Erzurum

“ The city lies with its head upon the talus or accumulated rubble which [202] fans out from the heights on the south. Its feet touch the floor of the plain.
Under modern conditions Erzerum is by far the most important strategical position throughout the length and breadth of the country described in this work. The heights confining the plain on the south are in fact the edge of the great block of tableland interposed between the plain of Mush and the northern capital. ”

“ Everything in nature, says Emerson, is engaged in writing its own history; the planet and the pebbles are attended by their shadows, the rolling rock leaves its furrows on the mountain side, the river its channel in the soil, the animal its bones in the stratum, the fern and the leaf their epitaphs in the coal, and the falling rain drops sculptures their story on the sand and on the stone. Nearly everything that is known about the geological formation of Oregon is due to the unselfish labors of one man. ”

“ It is necessary to hasten. Every day is precious.”
221 VI.
VILAYET OF ERZEROUM. The Vilayet of Erzeroum lies due north of Bitlis and Van, and is likewise a border province. It consists principally of the upper valleys of the Kara-Su (Western Euphrates) and the Tchorok. The fortress-city of Erzeroum itself is situated in a plain which collects the head-waters of the former river; Erzindjan, a place of almost equal importance, lies further west, about 120 miles down stream; while Baibourt, in the Tchorok valley, is the most important place on the high road from Erzeroum to Trebizond. ”

“ The remaining portion of the Territory of Oregon—the Eastern portion—we have sufficiently noticed in passing through it. Very much the largest portion of Eastern Oregon is at present and must continue for a great number of years to be comparatively valueless. It is a desert, so rugged, so dreary, and so exceedingly sterile that it cannot, until ages have melted its mountains, until the winds and floods and changes of thousands and thousands of years shall have crumbled into dust its rocks and its sands, yield anything worthy of consideration to the support of human life. ”

“ The Oregon fever is raging in almost every part of the Union. Companies are forming in the East, and in several parts of Ohio, which, added to those of Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, will make a pretty formidable army. The larger portion of those will probably join the companies of Fort Independence, Missouri, and proceed together across the mountains. It would be reasonable to suppose that there will be at least five thousand Americans west of the Rocky Mountains by next autumn. ”

“ At Forest Grove, reside some of the earliest settlers of the valley—persons who have seen their children, born in Oregon, grow up to manhood's estate, and have sent them back to "the States" to learn something of an older civilization than that of the mountains and plains of Washington County. There is always a great charm in hearing the annals of a State from the lips of its founders. Many walking cyclopedias of Oregon history belong to the population of the Tualatin Plains, and to their influence is due much of the good order and good morals of the community. ”

“ Grant County, embracing that central portion of Eastern Oregon where the Blue Mountains are highest, and extending southward to the southern boundary of the State, comprises altogether some of the most remarkable features of the whole country, including a portion of the wonderful "lake region." It was first settled in 1862, by a mining population; since which time it has contributed ten millions to the wealth of the world. The mining-camps are all on the head-waters and forks of the John Day River ”

“ So we come to-day to dedicate this monument, and the beautiful spot upon which it stands, to the people of Oregon for all time, in memory of the patriotic men whose names are thus recorded as being our oldest pioneer state builders. Sixty years ago there were less than thirty-six white male settlers within the entire boundary of what now constitutes the great State of Oregon. From this small beginning, and within a time that is comparatively short, has grown the magnificent state of which we are all so proud, and of whose possibilities, who can portend? ”

“ A state isolated from the rest of the great body of the American people by two thousand miles of mountains and arid plains that can accomplish these results and secure this position among the states of the Union is no ordinary community, and must have a history at once both unique and forceful to an extraordinary degree.
To search out facts from twenty thousand pages of printed matter heretofore issued to the world as veritable history of Oregon, a great deal of which is uncertain, much of it romance and not a little of it in dispute, is the task set before the author. ”

“ For, if after a long toilsome climbing over rocky declivities a pleasanter part of the way is reached, and the weary toilers are led to hope for easier travel, just here, at any turn in the road, the dreadful savage might suddenly make his appearance. Such was the dark picture the journey overland to Oregon presented to the men and women of the frontier, who yet restlessly waited for their own chance to try it. ”

“ What there is in the territory of Oregon to tempt our national cupidity, no one can tell. Of all the countries on the face of the earth, it is one of the least favored of heaven. It is the mere riddling of creation. ”

“ Victor was drowned in the sinking of an ocean steamship — The Pacific, November 4, 1875, south bound from Victoria, B. C.—and his widow commenced then to write Oregon history.
William H. Gray, the author of Gray's History of Oregon, will forever hold a unique place in the history and early literature of the state. Always in the forefront of the battle for what he conceived to be cause of truth and justice to the pioneers of Oregon, he will be recognized and remembered as one of Homer's heroes:
"Oh friends, be men, and let your hearts be strong. ”

“ Why should these noble men and women, willing to sacrifice life and everything dear to mankind go to far distant Oregon:
And pierce the Barean Wilderness
to plant the banner of the cross? Why pass the tribes between the Missouri and the Rocky mountains and go a thousand miles beyond the Blackfeet rascals that needed Christianizing worse than any other equal number of murdering robbers on the face of the earth? It is the duty of the historian to find out. ”

“ The reader may search the whole history of the world in vain to find a parallel or even a suggestive example for the pioneer emigration to Oregon. The travels of the Jews to find the promised land, where kind Providence sent the manna and quails for subsistance, and fire-works by night for cheer and comfort, was but a picnic, compared with the journeyings of our pioneers for two thousand miles through a hostile Indian country offering every imaginable delay and obstruction. ”

“ We know that in their ages of residence in the sun shine and fog of the coast, along the swift-flowing rivers and in the verdant and blossoming valleys, the early tribes of Oregon developed an important literature, but of the literature itself we have only a very little and can never have more than a small part of what might have been ours if we had not waited too long. ”

“ But, thank God and the energy of a free people, the country, with all its untold wealth and prospective grandeur, is ours, and to-day, as we hear the lightning tap of intelligence, from the Old World to Oregon, we have not one solitary regret that thirty of the best and most active years of our life have been spent, in contending publicly and privately, by day and by night, in season and out of season, against that influence. ”

“ Early in the spring of 1843, or as soon as the grass began to grow, promptly, without preconcert, but as if by appointment, emigrants from every part of Missouri and the neighboring states were on the roads to the usual rendezvous in the vicinity of Independence. Their wagons were drawn by two or three or five yokes of oxen; on the covers were the words "For Oregon," and their immense herds of cattle filled the highways. Many of them had been neighbors at home, and often families of brothers, with their wives and little ones, constituted a colony. ”

“ Especially interesting is the fact that a number of the men and women who helped to found the earliest communities within the present State of Iowa at an early day joined emigrant bands toiled over the long trail to Oregon, thus becoming pioneers of two Commonwealths. Scarcely had the eastern border of Iowa been settled before many of the settlers who had so lately crossed the Mississippi began to look to the Far West, to the much-discussed Oregon country. ”

“ In 1877 the men and women who settled the Rogue River and other southern valleys, and whose isolation, Mining adventures, and Indian wars gave them a history of their own, hardly identical with but no less interesting than that of the settlers of the Willamette Valley, met at the picturesque village of Ashland and founded the Pioneer Society of Southern Oregon on the 13th of September of that year, about 800 persons being present. Its first officers were L. C. Duncan president, William Hoffman secretary, N. S. Hayden treasurer. ”

“ The traditions of each family led through the Cumberland Gap or west to Pittsburg and down the Ohio, or along the line of the Great Lakes. Hon. W. Lair Hill, in his "Annual Address" before the Pioneer Association in 1883, fitly characterizes the people among whom the Oregon movement took its rise. "The greater number of them were pioneers by nature and occupation, as their fathers had been before them. In childhood the story of their ancestors' migrations from the east to the west, and then to the newer west was their handbook of history. ”

“ He held in his strong grasp for 45 years the most powerful thing in Oregon—the public opinion of that broad commonwealth and of a wide fringe around it.
Does not such a man go on living beyond the grave? Does not such a personality continue in perpetuity? ”

“ Crossing the river the road skirts the broad and ever-winding valley of the Frat as this branch of the Euphrates is called at Erzeroum—until turning into a narrow rocky gorge the road begins to climb the sides of the lofty Kop Dagh which is the great barrier between Erzeroum and Baiburt on the road to Trebizond, and forms the watershed between the valleys of the Euphrates and the Black Sea. The road has been finely engineered and the rise is one of easy ascent, but the roadbed is somewhat out of repair, the smaller bridges are all but impassable. ”

“ For a third of a century Fred Lockley has been extracting Oregon history from people who have lived it in one way or another in a wide range of categories—“ bull-whackers, muleskinners, pioneers, prospectors, ' 49ers, Indian fighters, trappers, ex-barkeepers, authors, preachers, poets and near poets, and all sorts and conditions of men and women.” ”

“ Oregon has it, and it is to the pioneer spirit that Oregon owes it.
Oregon is curiously faithful to those who redeemed it from the wilderness. Since 1856 the population of the state has multiplied five-fold. Every country and every race have contributed to the expansion; but the forces which started with the earlier years have continued to dominate. Habits planted at the beginning still rule the land. A thousand influences have intruded themselves, but they have bent to the conditions which existed before them. ”

“ In Oregon each family had secure, under the best title in the world, a square mile of land; usually embracing both prairie and woodland, and often both low lands for grain and pasture, and points of upland well suited for building sites and orchard slopes, while surrounding hills, partly wooded, still afforded range for multiplying flocks and herds....much pains had been taken to build up an orderly and enlightened society. ”

“ These characteristics of the mass developed traits in the individual no less marked and distinguishable. The independent fur hunter in lonely mountains, the pioneer farmer on the isolated prairies—all held themselves ready to defend the home or fly to the common defence. These hard circumstances developed in Oregon a race of men and women independent in thought and deed, courageous to insist on their rights and careless of wealth or fame.
It has been urged by some writers that there is a unity in all history of the human race. ”

“ When the Russians in 1829 captured Erzeroum for the first time, 96,000 Armenians, with the encouragement of the Russian government, left that city and the outlying villages with the Russian army, and emigrated towards the Caucasus, where they founded three new cities, Alexandropol, Akhalkalak, and Akhaltsikh. Only 300 Armenian families remained in Erzeroum, refusing to leave their homes, even in face of the Turkish despotism. Among these was the Pasdermadjian family. ”

“ And now we come to a man who "saved Oregon," who is wholly unlike every other man connected with Oregon history. Unappreciated and misunder- stood, by some called a fanatic, by others a crank, and by the Hudson's Bay Company treated as a horse-thief, the ghost of Hall J. Kelley appears and dis- appears through the shifting scenery of Oregon's strenuous history with such kaleidoscopic presentment as almost utterly baffles description. ”