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CHAPTER I

Cow Country

Eastern Oregon and Eastern Washington are far more like one another than they are like their respective sister halves, the lush green stretch of seacoast country which the Cascade Mountains separate from the inland. Sometimes when traveling north to south, or south to north, in Oregon and Washington, the sense of homogeneity is so strong that one is apt to think, how sensible it would have been to make these two wet sections one state, and let the dry sections form another. Yet this feeling changes when moving east or west along the mountain passes that separate these two dramatically contrasted landscapes. Then it seems that no matter how sensible it might appear on the maps there must surely be something very valuable in the experience afforded the citizens of these two states, for nature has offered them the chance to understand diverse ways of life produced by sharply contrasted environments.

And in the end one is more than content to leave them as they are.

Eastern Oregon and Washington played their brief but significant part in the colorful drama of the cowboy. Flavorsome Spanish words from the days when California ranchmen penetrated the Oregon country still linger in speech and writing: vaqueros, riatas, rosideros. A description of a real round-up in eastern Oregon in the old days sounds very much like the Southwest:

“They were all well-dressed, showy men, wearing bright colors—all roamers of space in light countries love color, for color is the product of light: the best equipped men for vaquero life of any that ever rode the plains, and they all had the fine, well-trained saddle horses, with silver-mounted bridles, hackamoors, mecates, and riatas. They mostly wore rosideros for the protection of their clothes—a buckskin apron that fits like a tailored pair of pants, tied around the legs with buckskin thongs. . . . Altogether with their wide sombreros and gay colors and good form and fine horses, with the sun shining over it all, it made a picture.”

This is the picturesque side, the theater side, of the days of the big ranches of eastern Oregon. The other side of the picture is not quite so pretty, for it shows some of the methods by which the rich inland grazing country, with its rare combinations of good soil and water supply, fell into the hands of a few greedy men. Land office and court records from Oregon’s Harney County have revealed some of the devices employed—apparently without any marked twinges of conscience—by the cattle barons and absentee landlords to acquire more property than they had any right to: “dummy” entry-men; land falsely described as “swamp” and procured at a dollar an acre; state school lands intended for the use of actual homesteading settlers stolen outright; terrorization of “little” homesteaders by hired thugs, and similar unsavory practices.

Henry Miller, the voracious rancher from California who managed with Charles Lux to acquire some million acres of land and a million head of cattle, owned large holdings in Oregon. One of his most famous acquisitions was the so-called Agency Ranch. At the time of the opening of the country to homesteaders a Miller partner, T. M. Overfelt, made a famous ride of two hundred miles in twenty-four hours—relaying to fresh mounts from ranch to ranch of Miller’s vast private domain—in order to be present at the bidding for this choice stretch of cattle country.

The cattle barons came to be cordially disliked. They were held responsible for retarding settlement in order to keep their holdings intact, and lesser men spoke freely against them. It was all part of a general picture of rugged individualism about which present day pioneer reunion speakers find, however, something favorable to say. A paper read at a Harney County reunion in 1937 sympathetically cited these men as products of their time. “Do not blame them!” adjured the writer. “They believed in:

‘The good old rule, the simple planThat they should take who have the power,And they should keep who can.’”

Although according to Bill Hanley, “the idea of the vaquero never got north of the Blue Mountains or across the Snake River,” Washington too had its big cattle day—if without quite such a Hollywood setting as Oregon’s. Many Washingtonians learn with surprise that the setting for Owen Wister’s The Virginian was not Montana or Wyoming but the Methow Valley in the Okanogan country of the north central section of their state. Wister knew the country through a Harvard classmate, Guy Waring, who went from Newport to the wilds of the Okanogan in the eighties and was known quite simply in all the lonely countryside as “the man at the forks.” Wister’s introduction to Waring’s story My Pioneer Past gives a clear picture of the hardships of travel near the century’s turn in this beautiful region, still little known and not extensively traveled.

Washington also had its full quota of tough hombres who rode the plains. It had, like Oregon, the day of cattle rustling, followed by the day of the vigilantes. There were long treks of cattle, east, north, even west and south. The famous Cariboo trail trip with beef on the hoof into the mining country of British Columbia is the source of many good yarns. Even that standard “thriller” of all western round-ups and rodeos, the feat of throwing a steer which is known as bulldogging, is claimed to have its origin in the state of Washington. In The History of Toppenish (Toppenish is a town in the Yakima Valley), the author has this to say:

“On the day they drove the cattle across the Columbia at Egbert French’s ferry, one of the steers refused to enter the water, whereupon young McCoy threw himself from his horse onto the steer and, grappling his horns, threw him to the ground. This was in about 1866. Alec McCoy believes this was the first instance of bulldogging in the world’s history. He had never heard of its being done before. Several men saw the feat and in later years it was occasionally performed on the reservation range by cowboys of daring inclination.”

There was in the Northwest a certain development of the native Indian horse. Selected “cayuse” brood mares were crossed with American sires to produce the staying qualities needed for western life. The word cayuse came from an Indian tribe called the Cayuses who used to ride along the emigrant trails trading their fresh horses for women’s dresses, household utensils, tools, or cattle. The name is now applied colloquially to any western horse.

In both Oregon and Washington the sheepmen came in on the heels of the cattlemen, and then there were the sheep and cattle feuds—not yet completely settled. There are still killings over range rights in Oregon. When the big ranges began to break up, the cattleman would settle on a creek and turn his cattle up into the mountains. Along would come a sheepman, the sheep would eat the outside grass and move on to another good range. This made the cattlemen very angry indeed. But perhaps there was more to it than just the problem of the grass. Bill Hanley, the “sage of Harney County,” wrote something about it once that would seem to indicate a psychological tension underlying these feuds: “It wasn’t any trouble for me to understand how to run sheep. What strikes at the dignity of the cattleman is the lowness of the service he has to give. They are always a-bleating, working their noise for sympathy, which is a kind of asking for protection. To a cattleman it is a dreary noise. Then they have to be kept in flocks, and given continual human association.”. . . and as his final indictment, “He [the sheep] has been herded since before the Good Book was written, and he don’t know any more now than he did then.”

Whatever your feeling about sheep you’ll see plenty of them along the highways in the early spring and autumn in the eastern part of Oregon and Washington. The presence of so many sheep is not the only change that an old-timer would notice coming back to this land which was for so many years a “resting place for Space.” Water has been brought to the desert, and the traveler’s eye falls pleasantly on stretches of new green, round which communities are springing up as the irrigation projects from the gigantic dams get under way. In certain shallow valleys among the barren hills, trees offer rich yield of fruits. Maps are dotted with town names slowly increasing the size of their type as their population increases.

I find it restful to look at a map and see big stretches of land with only an aimless thread of road winding in a vast empty space. Washington does not have such peaceful big stretches anymore. Almost fearfully each year I look at those white spaces where the Washington map says only Sand Dunes, The Pot Holes, Strawberry Butte, Bald Knob, the Colville Indian Reservation, and I wonder when the little “-villes” and “-tons,” the Junctions and Corners, are going to creep in with their ominous small blue lettering. Eastern Oregon is more reassuring. Malheur and Harney Counties remain relatively uncluttered. There are only a few names to conjure with around the Malheur Bird Refuge or the Hart Mountain Antelope Refuge. The names all make a picture to one who has traveled this country, joyously accepting the bumps and ruts, on the way to Blitzen or Frenchglen, or down into the Basque country farther toward the east. Horsehead Mountain, says the map, Alkali Lake; springs named for Mules, Skulls, and Buzzards; Coyote Wells; the mountains, Juniper, Little Juniper, Stinking-water, and Sheepshead. The name Wagontire recalls days when the presence of one in the vast indifference of the desert was a landmark spelling tragedy. The word Malheur cropping up in river and lake and county is a reminder of the French voyageur. The many Owyhees keep alive the memory of the days over a century ago when Hawaii was spelled Owyhee, and was a regular port of call for ships bound to the Northwest coast. Your directions in this part of the country are from ranch to ranch: Whitehorse, Alvord, Folly Farm. This is truly the Old West.

One of the most enjoyable ways to enter eastern Oregon is over the McKenzie Pass from Eugene into Bend and so along Route Fifty-four. This drive offers all the contrasts possible to this Northwest land—excepting only the sea coast. One sets out from Eugene, lying in the gentle valley of the Willamette, a university town, ringed round with blue hills and blue rivers, and goes climbing up along the roaring cool McKenzie, through a beautiful stand of virgin timber, to the summit where the lava beds stretch their bleak length incongruously through the green country, best seen in early evening when the light plays fanciful tricks with the forms and tones of this ancient cataclysm. Down then from the peak slowly through the wide-spaced pinkboled pines, onto the eastern plain where the mountains rise in solitary splinters from the desert floor.

Given a few days in and around Bend, including the beautiful Metolius country where even word-weary advertising men find themselves writing poetry; out and down as far as the Basque country of Jordan Valley, or to the section of the old big ranches like the famous P Ranch of Pete French; then to Klamath Falls, Medford, Ashland, Crater Lake; north and east to the Snake River Canyon, to Enterprise and La Grande, Baker and Pendleton, up to the John Day country; back finally to the Columbia River and along its barren rocky palisades until they begin to turn green with trees, and you’ll have some sense of the enchantment of inland Oregon.