Portland
SECTION IV—MORE PLACES AND PEOPLE
I The Islands and the Land To and From
III Olympic Peninsula: Big Trees—Sacred Elk— Ghost Towns
Olympia
Salem
VII Southern Oregon: Pelicans, Pears, Spade Beards, and Cavemen
SECTION V—HIGHLIGHTS ON THE LAST HORIZON
Admission and Acknowledgments
I want to begin this book by admitting freely that it is a personal interpretation of a part of America which I love, which I knew as a child in the intimate way that only children can know a country, and which I revisited and chose again for a home as an adult who had seen a good slice of the globe in between.
It is impossible with a book of this nature to be definitive, or in any sense complete. But I should like the book to accomplish two things: give the outsider a feeling of the unique flavor of this particular part of America, and give the insider a heightened sense of what he has here, what it came from, and what he can do with it if he once comes to see it in its full potentiality.
This is not a book for students, because students are very well taken care of with excellent libraries in Oregon and Washington dealing exclusively with Northwest material. I know how good these libraries are because I have made use of them and found their staffs cooperative and helpful. I have had, indeed, cooperation and help from so many people that I dare not start on a list of those to whom I am indebted, and shall have to take this opportunity of thanking them in general for special favors which have been granted to me in assembling this material.
SECTION I
The Last Playground
CHAPTER I
What Is the Pacific Northwest?
No matter how one arrives at the geographic boundaries for the Pacific Northwest they are apt to be, in the end, personal and arbitrary. When I choose to treat under this title only the two states of Oregon and Washington, omitting Montana and Idaho, I am well aware that I cut myself off from valuable and interesting material. In particular I lose the Panhandle of Idaho, which so nearly became a part of Washington at one time, and which is today so much a part of that “Inland Empire” over which the city of Spokane unquestionably rules. The omission of northern Idaho and western Montana also deprives me of much romantic and picturesque early mining history, and prevents reportage on a section rich in that democratic heartiness and frontier sociability which still belong to Cow Country. In considering also the vital indigenous and potential resources of the Northwest I shall miss the contribution of the two states to the east, usually included in resource surveys of this section of America.
The geographic characteristics shared by the two seacoast states are: a wet green seaboard, a backbone of mountains roughly dividing the land in half, and a high and arid inland area. Oregon and Washington have produced ways of life that have manifest likenesses and significant differences as a direct result of the effect of similar landscape and climate. Without frontage on the Pacific Ocean, Montana and Idaho would share only the eastern, dry, or Cow Country qualities of this land and its folk; and so sadly I omit them, saluting in passing their rare natural beauties and their tangy frontier flavor.
There is, in the Pacific Northwest, something no other part of America possesses in quite the same degree: a freshness and promise, as though the future hadn’t yet quite run out of the hourglass, as one so often feels it has along the Eastern seaboard and in the Old South, and even in many parts of the Middle West. This feeling has been packed into two enticing and nostalgic phrases: the Last Frontier, the Last Evergreen Playground. The search for this special blend of promise and answer brings yearly to the Northwest a tide of new tourists and emigrants hoping to recapture some fading dream around a campfire in sight of a snowcap, or to wrest a better way of life out of a land still in the process of “opening up.”
The sense of expansion and growth arises in part from the fact that so much of local history has taken place within the memory of living man. There are old men still alive—and full of vital juices in their eighties and nineties—who were among the first whites in their district. There is certainly still plenty of untracked forest; many peaks that haven’t been climbed or measured; miles of “view” without house or human; many a lonely anchorage for exploring boats. The Past and the Present do seem almost to meet in this land—so near is that which was to that which is. Even young people on the west coast can remember the Great Trees and the Paul Bunyans who chopped them down; those Scotch and Irish yarners, fiddlers, and singers, and the later silent giants out of Scandinavia, who helped turn stretches of this green country into burned-off wastes, growing fireweed, and the delicious wild blackberry. Old Indians crowding the hundred mark can still be found—by those who know where to look—willing to tell tales and dream their haunting myths out loud. Chinook jargon, that speech by which “Bostons,” King George Men, and Indians conversed and traded in the old days, lingers with flavorsome effect in the speech of old-timers; soft words like “cultus,” “skookum,” “wa-wa,” “klahowya.” Indian ways of cooking dominate white feasts in the summertime; clams baked under seaweed on the beach; salmon sluitum on picnics of the pioneers. Not long in their graves are those credited with bringing to this country the first honey bees, the first dandelions (for medicine), the first fruit trees. Even damask roses from the mission gardens of the first French fathers on
