and while the Portland Junior Symphony, or the touring Monte Carlo Ballet, may attract large audiences to the Portland Auditorium, the beer halls are filled also with citizens who frankly prefer "swing" rhythms. Perhaps the greatest cultural achievement of the commonwealth is expressed by the fact that only one state, Iowa, has a greater degree of literacy, although higher education in Oregon was long retarded by persons opposed to any institutions more advanced than the most elementary of schools.
Pictorially Oregon is this: tidy white houses and church spires of the Willamette Valley settlements, like transplanted New England towns, among pastoral scenery warm and graceful as the landscapes of Innes; the Alice-through-the-looking-glass effect of a swift incredible geographic change that lifts the motorist out of lush green forests and over the wind-scoured ridgepole of the Cascades, and plummets him into a grim Never-Never land of broken rim-rock and bone-bare plains beyond the range; the lamplit frontier towns of eastern Oregon, the rolling, golden wheatlands, great ranches where booted and spurred men still ride; Crater Lake, with its unbelievably blue waters trapped forever in a shattered mountain peak; Newberry Crater, the Lava Fields and the Columbia Gorge; and the Wallowa Mountains where the last big-horn sheep in Oregon browse among mile-high lakes and meadows of alpine flowers. Or if the bird's-eye view is toward the west coast; a humid, forested, mountainous region, fronting the Pacific, to which it presents, abruptly, a precipitous escarpment, relieved here and there by long stretches of sand beaches, an occasional lumber port or fishing village, or a river mouth. Southward toward California the land rises in a jungle of ranges dented by narrow valleys where live and work miners and lumbermen.
If symbolism may be needed to complete the picture, let there be two symbols for Oregon: a pioneer of the covered wagon epoch, and beside him likewise grim and indomitable, the plodding figure of a modern farmer driven from middle-western soil by years of drought. Thousands of dust-bowl refugees have drifted into Oregon since 1930. If hunger and hardships and uncertainty are the essences of the pioneer tradition, they are a part of it already; and as the bearded early immigrants brought a first cohesion to the territory, these latter day American pioneers may strengthen that cohesion and make their own distinctive contribution to the future state.
