Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 18.djvu/318



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OREGON.

I will now present to the committee, in brief, the facts which I gathered during a residence of five months in the Oregon territory, and which relate to the aspect, mountains, rivers and other waters, climate, soil, productions, trade and population of that coimtry. My inspecticm having been confined to the southwesterly portion of Oregon, I shall limit my statements accordingly.

The eastern section of the district referred to is bordered by a mountain range, running nearly parallel to the spine of the Rocky mountains [53] and to the coast, and which, from the number of its elevated peaks, I am inclined to call the President's range.*

There is a great uniformity of aspect among these peaks. They all resemble the frustum of a cone, the declivity forming an angle of from thirty to thirty-five degrees with the hori- zon. They lift their bold summits several thousand feet from their mountain bases, are thinly wooded near the bottom, but from mid-distance upward present their barren sides in the naked deformity of rock, lava, cinders, or whatever else might have come glowing, at some former period, from the deep- cavemed volcanic cauldrons below. I did not ascend them; but if it be safe to reason on the analogy furnished by the Mexican peaks, whose summits I did explore, and whose forms are precisely similar, these elevated simmiits are the chimneys of extinct volcanoes, and retain the vestiges of those craters from which the fiery discharges and eruptions were wont to be made.

I encamped for some time at the base of Mount Jackson, and was equally moved by the sublime spectacle of its abrupt ascent and towering grandeur, and by the beautiful diversity of its aspect and colors, engirdled as it was below with suc-

of the Hudson's Bay Company by other names, I have christened after our ex- Presidents, viz: I. Washington, latitude 46 deg. 15 min.; 2. Adams, latitude 45 deg. 10 minutes; 3- Jefferson, latitude 44 deg., ^o min.; 4. MadiSon, latitude 43 deg. 50 min.; s> Monroe, latitude 43 deg. so mm.; 6. J. Q. A^ama, latitude 4s deg. 10 min.; and 7. Jackson, latitude 41 dtg, 40 min.
 * These isolated an4 remarkabl* cones, which are now called amon^ the hnnters