Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/886



of the Atlantic and Mississippi valley states. That timber as it now stands in the Oregon forests is worth six hundred million dollars. It will be worth twice that in ten years. It will never be exhausted. Self interest, if nothing else, will provide means to preserve it from destruction by forest fires. It will grow up again as fast as it is consumed. Groves of young fir trees will grow one hun- dred feet high with trunks fifteen inches in diameter in thirty years. There is more timber in the Willamette valley today than there was sixty-five years ago when the settlers first took up the valley lands. These great forests covering the three ranges of mountains in the state, and fed and nurtured by the rains from the Pacific ocean, will prove an inexhaustible mine of wealth, feeding and stimulating every industry of the state for all time.

ELECTRIC POWER.

The electric power available for the building of the city of Portland, and for the use and benefit of its increasing population, is beyond human comprehension. Just as our finite minds cannot comprehend how the great luminary of our solar system throws its rays of electricity through the immensity of ninety-five million miles of space to raise our annual crops of food, and circulate the blood in the veins of our body, so, neither can we comprehend the immensity of the problem by which water enough is lifted up from the Pacific ocean and carried inland over mountains and valleys thousands of miles and then dropped down in snows and rains on mountain tops to form rivers throughout the year which in their descent to the valleys in their return to the ocean, creates three hundred million electric horse power within 200 miles of this city when checked and harnessed to turbine and dynamo. English engineers have carried the mighty power of the falls of the Zambesi river in central Africa by copper wire 700 miles to work the gold mines in the Transvaal, and produce millions of dollars of gold from rock that would otherwise never be lifted from its place in the deep mines. And what has been done to mine gold with electricity in Africa, can be done with the same sort of power to run all manner of manufactories, to plow the fields, thrash the grain, grind the wheat, haul the railroad trains, cook the dinners, turn night into day, and winter into summer heat in every dwelling house. And thus it will be seen that human life, and all life, animal and vegetable, is but a mere incident in the vast operation of the physical laws of our solar system; the laws which clothe the earth with forests, that bring forth fruit, food and flowers in their season, and keep up the endless cycle of reproduction, age after age.

The grandeur of this proposition is beyond description. Portland, Oregon, can command a greater electric power than all the cities in the United States east of the Missouri river. It needs only common honesty, and a descent honest state and city government, to give this city a greater power to build up and sup- port a large population than is possessed by any other city on the continent. The uses of electricity are yet in their infancy, and what they may be safely developed into cannot even be imagined. It is light, heat, wealth, and comfort already. And we can imagine, that long ages after the cities of the east have exhausted the coal mines of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Illinois and have been compelled to mine under the vast ice covered areas of the Arctic to get coal to prevent annihilation of their millions of people, Portland, Oregon, will be enjoying every comfort and pleasure, both summer and winter, produced by the inexhaustible electric power of the grand mountains within sight of every home.

i