Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/405

 4 From Youth to Age As An American. 377 of the Coast, Cascades, and Blue Mountains of Oregon should call attention to conditions peculiar to this region. From the experience of sixty-four years of labor-life, beginning with logging for a sawmill in the Coast Mountains, planting and cultivating trees, both fruit and forest, as a means of living, and clearing land for cultivation and cutting and burning young trees in defense of the rich natural pasturage which we as pioneers found on much of Western Oregon, I can say that I have no doubt that land-slides do occur on the west side of the Coast Range, as it receives the heaviest impact of both wind and rain from the Pacific Ocean, and in places the hill- sides are steep from weather-wear; but the only slide I re- member to have noted came down heavily clothed wdth tim- ber—about one and one-half miles east of Clifton, before the Groble & Astoria Railroad was thought of. With a large ex- perience in the Cascade Range since, I would ascribe that slide to the tide wash in the Columbia River. It was due in part to the under softening by the tide-water and in part to the leverage of its timber rocked by the wind. Within the Cascade Mountains, following up the north bank of the North Santiam to the summit tree of the Davenport survey of 1874, eighty-seven and one-half miles from Salem, all the signs of surface disturbance off the right of way of the Corvallis & Eastern Railroad line— and there are many— are slides which brought down the trees with them, either broken up or parti- ally covered with stone and soil. Almost uniformly there would be the evidence of slush and mud to indicate that the rocking of the trees by the wind had let in the rain, loading and loosening the mass. There are other kinds of surface movement in the Cascades, in places where there is little soil, but acres of broken rock of no value, which, however, tends toward soil-making by sliding down into the river. In the sixty miles of this valley of the North Santiam, with its south bank in sight most of the way, there is but one slide in sight from the north bank, and the mass is not more than five acres in area, but it represents a great aggregate of surface of steep mountain sides of broken up, hard, trap rock^ at so steep an