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. 14 DAY USE */ RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH ( EARTH SCIENCES LIBR This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Reiewed books are subject to immediate recall. 66 LD 21-50m-6,'60 (B1321slO)476 General Library University of California Berkeley