Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail Part 17

About 1882 I had come to realize that the important market for hops was in England, and E. Meeker & Co. began sending trial shipments, first seven bales, then the following year five hundred bales, then fifteen hundred. Finally our annual shipments reached eleven thousand bales a year, or the equivalent in value of half a million dollars--said at that time to be the largest export hop business of any one concern in the United States. At one time I had two full trainloads between the Pacific and the Atlantic, on their way to London. I spent four winters in London dealing in the hop market.

Little as I had thought ever to handle an international business, still less had I thought ever to write a book. My first publication was an eighty-page pamphlet descriptive of Washington Territory, printed in 1870. My first real book, _Hop Culture in the United States_, was published in 1883. I mention this fact simply as one instance out of the many that could be given of the unexpected lines of development that life in the new land opened out to the pioneers.

The hop business could not be called a venture; it was simply a growth.

The conditions were favorable to us in that we could produce hops for the world's market at the lowest prices. We actually pressed the English growers so closely that more than fifteen thousand acres of hops were destroyed in that country.

Our great prosperity was not to last. One evening in 1892, as I stepped out of my office and cast my eyes toward one group of hop houses, it struck me that the hop foliage of a field near by was off color--did not look natural. One of my clerks from the office said the same thing--the vines did not look natural. I walked down to the yards, a quarter of a mile away, and there first saw the hop louse. The yard was literally alive with lice, and they were destroying at least the quality of the hops. I issued a hop circular, sending it to more than six hundred correspondents all along the coast in California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, and before the week was out I began to receive samples from them, and letters asking what was the matter with the hops.

It appeared that the attack of lice was simultaneous in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, extending over a distance coastwise of more than five hundred miles, and even inland up the Skagit River, where there was an isolated yard. This plague was like a clap of thunder out of a clear sky to us.

I sent my second son, Fred Meeker, to London to learn the English methods of fighting the pest and to import some spraying machinery. We found to our cost, however, in the course of time, that the English methods did not suit our different conditions; for while we could kill the lice, we had to use so much spraying material on the dense foliage that, in killing them, we virtually destroyed the hops. Instead of being able to sell our hops at the top price of the market, we saw our product fall to the foot of the list. The last crop I raised cost me eleven cents a pound and sold for three under the hammer at sheriff's sale.

At that time I had advanced to my neighbors and others upon their hop crops more than a hundred thousand dollars, which was lost. These people simply could not pay, and I forgave the debt, taking no judgments against them, and I have never regretted the action. All my acc.u.mulations were swept away, and I quit the business--or, rather, the business quit me.

After a long struggle with the hop plague, nearly all the hops were plowed up and the land in the Puyallup valley and elsewhere was used for dairy farming, fruit growing, and general crops. It is actually of a higher value now than when it was bearing hops.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _United States Forest Service_

Going up the Chilkoot Pa.s.s.]

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

TRYING FOR A FORTUNE IN ALASKA

AFTER the failure of the hop business, I was left more or less at sea for some years. I tried various other projects--among them the raising of sugar beets. The country, we soon found, was not adapted to this industry. Then I tried banking, likewise with little success. Finally I decided to strike out for the mines of Alaska. This adventure, taken when I was nearly three score and ten years of age, was full of exciting experiences. Indeed, it left me richer only in experience.

I had lived in the old Oregon country forty-four years and had never seen a mine. Mining had had no attraction for me. But when my acc.u.mulations had all been swallowed up, I decided to take a chance. In the spring of 1898 I made my first trip over the Chilkoot Pa.s.s, went down the Yukon river to Dawson in a flatboat, and ran the famous White Horse Rapids with my load of vegetables for the Klondike miners.

One may read most graphic descriptions of Chilkoot Pa.s.s; but the difficulties met by those earlier fortune-seekers who tried it were worse than the wildest fancy can picture. I started in with fifteen tons of freight and got through with nine. On one stretch of two thousand feet, I paid forty dollars a ton. Some others paid even more.

The trip part of the way reminded me of the scenes on the Plains in 1852, when the people and teams crowded each other on the several parallel trails. At the pa.s.s, most of the travel came upon one track, and that so steep the ascent could be made only by cutting steps in the ice and snow--fifteen hundred steps in all. Frequently every step would be full, while crowds jostled each other at the foot of the ascent to get into the single file, each man carrying a hundred-pound pack on his back.

After all sorts of trying experiences, I finally arrived in Dawson, where I sold my fresh potatoes at thirty-six dollars a bushel and other things at proportionate prices. In two weeks I started up the river, homeward bound, with two hundred ounces of Klondike gold in my belt. But four round trips in two years satisfied me that I did not want any more of such experiences.

Once, fortunately, I was detained for a couple of days, and thereby escaped an avalanche that buried fifty-two other people in the snow. I pa.s.sed by the morgue the second day after the catastrophe on my way to the summit, doubtless over the bodies of many unknown dead, embedded so deeply in the snow that it was utterly impossible to recover them.

The good ducking I received in my first pa.s.sage through the White Horse Rapids made me resolve I would not go through there again. But I did it on the very next trip that same year, and came out of it dry. Again, when going down the Thirty-Mile River, it did seem that we could not escape being dashed upon the rocks. But somehow or other we got through safely, though the bank was strewn with wrecks and the waters had swallowed up many victims.

When the Yukon proper was reached, the current was less swift, but the shoals were numerous. More than once we were "hung up" on the bar, each time uncertain how we should get off. No mishap resulted, except once when a hole was jammed into the scow, and we thought we were "goners"

for sure; but we effected a landing so quickly that we unloaded our cargo dry.

While I now blame myself for taking such risks, I must admit that I enjoyed it. I was sustained, no doubt, by high hopes of coming out with my "pile." But fate or something else was against me, for mining ventures swept all my gains away "slick as a mitten," as the old phrase goes. I came out over the rotten ice of the Yukon in April of 1901 to stay, and to vow I never wanted to see another mine or visit another mining country.

In two weeks after my arrival home my wife and I celebrated our golden wedding. There was nothing but a golden welcome home, even if I had not returned with my pockets filled with gold.

Since I was then past my allotted three score years and ten, it naturally seemed that my ventures were at an end. But for many of these years I had been cherishing a dream that I felt must come true to round out my days most satisfactorily. I longed to go back over the old Oregon Trail and mark it for all time for the children of the pioneers who blazed it, and for the world. How that dream was made to come true is the story to be told in the succeeding part of this book of pioneer stories.

PART THREE

RETRACING THE OLD OREGON TRAIL

[Ill.u.s.tration: With the development of railroad construction it was thought that roads would go out of use except for local communication.

But since the advent of motor vehicles, transcontinental highways have again become of great importance. For many reasons it is highly desirable that there should be good roads clear across the continent.

Two have been proposed, and in sections meet the requirements of a great transcontinental highway; but neither is yet completed. One is the Oregon Highway, which follows the old Oregon Trail. This is the route over which Ezra Meeker traveled by ox-team in 1906 and on which many monuments have been erected to commemorate the pioneers of the 1840's and '50's. The other is the Lincoln Highway, shown by the lighter line on this map.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Out on the trail again.]

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A PLAN FOR A MEMORIAL TO THE PIONEERS

THE ox is pa.s.sing--in fact, has pa.s.sed. The old-time spinning wheel and the hand loom, the quaint old cobbler's bench with its handmade lasts and shoe pegs, the heavy iron mush pot on the crane in the chimney corner,--all have gone. The men and women of sixty years or more ago are pa.s.sing, too. All are laid aside for what is new in the drama of life.

While these old-time ways and scenes and actors have had their day, yet the experiences and the lessons they taught are not lost to the world.

The difference between a civilized and an untutored people lies in the application of experiences. The civilized man builds upon the foundations of the past, with hope and ambition for the future. The savage has neither past nor aspiration for the future. To keep the flame of patriotism alive, we must keep the memory of the past vividly before us.

It was with these thoughts in mind that the expedition to mark the old Oregon Trail was undertaken. There was this further thought, that on this trail heroic men and women had fought a veritable battle--a battle that wrested half a continent from the native race and from another mighty nation contending for mastery in unknown regions of the West. To mark the field of that battle for future generations was a duty waiting for some one; I determined to be the one to fulfill it.

The journey back over the old Oregon Trail by ox team was made during my seventy-seventh year. On January 29, 1906, I left my home in Puyallup, Washington, and on November 29, 1907, just twenty-two months later to the day, I reached Washington, our national capital, with my cattle and my old prairie schooner. Not all of this time was spent in travel, of course; a good deal of it was taken up in furthering the purpose of the trip by arranging for the erection and dedication of monuments to mark the Trail.

To accomplish the purpose of marking the trail would have been enough to make the journey worth while to me, besides all the interest of freshening my recollections of old times and reviving old memories.

There is not s.p.a.ce in this book to dwell on all the contrasts that came to my mind constantly,--of the uncleared forests with the farms and orchards of today, of the unbroken prairie lands with the ranches and farms and cities that now border the old trail from the Rockies to the Mississippi. There is nothing like an ox-team journey, I maintain, to make a person realize this country, realize its size, the number of its people, and the variety of conditions in which they live and of occupations by which they live. I wish I could share with every boy and girl in the country the panorama view that unrolled itself before me in this journey from tidewater to tidewater.

The ox team was chosen as a typical reminder of pioneer days. The Oregon Trail, it must be remembered, is essentially an ox-team trail. No more effective instrument, therefore, could have been chosen to attract attention, arouse enthusiasm, and secure aid in forwarding the work, than this living symbol of the old days.

Indeed, too much attention, in one sense, was attracted. I had scarcely driven the outfit away from my own dooryard before the wagon and wagon cover, and even the map of the old trail on the sides of the cover, began to be defaced. First I noticed a name or two written on the wagon bed, then a dozen or more, all stealthily placed there, until the whole was so closely covered that there was no room for more. Finally the vandals began carving initials on the wagon bed and cutting off pieces to carry away. Eventually I put a stop to such vandalism by employing special police, posting notices, and nabbing some offenders in the very act.

Give me Indians on the Plains to contend with; give me fleas or even the detested sage-brush ticks to burrow into the flesh; but deliver me from cheap notoriety seekers!

I had decided to take along one helper, and a man by the name of Herman Goebel went as far as The Dalles with the outfit. There William Marden joined me for the journey across the Plains. Marden stayed with me for three years, and proved to be faithful and helpful.

And now a word as to my oxen. The first team consisted of one seven-year-old ox, Twist, and one unbroken five-year-old range steer, Dave. When we were ready to start, Twist weighed 1,470 pounds and Dave 1,560. This order of weight was soon changed. In three months' time Twist gained 130 pounds and Dave lost 80. All this time I fed them with a lavish hand all the rolled barley I dared give and all the hay they would eat.