CHAPTER XIII.
THE COLUMBIA RIVER AND PUGET SOUND—HINTS TO TOURISTS.
In less than forty-eight hours after you leave San Francisco you find yourself crossing the bar which lies at the mouth of the Columbia River, and laughing, perhaps, over the oft-told local tale of how a captain, new to this region, lying off and on with his vessel, and impatiently signaling for a pilot, was temporarily comforted by a passenger, an old Californian, who "wondered why Jim over there couldn't take her safe over the bar."
"Do you think he knows the soundings well enough?" asked the anxious skipper; and was answered,
"I don't know about that, captain; but he's been taking all sorts of things 'straight' over the bar for about twenty years, to my knowledge, and I should think he might manage the brig."
The voyage from San Francisco is almost all the way in sight of land; and as you skirt the mountainous coast of Oregon you see long stretches of forest, miles of tall firs killed by forest fires, and rearing their bare heads toward the sky like a vast assemblage of bean-poles—a barren view which you owe to the noble red man, who, it is said, sets fire to these great woods in order to produce for himself a good crop of blueberries.
When, some years ago, Walk-in-the-Water, or Red Cloud, or some other Colorado chief, asserted in Washington the right of the Indian to hunt buffalo, on the familiar ground that he must live, a journalist given to figures demolished the Indian position by demonstrating that a race which insisted on living on buffalo meat required about sixteen thousand acres of land per head for its subsistence, which is more than even we can spare. One wonders, remembering these figures, how many millions of feet of first-class lumber are sacrificed to provide an Indian rancheria in Oregon with huckleberries.
On the second morning of your voyage you enter the Columbia River, and stop, on the right bank, near the mouth, at a place famous in history and romance, and fearfully disappointing to the actual view—Astoria. When you have seen it, you will wish you had passed it by unseen. I do not know precisely how it ought to have looked to have pleased my fancy, and realized the dreams of my boyhood, when I read Bonneville's "Journal" and Irving's "Astoria," and imagined Astoria to be the home of romance and of picturesque trappers. Any thing less romantic than Astoria is to-day you can scarcely imagine; and what is worse yet, your first view shows you that the narrow, broken, irreclaimably rough strip of land never had space for any thing picturesque or romantic.
Astoria, in truth, consists of a very narrow strip of hill-side, backed by a hill so steep that they can shoot timber down it, and inclosed on every side by dense forests, high, steep hills, and mud flats. It looks like the rudest Western clearing you ever saw. Its brief streets are paved with wood; its inhabitants wear their trowsers in their boots; if you step off the pavement you go deep into the mud; and ten minutes' walk brings you to the "forest primeval," which, picturesque as it may be in poetry, I confess to be dreary and monotonous in the extreme in reality.
There are but few remains of the old trapper station—one somewhat large house is the chief relic; but there is a saw-mill, which seems to make, with all its buzz and fuzz, scarcely an appreciable impression upon the belt of timber which so shuts in Astoria that I thought I had scarcely room in it to draw a full breath; and over to the left they pointed out to me the residence of a gentleman—a general, I think he was—who came hither twenty-six years ago in some official position, and had after a quarter of a century gained what looked to me from the steamer's deck like a precarious ten-acre lot from the "forest primeval," about enough room to bury himself and family in, with a probability that the firs would crowd them into the Columbia River if the saw-mill should break down.
On the voyage up I said to an Oregonian, "You have a good timber country, I hear?" and his reply seemed to me at the time extravagant. "Timber?" he said; "timber—till you can't sleep." When I had spent a day and a half at anchor abreast of Astoria, the words appeared less exaggerated. Wherever you look you see only timber; tall firs, straight as an arrow, big as the California redwoods, and dense as a Southern canebrake. On your right is Oregon—its hill-sides a forest so dense that jungle would be as fit a word for it as timber; on the left is Washington Territory, and its hill-sides are as densely covered as those of the nearer shore. This interminable, apparently impenetrable, thicket of firs exercised upon my mind, I confess, a gloomy, depressing influence. The fresh lovely green of the evergreen foliage, the wonderful arrowy straightness of the trees, their picturesque attitude where they cover headlands and reach down to the very water's edge, all did not make up to me for their dreary continuity of shade.
Astoria, however, means to grow. It has already a large hotel, which the timber has crowded down against the tide-washed flats; a saw-mill, which is sawing away for dear life, because if it stopped the forest would doubtless push it into the river, on whose brink it has courageously effected a lodgment; some tan-yards, shops, and "groceries;" and if you should wish to invest in real estate here, you can do so with the help of a "guide," which is distributed on the steamer, and tells you of numerous bargains in corner lots, etc.; for here, as in that part of the West which lies much farther east, people live apparently only to speculate in real estate.
An occasional flash of broad humor enlivens some of the land circulars and advertisements. I found one on the hotel table headed "Homes," with the following sample:
221 ACRES,
Four miles east of Silverton; frame house and a log house (can live in either); log barn; 20 acres in cultivation; 60 acres timber land; balance pasture land; well watered. We will sell this place for $1575. Will throw in a cook stove and all the household furniture, consisting of a frying-pan handle and a broomstick; also a cow and a yearling calf; also one bay heifer; also 8400 lbs. of hay, minus what the above-named stock have consumed during the winter; also 64 bushels of oats, subject to the above-mentioned diminution. If sold, we shall have left on our hands one of the driest and ugliest-looking old bachelors this side of the grave, which we will cheerfully throw in if at all acceptable to the purchaser. Old maids and rich widows are requested to give their particular attention to this special offer. Don't pass by on the other side.
_____
HOME, SWEET HOME!
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like Home!
We still have a few more "Sweet Homes" for sale, consisting of, etc., etc., etc.
Title Perfect—A Warrantee Deed from the Hub of the Earth to the Top of the Skies,
and Uncle Sam's Patent to Back Us!
A further-reaching title one could scarcely require.
I don't know where I got the belief that the Columbia was a second-rate river. There must have been some blunder in the geographies out of which I got my lessons and my notions of the North-west coast at school. Possibly, too, the knowledge that navigation is interrupted by rapids at the Cascades and Dalles contributed to form an impression conspicuously wrong. In fact, the Columbia is one of the great rivers of the world. It seems to me larger, as it is infinitely grander, than the Mississippi.
Between Astoria and the junction of the Willamette its breadth, its depth, its rapid current, and the vast body of water it carries to sea reminded me of descriptions I had read of the Amazon; and I suspect the Columbia would rank with that stream were it not for the unlucky obstructions at the Cascades and Dalles, which divide the stream into two unequal parts.
For ten miles above Astoria the river is so wide that it forms really a vast bay. Then it narrows somewhat, and the channel approaches now one and then the other of its bold, picturesque shores, which often for miles resemble the Palisades of the Hudson in steepness, and exceed them in height. But even after it becomes narrower the river frequently widens into broad, open, lake-like expanses, which are studded with lovely islands, and wherever the shore lowers you see, beyond, grand mountain ranges snow-clad and amazingly fine.
The banks are precipitous nearly all the way to the junction of the Willamette, and there is singularly little farming country on the immediate river. Below Kalama there are few spots where there is even room for a small farmstead. But along this part of the river are the "salmon factories," whence come the Oregon salmon, which, put up in tin cans, are now to be bought not only in our Eastern States, but all over the world. The fish are caught in weirs, in gill nets, as shad are caught on the Hudson, and this is the only part of the labor performed by white men. The fishermen carry the salmon in boats to the factory—usually a large frame building erected on piles over the water—and here they fall into the hands of Chinese, who get for their labor a dollar a day and their food.
The salmon are flung up on a stage, where they lie in heaps of a thousand at a time, a surprising sight to an Eastern person, for in such a pile you may see many fish weighing from thirty to sixty pounds. The work of preparing them for the cans is conducted with exact method and great cleanliness, water being abundant. One Chinaman seizes a fish and cuts off his head; the next slashes off the fins and disembowels the fish; it then falls into a large vat, where the blood soaks out—a salmon bleeds like a bull—and after soaking and repeated washing in different vats, it falls at last into the hands of one of a gang of Chinese whose business it is, with heavy knives, to chop the fish into chunks of suitable size for the tins. These pieces are plunged into brine, and presently stuffed into the cans, it being the object to fill each can as full as possible with fish, the bone being excluded.
The top of the can, which has a small hole pierced in it, is then soldered on, and five hundred tins set on a form are lowered into a huge kettle of boiling water, where they remain until the heat has expelled all the air. Then a Chinaman neatly drops a little solder over each pin-hole, and after another boiling, the object of which is, I believe, to make sure that the cans are hermetically sealed, the process is complete, and the salmon are ready to take a journey longer and more remarkable even than that which their progenitors took when, seized with the curious rage of spawning, they ascended the Columbia, to deposit their eggs in its head waters, near the centre of the continent.
I was assured by the fishermen that the salmon do not decrease in numbers or in size, yet in this year, 1873, more than two millions of pounds were put up in tin cans on the Lower Columbia alone, besides fifteen or twenty thousand barrels of salted salmon.
From Astoria to Portland is a distance of one hundred and ten miles, and as the current is strong, the steamer requires ten or twelve hours to make the trip. As you approach the mouth of the Willamette you meet more arable land, and the shores of this river are generally lower, and often alluvial, like the Missouri and Mississippi bottoms; and here you find cattle, sheep, orchards, and fields; and one who is familiar with the agricultural parts of California notices here signs of a somewhat severer climate, in more substantial houses; and the evidence of more protracted rains, in green and luxuriant grasses at a season when the pastures of California have already begun to turn brown.
Portland is a surprisingly well-built city, with so many large shops, so many elegant dwellings, and other signs of prosperity, as will make you credit the assertion of its inhabitants, that it contains more wealth in proportion to its population than any other town in the United States. It lies on the right bank of the Willamette, and is the centre of a large commerce. Its inhabitants seemed to me to have a singular fancy for plate-glass fronts in their shops and hotels, and even in the private houses, which led me at first to suppose that there must be a glass factory near at hand. It is all, I believe, imported.
From Portland, which you can see in a day, and whose most notable sight is a fine view of Mount Hood, obtainable from the hills back of the city, the sight-seer makes his excursions conveniently in various directions; and as the American traveler is always in a hurry, it is perhaps well to show what time is needed:
To the Dalles and Celilo, and return to Portland, three days.
To Victoria, Vancouver's Island, and return to Portland, including the tour of Puget Sound, seven days.
To San Francisco, overland, by railroad to Roseburg, thence by stage to Redding, and rail to San Francisco, seventy-nine hours.
Thus you may leave San Francisco by steamer for Portland, see the Dalles, the Cascades, Puget Sound, Victoria, the Willamette Valley, and the magnificent mountain scenery of Southern Oregon and Northern California, and be back in San Francisco in less than three weeks, making abundant allowance for possible though not probable detentions on the road. The time absolutely needed for the tour is but seventeen days.
Of course he who "takes a run over to California" from, the East, predetermined to be back in his office or shop within five or six weeks from the day he left home, can not see the Columbia River and Puget Sound. But travelers are beginning to discover that it is worth while to spend some months on the Pacific coast; some day, I do not doubt, it will be fashionable to go across the continent; and those whose circumstances give them leisure should not leave the Pacific without seeing Oregon and Washington Territory. In the few pages which follow, my aim is to smooth the way for others by a very simple account of what I myself saw and enjoyed.
And first as to the Cascades and the Dalles of the Columbia. You leave Portland for Dalles City in a steamboat at five o'clock in the morning. The better way is to sleep on board this steamer, and thus avoid an uncomfortably early awakening. Then when you do rise, at six or half past, you will find yourself on the Columbia, and steaming directly at Mount Hood, whose splendid snow-covered peak seems to bar your way but a short distance ahead. It lies, in fact, a hundred miles off; and when you have sailed some hours toward it the river makes a turn, which leaves the snowy peak at one side, and presently hides it behind the steep bank.
The little steamer, very clean and comfortable, affords you an excellent breakfast, and some amusement in the odd way in which she is managed. Most of the river steamers here have their propelling wheel at the stern; they have very powerful engines, which drive them ahead with surprising speed. I have gone sixteen miles an hour in one, with the current; and when they make a landing the pilot usually runs the boat's head slantingly against the shore, and passengers and freight are taken in or landed over the bow. At the wood-pile on the shore you may generally see one of the people called "Pikes," whom you will recognize by a very broad-brimmed hat, a frequent squirting of tobacco-juice, and the possession of two or three hounds, whom they call hereabouts "hound-dogs," as we say "bull-dog." And this reminds me that in Oregon the country people usually ask you if you will eat an "egg-omelet;" and they speak of pork—a favorite food of the Pike—as "hog-meat."
The voyage up the river presents a constant succession of wild and picturesque scenery; immense rocky capes jut out into the broad stream; for miles the banks are precipitous, like the Hudson River Palisades, only often much higher, and for other miles the river has worn its channel out of the rock, whose face looks bare and clean cut, as though it had been of human workmanship. The first explorer of the Columbia, even if he was a very commonplace mortal, must have passed days of the most singular exhilaration, especially if he ascended the stream in that season when the skies are bright and blue, for it seems to me one of the most magnificent sights in the world. I am not certain that the wildness does not oppress one a little after a while, and there are parts of the river where the smoothly cut cliffs, coming precipitously down to the water's edge, and following down, sheer down, to the river's bottom, make you think with terror of the unhappy people who might here be drowned, with this cold rock within their reach, yet not affording them even a momentary support. I should like to have seen the rugged cliffs relieved here and there by the softness of smooth lawns, and some evidences that man had conquered even this rude and resisting nature.
But for a century or two to come the traveler will have to do without this relief; nor need he grumble, for, with all its rugged grandeur, the scenery has many exquisite bits where nature has a little softened its aspect. Nor is it amiss to remember that but a little way back from the river there are farms, orchards, cattle, and sheep. At one point the boat for a moment turned her bow to the shore to admit a young man, who brought with him a wonderful bouquet of wild flowers, which he had gathered at his home a few miles back; and here and there, where the hill-sides have a more moderate incline, you will see that some energetic pioneer has carved himself out a farm.
Nevertheless it is with a sense of relief at the change that you at last approach a large island, a flat space of ten or twelve hundred acres, with fences and trees and grain fields and houses, and with a gentle and peaceful aspect, doubly charming to you when you come upon it suddenly, and fresh from the preceding and somewhat appalling grandeur. Here the boat stops; for you are here at the lower end of the famous Cascades, and you tranship yourself into cars which carry you to the upper end, a distance of about six miles, where again you take boat for Dalles City.
The Cascades are rapids. The river, which has ever a swift and impetuous current, is nearly two miles wide just above these rapids. Where the bed shoals it also narrows, and the great body of water rushes over the rocks, roaring, tumbling, foaming—a tolerably wild sight. There is nowhere any sudden descent sufficient to make a water-fall; but there is a fall of a good many feet in the six miles of cascades.
These rapids are considered impassable, though I believe the Indians used sometimes to venture down them in canoes; and it was my good fortune to shoot down them in a little steamer—the Shoshone—the third only, I was told, which had ever ventured this passage. The singular history of this steamboat shows the vast extent of the inland navigation made possible by the Columbia and its tributaries. She was built in 1866 on the Snake River, at a point ninety miles from Boise City, in Idaho Territory, and was employed in the upper waters of the Snake, running to near the mouth of the Bruneau, within one hundred and twenty-five miles of the head of Salt Lake.
When the mining excitement in that region subsided there ceased to be business for her, and her owner determined to bring her to Portland. She passed several rapids on the Snake, and at a low stage of water was run over the Dalles. Then she had to wait nearly a year until high water on the Cascades, and finally passed those rapids, and carried her owner, Mr. Ainsworth, who was also for this passage of the Cascades her pilot, and myself safely into Portland.
We steamed from Dalles City about three o'clock on an afternoon so windy as to make the Columbia very rough. When we arrived at the head of the Cascades we found the shore lined with people to watch our passage through the rapids. As we swept into the foaming and roaring waters the engine was slowed a little, and for a few minutes the pilots had their hands full; for the fierce currents, sweeping her now to one side and then to the other, made the steering extraordinarily difficult. At one point there seemed a probability that we should be swept on to the rocks; and it was very curious to stand, as General Sprague and I, the only passengers, did, in front of the pilot-house, and watch the boat's head swing against the helm and toward the rocks, until at last, after half a minute of suspense, she began slowly to swing back, obedient to her pilot's wish.
We made six miles in eleven minutes, which is at the rate of more than thirty miles per hour, a better rate of speed than steamboats commonly attain. Of course it is impossible to drive a vessel up the Cascades, and a steamboat which has once passed these rapids remains forever below.
At the upper end of the Cascades a boat awaits you, which carries you through yet more picturesque scenery to Dalles City, where you spend the night. This is a small place, remarkable to the traveler chiefly for the geological collection which every traveler ought to see, belonging to the Rev. Mr. Condon, a very intelligent and enthusiastic geologist, the Presbyterian minister of the place. You have also at Dalles City a magnificent view of Mount Hood, and Mr. Condon will tell you that he has seen this old crater emit smoke since he has lived here.
There is no doubt that both Mount Hood and Mount St. Helens have still internal fires, though both their craters are now filled up with ashes. There is reason to believe that at its last period of activity Mount Hood emitted only ashes; for there are still found traces of volcanic ashes, attributable, I am told, to this mountain, as far as one hundred miles from its summit. Of Mount St. Helens it is probable that its slumbering fires are not very deeply buried. A few years ago two adventurous citizens of Washington Territory were obliged, by a sudden fog and cold storm, to spend a night near its summit, and seeking for some cave among the lava where to shelter themselves from the storm, found a fissure from which came so glowing and immoderate a heat that they could not bear its vicinity, and, as they related, were alternately frozen and scorched all night—now roasting at the volcanic fire, and again rushing out to cool themselves in the sleet and snow.
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Puget Sound Chiefs
The rocks are volcanic from near the mouth of the Willamette to and above the Dalles, and geologists suppose that there have been great convulsions of nature hereabouts in recent geological times. The Indians have a tradition, indeed, that the river was originally navigable and unobstructed where now are the Cascades, and that formerly there was a long, natural tunnel, through which the Columbia passed under a mountain. They assert that a great earthquake broke down this tunnel, the site of which they still point out, and that the debris formed the present obstructions at the Cascades.
Oregon, if one may judge by the fossil remains in Mr. Condon's collection, seems once to have been inhabited by a great number and variety of pre-adamite beasts; but the most singular object he has to show is a very striking ape's head, carved with great spirit and vigor out of hard lava. This object was found upon the shore of the Columbia by Indians, after a flood which had washed away a piece of old alluvial bank. The rock of which it is composed is quite hard; the carving is, as I said, done with remarkable vigor; and the top of the head is hollowed out, precisely as the Indians still make shallow depressions in figures and heads which they carve out of slate, in which to burn what answers in their religious ceremonies for incense.
But supposing this relic to belong to Oregon—and there is, I was told, no reason to believe otherwise—where did the Indian who carved it get his idea of an ape? The Indians of this region, poor creatures that they are, have still the habit of carving rude figures out of slate and other soft rocks. They have also the habit of cutting out shallow, dish-like depressions in the heads of such figures, wherein to burn incense. But they could not give Mr. Condon any account of the ape's head they brought him, nor did they recognize its features as resembling any object or creature familiar to them even by tradition.
The Dalles of the Columbia are simply a succession of falls and rapids, not reaching over as great a distance as the Cascades, but containing one feature much more remarkable than any thing which the Cascades afford, and indeed, so far as I know, found nowhere else.
The Columbia above the Dalles is still a first-class river, comparable in depth and width, and in the volume of its water, only with the Lower Mississippi or the Amazon. It is a deep, rapidly-flowing stream, nearly a mile wide. But at one point in the Dalles the channel narrows until it is, at the ordinary height of the river, not over a hundred yards wide; and through this narrow gorge the whole volume of the river rushes for some distance. Of course water is not subject to compression; the volume of the river is not diminished; what happens, as you perceive when you see this singular freak of nature, is that the river is suddenly turned up on its edge. Suppose it is, above the Dalles, a mile wide and fifty feet deep; at the narrow gorge it is but a hundred yards wide—how deep must it be? Certainly it can be correctly said that the stream is turned up on its edge.
The Dalles lie five or six miles above Dalles City; and you pass these rapids in the train which bears you to Celilo early the next morning after you arrive at Dalles City. Celilo is not a town; it is simply a geographical point; it is the spot where, if you were bound to the interior of the continent by water, you would take steamboat. There is here a very long shed to shelter the goods which are sent up into this far-away and, to us Eastern people, unknown interior; there is a wharf where land the boats when they return from a journey of perhaps a thousand miles on the Upper Columbia or the Snake; there are two or three laborers' shanties—and that is all there is of Celilo; and your journey thither has been made only that you may see the Dalles, and Cape Horn, as a bold promontory on the river is called.
What I advise you to do is to take a hearty lunch with you, and, if you can find one, a guide, and get off the early Celilo train at the Dalles. You will have a most delightful day among very curious scenery; will see the Indians spearing salmon in the pools over which they build their stages; and can examine at leisure the curious rapids called the Dalles. A party of three or four persons could indeed spend several days very pleasantly picnicking about the Dalles, and in the season they would shoot hare and birds enough to supply them with meat. The weather in this part of Oregon, east of the Cascade range, is as settled as that of California, so that there is no risk in sleeping-out-of-doors in summer.
There is a singularly sudden climatic change between Western and Eastern Oregon; and if you ask the captain or pilot on the boat which plies between the Cascades and Dalles City, he can show you the mountain range on one side of which the climate is wet, while on the other side it is dry. The Cascade range is a continuation northward of the Sierra Nevada; and here, as farther south, it stops the water-laden winds which rush up from the sea. Western Oregon, lying between the Cascades and the ocean, has so much rain that its people are called "Web-feet;" Eastern Oregon, a vast grazing region, has comparatively little rain. Western Oregon, except in the Willamette and Rogue River valleys, is densely timbered; Eastern Oregon is a country of boundless plains, where they irrigate their few crops, and depend mainly on stock-grazing. This region is as yet sparsely settled; and when we in the East think of Oregon, or read of it even, it is of that part of the huge State which lies west of the Cascades, and where alone agriculture is carried on to a considerable extent.
You will spend a day in returning from the Dalles to Portland, and arriving there in the evening can set out the next morning for Olympia, on Puget Sound, by way of Kalama, which is the Columbia River terminus for the present of the Northern Pacific Railroad. It is possible to go by steamer from Portland to Victoria, and then return down Puget Sound to Olympia; but to most people the sea-voyage is not enticing, and there are but slight inconveniences in the short land journey. The steamer leaving Portland at six A.M. lands you at Kalama about eleven; there you get dinner, and proceed about two by rail to Olympia. It is a good plan to telegraph for accommodations on the pretty and comfortable steamer North Pacific, and go directly to her on your arrival at Olympia.
Puget Sound is one of the most picturesque and remarkable sheets of water in the world; and the voyage from Olympia to Victoria, which shows you the greater part of the Sound, is a delightful and novel excursion, specially to be recommended to people who like to go to sea without getting sea-sick; for these land-encircled waters are almost always smooth.
When, at Kalama, you enter Washington Territory, your ears begin to be assailed by the most barbarous names imaginable. On your way to Olympia by rail you cross a river called the Skookum-Chuck; your train stops at places named Newaukum, Tumwater, and Toutle; and if you seek further, you will hear of whole counties labeled Wahkiakum, or Snohomish, or Kitsap, or Klikatat; and Cowlitz, Hookium, and Nenolelops greet and offend you. They complain in Olympia that Washington Territory gets but little immigration; but what wonder? What man, having the whole American continent to chose from, would willingly date his letters from the county of Snohomish, or bring up his children in the city of Nenolelops? The village of Tumwater is, as I am ready to bear witness, very pretty indeed; but surely an emigrant would think twice before he established himself either there or at Toutle. Seattle is sufficiently barbarous; Steilacoom is no better; and I suspect that the Northern Pacific Railroad terminus has been fixed at Tacoma—if it is fixed there—because that is one of the few places on Puget Sound whose name does not inspire horror and disgust.
Olympia, which lies on an arm of Puget Sound, and was once a town of great expectations, surprises the traveler by its streets, all shaded with magnificent maples. The founder of the town was a man of taste; and he set a fashion which, being followed for a few years in this country of abundant rains, has given Olympia's streets shade trees by the hundred which would make it famous were it an Eastern place.
Unluckily, it has little else to charm the traveler, though it is the capital of the Territory; and when you have spent half an hour walking through the streets you will be quite ready to have the steamer set off for Victoria. The voyage lasts but about thirty-six hours, and would be shorter were it not that the steamer makes numerous landings. Thus you get glimpses of Seattle, Steilacoom, Tacoma, and of the so-called saw-mill ports—Port Madison, Port Gamble, Port Ludlow, and Port Townsend—the last named being also the boundary of our Uncle Samuel's dominions for the present, and the port of entry for this district, with a custom-house which looks like a barn, and a collector and inspectors, the latter of whom examine your trunk as you return from Victoria to save you from the sin of smuggling.
From Port Townsend your boat strikes across the straits of San Juan de Fuca to Victoria; and just here, as you are crossing from American to English territory, you get the most magnificent views of the grand Olympian range of mountains and of Mount Regnier. Also, the captain will point out to you in the distance that famous island of San Juan which formed the subject or object, or both, of our celebrated boundary dispute with great Britain, and you will wonder how small an object can nearly make nations go to war, and for what a petty thing we set several kings and great lords to studying geography and treaties and international law, and boring themselves, and filling enterprising newspapers with dozens of columns of dull history; and you will wonder the more at the stupid pertinacity of these English in clinging to the little island of San Juan when you reach Victoria, and see that we shall presently take that dull little town too, not because we want it or need it, but to save it from perishing of inanition.
It is something to have taste and a sense of the beautiful. Certainly the English, who discovered the little landlocked harbor of Victoria and chose it as the site of a town, displayed both. It is by natural advantages one of the loveliest places I ever saw, and I wonder, remote as it is, that it is not famous. The narrow harbor, which is not so big as one of the big Liverpool docks, is surrounded on both sides by the prettiest little miniature bays, rock-bound, with grassy knolls, and here and there shady clumps of evergreens; a river opening out above the town into a kind of lake, and spanned by pretty bridges, invites you to a boating excursion; and the fresh green of the lawn-like expanses of grass which reach into the bay from different directions, the rocky little promontories with boats moored near them, the fine snow-covered mountains in the distance, and the pleasantly winding roads leading in different directions into the country, all make up a landscape whose soft and gay aspect I suppose is the more delightful because one comes to it from the somewhat oppressive grandeur of the fir forests in Washington Territory.
In the harbor of Victoria the most conspicuous object is the long range of warehouses belonging to the Hudson Bay Company, with their little trading steamers moored alongside. These vessels bear the signs of traffic with a savage people in the high boarding nettings which guard them from stem to stern, and which are in their more solid parts pierced for musketry. Here, too, you see a queer little old steamboat, the first that ever vexed the waters of the Pacific Ocean with its paddle-wheels. And as your own steamer hauls up to the wharf, you will notice, arrayed to receive you, what is no doubt the most shocking and complete collection of ugly women in the world.
These are the Indians of this region. They are very light-colored; their complexion has an artificial look; there is something ghastly and unnatural in the yellow of the faces, penetrated by a rose or carmine color on the cheeks. They are hideous in all the possible aspects and varieties of hideousness—undersized, squat, evil-eyed, pug-nosed, tawdry in dress, ungraceful in every motion; they really mar the landscape, so that you are glad to escape from them to your hotel, which you find a clean and comfortable building, where, if you are as fortunate as the traveler who relates this, you may by-and-by catch a glimpse or two of a fresh, fair, girlish English face, which will make up to you for the precedent ugliness.
Victoria hopes to have its dullness enlivened by a railroad from the mainland one of these days, which may make it more prosperous, but will probably destroy some of the charm it now has for a tourist. It can hardly destroy the excellent roads by which you may take several picturesque drives and walks in the neighborhood of the town, nor the pretty views you have from the hills near by, nor the excursions by boat, in which you can best see how much Nature has done to beautify this place, and how little man has done so far to mar her work.
Silks and cigars are said to be very cheap in Victoria; and those who consume these articles will probably look through the shops and make a few purchases, not enough to satisfy, though sufficient to arouse the suspicions of the Collector of Customs at Port Townsend. If you use your time well, the thirty-six hours which the steamer spends at Victoria will suffice you to see all that is of interest there to a traveler, and you can return in her down the Sound, and make more permanent your impressions of its scenery.
You will perhaps be startled, if you chance to overhear the conversation of your fellow-passengers, to gather that it concerns itself chiefly with millions, and these millions run to such extraordinary figures that you may hear one man pitying another for the confession that he made no more than a hundred millions last year. It is feet of lumber they are speaking of; and when you see the monstrous piles of sawdust which encumber the mill ports, the vast quantities of waste stuff they burn, and the huge rafts of timber which are towed down to the mills, as well as the ships which lie there to load for South America, Tahiti, Australia, and California, you will not longer wonder that they talk of millions.
Some of these mills are owned by very wealthy companies, who have had the good fortune to buy at low rates large tracts of the best timber lands lying along the rivers and bays. A saw-mill is the centre of quite a town—and a very rough town too, to judge from the appearance of the men who come down to the dock to look at the steamer, and the repute of the Indian women who go from port to port and seem at home among the mill men.
Having gone by sea to Oregon, I should advise you to return to California overland. The journey lies by rail through the fertile Willamette Valley, for the present the chief agricultural country of Oregon, to Roseburg, and thence by stage over and through some of the most picturesque and grand scenery in America, into California. If you are curious in bizarre social experiments, you may very well stop a day at Aurora, thirty miles below Portland, and look at some of the finest orchards in the State, the property of a strange German community which has lived in harmony and acquired wealth at this point.
Salem, too, the capital of Oregon, lying on the railroad fifty miles below Portland, is worth a visit, to show you how rich a valley the Willamette is. And as you go down by stage toward California you will enjoy a long day's drive through the Rogue River Valley, a long, narrow, winding series of nooks, remote, among high mountains, looking for all the world as though in past ages a great river had swept through here, and left in its dry bed a fertile soil, and space enough for a great number of happy and comfortable homes.
May and June are the best months in which to see Oregon and Puget Sound. With San Francisco as a starting-point, one may go either to Portland or to Victoria direct. If you go first to Victoria, you save a return journey across Puget Sound, and from Olympia to Kalama, but you miss the sail up the Columbia from Astoria to Portland. The following table of fares will show you the cost of traveling in the region I have described:
| Time. | Fare. | |
| From San Francisco to Portland ............................................ | 3 days | $30 00 |
| From San Francisco to Victoria .............................................. | 3 days | 30 00 |
| From Portland to Celilo .......................................................... | 1 day | 7 00 |
| Excursion tickets, good from Portland to Celilo and back ....... | 3 days | 10 00 |
| From Portland by Olympia to Victoria ................................... | 3 days | 12 25 |
| From Portland to San Francisco by railroad and stage ........... | 79 hours | 42 00 |
Meals on these journeys are extra, and cost from half a dollar to seventy-five cents. They are generally good. All these rates are in coin. On the steamer from San Francisco to Portland or Victoria meals are included in the fare.
When you are once in Portland, a vast region opens itself to you, if you are an adventurous tourist. You may take boat at Celilo, above the Dalles, and steam up to Wallula, where you take stage for Elkton, a station on the Pacific Railroad, in Utah; this journey shows you the heart of the continent, and is said to abound in magnificent scenery. I have not made it, but it is frequently done. If you have not courage for so long an overland trip, a journey up to the mouth of Snake River and back to Portland, which consumes but a week, will give you an intelligent idea of the vastness of the country drained by the main body of the great Columbia River.
The great plains and table-lands which lie east of the Cascades, and are drained by the Columbia, the Snake, and their affluents, will some day contain a vast population. Already enterprising pioneers are pushing into the remotest valleys of this region. As you sail up the Columbia, you will hear of wheat, barley, sheep, stock, wool, orchards, and rapidly growing settlements, where, to our Eastern belief, the beaver still builds his dams, unvexed even by the traps and rifle of the hunter.
