Shaniko was the railroad point for all Central Oregon when I first made its acquaintance, and from it freighters hauled merchandise to towns as far distant as two hundred miles. Stages radiated to the south, and, in 1909, a few hardy automobiles tried conclusions with the roads. The sheep of a sheepman's empire congregated there, giving Shaniko one boast of preëminence--it shipped more wool than any other point in the State. With streets of mud or dust, according to the season, a score or so of frame shacks, its warehouses, livery barns, corrals, shipping pens, and hotels, Shaniko in its prime was a busy lighting place for birds of passage, a boisterous town of freighters, cowmen, and sheep herders. It, like its stagecoaches, was typical, I suppose, of the town found a decade or so ago upon our receding frontiers, and still encountered in the fancies of novelists whose travels are confined to the riotous territory east of Pittsburg. "Where are you bound?" my table neighbor asked me at supper. "I'm not sure," said I truthfully. "Oh, a land seeker. Well, when it comes right down to getting something worth while--something for nothing, you might say--the claims down by Silver Lake can't be beat. They--" and he launched into a rosy description of the land of his choice which lasted until the presiding Amazon deftly transferred the fork I had been using to the plate of pie she placed before me, a gentle lesson in domestic economy. My informant was a professional "locator" whose business it is to combine the landless man and the manless land with some profit to himself, in the shape of a fee for showing each "prospect" a suitable tract of untaken earth hitherto the property of Uncle Sam. Another neighbor took me in hand. The odor of gasolene about him--it was even more pungent than the fumes of other liquids, taken internally--proclaimed him an auto driver. "If you don't know where to go, let me show you," was the offer of this would-be guide and philosopher--I assume him a philosopher on the ground that any pilot in Central Oregon in those days must be one. In answer to my inquiries he bade me hie straight to Harney County. It was two hundred and fifty miles away. But I lost heart, stuck to my original half-resolve, and declared Bend my objective point. In later experience it was borne home to me that those pioneer auto men of Shaniko always sang loudest the praises of the most distant point; their rate was ten or fifteen cents per mile per passenger, and on the face of it their business acumen is apparent!