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<wo Islands. 35 
 
 Siskiyou island only changed to a Siskiyou 
 region, and the once Shoshone island to a 
 Shoshone region. And further, as the later 
 environment of the one was entirely marine, 
 and of the other entirely fresh water, it will 
 be most convenient to treat the ongrowth of 
 the Siskiyou island as including all west of 
 the Cascade barrier, and all the region east of 
 that barrier as the successive development of 
 the Shoshone, designating one as the Sho- 
 shone belt, the other as the Siskiyou belt. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 THE SISKIYOU ISLAND. 
 
 It will be remembered it was stated that 
 when this island was first elevated from the 
 sea bed, the movement was accompanied by 
 so much of violent force and consequent heat 
 that the limestones of the mass were turned 
 to marble, the argillaceous sediments into 
 slates, and between and through these, beds 
 of granite and other eruptive rocks were 
 forced into the positions they now occupy in 
 the mass. 
 
 It will be borne in mind, too, that the up- 
 lifted nucleus of the island was crowded to 
 the surface with so much of heat and pressure 
 as to destroy the outlines of many of the 
 organic forms it contained. 
 
 The island once elevated, the resistance 
 to this crushing force ceased, and a long 
 period of quiet succeeded. 
 
e 
 
 x 
 
 s! 
 
The Siskiyou Island. 37 
 
 It is just here at the dawn of a new chap- 
 ter in the life record of the region, that the 
 geological history of this Siskiyou island 
 opens to the collector of fossils its richest rec- 
 ords. Slowly the drifting currents of the sur- 
 rounding ocean brought to the shores of this 
 newly elevated island the eggs and seeds of sea 
 and land, to open there into life under new 
 conditions and environment. The beaches 
 upon which these lodged were rough and in- 
 hospitable. The sea shells that just struggled 
 for life, are found strangely cradled among 
 rough sharp pebbles, for soil and mud were 
 scarce as yet. 
 
 The mass of conglomerate rock photo- 
 graphed on Plate III finely describes this 
 opening stage of a new geological period. 
 It is from the base of the newer deposits 
 around the island. The pebbles it contains are 
 fragments of the older, the changed rocks of 
 the island, broken off from its cliffs, worn par- 
 tially smooth by the tossings of the surf, 
 mixed with fragments of shells and then 
 cemented into this conglomerate. The shell 
 
38 The Siskiyov Island. 
 
 most abundant along this ancient coast line 
 was a Trigonia, one entire valve of which 
 may be seen in our illustration, surrounded 
 by hundreds of fragments of others broken 
 by the surf, then covered by scanty sediment 
 and so assigned a permanent place in this 
 rock. These shells were multiplied and others 
 were rapidly added, until marine life filled 
 every available nook of the whole coast line 
 of the island. The geological period whose 
 beginning is thus marked, was the Cretaceous. 
 That is to say, the period at which these shells 
 lived was that in which the chalk of France 
 and England was deposited. 
 
 In other words, at the time when the great 
 body of Europe was yet under the deep sea 
 that was slowly depositing in its profoundest 
 depths this chalk, the far-off Siskiyou island 
 was surrounded by this ancient sea beach, on 
 which these shells struggled for life. Later 
 deposits on this beach as seen in layers a few 
 feet higher and therefore more recent, show 
 a notable change of material as well as fossil 
 contents. 
 
The Siskiyou Island. 39 
 
 The newer life of plant and animal adds 
 fresh material to the shore line deposit, and 
 as a result the smaller particles of the rock 
 show increasingly abundant other life than 
 that of the coarser shells. Sheltered bays lent 
 their protection to fragile forms of life, and 
 these so multiplied that the whole mass of 
 the rock becomes eloquent in its record, for 
 then, as now, marine life most abounded in 
 such sheltered places of the beach. 
 
 The chambered shells, represented by the 
 Nautilus and the Ammonite, are found widely 
 distributed in the rocks of the Siskiyou island. 
 The Nautilus survived all the changes of the 
 period and passed on to later times along the 
 newly formed western coast, while its cousin, 
 the Ammonite, of more complex internal 
 structure, became extinct with the close of 
 the Cretaceous. Three of this Ammonite 
 family from Siskiyou island are shown on 
 Plate IV. The causes which brought about 
 its extinction seem to have been connected 
 with the complexity of its structure rather 
 than with its environment, for it drops out of 
 
40 The Siskiyou Island. 
 
 geological history all over the world at the 
 close of the Cretaceous period. 
 
 Bivalves of the, Venus and Mactra families 
 were also abundant, and smaller shells in in- 
 creasing abundance filled those old beaches 
 with beauty and wealth of scientific materials. 
 
 In our narrative of the greater geological 
 changes along the Pacific coast we found the 
 gathering forces of a great geological revolu- 
 tion were taking form and direction, destined 
 to change the whole western face of the con- 
 tinent. The colossal sea dyke referred to in 
 the previous chapter as the Cascade barrier 
 was slowly rising from the bed of the ocean, 
 its line of uplift falling a little eastward of our 
 Siskiyou island and ultimately resulting in 
 connecting that island with the main land. 
 The point was reached of the permanent sepa- 
 ration of the two. islands by the upfold of the 
 Cascade barrier the Shoshone island becom- 
 ing enclosed in the stretch of land-locked wat- 
 ers east of the barrier, the Siskiyou island con- 
 tinuing in its marine environment. 
 
e 
 
 ^ 
 
 s 
 
The Siskiyou Island. 41 
 
 This change having occurred at the close 
 of the Cretaceous period the continuation of 
 the history would open upon Eocene times. 
 The geological sediments of these Eocene 
 times west of the Cascade barrier were those 
 of shoaling waters, chiefly sand stones and 
 often abounding in finely preserved marine 
 fossils. An extensive belt of this rock not 
 covered by any later deposit may be seen 
 reaching from Denmark, a few miles north 
 of Cape Blanco, to a point near the mouth 
 of the Coquelle river, reappearing again 
 south of the entrance to Coos bay, where fine 
 exposures of their fossils are found, among 
 which are well preserved Cardita planicosta, 
 that may be seen near the lighthouse at Cape 
 Arago, in rock tilted to an angle of sixty 
 degrees. The rock reappears at the mouth of 
 the Umpqua and forms the line of picturesque 
 bluffs along both banks of that river to Scotts- 
 burg, and is again extensively exposed along 
 Elk creek to Drain. 
 
 Further north the Eocene reappears 
 around Philomath and Corvallis. Here again 
 
42 The Siskiyoa Island. 
 
 one realizes the great thickness of those 
 Eocene beds, for in spite of the evidence these 
 hills furnish of long continued deep weather- 
 wearing, they present to-day a feature of 
 striking magnitude. In several places among 
 these Benton county hills Cardita planicosta 
 attest the Eocene age of these rocks. 
 
 Another exposure of the fossils of this 
 great belt of Eocene is found near Albany. 
 A low range of hills tends eastward from a 
 point north of Con-allis, compelling the Wil- 
 lamette to run eastward for ten miles or more. 
 Near Albany this range contains our charac- 
 teristic Eocene shells in fine condition and 
 goodly numbers. This is a mere off-shoot of 
 the main belt which continues on unbroken to 
 speak of long continued uniform history. 
 
 At Astoria the Columbia river cuts into 
 this Eocene belt and exposes another Eocene 
 fossil, the chambered shell Aturia, a beautiful 
 fossil, and important because it proves the 
 rock containing it to be Eocene. 
 
 The magnitude of these Eocene deposits, 
 estimated in the light of what one sees along 
 
The Siskiyou Island. 43 
 
 the coast line from Cape Blanco to the mouth 
 of the Umpqua, strikes one as very great, 
 while the uniformity of their materials and 
 the abundance of their fossil remains alike 
 speak of long continued uniform history. 
 
 Anyone may verify these convictions by 
 examining the thickness, uniformity and 
 abundant life of these rpcks on the North 
 Umpqua twenty miles east of Roseburg, the 
 thickness of deposit along both banks of the 
 Umpqua and Elk creek from Elkton to the 
 ocean, and at Cape Arago where again they 
 are richly fossiliferous. 
 
 Let it then be accepted that this whole 
 region north of Siskiyou island enjoyed a 
 long period of comparative quiet after the 
 Cascade revolution. But the completion of 
 the plan of North America calls for another 
 world belt, and it comes, this time as another 
 upfold of the crust of the earth beginning 
 again under the sea bed and reaching from 
 California to Alaska. Its line falls upon our 
 island of Siskiyou, and continues northward 
 and southward a sea dyke in its early stages, 
 
44 The Siskiyou Island. 
 
 and later a range of hills, and still later a range 
 of mountains the Coast range of the future 
 Pacific coast. It will at once strike the reader 
 that this new event has in it several points of 
 likeness, both in itself and in its results, to 
 the elevation of the Cascade barrier already 
 described. 
 
 This conclusion is entirely just, for both 
 of these upcrumplings became permanent 
 ranges of mountains; both cut off perma- 
 nently portions of the Pacific ocean, changing 
 these to inland belts of water, later to drain- 
 age troughs and ultimately into valleys; and 
 in each case one of our ancient islands be- 
 came the dominant feature of the region thus 
 added to the land, the region east of the Cas- 
 cade barrier dominated by the island of Sho- 
 shone, the region between the Cascade and 
 the Coast range dominated by the island of 
 Siskiyou. 
 
 Inasmuch as the upfold along the coast 
 line is apparently the final one in the struc- 
 ture of North America, and as two others 
 of like structural character preceded this, a 
 
s 
 2 
 
The Siskiyou Island. 45 
 
 brief consideration of the apparent causes 
 that underlie these surface movements may 
 not be out of place. 
 
 The first of the series within the range of 
 our subject was that which built up the Rocky 
 mountains; the second that which -forced up 
 the Cascade mountains; the third, this latest 
 one, the elevation of the Coast range. 
 
 In all these movements the work was be- 
 gun in the crumpling up of the bed of the 
 sea. In proof of this, one has only to point 
 out the fact common to all three regions, that 
 the sea mud, now hardened into rock and ele- 
 vated to the shoulders of these mountains and 
 constituting the bulk of the mountain mass, 
 abounds in sea shells, many of which lie ap- 
 parently undisturbed in the very mud banks 
 in which they lived. Another fact common to 
 all three regions, is the evidence they furnish 
 of the great force and heat that accompanied 
 their elevation. This is seen in such portions 
 of the masses as offered most resistance to this 
 elevating force, changing in such places, as 
 by fire, the very structure of the mass. 
 
46 The Siskiyou Island. 
 
 These facts and the great extent over 
 which they prevail seem to prove a cause at 
 least as extensive as the miles they cover. 
 
 We have now opened before as a new 
 chapter in the geological history of our coast, 
 the framework of the new order of things 
 traced in bold features. 
 
 Its greater features are two fold; first, a 
 mountain range lifted from the bed of the 
 ocean nearly a hundred miles westward of the 
 Cascade barrier; second, a related trough 
 between these two extending along the entire 
 length of the coast from Southern California 
 to the Alaskan peninsula. 
 
 Throughout this extent the unity of the 
 elevated mass receives recognition under the 
 name of the Coast range. The unity of the 
 related trough has not received a name to 
 cover its whole length, yet a moment's in- 
 spection will show the same unity among the 
 parts of the trough that is so carefully noted 
 in the uplifts. The San Joaquin and Sacra- 
 mento valleys of California, the Willamette 
 valley of Oregon, the trough of Puget sound, 
 
The Siskiyou Island. 47 
 
 through Queen Charlotte's sound all these 
 are but parts of the one continuous trough 
 that separates the Cascade range on the east 
 from the Coast range on the west. 
 
 The incompleteness of this new coast bar- 
 rier was such that the ocean water had for a 
 long time free access to the Oregon part of 
 the depression, now the Willamette valley. 
 
 The unity of movement, shown in the lines 
 of continuance of the mountain range and 
 the trough between this and the Cascade 
 range, presents several breaks; but these 
 broken links of the chain are explained by 
 the fact that the imperfection is always where 
 the new line of upheaval crosses an older up- 
 fold of the crust. 
 
 In proof of this, notice that the California 
 part of the trough is interrupted by the older 
 uplifts over against the Siskiyou region; that 
 the trough which begins again in Southern 
 Oregon is interrupted by cross lines of earlier 
 upfolds, disturbing its development till it 
 crosses the Calapooia mountains, after 
 which, the trough, as the Willamette valley, 
 
48 The Siskiyou Island. 
 
 regains its normal relations to the wider out- 
 line of the continent and passes on as the 
 Cowlitz valley. Here at the head of this val- 
 ley occurs another short break in an old 
 Eocene mass, and then the trough falls into 
 line again in the depression of Puget sound. 
 A fainter continuance of this trough may be 
 traced northward through Queen Charlotte's 
 sound and even farther on. 
 
 The geographical extent of these changes, 
 together with an approximate parallelism of 
 the working forces that produced them, 
 would seem to indicate a world wide cause 
 modified along the" Pacific slope by the coast 
 conditions, but unquestionably originating 
 from a continued shrinkage of the crust of the 
 earth. The earliest yielding to the force pro- 
 duced the Rocky mountains, the next the 
 Cascades, and the latest the Coast range. 
 These were so many upfolds of the shrinking 
 crust, each with its correlated troughs or 
 downfolds resembling the shrinkage on the 
 surface of a last year's apple. 
 
The Siskiyou Island. 49 
 
 This latest of these continental upfolds, the 
 Coast range, having taken its place among 
 world facts, an outline of its geological rela- 
 tions will be important. 
 
 At the opening of the Miocene period the 
 coast upfold was only a line of islands, the 
 geological materials of which were the re- 
 cently elevated belts of Eocene. Between 
 these islands were open passages through 
 which ebbed and flowed the ocean tides, while 
 the enclosed belt of water between the isl- 
 ands and the Cascade range was wide and 
 deep, a body of water similar to Queen Char- 
 lotte's sound of to-day. It was on the inner 
 slopes of this sound that the marine waters 
 of the period deposited their rich and varied 
 record of the life of the times. 
 
 In this way the outline of our modern 
 Willamette valley was first blocked out, the 
 framework of which still remains. Its rim 
 has varied in altitude, its bed has varied in 
 depth, but its original outline abides. 
 
 Its latest western border, the Coast range 
 of mountains, was not entire in the period we 
 
50 The Siskiyou Island. 
 
 are describing, but was pierced by straits 
 through which the ocean freely flowed till it 
 washed the slopes of the Cascade hills. This 
 free inflow of the ocean kept the enclosed body 
 of water salt enough to promote the health 
 and abundance of its sea shells, and no region 
 of Miocene times has kept a fuller record of 
 its life. And if now we are led to ask where 
 the Miocene agencies found the materials for 
 these later upbuildings of hills, we may re- 
 member that the great upfold we now call 
 the Coast range, once in place, settled into 
 two sorts of materials, a denser, heavier por- 
 tion that formed the mud-sills, and a lighter 
 topping lifted skyward. It was the work of 
 Miocene weather wear to form the skyward 
 portion into graceful drapery for our coming 
 valley. In short, Miocene winds and rain 
 transported these looser Miocene materials 
 into gentle inland slopes, to be in time cov- 
 ered by the tides of the ocean and stocked 
 with sea shells until it became a grand Mio- 
 cene aquarium. 
 
The Siskiyou Island. 51 
 
 In the deposits of sediments along the in- 
 ner slopes of this basin, the changed remains 
 of which now border the Willamette valley 
 as thick beds of rock, aggregating in some 
 localities hundreds of feet in vertical thickness, 
 may be traced the progress of this Miocene 
 work, in many places marked by abundance of 
 marine shells in the very sands and mud flats 
 in which they lived, but all now changed to 
 rock. Time has worn away the less dense 
 surface layers of this varied deposit, but the 
 denser lower layers of it have in different de- 
 grees resisted this wear and formed the foot 
 hills in nearly the entire circuit of the present 
 valley from the Columbia river to the Cala- 
 pooia mountains. 
 
 A fine exposure of these Miocene sedi- 
 ments may be seen in the excavated streets 
 of Astoria, resting on a like exposure of the 
 underlying Eocene, both groups of fossils 
 finely preserved, often enclosed in concretions 
 which apparently formed around the decay- 
 ing shells in quiet, deep waters. Sometimes 
 the enclosed fossil is a crab, and in the shales 
 
52 The Siskiyou Island. 
 
 of the underlying Eocene, is a chambered 
 shell, a near cousin of the Nautilus, the Aturia, 
 of fine form and well preserved. Another in- 
 teresting exposure of these Miocene fossils 
 may be observed at Westport, a few miles 
 above Astoria. The fossils here will be found 
 at the base of the hill south of the landing 
 and will be found to closely repeat the forms 
 at Astoria. 
 
 Still farther up the river, at the base of 
 the foot hills back of Scappoose, these Mio- 
 cene fossils are again seen, and here they 
 underlie a good deal of volcanic rock, but on 
 crossing over the mountains into Tualatin 
 Plains the Miocene shells are again found in 
 their native sand stone. Southwest of For- 
 est Grove where Coast mountain streams cut 
 through the Miocene foot hills, the fossils are 
 again very abundant and very fine 1 all Mio- 
 cene. South of this, bordering Wapato lake, 
 they appear again in shales, and this border 
 land of the Miocene may be traced by its fos- 
 sils to the head of the valley at Eugene where 
 they appear in great beauty and abundance. 
 
The Stsktyoa Island. 53 
 
 Passing northward on the east or Cascade 
 .side of the valley, one strikes these Miocene 
 beds at Willoughby's, West Point, Peterson's 
 Butte, Knox's Butte, in the bed of the San- 
 tiam east of Knox's Butte, and so on till we 
 reach Salem, whose hills are all fossiliferous. 
 
 The later geological record of the Willam- 
 ette valley is such as to suggest an explana- 
 tion of its facts. The theory is that through- 
 out the next geological period, the Pliocene, 
 the whole region remained above water and 
 so left no record; for if it, or any considerable 
 part of it, was covered by water during Plio- 
 cene times, the camel and other Pliocene 
 mammals, whose remains are so abundant in 
 Eastern Oregon, would be found fossil here. 
 But later in the Champlain period it shared 
 in the general land subsidence that then 
 marked the whole north temperate zone. The 
 Willamette valley, the Yakima valley and the 
 Walla Walla region were all again covered 
 with water to the depth of several hundred 
 feet. It is to the Western Oregon share of 
 these elevated waters that the name Willam- 
 ette sound has recently been given. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 THE WILLAMETTE SOUND. 
 
 The desire to study some of the evidences 
 of the more recent changes of level along the 
 coast of Oregon and Washington, with a view 
 to compare and if possible to connect them 
 with evidences of like changes in the interior, 
 led to a visit to Shoalwater bay, an inlet of 
 the coast a few miles north of the Columbia 
 river. June on our northern coast is a pleas- 
 ant season for such trips, and ours received 
 its full measure of help from such accessories 
 as bright sunshine and pure air above us, un- 
 measured wealth of form, color and fragrance 
 below. 
 
 The ride from the cape at the mouth of 
 the Columbia to Shoalwater bay is one of the 
 finest in the country. The road for the greater 
 part is along the ocean beach, always strewn 
 with the numerous wrecks of life cast upon its 
 
The Willamette Sound. 55 
 
 sands and often presenting to the naturalist 
 objects of rare interest. An abrupt turn of 
 the road inland ends this finest of beach drives 
 at ten or twelve miles from the cape. A short 
 distance through woods of spruce and pine, 
 thickly undergrown with a rich variety of 
 flowering shrubs, and the road opens upon a 
 fine view of Shoalwater bay at the pleasant lit- 
 tle town of Oysterville. The general outline 
 of the bay is in sight from this point. The 
 bluffs that define its shores appear, seen north- 
 ward, fifteen or eighteen miles away, and in 
 the direction of its southern extension, ten 
 or twelve miles. At intervals along this whole 
 shore line, one can plainly discern what in the 
 distance appear as land slides, but on nearer 
 approach prove to be portions of the bluff 
 shore undermined by the storm-surf, and in 
 their present form showing fine sections of 
 the strata of which they are composed. On 
 examining these more closely one sees a bank, 
 not of common earth, but disposed in strati- 
 fied layers of sediment, once evidently con- 
 tinuous over the whole region and of nearly 
 
56 The Willamette Sound. 
 
 uniform thickness, now worn away above into 
 a rolling surface, yet showing everywhere a 
 fine persistence in the old water lines that 
 ruled its formation. Buried in this mass of 
 sediment, and occasionally cropping out in 
 exposed sections, are vast beds of sea shells. 
 So completely do these represent the life now 
 around them that when an apparently excep- 
 tional form does appear, memory at once re- 
 calls having seen it somewhere on the coast. 
 And yet, identical in species as these shells 
 unquestionably are with those now living in 
 the surrounding waters, the two sets of condi- 
 tions are separated by the whole import of the 
 term "fossil." The waters that buried there 
 those fossil shells, and covered them with one 
 hundred or more vertical feet of ocean sedi- 
 ment, were waters that so defined our north- 
 ern coast as to give it a far different outline 
 from that of its present geography. 
 
 In some of these bluff exposures their past 
 record is read in masses of buried forest trees 
 trunk, leaves and seed so buried in clay and 
 so well preserved that the spruce cone, fragile 
 
s 
 
 a 
 
The Willamette Sound. 57 
 
 at all times, is scarcely discernible from one of 
 last year's fruitage drifting in the neighboring 
 waters. From these vegetable remains, as 
 from those of the shell fish, the same truths' 
 are taught, for the trees are the same in kind 
 as those growing on the bluffs one hundred 
 feet above them, while the waters that covered 
 them there with one hundred feet of sedi- 
 ment have passed away. The fossil story then 
 that may be read here is linked to our own 
 times by the sameness of vegetable and ani- 
 mal life, and separated from ours by the pass- 
 ing away of the agencies by which the rec- 
 ords were written. It is useless to ask, How 
 long ago? There is no chronological record 
 legible here. Future discoveries may connect 
 these things with human story. We may not 
 attempt this now. 
 
 The lowest marine remains of these bluffs 
 plainly prove that when they lived the waters 
 around them were at, or near, their present 
 level. They are species that love shoal water 
 and they are in place where found. The 
 oyster is very abundant among them, and 
 
58 The Willamette Sound. 
 
 the shells of most of them are neither broken 
 apart nor water-worn as they would be if 
 drifted here from some other locality. They 
 evidently lie here as fossils on the same bed 
 they occupied while living, and oysters then, 
 as now, rarely bed in waters more than a few 
 feet in depth. The common cockle another 
 lover of shoal water is also abundant among 
 these remains, and, like the oyster, lies fossil 
 where it lived, the opposite valves often occu- 
 pying the very positions, relatively, that they 
 held while living. So, too, with the mem- 
 bers of the clam family; whether Mactra or 
 Solen or Venus, all are evidently in their na- 
 tive beds where they lived and died. We 
 conclude that when these shell fish lived, the 
 surrounding waters held nearly their present 
 level. 
 
 Another truth plainly taught in these 
 stratified bluffs is this: the waters here be- 
 came afterward much higher, or speaking 
 more exactly, the land became much lower. 
 There must have been a change of more than 
 one hundred feet, for a stratified sediment of 
 
The Willamette Sound. 59 
 
 one hundred feet in thickness as now seen in 
 some of these bluffs that, for instance, near 
 the North river would require more than 
 that depth of water to place it there; and this 
 sediment is so fine in material as to warrant 
 the conviction that it once existed evenly dis- 
 tributed over the whole region, bay and all. 
 The upper layers, too, have in them the finest 
 materials and the fewest fossils; both facts in- 
 dicating increasing depth of water as the up- 
 per beds were deposited. 
 
 Yet another plain truth is legibly written 
 here the changes indicated in depth of water 
 over the place were quiet changes. Any sud- 
 den catastrophe would have signs of violence 
 and consequent strong current, but nothing 
 of the kind appears here. The fragile cone 
 of the spruce tree period, buried in that sedi- 
 ment, is found to-day among these shells as 
 little marred by time as the shells themselves. 
 The line of deposit along the sheltered bay, 
 just as it was at its deepest stage of water, 
 is now as unbroken as it was then. Neither 
 the violence of earthquake nor the suddenness 
 
60 The Willamette Sound. 
 
 of deluge has left any trace of such agency 
 to disturb the conviction one feels that the 
 changes indicated there were quiet ones, cov- 
 ering a long period of time, yet scarcely dis- 
 turbing the quiet order of life over which they 
 presided. 
 
 That every inlet on our northern coast 
 has its group of facts of like import there can 
 be no doubt. Our line of thought needs only 
 those that mark its extension to the Columbia 
 river, and there the lessons gleaned from the 
 bluffs of Shoalwater bay reappear in all their 
 clearness. A fine instance of this is seen in 
 a bluff on the old Whealdon farm, just inside 
 the cape. Several others may be seen along 
 the streams that fall into Young's bay, on the 
 south shore of the river, and just back of As- 
 toria. All these contain remains of animal 
 and vegetable life linked to our shores and 
 forests of to-day by identity of species, and 
 separated in our minds from the present order 
 of things by the conviction that the agencies 
 which placed them there have passed away. 
 
fe 
 
 e 
 
The Willamette Sound. 61 
 
 In all this we are obviously studying only 
 the lower limit of this latest of Oregon's geo- 
 logical changes. Where shall we look for 
 its upper limit? In other words, how high 
 did those waters rise above the present sea 
 level? We might look for traces of its upper 
 reaches in the remains of old sea beaches- in 
 elevated places on the abrupt slopes of the 
 hills along the coast, but in such exposures 
 old beach lines are but rarely preserved 
 against the storms of a thousand winters, still 
 less against those of tens of thousands. To 
 find them and their records plainly legible we 
 must look to more sheltered localities inland. 
 It will help us a good deal in our search for 
 such shore lines of the interior to carry with 
 us a theory that will point out the possible 
 limits within which they may reasonably be 
 sought. Will the facts we have gathered from 
 Shoalwater bay and the lower Columbia war- 
 rant us in forming such a theory? Let us see. 
 
 Stratified sediment of a hundred feet in 
 vertical thickness finer far in its upper lay- 
 ers than in those lower, and in its upper layers 
 
62 The Willamette Sound. 
 
 entirely devoid of marine remains, while the 
 lower ones are densely crowded with them 
 plainly indicate shoal water to begin the 
 work, and deep water afterward over its high- 
 est layers. But the sediment itself in one 
 hundred feet or more, and deep water over its 
 upper surface, equal to the requirements of its 
 facts, could not be less than another hundred 
 feet, thus making a total depth of at least 
 two hundred feet above the present water 
 level. Let then, a depth of two hundred feet 
 be our theory, and with this let us pass inland 
 for facts to confirm it if true, to reject it if 
 false; and if confirmed, to trace by its help 
 the outlines of that fine old Willamette sound 
 that may in the days of the Mammoth and 
 the Broad Faced Ox have welcomed to its 
 scores of sheltered harbors, the ancient 
 hunter who, in his canoe, if he had one, floated 
 one hundred feet or more above the present 
 altitude of the church spires of Portland and 
 Salem. 
 
 But as we pass along, let us in imagina- 
 tion reconstruct the fine inland sea that two 
 
The Willamette Sound. 63 
 
 hundred feet of elevation in the waters of the 
 Columbia must have made. We have first 
 the noble entrance, like that of the Straits 
 of Fuca, extending from the present site of 
 Astoria to that of St. Helens, eighty miles or 
 more in length, varying from five to twenty 
 miles in width and over two hundred feet in 
 depth. At St. Helens it spreads out into a 
 broad inland sea, extending from the Scap- 
 poose mountains to the elevated land east of 
 the Willamette valley. Like the Puget sound 
 of today, whose general outlines this old Wil- 
 lamette sound strangely resembles, it was in 
 its southern extension over the present val- 
 ley, among elevated islands, deep channels, 
 and land-locked bays reaching from the Scap- 
 poose mountains to Spencer's butte that it 
 spread out its greatest wealth of scenic beauty. 
 Our theory would make it cover the whole of 
 the lower levels through which the Willamette 
 now flows. 
 
 Let us trace this grand water system east- 
 ward along the present course of the Colum- 
 bia river. 
 
64 The Willamette Sound. 
 
 We started, it will be remembered, from 
 the capes with a theoretic elevation of the 
 waters two hundred feet above their present 
 level. The fall of the river, from the Lower 
 Cascades to the ocean, may be stated at forty 
 feet; the fall through the five miles of cas- 
 cades, at thirty-five feet. Above this there 
 are forty or fifty miles of narrow gorge 
 through a mountain range, with slopes too 
 steep for preserving old shore lines and 
 through which the river falls twenty feet more. 
 Here we find the first open space east of the 
 Cascade mountains, in which the waters of 
 that period if two hundred feet higher at 
 the capes than they now are would have had 
 an elevation above the present river level of 
 one hundred and five feet. There was at this 
 place a lake-like extension of the river seven 
 or eight miles wide and fifteen to twenty long, 
 and into this a semicircular system of streams, 
 six in number, brought a continued supply 
 of sediment -sand, clay and gravel and 
 buried, year after year, in the strata along the 
 margin of that lake, the record of the pass- 
 
The Willamette Sound. 65 
 
 ing events of the times. Now, manifestly, at 
 whatever level we may here find elevated 
 beach marks, with buried remains at all cor- 
 responding with those with which we started, 
 there we shall find the figures to correct the 
 theory with which we set out. 
 
 Within a few miles of the mouth of the 
 DesChutes river, the very evidence we need 
 turns up. More than two hundred and fifty 
 feet above the present level of the river, and 
 therefore one hundred and fifty feet higher 
 than the elevation with which we started in 
 theory, buried in the stratified sands, clays 
 and gravels that mark the wash of those 
 streams into and along that old lake beach, 
 are found the tusks, teeth and bones of the 
 land animals of that period, marking at once 
 the height at which these waters stood and 
 the life record of the times. A visit to this 
 locality in company with an eminent geol- 
 ogist, the late Professor LeConte, gives re- 
 markably fresh vividness to the recollection 
 of the facts and figures that define the posi- 
 tion of its fossils. 
 
66 The Willamette Sound. 
 
 A ride of four or five miles from The 
 Dalles, brings us to where three of the creeks 
 referred to join their streams and empty to- 
 gether into the Columbia. The surrounding 
 hills are composed largely of soft volcanic 
 tufa, and through this these streams have 
 worn deep ravines in their descent. The 
 ravines were worn to their present depth long 
 before the period we are describing, and when 
 subsequently the waters rose here, backed up 
 from the ocean, they filled these ravines, con- 
 verting them into deep bays, and thus form- 
 ing so many sheltered nooks into which the 
 streams washed and in which they buried 
 whatever the winds or floods committed to 
 their keeping. On entering one of these ra- 
 vines, we come suddenly to the edge of a 
 newer and deeper excavation in its mid-chan- 
 nel. A sudden melting of snows on the neigh- 
 boring hills, a few winters since, had caused 
 these newer excavations. Scores of them 
 were opened here within a circuit of twenty 
 miles. The one we entered is a large one, 
 though not the largest. It is more than a 
 
The Willamette Sound. 67 
 
 mile in length, is in some places two hundred 
 feet wide and twenty-five to thirty deep. 
 Along the freshly fallen sides of these new 
 excavations one can see the distinct hori- 
 zontally stratified deposits we are seeking. 
 The record at Shoalwater bay is the latest 
 there; the record among these ravines is the 
 latest here. The height of water proved to 
 have existed so recently there must neces- 
 sarily have made its mark here. And now, 
 inasmuch as these ravine sediments are the 
 latest traces of high waters here, their eleva- 
 tion necessarily gives the height of those 
 waters. And the figures that mark the height 
 of these fossils above the present level of the 
 river are the figures we need to complete the 
 theory with which we started from the capes 
 of the Columbia. 
 
 Nor is there any room for mistake here; 
 for while this fossil sediment extends through 
 a vertical range of more than one hundred and 
 fifty feet, the least total altitude that will meet 
 the conditions of the problem must take the 
 highest portion of this fossil bed. Stating this 
 
68 The Willamette Sound. 
 
 at two hundred and fifty feet above the pres- 
 ent level of the river is placing it at the low- 
 est, and even then with the understanding 
 that we are dealing with sediment and not 
 with surface lines. Nor yet will it do to set 
 these facts to the credit of that system of 
 river terraces known to exist throughout the 
 northern portion of our continent. These 
 were described from Frazer river by Chief 
 Justice Begbie of British Columbia, and years 
 ago Professor Dana described those from Ore- 
 gon and California; still later The American 
 Journal of Science designated them as "part 
 of a system of terraces that covers a large 
 part of North America north of the Ohio 
 and existing on all streams, as far as exam- 
 ined, nearly to their heads in the mountains." 
 Now our facts and these exclusively in- 
 land facts refuse to be classed together. 
 The system of old shore lines we are tracing 
 belongs primarily to the sea shore. These 
 other terraces run inland, high among the 
 mountains. The facts upon which our theory 
 was based were gathered at Shoalwater bay, 
 
K 
 
 ^ 
 
 5! 
 
The Willamette Sound. 69 
 
 were controlled entirely by the level of the 
 Pacific ocean, and scarcely affected by the 
 flood levels in the river, and still less by any 
 extended lake system of the interior. 
 
 And now, with our amended theory in 
 mind as a measuring rod, let us retrace our 
 steps to the lower country the Willamette 
 sound of the olden time. Let the fall of the 
 Columbia river, from this lake shore east of 
 the Cascade mountains to the mouth of the 
 Willamette river, be stated at eighty feet. Our 
 fossil remains on this lake shore are two hun- 
 dred and fifty feet above the present level of 
 its waters, making a total of three hundred 
 and thirty feet as the depth of those waters 
 above the present surface at the mouth of 
 the Willamette river. How naturally one 
 looks to the currents of such, a vast body of 
 water as the agency competent to the heaping 
 up of that long sandy ridge, one hundred 
 feet high, through which the river has cut its 
 way at Swan island, north of Portland! But 
 let us follow it still farther inland. Over 
 where Portland now stands, these waters were 
 
yo The Willamette Sound. 
 
 three hundred and twenty-five feet deep; over 
 Salem one hundred and sixty-five feet; over 
 Albany, one hundred and fifteen feet; over 
 Tualatin Plains, one hundred and forty-five 
 feet; over Lafayette, one hundred and seventy 
 feet. A narrow strait over the present valley 
 of the Tualatin river, ten or twelve miles in 
 length, opened westward upon a broad, beau- 
 tiful bay, extending over the present sites of 
 Hillsboro and Forest Grove, to Gale's peak, 
 among the foothills of the Coast range. The 
 subsoil of the fine farms of that rich agri- 
 cultural region is itself the muddy sediment of 
 that bay. Further south over the central por- 
 tion, of the present valley, and lying obliquely 
 across the widest part of the Willamette 
 sound, there arose above those waters an 
 elevated island. It extended from a point 
 south of Lafayette to one near Salem; 
 and must have formed a fine central ob- 
 ject in the scene. Three or ' four volcanic 
 islands extended in an irregular semicircle 
 where Linn county now is, and the islands 
 of those waters are the buttes of today 
 
The Willamette Sound. 71 
 
 Knox's, Peterson's and Ward's, One stand- 
 ing on the summit of either of these buttes, 
 with the suggestions of these pages before 
 him, could so easily and vividly imagine those 
 waters recalled, as to almost persuade himself 
 he heard the murmuring of their ripples at his 
 feet so sea like, the extended plain around 
 him so shore like that line of hills winding 
 from Mary's peak, on the west, to Spencer's 
 butte, on the south, and only lost on the east 
 among the foot hills of the Cascades. How 
 natural would seem to him this restoration 
 of one of geology's yesterdays! 
 
 The shores of that fine old Willamette 
 sound teemed with the life of the period. It 
 is marvelous that so few excavations in the 
 Willamette valley have failed to uncover some 
 of these relics of the past. Bones, teeth and 
 tusks, proving a wide range of animal life, 
 are often found in ditches, mill races, crumb- 
 ling cliffs and other exposures of the sedi- 
 ments of these waters, and often within a few 
 feet of the surface. Did man, too, live there 
 then? We need not point out the evidences 
 
72 The Willamette Sound. 
 
 of increasing interest the world feels in facts 
 that tend to solve the doubts that cluster 
 around this natural inquiry. A few more mill 
 races dug, a few more excavations of winter 
 floods, more careful search where mountain 
 streams washed their trophies to their burial 
 under still waters, and this question may be 
 set at rest, as it regards the Willamette sound. 
 Oregon does not answer it yet. 
 
s 
 
 X 
 
 s! 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 THE SHOSHONE ISLAND. 
 
 Thus far our attention has mainly been 
 occupied on the western or Siskiyou island; 
 we have now reached a point in our narrative 
 at which the other island calls for some notice 
 of the features specific to its region. 
 
 The outlines of this Shoshone island, like 
 those of the Siskiyou of the Cretaceous period, 
 are in part suggested by the back-lying ridges 
 of the changed older rocks, and partly by the 
 uplying surface of the Cretaceous shore line. 
 One sees a fine exposure of this Cretaceous 
 at old Camp Drake in the Crooked River val- 
 ley, which plainly was once part of the shore 
 line of the western spur of the Shoshone is- 
 land. A like stretch of the northern shore 
 line of the same spur may be seen in several 
 localities in the John Day valley one of these 
 on Rock creek and Spanish gulch east of old 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 THE SHOSHONE ISLAND. 
 
 Thus far our attention has mainly been 
 occupied on the western or Siskiyou island; 
 we have now reached a point in our narrative 
 at which the other island calls for some notice 
 of the features specific to its region. 
 
 The outlines of this Shoshone island, like 
 those of the Siskiyou of the Cretaceous period, 
 are in part suggested by the back-lying ridges 
 of the changed older rocks, and partly by .the 
 uplying surface of the Cretaceous shore line. 
 One sees a fine exposure of this Cretaceous 
 at old Camp Drake in the Crooked River val- 
 ley, which plainly was once part of the shore 
 line of the western spur of the Shoshone is- 
 land. A like stretch of the northern shore 
 line of the same spur may be seen in several 
 localities in the John Day valley one of these 
 on Rock creek and Spanish gulch east of old 
 
74 The Shoshone Island. 
 
 Camp Watson, another farther west on the 
 upper waters of Bridge creek the marine 
 shells from all these localities being abund- 
 ant, very fine and all Cretaceous. 
 
 Mention was made of back-lying ridges of 
 the older rocks that escaped the violent 
 changes of the early history of both islands. 
 
 A good example of this may be seen on 
 an elevated ridge west of Canyon City, the 
 Jurassic rocks of which are plainly seen with 
 their characteristic fossils unchanged. 
 
 But. the grand work of building at this 
 time was Cretaceous work, and the island of 
 Shoshone went on enlarging its outline in 
 times of elevation of surface and lessening its 
 area in times of subsidence throughout the 
 whole period of Cretaceous times. The geo- 
 graphical change that followed the elevation 
 of the Cascade range has already been men- 
 tioned in its relation to both islands. A word 
 on its relations to the Shoshone island. 
 
 In neither case was the dominance of the 
 island feature lost. As soon as this great sea 
 dyke reached the surface of the ocean it sep- 
 
The Shoshone Island. 75 
 
 arated the waters east of it from those west- 
 ward, the island waters to the eastward still 
 encircling their island, the Shoshone, as those 
 of the west continued to encircle the Siskiyou 
 with marine environment. The inland waters 
 slowly changed to brackish, then to fresh 
 water. But these inland waters were very 
 extensive. They received from the east the 
 whole watershed of the western slope of the 
 recently elevated Rocky Mountain range. 
 
 The discharge oceanward of this great 
 watershed slowly divided into three areas of 
 drainage, the southern one laying the foun- 
 dation of the drainage of the Colorado river, 
 the northern one laying the foundation of the 
 drainage of the Columbia river, while the mid- 
 dle region awaited the slower process of drain- 
 age by evaporation. 
 
 The double results of these elevations of 
 surface and erosions of drainage currents 
 slowly subdivided the enclosed waters, until 
 the interior of Oregon, to which region our 
 story is restricted, became covered with ex- 
 tensive lakes connected by drainage links 
 
7 6 The Shoshone Island. 
 
 from lake to lake, till by progressive drain- 
 age the links grew into a continuous stream, 
 the Columbia river. 
 
 It is with this lake period of the geolog- 
 ical history of Oregon that our narrative seeks 
 next to deal, and it is in its position sur- 
 rounded by these conditions that our Sho- 
 shone island develops the rest of its history. 
 As these surrounding lakes became smaller 
 and shallower the island extended, and these 
 extensions so varied its stretches of hill and 
 plain as to make it a region of exceptional 
 wealth of beauty and variety. 
 
 That the climate was the climate of the 
 rhinoceros and the palm tree is proved by 
 the fact that the bones of the rhinoceros and 
 the leaves of the palm tree are now found in 
 the rocky sediments of its lakes. Sometimes, 
 too, one finds the fruit and leaves of an alder, 
 then those of a maple or an elm, often the 
 leaf or branchlets of a yew-like tree closely re- 
 sembling the California redwood. In fact 
 the leaves of the forest trees are large and 
 of wide range of species, impressing one with 
 
e 
 
The Shoshone Island.. 77 
 
 the conviction that they are the product of a 
 moist, as well as a warm, atmosphere. One 
 readily sees from other than the evidence of 
 its fossil leaves why this must have been the 
 character of its climate, for in the early Ter- 
 tiary times the Cascade ridge of hills had not 
 yet reached an altitude sufficient to exclude 
 the warm, moist air of the Pacific ocean from 
 the island of Shoshone, as the present Cascade 
 range does now in that same region. So in 
 thosa clays the warm, moist atmosphere of 
 the Pacific ocean wrapped the island in its 
 cloudy folds and shed upon its slopes frequent 
 and refreshing rains. 
 
 But more than this; much of the present 
 region of Alaska remained under the ocean 
 during the early Tertiary times, and thus pre- 
 sented an open passage for the Japan current 
 flowing north of these Oregon islands on its 
 way towards Hudson bay and the coast of 
 Greenland; this cut off all accumulations of 
 snow and ice between Oregon and the Arctic 
 ocean. 
 
78 The Shoshone Island. 
 
 That great revolutionary movement, the 
 elevation of the Cascade mountains, while 
 important in its relations to both islands, did 
 far more to give variety of surroundings to 
 the Shoshone than to the Siskiyou region. 
 To both regions the changes it caused make 
 the event itself the geological epoch of the 
 times. In our narrative it will furnish us with 
 a convenient division line between the records 
 of the Cretaceous and those of the Tertiary 
 rocks, for its was the closing work of Cre- 
 taceous times to separate, and the opening 
 work of the Tertiary to begin, the new record. 
 But another feature of the region we are de- 
 scribing owes its entire existence to the ele- 
 vation of this range. It is the enormous 
 masses of volcanic rock that exist along the 
 eastern slopes of the Cascades. Ordinarily 
 volcanoes throw out well defined streams of 
 lava, so that their masses are easily measured; 
 but this upthrust of Cascade lavas was most 
 of it in sheeted masses, bursting to the surface 
 like sheets of water through broken ice to 
 freeze over its rents. 
 
The Shoshone Island. 79 
 
 These broader sheets of lava seem to have 
 been thrown out in the earlier stages of the 
 period of eruption and to have left their traces 
 along the eastern slopes of the range, while 
 the later, narrower and shorter outflows built 
 up more rapidly westward of the axis of the 
 upfold. I recall an impression I once received 
 of the enormous thickness of some of these 
 lava deposits on the DesChutes river east of 
 the Cascade range. 
 
 At about thirty miles from The Dalles the 
 old Canyon City road crosses the DesChutes. 
 In its descent from the DesChutes hills the 
 road was cut into the face of the hill, giving 
 a good exposure of its rocky materials. It 
 was thus seen that in the upper part of the 
 hill, loose materials, held in place by an occa- 
 sional dense lava flow, characterized the road 
 through a descent of sixteen or eighteen hun- 
 dred feet. The remaining part of the road 
 was simply a climbing down across the escarp- 
 ments of twenty-seven to thirty well marked 
 flows of lava, ranging in thickness from 
 twenty to fifty feet and aggregating not less 
 
8o The Shoshone Island. 
 
 than nine hundred feet. Through all of these 
 the DesChutes had worn its channel without 
 reaching- the bottom of this underlying hard 
 basalt. 
 
 Manifestly the upper and newer portions 
 of the hill were built of lighter materials, 
 mixed more and more, as one ascended, with 
 layers of volcanic ashes, and where the layers 
 were of denser materials, showing weathering 
 and erosion between the eruptions to which 
 they were due, at once suggesting that these 
 eruptions were separated by considerable in- 
 tervals of time. 
 
 In marked contrast with this condition of 
 these upper layers seemed that of the denser 
 ones of the lower division, indicating rapid 
 successions of outflows with no time for 
 weathering between them. The enormous 
 eruptive activity indicated by these lower de- 
 posits must have occurred in early Tertiary 
 times and in sight of our Shoshone island. 
 
 While these denser layers of basalt were 
 poured out over the surface in earlier stages of 
 this great eruption, another feature marked 
 
The Shoshone Island. 81 
 
 its later stages, that of vast showers of vol- 
 canic ashes, alternating with the denser flows 
 of lava. An example of this form of volcanic 
 agency is given from a modern instance of its 
 results. If it lacks in magnitude it will make 
 up in clearness of detail. The one offered is 
 from notes of a journey across the Cascades 
 along the line of the Middle fork of the Wil- 
 lamette river. 
 
 At eight or ten miles from the summit, 
 going eastward, the whole surface soil seems 
 changed by a covering of yellowish dust grow- 
 ing thicker as one approaches the summit. 
 On the eastern descent the depth of this sur- 
 face addition is greatly increased and its true 
 character is plainly seen to be volcanic ashes. 
 While carefully exploring for evidence of its 
 thickness at its deepest, I became satisfied 
 that it could hardly be less than twenty-five 
 or thirty feet. It was distributed evenly as 
 a fresh snow in still weather. Where it was 
 at its greatest depth the whole country was 
 covered with a growth of forest trees and 
 all of the trees were growing naturally from 
 
82 The Shoshone Island. 
 
 the surface of this ash bank. The trees of 
 largest size were Yellow Pine (Pinus Ponde- 
 rosa), some of them three or four feet in diam- 
 eter and in good healthy condition. All this 
 forest growth was on the surface of a sheet 
 of volcanic ashes. 
 
 Evidently all this heavy timber came from 
 a replanting that occurred long after the vol- 
 canic eruption. For aught that appears there, 
 several successive generations of trees may 
 have come and gone since that shower of 
 ashes fell. When this ashes fell it lay lightly 
 for a time. Rains and snows falling on it set- 
 tled it down with the help of its own gravity. 
 Where it is now twenty feet deep it must have 
 at first been forty or fifty feet deep, a depth 
 inconsistent with any thought of the survival 
 of any forest tree on which it fell. 
 
 It slowly diminishes as one recedes from 
 the mountain until at forty or fifty miles it 
 disappears. 
 
 After a good deal of search for some 
 exposure of the old surface upon which all 
 this spent fire material had fallen, I was for- 
 
The Shoshone Island. 83 
 
 tunate enough to find one. At a place under- 
 mined by the DesChutes river, I found a fine 
 section of the bank with about ten feet of the 
 condensed volcanic ash covering seven feet of 
 dark rich soil with traces of other times. 
 
 This recent instance of volcanic eruption 
 of volcanic ashes furnishes an impressive les- 
 son in geology, showing as it does the extent 
 to which such volcanic products were capable 
 of modifying the sediments of the waters of 
 this region during the early Tertiary times. 
 
 But this work of covering the hill sides 
 with showers of soil capable of sustaining for- 
 ests of pine, was not the only notable result 
 by which these showers of ashes may be 
 traced. The prevailing winds were westerly 
 and the drift of ashes to the eastward, and this 
 being a country of many lakes in the times we 
 are describing, much of this volcanic ash 
 would fall on these lake surfaces and become 
 an evenly distributed sediment, covering up 
 and so preserving the remains of bird and 
 beast in stratified volcanic ashes. A very in- 
 teresting example of this kind one finds near 
 
84 The Shoshone Island. 
 
 Silver lake, eastward of Klamath marsh, where 
 finely preserved fossils are so found. 
 
 These two classes of products of volcanic 
 activity have worked together the volcanic 
 flood and the volcanic cloud each doing its 
 part in fashioning the future of the island of 
 Shoshone. 
 
 Yet another feature of great importance 
 in modifying the future of the Shoshone re- 
 gion remains to be described the enormous 
 accumulations of lake sediments that on a 
 lower level completely encircle the old outline 
 of the island. 
 
 All the wash and wear and drift of the 
 land was of necessity toward the lowest places 
 the lake beds of the interior and the sea 
 bed of the coast. The dust of the atmosphere, 
 the sands of the river current, the mud wash 
 of the storm, the wear of the coast line, all 
 these ultimately drift toward the deepest 
 places; and because these deepest places 
 have but little current and only the finest of 
 the muddy sediments go into these current- 
 less depths, it results that deep oozy mud cov- 
 
The Shoshone Island. 85 
 
 ers the bottom of such places and accumulates 
 there. 
 
 That the mass of this ooze keeps increas- 
 ing with time needs no argument, and that 
 the increasing weight of continued accumu- 
 lation slowly presses the lower portion into 
 various stages of solidity is only a question 
 of time and gravitation. 
 
 Such a natural process of growth of lake 
 sediments must have occurred in the deep 
 lakes of Eastern Oregon in those early Ter- 
 tiary times. Can we find them and verify 
 them in that region to-day? 
 
 At a point sixty miles south of the Colum- 
 bia river and about forty east of the Des- 
 Chutes, on the old road to Canyon City, the 
 road gradually ascends from Antelope valley 
 to Cold camp, and from Cold camp to Kern 
 Creek hill, from whose ridge, looking east- 
 ward, a wonderful panorama opens to one's 
 view. It is the region known to the old min- 
 ers as the Potato Hills. Our Kern Creek hill 
 is simply the elevated shore line of an old 
 lake bed fifteen hundred to eighteen hundred 
 
86 The Shoshone Island. 
 
 feet above the muddy masses that once formed 
 its bed. From this Kern Creek hill we are 
 looking eastward into the very depths of that 
 old lake bed that once swept around the west- 
 ern spur of our Shoshone island. 
 
 And now, if after an hour's enjoyment of 
 this grand geological landscape and carefully 
 noting the varied shades of the picture, we 
 examine more minutely the surface features, 
 we may easily observe three or four drainage 
 depressions through which as many creeks 
 have carved their beds and through which 
 they now empty northward into the John 
 Day river. The nearest of these, and almost 
 at the foot of the descent before us, is the de- 
 pression of Kern creek. Beyond this, a like 
 irregular depression almost concealed by the 
 hills it has carved, lies the bed of Cherry 
 creek. 
 
 All this is simply a vast system of carving 
 done by these streams in the muddy sediments 
 of one of these old lake beds, and now turned 
 up to the light of study. 
 
The Shoshone Island. 87 
 
 The black stubs of inky shade are so many 
 dykes of eruptive rock burst through the 
 mass. One of these, a dyke of columnar 
 basalt, is exceptionally instructive. Seen at 
 the distance of two or three miles it seems a 
 vast wood pile a giant's wood pile. Seen at 
 closer range it is found to be a stack of rock 
 prisms of great regularity, evidently once 
 forced up through this old lake sediment, from 
 which atmospheric wearing has long since 
 cleared away the softer covering, leaving our 
 wood pile a picture itself. 
 
 These eruptive rocks in their relation to 
 the general landscape seem like ink blotches 
 on the face of a painting. If we look care- 
 fully at the other rocks we shall find them all 
 hardened sediments, fresh water sediments, 
 for whenever they contain shells these are 
 fresh water, or land shells, but never marine. 
 
 The aggregate thickness of these sedi- 
 mentary rocks of Tertiary times, between the 
 Shoshone island and the Cascade mountains, 
 is very great not less than three thousand 
 feet. 
 
88 The Shoshone Island. 
 
 If this seems an extraordinary depth for a 
 group of lakes one only need point out the 
 almost certainty that throughout the whole 
 time of this vast sedimentation the Cascade 
 mountains were subject to further uplifts, 
 and the depressions east and west of this line 
 of upfold were subject to correlated subsid- 
 ence, so that the earlier sediments of the Wil- 
 lamette valley on the west, and the beds of 
 these interior lakes on the eastward by their 
 gradual sinking, increase the capacity of these 
 depressions for continued sediments. 
 
 This borne in mind, the depth of even three 
 thousand feet will not seem startling. 
 
 Throughout this whole mass of lake sedi- 
 ments, fine and dense where it was deposited 
 in very deep and quiet water, fine sandstone 
 where the inflowing streams left the traces 
 of their emptying, all occasionally interstrati- 
 fied with beds of volcanic ashes, are inter- 
 spersed the leaves of plants, broken fragments 
 of wood, pieces of the bones of fish, of fowl, 
 or of mammal. 
 
The Shoshone Island. 89 
 
 Now all of these leaves, fragments of wood 
 and pieces of bone are enough different from 
 the leaves and bones of to-day to prove them 
 belonging to other times, for they tell the 
 story of other forms of life than ours. It is 
 the great number and variety of these fossil 
 remains of former life, interspersed through- 
 out these three thousand feet of sedimentary 
 rock, that gives this old lake bed its marvel- 
 ous interest. 
 
 One is liable at any turn in a ravine to 
 find protruding from its ledges a fragment of 
 a skull, a bone or a tooth, ranging from those 
 of a squirrel to those of a horse. But all these 
 underground records are remains of life 
 that once abode above ground, and so really 
 describe the former inhabitants of the Sho- 
 shone island and its environment of lakes. 
 
 If now from our point of outlook on the 
 crest of Kern Creek hill, looking eastward, 
 we may imagine the waters of that lake re- 
 turned until they submerged the whole of the 
 John Day basin, we might see across these 
 returned waters fifty miles away the ancient 
 
90 The Shoshone Island. 
 
 western spur and slopes of the island, the Sho- 
 shone island of the early Tertiaries. True, it 
 to-day lacks the palm tree on the shore and 
 the rhinoceros and hippopotamus in its wa- 
 ters, but their graves are here, monuments 
 that speak eloquently of other times. 
 
 While these sediments of mud or sand or 
 ash all come from the wear and wash of the 
 land transported into the lakes by winds or 
 streams, there is another sedimentary deposit 
 indigenous to the lake beds themselves, and 
 so different from the others as to call for a 
 word of special mention. It is known as 
 Diatomaceous earth. It is found in the form 
 of a stratified white, or yellowish white, rock, 
 often so light as to float on water and some- 
 times mistaken for chalk. It is often sold in 
 the shops under different names as a polishing 
 powder and as such is often named Tripolite. 
 On examination under a good microscope it 
 is found to be made up of the remains of one- 
 celled plants whose cell coating is silica, and 
 it is the accumulation of these shells or coat- 
 ings that makes the mass of the rock. 
 
The Shoshone Island. 91 
 
 Recent deposits of this material are found 
 in both sea and fresh water, sometimes in 
 swamps and in peat bogs. Extensive beds of 
 it are found fossil along the upper DesChutes 
 river in old lake bed deposits. A fine bed of it 
 may be found in a sloping bank of Three 
 Mile creek, two or three miles south of The 
 Dalles, 
 
 Geologically older than these deposits just 
 mentioned is a bed of this rock found in the 
 upper John Day valley, underlying the Plio- 
 cene rocks of that region and tilted at quite 
 an angle, while the Pliocene is nearly horizon- 
 tal, a fact that would at once place it among 
 the early Tertiaries. 
 
 An interesting outcrop of this may be seen 
 at the old Belshaw ranch on the Canyon City 
 road in the John Day valley. The rock itself 
 floats on water, is white as chalk, and contains, 
 besides its microscopic plant cells, some finely 
 preserved leaf prints of oak, maple and other 
 forest trees. Like chalk this rock is made up 
 of the dead shells of a one-celled organism, 
 but the chalk is the cell covering of an ani- 
 
The Shoshone Island. 93 
 
 ive shore lines were worked by the same 
 ocean, receiving into their deposits the re- 
 mains of the same sea life, and were affected 
 alike by the heat and pressure of their vast 
 accumulations of the wear and the wash of 
 older things. Nothing of all this tended to 
 make these islands unlike, and so their growth 
 was treated as the growth of twin sisters. The 
 divergence in their records commenced with 
 the growth of the Cascade barrier between 
 them, and of the early history of this and its 
 special bearing on the development of the 
 Shoshone island, careful note has been at- 
 tempted. 
 
 At a later period in its history, this barrier 
 character took another form. From a mere 
 water barrier to a range of hills, and still later 
 to a vast range of mountains, increased eleva- 
 tion lifted it into an atmospheric agency quite 
 as important as its previous marine one, for 
 when it reached the altitude of a mountain 
 range it excluded the moist, warm current 
 of the Pacific ocean and thus surrendered the 
 
94 The Shoshone Island. 
 
 interior to the dry, cold winds of the conti- 
 nent eastward. 
 
 Yet another of these barrier functions re- 
 mains to be ascribed to the Cascade range. 
 Its uplift along the coast of Alaska made it a 
 barrier to the flow eastward of the Japan cur- 
 rent of the ocean. 
 
 The present extended plains from Alaska 
 to Baffin's bay would warrant the conclusion 
 that before the elevation of the Cascade bar- 
 rier at Alaska, the Japan current must have 
 flowed over those stretches of low country on 
 its way northward. 
 
 The effect of this, as previously noted, 
 would be to sweep away all accumulations of 
 snow and ice in that region; in other words, 
 would prevent accumulations of snow and ice 
 between our island of Shoshone and the Arc- 
 tic circle, a condition of things which would 
 be very effective in modifying the climate of 
 the region we are describing. 
 
 Yet such an inflow of a vast tropical river 
 from the ocean itself must have 'existed till 
 
The Shoshone Island. 95 
 
 turned aside by the upfold of this Cascade 
 barrier along the coast of Alaska. 
 
 To say that this great upfold of the earth 
 kept on increasing in height and breadth 
 through the early and middle Tertiary times, 
 would tend to obscure the strong line of the 
 history, for it was the force that lifted this 
 Cascade dyke into the Cascade range of hills, 
 and these in turn into the Cascade range of 
 mountains. It was the epochs of these suc- 
 cessive upfolds that marked off into time pe- 
 riods the Eocene or early Tertiary, the Mio- 
 cene or middle Tertiary, and the Pliocene or 
 latest Tertiary. 
 
 But there is still a wider view of its world 
 relations than this one of the Pacific slope; 
 for while this Cascade barrier was making a 
 geographical separation between our two is- 
 lands of the Pacific, there was an extension of 
 the Gulf of Mexico northward into what is 
 now British America, covering much of the 
 region now occupied by the Rocky mountains. 
 The same crumpling process that elevated the 
 Cascade barrier by a like process of elevation, 
 
96 The Shoshone Island. 
 
 closed this American Mediterranean to the 
 ocean, and also added to the height and 
 breadth of the already begun upfold of the 
 Rocky mountains. This change was closely 
 followed by the conversion of the inclosed 
 waters of the region from salt, through brack- 
 ish, to fresh waters. 
 
 And yet a still wider relationship may be 
 mentioned. Up to the time when the Cascade 
 barrier was separating our Pacific islands, 
 Western Europe, from the British islands to 
 the Black sea, was covered by a deep ocean 
 over whose bed had been slowly deposited the 
 cast off calcareous shells of a Protozoan ani- 
 mal, the Globigerina. This accumulation of 
 life-remains, hundreds of feet in thickness and 
 extending over a length of six hundred miles, 
 was brought to a close by the elevation of the 
 sea bed, its calcareous sediment to be known 
 in after time as the chalk beds of Europe. 
 
 Now this shrinking and the resulting 
 crumpling of the surface seen in this light, be- 
 comes a world fact; its manifestation in the 
 Cascade barrier, its other manifestation along 
 
The Sho shone Island. 97 
 
 the line of the Rocky mountains, and the still 
 further one in the elevation of the chalk beds 
 of Europe, are but three links in the one chain 
 of force. It is this European link that gives 
 its name to the epoch, the Cretaceous (mean- 
 ing chalk), and the close of this period, a time 
 of great change, a revolution in the geologi- 
 cal history, marks the passing away of the 
 older forms of life and the introduction of the 
 newer forms of both plants and animals. To 
 accomplish this result the great types of life 
 at this time went through rapid changes. 
 
 The dominant forms of vertebrate life of 
 the Cretaceous period of land and sea, were 
 reptilian, the dominant forms of the new pe- 
 riod were mammalian. 
 
 A like radical change occurred at this time 
 among the plants, as the types that mark the 
 forests of to-day were not introduced till after 
 the close of the Cretaceous. In the light of 
 these facts there is a striking fitness in the 
 name Geologists have given the period that 
 follows the Cretaceous. They call it the 
 Eocene the dawn of the recent. 
 
98 The Shoshone Island. 
 
 When the violence that accompanied the 
 Cretaceous revolution passed away, quiet was 
 restored and life, land life, took its new tend- 
 ency on our Shoshone island. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 INTRODUCTION TO LIFE OF THE LAKES. 
 
 In our narrative of the changes that oc- 
 curred in the Siskiyou region, the record we 
 tried to translate was made by the waters of 
 the ocean; in carrying out a like inquiry for 
 the Shoshone region, we have found ourselves 
 shut in to the record of its lakes. 
 
 The ocean beach has no break in its rec- 
 ord, for the ocean always has a beach, and 
 the beach always makes its record, whether 
 kept or lost in later changes. The muddy sed- 
 iment of the lake lasts with the lake but ceases 
 to write when the lake dries up or drains off 
 and its record closes. The lake, then, keeps 
 the geological record of the interior of the 
 continent only while the lake lasts, the ocean 
 beach that of its external margin, and is con- 
 tinuous. It will be remembered when the 
 great sea dyke that formed the foundation of 
 
ioo Introduction to Life of the Lakes. 
 
 the Cascade mountains was first elevated 
 above the surface of the sea, it at once cut off 
 from the ocean and made an inland sea of the 
 great body of water between that dyke on 
 the west and the shore line of the Wasatch, 
 Bitter Root and Coeur d'Alene mountains on 
 the east. In the northern portion of this in- 
 land sea, the large irregular island we have 
 called Shoshone must have formed a fine re- 
 lief feature in so vast a water waste. The 
 level at which the water stood around it 
 would, of course, determine its extent and 
 outline, and these must have varied from age 
 to age, for surface disturbances have left many 
 records of their continued activity. 
 
 The slow elevation of this region devel- 
 oped, as already described, a drainage system 
 southward that in time became the Colorado 
 river, along whose watershed can be found 
 the record of its successive changes. The mid- 
 dle portion with its grand list of Tertiary lakes 
 we may dismiss as outside our theme for con- 
 sideration; but we will center our thought on 
 
Introduction to Life of the Lakes. 101 
 
 the remaining third, or northern portion, of 
 these waters. 
 
 It will be remembered that the ocean bar- 
 rier was so far elevated at the close of the Cre- 
 taceous period as to entirely exclude the sea 
 from the interior. Thereafter the fossil remains 
 buried in these waters would be fresh water 
 remains, and these alone are found there. The 
 contrast between these two kinds of sediment 
 is striking. One of its many instances can be 
 observed on Bridge creek, in Morrow county, 
 near the town of Mitchell. Here one can see 
 an extensive table land covered with a thin 
 soil scarcely concealing the rock below it, and 
 this rock abounding in sea shells Trigonia, 
 Actionella and Ammonites all plainly Cre- 
 taceous, while from the plateau on which they 
 occur one may look to the westward a mile 
 or two over a lower level filled with later sedi- 
 ments. These one soon learns to distinguish 
 as Miocene fresh water deposits of the Bridge 
 creek Oreodon beds. Here are brought into 
 sharp contrast the old basement floor of the 
 Cretaceous seas and the later deposits of the 
 
102 Introduction to Life of the Lakes. 
 
 Tertiary lakes, both forming to-day the west- 
 ern slope of what was once our Shoshone is- 
 land. We find, then, in Eastern Oregon of 
 to-day the remains of several old lake beds 
 preserving a more or less complete record of 
 the life of the Shoshone region in early Ter- 
 tiary times. It is to be understood here that 
 in all that is said of lake records there is im- 
 plied a sediment of mud containing casts and 
 impressions of the living things of other ages, 
 of things as real as the writing on Chaldean 
 pottery or hieroglyphics upon a piece of 
 Egyptian papyrus. The sediments of these 
 lakes are in effect so many openings into the 
 past, openings from which the curtains of 
 time are drawn aside so we see through them 
 the vista of the ages. 
 
 Two of these lake beds are of special im- 
 portance to us because they represent dis- 
 tinctly separate life records, the lower and 
 older one containing a marvelous wealth of 
 fossil life running through a long stretch of 
 geological history. The upper or later sedi- 
 ments are of more restricted surface but of 
 
Introduction to Life of the Lakes. 103 
 
 wider scope of life forms. The lower lake 
 remains would represent the early and middle 
 Tertiary, the upper the later Tertiary period. 
 The oldest of these lakes may be traced along 
 the lower reaches of the John Day river ex- 
 cavated by the wash and wear of that stream. 
 A southern extension of this lake sediment 
 was laid bare by the drainage of the Crooked 
 river, an eastern branch of the DesChutes. 
 Both of these will be described as lower lake 
 deposits, for they belong- to the same geolog- 
 ical horizon. 
 
 The lowest of these deposits abound in 
 well preserved leaf impressions, many of them 
 equal to the finest engravings, the original 
 carbon of the leaf furnishing the printer's ink. 
 As fitly illustrating these fossils there is intro- 
 duced on Plate V the print of an aralia, a 
 cousin of our thorny panax; and another on 
 Plate VI of some leaves of a cycad, a near 
 relative of salisburia, the Japanese ginco. 
 
 A fine impression of a fan palm was also 
 found in these same rocks a few years since. 
 The palm and ginco required a subtropical 
 
104 Introduction to Life of the Lakes. 
 
 climate, and such without doubt was the cli- 
 mate of this region during the Eocene period. 
 
 These fossil remains of forest trees of the 
 early Tertiary are so abundant and so finely 
 preserved that one is disappointed at the en- 
 tire absence of the bones of land animals from 
 these early records, their fossils being so abun- 
 dant here in the next age, the Miocene. 
 
 But it must be remembered that at the 
 close of the Cretaceous period the mammalian 
 forms of life were but few and not widely dis- 
 tributed. A few small Marsupials and some of 
 still lower type, like the Duck Bill, were all 
 the world had of mammalian forms at that 
 time. 
 
 Throughout the Cretaceous period the life 
 of the world's vertebrate animals was nearly 
 all reptilian the air, the land, the waters 
 teemed with reptilian forms of life. Mammals 
 of the two orders named had recently multi- 
 plied in North America as well as in Europe 
 and Asia, but it was not until after the great 
 mountain revolution of the Cascade barrier, 
 and therefore until the Eocene period, that 
 
Introduction to Life of the Lakes. 105 
 
 the world received its stock of highly varied 
 land animals, the Mammalia. If, then, it was 
 in the Eocene period that the orders of mam- 
 malian life were so varied and spread over the 
 continent of North America, a glance at the 
 geography of the period will help to determine 
 the relation of this fact to our Shoshone 
 island. 
 
 All through the Cretaceous period there 
 existed where the Rocky mountains now 
 stand, a deep Mediterranean sea. When, at 
 the close of this period, the Rocky mountains 
 were elevated, their mass was raised from the 
 bed of this sea. As part of the result of this 
 uplift the ocean waters were thenceforth shut 
 out from the interior of the continent and the 
 hollows that remained were filled with fresh 
 water and became lakes. Now into these lake 
 beds on both sides of the newly elevated 
 mountain range, were washed the skeletons of 
 the animals of the Eocene period and so pre- 
 served as fossils. These old lake beds are the 
 "Bad Lands" of to-day. 
 
106 Introduction to Life of the Lakes. 
 
 Inasmuch as our Shoshone island was yet 
 separated from the continent during the 
 Eocene period, the mammalia did not yet 
 reach that region. But as the whole coast 
 continued to rise above the sea level - there 
 came a time when one of the eastern spurs 
 of the island reached the main land and joined 
 the continent. This came to pass at the close 
 of the Eocene period, and at once the way 
 was opened from the Rocky mountain region 
 to Shoshone. 
 
 The larger mammals soon discovered this 
 and its first pioneers swarmed into the new 
 region of our future Oregon. The remains of 
 these migrating bands of mammalia are now 
 found in Eastern Oregon buried in old lake 
 beds, the soft oozy mud of which received 
 them from the wash of the mountain streams 
 and effectually preserved them from decay. 
 
 The fact that these fossils are found in lake 
 sediments furnishes no proof that the animals 
 to which they belonged were water animals, 
 for although many of them were such, a much 
 larger number were land animals. This result 
 
Introduction to Life of the Lakes. 107 
 
 comes in this way: We have given a large 
 lake hundreds of miles in extent into which 
 several rivers and very many smaller streams 
 empty, all flowing from the surrounding hills. 
 Now into these streams the wash and wear 
 of the whole surface of the hills are slowly 
 drifting to the lowest places. Once dumped 
 into the flooded stream bed all this is taken 
 up by the current and washed down to the 
 lake and out into its depths, to be covered 
 in its muddy sediments. This granted as the 
 ordinary course of things, it is readily seen 
 that there is no sick or wounded animal of the 
 hills passing to the banks of the streams to 
 drink, but is liable to die there, and the next 
 flood will wash what is left of its skeleton into 
 the lake, where it is soon buried in the soft 
 mud of the sediment. In this way the skele- 
 tons, or scattered bones, of not only the larger 
 animals, but those of rabbits, rats and squir- 
 rels from the hills, are borne to their resting 
 place in the depth of these waters. 
 
 The ocean has its own way of covering up 
 and preserving a bank of oyster shells or 
 
io8 Introduction to Life of the Lakes. 
 
 clams, but the place to look for land animals 
 is in some old lake bed, and this lake bed 
 being absent from any land region, no matter 
 how abundant the life on its hillside, the geo- 
 logical record is lost; for the hills are them- 
 selves dying and Nature writes no geological 
 records on dying hills. The reason for this is 
 not far to seek. If a bone or tooth is dropped 
 on a hillside beyond the reach of a stream, it 
 at once begins a process of decay that in a 
 few years reduces its form to dust and it is 
 thenceforth lost. These hills on which it fell 
 are themselves wasting away with all that rests 
 upon their surfaces. Geological records are 
 only preserved in the sediments of water. 
 Now, in the light of these facts, we see at once 
 the great geological advantages conferred 
 upon our Shoshone region by an extensive 
 lake of not less than one hundred thousand 
 square miles in area, extending from Shoshone 
 island westward to where the DesChutes river 
 now runs, and continuing through the whole 
 length of Miocene time. This lake of Eastern 
 Oregon continued to receive into its waters 
 
Introduction to Life of the Lakes. 109 
 
 and through them into its sediments the re- 
 mains of forest and field, burying them up 
 safely in its profoundest depth and thus 
 securing them from decay. The perfection of 
 this mode of preservation is well nigh com- 
 plete. The minutest vein work of the leaf; 
 the insect that fastened to its surface; the seed 
 pod or capsule of the plant; the pores of the 
 wood; the sutures of the animal's skull; the 
 epiphyses of the bones, enabling one to tell at 
 a glance whether these belong to the young or 
 the old; the minutest lines of age or accident 
 on a tooth; all are preserved with marvelous 
 faithfulness to the life type of the period, so 
 that no family of plants or of animals is likely 
 to have lived on the borders of the lake during 
 that long stretch of time, covering hundreds 
 of thousands of years, without sharing in the 
 record of its fossil history. It is from such 
 archives that materials have been collected 
 for a geological record of Oregon's past. 
 
 In describing in such rapid succession the 
 changed condition of this region and of the 
 mountain barrier that walled it in on the west, 
 
no Introduction to Life of the Lakes. 
 
 there is danger of giving the impression of a 
 continued record of stupendous violence. To 
 correct this wrong impression, one needs to 
 think of the great length of time over which 
 these records of changes stretch, as extending 
 over millions of years, and of very many of 
 these changes themselves as scarcely attract- 
 ing attention while occurring. Its measure of 
 results was the growth of long ages, if not 
 eons. That there were times of great and 
 sudden violence there can be no doubt; but 
 these were of short duration when compared 
 with the long ages of quiet growth for plant 
 and animal that intervened. 
 
 The reader will find Plate VII engraved 
 from a photograph of real fragments of the 
 bones and teeth of different animals all gath- 
 ered from the mud of this lower lake. A 
 curious fact in regard to these ought to be 
 added here, that the teeth figured on this plate 
 are all changed to agate and the cavities of 
 these bones and teeth are often filled with 
 crystallized quartz. In Oregon the term Mio- 
 cene will always apply to the rocks and fossils 
 
Introduction to Life of the Lakes. in 
 
 of this older lake period, the period of quartz 
 filled cavities. This fact of quartz infiltration 
 is also observed in some belts of Miocene rock 
 of the Willamette valley in which the cavities 
 of fossil clams contain perfect casts of chal- 
 cedony or agate. In both of these localities 
 the liquefaction of the infiltrated silica seems 
 due to the pressure and heat generated under 
 the weight of later deposits of sediment, since 
 removed by the wash and wear of atmos- 
 pheric erosion. The silica infiltration oc- 
 curred after the inclosure of the specimen by 
 the sediment. The shell drifts into deep water 
 and sinks into- the soft oozy mud of the bot- 
 tom. As long as there remains any crack or 
 chink of the shell accessible to this mud, the 
 weight of the water presses in more. In those 
 shells that are thus entirely filled the process 
 of filling up the inner cast is completed. But 
 if through any cause the shell is completely 
 enveloped by the sediment before the inner 
 cavity is filled, then this upper and unfilled 
 portion remains empty. Now it is this rem- 
 nant of space that is filled with silica. The 
 
ii2 Introduction to Life of the Lakes. 
 
 result is striking", for we have the exact cast 
 of the inner cavity of a bivalve, its lower half 
 a dark opaque sea mud, its upper half a fine 
 translucent chalcedony of rich carnelian tint. 
 Or if we take the same process as it may 
 be traced in a different fossil, we have here 
 the jaw of a rhinoceros. We have the com- 
 pleted result in this fossil, and the entire pro- 
 cess is this: The jaw with its teeth in place is 
 washed into the deep waters of an Eastern 
 Oregon lake; it sinks into the soft mud of the 
 lake bottom. In time the mud is pressed into 
 every accessible crevice of the bone and its 
 dental contents, but in the teeth that are 
 entire there remains a whole set of cavities 
 inaccessible to this lake mud. It is into these 
 nerve cavities that the liquid silica is forced 
 and in which it is preserved; and if we recall 
 the sea shell with its quartz infiltration, this 
 result often obtains: That if the shell is so en- 
 tirely closed as to wholly exclude the muddy 
 sediment, then the whole inner cavity is lined 
 with silica, clear as crystal, or if almost filled 
 with quartz, as often happens, then a small 
 
Introduction to Life of the Lakes. 113 
 
 central cavity only remains and this often 
 filled with vapor of water. As these cool, the 
 water settles to the bottom and an air bubble 
 rises to the upper level, making- the water 
 agate so much prized on our coast. 
 
 The rocks made by the sediments of the 
 Pliocene lakes of Oregon are looser, lighter, 
 more porous; the fossil leaves are more mod- 
 ern in style; the animals more like those of 
 to-day, but there were no more quartz filled 
 cavities. 
 
 And now, inasmuch as the aim of this geo- 
 logical narrative is to give, above and beyond 
 the physical changes, the story of the life that 
 the providence of God developed on this is- 
 land, it is needful that we seek to trace the 
 beginnings of these forms that for so long a 
 period were indigenous here in Oregon. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 LIFE OF LOWER LAKE REGION. 
 OREODONS. 
 
 The Oreodons, a large and very interest- 
 ing group of mammals, now entirely extinct, 
 were very abundant in the days of this lower 
 lake. They had the molar teeth of the modern 
 deer, the pre-molars or side teeth of the hog, 
 and the incisors of the carnivora. They ranged 
 in size from the stature of the coyote to that 
 of an elk. The type of this animal is finely 
 represented by the head figured on Plate 
 VIII. The characters that mark all the fossils 
 of the lower lake sediments are well shown 
 in the teeth and bones of this head; they are 
 dense and heavy, the teeth finely preserved 
 and glisten with the luster of agates. Aside 
 from the relation of this head to the life forms 
 of the Miocene period, it is in itself an object 
 of real beauty. And yet it is not as a piece of 
 
Life of Loiver Lake Region. 115 
 
 sculpture that this fine stone head exhibits its 
 true rank. It is the added story one reads in 
 its geological environment, for it is primarily 
 a piece of the Blue mountains of Eastern Ore- 
 gon, and as such its rock material represents 
 the fine sediment of a deep lake into which it 
 was washed by a flooded mountain stream. 
 Not a tooth of the forty-four this head con- 
 tains, but has a measurable nerve cavity filled 
 with some form of quartz which could only 
 penetrate that cavity in a liquid state. And 
 this liquid condition of quartz could only have 
 occurred under great heat and pressure, two 
 of the agencies by which the whole mass was 
 changed into rock. Think these thoughts, 
 then look again into that mute face! 
 
 The head figured on Plate IX is in some 
 of its features in broad contrast with the one 
 .just described. It belonged to an animal 
 about the same size, but of broader, almost 
 triangular crown, yet in the number and posi- 
 tion of its teeth completely conforming to the 
 Oreodon type. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 LIFE OF LOWER LAKE REGION. 
 OREODONS. 
 
 The Oreodons, a large and very interest- 
 ing group of mammals, now entirely extinct, 
 were very abundant in the days of this lower 
 lake. They had the molar teeth of the modern 
 deer, the pre-molars or side teeth of the hog, 
 and the incisors of the carnivora. They ranged 
 in size from the stature of the coyote to that 
 of an elk. The type of this animal is finely 
 represented by the head figured on Plate 
 VIII. The characters that mark all the fossils 
 of the lower lake sediments are well shown 
 in the teeth and bones of this head ; they are 
 dense and heavy, the teeth finely preserved 
 and glisten with the luster of agates. Aside 
 from the relation of this head to the life forms 
 of the Miocene period, it is in itself an object 
 of real beauty. And yet it is not as a piece of 
 
Life of Lower Lake Region. 115 
 
 sculpture that this fine stone head exhibits its 
 true rank. It is the added story one reads in 
 its geological environment, for it is primarily 
 a piece of the Blue mountains of Eastern Ore- 
 gon, and as such its rock material represents 
 the fine sediment of a deep lake into which it 
 was washed by a flooded mountain stream. 
 Not a tooth of the forty-four this head con- 
 tains, but has a measurable nerve cavity filled 
 with some form of quartz which could only 
 penetrate that cavity in a liquid state. And 
 this liquid condition of quartz could only have 
 occurred under great heat and pressure, two 
 of the agencies by which the whole mass was 
 changed into rock. Think these thoughts, 
 then look again into that mute face! 
 
 The head figured on Plate IX is in some 
 of its features in broad contrast with the one 
 just described. It belonged to an animal 
 about the same size, but of broader, almost 
 triangular crown, yet in the number and posi- 
 tion of its teeth completely conforming to the 
 Oreodon type. 
 
Life of Lower Lake Region. 117 
 
 of a fox, marking, perhaps, the extreme range 
 of the family. 
 
 In looking over the cases that contain the 
 fossils of these lower lake beds with the 
 thought of the comparative numbers of these 
 large mammals in mind, the figures were 
 found to be rhinoceros five, horses seven, dogs 
 four, cats three, peccaries and hogs five, oreo- 
 dons twenty; and these numbers fairly repre- 
 sent their relative frequency in the fossil beds. 
 It will be seen, then, that in the frequency 
 of their occurrence as fossils one sees the im- 
 portance of their place in the life record of 
 the Miocene. Paleontologists ascribe to this 
 skeleton some features of the deer, others of 
 the camel, and with great unanimity set him 
 down as a ruminating hog, and his anatomy as 
 that of a comprehensive type from which hog 
 and deer and camel may have descended. 
 
 One can scarcely study such a form, as he 
 loosens fragment after fragment from a crum- 
 bling hillside, without a conviction that the 
 law of lineal descent, with the holding power 
 of heredity and the directing power of an all 
 
1 1 8 Life of Lower Lake Region. 
 
 comprehensive plan, entered together into its 
 creation. The Almighty's work of creation, 
 as recorded among these Shoshone hills of 
 Miocene times, may be properly defined as a 
 providential bringing together of the agencies 
 of mountain streams, of uplifting forces, of 
 scattering seeds, of the nurture of plants and 
 animals, and of gathering into this favored 
 region the life that this same providence, 
 stretching over a preceding age, had prepared 
 for this Western Eden of the Miocene. 
 
 RHINOCEROS. 
 
 That in the sediment of a large lake with 
 a semi-tropical climate, the fossil remains of 
 the rhinoceros should be found abundant is 
 not surprising, but even this consideration 
 hardly prepares one for the frequency of their 
 occurrence. This relative abundance would 
 be explained by the fact that the life . and 
 death of the rhinoceros are both in lake bed 
 environment. The teeth are large and showy, 
 generally finely preserved and attractive as 
 fossils. 
 
Life of Lower Lake Region. 119 
 
 On Plates XIII and XIV the reader will 
 find a good head with teeth in place and in 
 fine condition. This head measures seven- 
 teen inches in length. The lower molars of 
 the rhinoceros may always be known by the 
 shape of their crowns which take on the like- 
 ness of the letter L, as may be seen on Plate 
 XV. The clumsiness of these bones and 
 teeth has given wider play to the presence of 
 infiltrated quartz, and the agate luster that 
 follows covers the whole surface of the fossil 
 teeth. 
 
 As compared with the fossils of the horse, 
 one is surprised at the small amount of varia- 
 tion of these bones and teeth, a fact that has 
 an explanation in a comparison of their con- 
 trasted environments, the horse being essen- 
 tially an uphill mammal surrounded with wide 
 varying of crag and mountain, the rhinoceros 
 is shut into the dull uniformity of the swamp 
 and lake shore. 
 
 ENTELODON. 
 
 The Suidae, or hog family, is represented 
 in these lower lake beds by several genera 
 
120 Life of Lower Lake Region. 
 
 with different measures of the features of that 
 family. One of these, represented on Plate 
 XVI by a jaw and several molars, under the 
 name Entelodon, is perhaps the largest of 
 the family. This old time companion of the 
 rhinoceros reminds one in many ways of the 
 hippopotamus to which it was closely related. 
 Its prominent canines, unlike the angular 
 tushes of the hog, were well rounded and are 
 often found in the rocks of this Miocene lake. 
 Many years ago Dr. Leidy described this En- 
 telodon from specimens discovered in the 
 "Bad Lands" of Nebraska. There, too, they 
 were found in lake sediment in company with 
 the Rhinoceros and Oreodon. 
 
 BOTHROLAB1S. 
 
 Another member of the hog type was rep- 
 resented in Oregon by the Bothrolabis. There 
 were two separate species which fairly rep- 
 resent the peccary of to-day. The larger of 
 these, given on Plate XVII, looks quite hog 
 like; the other one is a symmetrical, hand- 
 some head of a smaller Bothrolabis. 
 
Life of Lo<wer Lake Region. 121 
 
 Besides these finely preserved skulls and 
 teeth, there have been gathered many frag- 
 ments of the same type, showing peccaries 
 were abundant in* these lower beds of the 
 Shoshone. 
 
 SMALL RODENTS. 
 
 Rabbits, squirrels, rats and other small 
 rodents in minute fragments, and sometimes 
 in well preserved specimens, are found in 
 these lower beds. 
 
 LEPTOMERYX. 
 
 In the same rocks from which we gath- 
 ered the teeth of these rabbits, we found some 
 teeth that would be at once pronounced as a 
 miniature form of deer, but about the size 
 of the rabbit. There is such a small animal, 
 the Leptomeryx, known as the Musk deer in 
 South Eastern Asia, but the knowledge of 
 that fact hardly prepares one for the sight 
 of its fossil remains in the sediments of our 
 lower lake where they are often found. 
 
122 Life of Lower Lake Region. 
 
 Dr. Leicly describes the fossils of this 
 beautiful Musk deer from the "Bad Lands" of 
 Dakota. 
 
 FELIDAE. 
 
 On Plate XX is found a. fine head of a 
 cat that represents an animal about the size 
 of an Oregon cougar, only the skull is a lit- 
 tle narrower and the teeth longer and more 
 slender. This head was found on the North 
 Fork of the John Day river, and represents an 
 animal that was common in the days of this 
 old lake. 
 
 Fragments of bones and separated teeth 
 of many sizes, but all of the cat type, were 
 gathered years ago in the lower beds of the 
 John Day. A few of these are remembered as 
 indicating cats as large as the largest lions of 
 to-day. One such was lent to Yale University 
 years ago, that has never found its way back. 
 
 CANIDAE. 
 
 The dog type of this Miocene period was 
 represented in several species, one of which 
 is figured on Plate XVIII by the fragment 
 
Life of Lower Lake Region. 123 
 
 of an upper jaw with its three most charac- 
 teristic molars. They are well preserved and 
 so distinctly dog as to leave no doubt as to 
 their identity. These teeth would indicate an 
 animal about the size of a Newfoundland dog. 
 This one was described a few years ago in a 
 paper read before the Academy of Sciences 
 of the University of Oregon. The descrip- 
 tion was published in the transactions of the 
 academy under the name of Canis Shoshonen- 
 sis. The fossil was found along the North 
 Fork of the John Day river by a man who 
 was in the writer's employ in 1894. 
 
 The small dog's head given on Plate XIX 
 was taken from the fossil beds of Bridge creek, 
 several years ago, by J. W. Cusick, an Albany 
 banker. The writer once found in these lower 
 beds the molar teeth of a fossil dog, which 
 were twice the size of those of our largest 
 Newfoundland. 
 
 ANCH1THERIUM. 
 
 The mammalian division of animal life 
 seems to have been started in the world with 
 
124 Life of Lower Lake Region. 
 
 the five toes growing from a wrist or carpus 
 of the fore limb. So plainly acceptable is this 
 statement that even the whale has this carpus 
 of the mammal hidden in his fore flipper with 
 its complete attachment to rudimentary toes. 
 Each toe is held to the wrist attachment in 
 mammals by a long slender metacarpal bone, 
 originally five to each hand, and the diverg- 
 ence of mammalian families was plainly se- 
 cured by divergent treatment of these meta- 
 carpal bones. The whole five were made to 
 start off with nearly equal development for 
 the bear, the cat and the dog. These meta- 
 carpals were started with the central one dom- 
 inant and the rest subordinate for the horse 
 family. Two were evidently started together, 
 with nearly equal development, for the needs 
 of the ruminants, the camel, the ox, the deer, 
 sheep and goats. Later, yet, the completion 
 of the plan calls for a mammal with one meta- 
 carpal to serve the purpose of a single digit, 
 and to secure this, natural causes were set to 
 work to make dominant the central meta- 
 
s 
 
 a 
 
 I 
 
Life of Lower Lake Region. 125 
 
 carpal and slowly cast aside the subordinate 
 ones. 
 
 Scarcely any lesson in Paleontology has in 
 it more of interest than that of the intermedi- 
 ate stages of progress that connect the func- 
 tional hoof of the Tertiary horse with the rudi- 
 mentary splint of the living horse of the pres- 
 ent time. Here in the Shoshone land of our 
 story the Eastern Oregon of to-day afe the 
 archives of this horse history of the past. In 
 short, in these Shoshone rocks of the Mio- 
 cene age, we see God's creative work of the 
 ages in transforming a five-toed animal to one 
 of a single digit. It is the revelation of this 
 creative process that makes the fossil horse 
 of Oregon so full of scientific interest. 
 
 On Plate XXI is a good illustration of 
 the metacarpals of the horse in one of the 
 stages of this transition. The condition of 
 these metacarpals in the living horse is seen 
 on Plate XXI (i), the lower ends cast loose, 
 only the upper ends articulated, while in fig- 
 ure (2) these lower ends are articulated to 
 phalanges and these in turn to hoof cores. 
 
126 Life of Lower Lake Region. 
 
 The enveloping sediment that has preserved 
 these bones in place for untold ages is now 
 changed to rock, showing the exact position 
 of the distal end of these rudimentary hoofs. 
 
 The form of horse that most abounded 
 here in the early Miocene period was the An- 
 chitherium, a name Dr. Leidy found already 
 in use in Europe and so adopted for these 
 American fossils. It was a genus of three 
 or four species, varying in size from that of a 
 Newfoundland dog twenty-five to twenty- 
 seven inches in height, to that of a small 
 donkey. In spite of the many close resem- 
 blances between the skeleton of this Anchi- 
 therium and that of our living horse, there 
 were two features in which they differed 
 widely. In the molar teeth of the living horse 
 the divisions of the crown pass into prisms 
 nearly the whole length of the tooth, while the 
 corresponding molars of the Anchitherium 
 are planted in the jaw by fangs or roots. The 
 other feature in which they differ is in the 
 divisions of the foot. In Anchitherium there 
 were three continuous sets of bones in each 
 
Life of Lower Lake Region. 127 
 
 lower leg, joined to as many separate hoofs; 
 while in the living horse, two of the hoof at- 
 tachments are only rudimentary, their func- 
 tion being lost. The result is that the living 
 horse has but one hoof while our Anchithe- 
 rium had three functional hoofs for each foot. 
 
 The teeth of Anchitherium are wonder- 
 fully preserved, not only in outline, but so 
 completely silicified as to carry the luster of 
 agates. Many of these Anchitherium fossils 
 indicate a really beautiful little animal of 
 graceful outline about the size of an antelope, 
 bringing to that early period a truthful 
 prophecy of the highest type of our modern 
 horse. And so abundant were they on the 
 hills of Shoshone that fragments of skeletons 
 are found in nearly all its fossil beds. 
 
 On Plate XXII (i) is a good figure of the 
 lower front teeth of this animal from the lower 
 beds of the John Day. It was of this hand- 
 some fossil that an experienced stableman 
 once exclaimed: "Full mouth, five years old 
 past. Horse? By George! It is." 
 
128 Life of Lower Lake Region. 
 
 On Plate XXIII is a good figure of the 
 molar teeth of the Anchitherium from the 
 same region. 
 
 In the continued wear and tear of the 
 cliffs of these fossil beds under frosts and 
 storms, the fragments that survive erosion 
 longest and therefore accumulate on the drain- 
 age surface, will always be the teeth and the 
 thickly enameled articulating 1 surface of the 
 large bones of the skeleton. The ends of the 
 femur, the ends of the tibia, and especially 
 the ends of the radius, are so distinctly marked 
 in the horse skeleton that they quickly catch 
 the eye of the collector. 
 
 While the horses of the Miocene period 
 of the Shoshone region differed in size, it is 
 noticeable that the different parts of their 
 skeletons retain their relationship in size and 
 general form, so that any bone of any species 
 found to-day would at once be seen to con- 
 form to the type and show the size of the ani- 
 mal to which it must have belonged. The 
 mistaking of the bones of the young of a 
 larger species for the adult of a smaller one, 
 
Life of Lower Lake Region. 129 
 
 need never occur, for the bones of the young 
 carry with them the marks of their tender age. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 LIFE OF UPPER LAKE REGION. 
 
 TRANSITION. 
 
 Before dismissing the history of this lower 
 or Miocene lake, let us ponder a moment on 
 the evidence we have of its long duration. 
 We have a sediment of mud three thousand 
 feet in vertical thickness, by far the greater 
 portions of very fine materials, indicating a 
 slow rate of deposit, other portions coarser, 
 indicating a more rapid deposit, but an aver- 
 age accumulation of not more than a small 
 fraction of an inch per year, and this built 
 up to the thickness of three thousand feet. 
 Yes, this work covered an immense period of 
 time. 
 
 Now it was this vast accumulation of mud- 
 dy lake sediment that was slowly changed to 
 rock, every yard of it teeming with fragments 
 of organic forms that tell the story of its times. 
 
Life of Upper Lake Region. 131 
 
 But more. This great lake bed, one hundred 
 miles or more across, was slowly and unevenly 
 elevated, till, in some places, its bed was 
 tilted to an angle of several degrees from 
 its original level. It was slowly emptied of 
 its covering of water till an extended val- 
 ley only remained to mark its outline, but 
 the Miocene lake had gone forever. The 
 tiltings of the bed of the old lake, its 
 foldings and crumpled condition, give strik- 
 ing evidence of the great forces that mark 
 its passing away. Another fact of like im- 
 port calls for a word of notice, the occur- 
 rence at irregular intervals of dykes of trap 
 showing masses of lava that were forced up 
 from below, filling great orifices in, the hard- 
 ened mud of the lake bed and speaking of 
 nothing if not of force and heat. It was in 
 this cloud of confused and struggling forces 
 that the old Miocene record closes. 
 
 All that is now Eastern Oregon then be- 
 gan a new series of changes on the surface 
 of the upturned ruins of hill and vale. And 
 upon this uptilted mass of confusion, rain and 
 
132 Life of Upper Lake Region. 
 
 snow, heat and frost began a new structural 
 surface and continued its reshapings until a 
 drainage system was worked out for another 
 geological period. How long this period of 
 reconstruction lasted is not recorded; its very 
 stages of progress have long since been 
 blotted out. For aught the record would in- 
 dicate it may have lasted as long as the whole 
 time of the lower lake history, and through- 
 out this whole reconstruction period the hills 
 and plains of Shoshone may have richly 
 abounded in mammalian life, only lacking 
 nature's mode of recording the life of the hills, 
 a good deep lake bed into which mountain 
 streams might in time wash their life remains. 
 The new lake period at length opens as 
 a result of these reconstruction changes. The 
 old Shoshone lake had covered a large part 
 of what is now Eastern Oregon; the new lake 
 system consisted of a number of more re- 
 stricted bodies of water. One of these, the 
 earliest published, may be found along the 
 upper John Day valley, beginning where Cot- 
 tonwood creek joins the John Day river and 
 
Life of Upper Lake Region. 133 
 
 extending several miles southeastward, the 
 channel of the river being excavated through 
 it. It will be remembered that we called the 
 Miocene lake beds the Lower lake deposits. 
 These of the second group we will call the 
 Upper lake deposits and apply to them the 
 term Pliocene. This Upper John Day lake 
 sedimeni, then, is to be with us the type of 
 the group. 
 
 Another Pliocene lake covered a large por- 
 tion of the depression along which the Sho 
 shone or Snake river now flows; a third of 
 these lakes covered the place now occupied 
 by the city of The Dalles; a fourth lake ex- 
 tended north and west from Walla Walla into 
 the Yakima valley; a fifth occupied the de- 
 pression now ^covered by Klamath lake and 
 marsh. Two characteristic fossils run through 
 all these lake sediments of the Pliocene period, 
 the camel and the horse. 
 
 HIPPARION. 
 
 If we look for the record of the horse type 
 in this new chapter, we shall find a wonder- 
 
134 Life of Upper Lake Region. 
 
 ful increase in the variety of its fossil forms. 
 The one that attracts our attention most from 
 the frequency of its occurrence and beauty of 
 its fossil forms is that of the Hipparion. As 
 it occupies a midway position between the 
 Anchitherium and living horse, if we com- 
 pare the Anchitherium with the Hipparion we 
 shall have the amount of change through 
 which the horse passed from the Miocene to 
 the Pliocene age. And carrying the work 
 further if we compare the Hipparion with the 
 present horse we shall have the amount of 
 change through which the horse has passed 
 from the Pliocene to the present. Let us 
 first compare the horse of the Miocene with 
 that of the Pliocene. We find the simpler 
 teeth of the Anchitherium ha^e in the Hip- 
 parion taken on a more complex form in the 
 prisms of their enamel (see Plate XXV), and 
 that the molar teeth of the Anchitherium were, 
 through a large part of their trunks divided 
 into spreading roots, the body part of the 
 tooth remaining short, while in Hipparion 
 the molar teeth have small short roots and 
 
Life of Upper Lake Region. 135 
 
 i 
 
 a large increase in the depth of the body of 
 the tooth, so much so as to remind one at 
 once of the teeth of the living horse. 
 
 That we may extend our comparison to 
 the feet of these Tertiary horses, let us study 
 the fossil shown on Plate XXIV. Here is 
 an Hipparion foot consisting of three meta- 
 carpal bones with corresponding phalanges, 
 the central one much the longest and by far 
 the most symmetrical; all three are articu- 
 lated both above and below, above to the 
 carpus or wrist, below to the phalanges or 
 toe bones. It has been stated in the last chap- 
 ter that the Anchitherium had three useful 
 hoofs for each foot, but this Hipparion fossil 
 shows the two outer metacarpals so short- 
 ened that his hoofs were plainly carried but 
 of reach of the ground as he traveled, giving 
 evidence that the horse of the Pliocene was 
 losing his second and fourth toes. 
 
 If now we compare the same fossil with 
 the corresponding bones of the living horse 
 on Plate XXI, we will find a very marked 
 relative increase of the central metacarpal 
 
i3 6 Life of Upper Lake Region. 
 
 and a great relative diminution in the outer 
 bones, until in the modern horse we see the 
 total retirement of the second and fourth 
 metacarpals except as useless splints. This 
 change occurred between the time of the Hip- 
 parion and that of the living horse. Or, these 
 facts stated a little differently: Formerly the 
 metacarpal bones held the toes to their work, 
 and for this purpose were articulated below to 
 the phalanges or toes ; now these toes are cast 
 off and the metacarpals are only articulated 
 above. Formerly the middle or third meta- 
 carpal differed but little from the outer ones 
 in size, strength and symmetry of form; now 
 it alone can be considered, for all others are 
 rejected from their former functions except 
 this third or center bone. The rest are but 
 the useless tools of former working forces. 
 
 PROTOHIPPUS. 
 
 Another horse whose remains are abun- 
 dant in the Upper lake bed, is designated by 
 Paleontologists as Protohippus. As his name 
 indicates, he approaches the modern horse 
 
Life of Upper Lake Region. 137 
 
 still more closely than Hipparion both in size 
 and form. This Protohippus was also found 
 in Eastern Washington. A banking house in 
 Ellensburg was quarrying stone from a neigh- 
 boring hill for their new building when a 
 workman found some teeth imbedded in a 
 solid rock. These were sent to the ;vnter 
 by W. R. Abrams, who asked if they did not 
 belong to a fossil horse; and they proved to 
 be teeth of the Pliocene horse, Protohippus. 
 For convenience of reference it will be best 
 to designate the Ellensburg locality as part 
 of the Yakima Pliocene, and perhaps a con- 
 tinuation westward of the Touchet Pliocene. 
 
 CAMEL. 
 
 Next to the horse in the variety of interest 
 to which the subject appeals, stands the Camel 
 type among mammals, and in Oregon the 
 Pliocene must, for the present, stand as a 
 record of his life in the past. The fossil 
 camels, like the living members of the family, 
 were divided into two groups, the camel 
 proper and the Auchenia, distinguished by 
 
138 Life of Upper Lake Region. 
 
 the presence or absence of a clawed hoof. 
 There were at least three species of camel in 
 our Shoshone land. The ulna and radius of 
 the largest of these may be found on Plate 
 XXVI, where it is compared with the cor- 
 responding bones of a large recent dray horse 
 so that the reader may judge of the range in 
 size. This animal must have been fully as 
 large as the present Arabian camel. 
 
 An Auchenia, apparently about the size of 
 a goat, and perhaps akin to the South Ameri- 
 can Llama, is represented by a portion of the 
 head and teeth of a very good fossil from the 
 Pliocene lake of the Upper John Day valley. 
 
 The third species from the John Day is, 
 perhaps, the smallest yet noted, being only 
 about two feet high. The fossil bones of a 
 leg and foot of a large Auchenia from Silver 
 Lake region is given on Plate XXVII. This 
 is probably the Vitakeri mentioned m con- 
 nection with the Silver Lake group. A frag- 
 ment of a metacarpal bone of the Camelidae 
 family was found a few years since by D. H. 
 Roberts near The Dalles. Three phalanges 
 
Life of Upper Lake Region. 139 
 
 of the camel family were found in digging 
 wells near Walla Walla, All of these locali- 
 ties yielding camel fossils are presumably ac- 
 cepted as Pliocene. 
 
 CANIS. 
 
 The fine figure of a dog's head the reader 
 will find on Plate XVIII. This fossil was 
 badly broken when taken from the rocks, but 
 with a great deal of labor it was reconstructed. 
 It is one of the few fossils the writer has ever 
 attempted to name, but when the restoration 
 was complete it looked so dog-like that it 
 seemed unwise to send it away from home to 
 be named a procedure that in other years 
 had cost the writer many attractive fossils so 
 it was decided to find for it a name at home. 
 And inasmuch as this dog could not go to 
 the large cities of the world where the record 
 of new species was kept, it seemed fitting to 
 treat him like a country cousin and call his 
 name Canis Rurestris. 
 
 YAKIMA GROUP. 
 
 Before entering further into the geological 
 relations of the fossils on which the record 
 
14 Life of Upper Lake Region. 
 
 of the horse in Oregon is based, a brief outline 
 of the first discovery of these fossils will not 
 be out of place. In the spring of 1866, a new 
 mining interest in Eastern Oregon, Wash- 
 ington and Idaho, resulted in an extensive 
 demand for miners' supplies along the line of 
 Pend d'Oreille lake. The merchants of Walla 
 Walla, in an effort to secure resulting trade, 
 opened a road from Walla Walla to Palouse 
 landing, on Snake river. The distance along 
 this road from the crossing of the Touchet, 
 at Palouse, was thirty miles without water. 
 To remedy this need the road company dug 
 for water fifteen miles beyond the crossing 
 of the Touchet. During the same spring, and 
 in the interest of the same trade, Mr. Moody 
 of The Dalles, afterward Governor Moody 
 of Oregon, was building a small steamer on 
 Pend d'Oreille lake, and on his way home 
 encountered these well diggers of the Touchet 
 wagon road. They had dug through gravel 
 to the depth of eighty-six feet without strik- 
 ing water, but Mr. Moody found them exam- 
 ining some fossil bones they had just found 
 
Life of Upper Lake Region. 141 
 
 at this great depth. They, thinking they were 
 human remains, turned to him for an expla- 
 nation of the mystery and he promised to 
 carry some of the bones to The Dalles, where, 
 he told them, he had a friend who studied 
 such things. One of these fragments was 
 found by the writer to be a remarkably well 
 preserved specimen, shown on Plate XXIII, 
 of a fragment of a radius of a horse quite as 
 large as the corresponding bone of a good 
 sized dray horse of to-day. Careful inquiry 
 brought out the information that the region 
 from the Touchet to the Palouse was nearly 
 level, and the whole eighty-six feet of digging 
 was through river wash. Here, therefore, was 
 proof that when this horse lived, a lake thirty 
 miles across and eighty-six feet deep stretched 
 from the Touchet to the Snake, a depression 
 that was slowly filled up to its present level 
 by the river flow of the region. The same 
 winter the writer published these facts by a 
 lecture in Portland, and the Portland Ore- 
 gonian published the discovery of the fossil 
 horse in Oregon. But the writer took no 
 
142 Life of Upper Lake Region. 
 
 pains to communicate the facts to a scientific 
 journal and so missed the scientific credit of 
 their publication. This Touchet horse, found 
 in 1866 in this old Pliocene lake, was, so far 
 as is known to the writer, the first true fossil 
 horse discovered in North America. 
 
 THE DALLES GROUP. 
 
 Another of these Pliocene lake beds calls 
 for notice and description. One standing on 
 the streets of The Dalles and looking south- 
 ward, will hardly fail to notice a well defined 
 ledge of gray sandstone set against the hills 
 a mile or so from the town, and extending 
 westward three or four miles. It is a rem- 
 nant of an old lake bed that once extended 
 across the valley till its further margin set 
 against the Klickitat mountain. What re- 
 mains of this lake bed is to-day an unbroken 
 level, although surrounded by many of the 
 grandest exhibitions of volcanic and earth- 
 quake power, proving that no great violence 
 has troubled the region since the waters of a 
 quiet lake deposited its sediment there. All 
 
Life of Upper Lake Region. 143 
 
 Miocene deposits are disturbed in Oregon. 
 This deposit is not disturbed; it must, there- 
 fore, have been deposited after the disturb- 
 ance at the close of the Miocene, which would 
 make it Pliocene. But more; a few years 
 ago this rock was extensively used for build- 
 ing purposes in The Dalles. In one of the 
 building blocks taken from the quarry was 
 found a well defined fragment of a metacarpal 
 bone of a camel, and the camel in Oregon 
 marks the Pliocene. This metacarpal of the 
 camefl became of added interest when a few 
 years since a fragment of a very small radius 
 was found, which came into the hands of the 
 writer. This fossil was found among other 
 bones, two or three miles from The Dalles, 
 by men searching for gypsum in an eastern 
 extension of the same gray sandstone. The 
 animal to which it belonged was an Auchenia 
 of the camel family and represents an animal 
 perhaps twenty-five to thirty inches in height. 
 Years ago the writer designated the group 
 of rocks to which this gray sandstone belongs 
 as The Dalles group and Pliocene. 
 
144 Life of Upper Lake Region. 
 
 There is a curious piece of geological his- 
 tory brought to the front in endeavoring to 
 explain the circumstances under which this 
 gray sandstone of The Dalles group must 
 have been deposited in those far away Plio- 
 cene times. It to-day represents the bot- 
 tom of a former lake. It is two hundred and 
 fifty or three hundred feet above the present 
 level of the Columbia river. The river has, 
 in excavating its present bed, washed away 
 the whole of that lake bed excepting this 
 sandstone remnant, and worn its way through 
 over two hundred feet of solid basalt besides, 
 in reaching its present level. The east and 
 south borders of this lake sediment are con- 
 cealed by a covering of glacial deposit, under 
 which it may be traced eastward two or thrc(e 
 miles. It was from this eastward extension 
 of the rock that the small Auchenia fragment 
 of radius was found, and from this same gray 
 sandstone Mr. D. H. Roberts obtained the 
 distal end of a well defined metacarpal bone 
 of a larger Auchenia, perhaps the Vitakeri 
 elsewhere noted. 
 
Life of Upper Lake Region. 145 
 
 From this same locality the writer, many 
 years ago, made a collection of fossil plants 
 which passed into the hands of Dr. Newbury. 
 In this collection was a specimen of birch and 
 a beautiful branch of acacia, the leaflets all 
 finely outlined upon the gray sandstone and 
 the branch carrying three or four large thorns 
 so distinctly impressed on the rock as to give 
 a vivid impression of its place in plant life. 
 Besides these, there was an intensely interest- 
 ing group of oak leaves indicating a range of 
 four or five different species, the whole collec- 
 tion leaving on the mind a conviction of a 
 cold, unfriendly climate, producing a stunted 
 growth of leaves. 
 
 THE SILVER LAKE GROUP. 
 
 In 1876, Governor Whiteaker while 
 camping in Eastern Oregon in the' neighbor- 
 hood of Silver lake, noticed some fossil bones 
 on the surface of the open prairie and shortly 
 after this brought some fragments to the 
 writer of these pages for examination. The 
 Governor was soon convinced that he had dis- 
 
146 Life of Upper Lake Region. 
 
 covered an important fossil bed, and the next 
 summer by kindly furnishing a team and send- 
 ing his son as guide, he gave the writer the 
 pleasure of visiting this Silver lake country. 
 Considering the narrow area of this fossil 
 bed, a surprisingly large number and variety 
 of fossils were found and so brought to the 
 light of scientific report. The last part of the 
 journey took us through a monotonous dead 
 level covered with sage < brush, until finally 
 we reached the home of a ranchman on the 
 shore of one of those strange alkali lakes 
 whose flats are at this season covered with 
 a thick inflorescence of alkali. Here we left 
 our wagon and the next morning started on 
 horseback for the fossil beds. After traveling 
 about eight miles we saw, from the eminence 
 of a sand dune, an apparently circular depres- 
 sion four or five miles across, in the lowest 
 portion of which was a small pond, or lake, 
 surrounded by grass and tule rushes. Per- 
 haps two miles to the leeward this depression 
 was bordered by a line of sand dunes, unques- 
 tionably formed from sands blown from the 
 
Life of Upper Lake Region. H7 
 
 bed of the lake that once occupied the whole, 
 of this depression. It is the blowing out of 
 this sediment which exposes the fossils buried 
 in the depths of the old lake. Here we staked 
 our horses and went to work. We found 
 many fragments of elephant bones, a fine col- 
 lection of bird bones, the bones of a large 
 horse, a large camel, and the remains of a 
 smaller animal of the camel family, the Auche- 
 nia shown on Plate XXVII, which Professor 
 Cope named in honor of Governor Whiteaker, 
 Auchenia Vitakeri. 
 
 Judging from the uniformity of its sur- 
 roundings one is found unavoidably thinking 
 of an extensive lake sediment, of which this 
 fossil lake is only a very small portion. The 
 original Pliocene lake probably included Sil- 
 ver lake and Klamath marsh with its sur- 
 roundings, and perhaps Summer lake and an 
 extension eastward over the present Harney 
 and Malheur lake regions. These waters were 
 lowered to their present level by evaporation 
 in excess of inflow. The mineral left behind 
 accumulated in the process until it covered 
 
148 Life of Upper Lake Region. 
 
 the face of the pond like snow. These waters 
 must have varied in extent at different periods. 
 From one spot the writer could mark an ex- 
 tent of not less than sixty miles from east 
 tr west and fifteen to twenty from north to 
 south, with a variation of surface scarcely 
 reaching what an ordinary eye would call 
 thirty feet. And this whole extent was water- 
 covered during the life of the elephant, as is 
 proved by his remains. The portions of this 
 extensive lake bed, which remained latest, 
 caught most of the animal bones buried in 
 its mud. This special one we visited con- 
 tinued sandy and when dry its contents were 
 laid bare by drifting winds. 
 
 Beside this extensive Pliocene lake already 
 mentioned, there are, fronting on Snake river, 
 a series of terraces, fragments of a continuous 
 lake bed from which the writer has received 
 fresh water fossils. Among these a small 
 pastern bone of a horse was found, establish- 
 ing the claim of the beds as Pliocene. 
 
 The fossils of these Silver lake beds were 
 found often lying on the surface, bare of any 
 

 fi 
 
 ^ 
 
 S! 
 
 * 
 
Life of Upper Lake Region. 149 
 
 covering. The sands and dust that had cov- 
 ered them were blown to the leeward where 
 they lay in extended dunes, and this uncover- 
 ing and drifting process was still visibly going 
 on. Among these fossils we found many 
 arrow heads of obsidian such as were used by 
 recent Indians. 
 
 We found, too, lying among them, many 
 fresh water shells of species now living in the 
 waters of Klamath marsh. Shells and .arrow 
 heads were, like the fossil bones, entirely un- 
 covered, lying upon the surface of the ground. 
 If the sands, the fossils, the arrow points and 
 the fresh water shells, were all of the same 
 period, and the camel bones were Pliocene, 
 then the arrow points were fashioneb in the 
 Pliocene and men inhabited the surrounding 
 hills in the Pliocene period. But the mixture 
 of these facts may be due entirely to the sim- 
 ple law of gravitation, for both the arrow 
 points and the recent shells may have settled 
 down among the fossils as the dust and sand 
 upon which they rested were- gradually blown 
 away. Professor Cope, on seeing the facts in 
 
150 Life of Upper Lake Region. 
 
 place, accepted the conclusion that the fossils 
 and the arrow heads belonged together and 
 were both Pliocene, and therefore that human 
 beings were living here in Klamath region in 
 Pliocene times. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 LIFE OF SURFACE DEPOSITS. 
 SURFACE BEDS. 
 
 The field intended by the term Surface 
 beds includes all slight depressions of the sur- 
 face producing ponds with sediment enough 
 to preserve bones and teeth washed into them, 
 and also swamps and bogs into which large 
 mammals often sink to their death, leaving 
 their bones to such preserving agencies as 
 might occur there. And inasmuch as the lat- 
 est great surface leveling agency of the north 
 temperate zone was that of the glacial ice, 
 most of these surface depressions would date 
 from glacial times, and would, therefore, be 
 properly designated as Pleistocene. Further- 
 more, up to the glacial period the horse and 
 the camel were abundant here, and the ques- 
 tion of their continuance in Oregon through 
 glacial times is still in doubt, so that our 
 group of surface sediments must provide the 
 settling testimony on this question. 
 
152 Life of Surface Deposits. 
 
 If the bogs, swamps and minor surface de- 
 pressions furnish no horse or camel bones, 
 then must it be accepted that the glacial cold 
 drove these mammals away or destroyed 
 them. It is plain that the mammoth elephant 
 got him a coat of fur and lived through the 
 cold spell of the times. The fossils of this 
 group of Surface beds, such as the Mastodon, 
 the Mammoth, the Broad-faced Ox and Mylo- 
 don, though deeply interesting in themselves, 
 bring added historical attraction from the fact 
 that a large part of their geological period 
 overlaps that of prehistoric man. 
 
 THE MYLODON. 
 
 There were three of these sloth-like ani- 
 mals in North America during this period 
 designated by the term Surface beds the 
 Megatherium, the Megalonyx and the Mylo- 
 don. We have chosen to represent the group 
 by the Mylodon because we happen to have 
 a good pair of claw bones for illustration. The 
 animal was larger than the rhinoceros, fifteen 
 to eighteen feet long, and a browser of trees. 
 
Life of Surface Deposits. 153 
 
 Its remains are rare in Oregon. The toe 
 bones shown on Plate XXVIII (i and 3) are 
 from the banks of the Yamhill river, proving 
 that Mylodon lived in Oregon on the shores 
 of Willamette sound in the Pleistocene age. 
 They were more abundant further south, es- 
 pecially in South America. 
 
 BOS LATIFRONS. 
 
 The precursor of the buffalo in Oregon 
 was this Broad-faced Ox. His horns were 
 longer and stouter and his bony forehead was 
 wider than that of the buffalo, measuring 
 nineteen inches across the line of the eyes. 
 His brain cavity was very small, scarcely as 
 large as that of a three months calf of to-day. 
 His skull was not only very wide but un- 
 usually thick, being two and a half inches 
 thick in mid forehead. The front of this skull 
 is figured on Plate XXIX. This one was 
 found five or six miles east of The Dalles. 
 
 THE MASTODON. 
 
 The Mastodon and the Mammoth are 
 both abundant fossils in Oregon. In some 
 
154 Life of Surface Deposits. 
 
 features of their physiology they are similar, 
 as in size, in having trunks possessing great 
 delicacy of touch, and in the development of 
 tusks of great power and of pure ivory, but 
 they vary widely in external appearance and 
 their dentition was strangely different. The 
 crowns of the teeth of the Mastodon are cov- 
 ered with rows of conical protuberances, see. 
 Plate XXVIII (2), the jaws are filled with 
 closely set teeth like those of other mammals, 
 while the Mammoth has but one tooth at a 
 time in each jaw and that one a marvel of 
 structure. The mining processes of the Sho- 
 shone region have uncovered many fine speci- 
 mens of Mastodon jaw r s and teeth. 
 
 MAMMOTH. 
 
 In the Mammoth the student of animal 
 life will always find the furthest reach of mam- 
 malian development. The Shoshone region 
 had its full share of Mammoth life, for scarcely 
 a digging of any importance in Eastern Ore- 
 gon is without its list of Mammoth fossils. 
 Whether one considers the size of the indi- 
 
Life of Surface Deposits. 155 
 
 vidual, the length of its life or the time allotted 
 to its geological horizon, or the prodigious 
 numbers to which it reached, this great ele- 
 phant stands at the head of its column. In 
 its presence our living elephant is but a de- 
 generate offspring, indicating the rapid pass- 
 ing away of the race. There are scarcely any 
 fossil beds of this Surface division but have 
 their Mammoth teeth as trophies of their ex- 
 cavations. The Mammoth tooth is not sim- 
 ply a bulky mass, but an admirably con- 
 structed and complex piece of work. The 
 unit in its structure is simple, a single cusp. 
 The cusp is united with other cusps to form 
 a flat plate. The cusps are cemented together 
 by layers of dentine, each period of the ele- 
 phant's life being accorded a specific number 
 of plates so that the first molar, the milk 
 tooth, is cut at three months old and shed 
 when the calf is two years old; the second, of 
 eight or nine plates, is shed at six years; the 
 third, of eleven , thirteen plates, is shed at 
 nine years; the fourth, of fifteen or sixteen 
 plates, is shed at twenty-five years; the fifth, 
 
CHAPTER XL 
 THE ROCKS OF THE JOHN DAY VALLEY. 
 
 [ Published in The Overland Monthly, May, 1871.] 
 
 In the controversies of the day on the 
 Origin of Species, any record of the past 
 as authoritative as that of a good geological 
 field, covering an extensive range and filled 
 with minute details of events, can hardly fail 
 to be instructive. The basin of the Columbia 
 river, with its tributaries, offers such a history 
 to the world at once continuous and author- 
 itative, reaching, in its field of operations from 
 the Rocky mountains to the Pacific ocean, 
 and, in the time it covers, from the Cretaceous 
 period to the recent. It covers even the lay- 
 ing of the foundations of the country and de- 
 fines the narrow strips of land that first 
 emerged from the ocean to become the frame 
 work of the great mountain chains. Later, 
 
158 The Rocks of the John Day Valley. 
 
 as the elevation and extent of the land in- 
 creased, the ocean water that first occupied 
 the depressions between was displaced and 
 fresh water took its place, brought there by 
 the now greatly increased flow from the land. 
 Henceforth history written by the ocean 
 ceased; history written by lakes and rivers 
 commenced in the storing away of specimens 
 of tree and beast and bird, and their effectual 
 preservation as material facts in an unerring 
 record. The sea thus excluded never re- 
 turned to the region east of the Cascade 
 mountains. A vast lake system took its place 
 and began at once to make, as well as to 
 write, its own history. 
 
 There are many residents of the Pacific 
 slope who will remember having journeyed 
 from The Dalles, on the Columbia river, to 
 Canyon City, among the Blue mountains. 
 For sixty miles or more the road passes over 
 volcanic materials which have drifted there 
 from the Cascade range. Twenty miles fur- 
 ther and this outflow thins out into a mere 
 capping of basalt on the hill tops. The hills 
 
The Rocks of the John Day Valley. 159 
 
 themselves, and the foundations on which 
 they stand, are here found to be sedimentary 
 rock, wonderfully filled with the abundant 
 records of former animal and vegetable life. 
 Oldest of all in sight is the old ocean bed of 
 the Cretaceous period, with its teeming thou- 
 sands of marine shells, as perfect to-day in 
 their rocky bed as those of our recent sea 
 shores, their cavities often filled with calca- 
 reous spar or chalcedony as if to compensate 
 for the loss of their own proper marine hues. 
 Next in ascending order come the fresh-water 
 deposits of the earlier T ertiaries, so full of the 
 leaf prints of the grand old forests which dur- 
 ing that age of semi-tropical climate covered 
 those lake shores. The marine rocks form 
 the outer rim or shore-line of what was in 
 those early times a lake of irregular outline, 
 extending from Kern Creek hill on the west 
 to Canyon City on the east, and from the hills 
 north of the John Day river to the Crooked 
 River valley on the south. Within this lake 
 depression whose former muddy sediment is 
 now elevated into chalky hills, so despised for 
 
160 The Rocks of the John Day Valley. 
 
 their alkaline waters and unproductive soils, 
 the geologist feels at home. How strangely 
 out of place a score of palm trees, a hundred 
 yew trees, or even a bank of ferns, would seem 
 here now, and yet here these once lived and 
 died and were buried, and beautiful beyond 
 description are their fossil remains even now, 
 as they are unburied. 
 
 Seen from the summit of Kern Creek hill, 
 its western border, this vast amphitheater of 
 lesser hills presents a wild, wonderful group- 
 ing of varied outlines and colors. A spur of 
 the Blue mountains its nearest point forty 
 miles away covered with a dense forest, 
 forms the dark background of the view. The 
 varying shades of brown that characterize the 
 older marine rocks rise in vast border masses, 
 almost treeless and shrubless, in an inner, ir- 
 regular circle, while the lighter shades that 
 fill the deeper depressions of the central por- 
 tion mark the later sedimentary deposits; and 
 then, like vast ink blots on a painting, one 
 sees, here and there, a protruding mass of 
 dark colored trap. Through the heart of this 
 
The Rocks of the John Day Valley. 163 
 
 these the bones of the rhinoceros are frequent, 
 but the remains of an extinct animal, allied 
 in some respects to the camel, in others to the 
 tapir family, are most abundant. Paleontolo- 
 gists have designated the genus by the name 
 of Orecdon. The remains of three or four 
 species of this animal are found in Central 
 Oregon. One of these, new to science, was 
 discovered thirty miles from here, and was by 
 Dr. Leidy named Oreodon Superbus, from its 
 superior size. The shaly rocks in which these 
 remains are found are very brittle, and the en- 
 closed fossils partake of that brittleness to 
 such an extent that if not handled with the 
 utmost care they crumble into small frag- 
 ments. Two nearly entire heads were dis- 
 covered in a ravine that opens into Bridge 
 Creek valley. They had been exposed all 
 winter to rain and frost, and were very brittle, 
 almost ready to drop to pieces. They were 
 passed by until the following day, when a 
 careful treatment to several coats of good 
 flour paste was rendered the more efficient by 
 additional pasting on of common paper. This 
 
1 64 The Rocks of the John Day Valley. 
 
 was kept on for a while, when it was carefully 
 washed off, and a more permanent preparation 
 applied. These specimens now make a very 
 passable appearance. Mute historians are 
 they of the far distant past, uniting with hun- 
 dreds of others to tell strange stories of the 
 wonderful wealth of forest, field and lake shore 
 of that period. A tapir-like animal to which 
 the name of Lophiodon has been given lived 
 here too. His remains indicate an animal of 
 the size of the living tapir. Not far from the 
 last were found some bones of a fossil peccary 
 of large size. Another of the denizens of these 
 ancient lake shores bore some resemblance to 
 the horse. The remains of this animal, the 
 Anchitherium, were first discovered in the 
 Tertiary rocks of France a few years ago; 
 more recently they were found in the "Bad 
 Lands" of Nebraska, and later in the John 
 Day valley. But the richest chapters in the 
 history of the horse in Oregon are not from 
 those rocks of the lower valley, for another 
 and a later record in the upper part of the 
 valley contains these. 
 
The Rocks of the John Day Valley. 161 
 
 wild region winds the John Day river, run- 
 ning westward until it passes the middle 
 ground of the picture, and then turning north- 
 ward to join the Columbia. 
 
 This stream, so insignificant in appear- 
 ance, has done wonderful work among these 
 hills. The river itself was in the olden times 
 merely a series of connecting links between 
 a chain of lakes that extended from the Blue 
 mountains to the Cascades of the Columbia. 
 It has for unnumbered ages gone on excavat- 
 ing vast gorges and canyons as all other 
 streams in central Oregon have done, till lake 
 after lake was drained off and their beds laid 
 bare important records of the past, cutting 
 changed to a treeless desert. The deep ex- 
 cavations that resulted could hardly fail to lay 
 bare important records of the past, cutting 
 as they do through the whole extent of the 
 Tertiary period. In a deep canyon, through 
 which runs a branch of Kern creek, may be 
 found the remains of the fan palm, with abun- 
 dant remains of a beautiful fern, a gem of its 
 kind, which no thoughtful mind can see with- 
 
1 62 The Rocks of the John Day Valley. 
 
 out wonder and admiration. In another ra- 
 vine are seen in great numbers the remains 
 of a yew, or yew-like tree, that sheds annually 
 not its leaflets, but its branchlets;-for in this 
 form they are found of almost uniform length 
 and structure imbedded in the rocks. This 
 tree was evidently abundant upon those an- 
 cient shores, for it can be found at almost 
 every spot where a little stream washed its 
 miniature delta into the lake. Oaks, too, and 
 occasionally a fine impression of an acorn, or 
 acorn-cup, are found at intervals from this 
 place to the Blue mountains. 
 
 But the great geological importance of 
 that old lake depression does not arise from 
 the fossil remains of its forests, beautiful, 
 varied, and abundant as they are, but from 
 its finely preserved fossil bones. Two species 
 of rhinoceros lived their quiet, indolent lives 
 among the reeds that lined the old lake shore. 
 A little beyond the southern spur of that dis- 
 tant mountain there evidently emptied a 
 stream of some size, for its delta is strewn 
 with fragments of silicified bones. Among 
 
K 
 
The Rocks of the John Day Valley. 167 
 
 brought to a close. The last rock of the 
 series fills the place of a cover to the volume. 
 Never was cover better defined nor more dis- 
 tinctly separated from the well written and 
 well illustrated pages it serves to protect. The 
 cover itself, too, has a history worth reading. 
 It extends for miles, varying but slightly in 
 thickness, which amounts to twenty or 
 twenty-five feet, and is throughout so entirely 
 volcanic as to leave no room for mistake. Its 
 materials -are volcanic ashes and cinders, the 
 cinders ranging from an inch across down- 
 ward to the minuteness of the ashes. One 
 can hardly look at a piece of this rock without 
 recalling the younger Pliny's vivid description 
 of the shower of cinders from Mount Vesu- 
 vius, from which he saw people escaping with 
 pillows tied on their heads for protection. 
 Such showers fell here certainly over hun- 
 dreds of square miles and in such vast bulk 
 that, pressed by the hydraulic force of later 
 masses above it into a solid plate of rock, it 
 now in this form measures from twenty to 
 twenty-five feet through. No wonder it closed 
 
1 68 The Rocks of the John Day Valley. 
 
 one of the finest life records of that remote 
 period, and with the record that volume, be- 
 coming at once the proximate cause of the 
 changes that followed, and the upper cover of 
 the volume it sealed. 
 
 But this violent destruction of the life of 
 the period did not destroy that lake depres- 
 sion; it only partially filled its shallower por- 
 tions, and added thirty feet or more of sedi- 
 ment to the rest. The lake remained and still 
 continued to receive into its archives of hid- 
 den sediment tokens of the forces at work 
 among the hills around it. One remarkable 
 change marked that transition; the labora- 
 tories of the hills seem thereafter to have lost 
 the power to send forth from their secret re- 
 cesses heated vapors laden with mineral ma- 
 terials, as they had done, capable of changing 
 everything they touched to stone. The old 
 sediments of that lake, if originally clay, are 
 found changed to argillaceous rock; if sand, 
 changed to sand stone; if washed gravel, they 
 are found cemented into conglomerate. The 
 new sediments, if clay, remained clay; if sand, 
 
The Rocks of the John Day Valley. 165 
 
 Doubtless both portions of the valley were 
 once continuous and formed one lake, but a 
 stream of lava from the Blue mountains seems 
 to have run into it near the present site of 
 Camp Watson, dividing it into an upper and 
 a lower lake. The lower one seems to have 
 drained off first, the upper one remaining a 
 lake into the later Tertiary period, and receiv- 
 ing into its archives the remains of the animal 
 types of a later age. The river was apparently 
 turned northward by that outpouring of vol- 
 canic materials, and cutting for itself a new 
 channel in the deep canyon thirty miles or 
 more away formed a great bend, and exca- 
 vated an immense basin in these nearer and 
 lighter colored Tertiary rocks. Above that 
 bend, that canyon and that volcanic outflow, 
 the valley opens again, and there, extending 
 from Cottonwood creek to Canyon City, are 
 the remains of the upper lake depression of 
 the John Day valley. This later lake depres- 
 sion received into its sediment a larger amount 
 of volcanic ashes and cinders than the lower 
 one did. Several of its strata are pure vol- 
 
1 66 The Rocks of the John Day Valley. 
 
 canic ashes, rough to the touch as ground 
 pumice stone, which must have fallen on that 
 lake in vast quantities. The purest was evi- 
 dently that which had fallen directly into the 
 lake, the less pure that which, first falling on 
 surrounding hills, had subsequently drifted 
 from them by the action of the winds and 
 waters and had become part of the lake sedi- 
 ment. 
 
 Upon the hills that overlooked these lake 
 shores there lived three or four different 
 species of the horse family. Their remains 
 are easily distinguished, for the teeth are well 
 preserved and the teeth of the horse are well 
 marked. Almost as well marked as these 
 equine remains were some teeth that appar- 
 ently represented a member of the camel fam- 
 ily found there too, in a fine specimen of a 
 lower jaw silicified completely and in solid 
 rock. Fossil remains of other species also 
 giving a wide range of life record, were found. 
 
 But the most remarkable thing about this 
 upper lake record is that which reveals the 
 way in which its history of this period wa? 
 
The Rocks of the John Day Valley. 171 
 
 dawn! Strange, beautiful coincidence of fact 
 with system! 
 
 The next glimpse we get is of the middle 
 Tertiary period. It is distinct enough to en- 
 able us to recognize upon those lake shores 
 the rhinoceros, the oreodon, the tapir, and 
 then closes abruptly to give place to a record 
 of fire and of violence the fire of the vol- 
 cano, and the violence of the earthquake 
 bringing upon the life of the period a blotted, 
 illegible night record in its history. 
 
 But another dawn came then, and we see, 
 among the forms that move along those 
 shores, the familiar ones of the horse and 
 the camel. Again the legible record closes 
 and thirty feet or more of ashes and volcanic 
 cinders cover the land and choke and poison 
 the waters. 
 
 A long, dark, nearly illegible part of the 
 record follows, during which no life history 
 was written, but during which the old throes 
 of violence seem to have passed away, and 
 the laboratories of the earth seem to have lost 
 the power of forcing heated vapors to the 
 
172 The Rocks of the John Day Valley. 
 
 surface capable of changing all to stone that 
 they touched. 
 
 The mammoth, the horse and the ox ap- 
 pear in the light of the dawn that follows this 
 long geological night, and not fire, as before, 
 but frost, seems to have closed the record 
 marked by their fossil remains. 
 
 This alternating of light of life and dark- 
 ness of death as read in the rocks of that 
 region leaves us long periods of its chronology 
 unwritten save by fire and flood. What are 
 these blanks in that life-record? Have the 
 materials upon which they were originally 
 written been partially or wholly destroyed or 
 washed away? No, for in a neighboring 
 mountain, fifteen hundred feet in vertical sec- 
 tion, they still remain, protected by a heavy 
 capping of basalt. The pages are there but 
 they are defaced by fire and ashes. But were 
 there not, or at least might there not have 
 been, vast periods during which no record 
 was made? 
 
 This supposition, too, is inadmissible. A 
 lake existed here through the whole Tertiary 
 
The Rocks of the John Day Valley. 169 
 
 remained sand; if gravel, remained so, unal- 
 tered even now. 
 
 Long after that heaviest deluge of ashes 
 had settled down into permanent rock, a new 
 chapter was opened in the life record of these 
 lake shores. The stratified materials that re- 
 ceived these later records were washed from 
 either shore into remarkably uniform slopes 
 toward the middle line of the lake depression. 
 These slopes were evidently once continuous 
 along both sides of the valley, but since the 
 lake was drained off by the deeper wearing of 
 its outlet, every little stream from the sur- 
 rounding hills has cut its own ravine through 
 these stratified sands, gravels and clays, until 
 what was once continuous is now cut up into 
 the remarkably uniform series of ridges whose 
 summit outlines stand in fine perspective as 
 far as the eye can reach. In the ravines that 
 separate these ridges the gold of this region is 
 found, and in the diggings that result, the 
 bones, teeth and tusks of the elephant are 
 often uncovered, a few of which have been 
 preserved. In the loose m?/eria 1 s that form 
 
1 70 The Rocks of the John Day Valley. 
 
 these ridges the closing annals of that remark- 
 able lake period of Central Oregon may be 
 read as in a book. The last facts noted there 
 are the records of the mammoth, the horse, 
 the ox and their contemporaries. 
 
 We have thus attempted to give four or 
 five glimpses into the grand old panoramic 
 life record of the past in Central Oregon, suc- 
 cessive day-and-night glimpses of the past, 
 along the shores of a series of lakes that once 
 occupied the valley, now depressed, through 
 which meanders the John Day river. 
 
 The first one of these views is characteris- 
 tic of the old marine life of the original sea. 
 bed. It is made up of a number of patches 
 of sea beach, strewn with shells, a tooth or 
 two of some extinct reptile, a vertebra of an- 
 other, and the marine record closes. The 
 shoals on which these marine remains lived 
 became elevated into the framework of the 
 future Oregon, while in the depressions be- 
 tween them her earliest historic records at 
 once began. Oregon's Eocene, Oregon's 
 
Si 
 
 a 
 
 a 
 
The Rocks of the John Day Valley. 175 
 
 rest only in the path of the theologian who 
 claims a separate creation for each great type 
 of animal life, he greatly misapprehends the 
 present state of these investigations. But it was 
 no part of the plan of this article to advocate 
 any existing theory, or to start a new one 
 in this difficult field of inquiry so full today 
 of conflicting views, but rather to call atten- 
 tion to the importance of the Columbia basin 
 as a field filled to an extraordinary degree 
 with the very facts needed to throw light on 
 the question of the origin of species. 
 
 Three great ranges of mountains and sev- 
 eral minor ones were elevated across its water 
 shed, making so many immense dams holding 
 back the waters in extensive lake depressions, 
 among which the river itself was for ages but 
 a series of connecting links. It is now almost 
 certain that these vast lake depressions con- 
 tinued from their first formation to be such, 
 until the bones of the modern horse, ox and 
 elephant were received into their sedimentary 
 deposits, thus including records covering 
 nearly the whole period of ancient mammalian 
 
1 76 The Rocks of the John Day Valley. 
 
 life upon the earth. Add to these facts that 
 all the rocks through which the streams of 
 this region during this long geological period 
 have been wearing their way were those of 
 the later and softer materials, and therefore, 
 the more rapidly worn down, not only in the 
 canyons of the larger streams but the ravines 
 of the smaller ones and upon every hill side, 
 and we have a combination of favoring condi- 
 tions such as must make its geology accessi- 
 ble, very full and important. 
 
 Indeed, one can hardly look over its his- 
 toric archives of the Tertiary period without 
 a conviction that this Columbia basin is des- 
 tined yet to be the great battle ground of 
 conflicting theories upon the question of the 
 origin of species. 
 
The Rocks of the John Day Valley. 173 
 
 period, and a continued lake depression sur- 
 rounded by elevated ridges of hills, rising in 
 many places into mountain magnitude, im- 
 plies the deposit of continued sediment, and 
 this necessarily becomes the page upon which 
 the history of the life along its shores is writ- 
 ten. The winds would always blow into the 
 waters of the lake their burden of leaves, and 
 the floods of winter wash there some frag- 
 ments of the bones of the animals that char- 
 acterized the period. It must have happened, 
 then, that at the close of each great period as 
 indicated here, the animal life of these ancient 
 lake shores was entirely destroyed by fire, 
 flood and the poisonous vapors that tainted 
 earth, air and waters, or else those to whom 
 migration was possible escaped to some other 
 region. The supposition of their entire de- 
 struction encounters this difficulty: the de- 
 struction of the entire fauna of Oregon, and 
 even of the whole western slope of the conti- 
 nent, would not have secured the results ob- 
 served, unless we suppose a like destruction 
 extending to the Atlantic coast; for the same 
 
174 The Rocks of the John Day Valley. 
 
 animals lived there when they lived here. 
 Their remains are found, even to identity of 
 species, from Nebraska to New Mexico. It 
 is difficult to assign their destruction there to 
 the same causes that destroyed them here, or 
 to any cause operating at once over a whole 
 continent, while the climate remained un- 
 changed and food continued abundant. On 
 the other hand, the supposition of the escape 
 of a portion from these destroying agencies 
 meets, among others, this difficulty: when 
 here in this John Day valley quiet had been 
 again restored, the hills had been again 
 clothed in verdure and the waters had precipi- 
 tated not only, but covered out of sight, their 
 vast strata of volcanic ashes, then animal life 
 returned, too, but not the same that had pre- 
 viously existed. The whole fauna was 
 changed, and even where the same type was 
 restored, as in the case of the horse, it is in 
 some new species; the old had passed away, 
 and forever. 
 
 If any one supposes that all the difficulties 
 that beset these lines of inquiry and research 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 AN INDIAN LEGEND. 
 
 There is an Indian legend that many years 
 ago the Columbia was navigable for canoes 
 from the Chinook villages at the mouth of the 
 river to The Dalles; that voyagers on their 
 way up and down passed under a great nat- 
 ural bridge which spanned the river at the 
 present Cascades. The great falls of the river 
 in those days were a little above The Dalles 
 at the present falls of the Tumwater, where 
 the waters then descended perpendicularly 
 twelve to fifteen times the height of a tall 
 man. These falls prevented the salmon from 
 going above that place and the Indians of the 
 interior came there to purchase the fish for 
 which they gave buffalo and buffalo robes. 
 But after many years Mount Hood and 
 Mount St. Helens had a quarrel during which 
 these mountains threw out fire and smoke 
 
1 78 An Indian Legend. 
 
 and hurled great rocks at each other. Such 
 was the violence of the contest that the ground 
 shook for miles around and in this commotion 
 the natural bridge that spanned the river at 
 the Cascades was broken down and the ruin 
 of this bridge so obstructed the stream as to 
 dam up its waters at the Cascades, raising the 
 river above so high as to almost take away 
 the falls of the Tumwater. 
 
 A two-fold result followed this violent 
 change. The salmon, thenceforth, were able 
 to pass The Dalles, and the Indians of the 
 interior were no longer compelled to come 
 to the Tumwater for fish, while the canoes of 
 the Chinooks were thenceforth shut off from 
 the river above the Cascades. 
 
 The gold hunter takes a pan of dirt and 
 shakes it violently in water till he sees the 
 gold it contains, if there be any. Let us treat 
 this Indian legend to a like process. Is it 
 supposable that any existing cause could have 
 increased the obstructions in the river here 
 at the Cascades so as to have brought about 
 the change indicated in the legend? Or are 
 
An Indian Legend. 179 
 
 there now any existing indications of any such 
 changes having occurred? 
 
 The characteristic tendency of basalt to 
 vertical fracture, especially as in this case, 
 when overlying a softer rock, renders the por- 
 tions of these mountains that overhang the 
 river bank, liable to a good deal of crumbling. 
 That this friability is deep and not a mere sur- 
 face movement of debris is proved by a gen- 
 eral but slow movement of both banks toward 
 the river. The able engineer of the O. S. N. 
 Co. once assured the writer that this slow 
 glacial like movement of the mountains to- 
 ward the river was such as to necessitate fre- 
 quent readjustment of the railroad lines of the 
 company on both sides of the river. One 
 readily sees how this pressure of, foot hills to- 
 ward the bank may be unequally resisted or 
 accelerated by the rate of erosion over the 
 river bed, or the setting of the currents to- 
 wards one bank rather than the other. One 
 sees too, how any violent disturbance, such 
 as an earthquake, would greatly increase this 
 streamward movement, even to the extent of 
 
i8o An Indian Legend. 
 
 obstructing the channel and retarding the 
 current so as to cause the river above the Cas- 
 cades to rise above its former level. 
 
 The five miles of rapids we now call the 
 Cascades have a total fall of thirty-seven feet. 
 If thirty feet of this were, by any cause, now 
 transferred fifty miles above to the other fall 
 at the Tumwater, the result would certainly 
 be a barrier to all further progress upward of 
 the salmon of the Columbia. That something 
 has occurred here to raise the Columbia above 
 the Cascades within a century or so is almost 
 certain, for submerged groves of trees occur 
 along both sides of the river above for a dis- 
 tance of twelve or fifteen miles. These sub- 
 merged forests are not petrified, as sometimes 
 stated, but trees in slow process of decay in 
 positions to which landslides could not have 
 brought them, and in a depth of water in 
 which they could not grow. They are now in 
 the lowest stages of water standing in a depth 
 of fifteen to twenty feet. It is therefore almost 
 certain that when these groves of trees were 
 living, the Columbia river between the Upper 
 
fi 
 
 e 
 
An Indian Legend. 181 
 
 Cascades and The Dalles, was more than 
 twenty feet lower than it is today. 
 
 A strong confirmation of these facts and 
 conclusions may be found in the United States 
 Railroad Survey, Vol. 6, where Dr. Newbury 
 writes as follows: "The river from The Dalles 
 to the Cascades is very deep, has an impercep- 
 tible current and has rather the appearance 
 of an elongated lake than of a flowing stream." 
 Surely this looks a little like a damming up of 
 the waters, but Dr. Newbury continues: "At 
 intervals over the entire distance from the 
 point where we entered the mountains to the 
 Cascades, the river is bordered on either side 
 by the erect but partially decayed stumps of 
 trees, which project in considerable numbers 
 from the surface of the water. This has been 
 termed the 'Sunken Forest' and has been gen- 
 erally attributed to slides from the sides of 
 the mountains which have carried down into 
 the bed of the stream the standing trees. This 
 phenomenon however, is dependent on a dif- 
 ferent cause. As I have mentioned, the vicin- 
 itv of the falls has been the scene of recent 
 
1 82 An Indian Legend. 
 
 volcanic action. A consequence of this action 
 has been the precipitation of a portion of this 
 wall bordering the stream into its bed." 
 
 This lake like level of the waters above the 
 Cascades, together with its great depth; this 
 extended sunken forest whose trees are too 
 uniformly perpendicular to permit the suppo- 
 sition of landslides where they stand; this gla- 
 cial like lateral pressure against the Cascade 
 railroad so capable of great acceleration in 
 times of volcanic action; these facts indicate 
 some truth in that old Indian tradition of the 
 Lower Columbia. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 THE DEVELOPMENT THEORY. 
 
 [Lecture delivered in Portland, February, 1883.] 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 "Reasoning apriori, we assume that or- 
 ganisms, both plant and animal, have been 
 created by development from pre-existent 
 forms, because it agrees with the general 
 course of nature. All the events in geology, 
 as in physics and astronomy, being due to the 
 operation of natural laws, it is reasonably sup- 
 posed that the production of all the species of 
 plants and animals from original simple forms, 
 like the monera or bacteria, have been the 
 result of natural law. The study of the early 
 forms of life found in the Paleozoic strata; 
 the laws of the succession of types; the cor- 
 relation existing between the development of 
 the individual and of the members of the class 
 to which it belongs; the parallelism between 
 
184 The Development Theory. 
 
 the formation and the differentiation of the 
 land masses of the globe and the successive 
 extinctions and creations of plants and ani- 
 mals; all these facts, notwithstanding the 
 imperfections of the geological record, and the 
 fact that many of the older forms of animals 
 were nearly as much specialized as those now 
 living, tend strongly to prove that on the 
 whole the world as it now exists has been the 
 result of progressive development, one form 
 coming generically from another; the animal 
 and plant worlds constituting two systems 
 of blood relations rather than sets of inde- 
 pendent creations." Dr. Packard's Zoology, 
 pp. 671-2. 
 
 EVOLUTION. 
 
 The doctrine of theistic evolution, that is, 
 the doctrine that declares evolution to be 
 God's process of creation, is now taught by all 
 the higher colleges of our country. Among 
 its teachers it enrolls the names of Dr. Mc- 
 Cosh of Princeton, to represent the Presby- 
 terians; Professor Dana of Yale, to represent 
 the Congregationalists ; Professor Packard of 
 
The Development Theory. 185 
 
 Brown University, to represent the Baptists. 
 It claims among its seats of learning, Har- 
 vard, Dartmouth, Cornell, Michigan Univer- 
 sity, University of California and many other 
 colleges of less note. 
 
 Although it has this standing among reli- 
 gious teachers, two classes of thinkers still 
 persist in lecturing and sermonizing the pub- 
 lic into the belief that the doctrine itself is es- 
 sentially atheistic. The two classes are the 
 atheists and the faithful among the theolo- 
 gians. That an atheist should want to usurp 
 this doctrine is not surprising; that an ortho- 
 dox theologian should help him to succeed is 
 a matter of surprise and deep regret. If it 
 concerned the atheist or the theologian alone 
 the evil would be less than it is. As it is, the 
 real harm is clone to thousands of young peo- 
 ple who read enough to know that science ac- 
 cepts some sort of evolution and who hear 
 from Sabbath sermons that evolution and 
 godliness are not only inconsistent but de- 
 structive of each other. If these things are 
 stated with anything like fairness to the facts. 
 
1 86 The Development Theory. 
 
 it ought to be a service to the cause of truth 
 to spread before the public the evidence of the 
 extent to which the development theory has 
 already passed into general acceptance, and 
 also to attempt to show that this acceptance, 
 where accomplished through intelligent 
 weighing of its truth, has in it no tendency to 
 atheism. 
 
 Such is the aim of these pages. No effort 
 will be made to defend or to condemn ac- 
 cepted views, only to record them and their 
 results. 
 
 But a few years ago light, heat, electricity, 
 chemical reactions and mechanical motion 
 were supposed to be due to entirely separate 
 acts of creation. It is now clearly seen that 
 these and other physical forces are only sep- 
 arate links of one chain of underlying natural 
 force. It is demonstrated that nothing of 
 this underlying force is ever wasted. The 
 motion of a mill, of an arm, of a steam engine, 
 occurs because heat or some other link of the 
 chain is changed into motion. The motion 
 thus created expends itself by becoming again 
 
The Development Theory. 187 
 
 heat or electricity or some other form of the 
 same chain of forces. Nothing- of all this is 
 now made or destroyed, not even wasted. 
 
 These things are now the commonplace 
 facts of science. The natural effect of them 
 on human thought would be, >that whereas we 
 once thought God created light alone, we now 
 know he must have created a wider fact of 
 which light is only a part. And with scien- 
 tific Christians this was the only effect the 
 change produced.. Would that it had been 
 left to this! 
 
 How this view of the truth could lessen 
 anyone's adoring reverence of the Infinite 
 Source of all this wider force and profounder 
 power is difficult to understand; that it should 
 carry with it a tendency to atheism is incredi- 
 ble, for somewhere in that long chain of se- 
 quences the Creator's power must come in. 
 The normal effect upon our belief would be 
 expressed by such a statement as this: "'I 
 once believed God created a small fact; I now 
 see he must have created a whole system of 
 facts at once." 
 
1 88 The Development Theory. 
 
 This tendency to wider, more generalized 
 facts is the one characteristic of recent scien- 
 tific experiments. Our thoughts must be ad- 
 justed to this current of things if we would 
 keep our theology a working power among 
 men. 
 
 Still more plainly is this wider generaliza- 
 tion marked in the domain of chemistry. In 
 chemistry, as in other departments of science, 
 experiments continually reveal other and 
 wider facts and forces underlying our surface 
 ones. 
 
 The discoveries of late years through the 
 use of the spectroscope have added greatly to 
 this conviction. These show that the distant 
 stars are composed of chemical elements like 
 those of our own earth. This certainly gives 
 one a sufficiently generalized idea of the na- 
 ture of the materials out of which sun, moon 
 and planets are made. If we consider these 
 materials as we find them in the rocks around 
 us we shall find evidence enough of develop- 
 ment from single elements to complex com- 
 binations. 
 
g 
 
 sj 
 
The Development Theory. 189 
 
 As a surface fact nothing can be more 
 simple than a piece of chalk, yet if you exam- 
 ine it closely you will find its simplicity to van- 
 ish and in the place of that simplicity a most 
 complex combination of chemistry, history 
 and mineralogy. It tells of the lowly life of 
 a company of animals existing in the deep re- 
 gions of the ocean, milleniums ago, extract- 
 ing the carbonate of lime from the waters 
 around them and through the wonderful 
 chemical forces of life converting this lime 
 carbonate into bony skeletons which on the 
 death of the animals were consigned to the deep 
 oozy bed of the ocean to become chalk. It 
 tells of a subsequent elevation of this ancient 
 chalk bed into a montain mass of a neighbor- 
 ing continent. How far from simple, either 
 in time, in place or in chemistry, is this strange 
 mixture of rock and of history! 
 
 Yet you may say of this piece of chalk, 
 "God created it." So he did, but how? Evi- 
 dently by a long process of development from 
 simpler elements of time, force and material, 
 to what you now find it. 
 
19 The Development Theory. 
 
 A piece of granite from the hills, no more 
 than those hills themselves, can now be re- 
 garded as a. thing created into its present 
 form by an instantaneous exercise of divine 
 power. If you examine it closely you will find 
 it to be a combination of three other combina- 
 tions. It is made up of quartz, feldspar and 
 mica; the quartz is a combination of silicium 
 and oxygen; the feldspar is a combination of 
 silicic acid and aluminum with either potash 
 or soda; the mica is a combination of silicate 
 alumina, and for a third element, either pot- 
 ash, soda, magnesia, lime, or even iron. 
 Surely, here is development in its most 
 marked form; development through combina- 
 tions complex, and varied to present results. 
 And this without at all carrying the argument 
 to the molecules of a stage anterior to these 
 or to the atoms of the still more remote stage; 
 and yet the changes this material underwent 
 in these preceding stages are as truly a part of 
 the creation of your piece of granite as the 
 combination of its quartz, feldspar and mica. 
 How plainly then is it true that the creation 
 
The Development Theory. 191 
 
 of a piece of limestone or of granite consists 
 in such a combination of atoms and forces in 
 nature as shall secure these resulting masses, 
 and that time, and often a good deal of it, 
 enters into such combinations, making their 
 existence itself a history of changes. 
 
 Let it be remembered that the object here 
 is not to impress the hearer with a. fact in 
 chemistry or in mineralogy, but with the fact 
 of a creation through development accepted 
 throughout Christendom for the last hundred 
 years or more by the religious of all parties, 
 and without any known tendency to atheism. 
 It is not easy to see why the wider act of cre- 
 ation should have less need of a creator than 
 the narrower one, or that these general sys- 
 tems of nature should have any less need of a 
 plan and a designer than the more special 
 ones of our older thought. There is in both 
 the same need of a creator. The wider sys- 
 tems as well as the narrower ones will show 
 their missing links. What matters it where 
 these missing links occur? 
 
 "From Nature's chain whatever link you strike, 
 Tenth or ten-thousandth, breaks the chain alike." 
 
192 The Development Theory. 
 
 If the power and wisdom of a creating 
 God stand behind that missing link, no mat- 
 ter where it occurs in the creation of a piece 
 of granite itself or of the atoms of which it 
 is composed. And yet one might say in pass- 
 ing, of these missing links in all systems, that 
 there is no obvious gain in making the argu- 
 ment from design to hang rather on the ab- 
 sent than upon the present link, as if a broken 
 link in a chain should be made to commend 
 the skill of the mechanic more than if it were 
 unbroken. 
 
 Several years ago the astronomer La- 
 Place published a hypothesis of development 
 applied to the solar system, in which the claim 
 was made that the sun, moon and planets were 
 not created one by one from nothing by di- 
 vine power, but that the matter of which they 
 are composed once existed diffused through 
 space; that this matter was drawn together 
 by the mutual attraction of its particles; was 
 condensed into such position as to give play 
 to its chemical forces; that this condensation 
 developed motion in the whole mass, causing 
 
The Development Theory. 193 
 
 it to revolve around its center of gravity; that 
 the increase of this motion resulted in the 
 casting off of 'its outer portion into space, 
 which outcast mass would in time become 
 planets and moons circulating around the cen- 
 tral mass, and that our present sun is this 
 great central residue of all this. 
 
 With the great mass of the world's edu- 
 cated thinkers this explanation of God's mode 
 of creating the solar system has passed from 
 the domain of hypothesis to that of accepted 
 theory; one capable of explaining facts in its 
 connection not capable of explanation on any 
 other theory. 
 
 No one now. thinks of objecting to it on 
 the ground oi its giving a substitute in its 
 explanations for the power of God and thus 
 promoting atheism, although this was often 
 done when the hypothesis was first published. 
 You need not be reminded that this nebular 
 hypothesis is one of development as applied 
 to the solar system. 
 
 But the field of scientific work which of all 
 others shows the most marked change in the 
 
194 The Development Theory. 
 
 use of the word "create" is that of geology. 
 But a little while ago it was generally believed 
 that mountains were created as such and from 
 nothing. 
 
 It is now clearly seen that the mountain's 
 mass once existed in different form, perhaps 
 extended over a plain or sea bed, occupying 
 the very place now occupied by the mountain, 
 and that at an earlier period the materials 
 that now constitute its rocky mass existed as 
 a plastic mass of mud carried to this very place 
 by neighboring rivers. 
 
 Or 'if we take for our illustration a still 
 more specific case. It is strictly correct to 
 say God created this mountain west of Port- 
 land just where it is. But what do we mean 
 by created here? Let us inquire. In a care- 
 ful examination of the mountain itself we find 
 at least four different kinds of materials enter- 
 ing into its structure. Its surface to the depth 
 of several feet is covered with a rich bed of 
 soil; under this surface soil is a series of beds 
 of boulder clay; under this a varying mass of 
 basaltic lava evidently the remains of not one 
 
The Development Theory. 195 
 
 but many successive lava floods; and under- 
 lying all these a continuous mass of shales and 
 sandstones reaching back under the mountain 
 to Tualatin plains in one direction, to Scap- 
 poose and the Lower Columbia in another, 
 and to Eugene City and the upper Willamette 
 in still another. And so connected are all 
 these parts that no portion can be separated 
 from the others in the part it took in this one 
 act of creating power which we call the crea- 
 tion of this mountain. 
 
 Each of these portions of this mountain 
 has a history of its own, the whole a common 
 stretch of history. If we turn to the first, the 
 surface layer, and ask it of its record, we shall 
 be informed of ground-up material, of freez- 
 ings and thawings, of oxidations and deoxi- 
 dations, of additions from decaying leaves 
 and logs, by all of which means this surface 
 soil Was brought to its present condition of 
 usefulness. If we examine the layer under- 
 lying this surface one, that of the boulder clay, 
 we shall find a like stretch of history to mark 
 its preparation for its place. The drift of the 
 
196 The Development Theory.. 
 
 glacier that brought its heavy boulder masses 
 to their present place, the history of the occa- 
 sional piece of granite that seems so far out 
 of place among porphyries and basalts as to 
 suggest an iceberg journey from some north- 
 ern shore, all these fragments of story un- 
 avoidably come into our conception of the 
 creation of the boulder drift that constitutes 
 the second layer of our Portland mountain. 
 Then we shall find ourselves in the presence of 
 the basaltic layers of what were once, without 
 doubt, great lava flows over level causeways 
 long since eroded by deep valleys or narrow 
 ravines until the direction of their outflow 
 seems now almost incredible. 
 
 We now reach the basement sedimentary 
 rock upon which all this upbuilding has been 
 erected. You will find it in a few places crop- 
 ping out in the river bank at low water. It 
 extends back under the mountain to Tualatin 
 plains; it forms the foothills around the plains; 
 it borders the valley, forming its foothills 
 through South Tualatin, Wapato lake, Amity, 
 Albany, Eugene, and back down the valley 
 
B 
 
 K 
 
 X 
 
 si 
 
The Development Theory. 197 
 
 on the east to Portland again. It is an old 
 sea bed. Throughout its extent its fossil re- 
 mains are well marked and definitely fix the 
 time in which its sea shells, its star fishes and 
 its sharks lived at home in its waters. The 
 materials of sand and mud out of which these 
 sand stones and shales were made were 
 brought here from higher lands, so that at the 
 very foundation of our mountain base we find 
 ourselves looking back to an earlier period for 
 a part of the agencies that make up the his- 
 tory of our mountain mass. Such, in brief, 
 is the natural history of this mountain west of 
 Portland. 
 
 Now, if we say, as we have an undoubted 
 right to say, "God created this mountain," I 
 am compelled by the facts of the case to define 
 created, as developed through a long contin- 
 ued series of changes in which heat and frost, 
 sea and land, stream and flood and tide, all 
 did their share. 
 
 We reach a like conclusion if the object of 
 our study be the natural history of some river 
 channel. Look, for illustration, at our own 
 
198 The Development Theory. 
 
 Columbia. Of this, too, we may say, and 
 say properly, God created it, the whole of it. 
 But what does this act of creation imply? Let 
 us see: The long winding stream of water 
 we call the Columbia river is a vast thread that 
 binds into geographical oneness regions wide 
 apart and strangely varied, but united in this 
 one tie of an extended water course. 
 
 Similar to this is its place in time; here, 
 too, it becomes a thread that ties together 
 widely dissimilar chapters of geological his- 
 tory. Let us try to recall two or three of 
 these. 
 
 That we may get a glimpse of the first of 
 these restorations of past history, it is requi- 
 site that we imagine the stream of time rolled 
 back one hundred thousand years or more. 
 
 This done and we shall find the water shed 
 of the Columbia river of that period occupy- 
 ing in the main the same region it does now, 
 and yet along its whole course it will seem 
 wondrously changed. It was then in its lower 
 or western portion a broad, winding strait, 
 bearing the same relation to the interior that 
 
The Development Theory. 199 
 
 Fuca straits do now to Puget Sound. A broad 
 beautiful bay extending southward from this 
 strait to where Eugene City now stands, 
 fringed with deep inlets into which mountain 
 streams poured from the same valleys these 
 streams now occupy. This broad stretch of 
 inland water let us call the Willamette sound. 
 
 Another, and far greater, extension of the 
 Columbia river stretched from where Walla 
 Walla now stands to the Yakima valley, mak- 
 ing here, too, an extensive inland sea. 
 
 Still another extension reached frorh 
 Snake river to the westward to and including 
 the present Klamath marsh. No facts in the 
 natural history of the country are plainer than 
 the evidences of these former extensions of 
 this great water course. 
 
 Nor was this the beginning; far from it. 
 If now we take another step into the great 
 past we shall find still the same Columbia 
 river, but now only as a connecting series of 
 links between frequent lakes large and small. 
 A river whose banks w r ere covered with palms, 
 whose lakes and streams were frequented by 
 
200 The Development Theory. 
 
 the rhinoceros, the wild horse dwarfed and 
 giant the tapir, the camel and many stranger 
 forms long since passed away. 
 
 At the time of this earlier chapter the 
 present Willamette valley was, through many 
 broad, open straits, in communication with 
 the sea. 
 
 If now with. this extended view of its past 
 history, each epoch of which helped to form 
 the succeeding one, we say God created the 
 Columbia River valley, we of necessity are 
 held to imply through a long development of 
 forms and materials and forces like these now 
 at work around us, that among these were 
 the heat of internal fires, the frosts of unnum- 
 bered winters, changes of level and changes 
 in living forms on its banks; which of course 
 amounts to an acknowledgment that we re- 
 gard the development theory as defining 
 God's process of creating the Columbia river. 
 
 What is here said of mountain mass or of 
 river channel applies with like force to the 
 creation of a whole continent. 
 
The Development Theory. 201 
 
 Our own continent began its history as 
 such, eons ago, as a long strip of elevated sea 
 bed extending westward and northward from 
 our present Labrador. To this nucleus were 
 added through long periods of time, and by 
 the natural agencies of flood and tide and the 
 life and death of plant and animal, successive 
 strips of land, each strip having at once a 
 separate history of its own and a wider histor- 
 ical connection with the whole continent. So 
 plainly is this true that the whole geological 
 history is now conceded to be a marked in- 
 stance of a grand system of development 
 with plan and purpose in its movements, al- 
 though conducted through ages of change 
 and the agencies of nature. 
 
 Age after age thus left their record until 
 our continent reached its present southern ex- 
 tension in Florida and the gulf coast, and its 
 western extension along the shores of our 
 coast range of the Pacific. To these succes- 
 sive areas added to the continent geologists 
 have applied the names Laurentian, Silurian, 
 Devonian, Carboniferous, Jurassic, Creta- 
 
202 The Development Theory. 
 
 ceous, Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Post Ter- 
 tiary, each one of these names representing in 
 succession a period of time and an area added 
 to the continent. They stand toward each 
 other in three lines of relationship. First, they 
 stand toward each other in the relation of 
 parts to a whole continent, each part in such 
 relation to the whole that it could not possibly 
 fit anywhere else. Second, they stand to each 
 other and to the whole in the relation of suc- 
 cession in history. In this relation to the 
 whole continent the place of each period is as 
 necessarily where it is as that of a part to the 
 whole. The third relation is that of deriva- 
 tion. As before stated, each successive addi- 
 tion to the continent was an off-shore sea bed 
 near the former land, the muddy sediment of 
 which had been for ages wearing from the up- 
 lands; had been carried to the sea by neigh- 
 boring rivers and distributed by tides and cur- 
 rents; had at length been elevated into dry 
 land to form another, an added field, to our 
 continental form. Thus it was that each 
 added area was derived from the eroded sur- 
 
The Development Theory. 203 
 
 face of its parent country, adding the relation 
 of direct derivation to the other ties that bind 
 the whole into one great natural development. 
 Of course in all this, whether taken from the 
 history of a hill, a river, valley, or a continent, 
 we are treating of inorganic forces and devel- 
 opments; life has as yet not come into the 
 question. 
 
 And now, before we carry our subject be- 
 yond the line that separates the organic from 
 'the inorganic, let us sum up our conclusions 
 drawn from this part of our subject. 
 
 With our minds directed especially to the 
 truths of chemistry, we may state that it was 
 once believed God created granite directly 
 from nothing. The educated world now be- 
 lieves that God created the ultimate atoms and 
 the forces that governed their relations, and 
 that these acted on by their surroundings 
 made the granite. The difference is surely 
 this: The older belief ascribes to God the 
 creation of innumerable separate facts; the 
 newer thought ascribes to God the creation 
 of a system that results in these facts. 
 
204 The Development Theory. 
 
 The system, among scientists, prevails, for 
 all modern researches tend toward system; 
 only an added evidence that God works by 
 system. 
 
 If we direct our inquiries to the domain of 
 geology a similar result follows. Educated 
 men find the evidence overwhelming that God 
 did not create at once the whole continent as 
 men once believed, but that he so directed 
 natural agencies and materials that the nat- 
 ural forces of these acted on by their sur- 
 roundings developed a continent. 
 
 Here, too, the change into a generaliza- 
 tion. God did not stop to create a single fact; 
 he created a vast system of facts. 
 
 And as in both these departments of 
 thought that of chemistry and that of geol- 
 ogy the religious world has accepted these 
 changed views without conscious detriment to 
 religious faith, it must follow that develop- 
 ment as a form of creation, as God's process of 
 creation in at least some departments of his 
 work, is an accepted doctrine and is not athe- 
 istic. 
 
a 
 
 s 
 
The Development Theory. 205 
 
 But let us now go back a little in our geo- 
 logical history of the continent. It will be 
 remembered that the development of our con- 
 tinent was described as progressive elevations 
 of new portions of sea bed, like so many added 
 fields to an old farm. 
 
 If now r we add the statement that each of 
 these annexed fields was in its turn stocked 
 with plants and animals suitable to its period, 
 we have the opening of the other half of our 
 subject, development as applied to plants and 
 animals. 
 
 It will be remembered that there were des- 
 ignated ten or more of these annexed fields 
 during the whole period of geological history. 
 All through this history running through mil- 
 lions of years there were, side by side, two 
 kingdoms of life; that of the plant, the vege- 
 table kingdom, that of the animal, the animal 
 kingdom. During all this time the inter-rela- 
 tions of field and flora and of field and fauna 
 were such that each province of each kingdom 
 fits where it is and would fit nowhere else. 
 This triple relationship suggests a wider sys- 
 
206 The Development Theory. 
 
 tern to which these parts are essential in time, 
 in rank and in unity to the whole. 
 
 The perception of this great geological 
 system of plants as well as of animals, long 
 since suggested to Professor Agassiz what 
 was known as his system of evolution, an es- 
 sentially embryonic one, and therefore not de- 
 pendent on surroundings. 
 
 The other type of evolution is that of vari- 
 ations promoted by surroundings, and is best 
 represented by the Darwinian system. 
 Neither of these attempts to account for the 
 origin of life itself. They are both content to 
 ascribe this to God. 
 
 The scripture texts that relate to the intro- 
 duction of life into the world are the follow- 
 ing: 
 
 i "And God said let the earth bring forth 
 grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree 
 yielding fruit after his kind." 
 
 2 "And God said, let the waters bring 
 forth abundantly the moving creature that 
 hath life." 
 
The Development Theory. 207 
 
 3 "And God said, let the earth bring 
 forth the living creature after his kind, cattle 
 and creeping thing and beast of the earth 
 after his kind." 
 
 If these passages simply assure us that our 
 Heavenly Father created life upon the earth 
 and in the waters around the earth by start- 
 ing its streams from a germ which he caused 
 the waters or the land to bring forth, then 
 the believer in special creations and the theis- 
 tic evolutionist have here a common ground. 
 
 Beyond this their views separate, the evo- 
 lutionist claiming that God created the possi- 
 bility of the whole system in its first germ of 
 life, and so consigned it to the development of 
 the natural world. To him, then, these pas- 
 sages from Genesis open a vision of a vast 
 stream of life, beginning millions of years ago 
 in the dawn of the Paleozoic, increasing nat- 
 urally as it flowed on through the successive 
 additions to the continent, rapidly enlarging 
 as it flowed through the early Tertiary, till the 
 extending continents were overspread with 
 life in the wonderful variety of its higher forms 
 
208 The Development Theory. 
 
 with which the later Tertiary prepared the 
 world for its present. 
 
 If these passages of Genesis open to us- in 
 vision this grand procession of the life of the 
 past, our thought of God will certainly kindle 
 no less honor to him, while it will be more true 
 to the facts. 
 
 Man's place in this vast stream of life the' 
 theistic evolutionist finds no difficulty in de- 
 fining. His flesh is of the earth earthy; his 
 animal life belongs with the broad current 
 above described. But God assures us that he 
 created another system, in this wider life 
 stream, even a spiritual one; for it is written 
 of man that "God breathed into his nostrils 
 the breath of life; and man became a living 
 soul." 
 
 Here the 'Christian evolutionist finds the 
 latest and highest creative work of all that 
 to which all rightfully tends, that to which all 
 else was intended to be tributary the evolu- 
 tion of the religious destiny of mankind. 
 
 Suppose now the question were asked, 
 what effect will the development theory have 
 
The Development Theory. 209 
 
 on the faith of Christendom? It might be 
 presumptive to attempt to give a direct an- 
 swer to so grave an inquiry, but if we consult 
 history for parallels from the past these may 
 help us form a judgment. About three hun- 
 dred years ago a new hypothesis of the solar 
 system was published by the astronomer Co- 
 pernicus. His theory was adopted by Gal- 
 ileo, and demonstrated by the help of his 
 newly invented telescope. But the church 
 was alarmed, and asked the question: "What 
 will become of the faith of Christendom if 
 these unscriptural views of the sun and the 
 earth be generally accepted?" The poor as- 
 tronomer of the telescope was condemned for 
 heresy and compelled to retract his published 
 convictions on pain of the penalty due to 
 heresy. The heresy triumphed. Europe ac- 
 cepted the new views, but did not give up the 
 faith of Christendom. This is certainly a case 
 in point and ought to have its moral for us. 
 Years passed and a new scientific heresy was 
 published that of the great antiquity of the 
 earth; six thousand years would not cover the 
 
210 The Development Theory. 
 
 scope of history geologists saw in the rocks. 
 The theological cry was again raised and in 
 almost the same inquiry, "What will become 
 of the faith of Christendom if these views are 
 accepted?" Well, time passed, the longer 
 chronology was generally accepted, and the 
 faith of Christendom seemed rather to im- 
 prove under the change. 
 
 But yet another strain was in store for the 
 relation between theology and science. The 
 evidence of several lines of scientific inquiry 
 seemed to point to a longer human antiquity 
 than the received one. 
 
 Again the old cry was raised of atheism 
 and infidelity against the innovators, and 
 again the newer views prevailed without much 
 apparent change in the faith of Christendom. 
 That these periodic conflicts between theol- 
 ogy and science have been entirely harmless, 
 no well informed person will claim. 
 
 The church cannot put herself in a posi- 
 tion of chronic antagonism to science without 
 harm. 
 
The Development Theory. 211 
 
 But in opening out this subject so that we 
 may see how much of evolution we ourselves 
 believe, and also in enumerating the evidences 
 that our colleges are already teaching it to 
 our youth without taint of atheism, I have 
 done the work proposed by these pages. 
 
 That the wise and good of the nineteenth 
 century are about to let these doctrines make 
 atheists or even infidels of the rising genera- 
 tion, I cannot believe. That they are neces- 
 sarily destructive of faith 1 believe as little. 
 That the American church may, through their 
 help, be able to cast aside a good deal of 
 worthless teaching, and rise to a higher plane 
 of working power, is far more legitimate to 
 the signs of the times. 
 
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