The pretty French maiden who drives a four-horse team at Sutter Creek, California, is not considered much of a phenomenon by the Oregon folks. A Portland editor receives her story with this comment: "That French girl is a good girl. That [we] would not be so ungallant as to dispute. But where is our Lane County girl that put in eighty acres of wheat, and 'walloped' all the big boys in the precinct into decency and subjection? Eh? and when you are talking about girls with pluck, just bear in mind that Oregon can produce just about four thousand, now married, to be sure, and many of them grandmothers, each of whom whacked an ox team from the Missouri River to the Willamette Valley; stood guard against savage Indians on the plains, scaled three ranges of mountains, reached the promised land in triumph to raise a family of thirteen strapping boys and girls, and never laid eyes on a store-made bonnet for fifteen years. Don't mention your California girls."
San Jose Weekly Mercury, March 11, 1875, page 1

    Miss Carrie Dillon will teach the school up Ram Gulch this spring. Carrie is now developing her muscle with a pair of dumbbells, and proposes to subjugate old Tom Carter's freckle-faced boy if she has to break his back, and horsewhip old Tom if he interferes.--Heppner (Ore.) Gazette.
Tuolomne Gazette, Sonora, California, August 6, 1887, page 2

    Miss Mollie Bergen, a lass of 16 summers, whose parents reside on Pool's Slough, Yaquina, heard the dog making a great noise the other morning, and on looking out saw a deer jump into the slough. She stepped quickly into the house, picked up her father's Winchester, returned to the door, raised the rifle and fired. The first shot struck the animal in the head, the second in the shoulder, and the third and last went through the animal's heart, killing it. She then stepped down to the bank of the slough, unmoored a small boat, rowed to where the buck lay floating in the water, pulled the the carcass into the boat and succeeded in getting it on shore before any of the men folks appeared. The buck when dressed weighed 200 pounds.
New York Times, December 23, 1887, page 2


Oregon Correspondence, San Francisco Chronicle.
    The jar of heavy feet was heard. Some young horses came down a steep hill at full run. Behind was a reckless, rapid rider. The loose stock dashed past. The horse that bore the rider was tossing his head madly and slinging white foam in flakes from his mouth. He was a rearing, restless, heavy-built, regulation bronco, but it was remarked that he was well under control, for he seemed to be fairly lifted from side to side by the reins at the will of the rider, who drew up to our resting place. We stared in a way that was not mannerly, even in the wilds of Oregon. The rider of the restless pony was a young girl. She waited with embarrassment for us to tell our errand.
    "Who lives here?" we asked.
    "I do," she replied, in a tone that did not make us feel any more at home.
    "Whose garden is this?" was the next question.
    "Mine."
    After a pause she added:
    "Can I do anything for you, gentlemen?"
    "Well, well, no," was about the only intelligible answer at command.
    "Will you come to the house?" she added; "it is near dinner time."
    As she rode before we looked upon a graceful rider, a well-rounded, neat figure, a brunette with the languid beauty so much admired in the Castilian women, clad in coarse, strong, short skirts, below which showed a small boot and a keen, bright spur. Her rich saddle was new, strong and double-rigged. Her horse had not stopped at the gate till she sprang to the ground. My companion stepped forward with a Chesterfield bow, but too late to assist her. She asked us to go to the house while she led her horse to the stable. When we were within a rod of the door we both started with surprise. A repulsive, sullen, scowling Indian was at each window. We were greatly surprised to learn that our hostess was a half-breed. In her features or actions we had observed not one trace of the Indian. Her demeanor was modest, while at the same time she was fully imbued with that western liberality that allows a man to pass without an invitation to partake of a meal or night's lodging. We bade her goodbye reluctantly, and continued our hunt, thinking how much more appropriate such grace and such wealth would be in the circles of society than on the back of a bronco.
Evening Star, Washington, D.C., July 7, 1888, page 3

From the Coquille Herald.
    Mrs. Maud McAdams (nee Cox) and sisters-in-law, Sarah and Nannie McAdams, living a little northwest of this place, a few days since went blackberrying, at which they succeeded very well. They left their baskets a few minutes for a stroll, and on returning observed a Mr. Bear, which had just made a dinner of their berries, and with clubs they compelled Bruin to leave, pursued by the dogs that had accompanied the party. The dogs had not gone far till they started up three deer, and Mrs. McAdams and the Misses McAdams joined the chase. They shot one of the deer with a pistol, Mrs. McAdams cut its throat and the girls flayed it.
San Antonio Daily Light, San Antonio, Texas, September 19, 1893, page 8

WHAT AN OREGON GIRL DID.
From The Dalles Chronicle.

    Oregon, bathed in sea mist and the scent of whispering cedars, contests Kentucky's claim to America's most beautiful women--so Joaquin Miller and other distinguished travelers declare. But Oregon does not advertise her own rare qualities. Oregon women and girls undoubtedly show an unusual type of beauty, rare as it is flawless, healthful and natural as it is attractive. The climate along the coast, soft and mild, with never a harsh wind to roughen the skin or split the hair, or redden the eyes, with never an unrelenting sun to scorch and toughen and dry the delicate flesh, envelops the Oregon maid with tender touch, leaving a delicate texture and coloring like the seashell. The Oregon beauty is different from other American types. It lies in soft, silken hair, generally gold-tinted and curling; clear, deep eyes of decisive hues, rather regular, strong features full of character (it is never a doll face), and a complexion always clear, sometimes pale, sometimes touched so lightly and daintily with nature's pink as to seem almost unnatural in its delicious tints and tones.
    The Oregon girl is never nervous, nor hurried, nor impatient. She is calm, self-possessed, self-respecting, clear-eyed, a look-you-straight-in-the-face person who wins by frankness and holds by naive charm.
    This peculiar temperament arises largely from her love of the open. The Oregon girl thinks nothing of ascending snow peaks in the summer where the white snow domes penetrate the blue. She thinks nothing of long walks in the winter, often tramping 10 miles before noon. She is a fine horsewoman, and rides the whole winter through, in rain or shine, enjoying alike the soft Oregon mist against her cheeks and the sun when it bursts through the clouds. She is a creature of the open, and it is along the beach, through the great forests, and under the sky that she drinks in life at its best; and this life, reflected in her fresh, mist-bathed face, makes the stranger say: "Oregon women are the most beautiful in the world!"
    Oregon girls and young women, however, are not all trammel-free, and their business hours are almost (though not quite) as long as in eastern cities. Therefore the question of getting their share of the great out-of-doors that God made so entrancingly beautiful in the great Northwest is a problem. A number of the leading young women of Portland, with Miss Eleanor Kurt at their head, has settled it for many by organizing an out-of-door club. It was named the "Hee-Hee-Kalagamie" club, and signifies, in the Indian language, "Happy out-of-door people."
    The club was planned for the benefit of business women, to give every iota of out-of-door life possible to those who must spend many hours a day in an office.
    The schedule runs about like this: Two tennis courts, one on each side of the city, for all at all hours; one afternoon and evening the week, horseback riding, with an instructor for those who have not previously learned the equestrienne's art (easterners mostly); two evenings a week, rowing on the magnificent Columbia or the Willamette. Then, every Friday at 6, the members meet with lunch baskets, going straight from their work to some beautiful spot secluded by Mother Nature, where coffee is made under the trees and supper eaten in picnic style.
    Each Sunday morning the girls rise early, put up lunch, and with magazines or books meet by 7 and take some one of the many cars that lead into a wilderness of delights. There, by stream or along woodland trail, and in the depths of the old cedar forest, they have their breakfast and a rest on the mossy ground. Many of the young women return in time for church services. Others remain in the woods all day, reading, chatting, following winding trails or mountain streams until nightfall.
    Nature is never forsaken here; the Oregon girl is not cut off from outdoors in winter by biting cold. Nothing delights her soul more than to get into rubbers, raincoat and cap and face the rainstorm. Oregon women perhaps live out of doors, winter and summer, more than any others of all the world of women. They are perhaps the least artificial, the most self-reliant and the best satisfied with the life their native environment offers.
    Of all the world of women, they are, as Joaquin Miller affirms, the most beautiful.
Oregon Daily Journal, Portland, February 9, 1908, page 14

    New York.--Nine Oregon girls who reached New York from Portland after having motored about the city a few hours declared that so far as they could see New York was devoid of beauty. They are farmers' daughters who earned the trip by getting subscriptions for a newspaper. After two days in New York they went to Washington to meet the President, and finally to Chicago for the Republican convention.
    "Eastern women," said Mrs. M. A. Hartshorn, a newspaper woman who is chaperone of the party, "are made up too much to look pretty. Even the young girls look blase. Their faces are absolutely devoid of expression, and they cannot be compared with our girls with their natural vivacity. And as for your men, they all look so delicate. Their waistlines are even smaller than the girls'. They are not like our men, big and lovable."
Seymour Daily Republican, Seymour, Indiana, July 12, 1912, page 8

    TRIBUNE BUREAU, Panama-Pacific Exposition, March 9.--Apples for complexion? Sure!
    California carrots may be fine, but apples are better--and besides--who would eat carrots when big red apples are in sight?
    So declare the girls from Oregon. They're at the Exposition, praising their native state and its apples, and use the complexion argument as their strongest talking point--and the one most easily demonstrated, for the prettiest girls in Oregon have been sent to the fair as the official boosters of the apple.
    "You never seen an Oregon girl without a clear complexion," declared Miss Julia Miller, one of the fair Oregon boosters, "and you don't because we eat apples and drink cider. There's nothing better for health."
    The apples are being distributed as samples in the Oregon building.
Oakland Tribune, March 9, 1915, page 7




    To enable more men to offer their services with the colors without neglect to agricultural work in which they may be engaged and to offer assistance in harvesting Oregon's crops this summer, fifteen University of Oregon girls have banded together for work on farms and in orchards, following the close of school, June 15.
    Under the chaperonage of an older woman, the girls will hire out for general farm work and fruit and berry picking in a body, and will take their own tents and camping equipment along with them, moving from place to place as the jobs run out.
"The Helping Hand," Los Angeles Times, June 2, 1918, page 23


    An Oregon girl who failed to commit suicide got married instead. This is a reckless age.
Oakland Tribune, August 14, 1922, page 12