When one looks at the crowded rows of steamboats at the Portland wharves now, it is hard to realize that it is only thirty-two years since the first one was launched there. Two were built and launched in one year, the "Columbia" and the "Lot Whitcomb." The "Lot Whitcomb" was launched on Christmas Day; there were three days' feasting and dancing, and people gathered from all parts of the Territory to celebrate the occasion.
It is also hard to realize, when standing on the Portland wharves, that it is less than fifty years since there were angry discussions in the United States Congress as to whether or not it were worth while to obtain Oregon as a possession, and in the Eastern States manuals were being freely distributed, bearing such titles as this: "A general circular to all persons of good character wishing to emigrate to the Oregon Territory." Even those statesmen who were most earnest in favor of the securing of Oregon did not perceive the true nature of its value. One of Benton's most enthusiastic predictions was that an "emporium of Asiatic commerce" would be situated at the mouth of the Columbia, and that "a stream of Asiatic trade would pour into the valley of the Mississippi through the channel of Oregon." But the future of Oregon and Washington rests not on any transmission of the riches of other countries, however important an element in their prosperity that may ultimately become. Their true riches are their own and inalienable. They are to be among the great feeders of the earth. Gold and silver values are unsteady and capricious; intrigues can overthrow them; markets can be glutted, and mines fail. But bread the nations of the earth must have. The bread-yielder controls the situation always. Given a soil which can grow wheat year after year with no apparent fatigue or exhaustion, a climate where rains never fail and seed-time and harvest are uniformly certain, and conditions are created under which the future success and wealth of a country may be predicted just as surely as the movements of the planets in the heavens.
There are three great valleys in western Oregon,—the Willamette, the Umpqua, and the Rogue River. The Willamette is the largest, being sixty miles long by one hundred and fifty wide. The Umpqua and Rogue River together contain over a million of acres. These valleys are natural gardens; fertile to luxuriance, and watered by all the westward drainage of the great Cascade Range, the Andes of North America, a continuation of the Sierra Nevada. The Coast Range Mountains lie west of these valleys, breaking, but not shutting out, the influence of the sea air and fogs. This valley region between these two ranges contains less than a third of the area of Washington and Oregon. The country east of the Cascade Mountains is no less fertile, but has a drier climate, colder winters, and hotter summers. Its elevation is from two to four thousand feet,—probably the very best elevations for health. A comparison of statistics of yearly death-rates cannot be made with absolute fairness between old and thick-settled and new and sparsely settled countries. Allowance must be made for the probably superior health and strength of the men and women who have had the youth and energy to go forward as pioneers. But, making all due allowance for these, there still remains difference enough to startle one between the death-rates in some of the Atlantic States and in these infant empires of the New Northwest. The yearly death-rate in Massachusetts is one out of fifty-seven; in Vermont one out of ninety-seven; in Oregon one out of one hundred and seventy-two; and in Washington Territory one out of two hundred and twenty-eight.
As we glided slowly to anchorage in Portland harbor, five dazzling snow-white peaks were in sight on the horizon,—Mount Hood, of peerless shape, strong as if it were a bulwark of the very heavens themselves, yet graceful and sharp-cut as Egypt's pyramids; St. Helen's, a little lower, yet looking higher, with the marvellous curves of its slender shining cone, bent on and seemingly into the sky, like an intaglio of ice cut in the blue; miles away in the farthest north and east horizons, Mounts Tacoma and Adams and Baker, all gleaming white, and all seeming to uphold the skies.
These eternal, unalterable snow-peaks will be as eternal and unalterable factors in the history of the country as in its beauty to the eye. Their value will not come under any head of things reckonable by census, statistics, or computation, but it will be none the less real for that: it will be an element in the nature and character of every man and woman born within sight of the radiant splendor; and it will be strange if it does not ultimately develop, in the empire of this New Northwest, a local patriotism and passionate loyalty to soil as strong and lasting as that which has made generations of Swiss mountaineers ready to brave death for a sight of their mountains.
II.
SCOTLAND AND ENGLAND.
A BURNS PILGRIMAGE.
A shining-beached crescent of country facing to the sunset, and rising higher and higher to the east till it becomes mountain, is the county of Ayrshire, fair and famous among the southern Scotch highlands. To a sixty-mile measure by air, between its north and south promontories, it stretches a curving coast of ninety; and when Robert Burns strolled over its breezy uplands, he saw always beautiful and mysterious silver lines of land thrusting themselves out into the mists of the sea, pointing to far-off island peaks, seeming sometimes to bridge and sometimes to wall vistas ending only in sky. These lines are as beautiful, elusive, and luring now as then, and in the inalienable loyalty of nature bear testimony to-day to their lover.
This is the greatest crown of the hero and the poet. Other great men hold fame by failing records which moth and fire destroy. The places that knew them know them no more when they are dead. Marble and canvas and parchment league in vain to keep green the memory of him who did not love and consecrate by his life-blood, in fight or in song, the soil where he trod. But for him who has done this,—who fought well, sang well,—the morning cloud, and the wild rose, and broken blades of grass under men's feet, become immortal witnesses; so imperishable, after all, are what we are in the habit of calling the "perishable things of this earth."
More than two hundred years ago, when the followers and holders of the different baronies of Ayrshire compared respective dignities and values, they made a proverb which ran:—