Page:All Over Oregon and Washington.djvu/49

Rh in a bold promontory called Tillamook Head, closing in the southern view.

Having taken in all these features of the place, and pronounced it good, let us take the light wagon, and, driving across the plain and through the woods nearly sixteen miles, find the Grant—ubiquitous little steamer—waiting for us in Young's Bay. As we steam toward Astoria, the accomplished Captain of the Grant—the first white male child born west of the Rocky Mountains—becomes our guide, and points out the mouth of Lewis and Clarke's River, on the south side of the bay, where those hardy explorers spent the winter of 1805–6 in a log-hut, to which the severe rains confined them nearly all those dreary months, in imminent danger of starving. Not only have sixty years effaced all traces of their encampment, but a house, which stood on the same site in 1853, has quite disappeared, the site being overgrown with trees now twenty feet in height. Of a saw-mill that furnished lumber to San Francisco, in the same year, nothing now remains except immense beds of half-rotted sawdust, embedding one or two charred foundation timbers. A dense growth of vegetation covers the whole ground.

At the eastern extremity of the bay is the mouth of Young's River, a handsome stream, with densely wooded shores, and a fall, at one place, of fifty feet perpendicular, furnishing one of the attractions to boating parties of summer visitors at Astoria.

From the deck of the steamer we have a fine view of the Coast Range, and of one double peak higher than the range, which goes by the ugly misnomer of Saddle Mountain. Not snow-capped in summer, it is still very lofty and very picturesque, reminding us of