over Lafayette, one hundred and seventy feet. A narrow strait, over the present valley of the Tualatin River, ten or twelve miles in length, opened westward upon a broad, beautiful bay, extending over the present sites of Hillsboro’ and Forest Grove, to Gale’s Peak, among the foot-hills of the Coast Range. The subsoil of the fine farms of that rich agricultural region is itself the muddy sediment of that bay. Farther south, over the central portion of the present valley, and lying obliquely across the widest part of that Wallamet Sound, there arose above those waters an elevated island. It extended from a point south of Lafayette to one near Salem, and must have formed a fine central object in the scene. Three or four volcanic islands extended, in an irregular semicircle, where Linn County now is; and the islands of those waters are the Buttes of to-day—Knox’s, Peterson’s, and Ward’s. One standing on the summit of either of these Buttes, with the suggestions of these pages before him, could so easily and vividly imagine those waters recalled, as to almost persuade himself he heard the murmuring of their ripples at his feet—so sea-like, the extended plain around him—so shorelike, that line of hills, from Mary’s Peak, on the west, to Spencer’s Butte, on the south, and only lost, on the east, among the intricate windings of extended slopes among the foot-hills of the Cascades. How natural would seem to him this restoration of one of geology’s yesterdays!
“The shores of that fine old Wallamet Sound teemed with the life of the period. It is marvellous that so few excavations in the Wallamet Valley have failed to uncover some of these relics of the past. Bones, teeth, and tusks, proving a wide range of animal life, are often found in ditches, mill-races, crumbling cliffs, and other exposures of the sediments of those waters, and often within a few feet of the surface. Did man, too, live there then ? The world feels an increasing interest in facts that tend to solve the doubts that cluster around this natural inquiry. A few more mill-races dug, a few more excavations of winter floods, more careful search where mountain streams wash their trophies to their burial under still waters, and this question may be set at rest, as regards that Wallamet Sound. Oregon does not answer it yet.”
Washington, being formed by the same forces and at the same
