The Northern Galaxy

THE OREGON COUNTRY
Prentice, of the Louisville Journal, does not seem fully to have determined to pull up stakes and print his paper at the Falls of the Columbia, instead of the Falls of the Ohio. See how he paints Oregon, that earthly paradise of Senator Benton's waking dreams.— He has not dipped his pencil in couleur de rose, but his limning, we apprehend, is quite as faithful as the honorable Senator's:
"Of all the countries on the face of this earth, it is one of the least favored of heaven. It is the mere riddlings of creation. It is almost as barren as the Desert of Africa, and quite as unearthly as the Campania of Italy. To leave the fertile and salubrious lands on this side of the Rocky Mountains, and to go beyond their snowy summits a thousand miles, to be exiled from law and society, and to endeavor to extort food from the unwilling sand-heaps which are there called earth, is the maddest enterprise that ever deluded foolish man. We would not be subjected to the innumerable and indescribable tortures of a journey to Oregon for all the soil that its savage hunters ever wandered over. The journey thither, from all accounts, is horrible enough, but it is paradisean when contrasted with the wasting miseries which beset the wretched emigrant when he has reached the point where he fancied his unutterable woes were to cease, but where he finds they are to be increased beyond all endurance. Of the last party of emigrants that left Missouri for Oregon, only eight died of starvation before reaching Fort Hall, which is but half way to the country that is reckoned inhabitable by those who are afflicted with the Oregon mania.
We have already intimated that the journey to the Columbia river from this country is attended with starvation and a thousand other felicities. If the emigrant is so lucky as to escape the pangs of famine and the bullets of the Comanches on this side of the Rocky Mountains, he may perhaps survive the long and tedious ascent of the mountains. When he surmounts the summit and begins his downward journey, the land of promise, the delectable Canaan, the land flowing with milk and honey, spreads out illimitably before him.— And a most ravishing prospect it is! There is not a tree to limit the reach of imparadised vision. His enchanted eye wanders in ecstasy over piles of volcanic rocks and sand-stones, interspersed with oases of wild wormwood and prickly pears, ad libitum. Nothing else can be seen to the right or left, or in front. Behind him, the snow-clad peaks of the mountains lift their heads sublimely above the clouds, from whose dizzy heights avalanches of rocks come tumbling down, giving the traveller rare opportunities of exhibiting his dexterity in getting out of the line they take amusement in pursuing. This is the first glimpse the happy emigrants gets of the blissful Oregon.
As he descends the everlasting Western slopes of the mountains, the rocks seem to diminish, while the only green things, wormwood and prickly pear, seem to increase. Even here nothing seems to be created in vain: for the wormwood, if a man have courage to swallow it, affords some relief to the infirm and shrivelled stomachs which invariably prevail in that part of the journey, while the prickly pear not only scratches his shins which itch most intolerably in consequence of the bite of innumerable sand-ticks, but afford him agreeable diversion before the camp fire at night in pulling out the egregious thorns which are ever ready to exchange their hold on the parent pear for a softer location on the legs of man.
The traveller on this part of his journey has nothing to fear from Indians or panthers, or red-mouthed catamounts, as these animals are so glutinous in their natures that they will not stray where the hope of a full stomach is a gross delusion to the fancy.
Those sections of Oregon, that are most advantageously situated for culture and profit are unhealthy, and abound in reptiles and insects, which render life almost insupportable. There are moccasins, copperheads, rattlesnakes, scorpions, lizards, tarantulas, fleas, ticks, musquitoes, gallinippers, & other pests, of which neither entymology nor zoology nor herpetology gives any account. Of all these infamous pests the Oregon musquitoes are said to be the most unendurable from their numbers and insatiable voracity. Whenever enterprize, fate, or horse-flesh carries an unfortunate wretch to the romantic shores of the Columbia river, the musquitoes pay their respects to him in countless multitudes, and attach themselves with unremitting and unrelenting closeness to him as long as he, or any eatible and drinkable portion of his body remains.
Wherever the mud is sufficiently oleaginous to produce musquitoes, they swarm from it in flocks which obscure the sun at noonday. After these rapacious insects have eaten all the flesh from the bones, the autumunal agues commence their interesting experiments.
Persons who reside in the swamps of Illinois, on the Wabash bottom in Indiana, or on the lowlands of Red river, flatter themselves that their knowledge of the ague is consummate; but it is reserved to those fortunate individuals, who reside in the smiling valley of the Wallamett, to be carried to the seventh heaven of delight on the wings of immortal agues.
There are parts of Arabia Felix of which the heart of a lover of nature never wearies— the happy valley, according to the unquestionable authority of Doctor Johnson, is an exquisite garden spot—on some of the high table lands in South America the blush of spring is perennial, and the scenery is lovely beyond description—the vale of Tempe, the isle of Nyssa, the grove of Daphne by Orontes, and the field of Enna, live in the luxurious verse of old heathen poets, but, were the splendors of all these places congregated and concentrated on one, that one would not, in the imaginations of many of our countrymen, compare in richness and beauty with that lovely territory on which the stars look entranced, that stretches from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific ocean, and from California on the south to some imaginary boundary line away off to the north, known under heaven by the euphonious designation of Oregon. Indeed, we expect to wake up some of these mornings to learn that some biblical explorer has discovered, in the vicinity of Vancouver, conclusive proofs that there originally bloomed the glories of Eden.