“Arcady—the home of piping shepherds and coy shepherdesses, where rustic simplicity and plenty satisfied the ambition of untutored hearts and where ambition and its crimes were unknown.”

Some pamphlet writer with a gift for turning phrases has called Oregon “The Land That Lures.” And, so far as home and fortune seekers are concerned, it is. Whether it is the spirit of romance that our people have always associated with the great Northwest; whether it is the glamour of its booming rivers and its silent, axe-ripe forests or the appeal of its soft and balmy climate; or whether it is the extraordinary opportunities it offers for the acquirement of modest fortunes before one is too old to enjoy them, I do not know, but the undeniable fact remains that no region between the Portlands exercises so irresistible a fascination for the man who knows the trick of coaxing a fortune from the soil as this great, rich, hospitable, unfenced, forest-and-mountain-and-stream, meadow-and-orchard-and-home land that stretches from the Columbia south to the Siskiyous. It may be that California holds more attractions for the man who has already made his fortune, but certainly Oregon is the place to make the fortune in. No Western State is essentially less “Western” in the accepted sense of the term. This is due in part, no doubt, to the fact that it has been longer settled by Americans than any other portion of the Pacific Coast. Portland was a thriving city, remember, when St. Paul and Minneapolis were little more than trading-posts on the frontier. Settlers from the Atlantic seaboard and from the Middle West find themselves, upon reaching Oregon, in the midst of “home folks” and all the friendly, kindly, homely things that the term implies: ice-cream sociables and grange meetings and church picnics and literary societies and debating clubs and county fairs. The name of the State capital is inseparably associated with Puritan New England, one of its largest cities is named after the Massachusetts town which gave its name to rum, and I can show you a score of towns whose peaceful, elm-shaded streets and white-porticoed, red-brick houses might almost—but hot quite—deceive you into thinking that you are in Cooperstown, N. Y., or Newburyport, Mass., or Biddeford, Me. Almost, as I have said, but not quite, for all of these Oregonian towns, despite the staidness and sobriety of their appearance, are animated by an enthusiasm, an up-to-dateness, by an unshakable faith in their future, that is essentially a characteristic of the West.

The orthodox way of entering Oregon from the south is by way of Ashland, Medford, and Grant’s Pass, and so northward, through Roseburg and Eugene and Albany and Salem, to Portland. But, as I have related in the preceding chapter, we deliberately chose the back-stairs route, crossing the California-Oregon line at Klamath Lake and motoring northward, along the trail of the Lewis and Clark expedition, via Crater Lake and the valley of the Deschutes to The Dalles, and thence down the Columbia to Portland. We prided ourselves on having thus obtained an extraordinarily comprehensive idea of the State and its resources, not to mention having traversed a region which is quite inaccessible to the tourist unless he travels, as we did, by motor-car, but when we came to talk with some people from western Oregon we found that we didn’t know nearly as much about the State as we thought we did.

“How did you find the roads in the Willamette Valley?” inquired a friend with whom we were dining one night in Portland.

“We haven’t seen the Willamette Valley,” I explained. “You see, we came round the other way.”

“I suppose you’ve been down to Salem, though—nice city, Salem.”

“No,” I was forced to admit, “we haven’t been to Salem.”

“What did you think of the Marble Halls? Many people claim they’re finer than the Mammoth Cave.”

“The Marble Halls? Where are they? What are they? I never heard of them.”

“I suppose you had some fine fishing in the Grant’s Pass country. I hear that the trout are running big down there this season.”

“No, we didn’t come through Grant’s Pass.”

“Well, you surely don’t mean to tell me that you didn’t visit the Rogue River Valley—the apple-cellar of the world?”

“Sorry to say we didn’t.”

“Nor the valley of the Umpqua?”

“No.”

“Well,” after a long and painful pause, “what in the name of Heaven have you seen?”

“I think,” said I, turning to the others, “that the thing for us to do is to turn the car south again and see Oregon. Else we shall never be able to hold up our heads and look an Oregonian in the eye. The thousand miles or so of the State that we’ve just come through apparently don’t count.”

Though I made the remark facetiously, it contained a good-sized germ of truth. Just now the back country of Oregon, the hinterland, as our Teutonic friends would call it, doesn’t count for very much. It is going to count tremendously, mind you, in the not far distant future, when the railroads now under construction have opened it up to civilisation and commerce and when it is settled by the European hordes that will pour into it through the gateway of Panama. As things stand at present, however, the wealth and prosperity of Oregon are concentrated in that comparatively narrow but incredibly fertile zone which lies between the sea and the mile-high mountain wall formed by the Cascades, and whose farms and orchards are watered by the Willamette, the Umpqua, and the Rogue.

It was one of those autumn days so characteristic of the Pacific Northwest, which seem to be a combination of an Italian June and a Devonshire September, when we slipped out of Portland’s rush and bustle and turmoil and turned our front tires toward the south and the open country. For a dozen miles or more our road, built high on the hill slope above the broad reaches of the lower Willamette, commanded as entrancing a vista of beautiful homes as I have ever seen. For six solid miles south of Portland the banks of the Willamette are bordered by country houses of shingle, stone, and stucco, rising from the most beautiful rose gardens this side of Persia (Portland, you know, is called “The City of Roses”) and with shaven lawns sweeping gently down, like unrolled carpets, to the river’s edge. Through gaps in the screen of shrubbery which lines the highway we caught fleeting glimpses, as we whirled past, of vine-covered garages housing shiny motor-cars, while along the river front were moored lean power-boats, every line of them bespeaking speed, for those who are fortunate enough—and wealthy enough—to own homes upon the Willamette are able to run in to their offices in the city either by road or river. Far in the distance the Fujiyama-like cone of Mount Saint Helens rose above the miles of intervening forest, and, farther to the southward, the hoary head of Mount Hood. About this portion of residential Portland which lies along the banks of the Willamette there is a suggestion of the Thames near Hampton Court, a hint of the Seine near Saint Cloud, a subtle reminder of those residences which have been built by the rich of Budapest along the Danube, but most of all it recalls Stockholm. This is due, I suppose, to the proximity of the forests which surround the city, to the snow-capped mountains which loom up behind them, and to the ever-present scent of balsam in the air.

It is fifty miles or thereabout from Portland to Salem, which is the capital of the State, and when the roads are dry you can leave one city after an early dinner and reach the other before the theatre curtains have gone up for the first act. After a rain, however, it is a different matter altogether, for the roads, which leave a great deal to be desired, are for the most part of red clay, and so slippery that a car, even with chains on all four wheels, slips and slides and staggers like a Scotchman going home after celebrating the birthday of Robert Burns. Salem is as pleasing to the eye as a certified cheque. It is asphalted and electric-lighted and landscaped to the very limit. Though the residential architecture of the city shows unmistakable traces of the influence of both Queen Anne and Mary Anne, their artistic deficiencies are more than counter-balanced by the pleasant, shady lawns and the broad, hospitable piazzas, which seem to say to the passer-by: “Come right up, friend, and sit down and make yourself to home.” That’s the most striking characteristic of the place—hospitality.

The gates of the State Fair were thrown open the same day that we arrived in Salem, though I do not wish to be understood as intimating that the two events bore any relation to each other. Now, a fair is generally a pretty reliable index to the agricultural condition of a region. The first thing that strikes the visitor upon entering the gates of a New England fair is the extraordinary number of ramshackle, mud-stained, “democrat” wagons lined up along the fence, the horses munching contentedly in their nose-bags. The first thing that struck me as we entered the grounds of the Oregon State Fair was the extraordinary number of shiny new automobiles. Save en route to a Vanderbilt Cup Race, I don’t recall ever having seen so many motor-cars on one stretch of road as we encountered on our way to the fair-grounds. They made a noise like the droning of a billion bumblebees. Though there was, of course, a preponderance of little cars, there were also any number of big six-cylinder seven-passenger machines, for your Oregonian is nothing if not up to the minute. Instead of jogging in from the farm in rattletrap wagons, they came tearing down the pike in shiny, spick-and-span automobiles; pa at the steering-wheel, hat on the back of his head and whiskers streaming, ma in her new bonnet sitting proudly beside him, and grandma and the youngsters filling up the tonneau. It did my heart good to see them. There is an intangible something about a motor-car that seems to give the most hidebound old farmer in the community a new lease of life. A year or so ago a weekly magazine published a picture of a group of cars at some rural gathering in the Northwest, and unwisely labelled it: “Where the old cars go to.” It elicited a wave of indignant letters from automobile dealers and automobile owners in that section of the country that made the editor feel as though he had stepped on a charged wire. That gentleman learned, at the cost of several cancelled subscriptions, that, wherever else the second-hand cars go, they certainly do not go to the Northwest, whose people might well take as their motto: “The best is none too good for us.”

Your Oregonian farmer, unlike his fellows in the older, colder States, is neither hidebound nor conservative. He has no kinship with the bewhiskered, bebooted, by-gum and by-gosh hayseed made familiar by the comic papers and the bucolic dramas. Instead of shying from a new-fangled device as a horse does from a steam roller, he promptly gives it a trial and, if it makes good, he adopts it. He milks his cows and makes his butter by electricity, orders his groceries from the nearest town and asks for the baseball score by telephone, goes to church and to market in his motor-car, and passes his evenings with the aid of a circulating library, a pianola, and a phonograph. It did not take me long to find out that Oregon is as progressive agriculturally as it is politically. If the farmer does not succeed in Oregon it is because he has been hypnotised by those siren sisters, Obstinacy and Laziness; for if he is ignorant, the State stands ready to educate him; if he is perplexed, it stands ready to advise him; and if he gets into trouble, it stands ready to assist him. In other words, it wants him to make good, and it isn’t the fault of the State if he does not. For this purpose it maintains, in addition to the State Agricultural College at Corvallis, which is one of the most completely equipped institutions of its kind in the world, six experimental farms which are geographically distributed so as to meet practically every condition of agriculture found in Oregon. Two extensive demonstration farms are maintained, moreover, by business interests, and there is an enormous amount of agricultural co-operative work among the farmers themselves, so that if a man is in doubt as to whether he had better go in for Jerseys or Holsteins, for White Wyandottes or Plymouth Rocks, for Spitzenbergs or Newtown Pippins, all he has to do to obtain expert advice is to ask for it.

It is an undeniable fact that at most fairs in the East, and at a great many in the West, for that matter, the wheel-of-fortune, the ring-and-cane, and the three-balls-for-a-dime-and-your-money-back-if-you-hit-the-coon concessionaires, the fat woman, the living skeleton, the bearded lady, and the wild man from Borneo, to say nothing of the raucous-voiced venders of ice-cold-lemonade-made-in-the-shade and red-hot-coney-islands-only-a-nickel-half-a-dime, serve to distract both the attention and the shekels of the rural visitors from the legitimate exhibits. It seemed to me that the farmers and fruit growers who came pouring into the Salem fair were there for purposes of education rather than recreation. They seemed to take the fair seriously and with the idea of obtaining all the information and suggestions that they could from it. Eager, attentive groups surrounded the lecturers from the State Agricultural College and constantly interrupted them with intelligent, penetrating queries as to soils, grafting, fertilisers, insect sprays, and the like, while out in the long cattle sheds the men who are growing rich from milk and butter talked of Aaggie Arethusa Korndyke Koningen Colantha Clothilde Netherland Pietertje’s Queen of the Dairy IV and of Alban Albino Segis Pontiac Johann Hengerveld’s Monarch of the Meadows (the bearer of this last resonant title proving, upon investigation, to be a wabbly-kneed three-weeks-old calf) as casually as a New Yorker would refer to Connie Mack or Caruso or John Drew.

We went to the fair, as I have already intimated, for the primary purpose of getting a line on rural conditions as they exist in Oregon; but that did not prevent us from doing things which visitors to county fairs have done ever since county fairs began. We tossed rings—three-for-a-dime-step-right-this-way-and-try-your-luck-ladies-and-gents—over a bed of cane heads so temptingly thick that it seemed it would be only by a miracle that you could miss one, and after spending a dollar in rings the Lady won a bamboo walking-stick which she could have bought for ten cents almost anywhere and which she didn’t have the remotest use for, anyway. We tried our luck at breaking clay pipes in the shooting-gallery, and, in spite of the fact that the sights on my rifle had been deliberately hammered a quarter of an inch out of line, I succeeded in winning three dubious-looking cigars, to the proprietor’s very great astonishment. Had I smoked them I should not have survived to write this story. Then we leaned over the pig-pens and poked the pink, fat hogs with the yard-sticks which some enterprising advertiser had forced upon us; in the art department we gravely admired the cross-stitched mottoes bearing such virtuous sentiments as, “Virtue Is Its Own Reward,” and “There’s No Place Like Home,” and the water-colour studies of impossible fruit perpetrated “by Jane Maria Simpkins, aged eleven years.” Then we went over to the race-track and hung over the rail and became as excited over the result of the 2.40 free-for-all as we used to be in the old days at Morris Park before the anti-racing bill became a law. In fact, I surreptitiously wagered a dollar with an itinerant book-maker on a sixteen-to-one shot, on the ground that, as the horse had the same name as the Lady, it would surely prove a winner—and lost. Not until dark settled down and the lights of the homeward-bound cars had turned the highway into an excellent imitation of the Chicago freight yards did we climb into the tonneau again, sticky and dusty and tired, and tell the driver to “hit it up for the nearest hotel.”

From Salem to Eugene, down the pretty and well-wooded valley of the Willamette, is seventy odd miles as the motor goes, and the scenery throughout every mile of the distance looks exactly like those pictures you see on bill-boards advertising Swiss chocolate or condensed milk—I forget which: black cows with white spots, or white cows with black spots, grazing contentedly on emerald hillsides, with white mountains sticking up behind; rivers meandering through lush, green meadows; white farmhouses with red roofs and neat, green blinds peering out between the mathematically arranged orchard rows. But always there are the orchards. No matter how wide you open your throttle, no matter how high your speedometer needle climbs, you can’t escape them. They border the road on both sides, for mile after mile after mile, and in the spring, when they are in blossom, the countryside looks as though it had been struck by a snow-storm—and smells like Roger & Gallet’s perfumery works.

When I visited the Southwest the horny-handed farmer folk would meet me when I stepped from the train and whirl me incredible distances across the desert to show me a patch of alfalfa—“the finest patch of alfalfa, by jingo, in the whole blamed State!” In Oregon they did much the same thing, except, instead of showing me alfalfa they showed me apples. Up north of the Siskiyous, they’re literally apple drunk. They talk apples, think apples, dream apples, eat apple dumplings and apple pies, drink apple cider and apple brandy and applejack. Even their women are apple-cheeked. You can’t blame them for being a trifle boisterous about their apple crops, however, when you see what the apple has done for Oregon. I was shown one orchard of forty-five acres whose crop had sold the preceding year for seventy-five thousand dollars. Another orchard of but eight acres brought its owner sixteen thousand dollars. Five hundred trees yielded another man five thousand dollars. And I could repeat similar instances ad infinitum. They assured us in Medford that the apple cellars at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle always contain barrels stencilled “Grown in Oregon”—which is, I believe, a fact—and, though they didn’t say so in so many words, they intimated that when King George feels the need of a bite after a court ball or some equally arduous function, he lights a candle and shuffles down the cellar stairs in his dressing-gown and slippers and gropes about until he finds an Oregon-grown Northern Spy or a big, green Newtown Pippin.

Oregon’s success in apple growing—a success that has headed the pioneer northwestward as the gold craze of ’49 started the frontiersman Californiaward—is the joint product of work and brains. Where New England has given up all thought of saving her orchards, Oregon, by tincturing labour with scientific knowledge, has founded an industry which is doing for the State what wheat did for the Dakotas, what gold did for California. What happened to the orchards all through New England? There was enough hard work put into them, Heaven knows. The old New England farmer and his wife slaved to the bone and were eventually trundled away to the insane asylum or the cemetery from overwork, from devotion to the arid soil. The orchards of New England have been watered with blood and sweat and fertilised with blasted hopes. The young men were away in the universities acquiring scientific knowledge and learning how to apply that knowledge on the farms, and it never occurred to the old men that the wearied soil needed some encouragement, some strengthening, some vivifying, even as their spirits did, to bring material and spiritual prosperity. And Oregon has taken to heart and is profiting by the pathetic example of the New England farmer.

It is approximately four hundred miles as a motor goes from the Columbia to the California line and, as our object was to see the country, we spent upward of a week upon the journey, stopping as our fancies dictated to cast for trout in the swirling rivers, to gossip with village folk and farmers, and sometimes just to lie on our backs on inviting hillsides and smoke and chat and throw pebbles at inquisitive squirrels and watch the sunbeams filter through the foliage of the trees. That’s where the true joy of motoring comes in: to be able to stop when and where you please, without the necessity of having to give any why or wherefore, and, when you grow weary of one place, flying on again until you find another that tempts you. I have never been able to comprehend why those speed maniacs who tear through the country so fast that the telegraph-poles look like palings in a picket fence bother with automobiles at all; they could travel quite as fast in a train and ever so much more comfortably.

From Eugene our course lay south, due south through a bountiful and smiling land. We tore down yellow highroads between orchard rows as precisely placed and uniform as ranks of Prussian grenadiers; we flashed past trim farmhouses overshadowed by huge hip-roofed barns which seemed to be bursting with produce, as, in fact, they were; we rolled through villages so neat and clean and happy that they might have served as models for the street-car advertisement of Spotless Town; we spun along the banks of sun-flecked rivers whose waters were broken by trout jumping hungry for the fly; we boomed down forest roads so dim and silent that we felt as though we were motoring down a cathedral nave; Diamond Peak and the white-bonneted Three Sisters came into view and disappeared again; until at last, churning our way up the tortuous road that climbs the Umpqua Range, we looked down upon the enchanted valley of the Rogue.

Imagine a four-hundred-thousand-acre valley, every foot of which is tilled or tillable, protected on every side by mountain walls—on the east by the Cascades, on the west by the Coast Range, on the north by the Umpqua chain, and on the south by the Siskiyous; and meandering through this garden valley, watering its every corner, the winding, mischievous, inquisitive Rogue. It is indeed a beckoning land. But mind you, it is not a get-rich-quick land. It is a work-like-the-devil-and-you’ll-become-prosperous country. The soil and the climate will do as much for the farmer, perhaps more, than anywhere else in the world, but he must do his share. And no one should buy a ticket to Oregon expecting to find immediate employment in any line. Jobs are not lying loose on the streets, waiting for some one to come along and pick them up, any more than they are in Chicago or New York. I doubt very much, indeed, if the workingman with no other capital than his two hands has much to gain by emigrating to Oregon. Large projects, it is true, require many labourers, and these openings often present themselves; but the means of bringing in workmen are just as cheap and rapid as in other sections of the country, so it need not be expected that there would be any great difference in wages. The chief advantages that Oregon offers to labouring people without sufficient accumulations to give them a start are: a mild and equable climate, an absence of damaging storms, a certainty of crops, and opportunities as good, though perhaps no better, than any other State. If, however, he has been able to accumulate anywhere from a thousand to three thousand dollars, he is then in a position to avail himself of the innumerable opportunities which exist for men of small capital. Such men will find their best opportunities in buying a few acres of land, building a modest home upon it, and then “going in,” as the English say, for fruit growing or poultry raising or dairying or market-gardening. As sawmills are as plentiful in Oregon as pretty women are on Fifth Avenue, and as the State contains one fifth of all the standing timber in the country (you didn’t know that, did you?) lumber is extraordinarily cheap, the cost of the material for a comfortable four-room farmhouse, for example, not running to more than one hundred and fifty dollars. It is a mistake for the intending emigrant to count on getting a farm under the terms of the Homestead Act, for, though the total government lands open to homestead entry in Oregon are greater in area than the entire State of West Virginia, they are, for the most part, in the least desirable portions of the State and the settler who occupied them would have to pay the price incident to life in a remote and semicivilised region. On the other hand, excellent land, within easy reach of towns and railroads, can be had in the valleys of western Oregon all the way from fifty to one hundred and fifty dollars an acre, and this would, I am convinced, prove the best investment in the end.

There is no space to dwell at any length on the towns of western Oregon—Salem, Eugene, Roseburg, Drain, Grant’s Pass, Medford, Ashland. All of these towns have paved streets lined with comfortable and homelike residences and remarkably well-stocked shops; up-to-the-minute educational, lighting, and sewage systems; about double the number of parks, hotels, garages, and moving-picture houses that you would find in towns of similar size in the East; and boards of trade and chambers of commerce with enough surplus energy and enthusiasm to make a booster out of an Egyptian mummy. In most of these towns prohibition reigns, and, though, to be quite truthful, I am not accustomed to raise an admonishing hand when some one uncorks a gilt-topped bottle, I repeatedly remarked the fact that they were cleaner, quieter, more orderly—in short, pleasanter places to live—than those whose streets are dotted by the familiar swinging half-doors. That prohibition has done no harm to business is best proved by the fact that the very merchants who in the beginning were its most bitter assailants have become its most ardent advocates. After comparing the “dry” towns of Oregon to the “wet” ones—say, in the vicinity of Bakersfield, in California—it seems to me that, so far as the smaller rural communities are concerned, at least, there is only one side to the prohibition question.

Thirty miles from Grant’s Pass, in the fastnesses of the Siskiyous, are the recently discovered mammoth caves, which some genius in the art of appellation has christened “The Marble Halls of Oregon.” It needed an inspiration to conceive a name like that! Such a name would induce one to make a trip to see a hole in a sand-bank. As a matter of fact, these Oregonian caverns are decidedly worth the journey. Though they are very far from having been completely explored, sufficient investigations have been made to prove conclusively that they are much superior, both in size and beauty, to the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, a visit to which was considered as essential for every well-travelled American half a century ago as to have seen the Virginia Natural Bridge and Niagara Falls.

Oregon, with its fish-filled streams, its game-filled forests, and its coast-line rich in bays and coves and beaches, possesses all the requisites for one of the world’s great playgrounds, but some years must pass before it will possess the luxuries demanded by that class of summer vacationists who travel with wardrobe trunks. With less than one fifteenth of its sixty odd million acres under cultivation, it is still to a great extent a frontier region, with many of a frontier’s crudities and discomforts and, for a man who knows and loves the open, with all of a frontier country’s charm. I am perfectly aware, of course, that the farmers who are growing such amazing quantities of big, red apples in the valleys of the Hood and the Rogue and the real-estate boosters who are so frantically chopping town sites out of the primeval forest within cannon-shot of Portland will resent the statement that this is still a frontier country; but it is, nevertheless, and will be for a number of years to come. Barring the system which parallels the coast from north to south and the one which cuts across its northeast corner, there are no railways in Oregon; the scantiness of population and the peculiarly savage nature of a great portion of the country having offered few inducements to the railroad builders. This condition is changing rapidly, however, for the transcontinental systems which enter the State are working overtime to give it population, cities and towns and villages are springing up like mushrooms along its many waterways, the vast grants held by the railway and trading companies and by the pioneers are gradually being cut up into small farms, and a rural situation is being slowly created which is bound to effect a marked change in the conditions which have heretofore prevailed. But it has not yet, thank Heaven, reached that stage of civilisation which is characterised by summer hotels with miles of piazzas and acres of green lawns and oceans of red-and-white striped awnings. Taking the place of these sophisticated and ostentatious summer resorts are the unpretentious inns and camps and summer colonies which are sprinkled along the Oregon shore from the mouth of the Columbia to the California line.

The easiest way to reach this summer land is to take the little jerk-water railroad which meanders eastward from Hillsboro, a main-line townlet fifty miles or so south of Portland, through Tillamook County to the sea. For many miles the train follows the tumultuous Nehalem, stopping every now and then, as the fancy seems to strike it, at shrieking sawmills or at groups of slab-walled loggers’ shacks set down in clearings in the forest, where bearded, flannel-shirted men come out and swap stories and tobacco with the engineer. After a time the woods begin to dwindle into tracts of stumps and second-growths, and these merge gradually into farms, with neat white houses and orderly rows of fruit-trees and herds of sleek cattle grazing contentedly in clover meadows. Quite soon Nehalem Bay comes in sight and the lush meadows give way to wire-grass and the wire-grass runs out in beaches of yellow sand so much like those which border Cape Cod and Buzzard’s Bay that it is hard to believe that one is not on the coast of New England. From the names of the towns and from the types of faces that I saw, I gathered that much of this country was settled by New Englanders, who must have found in its hills and forests and fertile farm lands and alternate stretches of sandy beach and rock-bound shore much to remind them of home. Oregon is, as a glance at the map will show you, in exactly the same latitude as the New England States and has the same cool, invigorating summer weather that one finds in Maine, though its winters, thanks to the warm Japan current which sweeps along its shores, are characterised by rains instead of snow. From Nehalem to Tillamook the railroad hugs the coast. On one side the bosom of the Pacific rises and falls languorously under a genial sun; on the other the line of rugged hills, in their shaggy mantles of green, go up to meet the sky. Here and there some placid lake mirrors the crags and wind-bent trees, or a river, complaining noisily at the delay to which it has been subjected, finds a devious way through the hindering hill range to the waiting ocean. Nor are the attractions of the Tillamook country those of the sea alone, for within a dozen miles of the coast bear, panther, wildcats, deer, partridge, pheasant, duck, and geese are to be found, while the mountain streams are alive with trout waiting to be lured by the fly. It is a storied region, too, for thousands of moccasined feet have trod the famous Indian trail which was once the only route from the wilds of southern Oregon to the fur-post which the first Astor established at the mouth of the Columbia and which still bears his name, and here and there along the coast are the remains of the forts and trading stations which the Russians, in their campaign for the commercial mastery of the Pacific half a century ago, pushed southward even to the Bay of San Francisco. The lives led by those who summer along this shore would delight such rugged apostles of the simple life as John Muir and John Burroughs and Colonel Roosevelt, for there is a gratifying absence of fashionable hotels and luxurious camps and cottages, though there is an abundance of unpretentious but comfortable tent colonies and inns. The people whom I met in Portland and elsewhere apologised profusely for Oregon’s deficiencies in this respect and assured me very earnestly that in two or three years more the State would have a complete assortment of summer hotels “as good as anything you’ll find at Atlantic City or Narragansett Pier, by George.” All I have to say is that when their promises are realised, Oregon’s chiefest and most distinctive charm—its near-to-nature simplicity—will have disappeared, and, so far as the traveller and the pleasure seeker are concerned, it will be merely an indifferent imitation of the humdrum and prosaic East. At present, however, it is still a big, free, unfenced, keep-on-the-grass, do-as-you-please, happy-go-lucky, flannel-shirt-and-slouch-hat land. Even as I write I can hear its insistent, subtle summons in my ears: the whisper of the forests, the chatter of the rivers, the murmur of the ocean, the snarling of the sawmills, the chunk-a-chunk of paddles, the creak of saddle gear, all seeming to say: “Cut loose from towns and men; pack your kit and come again.” And that’s precisely what I’m going to do.