t as
distance is measured elsewhere. An instance, this: Burns is one hundred
and fifty miles from Bend; a year or two ago, through the enterprise of
citizens of the two communities, a new road was "opened"
between--scarcely a road, but a passageway among the sagebrush navigable
with motor-driven craft. It is to celebrate! So some forty citizens of
Bend, in a fourth that many cars, make the little jaunt to Burns. They
leave at dawn: they reach Burns that night: they are dined and wined and
the road-marriage of their town is fittingly celebrated; then, another
dawn being upon them, they deem it folly to waste time with trivialities
like sleep, they crank their cars, and they are back at Bend, and lo! it
is but the evening of the second day!

The past, naturally, was worse than the present, so far as the
difficulties of great mileage are concerned. The little town of Silver
Lake in south-central Oregon, to-day is in the lap of luxury,
transportationly speaking, being but a beggarly ninety miles from a
railroad. But in the early 'nineties no one but a centipede would have
considered frequent calls at Silver Lake with any equanimity. Then all
the freight came from The Dalles, two hundred and thirty miles to the
north, and the tariff often showed four cents a pound, which must have
contributed fearfully to the high cost of living, not to mention the
cost of high living, with wet goods weighing what they do. When the
roads were good and teamsters moderately sober the round trip occupied
forty days, one way light, the return loaded. In all the two hundred and
thirty miles Prineville was the only town, and some of the camps were
dry.

"Th' town couldn't help but grow," an oldtimer confided to me. "Yer see,
it was such a durn fierce trip, after a feller tried it once he never
wanted ter repeat--so he stayed with us!"

Burns, over in Harney County, in the southeastern portion of the State,
is another example of what the long haul means. During the summer of
comparatively good roads the one hundred and fifty miles to the railroad
isn't especially serious, but when winter comes the "outside" is far
away indeed, and often for two months no freight at all contrives to
negotiate the gumbo, snow, and frozen ruts. So, late in the autumn the
Burns merchant lays in a winter stock, while the auto trucks hibernate,
and the burdens of such forehandedness, no doubt, are shifted to the
shoulders of his customers.

Modernity has not swept t