284 Fred Wilbuk Powell
are finely wooded and timbered, broken into an agreeable variety of hill and dale, and covered with an excellent soiL The pine, oak and other timber is very abundant and very heavy, not only along the main stream of these rivers, but among all the highlands where they and their tributaries rise.
The Wallamette, an important branch of the Columbia river, has its headwaters near the sources of the Umpqua, receives numerous tributary streams from the Presidents' range, to which its course runs nearly parallel, and pours its floods into the Columbia, about eighty miles from the ocean. On its upper course it is said to be broken into several beautiful cat- aracts. For the last hundred miles above its junction it tra- verses a comparatively level and open coimtry; and, with the exception of one short portage, is navigable for this whole distance by boats drawing three or four feet of water. It penetrates the ridge of hills bordering the southern shore of the Columbia, and at that place falls over three several terraces of basaltic rock, making in all a descent of twenty- five feet. These falls are twenty miles irom the Columbia. Below this point its banks are low, are subject to inundation in the season of the "freshets" or vernal floods. It has two mouths, formed by the position of a gfroup of three islands whose longitudinal extent is sixteen miles, and which, though lying chiefly in the Columbia, project into the current of the Wallamette, and divide its waters in the manner described. This river has been sometimes misnamed the "Multnomah," with reference to a tribe of Indians, now extinct, who formerly occupied the land lying around its northern entrance into* the Columbia.
In beauty of scenery, fertility of soil, and other natural advantages, no portion of our country surpasses that which is found upon the Wallamette. The whole valley of this river abounds in white oak and other valuable timber. Fringes of trees grow along the margin of the stream, and back of these are rich bottom lands or prairie ground of inexhaustible fer-
