Steep Trails by John Muir — Read

Oregon is a large, rich, compact section of the west side of the continent, containing nearly a hundred thousand square miles of deep, wet evergreen woods, fertile valleys, icy mountains, and high, rolling wind-swept plains, watered by the majestic Columbia River and its countless branches. It is bounded on the north by Washington, on the east by Idaho, on the south by California and Nevada, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean. It is a grand, hearty, wholesome, foodful wilderness and, like Washington, once a part of the Oregon Territory, abounds in bold, far-reaching contrasts as to scenery, climate, soil, and productions. Side by side there is drouth on a grand scale and overflowing moisture; flinty, sharply cut lava beds, gloomy and forbidding, and smooth, flowery lawns; cool bogs, exquisitely plushy and soft, overshadowed by jagged crags barren as icebergs; forests seemingly boundless and plains with no tree in sight; presenting a wide range of conditions, but as a whole favorable to industry. Natural wealth of an available kind abounds nearly everywhere, inviting the farmer, the stock-raiser, the lumberman, the fisherman, the manufacturer, and the miner, as well as the free walker in search of knowledge and wildness. The scenery is mostly of a comfortable, assuring kind, grand and inspiring without too much of that dreadful overpowering sublimity and exuberance which tend to discourage effort and cast people into inaction and superstition.

Ever since Oregon was first heard of in the romantic, adventurous, hunting, trapping Wild West days, it seems to have been regarded as the most attractive and promising of all the Pacific countries for farmers. While yet the whole region as well as the way to it was wild, ere a single road or bridge was built, undaunted by the trackless thousand-mile distances and scalping, cattle-stealing Indians, long trains of covered wagons began to crawl wearily westward, crossing how many plains, rivers, ridges, and mountains, fighting the painted savages and weariness and famine. Setting out from the frontier of the old West in the spring as soon as the grass would support their cattle, they pushed on up the Platte, making haste slowly, however, that they might not be caught in the storms of winter ere they reached the promised land. They crossed the Rocky Mountains to Fort Hall; thence followed down the Snake River for three or four hundred miles, their cattle limping and failing on the rough lava plains; swimming the streams too deep to be forded, making boats out of wagon-boxes for the women and children and goods, or where trees could be had, lashing together logs for rafts. Thence, crossing the Blue Mountains and the plains of the Columbia, they followed the river to the Dalles. Here winter would be upon them, and before a wagon road was built across the Cascade Mountains the toil-worn emigrants would be compelled to leave their cattle and wagons until the following summer, and, in the mean time, with the assistance of the Hudson's Bay Company, make their way to the Willamette Valley on the river with rafts and boats.