Road-making in Oregon is like road-making elsewhere. We had a party of twelve or fourteen men at work, and had to build three huts at intervals before the road got through. The huts only took a few hours to construct. Cut down a dozen cherry poles, straight and long; saw off a cedar log and split it up again and again, till you get planks out of it four feet long and about an inch or so thick. Drive your cherry poles into dug holes, and set up the frame of your hut; build a recess five feet wide and two feet deep at one end for a chimney; board the whole in, and double the boarding on the roof; line the inside of the chimney with damp earth for about two feet up, and then carry that up above the roof of your house also by boards; hang a door on a couple of wooden hinges made by choosing strong forked pieces of crab-apple which will not split; beat down the floor level and hard, and, if you are very luxurious, set up standing bed-places, or bunks, of cherry-pole legs and cedar boards for the beds, and your habitation is complete--as soon, that is, as you have brought in a huge back-log and set a great fire blazing. Cut off a few chunks of wood level for chairs, and fix two or three boards against the walls for shelves, and you have no idea of the comfort you can get out of your house. We dug, and graded, and moved logs, and built bridges, and laid corduroy crossings over wet places, and in about three months the way into Rock Creek was clear. I confess to a little pride when the first wagon went safely in, and down into the level bottom below. The next question was the hard one, What will he do with it? The wilderness was before us; how were we to civilize it? Gazing down into the valley, with here a ferny slope, there a copse filling acres of bottom, then a deep cañon with green trees, there a beaver-dam flooding the best piece of land at every high water, and everywhere the great black trunks, standing or lying prostrate, in some places heaped together in the wildest confusion--it was a case that called for the "stout heart to the stiff brae." The first thing was to settle the place for a homestead, supplied with water, but out of the reach of flood. And a rising ground, some hundred yards from the river, along one side of which ran a clear little stream at right angles to the creek, supplying a chain of three beaver-ponds, overhung with trees and shrubs, was chosen. [Sidenote: _FENCING WILD LAND._]