oak, on their long grassy slopes. It is a sort of country where a man may seem to have a little world to himself; owning mountains, hills, plains, and water-courses, or at least springs of water, and neither overlooked by nor at any great distance from a neighbor.
Douglas County, extending from the Cascade Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, with a seaport of its own, is in area more like a State than a simple division of one. Its climate differs from that of the Wallamet as much as, by reason of its more southern latitude, greater elevation, and mingling of sea-breeze with mountain air, it might be expected to. The result is salubrity and productiveness. Its prairies are adapted to wheat and all cereals; its creek-bottoms to Indian corn, melons, and vegetables : its foot-hills to fruit-raising; and its uplands to grazing.
The same general variety of timber grows here as in the Wallamet Yalley, and a few kinds in addition. The evergreen myrtle is a fine cabinet wood not found in Northern Oregon ; the wild plum and wild grape also grow here; and the splendid Rhododendron maximum is a tall shrub, bearing a wealth of deep rose- colored clusters of great beauty. The botany of the country is very rich. Game abounds in the mountains, fish in the streams. I saw, in October, apple- and pear-trees with a new set of blossoms, some of the fruit having grown as large as a gooseberry.
In considering Douglas County, it must be taken into account that the valleys are separated from the most western portion by the Coast Range, and that the mountains extend within a distance of forty or fifty miles of the sea. The passage of the river through the mountains is a turbulent one, and the scenery highly romantic and alpine in its character; therefore the previous remarks on agricultural possibilities do not apply equally to this portion of the county. But taken altogether its resources are numerous, including fruit-raising, dairying, agriculture, stock-raising, wool-growing, lumbering, gold-mining, coal, oil, limestone, marble, sandstone, salt-springs, sulphur- and soda- springs, salmon- and oyster-fishing, and the last discovery is natural-gas. In 1880 Douglas County shipped, it is said, one million pounds of wool, and sold twenty-seven thousand sheep to Nevada farmers. The population claimed is between thirteen thousand and fourteen thousand.
