Trail-Making in the Oregon Mountains [pp. 201-213]

THE
O-E- RLAND M oN -
DEVOTED TO
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE COUNTRY.
VOL. 4.-MARCH, I870.-NO. 3.
TRAIL-MAKING IN THE OREGON MOUNTAINS.
W NIE left Oregon City, in July, for
a contemplated long term of
mountaineering.
If that preluding paragraph needs explanation, here is one, at the reader's
service. Our party of six were all "Old
Oregonians " -a title synonymous with
"Pioneer" or "Forty-niner" in California-and meaning that what we did not
know about crossing the Plains, mountaineering, camping out, and "roughing
it" in general, was not worth mentioning. Some of us had come to the Oregon Territory as mature men, others as
beardless boys; but, one and all, we
were trained in the rude craft of woodsmen, hunters, path-finders -could drive
an ox-team, or pack a mule-train, or keep
the trail afoot like born aborigines.
It is but natural to suppose, that, having gained all this experience under the
teachings of stern necessity, we ought
to have been content to forswear further
hardships of this sort, and remain quietly upon our farms in the beautiful valley of the Wallamet. But the love of
adventure is a cultivable quality, and
"(grows by what it feeds on." Not to
deceive the reader by this aphorism, let
it be here distinctly understood that love
of adventure was not the impulse which
set in motion the expedition of which
we are now writing, but a still stronger
love: the longing for the golden root of
all evil, and the desire to sit under the
branches of the tree it brings forth, as
under our "own.vine and fig-tree."
There had long been popular, in Oregon, a story of gold-discovery, made
by the immigration of I845, somewhere
about the head-waters of Crooked River,
an eastern tributary of the Des Chutes.
Legends of a yellow metal so malleable
that nuggets of it had been hammered
out upon the tires of their wagon-wheels
by the immigrants, had feen revived
from year to year ever since the discovery of gold in California; and various
efforts had been made by chimney-corner explorers to determine the exact locality of the "diggings," with no better
results than the final establishment of
an opinion that they really existed somewhere in eastern Oregon, upon the bor
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by JoHN H. CARMANY, in the Clerk's Office of
the District Court of the District of California.
VOL. IV - 14.
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