radiant, on the Columbia and Lower Wallamet; but nowhere had I found them so brilliant as at the head of the Wallamet Valley. And, as we afterwards ascertained, this is nearly the southern limit of the beautiful vine-maple. It was almost in vain that we looked for its scarlet-flaming thickets fifty miles farther south, and at a hundred miles it had disappeared from the landscape altogether.
The Umpqua Valley, which I could imagine in its June freshness, was now sere with the long drought of a rainless summer. The road, however, for some distance, led through the Calapooya Mountains, and the gorge of a creek, where the thick woods, in places, quite excluded the sun,—almost the light of day. Bright as the weather was, and dry as the autumn had been, there was shadow, coolness, and moisture here, among the thick-standing, giant trees, the underwood, and the ferns and mosses. A very pleasant ride on such a morning, but one which might be exceedingly uncomfortable in the rainy season, though never an uninteresting one.
Dry as was the valley beyond, it was still beautiful, one so soon learns to admire the soft coloring of these arid countries,— the pale russet hues of the valleys, the neutral tints in rocks and fences, the quiet dark-green of the forests, and the clear, pale, unclouded blue of the heavens. The expression of these landscapes is that of soft repose. Nature herself seems resting, and it is no reproach to man that he, too, forgets to work, and only dreams. But the men of this period are not dreamers. Even in the sacredest haunts of Nature, they plot business and talk railroad! I certainly thought railroad, as my eyes wandered over this beautiful, but isolated valley. But that was in a time now half forgotten, so rapidly do conditions change in this Northwest empire.
No longer without connection with the outside world, the Umpqua Valley is emerging from its former condition of a grazing and wool-growing region, and commencing to develop its abundant resources. Unlike the Wallamet, it has no great extent of level prairie-land bordering the river from which it takes its name, but is a rolling country, a perfect jumble of small valleys and intervening ridges; the valleys prairies, and the hills wooded with fir on top, but generally bare, or dotted with
