It is to the western valleys I wish to refer in this connection, as in these the donation land law chiefly operated until its expiration in the year 1855. Under that law every adult male citizen and his wife, immigrating to this coast before the year 1851, were entitled to six hundred and forty acres of land selected by the donees in such shape as they chose, and those coming after that time, were entitled to three hundred and twenty acres taken by legal subdivisions. Never before or since have such magnificent inducements been offered to settlers, and by the close of the year 1855 nearly all of the good lands in the Willamette, Umpqua, and Rogue River valleys were occupied by the donees who came from every State in the Union, but chiefly from the Mississippi Valley. Saying that these lands were taken by families, in section and half-section tracts, gives but a faint idea of what was acquired. Doctor Johnson's description of the happy valley in Rasselas would be rather too poetical to adopt for this country, as this is too far north for people to depend upon the spontaneous productions of the earth, but in many respects there is much similarity. The great Doctor's fancy had not been expanded and enlightened by the vast accomplishments of modern science and invention, whereby the forces of nature have been utilized, and, as a consequence, his happy valley was constructed more to gratify an indolent and dreamy æstheticism than to promote economic industry. In these western valleys, however, is everything that should stimulate men to the use of all their faculties, if steady and sure returns for exertion are better than unearned gratification of human wants and desires. Let the reader picture to himself an evergreen valley one hundred and fifty miles long and forty miles wide, a navigable river running the whole length, through its middle, with numerous branches on each side, the smaller rising in the foothills, the larger emerging from the forest covered mountains, the rich agricultural surface of the valley interspersed with timber and prairie in profitable proportions, and rising in gentle hills, among which are innumerable springs of pure, soft water, or subsiding into lowlands, here and there dotted by buttes, and he has the Willamette Valley, said by Saxe of Vermont to be the best poor man's country on the globe. This picture does not represent all its advantages by any means. Probably no farming country known has water power so abundant and diffused as here. Niagara is unrivaled for power, but the principal question there is one of distribution. Here the problem of distribution is reduced to small proportions, for no village or city is far away from water power.