Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/407

From Youth to Age As An American. 379 oxide of maguetic iron, sliOAving gold-bearing quartz on thou- sands of hill-tops; the water clear and apparently pure, yet carrying in solution a mineral which loads pine-twigs so that the}^ sink in the immense crystal springs that rise within five to eight miles east of the summit of the Cascades — full-grown mill-streams, clear as crystal and as cold as ice In addition to the peculiarity of leaves, twigs and branches sinking in the waters of these large springs, so numerous at the east base of the Cascades, and. which form the Matoles, which enters the Deschutes at the Agency, forty-five miles north, is the clearness and coldness of the water and its un- satisfactory character as drink— you wish to drink again at such short intervals. I have met more than one educated man who held that it is due to over-filtration —seeping so far through basaltic rock that the life principle is filtered out of it. The question arises : may it not be filtering through the stratum of volcanic ash which Professor Condon so finely de- scribes in his geological history, "The Two Islands," the evidences of which remain throughout the mountain, valleys and stream-beds of the plains? From where I stand in fancy at this writing, sixteen miles northwest reaches the hot-and-cold springs of the Santiam; twenty-six miles south reaches Crater Springs, on the head of the Matoles branch of the Deschutes. This crater is a fine, hollow cone, thirty feet high, at the bottom of which a current of ice-cold water is gurgling its way toward the Des- chutes, the Columbia, and the Pacific Ocean. I was the old man of the party, and not sure the boys were not joking about the good water and ice they had found at the bottom of the gigantic bowl. One gave me his cup and an ax to reach in and chip off the ice. I could get a good drink by lying down, but the ice was further in, and over the water. I secured both, but saw also, when I rose to my feet, that I was sur- rounded by formation very similar to that around Soda and Steamboat Springs on Bear River, Utah, 700 miles eastward, and in woodland scenery not unlike that in sight from Pacific Springs, where we camped in sight of snow on the Wind River