Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/481



CHAPTER XIX.

1825 — 1910.

Wheat, Flour, and Dairying — Sheep, Wool, and Woolen Manufac- tures — Horticulture and Export of Fruit — Live Stock and Meat Consumption.

WHEAT, FLOUR AND BEEF.

"What has Portland to do with the farms?" says one reader. Very much indeed. Farming in Oregon started right here on the Portland townsite, and Port- land is proud to be ranked in with the tillers of the soil. It was about the year 1825 that Etienne Lucier — the Canadian Frenchman that voted for an American govern- ment at Old Champoeg — while yet a trapper and servant in the employ of the Hud- son's Bay Company — made up his mind to settle in Oregon and open a farm. He chose for his first location the upland near the intersection of East Morrison and Union Avenue streets in East Portland, where he commenced to clear oflf and open a farm. By this start and the title of Lucier, we get our authority to put in a chap- ter in the history of Portland on the subject of farms, orchards, and the lessons they teach. Lucier cultivated his little farm for a few years, and tiring of grub- bing stumps and burning brush, he removed to what is now called "French prai- rie" (so named because so many Canadian French settled there), and opened a farm on the grassy prairie lands of what is now Marion County.

Agriculture has, from the first settlement of the country, been the mainstay of the great mass of Oregon's population. Of the one hundred and two men who took part in the provisional government convention at Champoeg, nine-tenths of them were farmers. Of the great mass of immigration from 1843 to 1853, nine- tenths came to get free land and make their living by farming and stock raising. From 1843 to 1873, the main dependence of the farmer and the great mass of the Oregon people was wheat and cattle. Sheep had been introduced and some woolen mills put in operation as early as 1860, but the income from sheep husbandry was yet small. Oregon commenced shipping wheat and flour to California as early as 1850, and that was the only market for grain until 1868, when the first cargo of wheat was shipped to Liverpool. Shipments of barley and oats to California commenced as early as i860. Oregon has sold to California and European coun- tries in the last fifty years not less than five hundred million bushels of wheat and barley, counting the flour in as wheat. And that has brought back to the country not less than three hundred million dollars in cash and goods, wares and merchan- dise. The grain crops of Oregon have cleared up and fenced the farms, built the farm houses, paid for the farm machinery, paid all the store bills, sent the boys and girls to schools and colleges, and gone a long ways toward paying for all the steamboats and railroads and building all the towns and cities in the Willamette valley and eastern Oregon.