lrillHH'Ulm"Jllt O ISLANDS I ICIKflfV IfBRARY UNIVERSITY OF ^ EARTH SCIENCES LIBRARY THE AUTHOR. THE TWO ISLANDS AND WHAT CAME OF THEM. B Y THOMASiCONDQN, Ph. D. Professor of Geology, University of Oregon. PORTLAND, OREGON. THE J. K. GILL COMPANY. 1902. Copyright 1902, by THOMAS CONDON. All rights reserved. Printed and Bound by The Irwin-Hodson Company, Portland, Oregon. TABLE OF CONTENTS. Page Introduction 5 CHAPTER I. The Stone Quarry 7 CHAPTER II. Sources of Materials 15 CHAPTER III. The Two Islands 25 CHAPTER IV. The Siskiyou Island 36 CHAPTER V. The Willamette Sound 54 CHAPTER VI. The Shoshone Island 73 CHAPTER VII. Introduction to Life of Lakes 99 CHAPTER VIII. Life of Lower Lake Region 114 CHAPTER IX. Life of Upper Lake Region 130 CHAPTER X. Surface Beds ............ 151 CHAPTER XI. The Rocks of the John Day Valley 157 CHAPTER XII. An Indian Legend 177 CHAPTER XIII. The Development Theory ' 183 426 ILLUSTRATIONS. FRONTISPIECE The Author. OpP- Page PLATE I Fragment of Miocene Sea Beach 8 " II Trigonias 16 " III Fragment of Cretaceous Sea Beach .... 20 " IV Ammonites 24 V Aralia Leaf 28 VI Cycad Leaves 36 " VII A Heap of Bones 40 " VIII Oreodon, Type Head 44 " IX Oreodon, Broad Triangular Crown 52 " X Oreodon, Long Nasal Bone 56 " XI Comparison of Camel and A uchenia Bones . 60 XII Oreodon, Size of Fox 68 XIII Rhinoceros Head, Side View 72 XIV Rhinoceros Head, Upper Molars 76 " XV Rhinoceros Lower Jaw 84 " XVI Entelodon Head 92 XVII Bothrolabis Head 100 " XVIII Canis rurestris 108 XIX Canis, a Smaller Type 116 XX Felis 124 " XXI (i) Donkey Bone 132 ( 2-8 ) Hipparian Bones " XXII Anchitherium Jaws and Teeth 140 " XXIII (i) Distal of Radius, Touch et Horse .... 148 (2) Anchitherium Molar Teeth " XXIV Hipparian Foot 156 XXV Hipparian Molar Teeth 164 XXVI (i ) Ulna and Radius of Camel 172 ( 2 ) Same of Dray Horse " XXVII Leg and Foot of Auchenia 180 " XXVIII (1-3) Mylodon Toes 188 ( 2 ) Mastodon Tooth " XXIX Bos Latifrons (Broad-faced Ox) 196 XXX Mammoth Tooth . 204 INTRODUCTION. The want which these pages attempt to supply is a popular rather than a scientific one. For years our General Government has been publishing through railroad surveys and the annual reports of the United States Geo- logical Surveys a large mass and wide range of geological information on the structure and history of our Western coast. But this large body of information is so scattered that few have the time to collect enough of it to form a continuous unity of its history. Besides, there are many things in the geology of Oregon of lively interest to the young and the uninstructed, and run- ning through them all are the threads of a continuous unity that seem capable of a pos- sible narrative form such as might increase the interest of the young. An attempt? to meet this double want, not with a fresh contribution to science, but with 6 Introduction. an attempt at picture-making for the unin- structed, has led to the writing of this story of "The Two Islands." THOMAS CONDON. University of Oregon, Eugene, 1902. CHAPTER I. THE STONE QUARRY. The ancient traveler and historian, Herod- otus, long ago put on record the statement that he had heard from Egyptian priests that in a range of hills along the eastern border of their country the rocks contained buried sea shells. The priests contended that these shells were in such positions and numbers as to in- dicate that in some countries the sea and land had changed places. The same thought occurs to-day to many an humble quarryman who disclaims all thought' of geology, but who does know his stone quarry is nothing else than a petrified sea beach. Professor Leslie finely says, "Every rock fragment that lies upon the sur- face of the crust of the earth has legibly writ- ten on it and around it, the facts of its his- tory if he would only study them." The evi- 8 The Stone Quarry. dence for our study of these facts varies all the way from the vague conviction of the quarryman's judgment to the convictions that are founded on the closest scrutiny of the facts by men whose whole lives are devoted to the study of just such things with all the skilled culture of the age to help them. In addition, then, to the quarryman's conviction, we have skilled students of science testifying that they find in these very stone quarries the materials for the exact study of plant and animal life. So complete are these materials that they satisfy all inquiry, and produce a conviction that in prying apart the stone lay- ers of the rocks the scientist is in reality open- ing the leaves of the past history of our world, and that in these buried leaves of sand stone and mud deposits of seas and lakes of former ages, he is uncovering not only the real shells and bones of the life of the period, but even the ripple marks of the waters that once cov- ered them. On Plate I we have a very good engraving from a photograph of one of these rock frag- IT The Stone Quarry . 9 ments of an ancient sea beach. This frag- ment here photographed is twenty-two inches in length and sixteen inches in breadth. The twelve or fifteen large shells of the print are of the family Mactridae, one of which is so well represented in this tablet of stone in the genus Mulina, a form that was very abun- dant along the coast when this beach was formed. A handsome elliptical shell, the Tel- lina, is represented in the plate by eight or ten impressions, some of which are distinct enough to give a good idea, not only of the shell form, but revealing the minute lines of its growth or its ornaments. Two or three straight impressions are made by the frag- ments of the genus Solen, a razor clam which was an abundant shell on the Pacific coast of those times. In addition to these bivalves the reader may notice three or four snail like shells of the family of the Naticidae. These two were abundant on those ancient sea beaches of which this piece of rock is a frag- ment, having been taken from a ledge of sand stone in the foothills of the southern io The Stone Quarry. part of the Willamette valley. It will be noticed that the surface of this specimen is thickly strewn with those shell forms varying in size from a hand breadth to the minutest specks. These lie exposed on the surface or "buried in the mass of the rock at different depths, some so slightly held that the shell material is easily displaced, others almost buried from sight, still others only found by making new fractures. Many of the bivalves * are tightly closed as when alive, others spread wide apart, and all these covered with sand and mud just as one sees such forms along a sea beach of to-day. And now of all these it may be truly said that they are not strangers to the student of to-day, but forms familiar to all who have even a slight acquaintance with the ocean life of our own times. As soon as one accepts the conviction that this piece of rock is a fragment of an ancient sea beach, then at once follows the question, ^How far does this old fossil beach extend?" One is compelled to answer, "Thousands of miles, like our present The Stone Quarry. n beaches." And this leads to another inquiry: "Are these other beaches older or newer than the one represented by this tablet?" Many are older and others newer; the newer ones where they touch it always overlying, the older ones underlying, the beach of this tab- let; and no part of the continent but pos- sesses its share of this wonderful history of the past. The Rocky mountains in their highest reaches bear upon their shoulders these records of a former life under the seas. Let us look at the subject from another point of view. If we make a rough catalogue of the stone quarries of Western Oregon, in- cluding in our list only those that have been worked sufficiently to give a fairly full set of their fossils, we shall find one at Ashland, one west of Medford, one at Jacksonville, and one or two in Josephine county. In Douglas county we find a notable exposure of fossils on the North Umpqua, twenty miles east of Roseburg; in Coos county we find one at Cape Arago, another on Coos river, a third on the Coquelle river. In the Willam- 12 The Stone Quarry. ette valley we find twenty or more well worked stone quarries along both lines of foothills from Eugene to Portland. Now, if we col- lect from all these localities their characteristic fossils and spread them out before us, and then call upon our quarryman to examine them without any help from science, he will at once separate them into three groups. Jackson and Josephine county fossils, as well as the rocks that contain them, having a fam- ily likeness, he will place by themselves in one group. He will as promptly select Doug- las and Coos county rock and fossils, and make of these a second group. He will with equal readiness place all those from the Wil- lamette valley in another, a third group. If you ask him for his reasons he will answer, "O, they look different;" and so they do. If now we doubt the soundness of our quarryman's opinion and call in a student of science, he will at once verify the classifica- tion of the quarryman and declare that Nature herself pronounces its correctness. Plainly this will at once suggest to our quarryman The Stone Quarry. 13 the explanations that these different groups of rock may be the petrified beaches of three different beach periods, and in this explana- tion the quarryman and the scientist are at one. This new thought becomes important. Let us see what it implies. If we designate the first, the Rogue River group, because of its association with the Rogue River valley; the second the Umpqua group, because of its association with the Umpqua valley; and the third the Willamette, because of its associa- tion with the Willamette region, and these three groups are held to represent the sea beaches in their relation to each other in the order of their occurrence, this order must be universal. This, also, is found- to be true, that whenever these groups are found in contact, the lower one is always the Rogue River group, the Umpqua next, and the Willamette the uppermost. Not only is this true on the Pacific coast. The world over, the group of rocks we have associated with the Rogue River valley, geologists have called the Cre- taceous; the group we have associated with 14 The Stone Quarry. the Umpqua region they have called the Eocene; the group we have associated with the Willamette region the geologists of the world have named the Miocene. CHAPTER II. SOURCES OF MATERIALS. In the preceding chapter the reader's at- tention was centered on a few type speci- mens of the shell forms found in stone quar- ries. It is now proposed to dwell on the materials of the enclosing rocks in explana- tion of their structure and history. In order to do this more fully, the thought of the stone quarry must enlarge itself into the wider thought of the whole rocky layer of which this stone quarry is but a small frag- ment. In short we are to think of a sea or lake beach hundreds of miles in length strewn with shells' and bones, often with leaves, fruits and branches of trees, all buried in sand or mud and elevated to the crests and slopes of the hills and changed to solid rock. It is with this wider group of facts we are now concerned, and we propose to inquire about 1 6 Sources of Materials. the origin of the rock materials, their travels, and the agencies that elevated them to their present positions, as well as to the hardening process that left them solid stone. If we travel for even a few miles along the banks of any large river just after its flood season, scarcely any fact awakens more in- terest than the enormous quantities of mud, sand and gravel one sees left by the flood in the quiet reaches of the stream during this period of high water. In a river bed of the magnitude of the Columbia, the quantity of this annual deposit will awaken surprise when seen at any one point of its course, but to realize its full magnitude, one must think of the whole length of the river bed bordered by these deposits, and further, that they are not stationary in any portion of the river bed, but all drifting further down stream every flood time till they reach the ocean or the lake, while fresh materials are drifting from the mountains to take their place. If, now, we would trace this stream of sediment still farther toward its fountain head, we will find e Sources of Materials. 17 its continuance in the currents of a thousand rills made turbid by rains that wash down- ward what last -winter's frosts loosened from rocks and ledges, and that these rills converge into brooks, the brooks into creeks, the creeks into rivers, and these into the Columbia. Such, in brief, is the course of this great flood of sediment that runs a continuous stream from the mountains to the sea. Once out at sea the current that brought it there ceases; the heavier particles drop to the bot- tom at the mouth of the river while the lighter and finer materials are drifted by the currents of the ocean, till the whole has found its rest- ing place as water sediment, covering in its muddy or sandy beds whatever of shell or bone or branch the life of the time casts off to be received and covered in these wide-spread deposits. Admitting, now, that all these river cur- rents are forever washing sediments into the seas and lakes and burying in their masses the harder portions of animal bodies such as bones, shells and teeth, there remains the fact 1 8 Sources of Materials. that these are found in sea or lake beds but not on the land. Our stone quarries are on the land, and this brings us to our next in- quiry, are sea beds ever elevated into dry land? Nineteen hundred years ago, Julius Caesar, at the head of the Roman army, in- vaded the country of the ancient Britons. Supplies for his army were brought from Italy in ships, and Caesar had a stone wharf or pier built in a sheltered bay of the Scottish coast for convenience in discharging cargo. The ruins of this pier are still visible, but they are so high above the water that it would re- quire a change of level of over sixty feet to enable a Roman galley to reach the spot to- day. Here is plain evidence that since the days of Caesar the coast of Scotland has risen from the sea over sixty feet in nineteen hun- dred years. A careful series of measurements con- ducted under the direction of the Swedish government has established the fact that nearly the whole of Norway and Sweden is Sources of Materials. 19 rising slowly above the ocean. This change of level has been going on for thousands of years and has lined both the Baltic and At- lantic borders with elevated beach terraces showing stage after stage of successive eleva- tions, all geologically recent. The rate of this elevation is stated by government author- ity as amounting to five or six feet in a cen- tury at the North cape, while less than this southward. A still more impressive group of such facts may be gathered from our own Pacific coast. Hundreds of miles of these elevated beaches have been observed and care- fully surveyed along the coast of South Amer- ica; but we leave these to fix our attention upon our own home share of such world facts. For this purpose we select four points of ob- servation along our own coast as exhibiting such recent elevated sea beds to a striking extent. At Cape Blanco, near the lighthouse, one may see an old sea beach elevated two hun- dred and ten feet above tide water, in which shells, for the most part like those now living 20 Sources of Materials. in the neighboring bays, are covered in the sand and mud deposits in which they once lived. Among the most frequently occurring of these were Schizotherus, our large blue clam, Saxidomus Nutali and Mya Truncata. This Mya does not inhabit our waters now, but is found in Alaska scarcely distinguishable from the fossil one of the elevated beach. Here would seem to be conclusive evidence that during the geological horizon to which these shells belong the Pacific ocean buried them along its beach line two hundred and ten feet above its present reach. A similar raised beach may be seen near the mouth of the Coquelle river on the hill above the town of Bandon. Here the number and variety of shells found were still greater, but at a less elevation. Schizotherus, Saxi- domus and Mya, like those of Cape Blanco, were found in an elevated beach one hundred feet above present waters, and so entirely un- divvturbed as to leave no doubt as to their having been deposited there by the ocean. e Sources of Materials. . 21 A third one of these elevated beaches may be seen on the Yaquina coast with similar recent shells and sea bed surrounding's, at an elevation of eighty feet, finely supplied with a rich variety of recent species of shells and mixed with spruce cones evidently buried with these shells and scarcely distinguishable from the cones of living species along the coast. This elevated beach at Yaquina merits careful study. At the town of Newport, on Yaquina bay, a fine example of these elevated beaches may be seen with all the details of its history plainly legible. The bluffs upon which part of the town is built rise here to the height of over a hundred feet above pres- ent tide water, seventy or eighty feet of which is marine sediment plainly due to a broader and higher shore line of the bay of other days. In the upper part of this sedimentary portion of these beds of sand and mud may be found imbedded marine shells, many of which are scarcely distinguishable, except by the stain of age, from the shells of the surrounding ocean. On the Yaquina coast one may stand 24 Sources of Materials. quartz will easily explain much more, es- pecially as all these are found contained in these sediments in the varying conditions of such cementing agents. fei si CHAPTER III. THE TWO ISLANDS. The geological history of the Pacific coast consists chiefly in the description of the slow elevation of successive belts of the bed of the ocean into dry land, and the progressive addi- tions of these to the western border of North America. These belts of ocean bed have not only been elevated into dry land, but in varying degrees hardened into rock, though retain- ing through all these changes the clearest evidence of their former sea-bed condition. The floor of the sea from which these beds were lifted, was in favored places strewn then, as such places are strewn to-day, with shells, fragments of corals or of bones, all bearing record of the life of the period in which they were covered by the ocean sediment. 26 The Two Islands. A minute and careful study of such rocky forms by some of the best minds of the pres- ent century, has secured such results that stu- dents of geology may now speak with confi- dence of many great changes in the former life of the world. So carefully have the re- sults of these geological studies been formu- lated that it is entirely practicable to tell what portions of any country were first above the seas, and often to trace the successive addi- tions to the land until its outline is recog- nized as the present continent. Following this method in deciphering the geological history of Oregon, one is carried back to a time when this region, which we now call our home, was covered by the ocean. In the natural world the evident results of violent upthrusts of portions of the earth crust are now accepted as among the trust- worthy records of many lands. These dis- turbances were sometimes accompanied by great heat, often by violent earthquakes and the outflow of melted rock, and sometimes only by heat enough to change the materials The Two Islands. 27 without melting them. Oregon's geological history had its origin in just such a violent crumpling of its ancient sea bed, and when the disturbance that caused this ceased, and quiet was restored to the region, there was left, as a result, two islands off the western coast of North America. It was these two islands that grew into Oregon. Of these islands, one occupied the eastern portion of what is now the Blue Mountain region, the other extending over what is now the southwest corner of the State of Oregon, together with a portion of Northern Califor- nia, occupying what is now the Siskiyou Mountain region. The violence that caused the elevation of these islands above the sea level was such that the original sediments of which they were composed were changed. If originally beds of limestone, these, in the process of up- heaval became marble; if originally clayey or argillaceous, the change was into hardened slate, and pasty masses of granite were forced 28 The Two Islands. into the more yielding portions, still further altering the now metamorphosed mass. It will be readily seen that whatever re- mains of shells, bones or leaf impressions these older sediments may have contained in their original condition, would be marred in form, if not changed in substance, by the heat and violence through which they passed, un- til the record of life they once bore was dimmed in portions less exposed to violence, and in others entirely lost. It would follow, too, that after the violence of this unheaval had passed away and quiet was again restored around the newly made islands, marine life would slowly regain its place on these freshly formed beaches. In tracing the early stages through which these islands passed, mention was made of changed slates and limestones and their erup- tive accompaniments of the granitic rocks. So close are the points of resemblance be- tween serpentines from Canyonville and Cow creek in Douglas county, and those from Canyon City in Eastern Oregon, that hand 3 The Two Islands. 29 specimens from these localities are scarcely distinguishable the one from the other. It is, too, of like import that the altered limestones of Bridge creek in the John Day valley, and those from Woodville in the Rogue River valley are easily mistaken for each other. A like resemblance is at once seen between the rich brown gabbros from the lower canyon of Rogue river and those of the Blue moun- tains east of Canyon City. Now, the places these rocks occupy in the framework of these islands, and the great similarity in the rocks themselves, would indicate that the same ele- vating forces operating at the same time and upon similar materials, gave origin to these islands. If now this ocean outlook of ours has been sketched with anything like fidelity to the facts, we may rightfully picture to ourselves these two islands set in the ancient Pacific three hundred miles apart, with the ocean flowing freely between them. The steady action of the surf upon the shore line would soon crumble the softer por- 3 The T c wo Islands. tions of these newly elevated materials until a wave-washed sloping beach was made a pro- gressive margin for each- island. It was on these sloping beaches that the life struggle around these islands first com- menced, and on comparing again the fossil forms from each, the kinship of the two re- gions becomes at once plain. Twenty years ago Mr. Day, of Eastern Oregon, found a small group of fossil shells on the elevated plateau between Canyon City and Prineville. Two of these shells, one of them a Pecten, the other a Pholodomya, were finely preserved and soon found their place in history. In time Shasta county, in Northern Cali- fornia, was found to have a like exposure of these Jurassic shells. Still later Mr. Huntington, of Baker county, threw a flood of light on the extent of the eastern island by obtaining another group of fossil shells which proved to be well defined Jurassic, found twenty-five miles north of Burns. This searchlight was soon followed The Two Islands. 31 by another. A friendly geological student found in Northern California a Triassic shell, the Halobia, recognized as of determining importance, while the same season a surveyor brought more of these shells from the region of Wallowa lake, plainly Halobia, too, thus proving the twin character of the two islands of our story. These facts readily suggest a nucleus for each island in the Triassic period, an exten- sion of these in the Jurassic and a continuous envelopment of both regions throughout the Cretaceous; for the Trigonia, a bivalve shell of Cretaceous times, is abundant in both re- gions, and of the three or four species most abundant on the coast all are common in the fossil beaches of both islands. Two species of Trigonia may be seen on Plate II. A handsome marine gastropod, allied in form to Actionella and Acteonina of this same period, and closely resembling the land shell Bulimus, is found abundant in the rock of both regions. 32 The T*wo Islands. But the group of marine fossils that at- tracts most and holds the collector's atten- tion longest is that of the chambered cephalo- pods. Of thisline group the highest in rank are the Ammonites, a division of cephalopods that was destined to become entirely extinct with the close of this Cretaceous period. These Ammonites were marvelously abundant along the beaches of these islands and in both regions small inferior forms closed the history of their race. In the earlier periods of their history these islands present themselves to the geologist as twins in age, in structure and in their rela- tions to the ocean in which they were set; for throughout the whole time the same environ- ment enwrapped both islands. A notable separation occurred to them with the close of the Cretaceous period. A geographical barrier was destined to separate them which next calls for our attention. Physical geography has scarcely within its domain a more interesting group of facts than that which goes to make up our conception The Two Islands. 33 of a mountain range. We have here the ne- cessity thrust upon us of imagining 1 an origi- nal, nearly level, ocean bed, lifted to the form of a great upfold of the crust of the earth to a height of fifteen or twenty thousand feet and extending across continents. Such an upfold as that includes the Alps, the Cau- casus and the Himalaya mountains in one belt of a continent, or the Andes, the Mexican Cordilleries and the Rocky mountains in an- other. After long ages of quiet life on our islands of the Pacific, the forces of the natural world commenced the work of building another of these world girdles, one whose lines of prog- ress were destined to pass between these is- lands of our story and cast into separate and dissimilar currents their subsequent history. A colossal sea dyke was slowly rising from the bed of the ocean, extending from what we call Lower California through what is now Oregon and Washington to the Aleutian Is- lands, a mere sea dyke for a long time, only a barrier between contiguous waters; then 34 The Two Islands. through other ages a ridge of elevated hills; then later, one of the world's mountain won- ders, the Cascade and Sierra Nevada range. This new feature in the geography of our western coast was destined to become the great shaping force in its subsequent geology. For so great a working agent, because of its relation to our narrative and our consequent need of frequent reference to it, we need a dis- tinctive name and shall call it the "Cascade Barrier." In its line of progress this barrier passed between the islands of our story and thence- forth Siskiyou and Shoshone became pro- gressively different environments. Before the elevation of the Cascade bar- rier the two islands were the only controlling features of the region and the geography was simple. The later multiplication of mountain masses removed this feature of simplicity, and yet in each case the once lone island, later a mountain mass towering above extending plains, retained its dominance as a feature of the landscape to such an extent that the once The T