A broad valley, rich, prosperous, and beautiful to look upon, is the Willamette, and a valley of many moods. Neither in scenic charms nor agricultural resourcefulness is its heritage restricted to a single field. There are timberland and trout stream, hill and dale, valley and mountain; rural beauty of calm Suffolk is neighbor to the ragged picturesqueness of Scotland; there are skylines comparable with Norway's, and lowlands peaceful as Sweden's pastoral vistas; the giant timber, or their relic stumps, at some pasture edge, spell wilderness, while a happy, alder-lined brook flowing through a bowlder-dotted field is reminiscent of the uplands of Connecticut. Altogether, it is a rarely variegated viewland, is this vale of the Willamette.
You have seen valleys which were vast wheat fields, or where orchards were everywhere; in California and abroad you have viewed valleys dedicated to vineyards, and from mountain vantage points you have feasted your eyes upon the greenery of timberland expanses; all the world over you can spy out valleys dotted with an unvaried checkerboard of gardens, or green with pasture lands. But where have you seen a valley where all of this is mingled, where nature refuses to be a specialist and man appears a Jack of all outdoor trades? If by chance you have journeyed from Medford to Portland, with some excursioning from the beaten paths through Oregon's valley of content, you have viewed such a one.
For nature has staged a lavish repertoire along the Willamette. There are fields of grain and fields of potatoes; hop yards and vineyards stand side by side; emerald pastures border brown cornfields; forests of primeval timber shadow market garden patches; natty orchards of apples, peaches, and plums are neighbors to waving expanses of beet tops. In short, as you whirl through the valley, conjure up some antithesis of vegetation and you must wait but a scanty mile or two before viewing it from the observation car.
As first I journeyed through this pleasant land of the Willamette, a little book, written just half a century ago, fell into my hands, and these words concerning the valley, read then, offered a description whose peer I have not yet encountered:
The sweet Arcadian valley of the Willamette, charming with meadow, park, and grove! In no older world where men have, in all their happiest moods, recreated themselves for generations in taming earth to orderly beauty, have they achieved a fairer garden than Nature's simple labor of love has made there, giving to rough pioneers the blessings and the possible education of refined and finished landscape, in the presence of landscape strong, savage, and majestic.
Then Portland. Portland, the city of roses and the metropolitan heart of Oregon, stands close to where the Willamette, the river of our valley of content, meanders into the greater Columbia. Were this a guidebook I might inundate you with figures of population, bank clearings, and land values, all of them risen and still rising in bounds almost beyond belief. I might narrate incidents of the city's building—how stumps stood a half dozen years ago where such and such a million dollar hostelry now rises, or how so-and-so exchanged a sack of flour for lots whose value to-day is reckoned in six figures. But these are matters of business, and business was divorced years ago from the simple pleasures of the out-of-doors.
Portland is a city of prosperity. That fact strikes home to the most casual observer. Blessed above all else—especially in the eyes of an Easterner—is its freedom from poverty. There are no slums, no "lower east side" like New York's rabbit warrens, no Whitechapel hell holes. It is a clean, youthful city, delightfully located on either side of its river and rising on surrounding hills of rare beauty. Its metropolitan maturity, indeed, is all the more remarkable for its youth, as seventy years ago the site of the town was a howling wilderness, set in the midst of a territory peopled at best by a few score whites.
It was in 1845 that the first settler, Overton by name, made his home where now is Portland. Close after him came Captain John H. Couch, who located a donation land claim where is now the northern portion of the city. And from that beginning gradually grew the city of to-day which in the California gold rush of the early fifties received her first notable impetus through her position as a commanding supply point for the fast-crowding and lavishly opulent sister State to the south.
Born at the hands of pioneers and weaned with the gold of California, the city was sturdily founded, and to-day the strength of the pioneer blood and the glow of the golden beginnings are still upon her.