d can have a worse
recommendation than that I know it not! Biggs, under the grassless
cliffs beside the Columbia, baked by sun, lashed by wind, and blinded
with sand, was impossible; and had it not been for the existence of
Biggs one truthfully might call Shaniko the least attractive spot in the
universe! The transcontinental train deposited me at Biggs and the
Columbia Southern trainlet received me, after a brief interval dedicated
to bolstering up the inner man with historic ham sandwiches and coffee
innocent of history, served in a shack beside a sand dune.

Seventy miles separates Biggs from Shaniko, and a long afternoon was
required to negotiate the distance. For an hour the diminutive train
panted up oppressive grades, winding among rain-washed coulees, where
the soil was red adobe and the rocks were round and also tinged with
red. Stunted sagebrush clothed the hillsides scantily, their slopes
serried by cattle trails as evenly as contour lines upon a map. Then,
the rim of the Columbia hills gained, away we rattled southward, more
directly and with some pretense of speed, across a rolling plateau of
stubble fields and grain lands, dotted here and there with homes and
serried by rounded valleys where the gold of sun and grain, and the gray
of vagrant cloud shadows, made gorgeous picturings. Westerly, beyond the
drab and golden foreground and the blue haziness of the middle distance,
the Cascade Range silhouetted against a sky whose tones became richer
and more cheerful as evening approached.

With the evening came Shaniko. "The evil that men do lives after them,"
said Mark Antony, "the good is oft interred with their bones." So let it
not be with Shaniko, for then in truth, of this town whose brightest day
has gone little indeed would survive.

[Illustration: In the dry-farms lands of Central Oregon. "Serried by
valleys, where the gold of sun and grain, and vagrant shadows, made
gorgeous paintings."]

Shaniko was the railroad point for all Central Oregon when I first made
its acquaintance, and from it freighters hauled merchandise to towns as
far distant as two hundred miles. Stages radiated to the south, and, in
1909, a few hardy automobiles tried conclusions with the roads. The
sheep of a sheepman's empire congregated there, giving Shaniko one boast
of preeminence--it shipped more wool than any other point in the State.
With streets of mud or dust, according to the season, a score or so of
frame shacks, its w