a set of personalities as the North American continent ever knew. Their manner of living was Oregon's last link to the fabulous West that has vanished forever. Many of the cattlemen rode into the unmapped country with no other possessions than their rifles and blankets and the clothing that they wore. Their successful efforts to wring livelihoods from the hostile land is an unwritten epic of the frontier. Although the financial wizard, Henry Miller, might swallow their ranches eventually, they held things with a short rein while they lasted, and were quicker to resort to the rifle than to the courts of law. Some of them were pillars of rectitude who married early, begot large families, and grew gaunt and gray and old in sober monogamy. Others punished their livers with bad whiskey and pursued their amours in the Indian lodges as well as in the brothels of Pendleton and the settlements of the Klamath Basin. A woman tavern keeper on Applegate Creek in Jackson County wrote to her niece in 1854: "Em, I should like to have you here, but a young lady is so seldom seen here that you would be in dangt of being taken by force."
This reckless era wore itself down with its own sheer animal vigor, and died, figuratively, in its tracks, like a spent bull. There followed the homesteading migration of the early igoo's when thousands of easterners settled upon lands that often failed to yield a living. Some of them ultimately beat their way back to the East, many found footholds in the productive soils of the western part of the State, and Oregon cities absorbed the rest. Then the World War was fought and finished, Oregon troops came back from overseas, and the State passed through the golden twenties and the lean nineteen-thirties to immediate time.
The forces of good and evil, as we know them, have hammered one another through every hour of the State's history. Balanced against debaucheries, failures and land frauds are the solid accomplishments of men and women who had honesty of purpose and vision, vast courage and friendliness, and generosity that sprang warm from their hearts.
Politically, the individual Oregonian may be certain that he understands himself, but he cannot always be so sure of his neighbors. Citizens of conservative opinion may declare solemnly that a staunch and inflexible conservatism is the bone and bowel and sinew of the State's body politic, but the body politic has never patiently endured a tightened belt, and there has been no lack of faithful followers to heed the chant of every economic muezzin from Henry George to Dr. Townsend. Throughout the State, a preponderantly conservative press voices at least an editorial approval of the status quo; but there is always a
