\vas declared legal tender and had a standard value of $i a bushel. With the rush of the gold-seekers to California, the price soared to $6 a bushel, and by 1849 more than 50 ships had entered the Columbia River seeking supplies of grain. This export commerce provided the economic foundation for building towns and seaports, laying out wagon roads, establishing steamship lines, and constructing railways. For the next half century the Willamette Valley, with its brown loams and silty clay soils, was predominantly "wheat country."
In 1861, gold was discovered in eastern Oregon and backtrailing farmers, attracted by the possibility of finding fertile land near the new diggins, followed the influx of miners to the region. Town sites were staked out and agricultural development began. River steamers plying the Columbia hastened the movement of farmers to the inland plateaus and sagebrush plains. The first wheat grown in this portion of the state, was harvested in 1863 by Andrew Kilgore in Umatilla County. Within a few years, wheat was being sown over a large area of eastern Oregon. Shipping centers sprang up along the river; and when, in the early 188o's, the railroad came through, wheat-growing developed wherever the soil was suitable and shipping possible.
It was inevitable that this extensive single-crop production should make for exhaustion of the light basaltic soils and a consequent decrease in the yield. In time it became necessary to reduce the seeded acreage and to try various plans for restoring fertility. Summer fallowing or dust mulching, a method whereby half of each ranch remains unseeded in alternate years, is now generally adopted, and wheat still remains the principal crop in Oregon. Production in 1937 was 20,424,000 bushels, valued at $18,263,000 or slightly more than 30 per cent of the combined income from all crops in the state. The average yield from the 993,000 acres harvested was 20.6 bushels an acre.
Present-day wheat ranching in the rolling country of eastern Oregon is a highly-mechanized industry. Each spring, tractor-drawn gangplows, harrows, and drills prepare and seed the moist earth. In late summer, great combines move over the vast fields, reaping and threshing, in a golden haze of chaff and straw, and leaving at measured intervals bags of wheat stacked behind them. Day and night, trucks haul the grain to towering elevators in nearby towns, or to freight sidings and warehouses, for shipment by rail or water to flour mills and export markets.
Of other grains than wheat, the principal crops in 1937 were oats, 10,360,000 bushels, harvested from 280,000 acres; barley, 4,160,000 bushels, from 130,000 acres; corn, 2,178,000 bushels, from 66,000 acres;
