woods, and minerals, Polk County has few towns of any size. Dallas is the county-seat, with about seven hundred inhabitants. It is situated on the Rickreal (corruption of La Creole) River, nearly opposite Salem, in a charming region.
Concerning names and their origin, there are many absurd conjectures made, quite as ludicrous as the frequent misnomers. I read the other day that Joaquin Miller gave the origin of the name of the Walla Walla tribe to be in the French ejaculation Voilà, voilà! Mr. Miller cannot have read Lewis and Clarke with much attention not to know that the Walla Walla tribe existed before any French voyageur dipped paddle in the Columbia. Lewis and Clarke spell the word Wallawollah.
The most delightful instance that I remember to have seen of the corruption of names was given by a newspaper correspondent from Colorado. The Spanish name of a river in the southern part of that State is El Rio de los Animos,—River of Souls. This correspondent, not being acquainted with Spanish particles, says of Lost Souls,—and further, that the French fur-traders, learning its meaning, called it Purgatoire, or Purgatory River, which the "bull-whacker of the overland trail," in his efforts to master the French, pronounced Picket-wire!
Lying west of Yamhill and Polk is Tillamook County, of which it is said “ there is no district of the Northwest so full of possibilities. A magnificent soil, a heavenly climate, and scenery that would delight the hearts of poets and painters are here as they are nowhere else; but its streams and rivers, its roads and its dales, its valleys, glens, and ravines are given over to the empire of loneliness.”
I am not authority for this glowing statement, which may be taken cum salis, but am ready to believe from collateral evidence that it is the isolation, rather than the presumed ruggedness, of this coast county which has heretofore ranked it lower than its relatives on the hither side of the mountains. It has a sea-coast of sixty miles in extent, and six rivers discharging into the sea, one of which, Tillamook, has a good harbor at its entrance. This bay was named by Lewis and Clarke, who made an excursion to it in the spring of 1806. About one-fourth of this county is occupied as an Indian reservation.
Like other coast counties, Tillamook has been cut off during
