CHAPTER XI.
A BRIEF SURVEY OF EASTERN OREGON.
Traveling in Eastern Oregon is altogether the same as we have described it in the Walla Walla Valley, except that here there is more of it, and the roads at once better and worse for the same reason: that is, better graded on the hills, and more smotheringly dusty on the levels. Leaving Umatilla, where we arrive by steamer, there is the same sand-waste to toil through, and the same rolling plain of light, ashen soil to overcome, before reaching the settled portion of the valley, that there is between Wallula and Walla Walla. Nor is there any material difference between the general features of the Walla Walla and Umatilla valleys—their respective streams rising in the Blue Mountains, flowing in the same general westerly direction, and falling into the Columbia about twenty-five miles apart. By natural boundary, the Walla Walla Valley belongs to Oregon, lying as it does wholly south of the Snake River, and partly south of the Oregon line. As mentioned elsewhere, it is the lowest point in the Columbia Basin—the Umatilla, the Grand Ronde, and Powder River valleys being each successively more elevated than the other.
The whole extent of country, lying east of the Cascades in Oregon, is 58,000 square miles, and consists of immense plateaux, crossed from the north-east to the south-west by the Blue Mountains, from which
