If you fancy another kind of cave, Oregon has that for you also. Down in Josephine County there are caves underground in a “mountain of marble”; stalactites and stalagmites theatrically lit, earnest young guides to point out to you the Ghost Chamber, Dante’s Inferno, Bacon Rind, the Onyx Butterfly, Kate and Duplicate and all the other tedious comparisons with which lecturers seek to beguile the public to gaze on nature’s handiwork. Even if you don’t like caves you can be extremely comfortable at the Caves Chateau in that rustic, overstuffed, and pleasant style—all chintz and stone and dark wood—which big resort hotels in the West manage to achieve with such apparent ease.
Surely no country anywhere in America is richer in resources for the weary human who wants to rest and restore himself than are these two states of the North Pacific slope. By boat, by foot, by horseback, by bicycle, and even by car, he can come, within a short distance of any city, to utter solitude and peace. There is such an extravagance of natural beauties that no visitor could possibly cover them all: lakes and rivers and ocean beaches; miles of inland sea; snowcaps and glaciers and alpine meadows; rocky canyons, pine forests, green valleys stream-threaded—it would be hard to choose one favorite kind of landscape from among the wealth that is offered.
SECTION II
Some Places and People
CHAPTER I
Cow Country
Eastern Oregon and Eastern Washington are far more like one another than they are like their respective sister halves, the lush green stretch of seacoast country which the Cascade Mountains separate from the inland. Sometimes when traveling north to south, or south to north, in Oregon and Washington, the sense of homogeneity is so strong that one is apt to think, how sensible it would have been to make these two wet sections one state, and let the dry sections form another. Yet this feeling changes when moving east or west along the mountain passes that separate these two dramatically contrasted landscapes. Then it seems that no matter how sensible it might appear on the maps there must surely be something very valuable in the experience afforded the citizens of these two states, for nature has offered them the chance to understand diverse ways of life produced by sharply contrasted environments.
And in the end one is more than content to leave them as they are.
Eastern Oregon and Washington played their brief but significant part in the colorful drama of the cowboy. Flavorsome Spanish words from the days when California ranchmen penetrated the Oregon country still linger in speech and writing: vaqueros, riatas, rosideros. A description of a real round-up in eastern Oregon in the old days sounds very much like the Southwest:
“They were all well-dressed, showy men, wearing bright colors—all roamers of space in light countries love color, for color is the product of light: the best equipped men for vaquero life of any that ever rode the plains, and they all had the fine, well-trained saddle horses, with silver-mounted bridles, hackamoors, mecates, and riatas. They mostly wore rosideros for the protection of their clothes—a buckskin apron that fits like a tailored pair of pants, tied around the legs with buckskin thongs. . . . Altogether with their wide sombreros and gay colors and good form and fine horses, with the sun shining over it all, it made a picture.”
This is the picturesque side, the theater side, of the days of the big ranches of eastern Oregon. The other side of the picture is not quite so pretty, for it shows some of the methods by which the rich inland grazing country, with its rare combinations of good soil and water supply, fell into the hands of a few greedy men. Land office and court records from Oregon’s Harney County have revealed some of the devices employed—apparently without any marked twinges of conscience—by the cattle barons and absentee landlords to acquire more property than they had any right to: “dummy” entry-men; land falsely described as “swamp” and procured at a dollar an acre; state school lands intended for the use of actual homesteading settlers stolen outright; terrorization of “little” homesteaders by hired thugs, and similar unsavory practices.
Henry Miller, the voracious rancher from California who managed with Charles Lux to acquire some million acres of land and a million head of cattle, owned large holdings in Oregon. One of his most famous acquisitions was the so-called Agency Ranch. At the time of the opening of the country to homesteaders a Miller partner, T. M. Overfelt, made a famous ride of two hundred miles in twenty-four hours—relaying to fresh mounts from ranch to ranch of Miller’s vast private domain—in order to be present at the bidding for this choice stretch of cattle country.
The cattle barons came to be cordially disliked. They were held responsible for retarding settlement in order to keep their holdings intact, and lesser men spoke freely against them. It was all part of a general picture of rugged individualism about which present day pioneer reunion speakers find, however, something favorable to say. A paper read at a Harney County reunion in 1937 sympathetically cited these men as products of their time. “Do not blame them!” adjured the writer. “They believed in:
‘The good old rule, the simple planThat they should take who have the power,And they should keep who can.’”
Although according to Bill Hanley, “the idea of the vaquero never got north of the Blue Mountains or across the Snake River,” Washington too had its big cattle day—if without quite such a Hollywood setting as Oregon’s. Many Washingtonians learn with surprise that the setting for Owen Wister’s The Virginian was not Montana or Wyoming but the Methow Valley in the Okanogan country of the north central section of their state. Wister knew the country through a Harvard classmate, Guy Waring, who went from Newport to the wilds of the Okanogan in the eighties and was known quite simply in all the lonely countryside as “the man at the forks.” Wister’s introduction to Waring’s story My Pioneer Past gives a clear picture of the hardships of travel near the century’s turn in this beautiful region, still little known and not extensively traveled.
Washington also had its full quota of tough hombres who rode the plains. It had, like Oregon, the day of cattle rustling, followed by the day of the vigilantes. There were long treks of cattle, east, north, even west and south. The famous Cariboo trail trip with beef on the hoof into the mining country of British Columbia is the source of many good yarns. Even that standard “thriller” of all western round-ups and rodeos, the feat of throwing a steer which is known as bulldogging, is claimed to have its origin in the state of Washington. In The History of Toppenish (Toppenish is a town in the Yakima Valley), the author has this to say:
“On the day they drove the cattle across the Columbia at Egbert French’s ferry, one of the steers refused to enter the water, whereupon young McCoy threw himself from his horse onto the steer and, grappling his horns, threw him to the ground. This was in about 1866. Alec McCoy believes this was the first instance of bulldogging in the world’s history. He had never heard of its being done before. Several men saw the feat and in later years it was occasionally performed on the reservation range by cowboys of daring inclination.”
There was in the Northwest a certain development of the native Indian horse. Selected “cayuse” brood mares were crossed with American sires to produce the staying qualities needed for western life. The word cayuse came from an Indian tribe called the Cayuses who used to ride along the emigrant trails trading their fresh horses for women’s dresses, household utensils, tools, or cattle. The name is now applied colloquially to any western horse.
In both Oregon and Washington the sheepmen came in on the heels of the cattlemen, and then there were the sheep and cattle feuds—not yet completely settled. There are still killings over range rights in Oregon. When the big ranges began to break up, the cattleman would settle on a creek and turn his cattle up into the mountains. Along would come a sheepman, the sheep would eat the outside grass and move on to another good range. This made