[Illustration: The First Boulder Marked.]
As we drew into camp a young man with eight horses approached the creek. "What do you do with so many horses, lad?" I queried, as the drove passed with their heads down and traces dangling around their bodies. "Why, I have been harrowing in wheat today, up on the hill; it's pretty tough work at that." "No, you see our horses are not large," responding to an inquiry about eight horses to one harrow, "and besides you see they are not in very good condition; the fact is, our feed has run short and we have put them on short rations," and the horses looked it, with their heads down as they came away from the creek. "Why, we usually harrow 35 acres for a full day's work, sometimes; but 40 acres is called a big day's run." "Yes, I can plow seven acres a day, which is a fair day's work—too much, perhaps, with this team, but with a good, strong team one can easily turn over eight acres." "Let me see," he continued, in response to further inquiries; "let me see. I think with what winter wheat we have in there'll be over 400 acres; we expect a yield of 20 bushels an acre, but some have got as high as 30." "Why, we got a dollar last year right here," this in response to a question as to price.
A nearby neighbor who had 600 acres in wheat said they expected a good yield this year as there "had been 14 inches rainfall already for the season, while the average was but 10."
"Well, of course it's a pretty good business with wheat at a dollar," which was in evidence at the next camp where a new fifteen hundred dollar automobile was snugly housed ready for use. This man had 1,200 acres of land. "Why, yes, of course we have neighbors; Neighbor R—— lives but two miles off and then there's Neighbor B—— not three."
When reminded that when I was a boy anyone living three miles away was considered out of the neighborhood: "Yes, but things is different in Oregon," which I readily admitted, having just passed a schoolhouse with but seven scholars, and remembered the six hundred or eight hundred and twelve hundred acre farms we had passed.
I was also reminded of my boyhood days when father spoke approvingly if I plowed two acres a day, and to harrow ten acres was the biggest kind of a day's work. I queried in my mind which was the best condition of things, the big farms and farming a business proposition, or the small farms with the home surroundings. I had been told that "that man over there has been there twenty-six years and don't raise fruit enough for his own use." Money-making was his object and he had no time to "fool with fruit trees or garden truck." Then I was reminded of the time we cut the wheat with a sickle, or maybe with the hand cradle, and thresh it out with horses on the barn floor. Sometimes we had a fanning mill, and how it would make my arms ache to turn the crank; then at other times if a stiff breeze sprung up the wheat and chaff would be shaken loosely from an elevation and the chaff would be blown away, or if all other means failed two stout arms at either end of a blanket or a sheet would move it as a fan to "clean" the wheat.