Preface
The Oregon Guide is the product of many hands and minds working joyously, without hope of individual reward or recognition, to accomplish something of which by and large they are proud, and diffidently offering it to the public of travelers and scholars and general readers. In contributing this volume to the American Guide Series, the members of the Oregon Writers' Project of the Work Projects Administration, speak collectively and anonymously. Most of them would rather have had some small part in its creation, working as carpenters of language with words as tools, finding facts and fashioning them into sentences and paragraphs and chapters, than to have built a fast highway or an impressive public building. For, generally, the writer believes that long after the best road of his day has been supplanted by a straighter and wider one, and long after the highest building has crumbled with time or been blown to bits by air bombs, this book will remain. And the makers of this Guide have faith, too, that their book will survive; in the future, when it no longer fills a current need as a handbook for tourists, it will serve as a reference source well-thumbed by school children and cherished by scholars, as a treasure trove of history, a picture of a period, and as a fadeless film of a civilization.
It was easy to write about Oregon. The state has something that inspires not provincial patriotism but affection. California has climate; Iowa has corn; Massachusetts has history; Utah has religion; and New York has buildings and money and hustle and congestion; but that "lovely dappled up-and-down land called Oregon" has an ever-green beauty as seductive as the lotus of ancient myth.
It is not only the native son of pioneers who feels this affection for the land. The newcomer at first may smile at the attitude of Oregonians towards their scenery and their climate. But soon he will begin to refer to Mt. Hood as "our mountain"—significantly, not as "The Mountain," as Seattlites speak of Mt. Rainier. Soon he will try to purchase a home-site from which he can view it. And before a year of life in Oregon has passed, the sheer splendor of peaks and pines, the joy of
