Robert Thomas Boyd, (403 pages) — Willamette Valley

"The divide Oregon into two regions, high desert to the east and the Willamette Valley and Pacific Coast to the west. The agricultural heart of the state resides in the valley, as do most of its citizens. It was in this region, 150 s long and up to 60 miles wide, that s reigned from the last decade of the 19th century until the ."

"On the hilltops of my home in upstate , the bare gray branches of the s seem to be traced with a newly sharpened pencil against the winter sky. But in the Willamette Valley, the Oregon s are drawn in thick green crayon. The steady winter rains keep the tree trunks lush and green with moss, while the leaves lie dormant. The mossy sponge drips a constant flow of water to the tree roots, saturating the ground below and filling the soil reservoir for the summer ahead."

"is Oregons most extensively planted variety, accounting in 2001 for 49 percent of the states total surface. If the counties outside the Willamette Valley are disregarded, pinots share rise to more than 55 percent, and it is the only of ."

"Only a small portion of the land being fenced, almost the whole Willamette Valley is open to travel, and covered with the herds of the settlers, some of whom own between two and three thousand cattle and horses. Though thus pastured the grass is knee-high on the plains, and yet more luxuriant on the low lands; in summer the hilly parts are incarnadine with . ... Besides the natural increase of the first importations, not a year has passed since the venture of the in 1837, without the introduction of cattle and horses from California, to which are added those driven from the States annually after 1842, .. when come likewise constantly increasing flocks of sheep."

"Beginning in the summer of 1830, and recurring each summer for several years thereafter, the lower and Willamette River valleys were visited by yet another "new" disease, called "fever and ague" (by the Americans) or "intermittent fever" (by the British). Although there has been some controversy over the identity of this disease, current consensus favors malaria ... Cumulatively, the "fever and ague" epidemics had a devastating impact on the and n peoples of the area. From a total population something under the 15,545 estimated by and the in the early decades of the 1800s, numbers for these two groups dropped to around 1,932 by 1841, a decline of 88% ..."