Dreams of returning to Rogue Valley and taking wife to Paris.
In Jack London’s 1912 novel of the Yukon gold rush titled Smoke Bellew, one character, Little Man, shares his hopes for a Rogue Valley future. Here is an excerpt:
“Knocked around on the Pacific coast, and southern Oregon looked good to us. We settled in the Rogue River Valley—apples. There’s a big future there, only nobody knows it. I got my land—on time, of course—for forty an acre. Ten years from now it’ll be worth five hundred.
“We’ve done some almighty hustling. Takes money, and we hadn’t a cent to start with, you know—had to build a house and barn, get horses and plows and all the rest. She taught school two years. Then the boy came … You ought to see those trees we planted—a hundred acres of them, almost mature now. But it’s all been outgo and the mortgage working overtime. That’s why I’m here … a gosh-danged expensive millionaire—in prospect.”
“…When I get back and the trees begin to bear, and the kids get going to school, she and I are going to do Paris.”
Source: London, Jack. Smoke Bellew. 22nd ed. : Dover Books on Literature and Drama, 2011. 104-5. Print.