[Illustration: A Central Oregon freighter. "You will find them everywhere in the railless land, the freighters and their teams"] Since that day when the old driver foresaw the yellow perils of "civilizin' inflooences" they have indeed invaded the land for which, until a couple of years ago, his four horses and his rattletrap stage formed the one connecting link with the "outside." The "iron horse" has swept his old nags into oblivion, and two great railroads carry the passengers and packages which he and his brothers of the old Shaniko line transported in the past. The change has come in five short years. Those, who, like myself, went a-pioneering for the fun of it, making for Central Oregon because upon the map it showed as the greatest railroadless land, have seen the warm breath of development work as picturesque changes there as ever in the story-book days when the West was in its infancy. We are young men, we who chanced to Oregon's hinterland a few seasons gone by, yet already can we spin yarns of the "good old days" which have a real smack of romance to them and cause the recounters themselves to sigh for what has gone before and, betimes, to pray for their return--almost! Almost, but not actually. For who prefers twenty odd hours of stagecoaching to travel in a Pullman? or seriously bemoans the advent of electric lights, running water, cement sidewalks, and other appurtenances of material development? Yet, of course, I realize full well how tame and inconsiderable the "pioneering," if by such a name it can be dignified, of Central Oregon in the last decade must appear in the eyes of Oregon's real pioneers, who came across the plains and staked out the State with monuments of courage driven deep with privation and far-sighted enterprise. Yet, while half our Eastern cousins believe the West utterly prosaic, and half are confident that some of it is still the scene of dashing adventure, and the dwellers of the Coast cities themselves are morally certain that all Oregon conducts itself along metropolitan lines, the fact remains that most of the big land between the Cascades and Blue Mountains was untouched yesterday and is to-day the pleasantest--and the least hackneyed--outdoor playland available in all the West. Central Oregon occupied an eddy in the stream of Western progress. On the north the Columbia flowed past her doors, and the stream of immigration, first following the water and later the railroads, ignored the uninviting portals. Rock-rimmed toward the Columbia, lined with hills on the east, hedged in by the Cascades on the west, and remote from California's valleys on the south, this empire of 30,000,000 acres has been a giant maverick, wandering at will among the ranges neglected by development. In 1911 the railroads roped the wanderer, when they forced their way southward from the Columbia up the canyon of the Deschutes. But my stage journey was two years prior to that.