Page:All Over Oregon and Washington.djvu/52

46 Opposite us, and distant between three and four miles, is the northern shore—a line of rounded highlands, covered with trees, with a narrow, low, and level strip of land between them and the beach. The village of Chinook is a little to the north-west; another village, Knappton, a little to the north-east. Following the opposite shore-line with the eye, as far to the east as the view extends, a considerable indentation in the shore marks Gray's Bay, where the discoverer of the river went ashore with his mate, to "view the country."

On the Astoria side the shore curves beautifully, in a north-east direction, quite to Tongue Point, four miles up the river. This point is one of the handsomest projections on the river. Connected with the main-land by a low, narrow isthmus, it rises gradually to the height of fifty or sixty feet, and is crowned with a splendid growth of trees. In the little bay formed by Tongue Point, lies the hulk of a vessel—a memento of the exciting times of 1849, when lumber was worth, in San Francisco, six hundred dollars a thousand feet.

The ship Silvie de Grace had come to Oregon for a cargo of the precious material, and proceeded as far as this on her return-voyage, when, through ignorance or mismanagement, she was allowed to strike on a rock, with such force that she was actually spitted, and never could be got off, even to sink. So she lies a dismantled hulk in this pretty cove, not unpicturesque, with her handsomely modeled deck half-overgrown with grass and shrubs, and the headless figure of a woman "to the fore."

Between Tongue Point and the present town is a cluster of rather dilapidated buildings, known as Up-