CHAJRACTERISTICS OF OREGON 



ter ere they reached the promised land. They 

 eroBsed the Rocky Mountains to Fort Hall; 

 thence followed down the Snake River for 

 three or four hundred miles, their cattle limp- 

 ing and faihng on the rough lava plains; swim- 

 ming the streams too deep to be forded, mak- 

 ing boats out of wagon-boxes for the women 

 and children and goods, or where trees could 

 be had, lashing together logs for rafts. Thence, 

 crossing the Blue Mountains and the plains 

 of the Columbia, they followed the river to 

 the Dalles. Here winter would be upon them, 

 and before a wagon-road was built across the 

 Cascade Mountains the toil-worn emigrants 

 would be compelled to leave their cattle and 

 wagons until the following summer, and, in the 

 mean time, with the assistance of the Hudson's 

 Bay Company, make their way to the Willam- 

 ette Valley on the river with rafts and boats. 



How strange and remote these trying times 

 have already become! They are now dim as 

 if a thousand years had passed over them. 

 Steamships and locomotives with magical 

 influence have well-nigh abolished the old dis- 

 tances and dangers, and brought forward the 

 New West into near and famiUar companion- 

 ship with the rest of the world. 



Purely wild for unnumbered centuries, a 

 paradise of oily, salmon-fed Indians, Oregon 



273 



