As we walked along next day the Sage told me the story of the. opening of this road—the Southern Immigrant Road it was called—by himself and others, in 1846, when it was feared in Oregon that there might be a war with Great Britain, and it behooved them to be surveying out a track for the soldiers of the United States to take in coming to protect the Oregon settlers, which would be safer to travel than the Columbia or Mount Hood routes. He showed me, too, a tree near the crossing of the Klamath River where some of Fremont’s exploring party carved their names in 1843.
Linkville was at the time of this trip but a few months old, and most of the settlers in Klamath Land had been driven out by fear of the Modocs—most of those not murdered. I was present at the trial of the Modoc prisoners at Fort Klamath, and spent some weeks at the Klamath Indian Agency, visiting notable places and studying Indian mythology under the tutelage of Captain O. C. Applegate, who is a master of Indianology.
But the crowning pleasure of those enjoyable weeks was an excursion to a lake then little known, but now famous in the Northwest. It was discovered in 1853 by prospectors from Jacksonville looking for gold, who, deeply impressed by its weird beauty, called it Lake Mystery. Subsequently some gentlemen from Fort Klamath visited it and called it Lake Majesty. Both these names were suggested by the effect upon the beholders. But exploration convinced all that the great rocky bowl containing these beautiful waters, whose rim was eight thousand feet above sea-level, was an immense crater, egg- shaped in form, and six by seven miles in extent of surface. This discovery changed the name to Crater Lake, which it is now called.
According to the belief of scientists and other observers, there once stood here a volcano higher by several thousand feet than any existing mountain, the angle of the remaining mass carrying an imaginary line to a height of thirty thousand feet. As surveyed by government officers the depth of the crater is four thousand feet, and of the water, two thousand feet over a large extent of the bottom, the shallowest part away from the cliffs being fifteen hundred feet. There is a crater within the crater, rising in a hollow cone above the water eight hundred and
