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 beautiful tortured forms of ancient convulsions. One can go to many places in the Pacific Northwest and forget for a while what is happening in “the world.” And perhaps we need these moments of freer and quieter breathing, for certainly something comes back to the average man in the sight of high mountains and within the sound of lapping tides, or in the breathless brooding silence of desert stretches and vast deep canyons thrust into the earth’s surface. Here an American can recapture a sense of the legendary beauty and poetry of his native land. Here it is possible again to catch a glimpse of a forgotten vision. “The Last Frontier” people say wistfully, even fearfully, looking out across the great blue stretch of the Pacific. Nostalgia and sadness are in the phrase, but there is certainly also promise.
“Well, we’ve come to the Jumping-Off Place at last,” pioneer women used to say, sitting down wearily at the trail’s end, sometimes to weep with their faces turned away, hidden in apron or sunbonnet. . . . The farthest reach, the shore of the other ocean, no more land for track of foot or wheel. So here we pause and stand and take our final root.
CHAPTER II
Historical Background
LOOKING BACK
The Pacific Northwest has recently become very conscious of its history. Everywhere historic roads and trails and the campsites of famous exploring or pioneering parties are being re-marked; old blockhouses, forts of the Indian War days, early cabins, and fur trading posts are now carefully preserved or restored; and the gracious houses of the first days of wealth and leisure are re-furnished by the women of pioneer societies.
From early summer to mid-autumn, one can see in almost any town embarrassed young men going about their normal business wearing an imposing growth of whiskers, and young women swishing self-consciously down the streets in the long full-skirted dresses of another period. These are unmistakable signs of a Pageant, a Fair, a Round-up, a Jubilee, a Stampede, a Potlatch, or just a simple Celebration.
The university town of Eugene, Oregon, gives a performance every three years which might serve as a model of what a good pageant can be when a community of above-average people whole-souledly devote themselves to a spectacle intended not alone to please boosters but to give enjoyment to poets, musicians, and artists. Goodwin Thacher, the University of Oregon professor who writes the scripts, does not do just a “continuity,” he does a “poem,” a “song.” Some three thousand people and five hundred animals take part in these great outdoor performances. All the university resources are tapped, including the departments of Drama, Music, and English, and the School of Physical Education, which helps train the dancers. The Eugene Gleemen and the Women’s Choral Union take part. All the rural families from the pioneer county of Lane contribute costumes, equipment, and participants. There is no speaking, only singing, music, and pantomime; and the parade is so complete that the one criticism ever leveled at it (and old-timers can be very critical) was made by a woman from arid eastern Oregon who said that it had “everything except water-witches”—an oversight which the Eugene Register Guard was pretty sure would be corrected next time.
At these anniversary celebrations the local papers find delight in reprinting the singularly inept prophecies of certain men who fought the annexation of Oregon Territory when it was a matter of debate in the United States Senate. The eminent Mr. Daniel Webster often commands a lead paragraph with his long-remembered words of the 1840s: “What can we do with the western coast, a coast of 3,000 miles, rockbound, cheerless, uninviting and not a harbor on it? What use have we for such a country? I will never vote one cent from the public treasury to place the Pacific Ocean one inch nearer Boston than it is now.”
Senator McDuffie of South Carolina was pleased to state that he would not “give a pinch of snuff for the whole territory.” He went so far as to wish that “the Rocky mountains were an impassable barrier”; while even Senator Thomas H. Benton, Oregon’s staunch friend, considered that perhaps these rocky peaks had indeed been “placed by Providence” to mark the western limits of the States and set thus a boundary to man’s ambitions.
Many of the best minds of the period were solidly against the settling of these distant lands; but there were, fortunately, a number of simple people willing to set out on one of those almost mystical American drives in search of the promised land.
EXPLORERS BY BOAT
When the local papers publish short résumés of Northwest coast history, many accounts begin with Balboa wading into the Pacific far to the south in 1513, flag in hand, to claim all the shoreline of this unexplored ocean in the name of his country. This included the lands of the Northwest, which Balboa did not see, and it was Spain’s first claim to the territory which at one time, from her Mexican seat, she wished to annex to herself.
In the sixteenth century most of the famous European mariners were busy searching for something which did not exist except in wishful thinking, the legendary Strait of Anian, or Northwest Passage to the Orient.
About the time that Henry VIII was scandalizing Christendom with his goings-on a Spanish galleon under Bartolome Ferrelo moved cautiously up the west coast, perhaps as far as the forty-third parallel, which means that Ferrelo was the first white man to reach the latitude of Oregon. In 1579, Francis Drake, busy making life uncomfortable for the Spaniards in the name of Henry’s daughter the Virgin Queen of England—a perverse jade who wouldn’t say yes or no to the king of Spain on the subject of matrimony—sailed his famous Golden Hind along the same wild coast. Some authorities say he reached the forty-eighth parallel, which would be about on a line with the town of Everett, Washington. Others say he certainly sailed no farther than the forty-third parallel. But however far Drake got he gave as his reason
