The Indians burned off the valley floor. No one knew why. ``They had their reasons,'' the old men said.
The good thing was that the land lay clear and ready to farm, and the settlers came into the valley and laid claim to it in tidy sections.
Sam Short came as a young man just married. He built a fair house and planned out his farm of hay fields, grazing land and fruit trees. Soon there was a child to care for.
Sam Short went out with seven young oak trees, the kind that grew in the valley when they got a chance. He planted a tree and then another a quarter mile further on. He planted all seven trees a quarter mile apart so that they formed a straight line from his farm to town.
``When the boy is ready for school he can follow the trees,'' he said. Some of the trees were on land already settled, some were not.
By the time the boy was ready for school the land was well settled and a road now passed the boy's home. The road did not follow the trees, because the trees strode purposefully straight to town while the road, laid after much wrangling, diplomatically skirted property lines and zig zagged carefully to town.
Seventy years later Sam Short's boy was old and the land was grown up with trees and shrubs and houses. Blackberry and Oregon grape grew in the untended places and power lines and microwave towers stood on the plain. Sometimes late at night in empty taverns young Indians may have talked of the old ways and thought there was an advantage to them. The seven oak trees still stood and it was unspoken that no one would take them down.
In a hundred years Sam Short's boy was dead. The oak tree by his farm was gone. Cut down by a newcomer who looked forward to a couple of years of firewood and some good beams to sell. The third oak from Sam Short's house went down in the storm that wreaked havoc through the country. The tree fell on the roof of a split level ranch style and didn't quite kill the inhabitants. The seventh oak came down to make way for a retirement home downtown. A place where old people could walk to the doctor or the grocery or the library and that was a good thing. Three high school girls stood round the oak and sang songs to try and save it. The reporter from the local paper did a short piece about them.
In a hundred and twenty years two oaks remained. A city law had been passed to protect them. The trees were splendid to look on. symmetric globes of graceful branches. Straight sturdy trunks. Amateur photographers took pictures of sunrise and sunset through their branches. Prizes were awarded at the county fair.
A hundred and fifty years after Sam Short spent a day of his life planting seven trees, the last tree fell. Victim of old age and insidious rot. For decades the winter rains had pooled in a split where there was a great division of the trunk. Cement patches, iron bars holding the great branches together failed to stave off the inevitable. The sixth tree had sickened and died the year before. A freeway had been planned to avoid the tree, to create an island of green between the lanes so that the tree could flourish. The fumes or perhaps the vibrations were not to its liking.
And the yellow school buses passed every day as the old tree was taken down and the children did not know or care about its story.