Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/101

Rh to slowly melt away, the face of the earth covered by it shows that the ice drifted slowly southward, grinding down the elevated ground, scarring the solid rock formations with deep stria, and filling up the valleys and lowlands with vast deposits of gravel, sand and clay. In this way was the outcrop of gold bearing rock veins ground off and the gold dust and nuggets of gold carried down and deposited in valleys from which it was recovered by American miners in California and Oregon in recent times. Subsequent to this glacial age of the earth, the water-shed west of the Rocky mountains passed through more than one submergence to, and elevation from, the depths of the ancient Pacific ocean. And with each one of these elevations appeared the outlines of subsequent appearing mountain ranges, and the disappearance one after another of the inland seas and sounds which covered eastern Oregon and the Willamette valley. Those mighty changes in the land and the sea greatly affected the flora and the fauna of the regions involved. We find in the rock graves, and in the vast drift deposits not only the remains of animals already mentioned, but other and later species; and especially the httle three-toed fossil horse discovered by Professor Thomas Condon of the Oregon university, and being the first discovery of the fossil horse contributed by the geology of the globe. And in the elevation which finally dried up the inland seas, and which extended from the Blue mountains in Oregon far down into Nevada and California, we can imagine the grandest volcanic display of mighty forces which ever took place on the entire globe. In that mountain range upheaval, the earth's crust was so extensively broken along the line of the Cascade range, that there must have been, between the British line on the north and the Shasta peak on the south, not less than twenty volcanoes in active operation belching forth vast deposits of lava and volcanic ashes at the same time for a period of several years. The ancient inland sea was not only dried up, but its great basin was filled up with the lava outflows from these volcanic mountains, and the remains of ancient forests, seas, meadow lands and all their teeming life of wild animals was covered up thousands of feet deep. And subsequent to this great volcanic upheaval, but without volcanic violence came the uplift of the coast range in Oregon, which dried up the Willamette valley sound and made dry land where Portland now stands. But prior to the uplift which made the Portland townsite dry land, the earth surface forces of nature had entered upon the vast work of constructing the Columbia river water way. Thousands of years before Portland and the Willamette valley had emerged from ocean's waves, the mighty Columbia had been carrying down millions upon millions of boulders, gravel and sand and depositing the same in the winding estuary this side of the Sandy river. So that when W. S. Ladd undertook to bore an artesian well on the Laurelhurst tract of land now inside of Portland city limits, he bored down for twelve hundred feet through the debris which had been carried down by the river and deposited in the deep waters of the ocean, among which debris were the trunks of, large trees. The construction of the Columbia river was the most important of all the great events in the selection and building of the city of Portland. The river is the life of the city. Without the. river, the city, any city might have been here or any where else. The work of erosion by grinding out a channel, miles wide and thousands of feet deep, and thousands of miles in length, through wide-extended fields of lava rock, with rolling boulders and pebbles from the distant reaches of the water-shed behind the Selkirk, Sawtooth and Blue mountain ranges of mountains, down through Idaho, British Columbia, eastern Washington, and eastern Oregon, carrying a deep cut through the Cascade and Coast Range mountains to the ocean, may have required a hundred thousand years. But it was done. The grand and incomprehensible work of nature is before us, is building our city, is feeding and clothing millions of people, and nowhere else on the face of the globe is there to be found such a marvelous display of the destructive forces of nature employed to make a great region the comfortable home of the human race.