short years. Those, who, like myself, went
a-pioneering for the fun of it, making for Central Oregon because upon
the map it showed as the greatest railroadless land, have seen the warm
breath of development work as picturesque changes there as ever in the
story-book days when the West was in its infancy. We are young men, we
who chanced to Oregon's hinterland a few seasons gone by, yet already
can we spin yarns of the "good old days" which have a real smack of
romance to them and cause the recounters themselves to sigh for what has
gone before and, betimes, to pray for their return--almost!

Almost, but not actually. For who prefers twenty odd hours of
stagecoaching to travel in a Pullman? or seriously bemoans the advent of
electric lights, running water, cement sidewalks, and other
appurtenances of material development? Yet, of course, I realize full
well how tame and inconsiderable the "pioneering," if by such a name it
can be dignified, of Central Oregon in the last decade must appear in
the eyes of Oregon's real pioneers, who came across the plains and
staked out the State with monuments of courage driven deep with
privation and far-sighted enterprise. Yet, while half our Eastern
cousins believe the West utterly prosaic, and half are confident that
some of it is still the scene of dashing adventure, and the dwellers of
the Coast cities themselves are morally certain that all Oregon conducts
itself along metropolitan lines, the fact remains that most of the big
land between the Cascades and Blue Mountains was untouched yesterday and
is to-day the pleasantest--and the least hackneyed--outdoor playland
available in all the West.

Central Oregon occupied an eddy in the stream of Western progress. On
the north the Columbia flowed past her doors, and the stream of
immigration, first following the water and later the railroads, ignored
the uninviting portals. Rock-rimmed toward the Columbia, lined with
hills on the east, hedged in by the Cascades on the west, and remote
from California's valleys on the south, this empire of 30,000,000 acres
has been a giant maverick, wandering at will among the ranges neglected
by development. In 1911 the railroads roped the wanderer, when they
forced their way southward from the Columbia up the canyon of the
Deschutes. But my stage journey was two years prior to that.

Shaniko was a jumping-off place. It was the end of the Columbia Southern
railroad, which began at Biggs--and if a roa