“I don’t know about that, captain; but he’s been taking all sorts of things ‘straight’ over the bar for about twenty years, to my knowledge, and I should think he might manage the brig.”

The voyage from San Francisco is almost all the way in sight of land; and as you skirt the mountainous coast of Oregon you see long stretches of forest, miles of tall firs killed by forest fires, and rearing their bare heads toward the sky like a vast assemblage of bean-poles—­a barren view which you owe to the noble red man, who, it is said, sets fire to these great woods in order to produce for himself a good crop of blueberries.

When, some years ago, Walk-in-the-Water, or Red Cloud, or some other Colorado chief, asserted in Washington the right of the Indian to hunt buffalo, on the familiar ground that he must live, a journalist given to figures demolished the Indian position by demonstrating that a race which insisted on living on buffalo meat required about sixteen thousand acres of land per head for its subsistence, which is more than even we can spare.  One wonders, remembering these figures, how many millions of feet of first-class lumber are sacrificed to provide an Indian rancheria in Oregon with huckleberries.

On the second morning of your voyage you enter the Columbia River, and stop, on the right bank, near the mouth, at a place famous in history and romance, and fearfully disappointing to the actual view—­Astoria.  When you have seen it, you will wish you had passed it by unseen.  I do not know precisely how it ought to have looked to have pleased my fancy, and realized the dreams of my boyhood, when I read Bonneville’s “Journal” and Irving’s “Astoria,” and imagined Astoria to be the home of romance and of picturesque trappers.  Any thing less romantic than Astoria is to-day you can scarcely imagine; and what is worse yet, your first view shows you that the narrow, broken, irreclaimably rough strip of land never had space for any thing picturesque or romantic.

Astoria, in truth, consists of a very narrow strip of hill-side, backed by a hill so steep that they can shoot timber down it, and inclosed on every side by dense forests, high, steep hills, and mud flats.  It looks like the rudest Western clearing you ever saw.  Its brief streets are paved with wood; its inhabitants wear their trowsers in their boots; if you step off the pavement you go deep into the mud; and ten minutes’ walk brings you to the “forest primeval,” which, picturesque as it may be in poetry, I confess to be dreary and monotonous in the extreme in reality.

There are but few remains of the old trapper station—­one somewhat large house is the chief relic; but there is a saw-mill, which seems to make, with all its buzz and fuzz, scarcely an appreciable impression upon the belt of timber which so shuts in Astoria that I thought I had scarcely room in it to draw a full breath; and over to the left they pointed out to me the residence of a gentleman—­a general, I think he was—­who came hither twenty-six years ago in some official position, and had after a quarter of a century gained what looked to me from the steamer’s deck like a precarious ten-acre lot from the “forest primeval,” about enough room to bury himself and family in, with a probability that the firs would crowd them into the Columbia River if the saw-mill should break down.