good ones, with pure soft water and generally a plenty of it. I presume there is 20 real good springs on this section, there is one where Lot Whitcomb built his house, about half a mile from here, that furnishes water enough for a large tanery, to grind bark &c. The rock of this country is nearly all basaltic, though on Bear River there is a little stone, and a kind of bastard lime stone on long island in Shoal Water. The Basaltic rock has the appearance of having been burnt, and very easy got, If you will get them from the bluffs where they mostly show themselves. I have thought it would be hard work to get stone enough from any peace of land that I have seen yet, to fence it with, as they do in New England. I know of no stone here that would answer very well for fine work, or that would receive much of a polish even for building purposes.
The buildings in towns are generally frame, built in the eastern style, some sealed up on the inside, some nail sheeting on the inside and then paper it on the cloth, but the houses in the country are many of them made of logs.
There is a conciderable shipping done here. Vessels generally come from San Francisco with goods, and return with lumber or timber. I suppose there is some 2 or 3 dozen vessels load here at this place in a year. Those that come here are of a small class, and generally carry from one hundred and twenty five thousand to two hundred thousand feet. There has 2 or 3 barks come from New York to Portland this season. The Santiam is a good sized stream flows into the Willamette about 20 miles above Salem. About 15 miles from its mouth, it forks, having a north and south branch, the north branch heads nearly under Mount Jefferson, the other a few miles south of it. It is about 120 miles, perhaps not more than 100 miles from here to Olympia. I was told last winter that the people at the Sound were intending to open a road from there through the mountains to the agency, on the Umatilla, and I heard that many of the emegrants were going that way this year.[1] The road has been surveyed, but I know no more than what is stated above
- ↑ This was the Naches Pass over the Cascade Range from Yakima to Puget Sound, opened in 1853. Pierre C. Pambrun and Cornelius Rogers are credited with an earlier exploration of the pass; Scott, Oregon Country, II, 252-53.
