To the Dalles and Celilo, and return to Portland, three days.

To Victoria, Vancouver’s Island, and return to Portland, including the tour of Puget Sound, seven days.

To San Francisco, overland, by railroad to Roseburg, thence by stage to Redding, and rail to San Francisco, seventy-nine hours.

[Illustration:  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON TERRITORY.]

Thus you may leave San Francisco by steamer for Portland, see the Dalles, the Cascades, Puget Sound, Victoria, the Willamette Valley, and the magnificent mountain scenery of Southern Oregon and Northern California, and be back in San Francisco in less than three weeks, making abundant allowance for possible though not probable detentions on the road.  The time absolutely needed for the tour is but seventeen days.

Of course he who “takes a run over to California” from, the East, predetermined to be back in his office or shop within five or six weeks from the day he left home, can not see the Columbia River and Puget Sound.  But travelers are beginning to discover that it is worth while to spend some months on the Pacific coast; some day, I do not doubt, it will be fashionable to go across the continent; and those whose circumstances give them leisure should not leave the Pacific without seeing Oregon and Washington Territory.  In the few pages which follow, my aim is to smooth the way for others by a very simple account of what I myself saw and enjoyed.

[Illustration:  VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA.]

And first as to the Cascades and the Dalles of the Columbia.  You leave Portland for Dalles City in a steamboat at five o’clock in the morning.  The better way is to sleep on board this steamer, and thus avoid an uncomfortably early awakening.  Then when you do rise, at six or half past, you will find yourself on the Columbia, and steaming directly at Mount Hood, whose splendid snow-covered peak seems to bar your way but a short distance ahead.  It lies, in fact, a hundred miles off; and when you have sailed some hours toward it the river makes a turn, which leaves the snowy peak at one side, and presently hides it behind the steep bank.

The little steamer, very clean and comfortable, affords you an excellent breakfast, and some amusement in the odd way in which she is managed.  Most of the river steamers here have their propelling wheel at the stern; they have very powerful engines, which drive them ahead with surprising speed.  I have gone sixteen miles an hour in one, with the current; and when they make a landing the pilot usually runs the boat’s head slantingly against the shore, and passengers and freight are taken in or landed over the bow.  At the wood-pile on the shore you may generally see one of the people called “Pikes,” whom you will recognize by a very broad-brimmed hat, a frequent squirting of tobacco-juice, and the possession of two or three hounds, whom they call hereabouts “hound-dogs,” as we say “bull-dog.”  And this reminds me that in Oregon the country people usually ask you if you will eat an “egg-omelet;” and they speak of pork—­a favorite food of the Pike—­as “hog-meat.”