THE SAGE PLAINS OF OREGON 
397 
trip was made northward in the Blue mountains. The expedi- 
tion then traveled south from Harney to Steins mountain, then 
westward across the plains, winding back and forth between the 
north and south mountain ranges to Fort Klamath, and finally 
over the Cascades to the railroad. 
The whole country apj^ears to have been covered at some not 
very remote geological period b}’’ a great sheet of lava, which has 
since been cracked, uplifted, and depressed in various portions. 
Almost every plateau ends in an escarpment of naked basalt, 
kitown throughout the region as rim-rock, perhaps geologically 
the most characteristic surface feature of the couTitry. Nearly 
every valle}’’ is inclosed by such a formation. 
The vegetation of the country consists primarily of sage brush, 
the well-known Artemisia tridentata of botanists, a shrub three to 
six feet high, closely related to the wormwood of Europe, and 
having in common with that plant a light gray color and a 
strongly aromatic odor. Awa}^ from stream beds and sinks and 
the shores of lakes, sage brush covers the whole country like 
a gray mantle and constitutes probably nine-tenths of the total 
vegetation. It is a plant the herbage of which is eaten by but 
few animals and by those only in starvation times, one that will 
grow with little moisture and will stand the widest range of 
temperature. Sage brush gives to the country its character. A 
level stretch is known as a sage plain ; the grouse which live 
there are known as sage hens; the fuel of the region is sage 
brush ; the odor upon the atmosphere is that of sage brush. 
After a season’s lack of rain the sage brush turns to a blackish 
gray and everything has a dead, hurned-out look, suggestive of 
thirst, of hot rocks, and parching winds. But after a soaking 
spring rain the sage brush puts on a new coloration, a delicate 
pale bluish green, soft and veiy ))leasing to the eye. Occasion- 
ally in some far-off lava-covered basin of the plains, where there 
has been no rain for months, a stream bed stretching down from 
a mountain brings to the thirsty plain the water that has fallen 
in a summer thunder-storm upon some high ))cak,and as a con- 
sequence the dark gray blanket of sage brush is lighted up b}’ a 
line of soft jjea green. If the stream bed is one that still con- 
tinues to carry water, the sage hens gather along it from miles 
back in the plains, and every morning and evening come down 
to driidc. Sometimes the teal and other ducks, if the mountain 
is high enough to ju’oduce a perennial stream, bring up their 
broods of young in the tall grass along its margin. In oik; day’s 
20 
