LET 'ER BUCK 



the tail-end of this puffin' cayuse 'cause it snorts cinders 

 and I've got to watch out for fires along the trail.' , 



The country was indeed dry. Some of the grain still 

 lay in the sheaf. Miles of golden-yellow stubble- 

 fields undulated away in the distance; willows and 

 cottonwoods stenciled green along the watercourses or 

 clustered about an occasional ranch-house or "nesters" 

 cabin. A few scattered herds of live stock grazed here 

 and there, where buffalo wallows still show green and 

 the slopes are scarred with the parallel trails of the 

 Great Herds which have passed, but whose remnant 

 have now moved back from the lines of steel to the 

 "interior country." 



Wherever the railroads have thrust their antennae, 

 the open range becomes dotted with the homesteaders' 

 shacks and webbed with wire ; dry farming and irriga- 

 tion turn a one-time half -desert into fertile fields and 

 blossoming orchards. Thus agriculture crowds out 

 the pastoral, and industry in turn both aids and crowds 

 out agriculture; and the ' 'chapped" (schapped) and 

 ' 'booted" cowboy and stockman retreat to their last 

 stamping-ground, where the Indians, trappers, pros- 

 pectors, and buckskin-garbed scouts have preceded 

 them. 



In Oregon, however, there remains even today some 

 interior country where the free life of the open is 

 still unhampered by a useless and deadening veneer 

 of paternal regulations and effete conventionalities. 

 There are still a few out-of-the-way corners yet un- 

 turned by the plow and unvexed by wire fences; and 

 a day in the saddle back from many of the railroads 

 brings one to a ranch country yet awaiting the settler 

 where the cowboy still "ropes" and "busts" steer or 

 bronco, "brands" and "hog-ties" calf and longhorn,and 



8 





