Oregon Historical Quarterly/Volume 60/Oregon
OREGON
The end of the world's most famous trail is Oregon, and argument might be assembled to show that a region first glimpsed by a Portuguese sailor in 1542, pioneered more than two and a half centuries later, granted statehood in 1859, is—if only through refreshing unpredictability at the polls—our best example of democracy at work. In the Lone Fir Cemetery in Portland a babel of markers in many languages is warrant to such thought. In a land of contrasting climates, soils, and crops, the people and opinions of people will differ too. How tremendous—"Where rolls the Oregon!"
In the vast remains of a once vaster Oregon Territory, two decisive mountain ranges and a torrent of rivers determine the position of pawns and castles on the chess board-a sweet and sour mixture of pay dirt, hard pan, agricultural and grazing land, saw-timber, kinetic water, and mineshaft. Taken thus by squares, Oregon is lush and alkali, magnificent and desolate, heart-warming and heart-breaking; the fisherman's paradise and squatter's despair; one of the world's great orchards; a game preserve, rain forest, desert, placer ruin, and manzanita thicket; flyway for ducks and geese. The traveller remembers Mt. Hood, the Bonneville Dam, roses and apple-blossoms, rhapsodic Crater Lake, and the majestic sweep of the Columbia River east and west at Crown Point high above it. He also remembers that the people everywhere are neighbors and friendly.
It would take a northwest Sibelius to sing the symphony of Chinook from Table Rock and ghost town to the John Day country or the wheat-field geometry of Grand Ronde Valley; from the sea-lion coast to the vertical Cascades; from the running of the salmon and steelhead to the quicksilver life in shelving waters, or the sound of blue grouse exploding in high timber. New England set her stamp on Oregon's architecture of the north, and journeyman carpenters made the shanty-towns. But the true poetry of Oregon red man and white persists in the names of rivers, districts, and places: Clackamas, Klamath, Willamette, Umpqua, Yamhill, Tualatin, Deschutes, Rogue River, Umatilla, Llao Rock, Wagontire, Siskiyou, Multnomah, Tillamook, Scappoose, Owyhee, and Necanicum.
David McCord