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The Sunday Oregonian, Portland, OR., September 11, 1932, section 4 & 5, page 2
Includes photograph

PETROGLYPHS IN ARLINGTON DISTRICT CAST LIGHT ON PRIMITIVE DWELLERS OF OREGON
One Pastoral Scene Depicted in Crude Carvings Believed Evidence of Use of Antelope for Milk and Other Domestic Uses: Mystery Hides Origin
By John B. Horner
Head of Department of History, Oregon State College

PETROGLYPHS near Arlington, on the Columbia river, may be the oldest records of animal husbandry in the Pacific northwest. Those visited most frequently are in a "glyphland" which is most easily reached via the Columbia highway and Arlington ferry.
Upon entering the Arlington "glyphland" visitors wonder whether the petroglyphs are very old. They also ask: Who made them? What region did they cover? Were they made as an idle pastime? Was there a design in them? What is their possible significance? Are they eposties on stone handed down by a former race? Will they ever be interpreted?
Because of their general resemblance to certain ancient glyphs in southern Oregon and Nevada they appear to belong to a wide extended system ascribed to a late western stone age. Originally they evidently bore a meaning that was understood; but that was so long ago their meaning has become mysterious. Who were the sculptures or whither they went we do not know. Mystery enshrouds of the "glyphland" carvings.

Carvers Believed Intelligent

One's first impression of the glyphs is that they are crude; but the early art of the catacombs is crude also, and neither the "glyphland" carvings or the art of the catacombs is cruder than the careless scribbling of many a gifted author whose manuscript is paitiently deciphere. Upon the whole, indications are that the Arlington glyphs, though somewhat crude, were carved with a purpose by a fairly intelligent people, and that patient study of them will be awarded with discoveries both striking and instructive.
Presence of antelopes and the absence of the horse among the glyphs of that time give rise to the belief that antelopes may have been domesticated as beasts of burden, and there are certain reasons for the belief that they may have been the milch animals also. The dual service to which the antelopes may have been put in that age is as possible as for milch cows to do service as draft animals on the Oregon trail in migration days.

Pastoral Scene Depicted

The accompanying photograph taken near Arlington ferry appears to be at a pastoral scene in which a primordial landlord with his dogs is driving a herd of four to grass, or, perchance, he is returning with them at the eventide. The picture does not suggest a chase or a hunt. On the contrary, the man is moving leisurely. He has no bow, no arrow, spear; and his playful dogs await his bidding as if the proceedings were a part of a daily regime.
The herd is distinguished from the allied families of goats and sheep by their light graceful deer-like form; and the females as well as the males have apparently solid branchless horns which are evidently perennial - characteristics of the antelope family. Furthermore, horns of their shape being processes of the frontal bone of the skull, strengthens the theory that the animals are antelopes.

Food Search Primitive

Inasmuch as the earliest families in history possessed flocks among which were such dairy animals as the camel, the cow and the goat, it would have been natural for their descendants, upon entering a new country abounding in wild animals, to tame and press into service some dairy animals that could do it its own foraging. This would have been especially true of refugees who, driven by enemies into a new country, had to leave their flocks behind.
The search for food is natural to all growing things. A dog buries a bone near a tree. The tree at once sends rootlets toward the bone; and it is only a matter of time until the bone which was animal matter becomes a part of the tree, as in the instance of Roger Williams, whose remains were taken up by an apple tree that grew beside his grave. Animals as trees instinctively turn to their natural food supply; and the inference is that the genius of man was capable of solving the milk-food problem under new conditions it faced in the Oregon stone age.

Antelopes In Abundance

Indeed it seems that with mammals plentiful, a people sufficiently intelligent to carve hieroplyphics and ideographs would not long have been denied the use of milk, the first and the natural food of man. In the absence of the camel, the cow and the goat, they would have instinctively turned to the nearest available animal, which happened to be the elk, "the largest existing deer," and to the antelope, a goat of the deer kind. The petroglyphs, however, indicate that those people chose the latter, in which case they emulated the Asiatics who developed the goat into a dairy animal, and they may have also have employed the elk and the mountain goat for this purpose.
The question, "Why did not Oregon tribes possesses dairy animals when the first white people came?" may be answered thus: when the earliest peoples had increased in numbers until their pastures and food supply grew scarce they became nomadic and shiftless and gradually lost many of their ancestral traits, among which were the care of flocks and relish for ancestral food.

Animals Long Tame

As to the antelope, it appears that this shy animal, having once been domesticated, never became entirely wild again until the coming of the hunter with hounds and guns. The same may be said of the elk which, as has been suggested, may also have been domesticated.
When the first settlers came west they found themselves on most intimate terms with the antelopes; and for this reason antelopes, of all larger game with the possible exception of the elk, were threatened first with extermination. But for the protection given them by the law the antelopes of the west would have been no more.
Antelopes were so tame that they frequently mingled with cattle and sometimes visited the settlers. Colonel William Hanley, Plato of the Oregon cattle range, tells us in that charming book, "Feelin' Fine!"

Scene Has Significance

"One night while I was out in the middle of the valley looking for stock, I got in with the antelopes and stayed with them all night. The snow was falling quietly and the antelopes were all around me. They looked at me and I looked at them. I was no more stranger to them than they were to me."
While many of the early practices of the northwest are not yet fully known, it must be borne in mind that these people, having been created in the image of an all-wise Intelligence, were in a measure likewise intelligent; and it would have been natural for an intelligent, even a semi-intelligent, people to endeavor to continue the use of milk, the food of which they had first knowledge. In the absence of the camel, the cow and the domestic goat, the probably chose the antelope or "deer-goat" as the most available dairy animal in the northwest wild. Hence the probable significance of the pastoral scene of the man with his dogs driving the herd of antelopes, as portrayed by the Arlington petroglyphs.