Anywhere you see a symbol next to a subject, click on it to see more links about that subject.

Here I am at Sutter's Fort in Sacramento, California. The man holding me is Tom, and he works here at the fort. Mrs. Pearson asked him if he lived here, and he said he'd sure like to. He knows a lot about the fort, and he loves it so much! Julia, the woman who works in the office, was kept really busy welcoming groups of school children to the fort the day we visited. She said to say "hi" to all the people who would be reading this report. And now for the story of Sutter's Fort:

A man named Johann Sutter who was from Switzerland built this fort in 1840, when California still belonged to Mexico. The place Mr. Sutter chose was near where the American River flows into the Sacramento River. Native Americans were living in this area at that time, and some of them helped Mr. Sutter build the fort and work in the fields where he grew the crops and vegetables. The fort was used mostly as a trading post, and many people lived right outside the walls as well as inside. Through the next nine years it became a supply center for immigrants who came to California, and it eventually contained a bakery, blanket factory, blacksmith shop, carpenter shop, and other workshops. There were rooms for guests to stay in as they were on their way to settle on land they had claimed. There was a tannery a little ways away on the American River. Further up the American River about 50 miles (80 kilometers) east of the fort Sutter was building a sawmill. He'd hired James Marshall to do that job, and as Mr. Marshall was digging in the river to deepen it for the millrace he discovered gold. The secret leaked out, and the gold rush of 1849 was on. The Forty-niners who came to try their luck in the gold fields came by this fort to get supplies, and eventually came in such great numbers that they stripped the fort and trampled the crops growing all around it. Sutter sold the fort at a great loss and moved to a farm near the town of Marysville, California. Mr. Marshall never got rich, either, even though he was the one who discovered the gold. It was a sad ending for those two men and an even sadder ending for the Native Americans who had lived here in California for many centuries and now had to give up their land to the settlers.

Here I am in the hands of one of our favorite little boys--Mrs. Pearson's grandson Connor. We got to visit him when he was in Portland for one afternoon on a train trip with his mom--another teacher named Mrs. Pearson! We drove out along the Columbia River on the Historic Columbia River Highway, which was built between 1913 and 1922. The place where Connor and I are standing is Chanticleer Point, in the Portland Women's Forum State Park. That river in the background is the mighty Columbia River, down which Lewis and Clark came floating in 1805. We're standing in Oregon, and that's Washington state on the other side of the river.

The second picture is of one of the many waterfalls that cascade down off a high ledge of land along the Gorge. This one is the most famous--and the highest. It's named Multnomah Falls, and it drops 620 feet (189 meters), all total. You can see a footbridge that crosses over the top of the lower part of the falls. There is a trail up to that footbridge, but we didn't try to walk up there with Connor. Some of the other waterfalls along the Historic Columbia River Highway are Latourell Falls, Bridal Veil Falls, Wahkeena Falls, and Horsetail Falls. Mrs. Pearson and I walked to all of those on a different day after Connor went back home to Colorado.

Some of the Historic Columbia River Highway got covered up by Interstate 84 when it was put through the bottom of the gorge along the river. Other parts of the old road are now hiking and biking trails, and from those parts you can see more waterfalls. The road was the idea of a lawyer, Sam Hill. He traveled the great roads of Europe before coming back with his ideas for this highway. The engineer who brought his dreams to reality was Samuel Lancaster.

The little white triangle to the right of Connor's head in the first picture is the Vista House several miles away at Crown Point, designed by Edgar Lazarus. It is a memorial to Oregon pioneers, many of whom came from the east on the famous Oregon Trail . Mr. Lancaster did a great job of getting the road to that point and then winding it gracefully down the mountainside in a series of figure-eight loops to bring the road down to the bottom of the gorge so that people could visit all the waterfalls past that point.

We really had a great adventure the day that Connor and his mom joined us!

In this picture I am in the United States, but just behind me, through that arch, is Canada. Mrs. Pearson and I walked through the arch back and forth having fun going from the U.S. to Canada and back to the U.S. again and again. The arch was built in 1921 to help people celebrate more than one hundred years of harmony between Canada and the United States. Inside the arch there are some words carved into the stone. On one side the words say, "Children of a Common Mother." That means that the United States and Canada both were once part of "Mother" England's territories. On the other side of the arch the words say, "Brothers Dwelling Together in Unity." (I think it should say "Brothers and Sisters," and Mrs. Pearson agrees.) The arch was built right over the old narrow gravel road that went between Washington and British Columbia. Later, when the road was widened and divided, the northbound and southbound lanes were separated by a park so that the Peace Arch could stand in this lovely garden between the lanes of traffic.

Here's my last report from the trip. (Mrs. Pearson has one more after this.) I was really ready to get home to Colorado, which is the next state south of Wyoming. But before we got home, Mrs. Pearson and I wanted to see some buffalo up close, because those animals were so important to the Lewis and Clark expedition. Here at Terry Bison Ranch, near Cheyenne, we got our wish. One of the ranch hands drove us out into the buffalo pasture in an old pickup truck, and we got to see these huge animals. By now, these buffalo are so used to pickups and people that they didn't think much of us being there, except they stared at us. We weren't allowed out of the pickup, so Mrs. Pearson held me out the window of the pickup and took this picture. I was a little nervous that she'd drop me, but she held on tight.

At Terry Bison Ranch they have 2,500 buffalo, and there are wagon tours through big herds of the animals. The ranch also has chuckwagon dinners and horseback riding. We'll do those things the next time we go up there.

Lewis and Clark were never in Wyoming on their trip, but both of them wrote a lot about the buffalo in their journals. I'll show you some of the things that Lewis told in his journal. He wrote on September 17, 1804, when they were traveling through what is now South Dakota:

"I do not think I exagerate when I estimate the number of Buffaloe which could be compre[hend]ed at one view to amount to 3000."

"the Indians have informed us that we should shortly leave the buffaloe country after passing the falls; this I much regret for I know when we leave the buffaloe that we shal sometimes be under the necessity of fasting occasionally."

"When I arrived in sight of the white-bear Islands the missouri bottoms on both sides of the river were crouded with buffaloe I sincerely beleif that there were not less than 10 thousand buffaloe within a circle of 2 miles [3.2 kilometers] around that place."

Mrs. Pearson bought some buffalo summer sausage in a shop in Montana, and she's been having slices of it as we've traveled through Montana and Wyoming. She says it's pretty tasty. She's awfully glad we didn't have to hunt for it the way Lewis and Clark did.