and as high as their heads in the creek-bottoms. Stock-raising
was a lucrative business in an early day in Oregon : in the first
place, because cattle were scarce among the settlers, and next,
because, afier they became more numerous, they were in demand for food by the mining population, with which gold discovery suddenly peopled the southern portion of the State.
The stock-owner then put his brand on his herd and turned
them out to “ summer and winter” themselves on the abundance
of the virgin prairies; but in course of time this indiscriminate
pasturing injured the grasses, reducing them to a shorter growth,
though it is said that when the land is permitted to lie idle
under fence they recover their old luxuriance.
The lives of the early Oregonians, while they very often lacked material comfort, were remarkably care-free. The genial climate and kindly soil rendered constant or excessive labor unnecessary. Comparative wealth was easily attained when a hundred cows represented a capital of ten thousand dollars. To mount his “spotted cayuse” and scamper over the prairie looking after his stock was a pastime; good riding, good shooting, and knowing how to throw the lasso, popular accomplishments. Clad in his buckskin suit, and booted and spurred in true vaquero style, it was his pleasure to scour the prairies day after day on any errand, from cattle-hunting to looking for a wife with three hundred and twenty acres to make a mile square with his own. And well it might be—unless some of wild California stock “got after him,” when a sharp race sometimes ended in the caballero being “ treed.”
This free and easy life in a country so beautiful had charms not difficult to comprehend, and was more profitable than the laborious farming which made men too slowly rich “back in the States.” The larger part of the Wallamet Valley was taken up under the Oregon Donation Law of 1850, which gave three hundred and twenty acres to a married man, and the same amount to his wife in her own right. This brought early marriages into fashion, the courting which preceded it being often accomplished while the would-be husband sat on his cayuse, and the not unwilling bride of thirteen or fourteen summers stood on the door-step. Large families who took up in this way adjoining square miles were able to call a whole township their own.
