Portland, the chief town of Oregon, is but a short distance south of Puget Sound, on the Willamette River, twelve miles from its confluence with the Columbia, and at the head of deep-sea navigation, one hundred and ten miles from the ocean. This is the leading business centre of the Pacific northwest, having seventy thousand people and extensive trade. It is finely situated, and from the heights on its western border is given a most superb view of the Cascades, the range grandly stretching over a hundred miles. The Mazama Club of earnest mountain explorers at Portland have done much to make known to the world the scenery and grandeur of these attractive mountains. Fifteen miles up the Willamette, at Oregon City, are the Falls, where that river descends forty feet in a splendid horseshoe cataract, displaying great beauty and furnishing valuable power. To the southward is Salem, on the Willamette, the capital of Oregon, having five thousand population. The "Oregon trail," as the route from San Francisco into this region was called, ascends the Rogue River, so named from the Indians of the region, crosses the Siskiyou Mountain, and descends on the southern side to the headwaters of the Sacramento. To the eastward, near the California boundary, high up in the Cascades, is the strangely constructed Crater Lake. It is at over sixty-two hundred feet elevation, and occupies an abyss produced by the subsidence of an enormous volcano, being six miles long and four wide. A perpendicular rocky wall one to two thousand feet high entirely surrounds it, and the water, without outlet or apparent inflow, is fully two thousand feet deep and densely blue in color. In the centre is Wizard Island, rising eight hundred and fifty feet, an extinct volcanic cone, thus presenting one crater within another. The district containing this wonderful lake has been made a reservation called the Oregon National Park. Some distance to the southward, the whole country being mountainous and the lower slopes covered with forests of splendid pines, is the grand snow-covered dome of Mount Shasta, one of the noblest of the Cascades (in California called the Coast Range), rising fourteen thousand four hundred and forty feet, a huge extinct volcano, having a crater in its western peak twenty-five hundred feet deep and three-quarters of a mile wide. Beyond, the Sacramento Valley stretches far away southward, passing Chico and Marysville, to Sacramento. It was to the eastward, near Coloma, that the first discovery of California gold was made in February, 1848, on the farm of Colonel Sutter, the county having been appropriately named El Dorado. SAN FRANCISCO BAY AND CITY.