The Mt. Adams Sun, Bingen, WA., November 18, 1954, page 4

OLDTIME EDITOR RECALLS KILLING AND PREDICTS TROUT LAKE'S FATE

(Forty-seven years ago (Sept. 28, 1907) the old Portland Telegram correctly predicted what has since happened to Trout Lake. The following feature about the editor's vacation was loaned to the Sun for re-publication by Tommy Burkell)

     Trout Lake is in Klickitat County, Wash. It suns itself and snoozes in a shallow pocket of the levels that stretch away from the base of Mt. Adams. But it will soon be among the late lamented unless it bestirs itself. The water lilies, the cat-tails, and other water-loving plants have taken permanent residence in the lake, and use it as a cemetery for their dead besides, so that every year the water grows less and less and the vegetation more. Were this little lake in Oregon instead of Washington, without a doubt some enterprising man would have it cleared of its rooted tenants, deepened and broadened until its finny population should increase and multiply to a numerous and desirable extent, for trout there are of a surety in it. This would of itself be an attraction sufficient to warrant the building of a summer hotel. In addition, the air is fine and the scenery surrounding the lake full of interest. The lake, however, is but half the story, and by no means the better half. From it there flows a stream that surely rivals "Bonny Doon" for purity, clearness, coolness and beauty of "banks and braes." The man who thinks the best sherries and champagnes are good to drink should step warily out on the mossy stones of Trout Creek -- out where the water is deep and clear and always moving, and dip his glass in and drink and drink. There is a positive exhilaration and "bead" and flavor to that water, and it has coolness of the mountain glacier from which it springs. Sherry and champagne? Pshaw! They're poor, forlorn, beggarly beverages besides the pure, plentiful flood of Trout Creek as it runs.

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     Nearly opposite the Guler House -- the one hotel of Trout Lake town, the creek divides into two tumbling cascades that hold in their arms a small island. Just where these foaming falls lose themselves in a placid, unruffled deep of the creek, in which the trout live, Mr. and Mrs. John M. Filoon, of The Dalles, on an elevated part of the bank, have their summer home -- "Kamp Kon tent", and here it was that the Viewpoint editor spent the last half of her vacation days. Mrs. Filoon belongs to the Viewpoint circle of friends. She is one of the many-sided women who are, perhaps, the special product of the times. Although thoroughly domestic she is at the same time, an influential club woman. Fond of the open, accustomed to hunting, fishing and not afraid to camp out under the sky, she is yet a reader of the best books, interested in all the questions that are demanding answers of us who live in the first part of the 20th century, is an artist at embroidery, as well as with canvas and oils. She is a native of Oregon and exceedingly well posted in early Oregon history, both from the white standpoint, and that of the Indians. All in all, you may guess that with such a hostess in such a place, there were no dull minutes. On a warm, lazy day we went on a long, lazy ride for miles up through one of the Government reservations, where the roads are little more than Indian trails and where one meets a dozen Indians to one white man. Here we saw evidence of at least one of Nature's recipes for world-making. She kept it all boiling hot -- who can tell how long, or how long ago? -- and evidently stirred constantly.

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     Did you ever make boiled corn meal mush, or "hasty pudding", as the New England colonists used to call it? If you have you remember when it got real thick how the bubbles would form and break and leave tiny, rough-edged craters in the boiling mass. Well, things are just like that on a big scale around Trout Lake, except the pudding is cold now and the holes where the hot steam of the boiling earth escaped, are rocky caves and subterranean passages. There's the Ice Caves, 12 feet down with plenty of good ice, and tunnel running quite a length under ground. There's the Lava Cave, 40 feet straight down, all walled in with lava blocks cut as neatly as if done by stonemasons at so much a day. The "Butter Cave" is easily explored as the ground slopes gradually down to the entrance, which at one time had a wooden door, and was used as a refrigerator by the ranchers in the vicinity. These, however, are but three, while there are countless others of no special renown.

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     The way to Trout Lake from Portland is by steamer to White Salmon, thence over the mountains by stage. The road is dusty, so dusty, in fact, that a sunbonnet is the best possible headgear for the trip, and a gray linen dust coat that covers you close from ears to heels the best possible outer garment. The road winds in places around mountain sides where it in nothing but a shelf cut right in the bulging sides of the dizzy slope; it takes you right by real, genuine logging camps, by many settlers' cabins, and also by some very comfortable-looking homes, as for instance, that of Mordecai Jones, the wealthy Englishman who owns and hunts over 1100 acres bought of our Uncle Sam. Mordecai is at present in Europe. On the Englishman's wide domains, close by the stage road, is an empty weather-beaten cabin. It is much better made than most of these, with a roof that slopes down to form a veranda. But the door stands wide open, the windows are gone, and despite the fact that it stands on a fine spot of cleared land, it is empty and inviting land untilled. The place is said to be -- haunted. Twenty years ago or so, it was built by a bachelor man -- which perhaps explains his bad temper -- and he lived there, with a boy to help him. One day the boy angered the man, and he started after him with specific intentions possibly, but they were none so evident as the axe that he brandished, so the boy, just where the fence comes close to the highway, there on that little rise of ground, turned and shot his pursuer. The boy was cleared of the charge of murder, but the scene of the tragedy is shunned to this day by happy folk looking for a home. Would you like to spend a night in a deserted cabin and see if the unhappy ghost of the ill-tempered man would protest against being disturbed?

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©  Jeffrey L. Elmer