Page:All Over Oregon and Washington.djvu/334

328 has been discovered at a place just at the northern end of Multnomah County, the remains of a camp-fire, with the half-burnt brands lying in position, as if the fire had but just gone out, and buried under twenty-seven feet of alluvial deposit. Equally curious is the fact that in the Nehalem Valley, eight miles back from the coast, and twenty-five feet below the surface, in a place where there is no suggestion even of a possible land-slide, was lately discovered a large knife of pure copper, with a stone handle. Here is a souvenir of the stone and copper age! Shall we ever be able to collect any facts concerning these ancient Oregonians? The paleontologists have here a splendid field to work in.

The work of the volcanoes is also very evident in Western Oregon. The valley of the Lower Columbia, in particular, reveals the immense overflows of lava in its many forms of basaltic rock. In many places, it occurs in solid masses of many feet in thickness; in others, it has assumed the columnar form; and in many more, it is broken into sharply angular fragments, mixed with earth. The fracture in the latter case is foliated—every fresh cleavage showing what appears like the impression of palm-leaves. The most interesting form of basalt occurs in some columns in the high river-banks just below the town of St. Helen. These columns have been brought to view by the gradual process of denudation; and now project only a dozen feet or so of their tops from the incline of the high bluffs. They consist of uniform blocks, of about ten inches in thickness, having six sides—laid one above another so as to appear like a solid pillar. But their great peculiarity is, that each individual block has a similar-sized chip off the lower side, on its north-west corner