Chapter VIII: Section 33: , then, is the section thus numbered in township 10, south of

range 7, west of the Willamette meridian. It lay just on the edge of the burned woods country.

[Sidenote: _THE GREAT CONFLAGRATION._]

Although forest-fires in Oregon are still of yearly occurrence, since settlement by the white men the range of the devastation has been by degrees narrowed and confined. Formerly the Indians started fires every year to burn the withered grass in the valleys and on the hillsides, and thence fire spread into the woods and ravaged many miles of timber. The "great fire" is said to have occurred about forty years ago, when many Indians perished in the flames, and others had to take refuge in the streams and rivers, till the destroying element had passed them in its resistless fury.

Standing on the top of one of these Coast Mountains, the eye ranges for many miles over hill and dale, dotted everywhere with the huge black trunks, the relics of the great conflagration. Many standing yet, some towering high into the sky, testify of their former gracefulness by the symmetrical tapering of the tall trunk, and the regular positions of the broken limbs and branches. But Nature is busily at work repairing damages; each winter's rains penetrate more deeply into the fabric of the trunk; each winter's gales loosen yet more the roots in which the living sap was long ago destroyed; each spring the wind brings down additions to the graveyard of trees, rotting away into mold; while a few young successors to the former race of firs are showing themselves clothed in living green, and a dense growth of copse-wood, hazel, cherry, vine-maple, arrow-wood, and crab-apple is crowding the hollows of the canyons on the hill-sides.

The brake-fern covers the hills, attaining a growth of five, six, or eight feet, and sheltering an undergrowth of wild-pea and native grass.