Many of the adventuresome young men who came
to Oregon while the Hudson Bay Co. was
still the ruling force lived here long enough to see the log cabins turn into
gigantic stone edifices, such as the Portland Hotel, or Meir & Frank. The
entertainment went from being some fiddles at a barn dance to operas and orchestras,
and the frontier wives were transformed into queens of high society. They rode
to entertainments in carriages with beveled glass windows, and then in Packard
town cars. I imagine that they learned how to talk in that fake British accent
that you hear "cultured" Americans using in the old movies—at least
their daughters did, after being sent to "finishing school" in the
East.
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| Pillars of Society in Portland, Oregon |
This takes me back to York, in the U.K., a
place I mentioned earlier as being very, very old. In fact, York is where the
emperor Constantine was crowned as Roman Emperor, and it was an old city then.
My friend Randy Giles (d. 2009, Pondicherry, India) grew up in West Lynn,
and ended up studying music at the University of York. His main tutor was an
elderly British gentleman who had the habit of saying, "Pillars of society
in Portland, Oregon!" He wasn't aware that Randy was from Portland, it was
merely and expression he had acquired that conveyed the meaning that someone
was putting on airs. For instance, if a student were to spout some knowledge of
some obscure musical fact, instead of raising his bushy white eyebrows and
saying, "I say! Well done! He would scowl and mumble, "Pillars of
society in Portland, Oregon!" Randy thought this was hilariously funny.
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| Dr. Randall Giles |
How very American to take a forested area
larger than England, peopled with a culture that had existed for many long
centuries, come in with guns and disease, cut down the trees, can the fish,
fill the meadows with wheat fields, build some palaces and declare yourself a
pillar of society, and have it all done by suppertime. This is something that
won't happen again, we have run out of wilderness (of course the people who
lived here didn't think of it as wilderness, they thought of it as home).
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