To the writer nothing has left such an impression of wilderness and solitude as a journey up the Willamette, forty-five years ago, in a birch-bark canoe, paddled by two Indian guides. The wild ducks were scarcely disturbed, and dropped to the water a hundred yards away, and the three-pronged buck, browsing among the lily pads, stopped to look at the unusual invasion of his domain, and went on feeding. The population of Oregon in that year, 1850, as shown by census, was 13,294, and that included all of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, with a part of Wyoming and Montana. After years of importunity, Congress had given Oregon a Territorial Government in 1849. Prior to that--from 1843 to 1849--it was an independent American government, for the people and by the people. Notwithstanding the neglect of Oregon by the General Government, and its entire failure to foster or protect, the old pioneers were true and loyal American citizens, and for six years took such care of themselves as they were able, and performed the task so well as to merit the best words of commendation. [Illustration: REV. STEPHEN B. L. PENROSE, President of Whitman College.] The commerce of the country, aside from its furs, was scarcely worth mentioning. The author, in 1851, bought what few salted salmon there were in the market, and shipped them to San Francisco, but wise and prudent advisers regarded it as a risky venture. He would have been considered a wild visionary, indeed, had he even hinted of the shipments of fish now annually made to all parts of the civilized world. It was then known that the rivers were filled with fish. In the spring of the year, the smaller streams, leading away from the Columbia, were literally blocked with almost solid masses of fish on their way to their spawning grounds. The bears along the Columbia, as well as the Indians, had an unlimited supply of the finest fish in the world, with scarcely an effort to take them. An Indian on the Willamette, at the foot of the falls, could fill his boat in an hour with salmon weighing from twenty to forty pounds. In the spring of the year, when the salmon are running up the Willamette, they begin to jump from the water a quarter of a mile before reaching the falls. One could sit in a boat and see hundreds of the great fish in the air constantly. Multitudes of them maimed and killed themselves jumping against the rocks at the falls. The Indian did not wait for "a rise" or "a bite." He had a hook with an eye socket, and a pole ten feet or more long. The hook he fastened to a deer thong, about two feet long, attached to the lower end of the pole. When ready for fishing the pole was inserted into the socket of the hook, and he felt for his fish, and by a sudden jerk caught it in the belly. The hook was pulled from the pole, and the fish had a play of the two feet of deer thong. But the Indian never stops to experiment; he hauled in his prize.