In the pleasant weather of summer, after the rainy season is past and only occasional refreshing showers fall, washing the sky and bringing out the fragrance of the flowers and the evergreens, then one may enjoy a fine, free walk all the way across the State from the sea to the eastern boundary on the Snake River.  Many a beautiful stream we should cross in such a walk, singing through forest and meadow and deep rocky gorge, and many a broad prairie and plain, mountain and valley, wild garden and desert, presenting landscape beauty on a grand scale and in a thousand forms, and new lessons without number, delightful to learn.  Oregon has three mountain ranges which run nearly parallel with the coast, the most influential of which, in every way, is the Cascade Range.  It is about six thousand to seven thousand feet in average height, and divides the State into two main sections called Eastern and Western Oregon, corresponding with the main divisions of Washington; while these are again divided, but less perfectly, by the Blue Mountains and the Coast Range.  The eastern section is about two hundred and thirty miles wide, and is made up in great part of the treeless plains of the Columbia, which are green and flowery in spring, but gray, dusty, hot, and forbidding in summer.  Considerable areas, however, on these plains, as well as some of the valleys countersunk below the general surface along the banks of the streams, have proved fertile and produce large crops of wheat, barley, hay, and other products.

In general views the western section seems to be covered with one vast, evenly planted forest, with the exception of the few snow-clad peaks of the Cascade Range, these peaks being the only points in the landscape that rise above the timberline.  Nevertheless, embosomed in this forest and lying in the great trough between the Cascades and coast mountains, there are some of the best bread-bearing valleys to be found in the world.  The largest of these are the Willamette, Umpqua, and Rogue River Valleys.  Inasmuch as a considerable portion of these main valleys was treeless, or nearly so, as well as surpassingly fertile, they were the first to attract settlers; and the Willamette, being at once the largest and nearest to tide water, was settled first of all, and now contains the greater portion of the population and wealth of the State.

The climate of this section, like the corresponding portion of Washington, is rather damp and sloppy throughout the winter months, but the summers are bright, ripening the wheat and allowing it to be garnered in good condition.  Taken as a whole, the weather is bland and kindly, and like the forest trees the crops and cattle grow plump and sound in it.  So also do the people; children ripen well and grow up with limbs of good size and fiber and, unless overworked in the woods, live to a good old age, hale and hearty.