Wheat Fields of the Columbia, Harper's Monthly Magazine,
Harper's & Bros., New York City, NY., September 1884, pages 500-515

WHEAT FIELDS OF THE COLUMBIA.

1.-EAST OF THE MOUNTAINS.

     A GLANCE at the map will remind the reader that Oregon and Washington Territory are divided into eastern and western halves by the Cascade Mountains. The western side of this "divide" is called the Coast, and the people who live there speak of the other side as the country "east of the mountains." This general phrase has now come to have specific application to the basin of the Columbia, a plateau region drained by the middle part of that great stream and its tributaries from the westward, such as the Yakima and Okanagon, and the lower part of the Snake River. To understand this thoroughly the reader in the Atlantic States should consult some modern map of this northwestern corner of the Union, whose features have only recently been accurately known and cartographed.
     Until some of the projected railways through passes of the Cascades shall have made an appearance outside of surveyors' note-books, the only avenue from the coast to the plains or plateaus east of the mountains is the Columbia River.
     Half a century has not yet gone by since a canoe trip of two weeks' duration was accounted good progress from Fort Vancouver to the Dalles, much time being lost in making the long portage at the Cascades, and in laboriously dragging the emptied canoe along the edge of the boiling rapids to the slack-water above. Thirty years ago small stern - wheeled steamboats began to run from Portland to the Cascades. There passengers and freight were transported by a wooden tramway to the other steamboats that carried them up to the Dalles, where a second portage was necessary. The next advance was the replacing of the old tramway by a railroad, and later by the construction of a railway from the Dalles to Walla Walla.
     All this river traffic was in the hands east and west of the mountains, acts in of the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, which was rivalled at its ocean end by the Portland and San Francisco, and eastwardly by the pretensions, if not the actual presence, of the Northern Pacific. Within the past few years, however, great changes have occurred. Seeing the advantage that might follow a union of these local interests in transportation and development with the transcontinental line of the Northern Pacific, which his genius was carrying to a successful completion, Mr. Henry Villard, of New York, secured control and substantial coalition of the ocean-going business of the Pacific Steamship Company, the river traffic and detached railways of the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, and of the rights and introductory construction of the Northern Pacific Company at this end. It happens at present, therefore, that the whole transportation system of Oregon and Washington, both east and west of the mountains, acts in unison. There are now, therefore, a continuous railway from Portland, Oregon, to Minnesota; a line southward from the Columbia to Baker City, Oregon, to meet the road proceeding westward from Granger, Wyoming; and several short "feeders" extended into the agricultural region where the great Snake River approaches the Columbia. Portland and San Francisco are connected by the Oregon and California Railway, traversing the long hollows between the Coast Range and the Sierra Nevada. To these should be added a fourth means of ingress to the public lands of the Columbia Basin - the ocean steamers on the Pacific, since thus will come many travellers from Europe, via the Atlantic steamers to Aspinwall and across the Isthmus.
     It was my fortune recently to make a trip through this basin, with good opportunities to examine what the region contained attractive to emigrants, and I have thought my experiences worth the telling.

II.- AROUND WALLA WALLA.

     Among the earlier immigrants into Oregon, thirty years ago, a few halted on the eastern skirts of the "blue hills" that had so long guided them across the wearisome plains. When a settlement became fixed there, the Indians massacred it, and war began. The government established a military post amid the sands of Wallula, but soon moved it a dozen miles up the Walla Walla River to a beautiful site among rolling green prairies, where it exists today as one of the pleasantest of all our army posts. Under this protection it rapidly grew up a community of farmers, tilling the valleys and creek-bottoms, scattering more widely with increasing numbers and assured safety, until now a district is covered by civilization stretching irregularly from the Columbia River southward to Pendleton, thence eastward along the base of the Blue Mountains to Lewiston, Idaho. This tract lies wholly south of the Snake River, partly in Oregon and partly in Washington Territory. It is a hundred miles long by an average of perhaps forty miles in breadth, and contains not far from 25,000 people. In addition, to the southward, there are the fertile Wallowa and the Grande Ronde valleys of Oregon, lying within circling spurs of the Blue Mountains; and also the long strip of arable country between the Blue Mountains and the Cascade Range, through which flow John Day's and the Des Chutes rivers. I do not know how many thousands of acres or square miles of cultivable soil these separate and hill-bordered patches would make if united; but two or three Atlantic States could be made up out of them without any trouble.
     Down across the upper portion of the Blue Mountains, from Umatilla via Pendleton and the Grande Ronde, there is a railway which gives access to all the western part of this region, and furnishes a quick outlet for its products both eastward and westward. Elsewhere ingress is had by the railway from Portland to Walla Walla, and thence by branches to Dixie, to Dayton, and across to the Snake River at Riparia, whence steamboats ascend to Lewiston, Idaho, while stages run across the country in all directions to remote settlements.
     The whole of this great track, though nowhere flat, is comparatively level, except where it reaches up into the foothills, or is crossed by long ridges, like that between Walla Walla and Dayton. The first settlers took the bottom-lands because they held their greenness longest and were easiest of cultivation. The streams here and there showed old beaver-dams, and were bordered by broad thickets of willows and cottonwoods convenient to "slash." The older farms are in such localities. Before long, however, adventurous spirits, finding that irrigation was unnecessary, made experiments in planting upon the round tops of the hills, whose yellow backs lay hot under the sun between the river copses and the mountain woods. The tufaceous soil turned up by the plough was dark and rich, and the yield outranked the best acres along the creekside. The hills were many and high, sufficing for all the wants of the scant population during many years, so that the wide level benches that lay between the foothills and the prairies - middle lands, light-soiled, dry, and dusty, covered with sorry bunch-grass and sad rabbit-weed - were neglected, and came to be considered worthless, and were to be had almost for the asking.
     One day about seven years ago a young man came into Walla Walla driving all his wealth in the shape of a span of horses and an old wagon. A day or two later he was busy hauling flour to Wallula, which he continued until he had saved a little money and won a little credit. Walla Walla stands some miles out in the plain, and none of its plentiful shade trees grew there naturally. Seeing the demand for fire-wood in the village, he built a small flume from the nearest wooded foot-hill, and brought down cord-wood or small timbers more cheaply than they could be drawn by horses. The profits of this, together with his practice as a physician, in which respect he had now had time to prove himself, made enough money to enable him to try an experiment in agriculture, namely, the cultivation of the intermediate bench lands. Taking up 160 acres he sowed wheat, and his success was so encouraging that he enlarged his operations until his crop of 1881 was no less than 80,000 bushels from 2000 acres of despised "rabbit-weed" - an average of forty bushels to the acre. This experiment has shown that the benches are nearly, if not quite, as good as the uplands or creek-bottoms. The average crop of the best up- lands, taking a long series of years together, is thirty bushels. This is of wheat, scarcely anything else being raised, not for lack of ability - oats and potatoes are especially successful - but because there is so much more ready money in wheat, for which there is always a market. Here, too, the dangers attending so exclusive a method of farming are lessened, for there has never yet been a failure of crops at Walla Walla, though absence of rain now and then shortens the yield to half its proper amount. So strong is the soil, also, that any manuring is not yet thought of, and one farm was pointed out to me where for eighteen successive years good crops had been produced. The farmers, nevertheless, are more and more generally adopting the "summer fallow" plan as a precaution against too great depletion of their soil. Another bit of economy is the use of "headers" rather than the ordinary mowers and reapers, the long stubble remaining after the harvest being burned, and thus returning to the soil in ashes the greater part of the minerals drawn into the straw during the previous half-year. Unfortunately, however, there is a large class of ignorant and shiftless farmers old-timers" for the most part, who are heedless of these far-seeing precautions.
     What I have said applies to the whole region between the Blue Mountains and the dry plateaus that begin at the Idaho line.
     Besides Walla Walla, there are half a dozen thriving, progressive farming centres, all connected by railway or stage lines, having the telegraph, a daily mail, local newspapers, and other appurtenances of civilization. The heavy storms of midwinter, mantling the face of the earth in snow four or five feet deep, and sinking the mercury away below zero for weeks together, isolate these communities sometimes, but not for protracted intervals.

III - UP SNAKE RIVER.

     The railway from Walla Walla struck Snake River about ninety miles above its mouth, at a station called Riparia, but known to the people of the region as Texas Ferry. The station and steamboat landing consisted here, as elsewhere in this region, of an immense wharf-boat or covered scow moored at the shore. Beside it a railway track ran upon a long incline down to the very lowest water mark, so that as the river sank or rose, and the boat's level altered accordingly, freight-cars would still stand even with her deck. The steamer proved to be a large, handsome craft, receiving a cargo of merchandise for the country stores, supplies of bran and such feed for cattle, and much agricultural machinery. It was a very hot day, but a breeze coming down the canon made the sheltered upper deck a comfortable place to sit and watch the clever way in which the men handled the bulky freight in the narrow limits of the forward gangway.
     This used to be the crossing-place for all the lower Palouse region, and the ferry did a good business, but now it is of small consequence. It consisted of a wire rope stretched across the river over a tripod on each bank high enough to keep it out of the way of the steamboats. Suspended to this wire by two pulleys, the small flat-bottomed ferryboat ran across by the force of the current, the right sheer being obtained by a windlass in the boat, which lengthened or shortened the guy-ropes at the will of the ferryman. This proved to be the type of all the ferries.
     The shores are lava hills that rise steeply from the water - so steeply that here no room is left for a cattle trail or beach. Maroon-red level cliff ledges, broken through by angular ravines, and connected, one terrace above the other, by grass-grown slopes or a natural riprapping of fallen fragments, stand with faces almost vertical for two or three hundred feet above the river, and then round off into golden-edged domes of sun-ripened turf. Everything in this deep river gorge appears as dry and useless as possible, but wheat is growing right on the brow of those bluffs, where the soil is rich, though the crops are always exposed to suffer from drought.
     We cast loose and began our voyage upstream soon after noon.
     The first landing was a curious sight. The cutting away of the bluff by a water gully had formed a bar of sand and gravel, and ploughed out a passage up to the table-land. The nose of the steamer - a flat-bottomed, run-on-a-heavy-dew style of boat - was pushed right up on the beach, whereupon the current quickly drifted her stern inshore, and the plank was run out. A small shed stood near the margin, in which some bags of salt were stored; otherwise every kind of freight, boxes, bales, barrels, packages of furniture, sacks of meal, crates of wooden ware, and the brilliant red wheels and wood-work of threshers and other machinery, all in pieces, lay scattered higgledy-piggledy, and half buried in the sand. Gradually these things would be carted back to their owners over the hills. Meanwhile the weather was to be trusted, and nobody would disturb them.
     This landing was named New York Bar by a company who once proposed to go into placer-mining here, but the diggings were soon abandoned to the patient China-men, who are only too glad to be let peace-fully alone with second pick at anything. We could see them working as we passed, half a dozen or so, hard to distinguish from the bowlders among which they delved. There is gold to be taken out of all the gravel banks and island bars along the whole river, and also down the Columbia. So the afternoon wore on, the sun blazing down, the scenery repeating itself exactly as we turned each bend in this truly snake-like river - long, level, red-brown escarpments like ruined walls fallen forward here and there under the pressure of the bulging earth behind, or rounded bluffs, whose gleaming yellow intensified the clear azure of the filtered sky, crowned with massive fortifications and pillared domes of lava, whose rifts and shadows were painted in ultramarine and indigo. Thus the view was limited between high horizons scarcely a mile apart, while the river filled the bottom of the winding canon.
     At Penewawa the stage road crosses from Colfax to Dayton and Walla Walla, following up the long dry bed of Dead Man's Hollow. This ferry, like the others, made a great deal of money before the Northern Pacific Railway turned all the merchandise from this route. Here were two or three extremely fine orchards, and pleasant homes surrounded by trees and gardens, for which they were indebted to a spring near the top of the hill.
     Recent farming on the highlands of the Snake has proved very successful. Meanwhile the plateaus are devoted to stock-raising and sheep-herding, affording fine pasturage. The bottoms are utilized in growing wheat, which is cut and stacked for hay, little timothy being sowed here. This wheat hay is to be fed in the snowy winter to the sheep.
     The breezy evening found us at Almota, a village with shops and hotels, and a wharf which is the landing-place for the large farming district about Moscow and westward. There is a government weather station here, and two youths were exchanging wig-wag practice with signal-flags across the river.
     In this neighborhood, again, were to be seen colonies of Chinese washing gold out of the gravelly shores of the river. Their houses were little holes dug in the bank, and roofed with just enough poles and brush to sustain a layer of earth and keep the dews out. The life they lived was far more comfortless and savage and isolated than that of the Indian on the opposite bank, who had his family, his horses, and his neighbors always with him, and who no doubt enjoys himself, according to his lights, from Easter to Christmas, enduring the bad season of midwinter as best he can.
     It was utter night when we cast off from the last landing at Granite Point, and passed under the black frown of the precipice. The water swishing by the prow flashed a moment in the yellow glare of our low head-light, and swept back into the velvety, noiseless gloom behind. No wind made moans or music through the wire cordage of the steamer's upper works, and the stillness of sleep settled upon the boat as I smoked my last warm pipeful in the pilot-house, studying "the deep sapphire overhead, Distinct with vivid stars inlaid."
     After this, cool oblivion, and an awaking in the bright morning at Lewiston, at the junction of the Snake and Clearwater rivers.

IV - ACROSS THE PALOUSE.

     The agricultural region north of the Snake River is known as the Palouse country, or simply as the Palouse, after the name of its central river. Stages traverse it, carrying the mail in several directions, and I chose the route from Lewiston to Cheney, a station on the Northern Pacific Railway, the direction being due north, and right along the boundary between Washington and Idaho. Five o'clock in the morning was the hour for starting, the vehicle proving to be an open two-seated and badly used-up buckboard. With great joy I saw a trio of the mangiest of "bagmen" drive away in the opposite direction, and found that my companion was to be a young Californian, acting as advance agent for The Man Mystery - a magician, contortionist, etc., who was making a tour of the region, "his wonders to perform" before the excited frontiersmen. Driving to the brink of the Clearwater, whose current is blue, while that of the Snake is yellow, we shouted to the ferryman opposite, who calmly finished his breakfast, and then leisurely steered us across by means of his wire-suspended flat-boat. He had eighteen dogs, all of which, "without distinction of race, color, or previous condition came down to welcome our bark with theirs. Here, too, stood a tall, sunburned maiden, straight as a wheat stalk. She had just alighted from a big black horse, and now climbed up beside the driver, who evidently considered us two passengers in the low seat behind entirely unnecessary to his happiness. Her costume was well adapted to her journey - a broad-brimmed and badly cracked chip hat, a double-caped water-proof, rusty with sunshine and dust, two green Balmoral skirts, and (outside the water-proof cloak) a riding-skirt of faded alpaca, which, when she took her seat on the buckboard, she wrapped around her waist like a sash. That she had a better hat, however, was manifest by the shape of a parcel carefully carried in her lap.
     Before us loomed a hill that it would require two and a half hours to climb, in order to get up to the plateau level, so deep was the river-bed sunken. The road wound here and there, wherever the grade was best. Expanding before us as we went higher and higher, all the landscape glowed, under the beams of the rising sun, with broad color - a mingled tone of the yellow of straw and the grayish-green of hay, with cobalt lying solid in the angular masses of shadow near at hand, or washed evenly and almost impalpably over the misty background. It soon appeared that our new passenger was a school-mistress, and wished she were back in California, not liking Idaho. The advance agent and she discovered they had acquaintances in common in the Sacramento Valley, and were soon very talkative together, whereupon the driver became sulky, and devoted himself to giving me geographical information, none of which was new.
     The deep ravine in the bare and gravelly bluff along which we were climbing was covered with hundreds of narrow sheep paths, dividing the face of the hill into a multitude of minute terraces. On our side we could hardly trace these through the weeds, though at a distance they were as plain as the lines of shingling on a roof. Great flocks of sheep passing back and forth in spring and again in the autumn, between their high summer pastures and the sheltered fields along the river, keep these tiny trails well trodden. As the summit approached, a vast scene was spread before us,

"grassy, wild, and bare,
Wide, wild, and open to the air."

     At the base of the bluff the two rivers came down to join currents, and break through the jagged indigo of the canon just visible at the right. In the south some mountain silhouettes were painted faintly on the far horizon, and right underneath us the orchards and white houses of Lewiston and the green meadows along the Clearwater formed bright notes in the landscape. All the rest was a treeless plateau, but a plateau through which the water had cut tortuous and confluent lines of drainage, beginning far back as mere pencil scratches, like the outermost twigs of a tree, and uniting into deeper and deeper channels, until the great gulches opened into the river gorge. All these rivulets, brooks, and winding river-courses were now dry and brown, with sere grass to their very beds, and between them lay rounded ridges like well-shaven lawns, as smooth and close-cropped and tawny as a pig's back. We were 1800 feet above the town, the school-mistress said, and only now could we begin to appreciate how deeply sunken, broad, and forcible a stream was this great river of the Snake. Its course could be traced for a score of miles - a vast cliff-guarded chasm ploughed far through the basalts that here and there protruded from underneath their thick blanket of soil and herbage. I have said ploughed, but that is only partially true, for one could easily see how the edges of the bluffs along each side of both the Snake and the Clearwater were higher than the general level of the plateaus back of them, showing that subterranean forces had forced the earth's crust apart along this line, furnishing an irregular drainage channel, to which all Idaho contributes.
     Walking slowly up the long hill in the freshness of the morning, and much of the time in the shade, there had been little discomfort; but here on the summit began the "heat and burden of the day." The sun blazed down straight from the cloud-less vault, and was reflected back from an unbounded area of seared plain. The light soil, powdered by incessant travel and pro- longed drought, was kicked into a dense cloud, hiding the horses' feet, and poured off the wheels into our faces and over our clothes. The glib tongue of the school- mistress was kept fast shut in her mouth, which she dared not open in the blinding dust, and the driver substituted touches of his whip-lash for speech in addressing his team.
     The people of this neighborhood were largely Norwegians, most of whom had previously dwelt somewhere else on the Pacific coast. Their houses were chiefly built of logs, which they had hauled ten or twenty miles from the hills, and the walls inclined inward somewhat, as I have seen represented in pictures of settlements. There was not the least appearance of an attempt to be nice about any of the houses, and almost no bushes or trees were set out. As the small, comfortless school building came into view on a distant eminence, the school-mistress began to talk about the difficulties of her position.
     "Most of my pupils are as old as I am, and it is hard to behave like a teacher with them. And stupid? Lordy !"
     I could see by the way her two hands went up that their dullness was immeasurable by words.
     "I guess some of 'em are pretty smart in their own lingo; but all they want of our teaching is just enough to read a little and make change. As soon as these boys get grown, you see, they're going away off a thousand miles or so, buy some land, and go to farming, just as their fathers did. They don't need much savvey for that."
     Nobody was to be seen around the hot little log school-house, the windows of which were boarded up, showing how the boys had smashed the glass. It looked pretty lonely for the young woman, who waved us good-by with her big hat as we came to 'the crest of the next hill. The driver was much affected. "I wouldn't mind goin' to school myself this afternoon," he sighed. "I think, if I were to try, I could make it interesting for the teacher."
     Arrived at Moscow for dinner, we looked very much like darkies or coal-heavers. Moscow is a lively little town, doing a large trade with the farmers.
     The advance agent thought this town, having so large a tributary population, would be a good place for his man, and so he "billed" it, which I learn is the proper expression for posting announcements and arranging the preliminaries of any exhibition. A lounger at the hotel took vast interest in the proceedings, and promised him a big house, as though he "carried the county in his breeches pocket," like a politician.
     "We 'ain't had a show since 'way back, and every feller that can raise the bullion 'll come, and bring his girl. Better not have any reserved seats. Charge everybody four bits straight, and the kids two bits. That 'll fetch 'em. Don't you fret. We'll whoop 'er up for the Professor."
     The same endless succession of rolling hills, farm-covered as far as the eye could reach, continued all the way to the Palouse River - a distance from Lewiston given as forty-five miles; but that is measured in an air line simply by counting the section lines. The road always takes two sides of a triangle, either in going over a hill or around a farm, so that it is much longer in fact, the hot sun and stifling dust not tending to shorten our estimate.
     At Palouse City we spent the night. The town is on the river, here a small, swift stream running through a thin growth of yellow pines. The water-power has caused two saw-mills to be built, to which logs are rafted down, and on the steep sides of the ravine a rough village of a hundred people or so has grown up, forming a supply point for the neighborhood. It has dawned upon them, however, that the rugged little canon is no place for the town, so they are picking it up bodily and moving a mile down the creek to where it may stand on a level. Colfax, a village of considerable size, not far away, had been burned just before my visit, and it was expected that the dwellers there would not rebuild, but would come and start afresh at this new town, or else at Endicott. It never occurred to any of these persons that there was any sentiment to hinder their pulling up stakes and moving a town about in this fashion. The whole country is merely laid off in squares. States, counties, towns, farms, are all run by surveyors lines. Nothing has been brought about by a course of events, or is determined by the natural boundaries of big-tree, stream, or hill range, as is pleasantly the case in the father-land. Hence there is no character in any district or piece of real estate, nor more hold upon a man's affection than in any other quarter section he might "take up." It is not home at all. Nobody has been born, or died, or married there; the owner has not planted hopes along with his orchard, and therefore has none to uproot in the abandonment of his trees. All that sort of thing is yet to come, and it costs him and his family no more pangs to pack up and go where they think they can do a little better than it does a hunter to move his nightly lodge as he follows the game.
     Between Palouse City and the railway occurs the same wide expanse of rolling fertile hills and valleys, everywhere dotted with farms. Various small streams, the largest of which is Hangman's Creek, exist, and it is said that springs are abundant throughout the whole region, and good wells easily obtained.
     Hangman's Creek is not at all as forbidding as its name, winding its way cheerily through willowy and flower-strewn banks. In 1857 the trees along its banks a little lower down were decorated with the bodies of several ringleaders of a murderous revolt on the part of the Spokane Indians, to whom General Wright administered a defeat so severe and so well merited that this tribe has been most polite and friendly to the whites ever since. The name of the pleasant creek perpetuates this execution, which in Idaho phrase was a "hanging-bee."
     Two villages north of the Palouse were passed through -- Farrington and Spangle -- which have a dozen stores and various workshops each, and look forward to a long continuance of their rapid growth. The heaviest establishment in all these villages is the warehouse of the man who sells agricultural implements. These farms -- a few of which exceed a thousand acres - require the use of machinery, and every farmer is discontented unless he owns a complete set, with all the latest improvements. This is expensive, for here machinery costs fully twice its price in the Eastern States. It is seldom that the farmer can pay more than a fraction of the cost; but the dealer gives him credit, takes a mortgage on the farm, and charges him one to two per cent. a month interest. The farmers don't deserve their good wagons and implements, even on these ruinous terms, for I saw them, in many instances, left out-of-doors to crack and rust.
     The methods of farming show nothing extraordinary except, perhaps, the cultivation of wheat for hay, to which end almost the entire crop has been consigned hitherto. Timothy, clover, and alfalfa do well, but have been cultivated very sparingly. The principal crop until recently was flax - the wild plant is plentiful all about these hills - the yield of which would average about fourteen bushels to the acre. It was profitable because of the saving in freight compared with a cargo of grain of equal value. Now, however the farmers are turning their attention more to wheat and oats; not much barley is raised. The average yield per acre of these grains is very large compared with the East, though by no means reaching the extravagant estimates often published, nor am I judging from the present year, which is one of unusual drought, the total yield of the region not being expected to more than equal last year's crop, in spite of the increased acreage. Drought is the great enemy the farmer has to dread, but no irrigation is considered necessary, and probably lack of grain is to be looked for no more here than in the Prairie States. Stock-raising was profitable to the first corners, but the rapid filling up and fencing in of the country has limited the possibilities of this. One does not see many cattle, therefore, and fewer horses than formerly, though every farmer has a small band, which are disposed of to drovers, who sell them again to the herdsmen of Wyoming and Colorado, to be used up and mercifully shot after a year or two of cattle-chasing. In the horse and cattle business, but especially the former, the farmers have keen competitors in the Nez Perce Indians, who raise great numbers of ponies, which they sell not only to the cattle men, but also to the Northern Indians - Spokanes, Coeur d'Alenes, Crees, and Flat-heads - who are less favorably situated for horse-breeding. These Indian ponies, and the half-breed scrub stock raised by the white men as well, go by the name of "Kyuses" - derived from a tribe of Indians in northern California with whom the pioneers first began to trade in horseflesh. They are tough, active, often speedy little brutes, but as full of tricks and deviltry as their homely skins will hold.

V - THE SPOKANE REGION.

     The sand and lava along the banks of the Columbia River extend northeastward from the Dalles in a triangular tongue of desert penetrating almost to Coeur d'Alene Lake. Its scenery, as viewed from the car window, is perfectly described by Bret Harte's familiar stanza:

"Just take a look about you: alkali, rock, and sage,
Sage and rock and alkali - ain't it a pretty page?
Sun in the east at mornin', sun in the west at night,
And the shadow of this yere station the only thing moves in sight."

     Through this desolation the Northern Pacific Railway, with incredible hardship to its engineers and workmen, has constructed its main line, following an ancient water-course, called the Great Coule. There is no station better than a switch and a telegraph office for two hundred and fifty miles, or all the way from the Dalles to the Spokane Valley. The situation was told very well by an old gentleman as the car drew up at a station consisting of a section-house and a big signboard, when he said, "The people here get just two drinks of water a day, one when the train goes up, and the other when it comes down."
     Nevertheless, in spite of this cheerless aspect of affairs, the sage-brush plains that lie on top of the bluffs bordering the railway are very rich, and beyond them bunch-grass uplands of scarcely less fertility stretch northward and southward (as we have already seen), and are continued west of the Columbia in the vastly useful valleys and grazing plateaus of the Yakima, and the other drainage slopes of the Cascade Range. All these uplands are being settled upon with amazing rapidity, and are to be yet more eagerly appropriated when the railway connections heretofore explained have made them readily accessible. At Sprague the shops of the Pacific division are established, and a considerable town has sprung up, to which much farm trade will presently go, in addition to the support of the railway mechanics.
     At present, however, the next station northeast of Sprague has great advantages. This is Cheney, just now the largest and most active village in eastern Washington.
     Cheney was the terminus of my Palouse stage trip, and my first impression of the town was that it was the scene of a military funeral. Getting nearer, the truth appeared. The nucleus of a band was playing before a theatre door, the brazen character of the performance appearing more in the temerity of the musicians than in the nature of their instruments. To make up for this deficiency, tones of thunder were being struck from a big bass-drum by a sad-spirited German, and it was this I had mistaken for the minute-guns of my funeral. Several times the music seemed about to break down, and the musicians to turn and flee; but the big drum kept thundering on to keep their courage up, and the little snare-drum trotted bravely along at the heels of the humming and banging as a sort of rear-guard to force into the thin ranks any cowardly or straggling notes that might fall behind.
     I thought the deepest misery of tavern life had been sounded at Walla Walla and Palouse City; but, bless you! I was inexperienced. The "gentlemanly clerk" of the Cheney hotel was a homicide not only under conviction, but actually undergoing a year's sentence, and he went up to the jail to sleep every night, carrying the key to his cell in his pocket. The crockery was the most valuable of bric-a-brac, if cracks are a criterion. The waiters were assorted into three nationalities and two colors, to suit every taste, and were obliging enough to sit beside you at the table and entertain you with enlivening conversation if their duties were slack for a moment. The bill of fare was gorgeously adorned with Egyptian scenery composed by the job-printer out of material kindly furnished by the type-foundry, and contained line after line of French dishes that complimented the erudition of the cooly cook far more than his ability when they presented them-selves.
     "Beef a la mode! one traveller was heard to exclaim. "I suppose that means 'after a fashion.'" A very bad fashion. When I wanted to go to bed I was conducted to a house some distance away, and shown to a little doorless cell upstairs, built of new lumber, out of which the resin was exuding in big drops and trickling streams. The total furniture consisted of three nails, a tin candlestick, and a rough bedstead on which was laid an inch or so of hay in a sack, and two army blankets. A series of these balsamic cells was occu- pied at a dollar a night each by men very glad to get any place to lie down. "Weariness Can snore upon the flint, when resty sloth Finds the down pillow hard."
     A pair of stentor-voiced minstrels going through a long repertory for the benefit of a contiguous beer saloon, in which "Rock of Ages" came next to "Patrick, mind the Baby," and "Annie Laurie" found herself in close pursuit of "Biddy McGee," made no hurtful impression upon my drowsy ears. It did wake me up, however, when at midnight one lodger who had left his bed for five minutes in search of a drink - of water, he said, but that is doubtful - came back to find a stranger between his warm blankets. Naturally a row ensued, but nobody was killed; and presently the sunshine of another day came streaming through the horizontal cracks in the wall and the vertical cracks in the partition, dividing the gloom of my cell into hundreds of cubes of gleaming dust-motes.
     Cheney possesses several hundred people, all of whom are enterprising and busy. Two years ago there was not a vestige of a town. Now it is the chief place for business "in the upper country," except Spokane Falls; is building brick stores, churches, a big new hotel, has a large academy, and is selling town lots at big prices. That it will have long and steady life, I have no doubt; whether its ambition of becoming the metropolis of the region is to be realized, remains to be seen. As yet it is new and rough to the last degree.
     At Spokane Falls is Liberty Hall.
     "That is your room," said our host, opening a door into a cool, prettily furnished chamber, domestic enough either to make us homesick or cure us of it, as the effect happened to be -- " That is your room; make the most of it. We don't get up till we get ready, but there is a good restaurant, where you can get your breakfast. For luncheon you will always find trifles in the cupboard" - and with that he led to the darkened dining-room - "and beer or claret in this refrigerator. Help yourself. We dine at five o'clock, but you needn't worry about any spike-tailed coat or clerical tie."
     So the jolly days went by in the luxurious idleness of rest, and in picking up loose ends of work that had trailed behind our rapid transit - went by in strong hot blaze at noonday, and in breezy coolness after sunset. Then in the comfort of hammocks and easy-chairs, under the influence of good tobacco and merry company, we heard much about the attractions of Spokane Falls, and believed it all, because we wished to. We learned what a bright little town was growing up there, and that a very excellent class of people were choosing it for their home; how it had none of the signs of the rough, temporary "camp," but was destined to grow solidly and prettily into the most important and most. desirable town in the whole region. Why this confidence? was the question asked and discussed. Because of the vast fertile plains north and south of it, which are being settled with great rapidity, and will send it a large portion of their trade; be- cause of the loveliness of its site; because of its healthfulness and comfortable climate, especially in winter; because its interests are already in the hands of enterprising and intelligent people; but chiefly on account of the inducements which it offers to manufacturers.
     The Spokane River at the falls comes sweeping down, a clear, full-bodied, powerful stream more than a hundred feet wide, and it goes crashing in a short series of magnificent cascades down three ledges, measuring together 150 feet. Few cataracts in the wide world are more splendid in their snowy, tumultuous beauty than this - a glory no device of men can ever destroy, as has been done at St. Anthony. But the grand picture of the falls is not the claim they make upon us for prophecy; it is the power in this swift and easily harnessed water to turn mill-wheels. At must soon make necessary, and about it Spokane Falls will rise the manufacturing will cluster the most solidly constituted town that the wide farming population of and agreeable society to be found "east of the plateaus of the Columbia and Spokane the mountains."

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©  Jeffrey L. Elmer