Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/100



The city of Portland was founded in an Indian country. Its citizens had to hastily arm and rush to the defense of out-lying settlements against the raids of infuriated savages. The native Indians were the first customers of the first merchants in this pioneer region, and their presence not only largely influenced the pioneer establishments of commerce, but it markedly influenced the lives and character of the pioneers themselves.

And, before there were Indians, there were here in old Oregon, many species of wild beasts that passed away from the face of the earth so many long ages ago, that the mind of man can have no comprehension of the time. Of the sabre-toothed tiger, the most destructive beast that ever trod the earth; of the mammoth, the grandest beast that has left behind perfect evidence of his existence, and of the great reptiles, seventy feet in length, we have now no representatives except the fossil remains preserved in the rocks or given up from the perpetual ice cap of Siberia. Great herds of the mammoth roamed over the plains of eastern Oregon, Washington and Idaho, browsing upon palm trees and other tropical vegetation which is now covered over with volcanic outflows and ice-cap drift four or five thousand feet deep. And long before those tropical forests fed the mammoth, and harbored his enemy, the sabre-toothed tiger, the site where Portland now stands was a spot in the bottom of the Pacific ocean a thousand miles from any existing land. The great Rocky mountain back-bone of the continent was even submerged under the one time almost universal sea of waters. The first to emerge from that universal sea, was the Bitter Root range; the next to emerge was the Blue mountains of eastern Oregon and Idaho, and the Sierra Navadas in California. Their first uplift did not give them the elevation above sea level which we now see. But in the uplifted mountains there were veins of gold, silver, copper, and iron, and streams of water. The intermediate and off coast waters of these ancient times were shallow seas. There were many islands in the Pacific then which are now submerged. Then following this stage of the evolutionary development of the habitable globe, we find the whole north temperate zone of the earth overtaken by a catastrophe which cannot be understood or explained, but which enveloped the whole region of North America down probably to thirty seven degrees of north latitude, in an ice cap or continental wide glacier five or six thousand feet deep. How much of the north Pacific ocean this ice-cap covered, or how long it existed can only be imagined. But,' when from a relapse to former conditions, or change of seasons, this vast ice covering commenced