Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 6).djvu/326

 and red spruce, and alder. There were a few dwarf white and gray ashes; and here and there a soft maple. The alder grows also to a very large size; I measured some of twelve to fifteen inches diameter; the wood was used by us in preference, to make charcoal for the blacksmith's forge. But the largest of all the trees that I saw in the country, was a white spruce: this tree, which had lost its top branches, and bore evident marks of having been struck by lightning, was a mere, straight trunk of about eighty to one hundred feet in height; its bark whitened by age, made it very conspicuous among the other trees with their brown bark and dark foliage, like a huge column of white marble. It stood on a slope of a hill immediately in the rear of our palisades. Seven of us placed ourselves round its trunk, and we could not embrace it by extending our arms and touching merely the {234} tips of our fingers; we measured it afterward in a more regular manner, and found it forty-two feet in circumference. It kept the same size, or nearly the same, to the very top.

We had it in contemplation at one time to construct a circular staircase to its summit, and erect a platform thereon for an observatory, but more necessary and pressing demands on our time made us abandon the project.

A short distance above Astoria, the oak and ash are plentiful, but neither of these is of much value or beauty.

From the middle of June to the middle of October, we had abundance of wild fruit; first, strawberries, almost white, small but very sweet; then raspberries, both red and orange color. These grow on a bush sometimes twelve feet in height: they are not sweet, but of a large size.

The months of July and August furnish a small berry of an agreeable, slightly acid flavor; this berry grows on a slender bush of some eight to nine feet high, with small round leaves; they are in size like a wild cherry: some are