The Siuslaw (pronounced Si-wse-law) River, which separates Douglas from Lane County, has an entrance which might be improved, with a good harbor inside. The present channel is tortuous and shifting, with six feet at low water, but it is possible to carry a ten-foot depth nearly to the head of tide, a distance of twenty miles, and it will probably be so improved in the near future. There are large bodies of excellent timber on this bay which would then be available. A project is already on foot to build a railroad to the Wallamet Yalley whenever the government makes desired improvement of the bar and channel. There is reported a fine country on the upper Siuslaw.
The river scenery from Gardiner to Scottsburg strongly resembles that of the Columbia, though on a much smaller scale. The river is in places very shallow, being almost quite interrupted by bars of rock, which engineering is busy removing.
Returning to Drain’s we find just beyond here Mount Yoncalla (Eagle-bird, in the Indian tongue), a point of interest. It was for nearly forty years the home of the grandest of those “ men of destiny,” as he himself named them, who, in 1843, opened a road for wagons from the Missouri to the Wallamet Yalley,— Jesse Applegate, “ the sage of Yoncalla.” The mansion where he dispensed wisdom and a free hospitality is given up to strangers, and the places that knew him shall know him no more.
Douglas County has two Methodist academies, one at Oakland, on a branch of the Umpqua about fifteen miles south of Yoncalla, and another at Wilbur, ten miles farther south. Both are charming locations. Oakland is Arcadian in beauty, its groves and natural park-like scenery being ideally “ academic.”
The North Fork of the Umpqua is to be dammed at Winchester, a short distance from Oakland, and a large woollen-mill to be erected there, which it is expected will be followed by other manufactories.
Roseburg, originally Deer Creek, the present county-seat of Douglas, and named after its founder, Aaron Rose, has a population of two thousand five hundred. It is the gem of the Umpqua Yalley, resting upon the river Umpqua, where it is a fine large stream bounded by beautiful park-like oak openings. Nothing could be finer than the sweep of the river as i
