Page:Oregon, End of the Trail.djvu/135



tions to the south. The trek began in late September, snakes and frogs crawling and hopping along together in such numbers that the procession required two hours to pass a given point. Two long parallel ridges were formed, one of snakes and one of frogs. At ten in the morning a halt was called and a long rest taken. Lumped, entwined, and bunched together during their siesta, they made a mass two feet wide, a foot and a half high, and a mile and a half long. Just before marching formations were resumed, about two o'clock in the afternoon, the hungry snakes gulped down a few of their companion frogs.

During dog days in August a rattlesnake bit Luther King, later featured in Oregon newspapers as Rattlesnake King. The wound upon his leg healed quickly. Twenty years later, in August, the old scar became a running sore. By early September he was well again. The next year in early August the old sore reappeared accompanied by another. Each August thereafter all the old ones and a new one broke out. King believed that when the number of sores equalled the number of rattles, his affliction, which he called the "Serpent's curse," would be removed. The cumulative eruptions upon his leg had reached more than a dozen when he died.

As ingenious as these stories, are those of the labor-saving devices used by early Oregonians. A Lake Creek settler used mouse traps to catch crawfish, while an Umpqua pioneer placed his hog pen where daily tides filled a fish trap with sturgeon for the hogs' food. A southern Oregon farmer broke a breachy horse, not by mending his fallen fences, but by tying an iron nut to the animal's foretop in such a manner that it hit him between the eyes each time he tried to jump.

Other tales that sound incredible have had the backing of reliable report. In 1877 sea pigeons came into the Columbia River in such multitudes that they formed a winging column 15 miles long. A caterpillar migration in Lane County was of such proportions that a Southern Pacific train was stalled when the rails became slick from the quantities crushed. During a cold spell a rancher in the Coast Range could not understand the nightly commotion of his horses out in the barn until he found that shivering cougars, in search of comfort, had been sleeping in the manger. A Siskiyou hunter, who bugled with a cowhorn to disperse his 20 hounds after game, was much annoyed by the coming of the railroad, because his hounds, mistaking the locomotive's whistle for the horn, "would wander on wild chases like the foolish after snipe." In a canyon between Portland and its Cascade watershed the huge wooden pipeline was gnawed by beavers, which