mouth of Salmon River, in Polk County, was a favorite resort
for the people of the central portion of the valley. To come
here in July, camp out two or three weeks, fish, ride, hunt, and
eat “ rock-oysters” and blackberries, was thought to be a sanitary as well as a recreative measure. The “rock-oyster,” so
called because it is embedded in sandstone rock, has to be
released from captivity by hard blows with a hammer. When
extricated, it is pear-shaped, with the impression of a scalloped
shell on the broad base of the soft shell which encloses it. At
the small end, where the stem of a pear would be, is a foot or
feeler projecting, not only out of the shell, but reaching out
through an air-hole in the stem, and probably used to secure
food. They are never found above tide-water, and are common,
I think, to the California coast as well, as I have seen them of
all sizes at Santa Cruz.
Crossing the plains gave, I fancy, a habit of out-door life to the early Oregonians which their children have inherited. To “go camping” every summer is their delight, and they cling to the primitive custom of camp-meetings,—“basket meetings” they are called. That “ the groves were God’s first temples” seems natural enough in “ the continuous woods where rolls the Oregon.” The devotional spirit comes more easily and quickly, and with more power, in immediate contact with Nature, than when coaxed and stimulated into exercise by the appliances of art. In the age when architecture was really and truly an art, this truth was seized upon ; and those grand cathedrals which still remain the glory ef Europe, in their pointed roofs, fretted arches, and long colonnades, their deep shadows, and windows of colored glass, staining the light they transmitted to the colors of Nature’s choicest hues, were intended to express that solemn and subtile sense of beauty, which, in the presence of great Nature, lifts the heart above and away from mean or trivial considerations.
The people on the east side of the valley who do not go to the sea coast find no lack of delightful summer camps among the foot-hills of the Cascade Mountains. The eastern half of Marion County is a natural park, where green hills overtopped by snow-peaks, solemn forest depths, mountain gorges, precipitous cliffs, lakes, and cataracts, alternating with s
