mountain vantage points you have
feasted your eyes upon the greenery of timberland expanses; all the
world over you can spy out valleys dotted with an unvaried checkerboard
of gardens, or green with pasture lands. But where have you seen a
valley where all of this is mingled, where nature refuses to be a
specialist and man appears a Jack of all outdoor trades? If by chance
you have journeyed from Medford to Portland, with some excursioning from
the beaten paths through Oregon's valley of content, you have viewed
such a one.

For nature has staged a lavish repertoire along the Willamette. There
are fields of grain and fields of potatoes; hop yards and vineyards
stand side by side; emerald pastures border brown cornfields; forests of
primeval timber shadow market garden patches; natty orchards of apples,
peaches, and plums are neighbors to waving expanses of beet tops. In
short, as you whirl through the valley, conjure up some antithesis of
vegetation and you must wait but a scanty mile or two before viewing it
from the observation car.

As first I journeyed through this pleasant land of the Willamette, a
little book, written just half a century ago, fell into my hands, and
these words concerning the valley, read then, offered a description
whose peer I have not yet encountered:

The sweet Arcadian valley of the Willamette, charming with meadow,
park, and grove! In no older world where men have, in all their
happiest moods, recreated themselves for generations in taming
earth to orderly beauty, have they achieved a fairer garden than
Nature's simple labor of love has made there, giving to rough
pioneers the blessings and the possible education of refined and
finished landscape, in the presence of landscape strong, savage,
and majestic.

Then Portland. Portland, the city of roses and the metropolitan heart of
Oregon, stands close to where the Willamette, the river of our valley of
content, meanders into the greater Columbia. Were this a guidebook I
might inundate you with figures of population, bank clearings, and land
values, all of them risen and still rising in bounds almost beyond
belief. I might narrate incidents of the city's building--how stumps
stood a half dozen years ago where such and such a million dollar
hostelry now rises, or how so-and-so exchanged a sack of flour for lots
whose value to-day is reckoned in six figures. But these are matters of
business, and busine