flowers more or less. Seeds of all these
Oregon evergreens and of many of the flowering shrubs and plants have
been sent to almost every country under the sun, and they are now
growing in carefully tended parks and gardens. And now that the ways of
approach are open one would expect to find these woods and gardens full
of admiring visitors reveling in their beauty like bees in a clover
field. Yet few care to visit them. A portion of the bark of one of the
California trees, the mere dead skin, excited the wondering attention
of thousands when it was set up in the Crystal Palace in London, as
did also a few peeled spars, the shafts of mere saplings from Oregon or
Washington. Could one of these great silver firs or sugar pines three
hundred feet high have been transplanted entire to that exhibition, how
enthusiastic would have been the praises accorded to it!

Nevertheless, the countless hosts waving at home beneath their own
sky, beside their own noble rivers and mountains, and standing on a
flower-enameled carpet of mosses thousands of square miles in extent,
attract but little attention. Most travelers content themselves with
what they may chance to see from car windows, hotel verandas, or the
deck of a steamer on the lower Columbia--clinging to the battered
highways like drowning sailors to a life raft. When an excursion into
the woods is proposed, all sorts of exaggerated or imaginary dangers are
conjured up, filling the kindly, soothing wilderness with colds, fevers,
Indians, bears, snakes, bugs, impassable rivers, and jungles of brush,
to which is always added quick and sure starvation.

As to starvation, the woods are full of food, and a supply of bread
may easily be carried for habit's sake, and replenished now and then
at outlying farms and camps. The Indians are seldom found in the woods,
being confined mainly to the banks of the rivers, where the greater part
of their food is obtained. Moreover, the most of them have been either
buried since the settlement of the country or civilized into comparative
innocence, industry, or harmless laziness. There are bears in the
woods, but not in such numbers nor of such unspeakable ferocity as
town-dwellers imagine, nor do bears spend their lives in going about the
country like the devil, seeking whom they may devour. Oregon bears, like
most others, have no liking for man either as meat or as society; and
while some may be curious at times to see what manner of creature he