A SLIDING MOUNTAIN IN OREGON.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3581, 3 January 1883, Page 2

A SLIDING MOUNTAIN IN OREGON.

The Government engineers engaged upon I the ship canal around the rapids where the [ Columbia River cuts through the Cascade Mountains, and the engineers of the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, whose railroad runs besiele the .government canal, have discovered that a point of the mountains, of tremendous height and three miles iv extent, is moving clown an incline into the river. The fact of a moving mountain is strange, but not incomprehensible. It. seems, says an intelligent correspondent of the New York Times, that the great river and the ravines that point to it have cut their way down through a superincumbent mass of basalt into a substratum of sandstone. This sandstone we will suppose, presents a smooth surface, with an incline toward the river ; the river cuts under tho basalt, into the sandstone and the natural effect is for the superin(iiunbent basalt, acting like a similar formation of ice in a glacier, to slide down hill. The same gentleman says, on the authority of Mr Thielson, engineer in chief of the Western Division of the Northern Pacific Railroad, that when an examination was made a year ago of a disused portage tramway past that point, the track was found to be twisted as much as seven or eight feet out of the true line in some places, caused beyond doubt by a movement of the mountain. It seemed certain to Mr Thielson that there was a movement of a tremendous mountain spur opposite this piece of road. The correspondent goes on to say:—"lt is a fact well known to all river men that above the Cascades, where the river is tranquil, the waters cover a submerged forest, whose trunks still stand v/ith their projecting limbs to attest some wonderful phenomenon, It has been a query in the minds of all as to what convulsion of nature or process of time caused this overflow of waters. Over tliirty years ago I saw the dead trunks standing beneath the waves, and the interest in tliis connection was increased by learning from the Indians that among their tradiotiqns, was one that ages since the mountains rose pro? cipitously at the river's side, and a great arch of stone spanned the river from shore to shore, and that their canoes passed under it. Tradition further says that in course of time a great earthquake threw down the arch and blocked the river, causing the cascades as we sec them now. It is not often that Indian tradition is sg specific in detail. As the records of tho aborigines of this region tire very transient, it is possible that this story rests on some fact of natural history of not very remote occurrence. Joining tradition and speculation with the discoveries and de? duction of science, we must conclude that some convulsion of nature has thrown great masses of rock into tho stream, sufficient to deaden its flow for eight miles above and to submerge tho forests just' above' the rapids. Mr Bra zee, who has been engineer of the navigation company that owned the Portage road round the falls, informs me that he has watched the movements of the mountain for twenty years, and thai it is no myth."