The quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, Vol. 4, March, 1903-December, 1903Oregon Historical Society
History
The quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, Vol. 4, March, 1903-December, 1903
Oregon Historical Society
Oregon -- History -- Periodicals
of a region where such bowers grow. May Major Bidwell long
live--though bachelor he be--to dispense his bounties to a people who
respect him for the liberal and generous manner in which he shares his
wealth with those not similarly blest.
From Tehama the ride of half a day brings us to Oroville, a city well
named, for situated as it is on the Feather River, it is in the heart
of a rich mining country, where the miners have worked like so many
beavers, and where the water of the Feather River is made to run in
pipes and reservoirs into lakes for hundreds of feet above the level
of the river, at the site of the town. This river is crossed by a
ferry. A steamer is said to have once landed here from Sacramento, but
such occurrences I regard as rare. The river is rapid; boils and
surges over a rocky and rugged bed, and joins the Sacramento at
Marysville--to which point a night's ride brings us--continuing to
pass through a rich agricultural region, under a state of high
cultivation. Marysville is a large, prosperous city--houses, mostly of
brick--at the junction of the Yuba and Feather rivers. Thence on to
Sacramento, (a journey of eight hours' staging,) the road is over a
level, agricultural district, throughout which the piles of drift
timber and the absence of fences, in many places, and the presence of
boats and bateaux, all told that the water had been here supreme not
many months past; barns with their roofs a mile distant; houses
without any; outhouses and dwellings with a watermark up to the second
story--and in many localities no dwellings at all, where commodious
and comfortable tenements had been--all told of the presence and the
power of the waters of Sacramento when charged with fullness on its
way to the ocean. It seems to me that a system of high levees is the
only thing to reclaim hundreds of acres of fine swamp land along the
Sacramento, and to prevent the repetition of these disastrous results,
which made the people poor and retard the growth of the State.
Sacramento is already surrounded by a high levee which may protect it
another season; but the levee should begin at Marysville and extend to
Sacramento. It will, of course, be expensive, but it will repay the
labor in the end.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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