YESTERDAY AND TODAY 5
style of architecture, a form of culture, or even a set of prejudices — uniquely their own. Subsequent waves of immigration, however, washed again and again over them, to warp the sober pattern of living that they laid down. The discovery of gold in southwestern Oregon and in the eastern portion of the State in the fifties and sixties brought the living prototypes of Bret Harte's fictions into the country by the thousands during the next two decades. The argonauts, like the Federal troops who came to fight a half dozen bloody Indian wars, had the irresponsibility of men who live lonely and dangerous lives anywhere, and they sowed their seed from Port Orford, on the southern Oregon coast, to the Wallowa foothills, on the State's northeastern boundary line. Veterans of Lee's shattered Army of the Confederacy, spared their horses by Grant at Appomattox, rode the starveling beasts into the country that had irked the Union commander as young lieutenant at Fort Vancouver years before, and men of his own victorious army pushed westward to settle side by side with their vanquished foes.
Then General Howard's troops blew out the last determined Indian resistance with a single gust of black powder smoke at Willow Springs in 1879, and eastern capitalists began to read some significance in the tumultuous Oregon scene. The transportation kings arrived, to wrestle for supremacy like embattled bulls, and while their methods may have shocked students of ethics, the shining rails went down, so that men along the Deschutes might ship some of the largest and finest potatoes in the world, and Jackson County fruit growers might find a market for their golden pears, and the lumber barons might hack at the State's timber resources. Lumberjacks from the thinning pine woods of Michigan swarmed into the Oregon wilds, just as in many cases their fathers before them had come into the Middle West from the hardwood forests of Maine, and the great epoch of Oregon lumbering was begun.
It is an interesting genealogical fact that the grandsons of Maine residents sometimes married the descendants of men who had come from that state a half century before; but there were not enough of these to make a Yankee sampler of Oregon. Swedes had come in too, and Norwegians; German and Bohemian immigrants were planting garden plots and pulling stumps as the forest wall receded. In Astoria Finnish fishermen adapted themselves to a climate less rigorous than that of their native land, while on the hills of southeastern Oregon, Spanish Basques were raising sheep, to the disgust of cattlemen who ruled like feudal lords over ranches larger than the lesser Balkan states.
The ranchers and the cowboys who served them, were as pungent
