Everybody loves wild woods and flowers more or less. Seeds of all
these Oregon evergreens and of many of the flowering shrubs and plants

have been sent to almost every country under the sun, and they are now
growing in carefully tended parks and gardens. And now that the ways

of approach are open one would expect to find these woods and gardens
full of admiring visitors reveling in their beauty like bees in a

clover field. Yet few care to visit them. A portion of the bark of
one of the California trees, the mere dead skin, excited the wondering

attention of thousands when it was set up in the Crystal Palace in
London, as did also a few peeled spars, the shafts of mere saplings

from Oregon or Washington. Could one of these great silver firs or
sugar pines three hundred feet high have been transplanted entire to

that exhibition, how enthusiastic would have been the praises accorded
to it!

Nevertheless, the countless hosts waving at home beneath their own
sky, beside their own noble rivers and mountains, and standing on a

flower-enameled carpet of mosses thousands of square miles in extent,
attract but little attention. Most travelers content themselves with

what they may chance to see from car windows, hotel verandas, or the
deck of a steamer on the lower Columbia--clinging to the battered

highways like drowning sailors to a life raft. When an excursion into
the woods is proposed, all sorts of exaggerated or imaginary dangers

are conjured up, filling the kindly, soothing wilderness with colds,
fevers, Indians, bears, snakes, bugs, impassable rivers, and jungles

of brush, to which is always added quick and sure starvation.
As to starvation, the woods are full of food, and a supply of bread

may easily be carried for habit's sake, and replenished now and then
at outlying farms and camps. The Indians are seldom found in the

woods, being confined mainly to the banks of the rivers, where the
greater part of their food is obtained. Moreover, the most of them

have been either buried since the settlement of the country or
civilized into comparativeinnocence, industry, or harmless laziness.

There are bears in the woods, but not in such numbers nor of such
unspeakable ferocity as town-dwellers imagine, nor do bears spend

their lives in going about the country like the devil, seeking whom
they may devour. Oregon bears, like most others, have no liking for

man either as meat or as society; and while some may be curious at
times to see what manner of creature he is, most of them have learned

to shun people as deadly enemies. They have been poisoned, trapped,
and shot at until they have become shy, and it is no longer easy to

make their acquaintance. Indeed, since the settlement of the country,
notwithstanding far the greater portion is yet wild, it is difficult

to find any of the larger animals that once were numerous and
comparatively familiar, such as the bear, wolf, panther, lynx, deer,

elk, and antelope.
As early as 1843, while the settlers numbered only a few thousands,

and before any sort of government had been organized, they came
together and held what they called "a wolf meeting," at which a

committee was appointed to devise means for the destruction of wild
animals destructive to tame ones, which committee in due time begged

to report as follows:--
It being admitted by all that bears, wolves, panthers, etc., are

destructive to the useful animals owned by the settlers of this
colony, your committee would submit the following resolutions as

the sense of this meeting, by which the community may be governed
in carrying on a defensive and destructive war on all such

animals:--
Resolved, 1st.--That we deem it expedient for the community to take

immediate measures for the destruction of all wolves, panthers, and
bears, and such other animals as are known to be destructive to

cattle, horses, sheep and hogs.
2d.--That a bounty of fifty cents be paid for the destruction of a

small wolf, $3.00 for a large wolf, $1.50 for a lynx, $2.00 for a
bear and $5.00 for a panther.

This center of destruction was in the Willamette Valley. But for many
years prior to the beginning of the operations of the "Wolf

Organization" the Hudson's Bay Company had established forts and
trading stations over all the country, wherever fur-gathering Indians

could be found, and vast numbers of these animals were killed. Their
destruction has since gone on at an accelerated rate from year to year

as the settlements have been extended, so that in some cases it is
difficult to obtainspecimens enough for the use of naturalists. But

even before any of these settlements were made, and before the coming
of the Hudson's Bay Company, there was very little danger to be met in

passing through this wilderness as far as animals were concerned, and
but little of any kind as compared with the dangers encountered in

crowded houses and streets.
When Lewis and Clark made their famous trip across the continent in

1804-05, when all the Rocky Mountain region was wild, as well as the
Pacific Slope, they did not lose a single man by wild animals, nor,

though frequently attacked, especially by the grizzlies of the Rocky
Mountains, were any of them wounded seriously. Captain Clark was

bitten on the hand by a wolf as he lay asleep; that was one bite among
more than a hundred men while traveling through eight to nine thousand

miles of savagewilderness. They could hardly have been so fortunate
had they stayed at home. They wintered on the edge of the Clatsop

plains, on the south side of the Columbia River near its mouth. In
the woods on that side they found game abundant, especially elk, and

with the aid of the friendly Indians who furnished salmon and
"wapatoo" (the tubers of Sagittaria variabilis), they were in no

danger of starving.
But on the return trip in the spring they reached the base of the

Rocky Mountains when the range was yet too heavily snow-laden to be
crossed with horses. Therefore they had to wait some weeks. This was

at the head of one of the northern branches of the Snake River, and,
their scanty stock of provisions being nearly exhausted, the whole

party was compelled to live mostly on bears and dogs; deer, antelope,
and elk, usually abundant, were now scarce because the region had been

closely hunted over by the Indians before their arrival.
Lewis and Clark had killed a number of bears and saved the skins of

the more interesting specimens, and the variations they found in size,
color of the hair, etc., made great difficulty in classification.

Wishing to get the opinion of the Chopumish Indians, near one of whose
villages they were encamped, concerning the various species, the

explorers unpacked their bundles and spread out for examination all
the skins they had taken. The Indian hunters immediately classed the

white, the deep and the pale grizzly red, the grizzly dark-brown--in
short, all those with the extremities of the hair of a white or frosty

color without regard to the color of the ground or foil--under the
name of hoh-host. The Indians assured them that these were all of the

same species as the white bear, that they associated together, had
longer nails than the others, and never climbed trees. On the other

hand, the black skins, those that were black with white hairs
intermixed or with a white breast, the uniform bay, the brown, and the

light reddish-brown, were classed under the name yack-ah, and were
said to resemble each other in being smaller and having shorter nails,

in climbing trees, and being so little vicious that they could be
pursued with safety.

Lewis and Clark came to the conclusion that all those with white-tipped
hair found by them in the basin of the Columbia belonged to the

same species as the grizzlies of the upper Missouri; and that the
black and reddish-brown, etc., of the Rocky Mountains belong to a

second speciesequallydistinct from the grizzly and the black bear of
the Pacific Coast and the East, which never vary in color.

As much as possible should be made by the ordinary traveler of these
descriptions, for he will be likely to see very little of any species

for himself; not that bears no longer exist here, but because, being
shy, they keep out of the way. In order to see them and learn their

habits one must go softly and alone, lingering long in the fringing
woods on the banks of the salmon streams, and in the small openings in

the midst of thickets where berries are most abundant.
As for rattlesnakes, the other grand dread of town dwellers when they

leave beaten roads, there are two, or perhaps three, species of them
in Oregon. But they are nowhere to be found in great numbers. In

western Oregon they are hardly known at all. In all my walks in the
Oregon forest I have never met a single specimen, though a few have

been seen at long intervals.
When the country was first settled by the whites, fifty years ago, the