shiploads to all
the world, a grand harvest was reaped every year while nobody sowed. Of
late, however, the salmon crop has begun to fail, and millions of young
fry are now sown like wheat in the river every year, from hatching
establishments belonging to the Government.

All of the Oregon waters that win their way to the sea are a tributary
to the Columbia, save the short streams of the immediate coast, and
the Umpqua and Rogue Rivers in southern Oregon. These both head in the
Cascade Mountains and find their way to the sea through gaps in the
Coast Range, and both drain large and fertile and beautiful valleys.
Rogue River Valley is peculiarly attractive. With a fine climate, and
kindly, productive soil, the scenery is delightful. About the main,
central open portion of the basin, dotted with picturesque groves of
oak, there are many smaller valleys charmingly environed, the whole
surrounded in the distance by the Siskiyou, Coast, Umpqua, and Cascade
Mountains. Besides the cereals nearly every sort of fruit flourishes
here, and large areas are being devoted to peach, apricot, nectarine,
and vine culture. To me it seems above all others the garden valley of
Oregon and the most delightful place for a home. On the eastern rim of
the valley, in the Cascade Mountains, about sixty miles from Medford in
a direct line, is the remarkable Crater Lake, usually regarded as the
one grand wonder of the region. It lies in a deep, sheer-walled basin
about seven thousand feet above the level of the sea, supposed to be the
crater of an extinct volcano.

Oregon as it is today is a very young country, though most of it seems
old. Contemplating the Columbia sweeping from forest to forest, across
plain and desert, one is led to say of it, as did Byron of the ocean,--

"Such as Creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now."

How ancient appear the crumbling basaltic monuments along its banks, and
the gray plains to the east of the Cascades! Nevertheless, the river
as well as its basin in anything like their present condition are
comparatively but of yesterday. Looming no further back in the
geological records than the Tertiary Period, the Oregon of that time
looks altogether strange in the few suggestive glimpses we may get of
it--forests in which palm trees wave their royal crowns, and strange
animals roaming beneath them or about the reedy margins of lakes, the
oreodon, the lophiodon, and several extinct species of the horse, the
camel,