Page:The History of Oregon Bancroft 1888.djvu/670

 Owyhee mining country at no great expense, and pass ing through a region rich in grass, timber, minerals, and agricultural lands. The grant amounted to 1,920 acres for each mile of road built, less the lands already settled on. The distance was about 420 miles. Of this enormous grant, exceeding all granted to the state on its admission to the union by 150,000 acres, excepting the swamp-lands, whose extent was un known, about one half, it was expected, would be available. At the minimum price of $1.25 an acre, the one half would amount to $1,008,000. Along the first twenty miles of the road, from Eugene City to the Cascade Mountains, the best lands were taken up; upon representing which to congress, other lands were granted in lieu of those already claimed, to be selected from the public lands. The law allowed a primary sale of thirty sections, or 19,200 acres, with which to begin the survey, which land was offered for sale in March 1865. With its own and the capital accruing from sales of land and stock, the company--consisting at first of seventeen incorporators --pushed the road to the summit of the Cascade Mountains in the autumn of 1867. This was the most difficult and ex pensive portion of the work, and though by no means what a military road should be, was accepted by the governor. It was never much used, and was almost entirely superseded in 1868 by a wagon-road from Ashland to the Klamath Basin, by the old Scott and Applegate pass of the Cascades, discovered in 1846.

A few months after the act authorizing a road through their country, Huntington, superintendent of Indian affairs, succeeded in treating with the Klamath and Modoc tribes, and a portion of the Shoshones, by