CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY AN UNCERTAIN FORTUNE By David Milholland love to feel their guts.” What better reason to clean the 20 to 30 fish we returned with each day. To be sure, Caroline’s joy in performing that onerous task was taken advantage of, but then we couldn’t have stopped her had we tried. She roamed the hills, went hunting and fishing, and generally operated with as few constraints as her older brothers and their friends. The pleasures of that freedom are the strongest memory of the ten years of my youth, from 1950-60, that I lived in the small community of Lakeview in Southeastern Oregon. Lakeview lies 14 miles from the California border and 350 miles from the metropolis of Portland. It is the seat of Oregon’s third largest county — Lake County — and is the self-proclaimed “ tallest town in Oregon,” almost a mile high. Locals speak of living “ behind the sagebrush curtain,” forgotten by the rest of the world and generally happy to be so. That distance has bred a sense of insularity and self-sufficiency, as well as a suspicion of outsiders . . . intruders on a private paradise. Say “ Portland hunter” in the town and say no more. Who wants intruders in a land replete with rainbow trout, wild plums, quail, grouse and sage hens, deer and antelope, geese and ducks, fertile soil that even in a short summer yields great gardens, unlimited firewood just miles from town, and finally, probably most important, enough land to find a place in the sun with no one to poke into one’s affairs. The county is a high, dry, desert county of alkaline lakes, faulted plateaus, geysers and hot springs, and sparse but extensive forests of fir and pine. The timber grows much more slowly than in the Cascade and Coast ranges, and the 12- to 15-inch rainfall makes livestock production very landintensive. The area has been populated continuously for over 25,000 In Lakeview, locals speak o f living ‘'behind the sagebrush curtain, ’’forgotten by the rest o f the world and generally happy to be so. Living there • has bred a sense o f insularity and self-sufficiency. years. A pair of primitive sandals found in a lava cave near Ft. Rock in northern Lake County was carbon- dated that age, along with more recent cooking and hunting implements. Arrowheads could always be found among the scrub brush and juniper, evidence of a subsistence hunting culture of long duration. Though migratory Indians continued roaming the plateaus on horseback as late as the 1920s, with one major campsite on a hillock directly above Lakeview, the onslaught of white explorers and settlers quickly modified those patterns. One locally advanced theory has a Spanish wagon route running between the California colonies and the Indian trading center at Celilo Falls for decades before the earliest U.S. explorer, John C. Fremont, visited the area. By 1850, one of the two major routes to the Oregon Country, the Applegate Trail with its terminus in Jacksonville, passed along the southern end of Goose Lake, leaving a smattering of tired travelers and visionaries by its shores. Not much later a steamer plied its 60-mile length, and before the turn of the century most of the arable land had been settled and sewn in crops not much different from those produced today. Most of these early merchants and farmer/ranchers were of Anglo-Saxon or Irish stock. Legend has it that Paddy was sold a direct ticket from County Cork to Lakeview and told not to let down his guard till safe again in the Lord’s hands. The county experienced its share of range wars between sheep and cattlemen, a shortlived gold strike in 1902 and a number of fires that swept the urban cores of Lakeview, New Pine Creek and Silver Lake out of existence. A Lakeview doctor, Bernard Daly, became legendary for his all-night ride through snow to Silver Lake, 100 miles north, to treat the survivors of that holocaust. The towns disappeared, but their reasons for existence, as trade centers and providers of basic urban amenities, continued. The same names reappeared on new storefronts and life went on as before. The timber industry arrived slightly later, as the rail links were established and the incredible first-growth stands of Western Oregon and Washington began shrinking. Local residents were soon joined by immigrants from the dustbowl areas of Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma, who found the style of life similar to what they’d left behind. By the 1950s, Lake County’s population had stabilized at around 6,000. The timber industry often left high unemployment among the gyppo loggers and millworkers. Usually the layoffs were seasonal, when the high winter snowpack curtailed operations, but external market forces — the Eisenhower recessions — also cut demand drastically. Even then, people survived. Can anyone be called truly poor with a locker full of venison and several cords of wood in for the winter? The goals of most residents, be they logger or lawyer, included the above. But it wasn’t always easy. Early one fall morning before school, our car was stopped for a routine game check — three sage hens per license — and directly behind us pulled up the car of a classmate, the oldest of 15 boys and a girl, whose Illustration by Steve Sandstrom 15
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz