were undeterred by the interminable length of the log they set themselves to severing. A village merchant in the Blue Mountains sold, and still sells, snowshoes for horses. Forty feet of cowhide belting used by an early Eastern Oregon sawmill stretched so much that within a week 50 feet had been cut off by installment shortening and 40 feet were still left.
Oregonians of the settler period, like the native tribes before them, were tinged with melancholy, but, unlike the Indians, they trafficked very little with spooks. At Rickreall and a few other places in the Willamette Valley were haunted mills. In Benton County was a hollow locally known as Banshee Canyon tenanted by the ghost of Whitehouse, a suicide. From the old, long- vacated Yaquina Bay Lighthouse came cries from a throat that was not human and light from a place where no light was; it is now occupied as a lookout station by the Coast Guard. A young journalist, while on vacation in the high Cascades, was lured away from his sleeping companions at night by mountain Lorelei, and was never afterwards found, passing into "some sweet life that has no end
Within the Cascades' inner walls,
Where nymphs beyond all fancy fair, Soothe him with siren madrigals
And deck him with their golden hair."
During the gold rush in Jackson County in the 1850'$ money to pay for the new courthouse was obtained from gold panned from the dirt excavated for the basement of the building. "Back yard" mines are still conducted in Jacksonville. One of the town's early churches was built on one night's receipts from the gambling houses. Hardworking men tossed away a year's or a season's earnings in a night at resorts which catered to their tastes. Bartenders swept pennies, proffered in change, to the sawdust floor with a gesture as grandiose as that with which they had tossed away their keys on opening day, a symbol that indicated that their place would never close.
Several accounts of buried wealth have caused much searching and digging. Letters, anchors, dots, and arrows on the rocks of Neah-kah-nie Mountain have long tantalized treasure hunters. Interviews with Indians during the period of settlement yielded varying and fantastic stories of shipwrecks, of a negro who was killed and interred with a chest on the mountain, and of slant-eyed Orientals and swaggering Spanish pirates. Pieces of oriental wood found on the shore, and tons of beeswax dug from the sands, have to a degree verified the stories of the wrecks.
