As I have reflected elsewhere, the railway in Western America is a more familiar and living part of life than in Europe. In the country it is unfenced and open, and runs down the middle of the streets of towns in many cases, and no Act of Parliament demands level-crossing gates, or bridges under streets. Incidentally this useful and familiar friend devours a good many more people annually than do the railways of Britain, and it has been calculated that the victims of railway disasters in the United States, in a single year, exceed the total loss of life in the famous Boer War ! But only those who have sojourned in the West can understand how living a link the railway is with the outside world.

Have you ever dwelt in a little frontier town, kind reader, on the great prairie, where the sun rises and sets upon the petty incidents of life of a cut-off community of the West? If so you will not have resisted it-resisted going to the station at the hour when the single daily train is timed to roll in. There is no platform or station enclosure probably : only the single line of rails and sleepers, a siding, a few shanties, and beyond and around it the broad stretch of desert extending away to the curvature of the earth, with nothing to break the eye except the dust-spirals whirling upwards from earth to sky, eddying away to nothing. But hark, what is that? a faint roar, a faint patch of vapour on the horizon, which some among the inhabitants for all are collected there-say they see and hear; some say they do not, according to their sight or imagination. It is the train; it has emerged from the nothingness of the horizon, and, a living entity, is approaching from the outside world. "Here she comes," says the Anglo-American loafer-if we are in Anglo-America (for this scene may be anywhere in the West). "Aqui viene la maquin," the Spanish-American equally says, and it means the same thing; and presently the train rolls up, the passengers gaze from the windows of the Pullman car, all is bustle for an instant; a sack of mail-ha! letters from home, and newspapers from the world-is thrown out. "All aboard!" or "Vamanos!" (according to the land or language as aforesaid) is shouted by the conductor of this desert convoy, and before we can turn to leave the place the ponderous vehicle is but a speck upon its shining lines

far away, and only the faint "click-clack" of the resetting rails under the hammer of the locomotive wheel is heard, which itself presently dies away.

I must confess that the railways of Western America have afforded me subjects of interest, both as an engineer and an observer. I have made journeys on foot over long stretches of some of these railways, traversing great viaducts where no balustrade intervenes between the rails and the ravine below. Some of these high viaducts as in California or elsewhere, are of great length, spanning valleys and deep ravines thousands of feet wide, and they consist of nothing but the high trestle or bridge girders, with no space for passing by any incautious foot-passenger who might be caught by a train there.

On one occasion I was caught thus. It was a long trestle on a curve, terminating at the end across the valley in a rock cutting, and I entered upon it hoping to hear the sound of a train-should there be one coming-before I had got too far to return, or near enough to the other end to reach it before the locomotive might enter upon the viaduct. But exactly what I feared might happen did befall. I had just reached the middle of the viaduct-it was about a thousand feet long-when I heard an ominous sound near. It must be a train! I laid my ear to the rails, and there was no possibility of mistaking the vibration. To go, or to return, that was the question; for beneath me roared a river a hundred feet below. I did not waste time in cogitating, but began to start to run back. Now running is not easy upon railway "ties" or sleepers, for they are spaced at a distance too short for your stride, and it is easy to catch the foot in the open space between, and trip up, unless going slowly. I had scarcely run a hundred feet when the locomotive emerged with a roar from the cutting and entered upon the viaduct; and I turned knowing that it must overtake me long before I could reach the end. I confess my heart stood in my mouth. The train was a heavy mineral train coming on with frightful velocity, and the driver, even if he had seen me, which possibly he did not, and even if he were willing to stop (which very possibly he was not, for your Western American engine-driver does not hold human life in the same value as

his British confrère) could not have pulled up in the distance. Was I to die thus; to be hurled into the forest below by the cow-catcher of a locomotive on a rickety viaduct? I thought not; and like an inspiration came the idea to let myself over the side of the structure and hang on by my hands. To think was to act; I slid over; the engine reached and passed me, a few feet from my head; the viaduct shook under the heavy train, nearly shaking me off; and then the train passed after what seemed an age. And I pulled myself up and lay down to breathe freely between the rails. Whenever I hear the roar of a locomotive I think of that great viaduct, river, pine forests and the hurtling train.

In the conquest of the desert, good reader, we shall not be free from perils. Yet an immortal chronicler of the desert has said and the heart of the pioneer shall repeat it-that the traveller shall not dash his foot against a stone, and that no plague shall come nigh his dwelling, nor the lion and the adder be a cause of danger to him.

IX

OREGON AND WASHINGTON: THE LANDS OF THE COLUMBIA

RIVER

THERE are certain regions which, by some set of circumstance, seem to remain little known by the outside world. Who except those immediately connected therewith remember where the states of Oregon and Washington are; or what is the occupation of their people? Yet here is a country on the Pacific Coast, with a shore-line five hundred miles in length and embodying vast areas of valuable land bordering upon the tributaries of the largest and most important river throughout the whole of the Americas, North, Central or South, which empties its waters into the Pacific-the Columbia River. Fifty-five years ago a remark was made about this region by the member of the American Congress which, if not complimentary, is historic. He said-and it is the same sort of thing which British statesmen have said about our own colonies in earlier periods, so we will not be pharisaical-that he "would not give a pinch of snuff for the whole territory."

Yet Oregon, in its early history, was a region of much greater political and commercial value either than California or British Columbia. Moreover, the Oregon question severely taxed the resources of diplomacy of British and North American statesmen, and was at that period almost a cause of war, as has been set forth in the chapter of this work devoted to the historical development of the coast. Oregon extends from California northwardly to the Columbia River; Washington from that great fluvial highway stretches northward to Puget Sound and the 49th parallel, which forms its frontier with British Columbia, both states extending from the coast back to their boundary with Idaho.

The main line railway which runs northwardly through the

Great Central Valley of California—which valley I have fully described in the chapter upon the Golden Gate-follows the course of the Sacramento River to the head of that valley and its great terminating landmark, Mount Shasta, amid whose snows the Sacramento is born. Crossing the Siskiyou range the railway enters the state of Oregon and traverses it between the Cascade range and the Coast range to where it reaches the great Columbia River and the important city of Portland.

Portland is looked upon, or, in a certain American aphorism, is expressed as, a species of Western Ultima Thule. "From Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon," the American says when he wishes to embrace his whole continent from east to west, for on the rock-bound coast of Maine there is also a town called Portland, much older, however, than its sister of the Pacific slope.

Oregon differs from California greatly as regards its climate, for it is a region of much heavier rainfall. Whilst California has but one navigable river, Oregon has four, notwithstanding that the first-named state has a coast-line seven hundred miles long and Oregon 350 miles. These rivers are the Columbia, the Willamette, the Umpqua and the Rogue River. All of these rivers empty into the Pacific, and all of them run westwardly and transversely from the mountains to the sea, except the Willamette, which is a longitudinally flowing artery, and an affluent of the Columbia, and coming from the south it empties into the latter great stream near Portland, some distance from the coast.

The climate, even in the north of Oregon, is remarkably mild, as evidenced by the fact that the mouth of the Willamette River-whose latitude is two hundred miles north of that of Boston on the Atlantic-is rarely covered in winter with more than a mere film of ice; whilst in some places the snow does not last three days in succession. This is the effect of the Japan current. Oregon possesses some fine lakes, as the Upper and Lower Klamath, and numerous other large bodies of water halfway across the territory towards the borders of the neighbouring state of Idaho. But perhaps the most unique of mountain lakes of these regions, next to Tahoe in California, is the remarkable Crater Lake, in the heart of