Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 3.djvu/242

232 men succeeded where others failed. Choice sheep camps became the sites of towns and cities, and favorite lambing grounds became rich grain farms. Dufur, Antelope, Arlington, Condon, Fossil, Heppner, Maysville, Moro, Adams, and many other towns are illustrations of this. Arlington began as a public shearing corral, the wool being taken from the bank of the river by passing steamboats. The means of crossing the common sheep towards the merino was at first derived from the few pioneer breeders in Western Oregon. The common or coarse wooled sheep were mainly supplied from Western Oregon, though some were driven in by both sides of the Cascade range as a result of heat and drouth in California in 1864, whence starving flocks were driven from the parched plains to the mountains, and across them to Oregon, Nevada, Washington, Idaho, and Utah. In 1866 a countermovement of stock sheep took place, and some hundred thousand head were taken from Western Oregon to California to restock pastures in that state. The toll gate keeper in South Umpqua Canyon reported passage of 80,000 head southward that season, and considerable numbers were driven up the middle fork of the Willamette and across the lake region of Southeastern Oregon to Pit River Valley, and thence across the Sierra Nevada to the plains of California. During these years of the early 60's sheep pastures were curtailed in favor of wheat growing in Western Oregon, and this added to the rapidly increasing flocks east of the Cascades in Oregon by colonizing, whence they were spread northward, east, and southeast, into Washington, Montana, Idaho, and Utah, and later to the Dakotas and Wyoming as stock sheep; and to Lincoln, Neb., and on to Chicago as mutton sheep. Hundreds of thousands of Oregon bred sheep have been trailed through the dryest and highest, least settled country, between Eastern Oregon and the corn