The mountains of Powder River were next crossed, and the weary pilgrims emerged upon an open plain over which the pygmy sagebrush of the desert ran riot. Here a quarter of a century later an enterprising city was destined to arise, in the midst of abounding mines and burdened wheatfields, wherein the irrigated lands would drop fatness and the stockman grow rich among the cattle of a thousand hills.
“This valley,” wrote Jean, under date of September 1, “is beautiful to look upon; but it is considered worthless, as it is too dry for cultivation, and there is no way to rid the land of the ever-obtruding sage. Daddie says it will never be made to sprout white beans.”
The ranchers, stock-raisers, mine-owners, merchants, artisans, mechanics, speculators, newspaper men, politicians, and successful schemers in every walk of life can well afford to forgive Daniel Webster, John Ranger, and every other false prophet who in his day harped on the same string, in view of the continuous fields of wheat, oats, barley, rye, vetch, hops, and fruits of all kinds peculiar to the temperate zone which this wonderfully fertile valley now produces under the impulse of irrigation, not to mention the mines of gold and silver, precious stones, and baser metals with which the hills and mountains are fabulously rich.
The descent of the Ranger company into the now famous Grande Ronde valley was most perilous. It was made long after nightfall, through a precipitous and rocky defile, where a slip of the wagon-wheel or the misstep of an ox would have plunged the adventurous teams, wagons, men, women, children, and all, over sheer bluffs.
Camp was pitched in the edge of the beautiful valley, then a reservation belonging to the Nez Percé Indians. Rye-grass was growing as high as the top of the head of a man on horseback; and at one end of the valley, where now is a famous resort for health and pleasure, a number of hot springs were outlined by great columns of steam, which, rising beneath the arid air, hung low over the foot-hills, and, hanging lower yet in the vale below, spread itself like an enormous fleece over a lake of seething water.
XXXI
THROUGH THE OREGON MOUNTAINS
After moving across the Grande Ronde valley through a veritable Eden of untamed verdure, and crossing the Grande Ronde River by ford, our travellers began the ascent of the Blue Mountains.
The air was cool and delicious. The cattle, much refreshed by their luscious feed in the bountiful and beautiful valley, moved more briskly than had been their wont, and were soon in the midst of the grand old forest trees, which, at that time untouched by the woodman’s ax, stood in all their native grandeur upon the grass-grown slopes. In the midst of one of these groves of stately whispering pines the company halted for the night near a sparkling spring, with scenery all around them so enchanting that Jean exclaimed in her journal, “Oh, this beautiful world! how big it is compared to the pygmy mortals who roam over its surface; and yet how little it is compared to the countless stars that gaze upon us from above this ‘boundless contiguity of shade’!”
For several days she had written little. Her thoughts wandered to the Green River experience that had awakened within her being a new life, from which, for her at least, there was to be no ending. She could not write, so she strolled aimlessly away to a mossy rock in a starlit ravine, at the foot of which a rivulet was singing.
“Why can’t I see you, mother dear?” she asked. “And you, Bobbie, can’t you say a word to your sister Jean?”