Get rich quick with Eastern Oregon!
January 30th, 2008
This outstanding book, The Oregon Desert, co-written in 1962 by a cowboy and a scientist has some little gems. Peculiar among the passages is the continued focus on how Eastern Oregon could make a man a lot of money.
Here’s one that struck me as particularly… interesting:
Right now, 1962, badger fur is rather valuable, large ones from the desert selling up to five dollars. An enterprising person could develop a market for the little ones as unusual pets.
And in a long discourse on the types of hunters in Eastern Oregon, read this passage and contemplate how things have changed:
The Amateur Naturalist. There are several subspecies, but these folks actually aren’t out there to get a deer. They take rifles and may get their share of deer, but that isn’t their purpose. They hunt because everyone would think them queer if they just wandered around out in the hills without any plain purpose. Actually, that’s what they want to do. I am not talking of photographers, artists, writers, and professional naturalists. I am talking of farmers, sawmill workers, lawyers, and persons of all trades who get more enjoyment out of being in the hills than out of any other one thing. They get it just by being there. They have to hunt as an excuse.
You can’t imagine a man going to his boss and saying, “I’ve just got to have a week off to wander alone out in the woods.” The boss would be calling in a psychiatrist.
Incidentally, in terms of the recent “stand your ground” laws that allow people to shoot to protect their property, what about this anecdote:
A few years ago a woman and her husband were hunting out of Burns. They went to a certain mountain where they knew the terrain. [...] A fine buck came bounding over the hill and the wife dropped him with one shot. She tied her tag to the antlers and was dressing her deer when a big man with brand new hunting clothes came up with an open knife, cut off her tag, threw it into the sagebrush, and tied on his own. The Burns woman, too astonished to argue at first, said, “What do you think you’re doing with my deer?” The man said, “It’s my deer now.”
This lady from Burns was of sterner stuff than most. She said, “The hell it is, mister,” and placed a shot carefully through his shoulder, below the bone. He began to yell, a car appeared on the road below, four companions came and led him away, the woman retrieved her tag, and went on cleaning the deer. She explained to her husband, “I didn’t want to kill him, but I wanted to teach him never to do a trick like that again.”
Now come on… surely this is apocryphal?!
Related posts: The end of ranching (and the need for land use safeguards), View from Harney County, A devastating year (so far) for Oregon and the environment...
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