r.
There is a range of hills called the Simcoe Mountains, which you cross, and find very pleasant, because wooded, after the dun and monotonous grass and sage-brush lands. The road takes us across the reservation, and shows us a good many fat cattle and lusty aborigines, but little improvement.
Goldendale is an agricultural town in a level valley among hills. It is a pretty and prosperous place, and looks forward to having railroad connection with Portland when the Hunt System is completed to that city. It is making proposals to secure the Soldiers' Home upon a tract of land near the town, and the place seems well adapted to the purpose, the plan being to erect cottages with gardens attached instead of one grand institution.
Trout Lake, and the ice caves mentioned in another chapter, are in Klickitat Count}^, to both of which a large number of visitors repair in summer. Mount Adams is only about thirtysix miles northwest of Goldendale, and is the point of sight of the people here, as Hood is of* Portland and The Dalles.
A new town, called North Dalles, has sprung up opposite the Oregon town, in Klickitat County, Washington. It is proposed to erect manufactories here, and it is said some are already secured. Manufactures on the Columbia, with free navigation of the great river, are what are required to give stability to that development which capital has inaugurated in other ways.
" Keep your eye on Pasco!" is the injunction which meets you in newspaper and hand-bill advertisements, making you curious to behold it, as if it were the What Is It. When you arrive, you look about you for something on which to keep your eye, which being blown full of sand refuses to risk more than the briefest glimpses thenceforward. There is a hotel, of brick, and some houses scattered about, built, I am told, by the Pasco Land Company, which has also in contemplation a large irrigating canal with which to make cultivable the wastes of sand and sage-brush owned by it. A Chinamen, it is said, has a small patch of ground behind his cabin which he sprinkles with a watering-pot, thereby being enabled to grow flowers and vegetables in luxuriant beauty and proportions. From this it is inferred that the irrigation of these wastes will redeem them
