s friends call Portland, and a mountain of destiny
surely is Hood--its destiny to diffuse something of the spirit of
healthful happiness and fuller ideals for those, at least, who will take
time from the busy rush of their multiplying prosperity.

And here again, on Council Crest, I venture to turn back to 1860;
venture at least again to quote from the literary heritage of Theodore
Winthrop, who saw Oregon's mountains then and wrote of them and their
influences these lines:

Our race has never yet come into contact with great mountains as
companions of daily life, nor felt that daily development of the
finer and more comprehensive senses which these signal facts of
nature compel. That is an influence of the future. The Oregon
people, in a climate where being is bliss,--where every breath is a
draught of vivid life,--these Oregon people, carrying to a new and
grander New England of the West a fuller growth of the American
Idea, under whose teaching the man of lowest ambitions must still
have some little indestructible respect for himself, and the brute
of most tyrannical aspirations some little respect for others;
carrying there a religion two centuries farther on than the crude
and cruel Hebraism of the Puritans; carrying the civilization of
history where it will not suffer by the example of Europe,--with
such material, that Western society, when it crystallizes, will
elaborate new systems of thought and life. It is unphilosophical to
suppose that a strong race, developing under the best, largest, and
calmest conditions of nature, will not achieve a destiny.

Be that as it may, no man, seeing Hood from Portland for the first time,
could but experience a longing to answer the call of the beckoning
mountain, and to find for himself the secrets of the land that lies
beyond it. And so Hood was the piper which called us to the hinterland
of Oregon, where, quite by chance, we stayed, until now we find we are
Oregonians, by adoption and by choice.

CHAPTER III

The Land of Legends

The nomenclature of the Northwest suffered at the hands of its
English-speaking discoverers, for much that was fair to the ear in the
Indian names has been replaced with dreary commonplaces, possessing
neither beauty nor special fitness.

Two Yankee sea captains tossed a coin to decide whether they would name
the city Portland or Boston. The Boston s