The Columbia River Part 20

Sweet sleep till midnight, and then we found ourselves awake all at once with a unanimity which at first we scarcely understood, but which a moment's observation made clear enough. A regular mountain gale had suddenly broken upon us. It had waked us up by nearly blowing us out of bed. Our camp-fire was aroused to newness of life by the gale, and the huge fire-brands flew down the mountain side, igniting pitchy thickets, until a fitful glare illuminated the lonely and savage grandeur of the scene. The whole sky seemed in motion. Then a cloud struck us. Night, glittering as she was a moment before with her tiaras of stars, was suddenly transformed into a dull, whitish blur. The vapour formed at once into thick drops on the trees and was precipitated in turn on us.

Occasional sleet and snowflakes struck us with almost the sting of flying sand when we ventured to peep out. Covering ourselves up, heads and all, we crowded against each other and grimly went to sleep.

We woke again, chattering with cold, to find it perfectly calm. The morning star was blazing over the spot where day was about to break. The sky was absolutely clear, not a mote on its whole concavity. The wind had swept and burnished it. The mountain towered above us cold and sharp as a crystal. There was a still, solemn majesty about it in the keen air and early light which struck us with a thrill of fear. The light just before daybreak is far more exact than the scarlet splendour of morning or the blinding blaze of noon. The world below us was a level sea of clouds. We seemed to be on an island of snow and rock, or on a small planetoid winging its own way in s.p.a.ce. Yet beyond the puncturing top of a few of the Simcoe peaks a wavering line that just touched the glowing eastern sky, told of clear weather a hundred leagues up the basin of the Columbia. Out of the ocean of cloud, the great peaks of Hood and St.

Helens rose, cold and white, like icebergs on an Arctic sea.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Typical Mountain Meadow, Stehekin Valley, Wash. Photo. by T. W. Tolman, Spokane.]

Coffee, ham, and hardtack, and then out on the ice and snow, just as the first warm flush of morning is gilding the mighty ma.s.s above us. The snow, hardened by the freezing morning, affords excellent footing, and in the sharp, bracing air we feel capable of any effort. We gain the summit of a bright red k.n.o.b, one of the secondary volcanoes that girdle the mountain.

At its peak are purple stones piled up like an altar, as indeed it is, though the incense from it is not of human kindling. The sun is not fairly up, but from below the horizon it splits the hemisphere of the sky into a hundred segments by its auroral flashes. And now we begin to climb a volcanic ridge, rising like a huge stairway, with blocks of stone as large as a piano. This is a tongue of lava, very recent, insomuch that it shows no glacial markings, and yet enough soil has acc.u.mulated upon it to support vegetation. It can be seen, a dull red river, three hundred yards wide, extending far down the mountain side. How well the old Greek poet described the process that must have taken place here: "aetna, pillar of heaven, nurse of snow, with fountains of fire; a river of fire, bearing down rocks with a crashing sound to the deep sea."

The ridge becomes very steep, at an angle of probably thirty-five or forty degrees, and we climb on all fours from one rock to another. At last we draw ourselves up a huge wedge of phonolite and find ourselves at the summit of the first peak. Six hundred yards beyond, m.u.f.fled in white silence, rises the great dome. It is probably five hundred feet higher than the first peak. To reach it we climb a bare, steep ridge of shaly, frost-shattered rock, in which we sink ankle deep, a difficult and even painful task with the laboured breathing of twelve thousand feet alt.i.tude.

But patience conquers, and at about noon, seven hours and a half from the time of starting, we stand on the very tip of the mountain. Ten minutes panting in the cold wind and then we are ready to look around. Within the circle of our vision is an area for an empire. Northward is a wilderness of mountains. High above all, Mt. Rainier lifts his white crown unbroken to the only majesty above him, the sky. The western horizon, more hazy than the eastern, is punctuated by the smooth dome and steely glitter of Mt. St. Helens. Far southward, across a wilderness of broken heights, rises the sharp pinnacle of Mt. Hood, and far beyond that, its younger brother, Jefferson. Still beyond, are the Alpine peaks of the Three Sisters, nearly two hundred miles distant. Our vision sweeps a circle whose diameter is probably five hundred miles. Far westward the white haze betokens the presence of the sea. A deep blue line north-eastward, far beyond the smooth dome of St. Helens, stands for Puget Sound. Numerous lakes gleam in woody solitudes.

Having looked around, let us now look down. On the eastern side the mountain breaks off in a monstrous chasm of probably four thousand feet, most of it perpendicular. We crawl as we draw near it. Lying down in turn, secured by ropes held behind, fearful as much of the mystic attraction of the abyss as of the slippery snow, we peep over the awful verge. Take your turn, gentle reader, if you would know what it seems to gaze down almost a mile of nearly perpendicular distance. Points of rock jut out from the pile and eye us darkly. That icy floor nearly a mile below us is the Klickitat glacier. From beneath it a milk-white stream issues and crawls off amid the rocky desolation. At the very edge of the great precipice stands a cone of ice a hundred feet high. Green, blue, yellow, red, and golden, the colours play with the circling sunbeams on its slippery surface, until one is ready to believe that here is where rainbows are made. We roll some rocks from a wind-swept point, and then shudder to see them go. They are lost to the eye as their noise to the ear, long before they cease to roll. Silence reigns. There is no echo. The thin air makes the voice sound weak. Our loudest shouts are brief bubbles of noise in the infinite s.p.a.ce. A pistol shot is only a puff of powder.

Even the rocks we set off are swallowed up and we get no response but the first reluctant clank as they grind the lip of the precipice. Nor do we care much for boisterous sounds. We are impelled rather to silence and worship.

[Ill.u.s.tration: High School, Walla Walla, Wash. Photo. by W. D. Chapman, Walla Walla.]

But now once more to earth and camp! For pure exhilaration, commend me to descending a snow peak. For a good part of Mt. Adams one may descend in huge jumps through the loose scoriae and volcanic ashes. Some of the way one may slide on the crusty snow, a perfect whiz of descent. How the thin wind cuts past us, and how our frames glow with the dizzy speed! Such a manner of descent is not altogether safe. As we are going in one place with flying jumps on the softening snow, a chasm suddenly appears before us. It looks ten feet wide, and how deep, no one could guess. To stop is out of the question. We make a wild bound and clear it, catching a momentary glance into the bluish-green crack as we fly across. We make the descent in an incredibly short time, only a little more than an hour, whereas it took us over seven hours to ascend. And then the rest and mighty feasts of camp, and the abundant and mountainous yarns, and the roaring camp-fire, whose shadows flicker on the solemn snow-fields, until the stars claim the heavens, and, while the wailing cry of the cougars rises from a jungle far below us, we sleep and perform again in dreams the day's exploits.

Of all scenes in connection with Mt. Adams, the most remarkable in all the experience of those who witnessed it, and one of those rare combinations which the sublimest aspects of nature afford, was at the time of the outing of the Mazama Club in 1902. The party had reached the summit in a dense fog, cold, bitter, forbidding, and nothing whatever to be seen. All was a dull, whitish blur. In the bitter chill the enthusiasm of some of the climbers evaporated and they turned away down the snowy waste. Others remained in the hope of a vanishing of the cloud-cap. And suddenly their hopes were realised. A marvellous transformation scene was unveiled like the lifting of a vast curtain. The cloud-cap was split asunder. The great red and black pinnacles of the summit sprung forth from the mist like the first lines in a developing photographic plate. Then the glistening tiaras and thrones of ice and snow caught the gleams of the unveiled sun, and lo, there we stood in mid-heaven, seemingly upon an island in s.p.a.ce, with no earth about us, just the sun and the sky above and a great swaying ocean of fog below. But now suddenly that ocean of fog was rent and split. The ardent sun burned and banished it away. Mountain peak after peak caught the glory. Range after range seemed to rise and stand in battle array. The transformation was complete. A moment before we were swathed in the densest cloud-cap, blinded with the fog. Now we were standing on a mount of transfiguration, with a new world below us. Every vestige of smoke or fog was gone. We could see the shimmer of the ocean to the west, the glistening bands of Puget Sound and the Columbia. Far eastward the plains of the Inland Empire lay palpitating in the July sun. The whole long line of the great snow-peaks of the Cascades were there revealed, the farthest a mere speck, yet distinctly discernible, two hundred miles distant. One unaccustomed to the mountains would not believe it possible that such an area could be caught within the vision from a single point.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Lake Chelan. Photo. by F. N. Kneeland.]

It may be understood that the description of one of our great snow-peaks is, in general terms, a description of all. With every one there are the same azure skies, the same snow-caps, the same creva.s.sed and glistening rivers of ice, the same long ridges with their intervening gra.s.sy and flowery meads, purling streams, and reflecting lakes. With the name of each there rises before Mazama or Mountaineer the remembrance of the camp of clouds or stars upon the edge of snow-bank, the sound of the bugle at two o'clock in the morning of the great climb, the hastily swallowed breakfast of coffee and ham, while climbers stand shivering around the flickering morning fire, the approaching day with its banners of crimson behind the heights, the daubing of faces with grease-paint and the putting on of goggles, amid shouts of laughter from each at the grotesque and picturesque ugliness of all the others, then the hastily grasped alpenstocks, the forming in line, and at about four o'clock, while the first rays of the sun are gilding the summit, the word of command and the beginning of the march.

Each great peak has its zones, so significant that each seems a world in itself. There is first the zone of summer with its fir and cedar forests at the base of the peak, from a thousand feet to twenty-five hundred above sea-level. In the case of most of our great peaks this zone consists of long gentle slopes and dense forests, with much undergrowth, though on the eastern sides there are frequently wide-open s.p.a.ces of gra.s.sy prairie.

Then comes the zone of pine forest and summer strawberry, with its fragrant air and long glades of gra.s.s and open aisles of columned trees, "G.o.d's first temples," pellucid streams babbling over pebbles and white sands, and occasionally falling in cascades over ledges of volcanic rock.

This zone rises in terraces which attest the ancient lava flow, at an increasing grade over the first, though at most points one might still drive a carriage through the open pine forests. Then comes the third zone, a zone of parks. The large pine trees now give way to the belts of subalpine fir and mountain pine and larch, exquisite for beauty, enclosing the parks and grouped here and there in clumps like those in some old baronial estate of feudal times. This is the zone of rhododendron, shushula, phlox, and painted brush. Through the open glades the ptarmigan and deer wander, formerly unafraid of man, but now, alas, under the ban of civilisation. The upward slope has now increased to twenty or twenty-five degrees, and to a party of climbers a frequent rest and the quaffing of the ice-cold stream that dashes through the woods afford a happy feature of the ascent. At the upper edge of this zone, at an elevation of probably seven thousand feet, beside some dashing stream or some clear pool, fed from the snows above, is the place for the camp. And such a camp! Oh, the beauty of such an unspoiled spot!

[Ill.u.s.tration: On the Banks of the Columbia River, near Hood River. Photo.

by E. H. Moorehouse.]

It is from such a camp at the upper edge of the paradise zone that a party sets forth at the four o'clock hour to attain the highest. So the march on the great day of a final climb carries us at once into a fourth zone. This is the zone of avalanche and glacier, the zone of elemental fury and warfare, a zone of ever-steepening ascent, thirty degrees, a zone of almost winter cold at night, but with such a dazzling brightness and fervour in the day as turns the snow-banks to slush and sends the fountains tearing and cutting across the glaciers and triturating the moraines. Vegetation has now almost ceased, though the heather still drapes the ledges on the eastern or southern exposures, and occasionally one of the tenacious mountain pines upholds the banner of spring in some sheltered nook. This wind-swept and storm-lashed zone is also the zone of the wild goats and mountain sheep. On the precipitous ridges and along the narrow ledges at the margin of glaciers they can be seen bounding away at the approach of the party, sure-footed and swift at points where the nerve of the best human climber might fail. This zone carries the climbers to ten or eleven thousand feet of elevation on the highest peaks. And here is the place for the Mountaineers and Mazamas to take the half-hour rest on their arduous march. A sweet rest it is. We pick out some sheltered place on the eastern slope, and stretch ourselves at full length on the warm rocks, while the icy wind from the summit goes hurtling above us. And how good the chocolate and the malted milk and the prunes and raisins of the scanty lunch taste, while we rest and feel the might of elemental nature again fill our veins and lungs and hearts.

But then comes a fifth zone, the last, the zone of the Arctic. This is the zone of the snow-cap. The glaciers are now below. All life has ceased. The grade has ever steepened, till now it is forty degrees or more. The snow is hummocked and granulated. Here is where part of the climbers begin to stop. Legs and lungs fail. Camp looks exceedingly good down there at the verge of the forests. They feel as though they had lost nothing on the summit worth going up for. A nausea, mountain sickness, attacks some.

Nosebleed attacks others. Things look serious. Icy mists sometimes begin to swirl around the presumptous climbers. Frost gathers on hair and mustache and eyebrows. The unaccustomed or the less ambitious or weaker lose heart and bid the rest go on, for they will turn toward a more summer-like clime. Generally about half an ordinary party drop out at this beginning of the Arctic zone. But the rest shout "Excelsior," take a firmer grasp of alpenstock, stamp feet more vehemently into the snow, and with dogged perseverance move step by step up the final height. Inch by inch, usually in the teeth of a biting gale, leaning forward, and panting heavily, they force the upward way. And victory at last! There comes a time when we are on the topmost pinnacle, and there is nothing above us but the storms and sun. And then what elation! Nothing seems quite to equal the pure delight of such a triumph of lungs and legs and heart and will.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Rooster Rock, Columbia River--Looking Up. Photo. by E. H.

Moorehouse, Portland.]

CHAPTER VI

The Lower River and the Ocean Tides

Remarkable Change in Climate and Topography--Farms and Villages--First View of Mt. Hood on West Side--Vancouver and its Historic Interest--The North Bank Railroad--View at the Mouth of the Willamette--Sauvie's or Wapatoo Island--Beauty of the Willamette and its Tributaries--Simpson's Poem--Approach to Portland--Site of Portland--Transportation Facilities--Portland's Commerce--Homes and Public Buildings--Art in Portland--The Historical Society Museum--The _Oregonian_ and its Editor--Once more on the River--The Fishing and Lumbering Villages--Scenery of the Lower River--Astoria and the Outlook to the Ocean--Industries of Astoria--The Fisheries--The Fleet of Fishing Boats on the Bar--The Ocean Beaches and the Tourist Travel--Through the Outer Headlands to the Pacific.

Having returned from our side trip to the mountain peaks of Hood and Adams and having resumed our station on the bank of the River just below Rooster Rock, we see that we are now in a new world. We are at sea-level. Dense forests clothe the sh.o.r.es, except for the places where the axe of the settler or the saws of the lumberman have made inroads. Moss drapes the rocks. Ferns and vines take possession wherever the trees have been removed. Even in summer a feeling of humidity usually pervades the air. A certain softness and roundness seems to characterise both the vegetable and animal world. The smell of the sea is in the atmosphere, even though the sea is yet distant. No longer do our eyes wander over boundless expanses of rolling prairie, crowned to the highest knolls with wheat-fields, as on the other side of the mountains. The mountains fall away, and low bottoms, sometimes oozy with the inflowing river or the creeks from the forests, stretch away in the lazy, hazy distance. The River no longer flows tumultuously and with that militant energy which is so characteristic of the long stretches from Kettle Falls to The Dalles.

It has a calm and stately majesty, the repose of accomplished warfare and victory. It has hewn its way down to the level of the ocean and no longer needs to fret and storm. It has conquered a peace.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Band of Elk on W. P. Reser's Ranch, Walla Walla, Wash.

Photo. by W. D. Chapman.]

Below Rooster Rock, the sh.o.r.es are flats with low hills in the background, and the River expands to a width of from one to two miles. If we still imagine ourselves in a small boat, we find the most delightful of sensations in gliding past the gra.s.sy islands and sh.o.r.es thick with fir or cottonwood. Or if we choose to take our way to one of the elegant steamers, _Spencer_ or _Bailey Gatzert_, we shall still partake of the same life and feel the same sense of repose and contentment which belong by natural right to this portion of the River.

Soon after leaving Rooster Rock, we begin to pa.s.s frequent pleasant farms on either bank. On the Washington side we see two pretty villages, Washougal and La Camas. The first has the historical distinction of being at or nearly at the highest spot reached by the English explorer Broughton in 1792, and named by him Point Vancouver. La Camas is the location of the most extensive paper mills in the North-west.

If, while we are in this section of the River and our eyes are bent eagerly forward to catch the ever-changing sh.o.r.e and river lines, we happen to glance backward, our gaze is fastened as with a magnet, and for a moment utterance fails. For what do we see? Glistening white, ethereal, Mt. Hood rises before us, a vision which, of the many mountain visions that we have seen, seems the most beautiful. Mt. Hood indeed is the background of many a n.o.ble scene upon the River, but there is none quite equal in amplitude, in variety, to this,--River, forest, sh.o.r.e, foreground of timbered hills, Cascade Gorge, distant white and purple chain of Cascade Mountains, and the volcanic cone overtopping and overawing all.

This view of Mt. Hood from the vicinity of La Camas has perhaps been oftener the subject of painting than any other.

A few miles below La Camas we reach the most historic and perhaps the most beautiful spot upon the Columbia, Vancouver. As the capital for twenty years of the Hudson's Bay Company's Fur Empire, a.s.sociated with the name of Dr. John McLoughlin, the centre of almost every event of importance in the early history, connected with both American and British occupation, and later as the location of the United States military post and preserving the names of Grant, Sheridan, McClellan, Hooker, and others of our famous generals, Vancouver has indeed a rich historic setting. But aside from such a.s.sociations with the past, every tourist must note the location of Vancouver as one of rare beauty. In fact, the spot is almost ideal for a great city. The splendid River, a mile and a half in width, offers limitless facilities for shipping, while, beginning at the water's edge, a gradually rising slope of land extends in a superb swell several miles to the north. Every feature of scenery that could delight the eye--Mt. Hood with the Cascades to the east, the Willamette Valley to the south, the Portland and Scappoose hills to the west, the River blending all--seems to have been lavished on Vancouver. It has been a surprise to many that the great city had not grown here rather than at Portland, which, though on an equally fine location, is on the tributary and much smaller Willamette. The chief reasons of this were the nearer proximity of Portland to the rich farming country of the Tualatin and the presence in the Columbia a mile below Vancouver of a sand-bar which embarra.s.sed shipping. This is now removed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Oregon City in 1845. From an Old Print.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fort Vancouver in 1845.]

At Vancouver the newly-built "North Bank" Railroad (Spokane, Portland, and Seattle) has constructed across the Columbia a bridge a mile and three quarters in length, said to be the largest and costliest of its kind in the world. This same railroad has also bridged the Willamette a few miles west of Vancouver, thus effecting an entrance to Portland. This railroad is one of the most interesting and remarkable undertakings of the age. It is said that its cost from Spokane to Portland exceeded forty million dollars. Vancouver expects much from this road, even antic.i.p.ating that much of the shipping hitherto centring in Portland will be diverted to the larger river. However that may prove, it is plain that Vancouver has the promise as well as the memory of great things.

Six miles west of Vancouver is one of those imposing scenes in which our River so abounds. This is the junction of the Willamette with the Columbia. This spot was noted by Broughton in 1792 as one of exceptional beauty, and to it he attached the name Belle Vue Point. It is indeed a combination of both historical and scenic interest. The Willamette steals shyly and coquettishly through green islands to fall into the strong arms of the stately Columbia. The western arm of the Willamette, commonly called the "Slough," joins the Columbia eighteen miles below at the picturesque little town of St. Helens. Between the Columbia and the Slough lies Sauvie's Island, named from a Hudson's Bay man, and famous throughout Hudson's Bay times as well as Indian times. The island was the seat of power of the Multnomah tribe. The scene of the book known as the _Bridge of the G.o.ds_ by Frederick Balch is mainly upon this island, and in that book will be found some glowing descriptions of this beauty spot. To the Indians it was known as Wapatoo Island. In the ponds grew the plant called the wapatoo, an onion-like root, very nutritious and palatable, and, with salmon, const.i.tuting the chief food of the natives. Not only so, but the Multnomah Indians used the wapatoo as a commercial stock, carrying on regular trade with both the coast and the up-river tribes.

According to the early explorers there were great annual fairs on Wapatoo Island, when Indians from ocean beach, from valley, from mountains, and from River, both up and down, would gather to exchange products, to gamble, race horses and boats, and have a general period of hilarity and good fellowship.

The gathering of the wapatoos developed upon the patient "klootchmen"

(women) of the tribe. They would go out in canoes to the shallow water where the roots grew and then, stripping naked, would hang over the side of the boat and dislodge the wapatoos with their toes from the soft mud.

Soon the surface would be covered with the floating roots. The squaws would gather these into the canoes. Then they would move to another place for another load. Sometimes they would spend almost the whole day in the water. The wapatoo still grows in the ponds and lagoons of the island.

These ponds formerly abounded in ducks and geese and cranes and swans.

Even yet there is fine hunting. During the damp soft days of the Oregon winter, the Nimrods of Portland betake themselves thither in great numbers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Lone Rock, Columbia River, about Fifty Miles East of Portland. Photo. by E. H. Moorehouse, Portland.]

From the steamer, as we enter the mouth of the Willamette, or from the greater elevation of the lighthouse, one may command one of the lordliest views that even this land of lordly views affords. Five snow-peaks, Hood, Rainier-Tacoma, St. Helens, Adams, and Jefferson, rise snow white from the purple forests of the Cascade Range. Up the Columbia the great gorge through which we have pa.s.sed stands open to view, while down-river the sinuous and hazy lines of low-lying sh.o.r.e betoken the nearer proximity of the ocean. Up the Willamette, enchanting islands, with low watery sh.o.r.es, occupy the foreground, while a short distance back from the western bank, a chain of picturesque hills, heavily timbered, encloses the vista. On the east side a low bench with bluffy promontories, crowned with the beautiful smooth-barked madrona tree, rises from the green meadows.

If we could, from so fair an entrance, ascend the Willamette to its source in the Cascade Mountains two hundred miles away, and if we could turn into the Tualatin, the Yamhill, the Clackamas, the Molalla, the La Creole, the Santiam, the Calapooia, affluents worthy of union with the Willamette, and if we could tarry among the vales and meadows and oak-crowned hills and distant Coast and Cascade ranges of mountains, all across that superb valley, fifty miles wide by a hundred and fifty long, as beautiful as Greece or Italy,--we would then all agree that the Willamette deserves a volume by itself and that it is almost a crime to introduce it so briefly here. Every old Oregonian, in thinking of the Willamette, at once a.s.sociates it with the apostrophe to it by S. L.

Simpson, the gifted and unfortunate poet of Oregon, whose genius deserved a wider recognition than it ever received. The first stanza of his poem is this:

From the Cascades' frozen gorges, Leaping like a child at play, Winding, widening through the valley, Bright Willamette glides away.

Onward ever, lovely River, Softly calling to the sea, Time that scars us, maims and mars us, Leaves no track or trench on thee.

And now that we have fairly entered the Willamette, it becomes speedily evident that we are in the near vicinity of a large and prosperous city.

Steamboats, an occasional steamship, sailing ships, sometimes huge four-masted steel ships towed by coughing tugs, long booms of logs in tow of some spluttering stern-wheeler, scows of every description, gasoline launches, rowboats,--a motley fleet, they seem to be making they way with all possible haste upon the stream.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Willamette Falls, Oregon City, Ore. Photo. by E. H.

Moorehouse.]