Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story, 1800-1940

Abstract

Review: Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story, 1800-1940. By William G. Robbins Reviewed by Kathleen A. Dahl Eastern Oregon University Robbins, William G. Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story, 1800- 1940. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997. 410 pp. US $29.95 cloth ISBN: 0-295-97632-2. All who love Oregon and western landscapes in general will want to read this book, an in-depth environmental history of the Oregon country by a distinguished professor of history at Oregon State University. It provides an important corollary to more conventional pioneer history and its frequent pronouncements of grandeur and heroism, for along with immigrants and explorers and settlers came profound and irreversible environmental change. Robbins begins by exploring environmental impacts wrought by native peoples, especially through their use of fire in the Willamette Valley, and then documents ensuing changes in land use resulting from the fur trade, agricultural development, cattle and sheep grazing, resource extraction, hunting and fishing, elimination of predators, railroads and timber interests, hydroelectric power, population growth, and 20th-century economic expansion. Indian tribes were in the way of development with its notions of progress and advancement, and, in Oregon as elsewhere, suffered severe depredations and, eventually, removal from their aboriginal territories. Most development endeavors had enthusiastic support from public officials and the press, as Robbins meticulously documents. These, he argues, were inevitable reflections of prevailing world views based on the belief that further remodeling of the regional landscape through ever more powerful and intrusive technologies would lead to the good society (p. 297). Robbins' discussion of the depletion of the wild salmon fisheries is particularly salient, for this has become one of the Northwest's most pressing issues. People of foresight were already sounding the alarm about the dangers to salmon and salmon habitat by the 1870s, citing overfishing, dams building, and destruction of riparian zones as major threats. But their solution to these problems, Robbins writes, was the fish hatchery, now ubiquitous in the Northwest, for even the