in part coincides with the original trail, a continuous caravan of folk whose purposes parallel those of the pioneers who sought adventure, profit or release from economic pressure. This third objective they have realized, it is said, because the Trail's End State, although slow to respond to the impetus of prosperity, has been correspondingly resistant to the effects of depression.
Oregon's topography, as well as its location, has importantly affected its development. The ninth largest commonwealth, it is divided physically by the Cascade mountain range, and metaphysically by economic, political, and sociological Alps of infinitely greater magnitude. The Cascades cut the State into two unequal portions from the northern to the southern boundary lines. If the geologists are correct, the mountains owe their eminence to a terrific vulcanism that sent the great peaks hurtling up through the ooze and miasma of prehistoric Oregon. The disturbance gave the modern state a scenic grandeur that has exhausted even the superlatives of the gentlemen who write recreational brochures, but it walled eastern Oregon away from the humid winds, the warm rains of the coast, and turned most of the land, through countless aeons of slow dehydration, into a country of drought and distances, of grim and tortured mountains and high desert grown sparsely with stunted juniper and wind-blown sage.
The mountain range stood as a colossal veto of whatever motions the early eastern Oregon settlers might have made toward economic equality with the pioneers of the lush country west of the Cascades. It turned them, out of sheer necessity, into cattlemen and sheepmen and miners and "dry" farmers, just as more benign circumstances made western Oregon residents into lumbermen, dairymen, fishermen and farmers, and—in the more populous centers—into artisans and politi
