Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/406

 378 John Minto. angle that the weight of a man or even a sheep will start tons it with a jingling, metallic grind, toward the brawling stream, busy with grinding roeks into gravel and sand and soil. In the case of this slide, it appears that the torrent, by undermining some softer rock— lime, marl, or volcanic ash- produced the slide which must have put thousands of tons under the grinding force of the stream. What has broken up these vast masses of hard, jingling stone? Are they the result of thousands or millions of years and countless earthquakes or volcanic upheavals? There is the presence of volcanic craters, now lake beds — like Marion Lake, sixteen miles east of this slide — the gem of this valley, at least as a natural fish-pond; then there are Clear Lake and Fish Lake, thirty miles south, draining into the McKenzie. All three of the lakes were formed by a mighty power throwing millions of tons of rock, scoria and ashes northeast from the cavities left, and the bottom of Clear Lake is formed by a grove of iir timber which must have slid gently to the place where they now are stand- ing upright, with their tops thirty to forty feet below the surface of the water. Ten miles east from this slide is a bed of ashes as fine as bolted flour, above the timber-line of Mount Jefferson, on the southwest slope. Every summer the snow- melt above the ash-belt makes new channels over them, and turns the crystal streams of the main river at first dun color and then whiter as it flows w^est to the great Willamette Val- ley. Mounts Jefferson, Hood and Raineer each mother white rivers. In the hot days of August the White and Pamelia branches of the North Santiam vary their flow from eight to sixteen inches daily. Mount Hood and the "Sisters" are the nursing mothers of streams in August and September, each sending down the life-giving fluid to bless human, vegetable, tree or animal life. The same general character of soil and soil formation reaches from the Willamette Valley eastward to and including the Rocky Mountains. From a point within forty miles southeast of the land or rock slide which started me on this descriptive tour, north to Puget Sound and south to New Mexico, soil on the highlands is colored reddish with