R E G O N
Ornamental nursery stock yields almost a million dollars each year for Multnomah County nurserymen alone. Field-grown roses are shipped out of the state in carload lots. Daffodil, tulip, and gladioli farms are numerous in western Oregon, and hothouses with thousands of feet under glass supply cut flowers and bulbs to local and national markets.
Until 1837 the only cattle in the Oregon country belonged to the Hudson's Bay Company, which supplied milk to the settlers but refused to sell any part of its stock to them. With the object of breaking up this monopoly, a group of prominent men in the Willamette Valley, headed by Jason Lee and Ewing Young, organized an expedition to California "to purchase and drive to Oregon a band of neat cattle for the supply of the settlers." The expedition sailed early in February 1837 on the U. S. brig Loriot, commanded by William A. Slacum, and returned overland a few months later with some 600 head of cattle and a number of horses, which were distributed among the settlers. The supply of livestock was considerably augmented in 1841, when Joseph Gale and others built the sloop Star of Oregon and sailed it from the Columbia River to San Francisco, where they traded their vessel for cattle, horses, mules, and sheep, which they drove north over the wilderness trails to Oregon. Soon thereafter the long "cow columns" of the eastern emigrants began to arrive in the Willamette Valley, and the future of one of Oregon's principal economic resources was permanently assured.
By the early 1870*8, cattle ranching had become a firmly established and highly profitable activity in the vast range lands of central and southeastern Oregon. For the next two decades, cattle had almost free run of this semi -arid plateau country, where the bunchgrass grew stirrup-high; and the unfenced area of Harney County in particular contained some of the most extensive ranches and largest herds in the West. But it was not long before sheepmen began to compete for the open range, and violent friction ensued between them and the cattle barons. Sheep were maliciously slaughtered, and their owners retaliated by burning the stacks, barns, and houses of the cattlemen. Into the feud was injected another element inimical to both sheep and cattle ranchers — the invasion of homesteaders with their fences and land-speculators with their townsites. The outcome was defeat for the hitherto dominant cattle kings, restriction of their rights, and a gradual decrease in the size of their herds. However, Harney County has remained a prominent cattle region, and Oregon as a whole is still an important cattle state.
