Attention was first drawn to the fertility of East Oregon by the population that rushed to the mines in 1861 and the three years immediately following. It became necessary to provide for the consumption of a large class of persons who dealt only in gold. The high prices they paid, and were willing to pay, for the necessary articles of subsistence, stimulated others to attempt the raising of grain and vegetables. The success which attended their efforts soon led to the taking up and cultivating of all the valley lands in the neighborhood of mines, and finally to experiments with grain-crops on the uplands, where also the farmers met with unexpected success. The nature of the soils on the south side of the Columbia is light, ashen, and often strongly alkaline on the plains, sandy and clay-loam at the base of the mountains, and richly alluvial in the bottoms, where it is often, too, mixed with alkali. It is discovered that on the highest uplands and tops of ridges there is a mixture of clay with loam, which accounts for the manner in which wheat crops endure the natural dryness of the climate in the growing season.
It would be difficult to generalize about East Oregon. The tourist who enters the State by the usually travelled routes would almost certainly receive a bad impression, because the longer railroad lines, in order to shorten their routes, avoid the better sections of the country and run through the worse ones. It is only by taking the branch lines, constructed later, that the traveller learns to reverse his first judgment in regard to this portion of the State. It might be added, it is only by actual experiment that an Eastern farmer acquires confidence in the possibilities of a country so different in appearance from any with which he is acquainted.
All along the Columbia, from The Dalles to the boundary between Oregon and Washington, there is a strip of sandy land, from five to ten miles in width, which is not cultivable,—at least, not without an abundance of water,—and which is a torment to the traveller and a serious trial to the railroad company, whose track it covers with drifts in many places.
For convenience the country may be said to be divided into sandy land, agricultural land, and mountain land, and still there remains the necessity of more special description, and to include desert land. The mountainous portions furnish timber—pine,
