JOU can go by rail on the Wild Goose Railroad to the rich placer claims on Anvil Creek now, but when I was there, in the summer of 1900, one had to "mush" out over the tundra, pack on on back, to the auriferous claims that had made half the Western world sit up and take notice and cast its glances toward Nome, that city of tents, on the rubytinted, gold-bearing sands by the Behring Sea.

The lure of gold, the call of the West, the love of adventure, the wanderlust which is the heritage of the sons of the hardy pioneers and of the Western-born, had drawn men from lands afar as the lodestone draws the black sands from the day's clean-up.

Standing on the bank of Anvil Creek I have watched the bronzed and bearded miners, knee-deep in the muddy overflow from the flume, shoveling the rich auriferous sand and gravel from bed rock into the sluice-boxes above. Then, at the end of the day's run, I have seen the clean-up -a gold pan heavy with its burden of coarse gold-dust and nuggets. There is no gainsaying the fact that it takes hold of one's imagination and that there is a fascination in the very uncertainty of not knowing whether the day's developments will make you a stake or leave you broke. Yet, though Nome and Klondike were names to conjure with, one may without journeying several thousand miles to the rim of the Arctic Circle see right in Umatilla County, Oregon, and throughout the Inland Empire larger and more certain clean-ups than he will see in the far North.

In fact the very certainty of the return here makes it seem prosaic and it has lost its charm to those for whom the farthest fields are ever greenest. In the northern gold-fields ninety men in every hundred, let them toil never so hard, fail of garnering the golden harvest, while

here ninety men or more in the hundred will meet success if they are willing to work and have an average amount of horse sense and judgment, for the Inland Empire is the granary of the West and its fields of golden grain pour a steady stream of golden prosperity into the laps of the Eastern Oregon farmer.

Though Umatilla County is famous for many industries, she would be a rich and prosperous county if she had no other resource but her wheat, for her crop of that staple is slightly more than one per cent of the total wheat crop of the United States.

When to her wheat you add her wool and her sheep, her blooded horses-the projeny of the world-famous Chehalis and other noted sires-her cattle on the fertile Butter Creek meadows and elsewhere, her orchards and alfalfa fields, it is easy to see why it is a prosperous county.

Men who came here a few years ago with only enough money to buy themselves overalls, a cotton shirt and a straw hat, took up land and now are well-to-do. As an instance of what is not at all unusual, a clerk a dozen years ago found his family was growing at a more rapid rate than his income, so he threw up his job. as a clerk, leased a farm, borrowed money for his seed grain and to have his plowing done, and when his grain was in the warehouse he found, after paying all expenses and returning the money he had borrowed, that he had $1,800 left. bought the farm and three seasons later he had it paid for. He recently spent $21,000 in buying a wheat ranch which he decided was a good buy.

He

About twenty-five years ago a teacher come here from Tennessee. He secured a school, taught for a year or two, took up a homestead and went to farming, bought up a quarter section every time. he had the money to spare. Last year he refused $100,000 for his farm lands. He has one ranch not far from Pendleton, which is a mile wide and six miles long.

Wheat has enabled him to buy more land which in turn has enabled him to raise more wheat, a sort of endless chain arrangement, resulting in his being among the heaviest taxpayers in Umatilla county.

At present, wheat has the center of the stage. On all sides is heard the hum and whir of the header or the muffled drumming of the combined harvester.

If you will drive to some little knoll or hill-top that overlooks the surrounding country you will see the golden brown, heavy-headed wheat far as the eye can sec, acres of it, sections of it, miles of it, ripe and ready.

There, on the hillside below, you can see a combined harvester, as it travels, like some vast Juggernaut, back and forth across the 640-acre field. In front of it patiently plod the thirty-two horses that form its motive power. Before the header stretches the wheat, shoulder high, behind it is the bristly brown stubble. The wheat which is nodding gracefully there, in the breeze, suddenly feels the sharp blade of the swiftly-moving sickle, the revolving reel throws it on the draper which carries it into the cylinder. It endures a score or more of strenuous seconds in the cylinder and a moment later the

"COMBINE" AND WALL OF SACKS.

header-tender releases the straw in long rows while the sack-sewer trips the dump and dumps the sacks of grain. A steady stream of plump brown wheat is running meanwhile from the spout into the waiting sack.

Look across the field and you will see a long line of recumbent sacks, they look like khaki-clad soldiers who have been dropped by the enemy's fire as they charged across the open field, and here comes the first aid to the injured in the shape of the six-horse wheat wagons which will haul them to the warehouse. They do things on a large and well-ordered. scale here.

Do you remember how we used to do it a few years ago? We followed the binder, tying with twisted wisps of straw the bundles that the binder had failed to tie. We took a bundle under each arm walked to the next two bundles that had been dumped. We set the butts of the two bundles down firmly in the stubble, joined their heads well together to make them hold, stacked the nearby bundles against the first two and went on to make the next shock.

A little later the threshing outfit come, you were one of the crew. Do you re

member how swollen your wrists got and how they ached the first few days of work with the pitchfork? You worked from dawn till twilight. Fifteen hours of work and then take care of your team. And then, to supper.

Eat! you didn't know you could eat so much, nor get so empty. When you sat down you were so hungry and everything smelt so good that, like John Ridd, you thanked God for the room there was inside of you. You were pitcher in the field, you remember? You went from shock to shock and kept a steady stream of bundles in the air, trying to snow under the man on the load who was stacking them; then away to the threshing machine.

Don't the very memory of the flying chaff and dust almost choke you? Can't you feel your sweating arms and neck smart from the dog-fennel and tansey? You lined up to wait your turn then drove up. as the empty wagon ahead of you pulled back into the field, and began pitching off your load, while the bandcutter kept busy cutting the bands, the feeder with a skillful and practiced flirt of his hands distributed the bundle of grain evenly as he fed it into the cavernous mouth of the machine; there in the lee of the machine sits the sack-sewer plying his bright and crooked needle, and there,

stripped to overalls, undershirt and brogans, are the husky sack-buckers.

Yes, in those days when you worked fifteen hours a day and then, in the gloaming, walked three miles through the lane fragrant with the odor of the sweet briar that covered the rail fence on each side to see her-H-E-R-threshing was not as simple as it is now where the cutting, threshing and sacking are all done in one operation and where the old-time crew of 15 or 20 men are replaced by three or four.

Here and there they still head the grain and thresh it, but when one remembers that there are 140 combined harvesters in use in Umatilla County alone, and that few of them thresh during a season less than a thousand acres, one realizes that the old way is not much in vogue. It is outgrown.

Here on the reservation the land is leased from the Indians and farming is conducted in a large way. The plowing is done by gang plows operated by from six to twelve head of horses, or is plowed by steam traction engines. The drill follows the plow and the grain is left to the kindly care of Nature with her vivifying, life-giving touch, and to her alchemy which can transmute the tiny kernels into an abundant harvest. Here it lies ministered to by the sun and the rain, the frosts

and the thaws, the snow which, like a warm blanket or a robe of eider down, protects it from the killing frosts till the warm caress of the chinook wind changes its winter robes into life-sustaining moisture which the thirsty earth eagerly drinks. Now, even before the shy violet, which comes before the swallow dares and woos the winds of March with beauty, you will see a multitude of tiny green shoots which give a delicate green tint to the bare brown earth, then almost before you are aware the tiny green shoots are half-way to your knee and are awave in the warm, caressing winds of Spring.

The lure of the North may draw you with its golden call, but 50 bushels of golden club or bluestem to the acre is a call that is better worth heeding. When you see by the report of the Director of the Mint that during the year 1904 the United States and her possessions produced a total of over eighty million dollars worth of gold, or, to be exact, $80,

464,700, it looks as though the yellow metal were one of our most important productions, yet when you turn to the report of the Department of Agriculture and find that for the same year the value of our wheat crop was $510,489,874, or more than six times as much, and that even the humble Irish potato yielded a crop worth more than one hundred and fifty million dollars, that the hen and her eggs earned more than the gold output, and so did the hog to the tune of one hundred and four millions, that the hay crop was more than the wheat crop in value, amounting to over five hundred and twenty-nine millions, you begin to see that gold mining is a side issue, and a very small one when compared to the value of the farm products last year, which were six billion, four hundred and fifteen million dollars.

It's enough to make us kick the rocker over, throw down the shovel and the gold pan, take up a homestead and go to farming.

I

N the discharge of my duties as Inspector of Fisheries for the Province of British Columbia, I was, during several years, brought into close touch with the Indians who live near the sea coast, as well as with many of those of more remote tribes, whose villages are situated in the vicinity of the larger rivers and lakes which constitute such important features in the physical geography of Canada's Pacific province.

Having frequently to employ some of the natives to take me in their canoes up the rivers and lakes when I wished to visit the creeks and subsidiary streams in which the salmon annually deposit their eggs, I made it a point when voyaging with them or while reposing by our camp fires at night to learn all they knew or were willing to tell of the legendary lore of their people.

It thus happened that on a fine day in the month of September, after paddling up Silver Creek to the head of navigation, about six miles above where it debouches into Harrison Lake-a fine sheet of water forty miles in length-I sat down for rest and refreshment, in company with my Indian-one of the most intelligent men of his tribe, upon a ledge of rock extending from bank to bank of the stream, obstructing the further ascent of salmon except a few of the early spring "run,” when it is in flood.

After smoking our pipes in silence for some time my canoe man said to me: "The last time I went up Harrison Lake with you you asked if I knew any stories about the fathers of my people who lived a long time ago. At that time I did not care to tell you the stories that were told by the old men of my people when I was young. Indians do not like to tell all they know to white men, but as you are a good "Tillicum' I will tell you now what the old men of my people told, when I

was a boy, about this rock upon which we are sitting, and how it came to be placed as a dam across the river."

At a period regarding the remoteness of which the legends and traditions which have come down through many generations give no indication, the waters of Harrison Lake reached almost to the tops of the surrounding mountains, and on the level plains which are there to be found the ancestors of the present tribes had their lodges. After the water subsided to almost its present level the ancient inhabitants of the mountains moved down and settled in villages situated near the rivers, as they wished to be more conveniently situated for catching salmon which then became their principal article of food, as it has continued to be that of their descendants down to the present time. The people from the mountains on the north of the lake settled near the mouth of Silver Creek, and those from the mountains on the opposite side at Chehalis, where their descendants still live.

After a time, when the number of inhabitants had greatly increased, the people of each settlement organized as an independent tribe, and each chose their own chief. They also established a boundary line, beyond which the hunting or fishing parties of either tribe were not to trespass.

For a long time after this the people of the rival settlements lived in peace and friendship, but at length quarrels arose which almost led to open war between them. The Silver Creeks accused the Chehalis of obstructing the salmon when on their way from the Fraser River to Harrison Lake and Silver Creek, thus rendering it difficult for the inhabitants of the latter place to secure a supply for food as usual. In consequence of this, all intercourse of a friendly character ceased between the tribes.

At this time the chief of the Silver