles in length paid tolls of $5 a wagon and $i for each head of livestock. Today part of the course is followed by the Mount Hood Loop Highway.
A second road, completed in 1846, led into the Willamette region by way of the Malheur River valley and the Klamath country, thence through the mountains and northward to the upper Willamette. By this time relatively short stretches of primitive road had been constructed between various adjacent settlements not connected by waterways. Some of these were community affairs, built by the settlers to provide means of local intercourse; others were commercial enterprises, operating under toll franchise. By 1846 there was a wagon road from Portland to the fertile Tualatin Plains. Many of the early roads led to river landings where boat service was available. Bridges, too, began to be built. On May 8, 1850, according to a local record, "the court proceeded to let by public outcry the bridge across the river near Hillsborough immediately below the forks of Dary and McKays creek where the former Frame bridge stood"; and another bridge was built across the Yamhill River, at the site of Lafayette, in 1851.
Popular demands for adequate mail service hastened the transformation of trails into vehicular roadways. A stagecoach line began operations in 1851 up and down the Willamette Valley and to points in southern Oregon; this line was taken over by the Wells Fargo company four years later. In 1857 a Concord coach made the run of about 50 miles ​
TRANSPORTATION Jl
from Portland to Salem in one day. Larger vehicles, some of them drawn by six horses, came into use as the roads were gradually improved. During the early 186o's connections were established with California stage lines, and fast service was instituted to adjacent valley and mountain points.
Until well along toward the middle of the I9th century, freighting on the Columbia River was chiefly controlled by the Hudson's Bay Company, which operated fleets of large barges for carrying furs from the upper tributaries of the Columbia down to the company's general depot at Fort Vancouver, where the pelts were examined, dried, and packed for shipment to London. Each of these barges had a cargo capacity of five or six tons, and was manned by a crew of at least six FrenchCanadian or half-breed oarsmen. At the Cascades, the boats and their cargoes were carried across a short portage, while the rapids below were "shot" by the sturdy voyageurs. Many of the early homeseekers and their belongings were transported down the river in these barges. The Hudson's Bay Company long maintained a similar service on the Willamette River as well.
There were few steamboats on either river before 1850. In that year the Columbia, go feet long, was launched at Astoria and began operating on a semi-weekly schedule between Astoria and Oregon City, on the Willamette. This service was supplemented later in the same year by a larger vessel, the Lot Whitcomb, built and launched at Milwaukie, near Portland. Steamer service above the falls at Oregon City reached Salem in 1853 and Eugene in 1857. At Portland, ocean-going vessels loaded shipments for California, the Sandwich Islands, and eastern ports by way of Cape Horn.
Wagon wheels were still creaking over the mountain passes when pioneer promoters in the Northwest began to organize railroad companies. In the late 1850'$, Joseph S. Ruckel and Harrison Olmstead gave Oregon its first rail service, selecting as their scene of operations the portage trail around the Cascades of the Columbia River. Here, in the summer of 1859, four and a half miles of wooden track were laid, between the site of Bonneville and what is now Cascade Locks; and over this track, mules and horses pulled trains of four or five small cars. A few months later the wooden rails were given a bearing surface of sheet iron, and the Oregon Pony, first steam locomotive to be built on the Pacific coast, began transporting amazed immigrants past the Cascades in a cloud of sparks and steam and smoke. The Union Transportation Company, later reorganized as the Oregon Steam Navigation ​
Company, also came into being in 1859. Starting operations with eight small river boats, it eventually acquired the portage railroad at the Cascades and another higher up along the Columbia between The Dalles and the mouth of the Deschutes River.
Oregon's railroad history begins with a project for a line from Oregon to connect with the railroad already built from California to the East. This intention resulted in plans for two lines, one from Portland up the east side of the Willamette River, the other on the west side. A group sponsoring each plan sought for land grants from the Federal Government, and a conflict developed between the "Eastsiders" and the "Westsiders" which involved much lobbying and trickery. In 1868 both broke ground for their lines. A Kentuckian, Ben Holladay, a picturesque character typical of the financiers of his time, thrust himself into this struggle and pushed the fortunes of the East Side road. The backers of the other line came at last to an agreement with Holladay that victory should go to the line that first completed twenty miles of track. Holladay won, and the rival road was sold to him. His road, the Oregon and California, had, however, been built only to Roseburg when, in 1873, financial difficulties blocked further construction.
Henry Villard, whose gift for organization was of much importance in the development of Oregon, was a German-American who had been a newspaper reporter in the 1859 gold rush to Colorado and in the Civil War. He had come to Oregon to represent German bond-holders in Holladay's enterprises. Villard took over the Oregon and California Railroad, and resumed the building of the line. It reached Ashland in 1884 and was extended over the Siskiyous to connect with San Francisco and the East in 1887, after Villard's control of it had ended.
Villard also acquired the Oregon Steam Navigation Company, which controlled traffic on the Columbia River, and, reorganizing it as the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, began building a line on the Oregon bank of the Columbia, intending to link it with a road being built northwestward across Idaho by the Union Pacific. That road, however, refused to join its tracks with Villard's. With Eastern backing, Villard managed to gain control of the Northern Pacific, then being built from Minneapolis toward the West. Confronting this opposition, the Oregon Short Line (Union Pacific) and the O. R. £ N. joined in 1884. Oregon now had its outlets to the East and to California.
The period from 1890 until well into the present century was one of almost continual railroad expansion in the state. With trunk lines established, branch lines were extended up many valleys where the set ​
tiers had relied on stagecoaches or steamboats. Astoria, the state's oldest city, had no railroad until 1898. Not until 1911 were coyotes on the high plateaus of central Oregon startled by steam whistles, and then the air was made doubly shrill by the construction race to Bend between the Hill and Harriman lines. Marshfield waited until April 5, 1918, to greet its first train. Burns, center of the cattle country, had to wait until 1924.
But the smell of gasoline was already heavy in the air. The good roads movement opposed at the outset by many who were to benefit most from it, was well under way by 1910. Auto travel demanded speedy and accessible highways. Presently the first of the one-man stage and truck lines appeared, automobiles that bumped over the still-dusty roads at 25 miles an hour, stopping anywhere and everywhere for passengers and freight, and delivering them to cities or remote mountain hamlets. Ribbons of asphalt, macadam, and concrete radiated from the more populous centers, and stretched out a few miles at a time across and up and down the state. The Columbia River Highway was begun and completed. The Pacific Highway became a hard-surface reality in 1932. By the end °f J939> there were almost 50,000 miles of road in the state, of which about 5,900 had medium or high type improvement.
Meanwhile the rail carriers were entering the bus and truck transport business and were pulling up rails that had outlasted their usefulness. Today, there are innumerable trucking lines, both interstate and intrastate. Much of the inland freight trade of Oregon's coast communities was first made possible by trucking companies, and the vast spaces of southeastern Oregon are still served entirely by motor.
Oregon was quick to grasp the significance of air transport. No soonei had stunt flying in crude planes become a part of state and county fair programs than adventurous individuals began buying machines for private use. Pastures near population centers became landing fields. As these pioneers showed the possibilities of flying, progressive cities started building airports. By 1936 there were 32 established airports in 31 cities. Three of these—Portland, Medford and Pendleton—are transcontinental lines and many of the others have been recognized as intrastate ports. There are also many emergency landing fields. In recent years the United States Forest Service has used planes for detecting and fighting forest fires.
The year 1936 saw the development of important Oregon airports, when the Works Progress Administration allocated one and one-half million dollars for their modernization and improvement. The new Port ​
land airport was established on the Columbia River and the Medford, Pendleton, and Astoria ports were improved.
Some 60 steamboat lines, operating in the coastwise and intercoastal trade have ports of call in Astoria and Portland; with the early completion of improvement to the river channel below Bonneville Dam, The Dalles is expected to become an important deep-water port. A total of 7,763,683 tons of outgoing vessel freight crossed the Columbia River bar in 1934; rafted lumber reached 4,318,906 tons; a total of well over 12 million tons for the year.
Steamboating on the Columbia and lower Willamette Rivers is still carried on by a few combination stern-wheel freight and towboats, craft whose construction recalls the days when rivers were the chief lanes of commerce and travel. There are also three small passenger boats plying six times a week, between Portland and Astoria. They call at way ports on both sides of the river and a trip on one of them recalls the old Steamboating days. ​niiiiimoiiiiiiimuaiiiiiiiiiiiioiiimiiiiiiaiiiiiiiiiiiiainiiiimiioiiim
Racial Elements
OREGON'S racial background is principally American. The first white inhabitants—the hunters and trappers, explorers, traders and fanners of 1800 to 1820, were either American-born or American in their general outlook, habits and ambitions. The Hudson's Bay Company, which established Fort Vancouver in 1824-25, though Britishcontrolled and in part British manned, employed many French-Canadians who, when their terms of service expired, settled on French Prairie in Marion County, where their descendants can be found today. The Hudson's Bay Company also prepared the way for the missionary settlers, zealous Americans who endeavored to improve the lot of the Oregon Indians.
In the wake of the Methodist missionaries, beginning about 1840, a few American settlers began to cross the great plains, the number increasing until the first large immigration arrived in 1843. From then on, almost every year showed a steady numerical increase, Missouri being the leading contributor to the population flow. These settlers were looking for economic opportunities more favorable than could be found in the older sections of the country and, regardless of their diverse national origins—German, English, Irish, Dutch, Scotch, Scandinavian, French and Italian—they were already Americans in their general outlook, habits and ambitions.
During the 1 850*8 gold hunters, adventurers and settlers drifted into Oregon from California; merchants and mechanics, laborers and professional men arrived from New England, the eastern seaboard and the Mississippi Basin, seeking more favorable economic opportunities than could be found in those regions.
In 1860 Oregon had a population of 52,465, which increased by decades— to 90,923; 174,768; 317,704; 413,536; 672,765; and 783,389, bringing the 1930 population to 953,786. In 1860 the per cent of foreign born was 9.8, which mounted to 18.0 per cent in 1890 and fell again to 11.6 per cent in 1930. The increase of aliens corresponds to the period of railroad construction when swarms of common laborers, ​
including Asiatics, were imported; and their decrease to the period of adjustment and changing economic conditions that followed. Of the 1 1.6 per cent of foreign born in Oregon in 1930, almost one-third came from English-speaking countries; 13,528 from Great Britain and North Ireland; 2,802 from the Irish Free State; and 17,946 from Canada.
Immigration to Oregon had two peaks—1880-90, when 142,936 people arrived, and 1900-10, when newcomers numbered 259,229. The first increase was largely due to the completion of the transcontinental railroads and the construction of local lines, affording easy transportation for settlers; while the second was in the main the result of the World's Fair held in Portland in 1905, which brought vast crowds of visitors, many of whom remained or returned later to the state to live; the development of irrigation which opened large tracts of land for settlement; and the modern exploitation of Oregon's great lumber resources, with the consequent growth of all business.
Of Oregon's 953,736 total population in 1930, 937,029 were white and 16,707 dark-skinned; 392,629 were born in the state and 450,667 in other states; and 110,440 were foreign-born. The native Oregonians, though less than half of the number of inhabitants, comprise, culturally and economically, the dominant elements in the state. The character of the early settlers has, in numberless instances, been inherited by their descendants, and pioneer names abound in the register of Oregon industrialists, merchants, bankers, agriculturists, and public and professional men. The thoroughly American character of Oregon's population is emphasized by the few exceptions to the rule. Only in isolated instances do groups of people maintain cultural habits that distinguish them from the majority. Among these are the Basques of the southeastern part of the state; the Germans of Aurora; the Finns and Scandinavians in and about Astoria; and the Chinese of Portland. Of Oregon's 110,440 foreign-born, 12,913 came from Germany; 5,507 from Finland; 22,033 from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and 2,075 from China. The number of Basques is negligible. Japanese number 4,958, but they have adopted occidental customs to a surprising degree. The negroes, numbering 2,234, are prone to live in colonies. All children in Oregon, regardless of hue of skin, attend the same schools, and restrictions because of color in business or occupational activity are non-existent. Indians number 4,776, largely on reservations, the most important of which are the Klamath, Umatilla, and Warm Springs (see INDIANS AND ARCHEOLOGY). There remains a small sprinkling of Mexicans, Filipinos and Hindus, insignificant in numbers. ​
In Oregon, as in other states, there has been a shift in population from country to city. In 1890 the urban inhabitants constituted 26.8 per cent; in 1900, 32.2; in 1910, 45.6; in 1920, 49.9; and in 1930, 51.3 per cent. The total urban population in that year was 489,746, while the rural numbered 464,040. The tendency of urban centers to absorb the native-born rural citizen is, of course, a familiar phenomenon. The residence of the foreign-born, because of his occupation, is usually determined before he leaves his homeland. Most of the state's immigrants from England, Scotland, Wales, and the north of Ireland, flocked to Portland because they were there likely to find work at the industrial pursuits in which they were skilled. Similarly, a large portion of the immigrants from Scandinavia, Russia, Italy and Poland selected this city as their residence, largely because it afforded them the most promising chances to make a livelihood in ways to which they were accustomed. Immigrants from Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland and other agricultural countries, drifted to the dairy, fruit and farming districts by preference; while Finns, and to some degree Russians, Swedes and Norwegians, sought regions where fishing, lumbering and sailing were the principal occupations.
Among groups that differ from the rest of the population are the Basques of Malheur County. More than forty years ago an immigrant from the Basque provinces in Spain visited the Jordan valley in southeastern Oregon. He was a herdsman, and the sweep of country from Crane in Harney County to the Nevada line, reminded him of home in its promise of fine pasturage for sheep. He wrote about the region to his brother in Spain, who soon joined him. Thus was started an im migration that resulted in the establishment of several Basque communities.
The people are thrifty and energetic and have become prosperous. In manners they are courteous and pleasant, but reticent. They have to a great degree maintained the cultural habits of their native country. Besides English, most of them speak Spanish and their native tongue of Escuara. Their appearance is marked by clear olive complexions, dark eyes, fine teeth and red lips. With their Spanish love of color they enjoy wearing bright sashes and vests. It is not unusual to find a group of them gathered about an accordion or guitar player, singing and dancing as many generations of Basques have done before them.
The German community at Aurora, Clackamas County, dates from 1856. The year before, because of marked Indian hostilities, migration to Oregon had slowed down. A determined band of Germans, of Bethel, ​
Missouri, decided to brave the danger of conflict with the redskins, and set out on the long westward trek. They were threatened on several occasions but eventually arrived in the Willamette Valley.
They obtained land, settled down to an experiment in communal living, and named their colony Aurora. Farms were established, fields cleared, and crops and stock raised. Dwellings, a church, a community house, shops and stores took shape; also a school and a park. A band was organized, the finest in the state at the time. Being industrious and frugal, the colony thrived.
The community developed on a communistic-religious basis, though the details are not fully known. The products of farm and shop were placed in a storehouse from which all members drew supplies as needed. No money changed hands. So diversified were the talents of the colonists that their town was practically self-sustaining.
It flourished, a place apart, both as to vocational and recreational life, for more than twenty years. Its religious leader was Dr. William Keil, the colony worshipping in accordance with the inspirations he drew from the Bible. When he died in 1877, a process of disintegration began. In time, hastened by pressure from the outside world, the communal property was divided and members of the Aurora colony embarked on individual enterprises.
Finnish immigrants—and in some measure Scandinavian—were drawn to Astoria because of the fishing and sailing, the shipbuilding and lumbering, pursuits to which they were accustomed in the old country. There had been a time, about 1870, when transient American fishermen from California had done the fishing for the Astoria canneries and caused a small "Barbary Coast" to grow up. The newcomers from the north of Europe were a different class of people. They were eager to settle down as law-abiding citizens, save money and send for families left behind. Besides being excellent workmen, they were steady and industrious. Gradually Astoria developed a Finnish-Scandinavian atmosphere. In 1930 more than half the city's population of 10,349 were Finnish-Scandinavian born, or of Finnish or Scandinavian parentage, with a sprinkling of Russian stock.
Chinese immigration to Oregon began in 1850. In that year the scarcity of common labor, caused by the rush of able-bodied men to the California goldfields, became so acute that Asiatics were imported. The influx increased with the years and the construction of the railroads, beginning in 1862, brought the Chinese pouring into the state.
At first everybody was satisfied. The Chinese were patient workers, ​
willing to toil long hours for small wages. But a reversal of feeling came with the completion of the first overland railroad in 1869. With swarms of coolie laborers released to compete with white laborers for jobs that were none too many, they were soon regarded as a menace by white workers in general all along the Pacific Coast. In Oregon the idle Chinese flocked to Portland, Oregon City, and other large towns.
For many years after 1870 anti-Chinese demonstrations were frequent. In Portland men met in open lots and harangued against the Orientals, while conservative newspapers defended them. Torch-light processions marched through the streets, carrying anti-Chinese banners. A committee of fifteen was chosen to notify the hated foreigners to "git up an' git." Masked men terrorized the Chinese by dynamiting their dwellings. Chinese lives were sacrificed and little done about it. The militia was finally called out to cope with the situation, but did no permanent good. It was only through the passing of the Chinese exclusion act in 1882 that violent race prejudice was finally appeased and the anti-Chinese feeling died down.
In Portland, as in other cities of the state where Chinese live today, they reside for the most part in a well-defined section. Portland's Chinatown is about two or three blocks wide and seven or eight long. Chinese is commonly spoken and Chinese dress frequently worn. Chinese funerals are still magnificent spectacles, and debts are still liquidated on the day of the Chinese New Year. However, these people are in general very quiet, peaceful and self-sufficient and ask only to be permitted to live as they see fit. With tong wars relegated to the past, the problems of work and business constitute their principal interests.
Oregon's 4,958 Japanese are engaged chiefly in farming, gardening and small commercial enterprises. A few are employed by industry or in hotels and restaurants. As farmers, their ambition to own land raised issues of national and international import. A quarter of a century ago early orchardists of the Hood River Valley hired Japanese laborers to clear land. The Oriental stump-diggers saved money and began to buy orchard land of their own, and to build homes. The act was resented and in 1917 a Hood River senator introduced a bill in the Oregon legislature, prohibiting Asiatics from owning land in the state.
The bill was withdrawn at the urgent request of the United States Department of State, for fear that it might have serious international consequences at a time when the country was on the verge of war in Europe. A later legislature, however, adopted the bill, following the example of California in this respect. In the meantime, a Hood River ​anti-Japanese association had been formed, and the Hood River Post of the American Legion had lent its influence toward prohibiting Japa nese immigration to the United States. The American Legion Post carried the issue to the state convention, and the latter obtained endorsement of the principle at their national meeting in Minneapolis. This was the beginning of a movement which resulted in Congressional action prohibiting Japanese immigration.
Of late the anti-Japanese ownership laws of Oregon have been much nullified, because Japanese children, born in the United States and guaranteed citizenship by the Federal Constitution, have acquired land under white guardianship. Thus Japanese today successfully own land in Oregon and till it with profit since they are expert gardeners and orchardists.
The proportion of negroes to whites in Oregon was greatest in 1850. being then 1.6 per cent. The 1930 total of 2,234 negroes in the state is only O.2 per cent of the inhabitants. In the pre-Civil War era negroes were brought to Oregon by wealthy southern immigrants in such large numbers that in June 1844, a law was enacted declaring all persons brought into the country as slaves must be removed in three years 01 become free. In 1857 tne State Constitution provided that no free negroes might enter Oregon. This law was, however, more honored in the breach than in the observance, and has long been a dead letter.
Of Oregon's 2,234 negroes, more than half live in Portland, in a colony, for the most part, on the east bank of the Willamette. The men are chiefly employed as railroad porters. They have several churches of their own, as well as lodges and other organizations. ​
Tall Tales and Legends
CEDAR shakes, described as "shingles that are the same thickness at bo:h ends," covered the log cabins of early Oregon. When Paul Bunyan's loggers roofed an Oregon bunkhouse with shakes, fog was so thick that they shingled forty feet into space before discovering they had passed the last rafter.
Paul Bunyan performed notable feats in Oregon, eclipsing the prowess of his famous predecessor Joe Paul, the Indian guide who lifted a barrel of lead from the floor to the trading post counter. He created Spencer's Butte, the Columbia River, and Crater Lake. Spencer's Butte, near Eugene, represents one wagon load of dirt, upset when Paul was making a road. The Columbia River was also something of an accident, being the deep, irregular furrow dug by Babe, the big blue ox, when he peevishly broke away with a plow and rushed headlong from the mountains to the sea. Into Crater Lake Paul dumped the last of the blue snow, where it melted and produced the azure phenomenon that greatly amazed early loggers.
Although Paul and Babe had ceased their exploits long before logging became important in Oregon, tales of "bull teams" continue to circulate. A bull-whacker for a logging company near Knappa found that sweet nothings, whispered in the oxen's ears, inspired them to prodigious feats, and he would race from one animal to another with his confidential endearments. In contrast was the far-reaching vituperation of Little Billy Ross, employed at Westport, whose voice could be heard for miles, and his stage-driving counterpart in Eastern Oregon, Whispering Thompson, whose ordinary conversational tones thundered across two counties.
Joe Gervais, descendant of an Astor boatman, gravely explained a Bunyanesque feat that he performed along the ocean. The Clatsops and Nehalems, a little tired of their constant warfare with each other, asked him to keep peace between them.
"I put the Clatsops at work on their side," he said, "and the Nehalems at work on the south, moving rocks and dirt. It was slow going ​
because we had to have a solid rock foundation. That required patience to fit the rocks together and yet allow space through the center so that water forced in by the ocean waves would surge up through it and trickle down the mountains, to irrigate the trees which we intended to plant."
When Gervais sighted an elk, he gave directions to his hounds and paddled his canoe home as fast as he could. Scarcely reaching his cabin before the elk would lope into sight, closely followed by the dogs, he would shoot it at his door.
Animals figured largely in pioneer tall tales. A ravenous cougar met a hunter on a mountain trail. When it sprang, the man rammed his hand down its throat, caught it by the tail, deftly flipped it wrong side out, and it tickled itself to death. A bear with a thorn in its paw mutely begged and obtained aid from an Oregonian. Imagine his astonishment the next morning to discover that during the night the grateful animal had brought him two hams and a side of bacon. A farmer in Eastern Oregon, who missed first his hogs, then his ripened corn, learned that bears had killed and cured the hogs and had ricked the corn in a secluded place.
In primitive Curry County areas wild hogs enjoy their porcine Eden, each succeeding generation teaching its young to sleep with heads downhill so that they may escape faster when disturbed by hunters. The first man to discover Chinook salmon in the Columbia, caught 264 in a day and. carried them across the river by walking on the backs of other fish. His greatest feat, however, was learning the Chinook jargon in 15 minutes from listening to salmon talk. Sheepherders claim that they rub tobacco juice in their eyes to keep awake during their long vigils. An erratic early-day sawmill in Union County received a cottonwood log, from which it cut seven thin boards and a wagonload of sawdust. Within three days, the hot sunshine so enlivened the boards that they warped themselves out of the lumber yard and were found a mile away in a neighbor's corral.
An inhabitant of the upper Rogue River, in passing down a narrow trail, shoved a huge boulder from his path. It crashed down the canyon, reached the bottom, and to his amazement, rolled up the other side. It poised on the crest then plunged down again, only to ascend to its original resting place. The native fled. Returning some weeks later, he discovered the rock had cut a new transverse canyon and was still crashing back and forth, as regular as a pendulum.
Frogs and snakes in Klamath County formerly made winter migra​
tions to the south. The trek began in late September, snakes and frogs crawling and hopping along together in such numbers that the procession required two hours to pass a given point. Two long parallel ridges were formed, one of snakes and one of frogs. At ten in the morning a halt was called and a long rest taken. Lumped, entwined, and bunched together during their siesta, they made a mass two feet wide, a foot and a half high, and a mile and a half long. Just before marching formations were resumed, about two o'clock in the afternoon, the hungry snakes gulped down a few of their companion frogs.
During dog days in August a rattlesnake bit Luther King, later featured in Oregon newspapers as Rattlesnake King. The wound upon his leg healed quickly. Twenty years later, in August, the old scar became a running sore. By early September he was well again. The next year in early August the old sore reappeared accompanied by another. Each August thereafter all the old ones and a new one broke out. King believed that when the number of sores equalled the number of rattles, his affliction, which he called the "Serpent's curse," would be removed. The cumulative eruptions upon his leg had reached more than a dozen when he died.
As ingenious as these stories, are those of the labor-saving devices used by early Oregonians. A Lake Creek settler used mouse traps to catch crawfish, while an Umpqua pioneer placed his hog pen where daily tides filled a fish trap with sturgeon for the hogs' food. A southern Oregon farmer broke a breachy horse, not by mending his fallen fences, but by tying an iron nut to the animal's foretop in such a manner that it hit him between the eyes each time he tried to jump.
Other tales that sound incredible have had the backing of reliable report. In 1877 sea pigeons came into the Columbia River in such multitudes that they formed a winging column 15 miles long. A caterpillar migration in Lane County was of such proportions that a Southern Pacific train was stalled when the rails became slick from the quantities crushed. During a cold spell a rancher in the Coast Range could not understand the nightly commotion of his horses out in the barn until he found that shivering cougars, in search of comfort, had been sleeping in the manger. A Siskiyou hunter, who bugled with a cowhorn to disperse his 20 hounds after game, was much annoyed by the coming of the railroad, because his hounds, mistaking the locomotive's whistle for the horn, "would wander on wild chases like the foolish after snipe." In a canyon between Portland and its Cascade watershed the huge wooden pipeline was gnawed by beavers, which ​
were undeterred by the interminable length of the log they set themselves to severing. A village merchant in the Blue Mountains sold, and still sells, snowshoes for horses. Forty feet of cowhide belting used by an early Eastern Oregon sawmill stretched so much that within a week 50 feet had been cut off by installment shortening and 40 feet were still left.
Oregonians of the settler period, like the native tribes before them, were tinged with melancholy, but, unlike the Indians, they trafficked very little with spooks. At Rickreall and a few other places in the Willamette Valley were haunted mills. In Benton County was a hollow locally known as Banshee Canyon tenanted by the ghost of Whitehouse, a suicide. From the old, long- vacated Yaquina Bay Lighthouse came cries from a throat that was not human and light from a place where no light was; it is now occupied as a lookout station by the Coast Guard. A young journalist, while on vacation in the high Cascades, was lured away from his sleeping companions at night by mountain Lorelei, and was never afterwards found, passing into "some sweet life that has no end
Within the Cascades' inner walls,
Where nymphs beyond all fancy fair, Soothe him with siren madrigals
And deck him with their golden hair."
During the gold rush in Jackson County in the 1850'$ money to pay for the new courthouse was obtained from gold panned from the dirt excavated for the basement of the building. "Back yard" mines are still conducted in Jacksonville. One of the town's early churches was built on one night's receipts from the gambling houses. Hardworking men tossed away a year's or a season's earnings in a night at resorts which catered to their tastes. Bartenders swept pennies, proffered in change, to the sawdust floor with a gesture as grandiose as that with which they had tossed away their keys on opening day, a symbol that indicated that their place would never close.
Several accounts of buried wealth have caused much searching and digging. Letters, anchors, dots, and arrows on the rocks of Neah-kah-nie Mountain have long tantalized treasure hunters. Interviews with Indians during the period of settlement yielded varying and fantastic stories of shipwrecks, of a negro who was killed and interred with a chest on the mountain, and of slant-eyed Orientals and swaggering Spanish pirates. Pieces of oriental wood found on the shore, and tons of beeswax dug from the sands, have to a degree verified the stories of the wrecks. ​
Laurel Hill, on the old Barlow immigrant road near Mount Hood, also hides treasure, placed there by a highwayman who murdered his accomplice and buried their loot. Upon his deathbed the outlaw con fessed to his son, who spent several summers trying to find the money, but discovered only the blazes on the cedar he had been directed to seek
When two miners from the Randolph beach mines became appre hensive of robbery, they buried a five-gallon can of gold dust beneath a tree and left the country. Upon returning they found that a forest fire had swept the district. The can of gold, as yet undiscovered, ha^ been sought for years.
The Blue Bucket Mines, said to be located on a swift central Orego.1 stream that is literally pebbled with gold nuggets, have been sought fo seventy-five years. Emigrants, camping for the night on a hazardou* section of Meek's Cut-off, fished in the stream. Yellow pebbles, taken from the stream bed, and hammered flat on wagon tires, served as sinkers in the swift current. Children filled a blue bucket with the stones but all were tossed aside as the train proceeded. Several years later tales of the gold strikes in California renewed discussion of the yellow pebbles, and a wild rush to discover the Blue Bucket Mines ensued They have never been discovered.
Aptness of description, sometimes with a jest, is evident in the names applied to pioneer Oregon localities. Some of this nomenclature persists, but much of it has been discarded by a more polite but less poetic era. Fair Play was so called from the fairness of its horse races. Lick Skillet and Scanty Grease have an obvious origin. Row River was named for neighborhood feuds; Soap Creek for bachelors who had no soap; and Ah Doon Hill for a Chinese who was shanghaied there. Hell's Canyon on Snake River, the deepest chasm in America, is as descriptive of wild grandeur as God's Valley in the Nehalem country is of peace. ​
Huckleberry Cakes and Venison
ASK an old pioneer about his first years in the Oregon country and a reminiscent light comes into his eyes. "Our first years in Oregon? Well, it wasn't so bad. There were venison, fish, and wild game. We had plenty of berries. Our principal dish was boiled wheat or hominy and milk. Used side bacon as a seasoning. Didn't have much salt in those days. Salt was so scarce it was often traded for its weight in gold. The Indians were fairly friendly. Taught us a lot. Oh, yes, my mother used to work pretty hard cooking for our big family, but she never seemed to mind the hardships."
Many an old-timer remembers the revolving table, a common sight in the homes of early settlers. It was a circular, homemade affair about six feet in diameter, like an ordinary table; but attached to a support in the center, about eight inches above the main surface, there was a smaller table-top that could be revolved by hand. Appetizing arrays of food used to grace these curious old tables—loaves of golden bread and plates of butter, brilliantly colored fruits and vegetables, cinnamonbrown gingerbread cakes, fruit pies with rich juices staining the crisp crust, head cheese, fresh or salted meat and fish.
Some of the dishes enjoyed by the pioneers of Oregon have not been prepared for many years; but the recipes for others are carefully preserved, and (with some adaptation to present-day methods and materials) are still followed by many housewives. In the former category is fern pie, thus referred to by George A. Waggoner in his Stories of Old Oregon:
At supper, among other things, we had what I feel assured but few mortals have ever tasted—fern pie. It was made of the tender and nutritious stalks of young ferns, and was very good. Thomas was surprised, but said the Lord was very wise, and had undoubtedly clothed the hills and valleys with the delicious plant in order that the coming generation might be supplied with food, and never be without a supply of good pie. ... I believe these pies are now extinct, and their making a lost art, unless, happily, a recipe has been preserved among the early settlers of Sweet Home valley.
Prominent among the recipes that are still popular is the following, ​
originated some 70 years ago by Mrs. John James Burton, an Oregon pioneer:
MEAT PANCAKES
To a cupful of cold meat add a few raisins, chop the mixture fine and season with salt, paprika, the pulp of a lemon, nutmeg, sugar, and i teaspoon of finely chopped pepper; add an egg and heat the mixture. 3 eggs, a pint of milk, and enough flour to make a thin batter. After beating thoroughly, drop the batter in large spoonfuls on a hot and well greased frying pan. As each cake browns on one side, place some of the meat mixture on it and fold the cake over the mixture. Then place the cakes in another pan containing a little meat-stock and butter, and steam from 5 to 10 minutes.
The wild fruits of the Northwest were much used in early days, as indeed they are now. The huckleberry, blackberry, Oregon grape, elderberry, and serviceberry provided a basis for many delectable dessert dishes. Here is an old iccipe that is still much used:
HUCKLEBERRY GRIDDLE CAKES
Sift together 2 cups of flour, i teaspoon of salt, and il/2 teaspoons of baking powder. Combine with i beaten egg, 11/* cups of sour milk, and i teaspoon of soda. Then add i teaspoon of melted butter and i cup of huckleberries. Bake on hot greased griddle, and serve with syrup or thick huckleberry sauce.
An early western recipe for apple turnovers, named no doubt for some long-departed Mrs. McGinty of culinary prowess, runs as follows:
McGINTIES
Wash i pound of dried apples, removing bits of core and skin, and soak overnight. Next day stew in enough water to cover, and when soft run through a collander. Replace on stove, add enough brown sugar to make the fruit rich and *weet, and cook until thick; then cool and add il/i tablespoons of ground cinnamon. Line a dripping-pan with pie crust, put in fruit mixture and cover with upper crust, gashing the latter slightly to let the steam escape. Press edges of crust together and bake—at first in a hot oven, then reducing the heat. When done cut into diamond-shaped portions, and serve hot with cream.
Sourdough biscuits and prospector's soup were known to every oldtimer who roamed the mountains, valleys, and plains of the West in search of some likely spot in which to stake a mining claim. This is the way they were commonly prepared:
SOURDOUGH BISCUITS
Mix i pint of flour and i teaspoon of salt with i pint of warm water or canned milk. Beat into a smooth batter, and keep in a warm place ​until well
soured or fermented; then add another teaspoon of salt, i^ teaspoons of soda dissolved in half a cup of tepid water, and enough flour to make the dough easy to handle. Knead thoroughly, until dough is no longer sticky, then cut up into biscuits and cook in a pan containing plenty of grease.
PROSPECTOR'S SOUP
Put 2 tablespoons of bacon fat and 3 tablespoons of flour into a saucepan, and stir over a medium fire until the flour is golden brown. Then add i quart of boiling water and a half a can of milk, stirring in slowly until smooth, and season with salt and pepper to taste. An onion may be added to improve the flavor.
Deer once roamed the Oregon woods in countless numbers, and the settler's meat supply was easily replenished at the expense of a charge of powder and lead. The favorite method of cooking venison was by roasting, a method which the housewife of today continues to follow.
ROAST VENISON
Rub a leg or saddle of venison with butter, wrap it in buttered paper and place in roasting pan. Make a thick paste of flour and water, and apply a halfinch coating of this to the paper. Put a pint of water in pan, cover the latter, and roast in a moderately slow oven, allowing 30 minutes of roasting time for each pound of meat and basting every 15 minutes after the first hour. Before serving remove paper wrapping and baste with a sauce of melted butter, flour, salt, and pepper.
Fish from the rivers and coastal waters provided a bountiful food supply for early Oregonians. The Indians depended largely on salmon for their sustenance throughout the year; and today, as for more than a century past, this fish is a staple delicacy. Fresh salmon, split lengthwise and slow-baked in a willow frame before an open fire, according to the Indian method of cooking, has a delicious flavor that modern grills and broilers fail to impart. An old recipe for preparing salt salmon, one that continues to be extensively used, is as follows:
SALT SALMON, PIONEER STYLE
Soak two pounds of salt salmon in fresh water overnight. Next day shred without peeling 6 or 8 potatoes, place the salmon and potatoes in a stew pan, cover with boiling water, and boil until the potatoes are done. Serve in a cream sauce.
A delicacy not to be found on any restaurant menu is smoked native or brook trout. Preparation of this chef-d'oeuvre assumes an ample supply (from 50 to 200 pounds) of freshly caught trout, since the time and ​
labor required in the operations would not warrant dealing with a picayune quantity. The place should be in the mountains where plenty of the right variety of willow for smoking may be secured—Elk Lake, for example. The next step is to build a conical tepee or wickiup of stout green boughs covered with leaves. Then, from the nearby marshes or shores of the lake, loads of young willows are brought by canoe to the improvised smokehouse. When the fish have been suspended inside the structure, a subdued smoky fire of willow twigs is maintained for 24 hours—a task requiring energy, patience, and an optimism that is justified by the results. After the smoked trout are dressed with butter in a hot pan and cooked over glowing camp coals, the gourmand has only to take the final step and eat as heartily as he likes, while the rest of the catch can be conveniently shipped from the mountains to his home.
Coos Bay is noted for its Empire clams, which sometimes weigh four or five pounds each. The large necks of these clams can be split into sections after scraping off the rough outer skin; the sections are then well pounded, dipped in seasoned flour or cornmeal, and fried to a crisp brown. The Indian method of making clam chowder was to soak the clams overnight in a freshwater stream, and then throw them into a hollowed log containing water heated to the boiling point by hot stones. After they had opened, the clams were scraped from their shells and replaced in the water, together with chunks of jerked or smoked venison, dried wild onions, and wapato roots that the squaws had gathered in dry lake beds. An appetizing counterpart of this can be prepared today in a boiler over a driftwood fire, substituting bacon, potatoes, and ordinary onions for the now less accessible minor ingredients used by the Indians.
Another prized marine delicacy is the Columbia River smelt or eulachon (referred to by Lewis and Clark as the anchovy), which is caught in immense quantities each r spring. These little oily fish are commonly fried in their own fat, but a favorite way of serving them on the Pacific coast is this:
Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil or bacon grease in a skillet, and brown therein a small quantity of minced onions, garlic, and green pepper. Add a can of tomato sauce, and let simmer for 5 minutes; then add half a cup of vinegar and cook 2 minutes longer. Meanwhile dredge the smelt in flour, and fry until brown and tender. Place on platter, and pour the sauce over the fish.
It was old Peter Mclntosh, a Canadian, who introduced the fine art of cheese-making to Tillamook County more than half a century ago, and Tillamook has been famous ever since for its American cheddar. ​In his delightful book, The Cheddar Box, Dean Collins writes: "If you follow the trail of the history of cheese in the Pacific Northwest, outside the confines of Tillamook County into southern Oregon, you'll still find Peter McIntosh. . . . And if you'll sit in on a meeting of Alaska sourdoughs talking about the Klondike, you'll hear about McIntosh cheese, which was as yellow as the gold in Alaska, and at times commanded almost ounce for ounce in the mining camps." A delicious cheese sauce for boiled fish, especially halibut, has been originated by the Portland home economics expert, Mary Cullen. Her recipe runs as follows:
   Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in the top of a double boiler, and add 1½ tablespoons of flour, half a teaspoon of salt, and a quarter teaspoon of pepper and paprika. Blend thoroughly, and add gradually 1½ cups of milk. Cook 10 minutes, stirring constantly, then add half a pound of cheese grated or cut into small pieces, and beat with an eggbeater until the cheese is melted. After draining the fish, pour the sauce over it and garnish with parsley and lemon.
Sports and Recreations
THE charms of Oregon have been sung since 1805 when Captain William Clark wrote his vivid description of its ocean shore, mountains, and streams. A few years later William Cullen Bryant in Thanatopsis celebrated the grandeur of its great river and its forests. Today hundreds of miles of highway penetrate the innermost fastnesses of the wilderness; and trails that were formerly seldom trodden have become all-year routes of travel.
The extension of good roads has coincided with a Federal program designed to conserve Oregon's resources for recreation. In 1897 the Federal government took over wide areas of forest land, and later created national forests and opened them to the public. In May 1902 Congress established Crater Lake National Park, and in July 1909 President Taft proclaimed the Oregon Caves a national monument. Within the past few years the U. S. Forest Service has set apart large tracts as recreational and wilderness areas. Its sustained-yield forest policy preserves these great playgrounds for perpetual public uses (see NATIONAL FORESTS).
Angling in the thousands of streams and lakes in all parts of Oregon is one of the state's chief sports. The cutthroat, the rainbow, the Dolly Varden, and the eastern brook trout are the principal game fish, but the one most sought after is the cutthroat, which starts upstream in March or April, when it is very susceptible to a bait of salmon eggs. In summer its taste turns to flies, with an all-season relish for royal coachman No. 10 and a less sustained appetite for March-brown, red-and-blue, upright, and grey hackle.
Men the world over have come to Oregon to fish for the steelhead, king of game fish, torpedo-like on the line. Flies, spinners, and crayfish tails are the enticements to make it strike. The Rogue and the Umpqua, its chief habitat, are at their best from July to October. The Deschutes is a famed trout stream in which flies are used exclusively during all seasons.
Rudyard Kipling has left an exciting account of a day on the Clacka​mas River, matching strength and wits with a battling salmon. The Willamette River below the falls at Oregon City is one of the few places in the world where a fisherman can sit in his boat and calmly wait for salmon to bite. This is possible because of the swift current that carries the lure into the face of the up-river bound salmon. The Columbia, the Nehalem, the Umpqua, and the Rogue have spring runs of Chinook salmon, which are usually lured by No. 4 spinners and wobblers. The autumn runs of Silverside salmon entice anglers to coastal streams and bays.
The State Game Commission maintains sixteen fish hatcheries in all parts of the state at which trout are propagated for the stocking of streams and lakes. At these hatcheries millions of fingerlings are developed each year.
In the lower Columbia and Willamette rivers and in the lakes and bayous of Sauvie Island are bass, crappie, catfish, blue gill, and perch. The Tualatin, the Long Tom, and the Yamhill rivers, as well as many coastal and mountain lakes, are stocked with bass. Many vacationists go deep-sea fishing in small vessels off the coast, or angle with pole and line from the sand or rocks for torn-cod, perch, sea-trout, and flounders. Each year the early spring smelt-runs attract great crowds of visitors to the banks of the Sandy.
At the opening of the hunting season, red-capped and red-shirted men flock to forest, mountain, or field. As many as 12,000 deer—the Columbian blacktailed in the western section and the mule-deer in the eastern and southeastern section of Oregon—are killed annually. Elk or Wapiti are hunted in the Wallowa and Blue Mountain region, but antelope are at present protected by law. On the Hart Mountain Antelope Preserve in the south central part of the state are great herds of this fleet little animal. Timber wolves are few but coyotes plentiful. Bounties have decreased the number of cougars and bobcats, but these animals have by no means entirely disappeared. Cinnamon and black bears are most numerous on the western slopes of the Cascades and in the Coast Range.
The State Game Commission operates five game farms from which are liberated yearly thousands of China and Mongolian pheasants. Geese and ducks are found in the entire drainage area of the Columbia and on the marshes and lakes of southeastern Oregon. In the western valleys and upland pastures are pheasants, quail, bobwhites, and Hungarian partridges, while blue and ruffed grouse inhabit most wooded sections of the state.
​The Canyon Creek game refuge in Grant County has been reserved for bow and arrow hunters. Arrows are inspected for sharpness at a checking station near John Day.
Because of its many sky-piercing peaks and its leagues of forest trail, Oregon is especially appealing to the climber and hiker. There are many mountain-climbing organizations in the state: The Mazamas, the Wy'east Climbers, and the Trails Club of Portland; the Angoras of Astoria; the Obsidians of Eugene; the Chemeketans of Salem; the Skyliners of Bend; the Crag Rats of Hood River, and others, with more than 2,000 members in all. The peak of Mount Hood, with an average of 1,500 ascents a year, is second in mountain-climbing popularity in the world. Hundreds of foot and bridle-trails criss-cross the forested mountain regions. The Skyline Trail, that clings to the summit of the Cascade Range across the entire length of the state, is one of the Nation's most interesting hiking routes.
Thousands enjoy swimming and canoeing in Oregon lakes. Many own motor launches and cruise up and down the rivers and lakes of the state. Towns dotting the Oregon Coast draw throngs of tourists each year. The most popular are Seaside, Cannon Beach, Tillamook County and the Lincoln County beaches. Popular forms of recreation are surf bathing, clam digging, crab raking and netting, deep sea fishing, shell and agate collecting, tennis, and golf. Most Oregon cities have modern pools for residents and visitors.
An annual winter sports carnival is held at Mount Hood each year. The peak is only sixty miles from Portland, and Timberline Lodge, constructed in 1936 by the Works Progress Administration, located on its slope, is easily accessible by automobile and stage (see MOUNT HOOD).
Tobogganing, skiing, snowshoeing, and hiking are the main forms of winter recreation. Winter sports are also held at Three Sisters, west of Bend, in the Cascades east of Eugene and Albany, in the Blue Mountains near La Grande, the Anthony Lakes area near Baker, in the Siskiyous, and in many other sections.
The Pendleton Round-Up, a civic enterprise held in a mammoth arena, is representative of many of its type in the state. Competitive events include racing, broncho-breaking, roping, steer riding, and bulldogging. As a special feature of the Round-Up, Indians come in from the Umatilla Reservation to dance and to re-enact scenes which were once a grim reality to living members of the tribe. In the boxes around ​
the arena many prominent figures of the Old West gather to watch the
revival of activities in which they themselves once participated.
Tennis courts are found everywhere; the larger towns often provide municipal grounds, some of which are flood-lighted for night playing. Twenty-one free public courts in Portland are maintained by the city Bureau of Parks, In or adjacent to Portland are twenty-four golf links and "out-state" are sixty additional courses, most of them located in Western Oregon. Fees are moderate, ranging from 3OC for nine holes to $2 a day.
The state has the usual round of interscholastic and inter-collegiate sports, as well as professional and semi-professional events. The Coliseum of Portland, ice-skating rink, is the home arena of the Buckaroos, members of the Pacific Northwest Hockey League. In summer the Multnomah Civic Stadium is nightly filled with an average of 7,500 dog-racing fans; about 400 greyhounds are brought to Portland for these events from kennels all over the United States. Racing and parimutual betting are legal in Oregon, and from these the state annually collects $60,000 in taxes. Horse races are features of the State Fair at Salem and of various county fairs. ​iiniiiiiiniiiuiiiiiMDiiiiHiiiiiiniimiiiiiiiaiiiiiiHiiiiDiiiiiiiiiiiinim
Social IVelfare
PIONEER Oregon had a simple formula of social welfare: work was provided for those who could work and aid for those who could not. Whatever latter-day society has added to the homespun tradition has been brought forward by trial and error methods in a state which still has vast unexploited natural resources and, theoretically at least, offers more opportunities than many other states.
If the present results of Oregon's efforts to provide aid for the indigent young and old, hospitalization for the physically and mentally ill, and rehabilitation for criminals may seem inadequate in some respects, it should be remembered that most of the state's present social welfare institutions are comparatively young, and were established to complement a robust pre-depression economy.
Few persons in the opulent 1920*5 anticipated the havoc that falling prices and dwindling markets might work upon Oregon's great lumbering and agricultural enterprises, or that "seasonal" work—long a convenient stop-gap measure for spring and summer unemployment — might fail to halt a rising tide of indigence, swollen by the migration of thousands of desperate persons from the drouth areas of the middle west. It is significant that the editor of a prominent newspaper recently questioned the necessity of organization among the unemployed, intimating that opportunity still knocked at every man's door in Oregon, even if not so loudly and insistently as some romanticists would have us believe. In Oregon, as elsewhere, the Federal Government has entered into the relief field upon a tremendous scale, and the number of the unemployed apparently makes the continuation of Federal aid imperative. The achievements of the Federal agencies— the WPA, PWA, NYA, and FSA—are a warm penumbra between the bright accomplishments of Oregonians who have striven to keep alive the best pioneer tradition of mutual help, and the darkness of insufficient relief, the thin slops provided on soup lines, and the county poor farms for the needy aged.
Until the beginning of the present decade, Oregon's legislative assemblies, drawn from a state with many diverse geographical sections ​
gb OREGON
and divergent economic problems, left most public welfare services to be performed by the counties, or by various private agencies. A legislative act of 1913, however, required that counties levy a tax providing assistance to mothers with dependent children. The state had early a workman's compensation act, faulty in the opinion of many persons, because of a clause which permits employers to reject the responsibilities of the measure. Old age pensions which seldom reach maximum payments of $30 a month have been declared inadequate by many sociologists. The state board of health, which has broad powers, cooperates with county and municipal agencies, and seldom operates locally, unless authorities refuse or neglect to enforce ordinances. The board has done yeoman service in Oregon's fight against disease, and its efficiency is reflected by the fact that the state has 9.2 hospital beds for every thousand of population, an enviable rating compared to the national standard of 4.6 beds per thousand.
The excellence of hospital facilities is perhaps the brightest tone of the Oregon social welfare spectrum. While many of the state's 72 hospitals, sanitariums, and related institutions with their total of 10,298 beds, are in Portland, there are modern hospitals in every section of the state except the most remote areas. On Marquam Hill in Portland are a notable group, consisting of the Doernbecher Memorial hospital for children, The United States Veterans hospital and the Multnomah County General hospital which houses the laboratory and class-rooms of the University of Oregon Medical school. Outstanding among denominational general hospitals in the city are: St. Vincent (Catholic), Good Samaritan (Protestant Episcopal), both of which maintain schools for nurses; Emanuel (Lutheran) and the Portland Sanitarium (Seventh Day Adventist). Other modern institutions include the Hahnemann Private Hospital, Portland Medical Hospital, Portland Convalescent Hospital, Sellwood General Hospital, Portland Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital, the Mountain View Sanitarium, the Portland Open Air Sanitarium, and the Shriners Hospital for crippled children. A cooperative hospital is in the process of organization.
Other hospitals of official nature in addition to the Multnomah County hospital and the Veterans institution are the Multnomah County Tuberculosis Pavillion, which cares for indigent persons, the Oregon State Tuberculosis hospital at Salem, a similar institution at The Dalles, and the Morningside hospital at Portland, maintained by the government for the care of mental patients from Alaska.
The Oregon Tuberculosis Association, supported by the sale of penny ​
Christmas seals, is interested in the eradication of tuberculosis by educational methods, early diagnosis, nursing service, promotion of preventive legislation and appropriations for clinical and hospital services. Airs. Sadie Orr Dunbar for many years executive secretary of this organization is now (1940) on leave of absence as national president of the General Federation of Women's Clubs with headquarters at Washington, D. C. The tuberculosis death rate of Oregon has gradually been lessened until it is now among the lowest in the world.
Critics of the State declare that the high percentage of industrial accidents makes the maintenance of numerous hospitals necessary, but constantly diminishing epidemics and low infant and general mortality rates seem to indicate consistent and reasonably thorough efforts to safeguard and improve public health. Oregon has made conscientious attempts to check venereal diseases, through the establishment of clinics for the treatment of gonorrhea and syphilis, and through the passage of a law which requires physical examinations before marriage licenses can be obtained. The state's experiments in the field of cooperative medical care have attracted nation-wide attention, and thousands of persons belong to group health associations, which provide preventive medical service, surgery and hospitalization at low cost.
Conditions in the institutions for the mentally ill are less favorable. Both the Oregon State hospital at Salem and the Eastern Oregon State hospital at Pendleton are overcrowded, and the effect of economic cataclysm is evident in the steadily increasing number of commitments since 1930. These institutions supplanted—and improved—a system under which before the mentally ill were cared for under contract or by a private asylum in Portland. Both hospitals provide educational facilities, medical and dental care, and vocational therapy, as does also the Oregon Fairview Home for feeble-minded and epileptics, located near Salem.
Approximately 2000 children annually receive care in institutions supervised by the State Child Welfare Commission, whose functions, by act of the 1939 legislature, are being absorbed by the State Welfare Commission. The bright record for child welfare has been smudged occasionally by scandals arising from the efforts of certain institutions to regulate placements of orphaned or abandoned children for purposes of profit alone, but these are exceptional cases.
Portland with more than one-third of the state's population, has many child placement organizations, juvenile clinics, orphanages, foundling homes and shelters for unmarried mothers and their children. Out ​
standing is the Albertina Kerr Nursery Home which provides for babies of unmarried or abandoned mothers and for foundlings under five years of age. The Salvation Army offers similar services at its White Shield Home; the Volunteers of America provide an additional place of refuge for deserted or widowed mothers and their children; the Louise Home cares for delinquent girls and for young unmarried mothers and their infants, and also maintains a juvenile hospital for girls afflicted with venereal diseases. In the city and its vicinity there are a dozen institutions which shelter children from infancy to seventeen years of age. Many are non-sectarian; Catholic charitable activities in the Portland Arch Diocese are coordinated under one agency; the Jewish Shelter Home, cares for children between the ages of three and sixteen, and serves also as a placement bureau.
Portland offers social welfare services similar to those afforded in most other metropolitan cities. There are children's clinics, supervised playgrounds and recreational centers within the city, summer camps in the country to which are sent selected children and, occasionally, their mothers from the city's low rent districts. An outstanding contribution to child welfare in Portland is the Fire Department's "milk fund," supported by athletic events, which distributes milk to undernourished pupils in the public schools.
The Portland Community Chest, of which Ralph J. Reed has long been secretary, coordinates the activities of 44 charitable and philanthropic organizations, including many already mentioned here, and through its annual campaigns solicits all or a large portion of the funds upon which their operation depends. The Chest maintains the Portland Council of Social Agencies as a social service planning board representing public and private agencies of the county. Established in 1920, the Community Chest over-subscribed its quota in 1939. Its annual budget, in recent years fully subscribed by Portland citizens, provides for the full scope of activities usual in a Chest program.
The Portland City Bureau of Health maintains an emergency hospital for first aid at the Portland police headquarters. The Women's Protective Division of the Portland police department cooperates with the Bureau. The "Sunshine Division" of the Portland City Police Department has won acclaim by collecting new and used material for distribution to needy families. The Portland Fire Department "Toy and Joy Makers" repair annually great numbers of broken toys donated to the organization for distribution as Christmas gifts.
Oregon's Good Will Industries provide work and wages for aged ​
and otherwise handicapped poor, collecting discarded articles which are refurbished and sold in stores throughout the city.
The Travelers' Aid Society functions in Portland as well as in other metropolitan areas. A legal aid committee of the Oregon Bar Association renders free legal assistance to indigent persons in Multnomah County, while the American Civil Liberties Union acts to safeguard constitutional rights of free speech and assembly.
The Multnomah County Health Unit provides skilled nursing in the home and conducts health education. Indigent soldiers in the county are provided for from the funds raised by a tax levy.
Fraternal orders have established many homes for their aged members in Portland. The Maccabees, the United Artisans, the Odd Fellows, Masonic Orders and the Eastern Star all maintain homes in the state. The Oregon- Washington Pythian Home also serves Oregon, though located at Vancouver, Washington. The Patton and the Mann Homes in Portland provide board and room and general care for men and women under 60. Grandma's Kitchen gives shelter to 300 homeless men and 50 indigent women, besides operating a salvage department and a working girls' home. The First Presbyterian Church Men's Resort in Portland maintains a free reading and writing room.
Operating in Portland are several agencies which give aid to different national groups. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is also active. The American National Red Cross has a number of county chapters in Oregon, the Multnomah County Chapter with 30,000 members being the largest and most active.
Oregon has the usual organizations classed as "character building" institutions including the Young Men's Christian Association, and the Young Women's Christian Association. The 4.H Clubs and the Future Farmers of America are active throughout the state. Boy Scouts and Campfire Girls and Girl Scouts have many active troops.
In the field of penology, Oregon suffers from the lack of a modern and more commodious penitentiary, although the treatment of prisoners is generally humane, and the commonwealth's efforts to rehabilitate criminals equals those of penologists in many other states. Oregon's first penitentiary was established by legislative act of the territorial government in 1851. First located at Portland, it was moved to Salem in 1866.
On January 24, 1939, it housed 1071 inmates, of whom 10 were women. Convicts labor in a prison flax plant, which has developed into an important establishment with the largest scutching plant in the ​
100 OREGON
United States, although regulations are imposed by many commonwealths and foreign nations against the importation of prison-made goods.
The prison magazine Shadows for two successive years (1936-1937) won the Walter F. Gries award, the "Pulitzer Prize of prison journalism." Its title page bears the legend: "A monthly magazine dedicated to those who would salvage rather than destroy," and its purpose is, "to give inmates an opportunity for self-expression; to encourage moral and intellectual improvement among the inmates; and to acquaint the public with the true status of the prisoner." The magazine is available to the general public at $1.00 per year.
The Oregon Prison Association, a private agency conducted by the Pacific Protective Society, does valuable work in maintaining the rights of prisoners and overseeing their welfare following release.
Oregon correctional institutions for youth stress rehabilitation rather than punishment. The Frazier Detention Home of Portland cares for delinquent boys committed by the Department of Domestic Relations. The Oregon State Training School for Boys near Woodburn receives boys 10 to 1 8 years old and gives them training in useful occupations. Girls from 12 to 25 classed as delinquent or incorrigible are sent to the State Industrial School for Girls at Salem. The school provides educational facilities, medical and dental care, and special vocational instruction.
Among the state agencies at Salem, directly or indirectly involved in social welfare are the State Board for Vocational Education, State Board of Eugenics, Oregon Mental Hygiene Society, State Welfare Commission, State Industrial Accident Commission, and the Unemployment Compensation Commission. Also near Salem is the School for the Deaf, which cares for children between the ages of 6 to 21 years who are unable to attend ordinary schools.
The School for the Blind at Salem provides special education for visually handicapped youth. The Blind Trade School includes in its curriculum, broom making, chair caning, and classes in Braille. Dormitories are provided for those living at the school, which is under the jurisdiction of the State Commission for the Blind and the Prevention of Blindness.
The broad program of the Work Projects Administration in Oregon has, through service projects, made substantial contributions to the social welfare of the state. More than fifteen hundred persons are employed upon projects that have a wide range in variety and pointof