The rainy season had now thoroughly set in. Travelling any considerable distance in open boats, or among the tangled underbrush on foot, or on horseback, was quite impracticable. I therefore determined to avail myself of whatever other means of information were in my reach; and as the gentlemen in charge of the various trading-posts {220} in the territory, had arrived at Vancouver to meet the express from London, I could not have had for this object a more favourable opportunity. The information obtained from these gentlemen, and from other residents in the country, I have relied on as correct, and combined it with my own observations in the following general account of Oregon. Oregon Territory is bounded on the north by the parallel of 54 deg. 40 min. north latitude;[20] on the east by the Rocky Mountains; on the south by the parallel of 42 deg. north latitude; and on the west by the Pacific Ocean. Mountains of Oregon. Different sections of the great chain of highlands which stretch from the straits of Magellan to the Arctic sea, have received different names—as the Andes, the Cordilleras, the Anahuac, the Rocky and the Chippewayan Mountains. The last mentioned appellation has been applied to that portion of it which lies between 58° of north latitude and the Arctic sea. The Hudson Bay Company, in completing the survey of the Arctic coast, have ascertained that these mountains preserve a strongly defined outline entirely to the sea, and hang in towering cliffs over it, {221} and by other surveys have discovered that they gradually increase in height from the sea southward. The section to which the term Rocky Mountains has been applied, extends from latitude 58° to the Great Gap, or southern pass, in latitude 42° north. Their altitude is greater than that of any other range on the northern part of the continent. Mr. Thompson, the astronomer of the Hudson Bay Company, reports that he found peaks between latitudes 53 and 56 north, more than twenty-six thousand feet above the level of the sea.[21] That portion lying east of Oregon, and dividing it from the Great Prairie Wilderness, will be particularly noticed. Its southern point is in the Wind River cluster, latitude 42° north, and about seven hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean. Its northern point is in latitude 54° 40′, about seventy miles north of Mount Browne,[22] and about four hundred miles from the same sea. Its general direction between these points is from N. N. W. to S. S. E.