MOUNT HOOD 243 



it goes. I should say that the chief activity of 

 the State is holding on to corner lots, a sort 

 of husbandry singularly without virtue here in 

 Massachusetts, but which in Oregon yields thirty, 

 sixty, and a thousand fold. Towns are being laid 

 out, roads built, farms cleared, orchards planted, 

 and apples, the fairest apples in the world, are be- 

 ing picked, while the tent-pins of the population 

 are still unpulled, the people of city and country 

 guarding their land with guns, as it were, or watch- 

 ing their chance to jump some neighbor's claim. 

 The most astonishing thing to me in all of Oregon 

 was the price of land. But then, it is astonishing 

 land. I stopped to watch the plowing of a great 

 field of stubble in Joseph, where, as the plows 

 were turning the black soil around the boundaries, 

 the machines were threshing the yellow grain in the 

 center. The crop had just been cut — sixty bushels 

 to the acre, — the stubble being turned in for the 

 next sowing, no manure, no dressing with it to 

 feed the land. And this was the thirty-sixth con- 

 secutive year that wheat had been sown in this 

 field, and that wheat had been threshed — sixty 

 bushels to the acre — without a pound of fertili- 

 zer given back to the soil. 



