told him: Young ma
going to Oregon City after them. The whole dog-gone Noah's flood of a
country will be a fall and melt and float away some day.'" And more to
the same effect.

But no one need leave Oregon in search of fair weather. The wheat and
cattle region of eastern Oregon and Washington on the upper Columbia
plains is dry enough and dusty enough more than half the year. The truth
is, most of these wanderers enjoy the freedom of gypsy life and seek not
homes but camps. Having crossed the plains and reached the ocean, they
can find no farther west within reach of wagons, and are therefore
compelled now to go north and south between Mexico and Alaska, always
glad to find an excuse for moving, stopping a few months or weeks here
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 desire to find a country at once fertile and winterless, where
their flocks and herds could find pasture all the year, thus doing away
with the long and tiresome period of haying and feeding necessary in the
eastern and old western 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 the icy winters was well-nigh
impossible to poor farmers.

Along the coast and throughout the greater part of western Oregon in
general, snow seldom falls on the lowlands to a greater depth than a
few inches, and never lies long. Grass is green all winter. The average
temperature for the year in the Willamette Valley is about 52 degrees,
the highest and lowest being about 100 degrees and 20 degrees, though
occasionally a much lower temperature