Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 4.djvu/212



For those who have not made the journey direct from Walla Walla, through the agricultural heart of Oregon, and across the mountains through the mining region of northern California, there is much of interest and pleasure; and though the trip should be fraught with much personal discomfort, there is much to repay the traveler in the collection of statistics, and in seeing a region where the wilderness of yesterday has to-day given place to homes, where material prosperity, at least, arrest the attention of the traveler at every mile of the journey. The mode of conveyance from Walla Walla to Wallula is by stages that run daily between these points, and where the journey is of six hours and a cost of $5 brings you to the banks of the Columbia, whence you take steamers for the Des Chutes Landing. The improvements along the banks of the Walla Walla, in the shape of new and additional enclosures for farming purposes, during the last two years, have been many, and mark with unerring certainty the future of the Walla Walla country, as the distributing center for a radius of three hundred miles of country, now fast developing in all the elements of material, social, and political prosperity. It has more than once occurred to me that the Walla Walla River, by a system of locks, could be advantageously used as a line of connection between Wallula and Walla Walla, and one needs but see the long line of wagons and pack trains,