She drank in the beauty avidly, turning from the rivers below to the mountains and back again. The grandeur of the two snow-covered peaks against the ragged sky line was bewildering—Mount St. Helen’s, smooth and unbroken in its symmetry, and to the east majestic Mount Hood, its snowy sides mottled with dark rocks all tinged rosy pink in the glow of the late afternoon sun.
With straining eyes she looked southward. Nothing was to be seen there but undulating waves of fir timber. Climbing to a sharp rise above, the panorama of the southern part of the country spread out beneath her gaze. In the distance the mighty falls of the Willamette dropped to the lower river, with Oregon City on the flat below. Silent with awe, Martha watched the spray of rainbow mist hovering above the cataract. Willamette Falls justified all the stories she had heard of its grandeur.
Oregon City’s little group of houses held her, but as her gaze wandered up the hill, she noted a well-developed farm standing out, a clear-cut jewel, against the background of timber. The marvels of snowy peaks, cataract, and rivers had been uplifting, but this farm brought her swiftly back to earth with its silent promise of plenty so easily wrested from virgin soil. This was a farm beyond the wildest dreams of what awaited her in the Oregon country. Measuring with an eye unaccustomed to mountain surfaces, she judged it to be the full six hundred and forty acres—a square mile—that had been promised by the Linn bill, then before Congress, to settlers in the Oregon country.
