Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 22.djvu/162



152 S. H. TAYLOR

and perhaps with oats. With coarse vegetables the country does well. In fat cattle, it can't be beat. Now, at mid- winter, there are hundreds of cattle, as fat as your best stall fed, on the commons propagating, growing, fatting, with as little human care as the deer on the mountains. The animal grows through all the seasons, and at one year old is as heavy as in your country at two. An ox here is expected to weigh eight to eleven hundred, of course, and you see one yoke performing a labor that two of ours can hardly do. The wheat crop for the next harvest is yet, Dec. 17, but little of it in. They sow till March. The plowing of the season is now from a third to a half done. It commences with the rains late in Nov. and continues to the middle of Feb. or first of March. It requires four or five yoke of oxen to break with a plow cutting 14 inches. We have had now four freezing nights, all in suc- cession. It is called remarkably cold. Men complain of the cold as they do in your country when the mercury is 20 degrees below zero. Their houses are very open about open enough for comfortable summer houses and they expect to keep warm in them. The commerce of the country is carried on upon 'pack mules, and so mild are the winters that the "packers" expect to sleep and live in the open air in all seasons, even without tents. The highest point to which the mercury rose last summer was 112 degrees but the heat was not oppressive as it is in Wis- consin. The air is balmy from the effect of the sea, and one feels free about the chest in the highest heat of summer. In winter the temperature ranges in the neighborhood of zero to 14 degrees below seldom, perhaps never, freezing in the day time, and only now and then nights. Nobody thinks of such a thing as feeding cattle in the winter. You sometimes see a little stack of hay designed for a working team in time of emergency but this is not common. It is expected that teams will go right along through the winter, plowing and keeping fat on the new growth of grass which is now green and fine. The old Spanish trail and the present inland commercial route, is through this valley, from California to Oregon. Thousands