lowlands, here and there dotted by buttes, and he has the Willamette Valley, said by Saxe of Vermont to be the best poor man's country on the globe. This picture does not represent all its advantages by any means.
Probably no farming country known has water power so abundant and diffused as here. Niagara is unrivaled for power, but the principal question there is one of distribution. Here the problem of distribution is reduced to small proportions, for no village or city is far away from water power.
The Cascade Mountains, through their whole extent, are resonant with the clamorings of unused force, and likely, in their dark fir forests will first be realized Edison's dreams of the application of electric power,—trees felled, cut into saw logs and conveyed to the mill, with little of man's help except intelligent superintendence.
To be sure the first settlers of Oregon had no such anticipations as these, but they were not slow to perceive the advantages everywhere around them; sawmills were erected in advance of the great bulk of the immigration, so that immigrants were not required to go through the experience of the first settlers of Ohio and Indiana, housing one or two generations in log cabins.
No description of soil or surface or scenery can give an adequate presentation of this country, as upon the climate depends nearly everything which makes it, pre-eminently, a never failing supplier of man's wants. In this latitude, countries east of the Rocky Mountains have long cold winters and short hot summers, while west of the Cascades no such extremes are ever known.
The Kuro-shiwo of Japan, a broad, deep, and warm current of ocean water flows along our western shore, tempering the mountain air and covering the valleys with perpetual verdure. At this writing, the twenty-fifth of January, the fields have been once whitened with
