SACRAMENTO BUTE. 649 
many parts of the Columbia and Willammet regions, as we have 
already intimated. ‘These conglomerates are coarse or fine, including 
sometimes large masses of basalt, and again consisting of pebbles or 
fragments, and earth; and they graduate into the stratified tufas, 
which consist of earthy material alone. Under these different forms, 
the rock is associated with the tertiary sandstone of Oregon, and it 
will come again under consideration on a following page. 
Sacramento Bute.—Passing from Oregon to California we observed 
a single extinct volcano in the Sacramento Valley, one hundred and 
twenty miles from the mouth of the river; it is called the Sacramento 
Bute. Ninety miles above the Bute, to the east of the river, the 
prairie, for a few miles, was thinly strewed with rounded pieces of a 
vesicular lava; and the dry beds of some streams, running from the 
eastward, were composed of similar pebbles and stones. On the pre- 
ceding day, there were three or four conical peaks in sight, rising a 
little above the lower hills of the region; but we did not pass within 
fifteen miles of them, and I could only suspect their volcanic nature : 
the pebbles observed indicated that there were extinct craters in that 
direction. 
The Bute stands solitary in a wide prairie, the flat bottom-land of 
the Sacramento, and is about five miles from the banks of the river. 
It is a mass of mountain peaks, (as here represented,) with the lower 
Fig. 1. 
oo PETC = 
SACRAMENTO BUTE, BEARING SOUTHEAST-BY-EAST, 
slopes long and gentle. It consists of an outer belt, and an inner area, 
as shown in the annexed profile. The inner area is an irregular 
Fig. 2. 
eS, 
collection of summits,* encircled by a flat valley, which forms a kind 
of highway, three to four hundred yards wide, around the moun- 
* The section of the inner mountains in the second view is ideal; we suspected, from 
the distant views, that the mass of peaks and ridges surround a central depression ; but 
there was no time to verify this conclusion. 
163 
