r is the shiftless land seeker, and is to be distinguished
from the sincere home seeker who fares forth into strange lands with his
family and his _penates_, and who finds vacant government land and
proceeds to "take it up." The best of all the free acres went years ago,
along with the free timber and the other compensations for pioneering,
but here and there remote areas worth having still remain. About the
last of these, and by all odds the greatest, was in Central Oregon when
the railroads opened the doors of immigration a few years ago.

Before the railroads came I went from Bend southeasterly through what is
now well called the "homestead country," and in all the one hundred and
fifty miles traversed we saw three human habitations: the stockman's,
George Millican, the horse breeder, Johnny Schmeer, and the sheepman's,
Bill Brown. The rest of it was sagebrush and jack rabbits, with a band
of "fuzz-tails" stampeding at the sight of us and a few cattle nipping
the bunch grass. My companions were a locator and a man who took up one
of the first "claims" in all that country, at Hampton Valley, one
hundred and thirty miles from a railroad.

To-day there are schools out there, homes, fences, and plowed fields.
Some of it is very good land, and the modern pioneers are prospering.
Some of it is not so good, and there have been failures and
disappointments as in all the homestead districts of all the West, past
and present. For there is truth in the old saying that for the most part
the first crop of homesteaders fails, and the success of the late comers
is built upon the broken hopes of the pioneers. However that may be, the
battle against the odds set up by a none too bountiful nature is often
enough pitiful, and occasionally heroic.

Picture an unbroken plain of sagebrush. Low hills, a mile distant, are
fringed with olive-green juniper trees; all the rest is gray, except the
ever blue sky which must answer for the eternal hope in the hearts of
the home makers--God smiles there. In the midst of the drab waste is a
speck of white, a tent. A water barrel beside it tells the story of the
long road to the nearest well--no road, but a trail, for this is well
off the beaten path and such luxuries as surveyed highways are yet to
come. The tent is the very outpost of settlement, a mute testimonial of
the insistent desire to possess land of one's very own.

Our car stops to inquire the way, and a woman appears. Yes, it is forty