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CHAPTER XX

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CHANGE

Observations of a traveller in the Northwest.

Entering the Oregon country by the old "Oregon Trail" in the summer of 1900, the writer was impressed with the thought that pioneer conditions were both absent and present. Compared to the social barrenness, matching the physical barrenness, which was encountered by the emigrants of 1843, '44> and '45, one found every night even in the mountain stretches a sheltering ranch house by the side of the trail and usually good and abundant food. The line of the North Platte was marked by irrigated alfalfa meadows. On the Sweetwater also an occasional level, near a convenient water privilege, was ditched and cultivated, usually to produce winter feed for cattle, though here and there was a field of wheat grown by irrigation. Land was still cheap in those regions; in fact excellent irrigated bottom land on the Platte was selling as low as $20.00 per acre, not an excessive price for wheat land guaranteed to produce a large yield each year.

iThe sources of information for the present chapter, which deals mainly with recent developments, are in large part the direct observations made by the author during a residence of seventeen years in the state of Oregon.