Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 6.djvu/95

 before, I laid my gun at my feet, on the ground, and waved my hand for him to come to me, which he did slowly and with great caution. I then made him place his bow and quiver of arrows beside my gun and striking a light gave him a smoke out of my own pipe, and a present of a few beads. With my pencil I made a rough sketch of the Cone and Pine tree which I wanted to obtain, and drew his attention to it, when he instantly pointed with his hand to the hills fifteen or twenty miles distant towards the South; and when I expressed my intention of going thither, cheerfully set about accompanying me. At midday I reached my long-wished-for Pines, and lost no time in examining them and endeavouring to collect specimens and seeds. New and strange things seldom fail to make strong impressions, and are therefore frequently overrated; so that lest I should never again see my friends in England to inform them verbally of this most beautiful and immensely grand tree, I shall here state the dimensions of the largest that I could find among several that had been blown down by the wind. At three feet from the ground its circumference is 57 feet 9 inches; at one hundred and thirty-four feet, 17 feet 5 inches; the extreme length 245 feet. The trunks are uncommonly straight, and the bark remarkably smooth, for such large timber, of whitish or light-brown colour, and yielding a great quantity of bright amber gum. The tallest stems are generally unbranched for two-thirds of the height of the tree; the branches rather pendulous, with cones hanging from their points like sugar-loaves in a grocer's shop. These cones are, however, only seen on the loftiest trees, and the putting myself in possession of three of these (all I could obtain) nearly brought my life to a close. As it was impossible either to climb the tree or hew it down, I endeavoured to knock off the the cones by firing at them with ball, when the report of my gun brought eight In-