CHAPTER VIII.
OTHER TOWNS OF THE WALLAMET VALLEY.
Proceeding up the Wallamet, we come in about six miles to Oswego, the seat of the Oregon Iron- and Steel-Works, a busy little place on the west bank. Nearly opposite is Milwaukee, famous for having been the place where the first nursery of the Pacific coast was planted, on the grounds of Meek and Lluelling. The young trees were brought across the continent in a wagon-box filled with earth. The earliest export of this fruit was made in 1853 to San Francisco, where two hundred pounds brought five hundred dollars. The same firm sold the following year forty bushels of apples for sixty-two dollars and fifty cents per bushel. “The land of red apples” and “the land of cider” are still synonymes for the Wallamet Valley among Californians. Milwaukee was also noted for the flour produced there, but as a town it has no development.
About three miles above Milwaukee, on the east side, there comes in the Clackamas river, the lowest tributary of the Wallamet, and nearly opposite the Tualatin. There is a fish hatchery on the Clackamas where between five and six million eggs were taken in 1890, most of which will be fish. Above here another three miles are the Falls of the Wallamet, and Oregon City, built upon a bed of solid basalt, a ledge of which extends quite across the river, cropping out on the other side. This ledge is about twenty feet higher than the surface of the river below the fall, and is broken into a ragged crescent with rather a sharp angle in the middle, where the water deflects towards the western shore. In low or ordinary stage of water the stream divides into several parts, seeking the deepest channels in the rocks, and forming a number of different cataracts; yet the central one, at the angle spoken of, is always the principal one. Above the falls the river parts, flowing around an island of rock, on which once stood a mill belonging to the Methodist Mission, but which was carried away in the great flood of 1862, along with numerous other buildings from the mainland.
