“Well, if you be a horned toad or coyote,” the seeker of moisture would reply, “then maybe you can stand it.  Just keep right on by the Alabama Settlement to Tulare and you can have my place on Big Dry Creek and welcome.  You’ll be drowned there mighty seldom.  The wagon spokes and tires will rattle and tell you when you come to it.”

“All right, partner, we’ll swap square, you can have mine in Yamhill and the rain thrown in.  Last August a painter sharp came along one day wanting to know the way to Willamette Falls, and I told him:  Young man, just wait a little and you’ll find falls enough without going to Oregon City after them.  The whole dog-gone Noah’s flood of a country will be a fall and melt and float away some day.’” And more to the same effect.

But no one need leave Oregon in search of fair weather.  The wheat and cattle region of eastern Oregon and Washington on the upper Columbia plains is dry enough and dusty enough more than half the year.  The truth is, most of these wanderers enjoy the freedom of gypsy life and seek not homes but camps.  Having crossed the plains and reached the ocean, they can find no farther west within reach of wagons, and are therefore compelled now to go north and south between Mexico and Alaska, always glad to find an excuse for moving, stopping a few months or weeks here and there, the time being measured by the size of the camp-meadow, conditions of the grass, game, and other indications.  Even their so-called settlements of a year or two, when they take up land and build cabins, are only another kind of camp, in no common sense homes.  Never a tree is planted, nor do they plant themselves, but like good soldiers in time of war are ever ready to march.  Their journey of life is indeed a journey with very matter-of-fact thorns in the way, though not wholly wanting in compensation.

One of the most influential of the motives that brought the early settlers to these shores, apart from that natural instinct to scatter and multiply which urges even sober salmon to climb the Rocky Mountains, was their desire to find a country at once fertile and winterless, where their flocks and herds could find pasture all the year, thus doing away with the long and tiresome period of haying and feeding necessary in the eastern and old western States and Territories.  Cheap land and good land there was in abundance in Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Iowa; but there the labor of providing for animals of the farm was very great, and much of that labor was crowded together into a few summer months, while to keep cool in summers and warm in the icy winters was well-nigh impossible to poor farmers.

Along the coast and throughout the greater part of western Oregon in general, snow seldom falls on the lowlands to a greater depth than a few inches, and never lies long.  Grass is green all winter.  The average temperature for the year in the Willamette Valley is about 52 degrees, the highest and lowest being about 100 degrees and 20 degrees, though occasionally a much lower temperature is reached.