arehouses, livery barns, corrals, shipping pens, and
hotels, Shaniko in its prime was a busy lighting place for birds of
passage, a boisterous town of freighters, cowmen, and sheep herders. It,
like its stagecoaches, was typical, I suppose, of the town found a
decade or so ago upon our receding frontiers, and still encountered in
the fancies of novelists whose travels are confined to the riotous
territory east of Pittsburg.

"Where are you bound?" my table neighbor asked me at supper.

"I'm not sure," said I truthfully.

"Oh, a land seeker. Well, when it comes right down to getting something
worth while--something for nothing, you might say--the claims down by
Silver Lake can't be beat. They--" and he launched into a rosy
description of the land of his choice which lasted until the presiding
Amazon deftly transferred the fork I had been using to the plate of pie
she placed before me, a gentle lesson in domestic economy. My informant
was a professional "locator" whose business it is to combine the
landless man and the manless land with some profit to himself, in the
shape of a fee for showing each "prospect" a suitable tract of untaken
earth hitherto the property of Uncle Sam.

Another neighbor took me in hand. The odor of gasolene about him--it was
even more pungent than the fumes of other liquids, taken
internally--proclaimed him an auto driver.

"If you don't know where to go, let me show you," was the offer of this
would-be guide and philosopher--I assume him a philosopher on the ground
that any pilot in Central Oregon in those days must be one.

In answer to my inquiries he bade me hie straight to Harney County. It
was two hundred and fifty miles away. But I lost heart, stuck to my
original half-resolve, and declared Bend my objective point. In later
experience it was borne home to me that those pioneer auto men of
Shaniko always sang loudest the praises of the most distant point; their
rate was ten or fifteen cents per mile per passenger, and on the face of
it their business acumen is apparent!

One hundred miles of staging--five hundred and twenty-eight thousand
feet of dust, if it be summer, or mud, if it be winter; Heaven knows how
many chuck holes, how many ruts, how many bumps! The ride, commencing at
eight one evening, ended about six the next. No early Christian martyr
was more thoroughly bruised and stiffened at the hands of Roman mobs
than the tenderfoot traveler on the memorable Shaniko-Bend journe