Finally there is this very moment’s drama of hydroelectricity, the Northwest’s great new challenging potential; and along with it, an inseparable part of it—tied up with the promise of reclaimed lands and cheap electricity—the new migrations toward the Pacific; the jalopy caravans of defeated people moving out of exhausted country, moving westward filled with hope and fear.
The geologic history cannot be surpassed for mystery and marvel in all this continent. Where else could one find so varied a record of the action of ancient convulsive forces on the surface of the earth? Snowcapped mountain ranges like the Cascades and the Olympics; mighty rivers like the Snake and the Columbia; mountain passes six thousand feet high connecting Canoe and Horse country; gentle rich western valleys like the Skagit, the Puyallup, the Willamette; vast dryland acreage like the Oregon cattle counties of Malheur and Harney; wheat lands like the Palouse; apple country like the Wenatchee and Yakima, Hood River and the Valley of the Rogue—and all the riddles of lost rivers, dry falls, cones and craters and lava blankets that tease the scientific mind.
Is it to be wondered at that in a country of such scope and richness and dimension the people fell victim to the American weakness of the worship of the Big Thing—dimension admired just for dimension’s sake? Not long ago I saw the first copy of a Junior Historical Quarterly issued by the University of Oregon extension service. In it there appeared an article which showed, by the aid of old maps, that Gulliver’s Land of Giants, the fabled Brobdingnag, was actually the Olympic Peninsula. Swift created this mythical kingdom after reading Hakluyt and Purchas and their tales of the legendary kingdoms of Quivira and Anian which lay along the great unknown western ocean. This same magazine quoted from Harper’s of 1883, “They have discovered footprints three feet long in the sands of Oregon, supposed to belong to a lost race.”
Small wonder the Northwestern myth hero is Paul Bunyan, the logger giant. And in truth the far western country was not built up by weaklings. It took strong men to dare the trip westward in the first place, to accept for themselves and their wives and children seemingly endless hardships and solitude; to hew the great trees and make little clearings in the green gloom of formidable forest; to believe wholeheartedly in the future of dry desert lands; to resist the lure of goldfields south, north, and east; to keep exhausted and homesick women on the track; to exert pressure for wagon roads and later for railroads, adequate defense measures against Indians, representation in the states “back home” and all the rest of it. A Northwesterner who knows his history is always anxious to point out to the inquiring stranger that this country was won for America—in the face of marked indifference at the national capital—by the men who settled it, set up their own government, and prepared if need be to fight to keep it. This way of acquiring territory is unique in the history of America.
There’s a good deal that the descendants of pioneers might well be proud of in this Northwest country, and there are some things of which they should be heartily ashamed: curious prejudices, tendencies to exclusion and bigotry for which today we have created the word Fascist without at all altering the quality of the thing described. The descendant of pioneers is apt to look with a wary and suspicious eye on the somewhat less glamorous pioneers of the present: those migrants from the Middle West who have been pushing westward since 1935 at an estimated one hundred and ninety a day, searching for green land, rainfall, and a future for their children.
Minority groups in the Pacific Northwest—notably Chinese and Japanese—have not had a very happy history. When the Chinaman ceased to be useful as a railroad builder he was no longer welcome, and the shameful way in which he was ousted from coast and inland cities does not make very pleasant reading, although then, as so often today, there was the curious anomaly of the big interest and the liberal pleading together for racial tolerance, while on the other side of the fence stood the little man who was feeling the Chinese wage scale right in his stomach. Today liberal-minded people are already organizing to prevent the occurrence of similar treatment of a minority in the Northwest with the rising tide of anti-Japanese sentiment that now dominates the coast.
In the Pacific Northwest are clearly set forth those powers of destruction and construction by which man affects the land in which he lives. The Northwest country is still too new to hide its scars and shames. Ugly and meaningless waste has followed in the wake of the mining and lumber industries; towns which just “grew” are usually eyesores in a spectacular landscape. In a ghost town along the Eastern seaboard, when the essential industry has closed its doors and departed, the sight is not always immediately shocking or deeply depressive, for there is some rather gentle air of the past lingering about the place; the houses not infrequently possess the graciousness of line and simple dignity that belonged to a slower-paced era, and there are old trees to hide the illness that has fallen upon the community. Most of the dead towns of the Pacific Northwest, on the contrary, are apt to be grotesquely naked and ugly; for they grew up in a period when architecture, along with all the other arts, had died a shameful death. Here is post–Civil War America set forth with little softening detail from a less “commercial” earlier period. There are exceptions of course—towns that grew and died, or faded, with an air: Jacksonville, Oregon, and Port Gamble, Washington.
Yet not all the picture of the Pacific Northwest’s use of resources is a dark or negative one. The great new projects for irrigating land and for generating cheap electricity challenge the imagination with the scope of their promise. But the Northwest country did not have to wait for government help to get its drylands into productivity. Although certain irrigated valleys no longer seem so amazing in the light of the vast program of the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project they do stand as concrete examples of an aphorism from the drylands, “There’s no waste country, only waiting country.” And these same valleys, irrigated for so many years and caught now into far-reaching economic problems of distribution, present two basic American anomalies: the economic insecurity of the man who grows our foodstuffs; the presence of hunger in the midst of plenty.
The Pacific Northwestener—true American that he is—finds it a heady experience to boast of the statistics which the government issues on the Grand Coulee Dam. He feels himself Paul Bunyan indeed when he tells you that man has built a dam on top of which four ocean liners the size of the Queen Mary could be carried with space to spare. But he is beginning to realize that the true story of this enterprise will be told in the uses to which such a gigantic piece of engineering are eventually turned.
The question of what will happen to the states of the Last Frontier is tied close to the heart of the American dream—and when one reads the history of this country there seems little reason to doubt that there was a dream. In the Pacific Northwest one might truly say the dreamer and the awakened one face each other.
What has drawn and still draws people to this country, and so often holds them there, is not alone the economic and social advantages offered by land that is still “open.” It is something with a deeper and less tangible pull. The landscape itself beckons. The eye is always being stretched to the tops of high peaks and tall trees, across golden deserts to purple hill slopes, around bends in great rivers and turns of the magnificent coast highways where great waves break far out on the solitary rocks of an old shoreline. Nature is inescapable in this part of the world. The Pacific Northwesterner carries snapshots of his “view” around with him along with pictures of his wife and children. Real estate agents have long recognized the selling force of “view lots” which make up in distant glimpse of mountain, lake, river, or sea for any possible inconveniences in transportation facilities. Nowhere do cities lie so close to scenes of breathtaking beauty, ringed round with shining water and snowcapped peaks. Even in the eastern drylands nature forces the sense of her power and mystery into the human consciousness with the