1826, NOVEMBER. THE UMPQUA RIVER 233 



I daily expected. From this place as far as I went the banks are steep, 

 rocky, and thickly wooded with pine, the same as is found on the 

 Columbia near the ocean. The lowest part of the river I saw might be 

 from seven to eight hundred yards wide ; tide flows up the river twenty- 

 seven miles, and fifteen from the sea rises 4 feet. Returned at six o'clock 

 in the evening. Whole day very heavy rain. Collected a fine shrub in 

 ripe fruit : berries in a thick close long raceme, round and somewhat 

 pointed at the top, two-seeded in a soft blood-red pulpy juice ; skin hard, 

 brittle and pubescent ; leaves opposite entire, pubescent underneath ; 

 petiole short, ovate, smooth ; a handsome evergreen shrub, 4 to 10 feet 

 high ; wood hard and brittle, with a whitish bark ; abundant on rocky 

 places. I learn it is also plentiful to the north, in the country inhabited 

 by the Killimuck Indians and also to the south, but is not eatable. 

 Found in abundance Vaccinium ovatum, loaded with fruit : berry small, 

 jet black when perfectly ripe, and yields a great quantity of thin watery 

 bloody juice, but exceedingly pleasant acid ; fruit in clusters at the point 

 of the branches ; gathered a large paper of seeds and took a few twigs as 

 specimens, as also the preceding. Still unable to find Castanea in a perfect 

 state, as well as Ilex Dahoon. At a small viUage nineteen miles from the 

 sea, on the right bank of the river, consisting of seven or eight lodges, I got 

 a few berries of a species of Vaccinium, very large, f uUy as large as marrow- 

 fat peas, light blue colour (nearly azure), has on pressure scarcely any acid, 

 gives a large quantity of thick jelly of the same colour as the skin. Whether 

 the shrub be evergreen, large or small, I am unable to learn, and the only 

 thing respecting it is that it grows on the mountains. 



Saturday, ith. — I had not been at our camp more than an hour last 

 night when t had the satisfaction of being joined by Mr. McLeod from his 

 travels to the southward. He informs me that this river (the Umpqua) 

 at its confluence with the ocean is about three-quarters of a mile broad and 

 has a shallow sand-bar and much broken water at the flow of the tide ; 

 will not admit ever of any shipping. He journeyed along the sea-beach 

 for twenty-three miles, when he came to a second river, similar in size to 

 this one and also affording the same sort of salmon and salmon-trout. At 

 its mouth are numerous bays : some of them run considerable distances 

 through the country, which is by no means so mountainous as that north- 

 wards, and in one of the said bays he pursued his route to the south in a 

 canoe for twenty miles, where he came to a third river, a little smaller than 

 the others, but by the Indian account takes its waters a long distance in the 

 interior. Abounds with the same fishes. Here for the present his expe- 

 dition stops until he has his party aU forward. By his account from the 

 Indians a large stream of water falls into the sea, perhaps about sixty mUes 

 still further to the south, where the natives are said to be very numerous : 

 one of his linguists, who has seen the Columbia and the new river, says it is 

 much larger than it. Mr. McLeod tells me the country on the coast assumes 

 a very different appearance from that on the Columbia. In the inter- 

 mediate distance between here and there, and to the north half-way 

 between the last two rivers, which will be found about 41° North latitude, 

 the genus Pinus is no longer to be seen ; on the banks of rivers and on the 



