National Affairs: The INLAND EMPIRE

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The countryside is still liberally sprinkled with hardy oldtimers who came West in covered wagons, raised log cabins and broke virgin soil, fought with Indians and rode stages into newly opened valleys. Others, still in their 50s, are keenly conscious of their parents' trials, pulling handcarts across the U.S., clearing settlements, huddling in sod forts during the Nez Perce and Bannock uprisings. The big country, immense space and small population have nurtured this pioneer feeling. Deep in the Washington woods, along upper Montana benchlands and in the wilderness of Idaho's canyons, are lone dwellings of families who still fight bears and cougars and board their children in school towns 50 miles away during winter. And across the Inland Empire, in a multitude of saloons called "Mint bars" and "Stockmen's bars," silver-dollar-jangling miners and cowpokes speak up loudly in a man's world, while the roads to something-else are still walked by cocky, freewheeling itinerant ranch hands, gandy dancers and bindlestiffs.

These are very lively relics of a U.S. past that has died in most other parts of the West. But the Inland Empire is no relic; harder perhaps than any other region, it is riding toward the future. In the Columbia Basin, settlers are filling up newly irrigated farm lands. Power from McNary, Hungry Horse and other dams is attracting new industry and population to the cities. Long an inland colony, the Inland Empire is getting ready to live up to its proud name.