Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/160

142 John Minto. of fruit growing might lead me. I was trying with poor success to get some instructive talk from him, and mentioned fruit culture as one of Oregon's reliable resources. He w?s slow to answer ; looking into the oak-wood fire and moving hi.? head in emphasis of his conclusions, he spoke more to the fire than to me : " Not a necessity of life— soon be cheap enough. ' ' Nine words, that saved me the folly of wasting investment and labor in planting twenty acres of additional apple orchard where wise foresight called for twenty acres of good hay. I had got it, in part, by ditching through my aspen grove and killing the beaver with gun and dog, thus destroying their pond as a trout pool. I could not now restore it with a thousand dollars outlay. Of course it required ten years of time to indicate to me the probable folly of what I had done, and those years required much labor to check the forest growth from spreading too fast and far over my natural sheep pastur- age by means of the winged seed of the yellow fir— a few old trees of which stood on my highest land, immune from the grass fires of former times by the fact that they had rooted upon the top out-cropping of a wide vein of rose quartz, pre- cisely like that of the Quartzville mining camp on the Santiam, as I discovered by riding in there when the indications were first found, when I picked out of the vein myself about $1.50 in gold from fifty pounds of quartz chippings. CHAPTER V. THE SPIRIT OF FREEDOM IN OREGON. I have now in my narrative come to the edge of my life where I think it should be instructive to future workers as well as of interest as past local history. My chief reason for writing it now is past promises to friends that I would do so, to show the conditions first met, and a belief that the last forty-seven years of it may interest my co-laborers in the future development of our State, by reviving memories of what they themselves have contributed to Oregon's advance- ment, and also, perhaps, encourage the young by suggesting honorable lines of endeavor yet to be occupied.