its success in a financial point of view. Other salt-works, on a small scale, have been operated in Polk and Douglas counties. The salt made in Oregon is of a remarkable purity; so much so that a specimen of it was taken to the Paris Exposition by Prof. Wm. P. Blake, of the California Commission. The chemists of San Francisco pronounce it pure enough for the uses of the laboratory without being clarified, which no other salt in the market is.
Notwithstanding the amount and excellence of the iron ores of Oregon, they have never yet been made so profitable as they should be. The only works for the manufacture of iron are those located at Oswego, on the Wallamet River, six miles above Portland. The quality of the iron there made is said to be equal to the best Swedish; but the cost of its manufacture, arising from the high price of labor, and also somewhat from some ineligibility in the situation of the works, has prevented their entire success. A better situation for iron-works is on a bay of the Columbia, extending back of the town of St. Helen, in Columbia County, where extensive beds of ore exist in connection with coal, wood, fine water-power, and navigable water.
This is a brief account of the present mineral productions of Western Oregon, sometime, no doubt, to become famous for its manufactures, supplied by its home resources.
The eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains do not, like the western, furnish gold-fields. Whatever treasure the laboratories of the far-distant past deposited in their depths, volcanic overflow subsequently concealed from human research, burying it under many successive layers of eternal basalt. The gold-field of
