d 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 " 30 00
From Portland to Celilo.......................... 1 day 7 00
Excursion t