and fifty cents to twenty dollars per acre, which is yet to be settled. This tells the story of the resources of this part of Oregon as far as developed. No wheat or cereals,—it would cost too much to ship them to the sea-board; no minerals except gold quartz,—they are not mined or manufactured for a similar reason. Nothing against the soil or climate, but everything against the transportation, or the lack of it. It is time that Southern Oregon sought shorter and cheaper routes to markets.
I was shown a potato in Rogue River Yalley which weighed seven pounds! It was one of a lot of twenty whose aggregate weight was one hundred and one pounds, and the crop of which they were a part matured without either rain or irrigation, on land that had been planted to potatoes for twenty-eight consecutive years. The owner expected forty thousand pounds from one acre. This was near Grant’s Pass. Another farmer near Ashland reported thirty thousand pounds of potatoes to the acre. None of my readers are likely to believe this, but it is true.
The Oregon and California, or, as it is now called, the Southern Pacific Railroad, from Glendale to Grant’s Pass runs just inside the eastern boundary-line of Josephine County, a large portion of which is still unsurveyed. It is here that it strikes Rogue or Rascal River, so named by the fur-hunters of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who had, as well as later travellers, many a skirmish to effect a crossing, the Indians lying in wait for them at the ford. The name, applied to the natives and the stream, became attached to the valley.
Rogue River rises in the Cascade Mountains and courses southwest and west to Grant’s Pass, where it runs northwest, and again southwest, receiving the Illinois River, which drains Josephine County, about twenty miles from the sea. Rogue River Yalley, embracing all the country drained by that river and its numerous tributaries, is an aggregation of smaller valleys, divided by rolling hills, the whole encircled by elevated mountain ranges. The river is not navigable for any great distance from the sea, but abounds in rapids and falls, furnishing abundant power for manufacturing purposes. It is a stream of unsurpassed beauty, with water as blue as the sky, and banks overhung in some places with shaggy cliffs, and in others with thickets of wild grape-vines and blossoming shrubs.
