Trail Tales Part 10

After hours of fearsome and benumbing travel, Jenny stumbled with me into the little home town. A good feed of oats and a warm shelter doubtless ended the story happily for her. But for me--the ghost of the desert and the wraith of the blizzard had become real. They spoke to me that night and I understood.

THE GREAT NORTHWEST

G.o.d had sifted three kingdoms to find the wheat for this planting.--_Longfellow_.

Westward the course of empire takes its way.--_Berkeley_.

In the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water.--_Isaiah_.

THE GREAT NORTHWEST

Possibly there are those who find themselves thinking that Western tales are travelers' tales and must be taken with "a grain of salt."

Some also say that the man who crosses the Missouri never is able to tell the truth again; this is crude, I know, and in some cases true, but they who are so afflicted were just the same before they ever saw the Missouri.

Our waterless areas were considered by Captain Bonneville (as told by Was.h.i.+ngton Irving) utterly barren and forever hopeless wastes. In Astoria--chapter thirty-four--these words are used:

"In this dreary desert of sand and gravel of the Snake here and there is a thin and scanty herbage, insufficient for the horse or the buffalo. Indeed, these treeless wastes between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific are even more desolate and barren than the naked, upper prairies on the Atlantic side; they present vast desert tracts that must ever defy cultivation, and interpose dreary and thirsty wilds between the habitations of man, in traversing which the wanderer will often be in danger of peris.h.i.+ng."

So thought Captain Bonneville; so wrote the matchless American _litterateur_, Was.h.i.+ngton Irving, of "Sunnyside," author and authority, creator of The Life of George Was.h.i.+ngton, and the Broken Heart, which made Lord Byron weep. The doughty Captain Benjamin L. E.

Bonneville, who died as late as 1878, obtaining leave of absence and a furlough, endured the pleasure of hards.h.i.+ps common to the explorer, and through his happy biographer added the Trail to literature; but his eye of vision did not see these great stones of the commonwealth, Utah, Wyoming, Oregon, Was.h.i.+ngton, and Idaho. The very region so carefully pictured above as the dreariest of deserts, a veritable Western Sahara, is the exact location of Idaho and a large portion of Oregon; a region perfectly adapted to the sustenance of immense population and intense development.

Moses understood all the wisdom of the Egyptians. We do not, but we do know that the biggest thing in an arid country is the ditch. America's triumph to date in the twentieth century is the completion of the Panama Ditch. The ditch is in Idaho more valuable by far than the land, for without it the parched soil is practically worthless, being an area of s.h.i.+mmering sand, where the ash-colored and dust-covered sagebrush breeds the loathsome horned toad, the rough-and-ready rattlesnake, and the slinking, night-hunting coyote, which preys on the lithe-limbed, loping jack rabbit.

The modern Western American is rapidly learning a modified wisdom of the ancient irrigators of Egypt, and already knows how to drain the irrigated acres and leech these old alluvial plains. From the days when the frosty glacial plowman ran his deep basaltic furrows for the majestic Snake and other streams, these gorges of nature had been only mossy beds over which lazily slid the unmeasured volumes down to the western and "bitter moon-mad sea." Now man, the mightiest of all magicians, has lured the liquid serpents from their age-long couches, cut them into thousands of smaller streams, and sent them bravely abroad on the face of the protesting desert, drowning its death and making it to bloom and blossom.

As a concrete instance of the artificial possibilities of Idaho and contiguous regions, I will here instance a statement made for me by the Rev. H. W. Parker, superintendent of Pocatello District, and resident of Twin Falls, under date of October, 1914: "Where ten years ago this very minute there was not a fence nor a furrow (only the conditions above described by Was.h.i.+ngton Irving) there are now such munic.i.p.alities as Twin Falls, Filer, Rupert, Burley, and others soon to be as fine. As pastor in 1904, my first official trip to Twin Falls was made on July 14. I found one or two frame buildings and some tents stuck around in the sagebrush; some streets had been marked out, but no grading had been done. Dust, heat, and sagebrush were the main features of the place. In October I preached the first sermon ever delivered by any minister in the new village. The congregation numbered forty-one. On February 5, 1905, I organized the first church with seventeen members; on May 23, 1909, we dedicated the present edifice at a cost of $18,000, exclusive of the lots.

"To-day this church has a members.h.i.+p of more than five hundred. This youngster has turned back into the treasuries of the denomination in regular collections more than $3,000. The city has to-day seven thousand people. There are between four and five miles of asphalt-paved streets, a perfect sewer system, and cement sidewalks throughout the whole munic.i.p.ality. An investment of $120,000 has been made in two splendidly equipped grade school buildings, besides a high school costing a quarter of a million dollars. These combined schools have an enrollment of over two thousand pupils with a teaching force of above sixty; the high school graduated forty-eight last commencement. There is not a saloon in the entire county."

Surely "progress" is here spelled in large letters.

Years ago, with the narrow strip along the Atlantic in mind, Longfellow wrote, "G.o.d had sifted three kingdoms to find the wheat for this planting." And as the mighty empire took its course toward the West of limitless opportunity the good G.o.d kept the sieve running full time, so that to-day

The best of the best Are in the Northwest.

[Ill.u.s.tration: END OF THE TRAIL]