The Columbia, viewed as one from the sea to the mountains, is like a rugged, broad-topped picturesque old oak, about six hundred miles long, and nearly a thousand miles wide, measured across the spread of its upper branches, the main limbs gnarled and swollen with lakes and lake-like expansions, while innumerable smaller lakes shine like fruit among the smaller branches.—John Muir.

Never was a marine picture of greater stress. No watcher from the crags, none who go down to the sea in ships, ever beheld a scene more awful. Ceaselessly the mighty surges piled up against the ridge at our feet, as if to tear away the solid foundations of the mountain. Towers and castles of foam were built up, huge and white, against the sullen sky, only to hurl themselves into the gulf. Far to the north, dimly above this gray and heaving surface were seen the crests of three snow-mantled mountains, paler even than the undulating expanse from which they emerged. All between was a wild sea that rolled across sixty miles of space to assail those ghostly islands.

Yet the tossing breakers gave forth no roar. It was a spectral and pantomimic ocean. We "had sight of Proteus rising from the sea," but no Triton of the upper air blew his "wreathed horn." Cold and uncanny, all that seething ocean was silent as a windless lake under summer stars. It was a sea of clouds.

Swiftly the dawn marched westward. The sun, breaking across the eastern ridges, sent long level beams to sprinkle the cloud-sea with silver. Its touch was magical. The billows broke and parted. The mists fled in panic. Cloud after cloud arose and was caught away into space. The tops of the Cascade ranges below came, one by one, into view. Lower and lower, with the shortening shadows, the wooded slopes were revealed in the morning light. Here and there some deep vale was still white and hidden. Scattered cloud-fleeces clung to pinnacles on the cliffs. Northward, the snow-peaks in Washington towered higher. Great banks of fog embraced their forested abutments, and surged up to their glaciers. But the icy summits smiled in the gladness of a new day. The reign of darkness and mist was broken.

Clearer and wider the picture grew. Below us, the orchards of Hood River caught the fresh breezes and laughed in the first sunshine. The day reached down into the nearer canyons, and saluted the busy, leaping brooks. Noisy waterfalls filled the glens with spray, and built rainbows from bank to bank, then hurried and tumbled on, in conceited haste, as if the ocean must run dry unless replenished by their wetness ere the sun should set again. Rippling lakes, in little mountain pockets, signaled their joy as blankets of dense vapor were folded up and quickly whisked away.

Thirty miles northeast, a ribbon of gold flashed the story of a mighty stream at The Dalles. Far beyond, even to the uplands of the Umatilla and the Snake, to the Blue Mountains of eastern Washington and Oregon, stretched the wheat fields and stock ranges of that vast "Inland Empire" which the great river watered; while westward, cut deep[19]
[20]
[21] through a dozen folds of the Cascades, the chasm it had torn on its way to the sea was traced in the faint blue that distance paints upon evergreen hills. Out on our left, beyond the mountains, the Willamette slipped down its famous valley to join the larger river; and still farther, a hundred and fifty miles away, our glasses caught the vague gray line of the Pacific. Within these limits of vision lay a noble and historic country, the lower watershed of the Columbia.

Wide as was the prospect, however, it called the imagination to a still broader view; to look back, indeed,—how many millions of years?—to an earlier dawn, bounded by the horizons of geological time. Let us try to realize the panorama thus unfolded. As we look down from some aerial viewpoint, behold! there is no Mount Hood and no Cascade Range. The volcanic snow-peaks of Oregon and Washington are still embryo in the womb of earth. We stand face to face with the beginnings of the Northwest.

Far south and east of our castle-in-the-air, islands rise slowly out of a Pacific that has long rolled, unbroken, to the Rocky Mountains. We see the ocean bed pushed above the tide in what men of later ages will call the Siskiyou and the Blue Mountains, one range in southwestern, the other in eastern, Oregon. A third uptilt, the great Okanogan, in northern Washington, soon appears. All else is sea. Upon these primitive uplands, the date is written in the fossil archives of their ancient sea beaches, raised thousands of feet above the former shore-line level. At a time when all western Europe was still ocean, and busy foraminifers were strewing its floor with shells to form the chalk beds of France and England, these first lands of our Northwest emerged from the great deep. It is but a glimpse we get into the immeasurable distance of the Paleozoic. Its time-units are centuries instead of minutes.

Another glance, as the next long geological age passes, and we perceive a second step in the making of the West. It is the gradual uplift of a thin sea-dike, separating the two islands first disclosed, and stretching from the present Lower California to our Alaska. It is a folding of the earth's crust that will, for innumerable ages, exercise a controlling influence upon the whole western slope of North America. At first merely a sea-dike, we see it slowly become a far-reaching range of hills, and then a vast continental mountain system, covering a broad region with its spurs and interlying plateaus. "The highest mountains," our school geographies used to tell us, "parallel the deepest oceans." So here, bordering its profound depths, the Pacific ocean, through centuries of centuries, thrust upward, fold on fold, the lofty ridges of this colossal Sierra-Cascade barrier, to be itself a guide of further land building, a governor of climate, and a reservoir of water for valleys and river basins as yet unborn.

Behind this barrier, what revolutions are recorded! The inland sea, at first a huge body of ocean waters, becomes in time a fresh-water lake. In its three thousand feet of sediment, it buries the fossils of a strange reptilian life, covering hundreds of thousands of years. Cycle follows cycle, altering the face of all that interior basin. Its vast lake is lessened in area as it is cut off from the Utah lake on the south and hemmed in by upfolds on the north. Then its bed is lifted up and broken by forces of which our present-day experiences give us no example. Instead of one great lake, as drainage proceeds, we behold at last a wide country of many lakes and rivers. Their shores are clothed in tropical vegetation. Under the palms, flourish a race of giant mammals. The broad-faced ox, the mylodon, mammoth, elephant, rhinoceros, and mastodon, and with them the camel and the three-toed horse, roam the forests that are building the coal deposits for a later age. This story of the Eocene and Miocene time is also told in the fossils of the period, and we may read it in the strata deposited by the lakes.

Age succeeds age, not always distinct, but often overlapping one another, and all changing the face of nature. The Coast Range rises, shutting in vast gulfs to fill later, and form the valleys of the Sacramento and San Joaquin in California and the Willamette in Oregon, with the partly filled basin of Puget Sound in Washington. Centering along the Cascade barrier, an era of terrific violence shakes the very foundation of the Northwest. Elevations and contours are changed. New lake beds are created. Watersheds and stream courses are remodeled. Dry "coulees" are left where formerly rivers flowed. Strata are uptilted and riven, to be cross-sectioned again by the new rivers as they cut new canyons in draining the new lakes. Most important of all, outflows of melted rock, pouring from fissures in the changing earth-folds, spread vast sheets of basalt, trap and andesite over most of the interior. Innumerable craters build cones of lava and scoriÆ along the Cascade uptilt, and scatter clouds of volcanic ashes upon the steady sea winds, to blanket the country for hundreds of miles with deep layers of future soil.

A reign of ice follows the era of tropic heat. Stupendous glaciers grind the volcanic rocks, and carving new valleys, endow them with fertility for new forests that will rise where once the palm forests stood. With advancing age, the earth grows cold and quiet, awakening only to an occasional volcanic eruption or earthquake as a reminder of former violence. The dawn of history approaches. The country slowly takes on its present shape. Landscape changes are henceforth the work of milder forces, erosion by streams and remnant glaciers. Man appears.

Throughout the cycles of convulsion and revolution which we have witnessed from our eyrie in the clouds, the vital and increasing influence in the building of the Northwest has been the Cascade upfold. First, it merely shuts in a piece of the Pacific. Rising higher, its condensation of the moist ocean wind feeds the thousand streams that convert the inland seas thus enclosed from salt to fresh water, and furnish the silt deposited over their floors. The fractures and faults resulting from its uptilting spread an empire with some of the largest lava flows in geological history. It pushes its snow-covered volcanoes upward, to scatter ashes far to the east. Finally, its increasing height converts a realm of tropical verdure into semi-arid land, which only its rivers, impounded by man, will again make fertile.

In all this great continental barrier, throughout the changes which we have witnessed, there has been only one sea-level pass. For nearly a thousand miles northward from the Gulf of California, the single outlet for the waters of the interior is the remarkable canyon which we first saw from the distant roof of Cloud Cap Inn. Here the Columbia, greatest of Western rivers, has cut its way through ranges rising more than 4,000 feet on either hand. This erosion, let us remember, has been continuous and gradual, rather than the work of any single epoch. It doubtless began when the Cascade Mountains were in their infancy, a gap in the prolonged but low sea-dike. The drainage, first of the vast salt lake shut off from the ocean, and then of the succeeding fresh-water lakes, has preserved this channel to the sea, cutting it deeper and deeper as the earth-folds rose higher, until at last the canyon became one of the most important river gorges in the world. Thus nature prepared a vast and fruitful section of the continent for human use, and provided it with a worthy highway to the ocean.

Over this beautiful region we may descry yet another dawn, the beginnings of the Northwestern world according to Indian legend. The Columbia River Indian, like his brothers in other parts of the country, was curious about the origin of the things he beheld around him, and oppressed by things he could not see. The mysteries both of creation and of human destiny weighed heavily upon his blindness; and his mind, pathetically groping in the dark, was ever seeking to penetrate the distant past and the dim future. So far as he had any religion, it was connected with the symbols of power in nature, the forces which he saw at work about him. These forces were often terrible and ruinous, so his gods were as often his enemies as his benefactors. Feeling his powerlessness against their cunning, he borrowed a cue from the "animal people," Watetash, who used craft to circumvent the malevolent gods.

These animal people, the Indian believed, had inhabited the world before the time of the first grandfather, when the sun was as yet only a star, and the earth, too, had grown but little, and was only a small island. The chief of the animal people was Speelyei, the coyote, not the mightiest but the shrewdest of them all. Speelyei was the friend of "people". He had bidden people to appear, and they "came out."

One of the most interesting attempts to account for the existence of the Red Man in the Northwest is the Okanogan legend that tells of an island far out at sea inhabited by a race of giant whites, whose chief was a tall and powerful woman, Scomalt. When her giants warred among themselves, Scomalt grew angry and drove all the fighters to the end of the island. Then she broke off the end of the island, and pushing with her foot sent it floating away over the sea. The new island drifted far. All the people on it died save one man and one woman. They caught a whale, and its blubber saved them from starving. At last they escaped from the island by making a canoe. In this they paddled many days. Then they came to the mainland, but it was small. It had not yet grown much. Here they landed. But while they had been in the canoe, the sun had turned them from white to red. All the Okanogans were their children. Hence they all are red. Many years from now the whole of the mainland will be cut loose from its foundations,[34]
[35]
[36] and become an island. It will float about on the sea. That will be the end of the world.

To the aboriginal Americans in the Northwest the great river, "Wauna" in their vocabulary, was inevitably a subject of deep interest. It not only furnished them a highway, but it supplied them with food. Their most fascinating myths are woven about its history. One of these told of the mighty struggle between Speelyei and Wishpoosh, the greedy king beaver, which resulted in breaking down the walls of the great lakes of the interior and creating a passage for their waters through the mountains. Thus the Indians accounted for the Columbia and its canyon.

But first among the river myths must always be the Klickitat legend of the famous natural bridge, fabled to have stood where the Cascades of the[37]
[38]
[39] Columbia now are. This is one of the most beautiful legends connected with the source of fire, a problem of life in all the northern lands. Further, it tells the origin of the three snow-peaks that are the subject of this book.

In the time of their remote grandfathers, said the Klickitats, Tyhee Saghalie, chief of the gods, had two sons. They made a trip together down the river to where The Dalles are now. The sons saw that the country was beautiful, and quarrelled as to its possession. Then Saghalie shot an arrow to the north and an arrow to the west. The sons were bidden to find the arrows, and settle where they had fallen. Thus one son settled in the fair country between the great river and the Yakima, and became the grandfather of the Klickitats. The other son settled in the Willamette valley and became the ancestor of the large Multnomah tribe. To keep peace between the two tribes, Saghalie raised the great mountains that separate those regions. But there were not yet any snow-peaks. The great river also flowed very deep between the country of the Klickitats and the country of the Multnomahs. That the tribes might always be friendly, Saghalie built a huge bridge of stone over the river. The Indians called it the tamahnawas bridge, or bridge of the gods. The great river flowed under it, and a witch-woman, Loowit, lived on it. Loowit had charge of the only fire in the world.

Loowit saw how miserable the tribes were without fire. Therefore she besought Saghalie to permit her to give them fire. Saghalie granted her request. Thus a fire was kindled on the bridge. The Indians came there and obtained fire, which greatly improved their condition. Saghalie was so much pleased with Loowit's faithfulness that he promised the witch-woman anything she might ask. Loowit asked for youth and beauty. So Saghalie transformed her into a beautiful maiden.

Many chiefs fell in love with Loowit because of her beauty. But she paid heed to none till there came two other chiefs, Klickitat from the north, Wiyeast from the west. As she could not decide which of them to accept as her husband, they and their people went to war. Great distress came upon the people because of this fighting. Saghalie grew angry at their evil doing, and determined to punish them. He broke down the tamahnawas bridge, and put Loowit, Wiyeast and Klickitat to death. But they had been beautiful in life, therefore Saghalie would have them beautiful in death. So he made of them the three famous snow-peaks. Wiyeast became the mountain which white men call Mount Hood; Klickitat became Mount Adams; Loowit was changed into Mount St. Helens. Always, said Saghalie, they should be clothed in garments of snow.

Thus was the wonderful tamahnawas bridge destroyed, and the great river dammed by the huge rocks that fell into it. That caused the Cascade rapids. Above the rapids, when the river is low, you can still see the forests that were buried when the bridge fell down and dammed the waters.

This noteworthy myth, fit to rank with the folk-lore masterpieces of any primitive people, Greek or Gothic, is of course only a legend. The Indian was not a geologist. True, we see the submerged forests to-day, at low water. But their slowly decaying trunks were killed, perhaps not much more than a century ago, by a rise in the river that was not caused by the fall of a natural bridge, but by a landslide from the mountains.

There is a slow and glacier-like motion of the hillsides here which from time to time compels the railways on either bank to readjust their tracks. The rapids at the Cascades, with their fall of nearly forty feet, are doubtless the result of comparatively recent volcanic action. Shaking down vast masses of rock, this dammed the river, and caused it to overflow its wooded shores above. But to the traveler on a steamboat breasting the terrific current below the government locks, as he looks up to the towering heights on either side of the narrowed channel, the invention of poor Lo's untutored mind seems almost as easy to believe as the simpler explanation of the scientist.

Remarkable as is this fire myth of the tamahnawas bridge, the legend inspired by the peculiarities of northwestern climate is no less beautiful. This climate differs materially, it is well known, from that of eastern America in the same latitude. The Japan Current warms the coast of Oregon and Washington just as the Gulf Stream warms the coast of Ireland. East of the Cascade Mountains, the severe cold of a northern winter is tempered by the "Chinook" winds from the Pacific. A period of freezing weather is shortly followed by the melting of the snow upon the distant mountains; by night the warm Chinook sweeps up the Columbia canyon and across the passes, and in a few hours the mildness of spring covers the land.

Such a phenomenon inevitably stirred the Indian to an attempt to interpret it. Like the ancients of other races, he personified the winds. The Yakima account of the struggle between the warm winds from the coast and the icy blasts out of the Northeast will bear comparison with the Homeric tale of Ulysses, buffeted by the breezes from the bag given him by the wind-god Aeolus.

Five Chinook brothers, said the Yakima tradition, lived on the great river. They caused the warm winds to blow. Five other brothers lived at Walla Walla, the meeting place of the waters. They caused the cold winds. The grandparents of them all lived at Umatilla, home of the wind-blown sands. Always there was war between them. They swept over the country, destroying the forests, covering the rivers with ice, or melting the snows and causing floods. The people suffered much because of their violence.

Then Walla Walla brothers challenged Chinook brothers to wrestle. Speelyei, the coyote god, should judge the contest. He should cut off the heads of those who fell.

The crafty Speelyei secretly advised the grandparents of Chinook brothers that if they would throw oil on the ground, their sons would not fall. This they did. But Speelyei also told the grandparents of Walla Walla brothers that if they would throw ice on the ground, their sons would not fall. This they did. So the Chinook brothers were thrown one after another, and Speelyei cut off their heads, according to the bargain. So the five Chinook brothers were dead.

But the oldest of them left an infant son. The child's mother brought him up to avenge the killing of his kinsmen. So the son grew very strong, until he could pull up great fir trees as if they were weeds. Then Walla Walla brothers challenged Young Chinook to wrestle. Speelyei should judge the contest. He should cut off the heads of those who fell. Secretly Speelyei advised Young Chinook's grandparents to throw oil on the ground last. This they did. So Walla Walla brothers were thrown one after another by Young Chinook, until four of them had fallen. Only the youngest of them was left. His heart failed him, and he refused to wrestle. Speelyei pronounced this sentence upon him: "You shall live, but you shall no longer have power to freeze people." To Young Chinook, he said: "You must blow only lightly, and you must blow first upon the mountains, to warn people of your coming."

The last dawn of all opens upon the white man's era. On the Columbia, recorded history is recent, but already epic. Its story is outside the purpose of this volume. But it is worth while, in closing our brief glance at the field, to note that this story has been true to its setting. Rich in heroism and romance, it is perhaps the most typical, as it is the latest, chapter in the development of the West. For this land of the river, its quarter-million square miles stretching far northward to Canada, and far eastward to the Yellowstone, built about with colossal mountains, laced with splendid waterways, jeweled with beautiful lakes, where upheaval and eruption, earthquake and glacier have prepared a home for a great and happy population, has already been the scene of a drama of curious political contradictions and remarkable popular achievement.

The Columbia River basin, alone of all the territories which the United States has added to its original area, was neither bought with money nor annexed by war. Its acquisition was a triumph of the American pioneer. Many nations looked with longing to this Northwest, but it fell a prize to the nation that neglected it. Spain and Russia wished to own it. Great Britain claimed and practically held it. The United States ignored it. For nearly half a century after the discovery of the river by a Yankee ship captain, Robert Gray, in 1792, and its exploration by Jefferson's expedition under Lewis and Clark, in 1805, its ownership was in question. For several decades after an American merchant, John Jacob Astor, had established the first unsuccessful trading post, in 1811, the country was actually ruled by the British through a private corporation. The magic circle drawn about it by the Hudson's Bay Company seemed impenetrable. Held nominally by the American and British governments in joint occupancy, it was in fact left to the halfbreed servants of a foreign monopoly that sought to hold an empire for its fur trade, and to exclude settlers because their farms would interfere with its beaver traps. Congress deemed the region worthless.

But while sleepy diplomacy played its game of chess between Washington and London, the issue was joined, the title cleared and possession taken by a breed of men to whom the United States owes more than it can ever pay. From far east came the thin vanguard of civilization which, for a century after the old French and Indian war, pushed our boundaries resistlessly westward. It had seized the "dark and bloody ground" of Kentucky. It had held the Ohio valley for the young republic during the Revolution. It had built states from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi. And now, dragging its wagons across the plains and mountains, it burst, sun-browned and half-starved, into Oregon. Missionaries and traders, farmers, politicians and speculators, it was part of that army of restless spirits who, always seeing visions of more fertile lands and rising cities beyond, stayed and long in no place, until at last they found their way barred by the Pacific, and therefore stayed to build the commonwealths of Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

The arena of their peaceful contest was worthy of their daring. "'A land of old upheaven from the abyss,' a land of deepest deeps and highest heights, of richest verdure here, and barest desolation there, of dense forest on one side, and wide extended prairies on the other; a land of contrasts, contrasts in contour, hues, productions, and history,"—thus Professor Lyman describes the stage which the pioneers found set for them.

The tremendous problems of its development, due to its topography, its remoteness, its magnificent distances, and its lack of transportation, demanded men of sturdiest fiber and intrepid leading. No pages of our history tell a finer story of action and initiative than those which enroll the names of McLoughlin, the great Company's autocratic governor, not unfitly called "the father of Oregon," and Whitman, the martyr, with the frontier leaders who fashioned the first ship of state launched in the Northwest, and their contemporaries, the men who built the first towns, roads, schools, mills, steamboats and railways.

Macaulay tells us that a people who are not proud of their forebears will never deserve the pride of their descendants. The makers of Old Oregon included as fair a proportion of patriots and heroes as the immigrants of the Mayflower. We who journey up or down the Columbia in a luxurious steamer, or ride in a train de luxe along its banks, are the heirs of their achievement. Honor to the dirt-tanned ox-drivers who seized for themselves and us this empire of the river and its guardian snow-peaks!