Part 20
But before the rickety deck chairs had ceased their creaking complaints about the burden we had imposed on them we were congratulating ourselves on the circumstance that had forced us to exchange a hot and dusty highroad for a cool and silent waterway. To me there is something irresistibly fascinating and seductive about a river. I always find myself wondering where it comes from, and what strange things it has seen along its course, and where it is going to, and I invariably have a hankering to take ship and keep it company. And the greater the stream, the greater its fascination, because, of course, it has travelled so much farther. Now the Columbia, as that friend of our boyhood, Huck Finn, would have put it, is no slouch of a river. If its kinks and twists were carefully straightened out it would reach half-way across the continent, or as far as from New York to Kansas City. It is somewhat disturbing for one who visits the valley of the Columbia for the first time, with the purpose of writing about it, to have these facts suddenly thrown, as it were, in his face, particularly if, like myself, he has been brought up in that part of the country where the Hudson is regarded as the only real river in America—doubtless because it washes the shores of Manhattan—and where all other waterways are looked upon as being not much better than creeks. I felt like apologising to somebody, and when, on top of all this, I was told that the Columbia and its tributaries drain a region equal in area to all the States along our Atlantic seaboard put together, I had a sudden desire to go ashore at the next landing and take a train back home.
Though of British birth, for it has its source above the Canadian line in the country of the Kootenai, the Columbia emends this unfortunate circumstance by becoming naturalised when it is still a slender stripling, dividing its allegiance, however, between Oregon and Washington, for which it serves as a boundary for upward of four hundred miles. It is not only the father of Northwestern waters, but it is the big brother of all those streams, from the Straits of Behring to the Straits of Magellan, which call the Pacific Ocean “grandpa.” By white-hulled river steamer, by panting power-boat, by produce-laden barge, by bark canoe, by the goatskin raft called _kelek_, I have loitered my leisurely way down many famous rivers—the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Mississippi, the Fraser, the Skeena, the Rio Balsas, the Rhine, the Danube, the Volga, the Euphrates, the Ganges, the Zambesi, the Nile—and I assert, after having duly weighed my words, that in the continuity and grandeur of its scenery the Columbia is the superior of them all. If you think that I am carried away by enthusiasm you had better go and see it for yourself.
It was Carlyle—was it not?—who remarked that all great works produce an unpleasant impression on first acquaintance. It is so with the Columbia. We saw it first on a broiling August day from the heights above Celilo—the great, silent, mysterious river winding away into the unknown between banks of lava as sinister and forbidding as the flanks of Etna, and with a sun beating down upon it from a sky of molten brass. There were no grassy banks, no trees, no flowers, no vegetation of any kind, none of the things that one usually associates with a river. But when the steamer bears you around the first of those frowning cliffs that rise sheer from the surface of the river below The Dalles—ah, well, that is quite another matter.
Since Time began, the sheets of lava which give The Dalles its name, by compressing the half-mile-wide river into a channel barely sixscore feet across, have effectually obstructed continuous navigation upon the Upper Columbia. But, as towns multiplied and population increased along the upper reaches of the great river and its tributaries in Washington and Oregon, in Montana and Idaho, this hinderance to the navigation of so splendid a waterway became intolerable, unthinkable, absurd. At last the frock-coated gentlemen in Congress were prodded into action, and the passage of a bill for the construction of a canal around The Dalles, at Celilo, was the result. Came then keen-eyed, self-reliant men who, jeering at the obstacles which Nature had heaped in their path, proceeded to slash a canal through eight miles of shifting sands and basalt rock, so that hereafter the fruit growers and farmers and ranchers as far inland as Lewiston, in Idaho, can send their produce down to the sea in ships.
“The trouble with the Columbia,” complained the Lady, “is that it’s all scenery and no romance. It’s too big, too prosaic, too commercial. It doesn’t arouse any overwhelming enthusiasm in me to be told that this river irrigates goodness knows how many thousand square miles of land, or that the top of that mountain over there is so many thousand feet above the level of the sea, or that so many thousand barrels of apples were grown last year in the valley we just passed and that they brought so many dollars a barrel. Facts like those are all well enough in an almanac, because no one ever reads almanacs anyway, but they don’t interest me and I don’t believe that they interest many other visitors, either. If a river hasn’t any romance connected with it, it isn’t much better than a canal. Don’t you remember that rock in the Bosphorus, near Scutari, to which Leander used to swim out to see Hero, and how when we passed it the passengers would all rush over to that side of the deck, and how the steamer would list until her rail was almost under water, and how the Turkish officers would get frightened half to death and shove the people back? You don’t see the passengers on this boat threatening to capsize it because of their anxiety to see something romantic, do you? I should say not. Do you remember Kerbela, that town on the Euphrates, where all Persians hope to be buried when they die, and how, long before we reached there, we could smell the Caravans of the Dead which were carrying the bodies there from across the desert? And those crumbling, ivy-covered castles along the Rhine, with their queer legends and traditions and superstitions? That’s what I mean by romance, and you know as well as I do that there is nothing romantic about apple orchards and salmon canneries and sawmills. Is there?”
“Pardon me, madam,” said a gentleman who had been seated so close to us that he could not help overhearing what she said and who had been unable to conceal his disagreement with the views she had expressed, “but do you see that island over there near the Washington shore? The long, low one with the little white monument sticking up at the end of it. That is Memaloose—the Island of the Dead. It is the Indian Valhalla. Talk about the Persians whose bodies are borne across the desert to be buried at Kerbela! Did you happen to know that on the slopes of that island are buried untold thousands of Chinooks, whose bodies were brought on the backs of men hundreds of miles through the wilderness or in canoes down long and lonely rivers that they might find their last resting-places in its sacred soil? And the monument that you see marks the grave of a frontiersman who was as romantic a character as you will find in the pages of Fenimore Cooper. His name was Victor Trevet; he knew and liked the Indians; and he asked to be buried on Memaloose that his bones might lie among those of ‘honest men.’ Is it legend and tradition that you say the river lacks? A few miles ahead of us, at the Cascades, the river was once spanned, according to the Indian legend, by a stupendous natural bridge of rock. The Indians called it the Bridge of the Gods. The great river flowed under it, and on it lived a witch woman named Loowit, who had charge of the only fire in the world. Seeing how wretched was the lot of the fireless tribes, who had to live on uncooked meats and vegetables, she begged permission of the gods to give them fire. Her request was granted and the condition of the Indians was thus enormously improved. So gratified were the gods by Loowit’s consideration for the welfare of the Indians that they promised to grant any request that she might make. Womanlike, she promptly asked for youth and beauty. Whereupon she was transformed into a maiden whose loveliness would have caused Lina Cavalieri to go out of the professional beauty business. The news of her beauty spreading among the tribes like fire in summer grass, there came numberless youths who pleaded for her hand, or, rather, for the face and figure that went with it. Among them were two young chieftains: Klickitat from the north and Wiyeast from the west. As she was unable to decide between them, they and their tribesmen decided to settle the rivalry with the tomahawk. But the gods, angry at this senseless waste of lives over a pretty woman, put Loowit and her two gentlemen friends to death and sent the great bridge on which she had dwelt crashing down into the river. But as they had all three been good to look upon in life, so the gods, who were evidently æsthetic, made them good to look upon even in death by turning them into snow peaks. Wiyeast became the mountain which we palefaces call Mount Hood; Klickitat they transformed into the peak we know as Mount Adams; while Mount Saint Helens is the beautiful form taken by the fair Loowit. Thus was the wonderful Bridge of the Gods destroyed and the Columbia dammed by the débris which fell into it. In a few minutes we will be at the Cascades and you can see the ruins of the bridge for yourself. And, if you still have any lingering doubts as to the truth of the story, why, there is Klickitat in his white blanket rising above the forests to the right, and Wiyeast is over there to your left, and ahead of us, down the river, is the Loowit lady disguised as Mount Saint Helens. So you see there is no room for doubt.
“You assert that the Columbia is lacking in romance because, forsooth, no Leander has swum across it to see a Hero. Good heavens, my dear young lady, I can tell you a story that has more all-wool-and-a-yard-wide romance in it than a dozen such Hellespontine fables. Did you never hear of Whitman the missionary, who, instead of crossing a measly strait to win a woman, crossed a continent and won an empire?
“In the early forties Whitman established a mission station near the present site of Walla Walla. Hearing rumours that our government was on the point of accommodatingly ceding the Valley of the Columbia to England in return for some paltry fishing rights off the banks of Newfoundland—the government officials of those days evidently preferred codfish to salmon—he rode overland to Washington in the dead of winter, through blinding snow-storms, swimming icy rivers, subsisting on his pack-mules and his dogs when his food ran out, facing death by torture at the hands of hostile Indians. Gaining admission to the White House in his dress of furs and buckskin, with his feet and fingers terribly frozen, he so impressed President Tyler and Secretary of State Webster by his vivid description of the richness and fertility of the region which they were on the point of ceding to England that he saved the entire Pacific Northwest to the Union. If that isn’t sufficient romance for you, then I’m afraid you’re hard to please.”
“I surrender,” said the Lady. “Your old Columbia has plenty of romance, after all. The trouble is that tourists don’t know these interesting things that you’ve just been telling us and they _do_ know all about the Danube and the Rhine.”
“That’s easily remedied,” said I. “I’ll tell them about it myself.”
And that, my friends, is precisely what I have just been trying to do.
* * * * *
“Next stop Hood River!” bawled the purser.
“That’s where the apples come from,” remarked our deck acquaintance, who had turned himself into a guide-book for our benefit. “In some of the orchards up the valley you’ll find apples with paper letters pasted on them: ‘C de P’ for the Café de Paris, you know, and ‘W-A’ for the Waldorf-Astoria, and ‘G R & I’ for Georgius Rex et Imperator—which is _not_ the name of the restaurant. They paste the letters on quite carefully when the apples are still green upon the tree, and when they ripen the paper is torn off, leaving the yellow initials on the bright red fruit. Those are the apples that they serve at royal banquets and that they charge a dollar apiece for in the smart restaurants in Europe. I don’t mean to imply that all of the Hood River apples are thus initialled to order, but some of them are. The average value of the land in that valley, cultivated and uncultivated, is three hundred and forty dollars an acre, and if a man wanted to purchase an orchard in bearing he would have to pay at least four thousand dollars an acre for it. Some people think that it was the original Garden of Eden. If it was, I don’t blame Eve for stealing the apple. I’d steal a Hood River apple myself if I got the chance.”
Had the second mate been a little more obliging, and had there not been so formidable a barricade of crates and milk cans about the car, I would have had it run ashore then and there and would have taken a whirl through the famous apple orchards which cover the lower slopes of Mount Hood and have kept on up the zigzag mountain road as far as the cosy little hostelry called Cloud Cap Inn, which some public-spirited Portlander has built upon the snow-line. Perhaps it was just as well we didn’t, however, for I learned afterward that the famous valley is only about twenty miles long, so, if we had not put on the emergency brake before we started, we would have run through it before we could have stopped and would not have seen it at all. Nowhere in Switzerland do I recall a picture of such surpassing splendour as that which stood before us, as though on a titanic easel, as, from the vantage of the steamer’s upper deck, we looked up the vista formed by this fragrant, verdant valley toward the great white cone of Mount Hood. It is, indeed, so very beautiful that those Americans who know and love the world’s white rooftrees can find scant justification for turning their faces toward the Alps when here, in the upper left-hand corner of their own country, are mountains which would make the ghost of the great Whymper moan for an alpenstock and hobnailed boots. This startlingly sudden transition from orchards groaning with fruit to dense primeval forests, and from these forests to the stately, isolated snow peaks, is very different from Switzerland, of course. Indeed, to compare these mountains of the Pacific Northwest with the Alps, as is so frequently done, seems to me to be a grave injustice to them both. The Alps form a wild and angry sea of icy mountains, and we have nothing in America to which they can be fittingly compared. The Cascades, on the other hand, form a great system of lofty forest-wrapped ranges surmounted by the towering isolated peaks of snowy volcanoes, and Europe contains nothing to equal them. I am perfectly aware, of course, that the very large number of Americans who spend their summers in the ascent of the orthodox Swiss peaks—more often than not, if the truth were known, by means of funicular railways or through telescopes on hotel piazzas—look with scorn and contumely upon these mountains of the far Nor’west, which they regard as home-made and unfashionable and vulgar and not worth bothering about. Perhaps they are not aware, however, that no less an authority on mountaineering than James Bryce (I don’t recall the title that he has taken now that he has been made a peer, and no one would recognise him if I used it) said not long ago, in speaking of these sentinels that guard the Columbia:
“We have nothing more beautiful in Switzerland or Tyrol, in Norway or the Pyrenees. The combination of ice scenery with woodland scenery of the grandest type is to be found nowhere in the Old World, unless it be in the Himalayas, and, so far as we know, nowhere else on the American continent.”
Which but serves to point the truth that foreigners are more appreciative of the beauties and grandeurs of our country than we are ourselves.
* * * * *
At the Cascades the Columbia takes a drop of half a hundred feet and we had, perforce, to bide our time in the locks, by means of which the rapids have been circumvented, until the waters found their level. It is not until the Cascades are passed that the scenery for which the Columbia is famous begins in all its sublimity and grandeur. The Great Artist has painted pictures more colourful, more sensational, perhaps, as the Grand Cañon, for example, the Yellowstone, and the Sahara, but none which combines the qualities of strength and restfulness as this mighty river, flowing swiftly, silently between the everlasting hills. From the shores the orchards and the gardens rise, terrace above terrace, until they become merged in the forest-covered ranges, and above the ranges rise the august snow peaks, solitary, silent, like a line of sentries strung along the horizon. At times, particularly in the early morning and again at sunset, these snow mountains present that singular appearance familiar to the traveller in the Himalayas and the Cordilleras, when the snowy cone seems to be floating ethereally upon a sea of mist which completely shrouds the hills and forests at its base. Immediately below the Cascades commences the series of waterfalls for which the lower reaches of the Columbia are famous, the granite cliffs which, for nearly twoscore miles border the Oregon shore with a sheer wall of rock, being scored at frequent intervals by what seem, from a distance, to be ribbons of shining silver. As the boat draws nearer, however, you see that what looked like ribbons are really mountain streams which are so impatient to join their mother, the Columbia, that, instead of taking the more sedate but circuitous route, they fling themselves tempestuously over the brink of the sheer cliff into the arms of the parent stream. First come the Horsetail Falls, whose falling waters, blown by the wind into silvery strands, are suggestive of the flowing tail of a white Arab; then, in quick succession, the Oneonta Falls, at the end of a narrow gorge which penetrates the cliffs for a mile or more; the nine-hundred-feet-high Multnomah, the highest falls in all the northwest country if not, indeed, on the entire Pacific Coast; the Bridal Veil, as radiantly beautiful as its namesake of the Yosemite; and finally, just below the great monolith rising from the river known as Rooster Rock, the Falls of Latourelle. On the opposite shore the mighty promontory known as Cape Horn rises five hundred feet above the surface of the river, and, a few miles farther up-stream, Castle Rock, whose turreted crags bear a striking resemblance to some stronghold of the Middle Ages, attains to twice that height. By the time the steamer reaches the mighty natural gateway known as the Pillars of Hercules, the traveller is actually surfeited with grandeur and is quite ready for the simple, friendly, pastoral scenes again, just as one after a season of Wagnerian opera welcomes the simple airs and the old-fashioned songs.
[Illustration: “WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON.”
The Columbia from Saint Peter’s Dome, with Mount Adams in the distance. “The Great Artist has painted pictures more colorful, more sensational, perhaps, but none which so combine the qualities of strength and restfulness as this mighty river.”]
As I do not chew popcorn, peanuts, gum, or candy, nor munch dripping ice-cream cones, and as I have an unconquerable aversion to other people doing those unpleasant things in my immediate vicinity, I left the others, who did not seem to mind such minor annoyances, among the excursionists upon the upper deck and made my way below. After clambering over great piles of crates, sacks, and barrels filled with Columbia River produce, I finally succeeded in finding a secluded spot in the vessel’s bows, whence I could watch, undisturbed by sticky-fingered youngsters or idle chatter, the varied commerce of the mighty water road. Stern-wheel, twin-funnelled passenger boats zigzagged from shore to shore to pick up the passengers and freight that patiently awaited their coming; rusty freighters scuttled down-stream laden with fruit for the coast towns and salmon for the Astoria canneries; spick-and-span pleasure craft, with shining brass work and graceful, tapering spars, daintily picked their way through the press of river traffic as a pretty girl picks her way along a crowded street; grimy fishing craft, their sails as weather-beaten as the faces of the men that raise them, danced by us, eager for home and supper and the evening fire; great log rafts wallowed by, sent down by the forests to propitiate the greedy sawmills, whose sharp-toothed jaws devour the sacrifice and scream for more.
Perhaps the most interesting and characteristic feature of the landscape along the lower Columbia are the fish-wheels—ingenious contrivances, twenty to forty feet in diameter and six to eight feet across, which look like pocket editions of the passenger-carrying Ferris wheel at the Chicago Exposition. The wheels, which are hung in substantial frameworks close to the banks, where the salmon run the thickest, are revolved by the current, which keeps the wire-meshed scoops with which each pair of spokes are fitted for ever lifting from the water. The great schools of salmon are guided toward the wheel by means of a lattice dam which reaches out into the river like the arm of a false friend, and, before the unsuspecting fish know what has happened to them, they are hoisted into the air in the wire scoops and dumped into an inclined trough, down which they slide into a fenced-in pool, where the fishermen can get them at their leisure. They are then strung on wires and attached to a barrel which acts as a buoy, the barrel, sometimes with a ton of fish trailing behind it like the tail to a kite, floating down-stream to the nearest cannery, where a man in a launch is on the lookout and tows them ashore. Months later, in Pekin or Peoria, in Rome or Rumford Falls, or wherever else you may happen to be dining, you will see the item “Columbia River Salmon” on the hotel menu.