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Show 400 WESTERN WILDS. out of town. Mount Saint Helens is sometimes in good view, though eighty miles to the north- east. All the hills around the city are cov-ered with heavy timber, and in town every street is double lined with shade trees. Of the 25,000 people in Portland, one- sixth are Chinamen. They are porters, washer- men, railroad laborers, cigar makers, and artisans of other sorts, with an occasional member of the higher caste engaged in trade. Sam Poy Lahong has seven stores on the Pacific Coast, his head- quarters being at Portland. I made his acquaintance, and found him a gentleman of great intelligence. The firm of Tung, Duck, Chung & Co., charter vessels and import extensively from China, as do some smaller firms. Other foreigners are scarce ; the Jews pre-dominate. Portland is almost exclusively an American city, in fact, a Yankee settlement; though most of the people in the country are from Missouri and other South- western States. The city seems to have all the enterprise which the State at large lacks. The rural " web- foot," as the residents are called, in ironical allusion to the climate, is sui generis: there is a distinctively Oregonian look about all the natives and old residents which is hard to describe. Certainly they are not an enterprising people. They drifted in here all along from 1835 to 1855, and some of them at an even earlier period, when many western Americans came to the Pacific Coast to engage in cattle-raising not considering the country fit for much else. They left Missouri and Illinois most of them because those States were even then " too crowded" for them, and they wanted to get away where " they was plenty o' range and plenty o' game," and have a good, easy time. With one team to each family ( time being no object to such people) it costs them nothing to move ; and the peculiar land laws applied to Oregon gave them every advantage, and have been a serious hinderance to settlement ever since. Each single male settler could acquire title to three hundred and twenty acres, and each married man to six hundred and forty ; there were besides some inducements to families, so that the birth of a child was a pecuniary advantage to the parents. The result was that hundreds of girls of eleven, twelve and thirteen years of age were married ; with the further result, that all this fine land is owned in vast bodies by these old families, many of whom will neither sell, improve, nor hire any one else to improve. They acknowledge their own laziness, and talk about it so good-humoredly that one is compelled to sympathize with them. The steamer on which I had engaged passage down the coast was to start at dark, but going on board I was informed that we should |