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.