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SPRING 2017 ISSUE 01 / VOL. 02
Rock-hopping Pate Lake on our way to the summit of The Steens.
1893 military post of Fort Bidwell is a quarry stone school building with broken windows and boarded doors where the last classes were held about 60 years ago. If this evocative scene doesn’ t stir some old longing in your chest, you’ re losing touch with the kid you used to be. Don’ t let it happen.
Next day, what a day. The 40 miles of gravel byway that connects Fort Bidwell to Adel, Oregon, is so remote there’ s a sign at the California- Oregon border posted by a local ranch: The Rattlesnake Ranch Welcomes You To Oregon. Given the dreamy look of the spread from the main gate— horses graze in lush green meadows bordered by rugged rocky hills dotted with juniper and pine, and the only sound is wind rush— it appears to be a venue where you could be very happy with no newspaper, no cell phone, no Internet, and maybe, if the gods aren’ t cruel, even no TV. You might miss all those commercials between downs when the Niners are losing, but I don’ t think so. From Adel, where you briefly pick up pavement again, you ride east into the Warner Valley where you will see a long string of pothole lakes that are remnants of a great Pleistocene sea. You will pause to gas up at the Hart Mountain General Store in Plush. Yes, you’ re reading it right, Plush. Plush, Oregon. It’ s called Plush because of a local celebrity who was a member of the Paiute tribe. He got into a poker game with several palefaces sometime in 1888. The game was a set-up. The Indian was dealt a flush by another member of the party who held a better hand. He couldn’ t pronounce the word“ flush” and called it“ plush” and that’ s how history pivots.
Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge. Here you ride on a rooftop of the Great Basin, an 8,000-foot fault block mountain that encompasses a 278,000-acre unfenced home to herds of the fastest land animals in North America, and you see plenty of them making like tan-white blurs across these seemingly endless high plains that have been their ancestral home for thousands of years, their great speed evolved from a time when two species of cheetahs hunted this region. Here upon this drift of wild, wide-open land you get the sense this isn’ t such a crowded country after all, but the Northern Paiutes would have argued that point. Their country was getting plenty crowded by 1866 when General George C. Crook,“ The greatest Indian fighter in U. S. history”( according to General William T. Sherman) established Camp Warner up here to protect the growing influx of white settlers from people who preceded them by 11,000 years. The human cost of the mother of all blizzards that fatal winter, well described in the general’ s autobiography, forced closure of the post a year later. All that’ s left of this history are two lone white gravestones virtually hidden in a copse of trees 15 miles from the refuge headquarters in a setting I would describe as the middle of nowhere. We wouldn’ t have found the site without Ryan’ s persistence. Inscribed on the stones: Edward Cantrell, Sarg Co B, 23 US Inf 1846-1867, and Lewis Debold, Pvt Co D, 14 US Inf 1847-1866.
Frenchglen, Oregon. Pete French arrived here in 1873 with orders from his wealthy father-inlaw, Dr. Hugh Glenn, to buy grazing land. French bought the P-Ranch and ended up with 200,000 acres. Unfortunately he was shot dead by a rival homesteader in 1897, so he didn’ t participate in the early 20th-century P-Ranch project to erect lodging for its guests that stands today as the Frenchglen Hotel, an Oregon State Heritage Site. The family style meals served here by manager John Ross and his staff are famous and reason enough to ride a long way to get here, the thick