Page:All Over Oregon and Washington.djvu/374

368 established at Corvallis, and the Christian College at Monmouth. Nearly every county in Western Oregon has one or more of these institutions of learning, which, if not yet rich enough to furnish every help to instruction which Eastern academies and colleges have, make a very fair showing for a State so thinly populated.

For a State with no more than ninety-five thousand inhabitants, it may be said, with truth, that the institutions of Oregon compare favorably with those of older and more populous ones. But a mighty change is coming upon the whole of this North-west Coast within the next decade, which shall give to it a rank and importance that those not familiar with its advantages of climate and natural resources can very indifferently understand. A country that has the Rocky Mountains for its eastern wall, the Pacific Sea for its western barrier; whose interior mountains are teeming with treasure; whose soil is seldom hardened by frost; down whose coasts sail no icebergs; whose wharves front those of China and Japan, and whose people are full of the intellectuality of the nineteenth century, will not pause nor hesitate on the road to wealth, learning, literature, or art. Already Oregon has furnished the world a poet, whose mountain minstrelsy echoes from foreign shores. From his heights, he