Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 7.pdf/38

32 now published and edited by M. D. Wisdom. To-day we have the Rural Spirit, Portland, Pacific Homestead, Salem, and Oregon Agriculturist and Rural Northwest, Portland, published and edited by H. M. Williamson, and the Northwest Pacific Farmer, Portland, published and edited by Frank Lee.

The early history of fruit-growing presents to the student at once, a most romantic and a thoroughly practical and matter-of-fact series of interesting pictures. It is related of some of the earliest settlers in the Willamette Valley that nothing more thoroughly and painfully accentuated their isolated condition than the absence of fruit trees on their newly-made farms. Half the beauty and pleasure that brightens the life of youth and childhood, it is not too much to say, is found in the orchard of the old homestead—the sight of the trees in bloom, the waiting and watching for the first ripe fruit, the in-gathering of the fruit in the fall, and the storing of it away in bin and cellar for use in the winter around the ingleside.

Is it any wonder, then, that when some of the early settlers were called to southern Oregon to aid their fellow-countrymen in repelling the attacks of Indians, and finding there wild plums and wild grapes, they brought with them on their return, roots of the former and cuttings of the latter, in the hope that these foundlings of the southern forest would take kindly to a more northern soil? In this act of transplanting was illustrated the world's hunger for the fruit of the vine and tree, so beautifully illustrated by Whittier in his poem commencing with these lines:

The old Puritans could not have been such terribly stern and uncompromising foes of the good things of life,