side by dense forests, high, steep hills, and mud flats. It looks like
the rudest Western clearing you ever saw. Its brief streets are paved with
wood; its inhabitants wear their trowsers in their boots; if you step off
the pavement you go deep into the mud; and ten minutes' walk brings you
to the "forest primeval," which, picturesque as it may be in poetry, I
confess to be dreary and monotonous in the extreme in reality.

There are but few remains of the old trapper station--one somewhat large
house is the chief relic; but there is a saw-mill, which seems to make,
with all its buzz and fuzz, scarcely an appreciable impression upon the
belt of timber which so shuts in Astoria that I thought I had scarcely
room in it to draw a full breath; and over to the left they pointed out
to me the residence of a gentleman--a general, I think he was--who came
hither twenty-six years ago in some official position, and had after a
quarter of a century gained what looked to me from the steamer's deck like
a precarious ten-acre lot from the "forest primeval," about enough room to
bury himself and family in, with a probability that the firs would crowd
them into the Columbia River if the saw-mill should break down.

On the voyage up I said to an Oregonian, "You have a good timber country,
I hear?" and his reply seemed to me at the time extravagant. "Timber?" he
said; "timber--till you can't sleep." When I had spent a day and a half at
anchor abreast of Astoria, the words appeared less exaggerated. Wherever
you look you see only timber; tall firs, straight as an arrow, big as the
California redwoods, and dense as a Southern canebrake. On your right is
Oregon--its hill-sides a forest so dense that jungle would be as fit
a word for it as timber; on the left is Washington Territory, and its
hill-sides are as densely covered as those of the nearer shore. This
interminable, apparently impenetrable, thicket of firs exercised upon my
mind, I confess, a gloomy, depressing influence. The fresh lovely green