Whatever your feeling about sheep you’ll see plenty of them along the highways in the early spring and autumn in the eastern part of Oregon and Washington. The presence of so many sheep is not the only change that an old-timer would notice coming back to this land which was for so many years a “resting place for Space.” Water has been brought to the desert, and the traveler’s eye falls pleasantly on stretches of new green, round which communities are springing up as the irrigation projects from the gigantic dams get under way. In certain shallow valleys among the barren hills, trees offer rich yield of fruits. Maps are dotted with town names slowly increasing the size of their type as their population increases.
I find it restful to look at a map and see big stretches of land with only an aimless thread of road winding in a vast empty space. Washington does not have such peaceful big stretches anymore. Almost fearfully each year I look at those white spaces where the Washington map says only Sand Dunes, The Pot Holes, Strawberry Butte, Bald Knob, the Colville Indian Reservation, and I wonder when the little “-villes” and “-tons,” the Junctions and Corners, are going to creep in with their ominous small blue lettering. Eastern Oregon is more reassuring. Malheur and Harney Counties remain relatively uncluttered. There are only a few names to conjure with around the Malheur Bird Refuge or the Hart Mountain Antelope Refuge. The names all make a picture to one who has traveled this country, joyously accepting the bumps and ruts, on the way to Blitzen or Frenchglen, or down into the Basque country farther toward the east. Horsehead Mountain, says the map, Alkali Lake; springs named for Mules, Skulls, and Buzzards; Coyote Wells; the mountains, Juniper, Little Juniper, Stinking-water, and Sheepshead. The name Wagontire recalls days when the presence of one in the vast indifference of the desert was a landmark spelling tragedy. The word Malheur cropping up in river and lake and county is a reminder of the French voyageur. The many Owyhees keep alive the memory of the days over a century ago when Hawaii was spelled Owyhee, and was a regular port of call for ships bound to the Northwest coast. Your directions in this part of the country are from ranch to ranch: Whitehorse, Alvord, Folly Farm. This is truly the Old West.
One of the most enjoyable ways to enter eastern Oregon is over the McKenzie Pass from Eugene into Bend and so along Route Fifty-four. This drive offers all the contrasts possible to this Northwest land—excepting only the sea coast. One sets out from Eugene, lying in the gentle valley of the Willamette, a university town, ringed round with blue hills and blue rivers, and goes climbing up along the roaring cool McKenzie, through a beautiful stand of virgin timber, to the summit where the lava beds stretch their bleak length incongruously through the green country, best seen in early evening when the light plays fanciful tricks with the forms and tones of this ancient cataclysm. Down then from the peak slowly through the wide-spaced pinkboled pines, onto the eastern plain where the mountains rise in solitary splinters from the desert floor.
Given a few days in and around Bend, including the beautiful Metolius country where even word-weary advertising men find themselves writing poetry; out and down as far as the Basque country of Jordan Valley, or to the section of the old big ranches like the famous P Ranch of Pete French; then to Klamath Falls, Medford, Ashland, Crater Lake; north and east to the Snake River Canyon, to Enterprise and La Grande, Baker and Pendleton, up to the John Day country; back finally to the Columbia River and along its barren rocky palisades until they begin to turn green with trees, and you’ll have some sense of the enchantment of inland Oregon.
CHAPTER II
Farewell Bend
Bend isn’t a typical Oregon town—if there is such a thing as a typical Oregon town—and yet it is a town which only the Pacific Northwest—perhaps even only Oregon—could produce. Its citizens range from the distinguished and handsome Mr. Sawyer, with his Harvard accent, who publishes the Bend Bulletin, to Klondike Kate, a “convent-bred” lady now well on in years who was once the diamond-bedecked toast of Dawson. Klondike Kate is married now to an Alaskan sourdough named Matson who admired her from a distance for thirty years. She came to reside in Bend because she saw some pictures of it in a movie travelogue and liked the look of it.
Bend does have a nice look. Although it is a mill town, living off lumber, its streets are clean, charming, well laid out along a little park where water fêtes are given annually on an artificial lake. All around Bend lies a famous recreation area of lakes, rivers, and mountains, ski slopes, trout streams, geologic riddles to confound scientists. Regional planning councils give Bend just about ten more years before its adjacent lumber supply is exhausted—unless it adopts some “sustained yield” program to save the timber resources. Will it turn to pulp for salvation, as many similar Northwestern communities have done; or to something newer like rayon? Will it discover mineral resources? Will it die slowly and become a ghost community? . . . When such questions confront a town as lively as Bend one comes suddenly and sharply to an understanding of the dark problems that this whole Northwest region poses.
Many Easterners have been identified with Bend; notably, however, not many of those who trekked through here on their way to the fertile Willamette in the fifties and sixties of the last century. These travelers looked back with recorded reluctance at the green stretch beside the river and named the place somewhat whimsically, Farewell Bend, because of the curve the river made there. But these weary folk were tired of barren hills. They wanted green slopes and verdant valleys, damp underfoot; so they pushed on, and it was not until the late nineteenth century that Bend became a town.
In the early 1900s irrigation came, and shortly afterward the lumber interests found the place. Tom Shevlin, the football hero from Yale, came in 1915 to build the Shevlin-Hixon sawmill. George Palmer Putnam came to edit the paper. People in Bend are fond of telling how Mrs. Putnam tried to break her husband of the habit of dropping his clothes on the floor wherever he stepped out of them. (I’m sure Bend didn’t have in those days, and hasn’t now, any human creature you could conceivably call a servant.) Mrs. Putnam, it is related, would take hammer and nail and pound George’s clothes into the boards wherever she happened to find them lying.
Out of experience in the pine forests around the town, Paul Hosmer got the material for his book Now We’re Loggin, which paints, with the exaggeration and gusty humor proper to logging vocabularies, a picture of the various types of jobs and human beings which keep the lumber industry going. I can’t resist Mr. Hosmer’s theory on the decline of the old-time lumberjack:
“A few years ago one could always tell a real lumberjack at a glance. There never was much room for doubt about him. If, through error, you should mistake him for an actor, a farmer or what have you, it was his playful habit to correct you at once by pulling your hat down over your eyes with his left hand and rapping you smartly on the chin with his right, after which he would carelessly toss you into the log pond before proceeding on his more important business of depleting the available liquor supply, which always seemed to pile up on him during his enforced stay in the woods through the winter. He was garbed in raiment peculiar to his calling—stagged pants, a little round hat from which the bloom of youth had long since departed, and a noisy, passionate shirt of many checks and colors. The shirt was always worn outside the trousers, like a Chinese laundryman. It was a half an inch thick and so scratchy that the ordinary human began to itch all over the minute he got into the same room with it. Lastly, he had on a pair of logger’s shoes with half-inch caulks in the soles—‘corks’ in the woods—the most devastating thing in the line of footwear ever devised by man. Corked shoes were to the lumberjack what a tail is to a monkey; in other words, without them he wouldn’t be much of anything and couldn’t go any place. They served two or three purposes. For one thing they enabled our hero to earn an honest livelihood by spending fourteen