Page:All Over Oregon and Washington.djvu/123

Rh the bunch-grass grows, we observe the fine looks of the stock subsisting entirely upon it.

Beyond Waitsburg the road follows along the Touchet Valley for twenty miles, past a constant succession of farms, with neat, commodious dwellings, and a neat, commodious, white-painted school-house, every few miles of the way. With such beginnings, the people of the Walla Walla Valley are on the high road to wealth and eminent social position, in the future of the State of Washington.

After leaving the Touchet, the road takes a course at right angles to all the streams, keeping up on the high ground except at the crossings. From the greatest elevations there are splendid views—wonderful for extent, and rather awful; inasmuch as we are able to realize that we are traveling like the fly on the orange, and can look down its slopes to dizzy descents of curvature. The crossings of the Tucanon and Alpowah rivers are any thing but agreeable coupons of travel. The hill of the Tucanon is frightful. Seeing the preparations made for the descent, prepares us for something of a hill; but when once started down the narrow, winding grade, with the coach seemingly minded to tumble over the backs of the horses, it is the most natural thing in the world to wish we had not undertaken the ride down. Walking, we reflect, if not an easy mode of locomotion, has the advantage of being eminently safe, compared to this. A mile and a quarter of such reflection prepares us to be thoroughly glad when the lowest level is reached, and we are in the little valley of the Tucanon, where again we find farms and pretty groves of glossy-leaved cottonwood. At the Alpowah we repeat the dizzying descent, with this difference, that once down we do not have to climb up again