Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 24.djvu/263

 John Work's Journey to Umpqua River, 1834 241 ground at Faladin Plain. In the afternoon gave out the people their horses & selected those to accompany the party, the remainder to be sent tomorrow to Mr. McKay's place. We were 3% hours crossing the mountains which may be perhaps 10 miles across about S. West. [184] The road is in many places steep & rugged particularly on the N side of the hill. The unfavorable weather & being encumbered in places with fallen timber rendered it worse than it otherwise might be. The soil is composed of a thick strata of dark vegetable mould perhaps not over 6 or 8 inches deep, over a bed of reddish tile (?) No stone or gravel worth mentioning. It is not thickly wooded with timber but overgrown with underwood. The trees principally pine & cedar and of a pretty large size. On reaching the plains some oak of a middling size fringe the edges of the woods. There are also some ash & other trees. The country on getting out of the woods has a Comments a son of Alexander McKay who was lost on the Tonquin in 1811. Wilkes' Narrative, 1841, page 221, mentions McKay's gristmill near Champoeg and describes him as "a man of middle age, tall, well-made and of muscular frame, with an expression of energy and daring, and a deep-set, piercing black eye, beneath a full projecting eye brow." The gristmill was built in 1836. "Killy- maux" Mountain, to the west, is John Work's variation of Tillamook, which has had many diverse forms and is supposed to have been originally the designation of an Indian tribe. The camping place was east of the present village North Plains, Washington County, probably four or five miles north and east of the site of Hillsboro. "The most northern fork of the Faladin" probably was Dairy Creek, some four miles southwest. The distance to the Columbia River, north, given by John Work as "not far," was thirty-five miles. In a northeasterly direction the distance to that river was less than fifteen miles.