CORRESPONDENCE 287
even monthly. 186 There are some eight or ten Baptist mem- bers in the settlement.
12th. Traveled 23 miles this day over some of the most delightful part of Oregon; my way lay along the borders of the timber skirting the Willamette, crossing successively the Santiam and Callipooia rivers. In passing the Santiam the foot of the mountains recedes from the river and the prairies on the east open out to ten or twelve miles in width and forty or fifty miles in length, except as the streams are sometimes skirted with rich groves of fir and oak. The valleys of these streams sometimes penetrate far into the bosom of the mountains, affording some of the richest and best watered lands in the world. Farther east the mountains rise, pile above pile, till at last may be seen some six or seven lofty conical peaks, raising their summits far into the region of perpetual snow. At one view the eye can survey the luxuriant plains with their meandering streams, the ever- varied mountain side clad with dense forests of evergreen firs and the still more lofty snow-capped mountains, around whose sides the clouds sport in wild confusion. Perhaps no part of the world can exhibit, at one glance of the eye, so admirable a combination of the beautiful, the grand and the sublime.
13th. Spent the day in examining the country in refer- ence to the location of an institution of learning. I never travel through this portion of the valley without being for- cibly impressed with the thought of the almost incomparable beauty and grandeur which must strike the eye and cannot fail to inspire the heart of every beholder, when civilization shall have taxed all the resources of these plains and moun- tains. How important then that the character of the crowds that must soon people this valley should be formed by the precepts of our Holy Law-giver!
186 This was probably the nucleus of the Shiloh (Turner) Baptist Church, or- ganized August 31, 1850. Mattoon, Bap. An. of Ore. I:g.
