 
Thus far I have confined myself to the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the early settlement of the country, its public men, the provisional government, adverse influence, and the American and Jesuit missions. We will now proceed to describe its geographical and physical position and value. Previous to the treaty of 1846, all that portion of country lying south of the Russian possessions, west of the Rocky Mountains, and north of California, was called Oregon. By that treaty the 49th parallel was constituted the boundary line between the United States and the British possessions. In the act of Congress passed August 14, 1848, the boundaries were thus defined: “All that part of the territory of the United States which lies west of the summit of the Rocky Mountains, north of the 42d degree of north latitude, known as the Territory of Oregon, shall be organized into, and constitute a temporary government, by the name of The Territory of Oregon.” Unfortunately, though our national Congress contained many noble, intelligent, and talented men, none of them knew any thing about the country they were defining as Oregon Territory. Thomas H. Benton, about this time, made his famous Oregon speech. In it he declared that all north of the 49th parallel of latitude was only fit for the poorest and most meager animal existence; that it was the “derelict of all nations,” not fit for the subsistence of civilized man. This impression of Mr. Benton was received from high British—and no doubt he thought the most correct and reliable—authority. In fact, in the mind of this, and many other of our statesmen, the entire territory was of but little value. It is scarcely necessary to say whence this impression arose, and for what purpose it was so persistently kept before the minds of our most eminent statesmen. The immense fur trade of the country, carried on at a nominal expense, was too profitable to allow the truth to be told, or an experiment to be made, to show the value of the soil, or the amount or variety of its productions. The soil, like The American missionary arrives in the country, and is assured by the Hudson’s Bay Company that but a very small portion of the country is susceptible of cultivation; that no extensive settlements can ever be formed in it. These statements are made by men who have spent their lives in the country, and say they have tested the qualities of the soil faithfully, and found it to be unproductive. The missionaries partially believe these statements, and communicate to their friends in the east their doubts as to the extent and richness of the arable land in the country. In the mean time they must provide for their own subsistence. The Missionary Boards that sent them out are not able to pay the prices demanded for a continual supply of such food as can be raised in the country. This they knew and were prepared for it, and at once commenced to experiment upon the soil for themselves. Their first effort astonishes and delights them. Instead of a hard, barren, unproductive soil, as they had been told, it proves to be a light rich clay loam all through the Wallamet Valley, and in the interior, a dark, mellow, inexhaustible alkali soil, of the richest kind, and, when properly cultivated, very productive. The missionary experiments are continued and extended. They soon begin to send glowing accounts to their friends of the richness of the valleys of Oregon—eight hundred bushels of potatoes, or from thirty to sixty bushels of wheat, to the acre. The American trappers and hunters gather into the Wallamet Valley, around the Methodist Mission. The Canadian-French, British subjects, who have become worn out and unprofitable to the company, are permitted to locate in the same valley, but, with the clumsy and imperfect farming implements furnished them, and their ignorance of farming, they were not able to accomplish much, and are still referred to, as proof of the worthlessness of the country. The American settler comes in, and proves the truth of the missionaries’ large farming stories, and finds that he can do, with two yoke of oxen, what it required six to do in the Mississippi Valley—his labor producing double pay. He is more than satisfied—he is delighted—with the soil, the climate, and country, and reports his success to his friends. By this time a few peaches and apples have been produced outside the inclosures and garden of Fort Vancouver, which convinces the American settler that fruit can be produced in Oregon; and soon we find every known variety to be profitably cultivated. Timber.—The fir, spruce, and hemlock are superabundant, all along the coast range, from California to Puget Sound. The fir, pine, oak, ash, and maple are abundant in the valleys of the Wallamet and Cow The Wallamet Valley is from forty to sixty miles wide, and one hundred and eighty long. It has less timber land than fine level prairie; through which winds with its tributaries the beautiful Wallamet, skirted all along its banks and level bottoms with cotton-wood, ash, alder, oak, fir, yellow pine, yew, and soft maple, with a small amount of cedar. This river has its source in the Umpqua Mountains; and its tributaries in the Coast and Cascade ranges,—the main river running north, or west of north, till it joins the majestic Columbia. Its meandering streams, and valleys composed mainly of prairie interspersed with groves of oak, pine, fir, and cotton-wood, make up a scenery which for beauty and loveliness can not be surpassed. The Cascade range on the east is dotted, at intervals of from a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles apart, with towering, snow-capped mountains from 15,000 to 18,600 feet high, and is cut at right angles, midway between the California Mountains on the south, and Mount Baker on the north, by the great river of Oregon, the noble Columbia, which forces its resistless current over its rocky bed, till it finds its way to the ocean. Ascending this river from the ocean, for sixty miles, to the mouth of the Cowlitz, we find it lined on either bank with lofty and dense forests of spruce, hemlock, cedar, and fir, with scarcely a sign of prairie; from, this up, the timber is interspersed with prairie, till we enter the Cascade Mountains, one hundred and twenty-five miles from the ocean, and ten below the Cascade portage, which is five miles long,—now made by railroad; thence to the Dalles is thirty-eight miles, making fifty miles of the roughest and grandest river and mountain scenery on our continent. Old ocean in its mightiest heavings is but a placid lake, when compared with this fifty-five miles of mountain roughness, grandeur, and sublimity, from various points of which may be seen Mounts Baker, Rainier, St. Helens, Adams, Hood, and Jefferson, with others of less note, all raising their lofty heads above the regions of perpetual snow. Prominent among them stands Mount Hood, about thirty miles south of the Columbia, towering to the height of 18,600 feet, with his everlasting white cap on, and overlooking the lovely valleys of the Wallamet to the south and west; the Columbia and Cowlitz to the west and north; and the great upper basin of the Columbia to the northeast, east, and southeast. From the Dalles we ascend this mighty river fourteen miles by rail, where the water has worn its crooked course At the end of the railroad the steamboat receives the traveler, when, as he ascends the river, the land on either side diminishes in height, till he reaches Castle Rock; seventy-one miles above the Dalles. This is a lone pile of basaltic rocks having the appearance of an old castle in the midst of a great plain to the east, south, and west of it. A large portion of this plain, lying along the river, is of course gravel and sand, dry, and comparatively barren; yet producing the artemisia, sage, and a luxurious growth of wild mustard in the early spring; with but little grass, and abundance of the low sunflower. The lands back from the river are high rolling prairie, covered with rich bunch grass, having a light soil composed of pulverized basaltic sandstone. This soil, to the eye of the careless observer, though it is thickly set with the bunch grass, generally appears barren and worthless; yet, with irrigation, or with winter grains, or grasses adapted to the soil, it can not be exhausted. Twenty-five miles above Castle Rock stands the thriving little town of Umatilla, at the mouth of the river of the same name, and nine miles above is Windmill Rock. In ascending the river fifteen miles from this place, the land on either side rises to some fifteen hundred feet above the level of the river which occupies the entire bottom from rocks to rocks on either side; when the land suddenly drops from this high plain which extends from the Blue Mountains on the east to the Cascade range on the west, forming, as it were, a great inland dam across the Columbia River, fifteen hundred feet high at the place where the river has broken through the dam. As you pass out of this gap, in looking to the north and east, the eye rests upon another vast, high, rolling plain, in the southeastern part of which lies the beautiful valley of the Wallawalla. At the upper or eastern end was situated the Whitman or Cayuse Mission. Some six miles above is the flourishing town of Wallawalla. The most of this vast, high, rolling plain, and especially the valleys, have more or less of alkali soil; the high plains are similar to those we have just passed,—destitute of all kinds of timber, except at the foot of the mountains, and small patches of willow and cotton-wood, in some little nook or corner, near some spring or stream. Imagine Wallawalla a little east of the center of a great plain one hundred miles wide, east and west, one hundred and eighty long, north and south, situated just inside of this great mountain dam we have described; with the majestic Cascade range of mountains on the west, the Blue Moun The northern portion of Oregon, now Washington Territory, is beautifully interspersed with timber and prairie, in good proportions, and has a rich clay soil. The whole country abounds in trap-rock and granite, singularly mingled with basalt. Near the mouth of Spokan River is found a splendid variety of marble; some sections of it are of a pure white, while others are beautifully clouded with blue, brown, and green. The face of the country is not so uneven as that further south. Some sixty miles south of the forty-ninth parallel, we come to the mouth of the Okanagon River, which is the outlet of a chain of lakes in British Columbia, from which it takes its name; it has an extensive and rich valley for settlement. At Colville, in the vicinity of the Kettle Falls, on the Columbia, are a United States military post, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s post, and a considerable settlement. Some fifteen miles from the mouth of the Spokan, and sixty from Kettle Falls, was located the Cimakain—or Rev. Messrs. Walker and Eells’—Mission. About sixty miles in a southeasterly direction is the Coeur d’AlÊne Italian Jesuit Mission. Turning to the north, east, and southeast, we enter the gold and silver mountains of the Pacific Slope; this range is cut through by the Snake River, or south branch of the Columbia. Millions of dollars’ worth of treasure is taken out of the mines within these desolate and barren-looking regions, and untold millions still await the miner’s toil. The reader will remember that we are now traveling east. This range is, on the north of Snake River, called Salmon River Mountains, and on the south, the Blue Mountains; thence, on to the southern portions of Oregon, it joins the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges, bends to the west, and, near the forty-second parallel, runs into those vast promontories that jut into the Pacific Ocean. In all the northern portion of this great inland mountain plain there is an extensive placer and quartz mining country, besides numerous rich farming valleys, with an abundance of timber for all practical uses; most of the rough, rocky ranges of mountains being covered about half-way up their sides with timber, till you reach the open prairies along the main valley. To the south, and along Snake River, are the high barren sage plains, extending from the Rocky Mountains on the east to the Blue Mountains on the west. There are large tracts of arable land in the region just described, though to the weary traveler coming from the green plains of Kansas or the valley of the Wallamet, every thing looks forbidding and desolate, especially during the dry season. But remove the sage from any of these dry, barren places, and the rich bunch-grass takes its place. As well might the farmer expect his wheat to grow in a hemlock wood or cedar swamp, as for any thing but sage to grow on these plains till that is destroyed. Hence, from the experiments we have made on the soils of which we have been speaking, we are confident that the greater portion of the country now and for years past pronounced barren and useless, will be found, with intelligent and proper cultivation, to rank among as good lands as any we have, and probably more desirable. As to timber, that must be cultivated till it becomes accustomed to the soil. Cotton-wood is found in small quantities all over this plain, in the vicinity of streams and springs. The northeastern part of this basin is Montana; the southwestern is Idaho. The mineral wealth of this country, especially that of north Idaho and Montana, is inexhaustible. Gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, cinnabar, and tin, are found in abundance in these Territories, and in eastern and middle Oregon.
We take the following from an official report to the Secretary of the Treasury, a copy of which has been sent to Congress:—
The climate varies in the three sections of country we have described, exactly in the ratio of soil and timber. On the coast, contiguous to the ocean, we have more rain than we require. Like our superabundance of the tallest and best of fir-timber, there is so much of it that we would be glad if we could divide with the second and third places we have described. We have enough rain and timber to supply all the country; and perhaps, when we can cut down our tall trees, that filter the rain out of the clouds, they may get more and we less. Be that as it may, our winters are mild and rainy, our summers cool and pleasant, with sufficient rain and ocean mist to supply the vegetable creation with abundant moisture. In middle Oregon the winters are mild and frosty, with a small amount of snow—seldom severe; farmers should feed stock a month or six weeks; summers warm, and sometimes sultry in July and August; rains in the spring and late in the fall, scarcely enough for the farmers’ use. In the eastern plain or great mountain basin, the winters are cold and dry, snow and frost severe. Snow seldom falls to exceed two feet in depth,—average winters, eighteen inches,—but it falls deep upon the mountains and remains till it is melted by the warm winds and sun of early summer, causing the summer floods. The principal rise in the rivers is during the mouths of June and July. Less rain, spring and fall, than in middle Oregon; summers dry and hot. In the northern part, the country is better supplied with rain. This may arise from the ranges of the mountain currents of air and the winds from the South Pacific Ocean along the inland plains, and the cool atmosphere around our snow-clad mountains. We will leave further speculation on this point to those who have had more experience in such matters than ourselves. Taking the country as a whole, with our inexhaustible gold, silver, and other minerals; our extensive farming valleys; our vast forests of timber upon the borders of an ocean comparatively destitute of this essential element of civilization; there is no plausible reason why this western portion of the United States may not in a few years become the abode of industrious and thriving millions. The following article on the Northern Pacific Railroad is from the pen of Mr. Philip Ritz:—
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