CHARACTERISTICS OF OREGON 



and there, the time being measured by the 

 size of the camp-meadow, conditions of the 

 grass, game, and other indications. Even 

 their so-called settlements of a year or two, 

 when they take up land and build cabins, are 

 only another kind of camp, in no common 

 sense homes. Never a tree is planted, nor do 

 they plant themselves, but like good soldiers 

 in time of war are ever ready to march. Their 

 journey of life is indeed a journey with very 

 matter-of-fact thorns in the way, though not 

 wholly wanting in compensation. 



One of the most influential of the motives 

 that brought the early settlers to these shores, 

 apart from that natural instinct to scatter and 

 multiply which urges even sober salmon to 

 climb the Rocky Mountains, was their de- 

 sire to find a country at once fertile and win- 

 terless, where their flocks and herds could 

 find pasture all the year, thus doing away with 

 the long and tiresome period of hajdng and 

 feeding necessary in the eastern and old west- 

 em States and Territories. Cheap land and 

 good land there was in abundance in Kansas, 

 Nebraska, Minnesota, and Iowa; but there the 

 labor of providing for animals of the farm 

 was very great, and much of that labor was 

 crowded together into a few summer months, 

 while to keep cool in summers and warm in 

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