THE WEST SHORE.
February, 1880
3
TIIK CHOICE OK A HOME BY SETTLERS
IN OREGON OR WASHINGTON OR
IDAHO.
HY KKV. 0. II. ATKINSON, I). II.
homes on TBI PACIFIC HOHTHWBSTi
This is a region of homes, owned,
with few exceptions, by their occu
pants. Government land is so cheap,
and homesteads, pre-emptions, timber
culture claims can be taken and held
011 terms so easy, that every family,
however poor, can have a home. This
proffer by the U. S. Government, in
this entire Pacific Northwest formal
ly known as Oregon for the past
thirty years, has led to the steady
growth of settlements made of home
furms, small and large, and home-like
villages and cities. Probably this
growth would have been more rapid,
had not the acquisition of California
and the discovery there of rich placer
gold fields, and the sudden rush of our
people thither, turned the public mind
to the hope of making quick fortunes,
and going back to their eastern or west
ern homes to live. Hut the benefits of
this exodus to the mines of California,
anil to the later found mines of Ore
gon, Idaho, Washington, Mritish Co
lumbia and Alaska, have been to adver
tise the whole Pacific coast to the world
and draw hither emigrants from all
nations; open new fields of business en
terprise; to cause steamship and rail
road lines to be established; and to in
duce the investment of home and for
eign capital I to create three large Pa
cific states and six territories, with their
senators, representatives and delegate
in congress; and finally to settle the
question with business men of all
classes, farmers, mechanics, merchants,
artisans, physicians, lawyers, ministers,
journalists, educators, publicists, and
xilitical economists, that our whole do
main between the Kocky mountains
and the Pacific ocean is to be the chosen
and permanent home of a very large
and rapidly increasing population. Pla
cer mining by the many with shovel
nnd rocker and sluiccr, have given way
to quartz mining by the few capitalists
in deep shafts and cavernous chambers
with rock blasting, crushing machines
and separators. The great Spanish
grant ranches of California, held by a
few rith men and leased or w orked by
hired laborers and machinery, while
furnishing large amounts of grain for
export in good years, yet exclude the
mass of farmers from ownership of the
soil, and compel them to find or make
homes elsewhere on government or
rail road lands. Our Pacific North
west now welcomes these exiles from
California. Our fields have been tested
for their cereals, grasses, vegetables and
fruits, and found productive.
7 he writer has witnessed thirty-two
harvests in Oregon, without the fail
ure of a crop. Our climate has been
proved favorable for growth and for
health.
Our forests bear the test of value for
timber and lumber of almost every
needed variety, and of unlimited ex
tent. The coal fields of British Colum
bian, Washington Territory and Ore
gon and Alaska prove to be numerous,
and excellent for domestic and steam
ship uses. Idaho and Montana will
probably be found equally rich in coal
and of older formation and superior
qualities.
Our salmon fisheries on the Colum
bia and other rivers j our herring and
halibut fisheries in Puget Sound, De
Fuca Straits, and along the coast; our
cod and halibut fisheries along the
coasts of Alaska, extending to those of
the Okotsk, and joining the mackerel
fisheries of the Japan seas and straits,
surpass in extent and rival in value the
fisheries of the rivers and hays of the
western coast of Europe; the channels
and sounds and friths of Great Britain)
the straits and fiords of Denmark and
Norway, the Baltic and the North sea,
with those of Labrador and New
foundland added. Japan has a popula
tion of 35,xx,xx whose almost entire
animal food for a thousand years has
been the fish of her own surrounding
seas.
The Pacific ocean, whose wanner
waters lave the shores of Asia and
America, favors the life and furnishes
the tropic food for untold varieties and
numberless schools of fish. This is
their great pasture ground. Thither
they immigrate, like the birds, from
bays and rivers for winter, and return
in spring for their spawning nests and
the nurseries of their young. They
await the increase of population on our
coast for a market.
A few of our iron mines and lime
stone leds have been opened and
worked with success. Our tlax fields
have yielded seed for oil, of such amount
and good quality, and lint for looms ot
such fineness and strength of fibre as
to command high prices, the one in
San Francisco, and the other in Dun
dee and Belfast.
Our home manufactures of wooden
and iron and woolen fabrics, have only
begun. Our water power and fuel
power have been merely tested. The
slow development of these resources
during the past thirty years, has been
a preliminary work. These results
are the signal banners of what vast
products await human industry and en
terprise. The present annual exports
of several hundred thousand tons of
harvest products, foretoken tenfold the
amounts that will be borne to all the
marts of the world under the white
wings of a thousand merchant ships.
Tllli CHANGES.
At first the immigrant aimed to make
his home on the choicest spot he could
find of government land, prairie and
timber, with springs or brooks at hand.
Next he hurried to the mines for gold
to buy a home. Next he became a
trader or a speculator to obtain a com
petence for himself and family. Latterly
he has become a stock-raiser, or has
sown his broad fields in wheat, and has
won success. Farmers in all directions
sought first the treeless, flat or rolling
prairies of the Willamette valley as the
only fit place for farms. Stock was
gradually driven to the high prairies
east of the Cascade mountains for pas
ture. Herders and shepherds, and
widely separated ranchmen, occupied
that region. Merchants and transpor
tation companies supplied the few goods
and bore off the few exports of the in
terior. The trade of the valley doubled and
quadrupled by means of railroads and
improved river navigation. It was
found ten years ago that the cereals
could be raised at a profit in the upper
Columbia basin. Four years ago the
plough slowly crept up the slopes of
the high eastern prairies. Two years
ago it reached and turned up the rich
soils on the hill tops. Those lands
called too dry and desert-like, have
yielded twenty-five to fifty bushels of
wheat per acre. In mid-summer the
wheat was green and luxuriant from
the invisible vapors absorbed by the
ploughed and spongy soil, while the
bunch grass on unploughed land two
feet distant was drying up. The choice
farms a few years ago were along the