Fishing, hospitality and an arrest hoax

The Great Northern sent four men to look over Central Oregon; the Emblem Club fed them, and then had one of them arrested.

Four men from Ashville, Oklahoma City, Kansas City and Knoxville came to Bend in July 1914 to see whether Central Oregon was worth sending settlers to. That was their job: immigration agents of the Great Northern Railroad, employed “to direct home-seekers to this section when they return to the east”. The Emblem Club entertained them and two members drove them round in cars.

Then the club’s idea of hospitality shows itself. While Dryer fished in front of the clubhouse, the others arranged with the game warden to arrest him for fishing without a licence, and let him get as far as offering the twenty-five dollars before they explained.

Two things in it are worth more than the joke. The first is that the fishing was “in front of the Emblem Clubhouse” — the club’s building stood on the bank of the Deschutes, and this is the archive’s plainest evidence of it in the club’s own period.

The second is who these men worked for. The Great Northern was James J. Hill’s railroad, and the Deschutes Historical Museum’s account of where Bend got the idea of a hundred thousand people points at Spokane and at Hill. Nothing here proves that figure. But it puts the Emblem Club and Hill’s settlement machinery in the same room, in 1914, with the club buying the lunch.

The paper spells him Dryer in the list and Dreyer twice in the next paragraph. Both are kept as printed.