Pilot Knob

Pilot Knob', 1872. Covered wagons travelling west past Pilot Rock, a volcanic plug in Oregon, USA: 'one sees rising in the blue air the singular form of Pilot Knob, an elevation of the Siskiyou Mountains which, becoming a landmark to immigrants journeying to Oregon, has attained its name. This rock is a great mass of black volcanic substance, which rises perpendicularly from the mountain-crest. The Siskiyou Range has here an elevation of twenty-five hundred feet, and the knob is about five hundred feet higher...The volcanic origin of the mountains all through this region accounts for their singular lack of beauty. The angles are so sharp that the earth which covers their skeletons cannot adhere, and comes off in great land-slides, leaving the mountain-sides bare and exposed'. From "Picturesque America; or, The Land We Live In, A Delineation by Pen and Pencil of the Mountains, Rivers, Lakes...with Illustrations on Steel and Wood by Eminent American . Artists" Vol. I, edited by William Cullen Bryant. [D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1872]. Artist Henry Duff Linton. (Photo by The Print Collector/Heritage Images via Getty Images)