The land-office; its object and functionaries—How to find your land—Section 33—The great conflagration—The survivors of the fire—The burnt timber and the brush—The clearing-party—Chopping by beginners—Cooking, amateur and professional—The wild-cat—Deer and hunting—Piling brush—Dear and cheap clearing—The skillful axeman—Clearing by Chinamen—Dragging out stumps—What profits the farmer may expect on a valley farm—On a foot-hills farm.
By the time we had been here about a month and had settled down a little, we set about clearing a tract of wild land called section 33, situated nearly twenty miles away. You will ask, What does section 33 mean? Oregon is divided into several districts. For the Willamette Valley the land-office is at Oregon City, one of the most ancient towns in the State, having a history of forty years, dating from the rule of the Hudson's Bay Company. The chief officer is called the "register." He is supplied with maps of the surveys from the central office at Washington. Each map is of one township, consisting of a square block of thirty-six sections of a square mile or six hundred and forty acres each. Each township is numbered with reference to a baseline and a meridian, fixed by the original survey of the State, thus giving a position of latitude and longitude. From the land-office duplicates of the maps for each county are furnished to the county-seat and are deposited in the county clerk's office for general inspection. Each year a certain sum is set aside for new surveys, and contracts are given by the Surveyor-General of the State to local surveyors for the work.
The corners of each square-mile section are denoted by posts or large stones, and the neighboring trees are blazed or marked so as to direct attention to the corner post or stone.
Thus for years after the surveying-party have passed through wild land, there is but little difficulty in finding the corner-posts, and thence by compass ascertaining the boundary-lines of any section or fraction of a section in question. Surveys being officially made, boundary disputes are avoided, or easily solved and set at rest by reference to the county surveyor, who for a few dollars' fee comes out and "runs the lines" afresh of any particular plot.
Section 33, then, is the section thus numbered in township 10, south of range 7, west of the Willamette meridian. It lay just on the edge of the burned woods country.
THE GREAT CONFLAGRATION.Although forest-fires in Oregon are still of yearly occurrence, since settlement by the white men the range of the devastation has been by degrees narrowed and confined. Formerly the Indians started fires every year to burn the withered grass in the valleys and on the hillsides, and thence fire spread into the woods and ravaged many miles of timber. The "great fire" is said to have occurred about forty years ago, when many Indians perished in the flames, and others had to take refuge in the streams and rivers, till the destroying element had passed them in its resistless fury.
Standing on the top of one of these Coast Mountains, the eye ranges for many miles over hill and dale, dotted everywhere with the huge black trunks, the relics of the great conflagration. Many standing yet, some towering high into the sky, testify of their former gracefulness by the symmetrical tapering of the tall trunk, and the regular positions of the broken limbs and branches. But Nature is busily at work repairing damages; each winter's rains penetrate more deeply into the fabric of the trunk; each winter's gales loosen yet more the roots in which the living sap was long ago destroyed; each spring the wind brings down additions to the graveyard of trees, rotting away into mold; while a few young successors to the former race of firs are showing themselves clothed in living green, and a dense growth of copse-wood, hazel, cherry, vine-maple, arrow-wood, and crab-apple is crowding the hollows of the cañons on the hill-sides.
The brake-fern covers the hills, attaining a growth of five, six, or eight feet, and sheltering an undergrowth of wild-pea and native grass. Section 33 lies between the burned timber and the living forest, but its chief value is in the valley of some three hundred acres of alluvial land forming its center, through which winds here and there the Mary River, at this distance from its mouth scarcely more than a clear and rapid brook.
Eight of us started on the clearing-party with two light wagons, and a good supply of food, blankets, and axes and saws. A squatter had settled on one corner and built himself a hut and a little barn, and had got four or five acres of land cleared and plowed. But he had abandoned his improvements and gone some ten miles off, to clear another homestead among the thick woods.
The first night we camped out in a grassy corner by the wood-side, while the horses were tethered near.