The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Guardians of the Columbia, by John H. (John Harvey) Williams

THE MOUNTAIN

I hold above a careless land
The menace of the skies;
Within the hollow of my hand
The sleeping tempest lies.
Mine are the promise of the morn,
The triumph of the day;
And parting sunset's beams forlorn
Upon my heights delay.
—Edward Sydney Tylee

COPYRIGHT DR. U. M. LAUMAN

"Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops." Shakespeare.

THE GUARDIANS
OF THE COLUMBIA

MOUNT HOOD, MOUNT ADAMS AND MOUNT ST. HELENS
By JOHN H. WILLIAMS
Author of "THE MOUNTAIN THAT WAS 'GOD'"

And mountains that like giants stand
To sentinel enchanted land.
Scott: "The Lady of the Lake."

WITH MORE THAN TWO HUNDRED ILLUSTRATIONS
INCLUDING EIGHT IN COLORS
TACOMA
JOHN H. WILLIAMS
1912

COPYRIGHT, G. M. WEISTER

Climbing the last steep slope on Mount Hood, from Cooper's Spur, with ropes anchored on summit.

Copyright, 1912, by John H. Williams

Willamette River at Portland, with ships loading wheat and lumber for foreign ports.

FOREWORD

In offering this second volume of a proposed series on Western mountain scenery, I am fortunate in having a subject as unhackneyed as was that of "The Mountain that Was 'God.'" The Columbia River has been described in many publications about the Northwest, but the three fine snow-peaks guarding its great canyon have received scant attention, and that mainly from periodicals of local circulation.

These peaks are vitally a part of the vast Cascade-Columbia scene to which they give a climax. Hence the story here told by text and picture has necessarily included the stage upon which they were built up. And since the great forests of this mountain and river district are a factor of its beauty as well as its wealth, I am glad to be able to present a brief chapter about them from the competent hand of Mr. H. D. Langille, formerly of the United States forest service. A short bibliography, with notes on transportation routes, hotels, guides and other matters of interest to travelers and students, will be found at the end.

Accuracy has been my first aim. I have tried to avoid the exaggeration employed in much current writing for the supposed edification of tourists. It has seemed to me that simply and briefly to tell the truth about the fascinating Columbia country would be the best service I could render to those who love its splendid mountains and its noble river. A mass of books, government documents and scientific essays has been examined. This literature is more or less contradictory, and as I cannot hope to have avoided all errors, I shall be grateful for any correction of my text.

In choosing the illustrations, I have sought to show the individuality of each peak. Mountains, like men, wear their history on their faces,—none more so than Hood's sharp and finely scarred pyramid; or Adams, with its wide, truncated dome and deeply carved slopes; or St. Helens, newest of all our extinct volcanoes—if, indeed, it be extinct,—and least marred by the ice, its cone as perfect as Fujiyama's. Each has its own wonderful story to tell of ancient and often recent vulcanism. Let me again suggest that readers who would get the full value of the more comprehensive illustrations will find a reading glass very useful.

Thanks are due to many helpers. More than fifty photographers, professional and amateur, are named in the table of illustrations. Without their co-operation the book would have been impossible. I am also indebted for valued information and assistance to the librarians at the Portland and Tacoma public libraries, the officers and members of the several mountaineering clubs in Portland, and the passenger departments of the railways reaching that city; to Prof. Harry Fielding Reid, the eminent geologist of Johns Hopkins University; Fred G. Plummer, geographer of the United States forest service; Dr. George Otis Smith, director of the United States geological survey; Judge Harrington Putnam, of New York, president of the American Alpine Club; Messrs. Rodney L. Glisan, William M. Ladd, H. O. Stabler, T. H. Sherrard, Judge W. B. Gilbert, H. L. Pittock, George H. Himes, John Gill, C. E. Rusk, and others in Portland and elsewhere.

The West has much besides magnificent scenery to give those who visit it. Here have been played, upon a grander stage, the closing acts in the great drama of state-building which opened three hundred years ago on the Atlantic Coast. The setting has powerfully moulded the history, and we must know one if we would understand the other. Europe, of course, offers to the American student of culture and the arts something which travel here at home cannot supply. But every influence that brings the different sections of the United States into closer touch and fuller sympathy makes for patriotism and increased national strength.

This, rather than regret for the two hundred millions of dollars which our tourists spend abroad each year, is the true basis of the "See America First" movement. According to his capacity, the tourist commonly gets value for his money, whether traveling in Europe or America. But Eastern ignorance of the West is costing the country more than the drain of tourist money.

This volume is presented, therefore, as a call to better appreciation of the splendor and worth of our own land. Its publication will be justified if it is found to merit in some degree the commendation given its predecessor by Prof. W. D. Lyman, of Whitman College, whose delightful book on the Columbia has been consulted and whose personal advice has been of great value throughout my work. "I wish to express the conviction," writes Prof. Lyman, "that you have done an inestimable service to all who love beauty, and who stand for those higher things among our possessions that cannot be measured in money, but which have an untold bearing upon the finer sensibilities of a nation."

Tacoma, June 15, 1912.

Mount Adams, seen from south slope of Mount St. Helens, near the summit, showing the Cascade ranges below. Note the great burn in the forest cover of the ridges. "Steamboat Mountain" is seen in the distance beyond. Elevation of camera, nearly 9,000 feet.

Looking up the Columbia at Lyle, Washington.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

The * indicates engravings from copyrighted photographs. See notice under the illustration.

[Enlarge.]

A Gray Day on the Columbia. Telephotograph of Mount Hood from the river opposite Vancouver Barracks.

Trout Lake and Mount Adams.

THE GUARDIANS OF THE COLUMBIA

I.

THE RIVER

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.

ON a frosty morning of last July, before sunrise, I stood upon the belvedere of the delightful Cloud Cap Inn, which a public-spirited man of Portland has provided for visitors to the north side of Mount Hood; and from that superb viewpoint, six thousand feet above sea level, watched the day come up out of the delicate saffron east. Behind us lay Eliot Glacier, sloping to the summit of the kindling peak. Before us rose—an ocean!

Mount St. Helens, seen from the Columbia at Vancouver, with railway bridge in foreground.

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.

COPYRIGHT, G. M. WEISTER

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.

Astoria in 1813, showing the trading post established by John Jacob Astor.

COPYRIGHT, G. M. WEISTER

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.

Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor valley, rock or hill.

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.

Columbia Slough in Winter, near the mouth of the Willamette.

COPYRIGHT, KISER PHOTO CO.

COPYRIGHT, G. M. WEISTER

"Uplift against the blue walls of the sky
Your mighty shapes, and let the sunshine weave
Its golden network in your belting woods;
Smile down in rainbows from your falling floods,
And on your kingly brows at morn and eve
Set crowns of fire."—Whittier.

Mount Hood, seen from Columbia Slough.

COPYRIGHT, FRANK WOODFIELD

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 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.

Earth has not anything to show more fair.

Sunset at the mouth of the Columbia. Cape Hancock on right, Point Adams on left. View from river off Astoria.

[Enlarge]

"The Coming of the White Man" and "Sacajawea," statues in Portland City Park which commemorate the aboriginal Americans.

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.

Sunset on Vancouver Lake, near Vancouver, Washington.

Fort Vancouver in 1852.

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.

COPYRIGHT, G. M. WEISTER

Seining for salmon on the lower Columbia.

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.

COPYRIGHT, KISER PHOTO CO.

Captain Som-Kin, chief of Indian police, Umatilla reservation.

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.

COPYRIGHT, KISER PHOTO CO.

COPYRIGHT, KISER PHOTO CO.

COPYRIGHT, KISER PHOTO CO.

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.

COPYRIGHT, KISER PHOTO CO.

An original American—"Jake" Hunt, former Klickitat chief, 112 years old. He is said to be the oldest Indian on the Columbia.

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.

COPYRIGHT, KISER PHOTO CO.

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.

COPYRIGHT, G. M. WEISTER

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."

Looking up the Columbia, near Bonneville. The main channel of the river is on right of the shoal in foreground.

Salmon trying to jump the Falls of the Willamette at Oregon City.

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, and become an island. It will float about on the sea. That will be the end of the world.

COPYRIGHT, KISER PHOTO CO.

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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.

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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 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.

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"O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow forever and forever."—Tennyson.

Looking down the Columbia below the Cascades, showing many ranges cut by the river. On the left of the scene is "Sliding Mountain," its name a reminder that the hillsides on both banks are slowly moving toward the stream and compelling the railways occasionally to readjust their tracks.

COPYRIGHT, G. M. WEISTER

Steamboat entering Cascade Locks.

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.

Moonlight upon the Columbia, with clouds on Wind Mountain. Looking up the river from the Cascades.

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.

Looking down the Columbia Canyon from the cliffs at White Salmon, Washington.

An Oregon Trout Stream.

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.

Looking up the Columbia from Hood River, Oregon.

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.

COPYRIGHT, B. A. GIFFORD

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.

A Late Winter Afternoon. View across the Columbia from White Salmon to the mouth of Hood River, showing the Hood River Valley with Mount Hood wrapped in clouds.

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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.

"Gateway to the Inland Empire." Towering cliffs of stratified lava that guard the Columbia on each bank at Lyle, Washington.

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.

"Grant Castle" and Palisades of the Columbia, on north side of the river below The Dalles.

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.

COPYRIGHT, G. M. WEISTER

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.

Cabbage Rock, a huge freak of nature standing in the open plain four miles north of The Dalles. Apparently, the lava core of a small extinct crater.

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.

A True Fish Story of the Columbia, where four- and even five-foot salmon are not uncommon.

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 Zigzag river in winter, south side of Mount Hood.

COPYRIGHT, G. M. WEISTER

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 "Witch's Head," an Indian picture rock at the old native village of Wishram, north side of the Columbia near Celilo Falls. The Indians believe that if an unfaithful wife passes this rock, its eyes follow her with mute accusation.

Village of Indian Tepees, Umatilla Reservation, near Pendleton, Oregon. Many of these Indians are rich landowners, but they prefer tents to houses.

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.

Mount Adams, seen from Eagle Peak in the Rainier National Park. View shows some of the largest earth-folds in the Cascade Range, with the great canyon of the Cowlitz, one of the tributaries of the Columbia River. Elevation of camera 6,000 feet.

A clearing in the forest. Mount Hood from Sandy, twenty-five miles west of the peak.

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.

An Indian Madonna and Child. Umatilla Reservation.

Finished portion of Canal at Celilo, which the Government is building around Tumwater Falls and The Dalles.

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.

COPYRIGHT, G. M. WEISTER

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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!

A lordly river, broad and deep,
With mountains for its neighbors, and in view
Of distant mountains and their snowy tops.

COPYRIGHT. G. M. WEISTER

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"Beloved mountain, I
Thy worshiper, as thou the sun's, each morn
My dawn, before the dawn, receive from thee;
And think, as thy rose-tinted peak I see,
That thou wert great when Homer was not born,
And ere thou change all human song shall die."—Helen Hunt Jackson.

North side of Mount Hood, from ridge several miles west of Cloud Cap Inn. View shows gorges cut by the glacier-fed streams. Cooper Spur is on left sky line. Barret Spur is the great ridge on right, with Ladd glacier canyon beyond. Coe glacier is in center.

II.

THE MOUNTAINS.

Silent and calm, have you e'er scaled the height
Of some lone mountain peak, in heaven's sight?
—Victor Hugo.

There stood Mount Hood in all the glory of the alpen glow, looming immensely high, beaming with intelligence. It seemed neither near nor far. . . . The whole mountain appeared as one glorious manifestation of divine power, enthusiastic and benevolent, glowing like a countenance with ineffable repose and beauty, before which we could only gaze with devout and lowly admiration.—John Muir.

FROM the heights which back the city of Portland on the west, one may have a view that is justly famous among the fairest prospects in America. Below him lies the restless city, busy with its commerce. Winding up from the south comes the Willamette, its fine valley narrowed here by the hills, where the river forms Portland's harbor, and is lined on either side with mills and shipping. Ten miles beyond, the Columbia flows down from its canyon on the east, and turns northward, an expanding waterway for great vessels, to its broad pass through the Coast Range. In every direction, city and country, farm and forest, valley and mountain, stretches a noble perspective. From the wide rivers and their shining borders, almost at sea level, the scene arises, terrace upon terrace, to the encircling hills, and spreads across range after range to the summits of the great Cascades.

Winter on Mount Hood. The roof of the club house of the Portland Snow-shoe Club is seen over the ridge.

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Dominating all are the snow-peaks, august sentinels upon the horizon. On a clear day, the long line of them begins far down in central Oregon, and numbers six snowy domes. But any average day includes in its glory the three nearest, Hood, Adams, and St. Helens. Spirit-like, they loom above the soft Oregon haze, their glaciers signaling from peak to peak, and their shining summits bidding the sordid world below to look upward.

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Nature has painted canvases more colorful, but none more perfect in its strength and rest. Here is no flare of the desert, none of the flamboyant, terrible beauty of the Grand Canyon. It is a land of warm ocean winds and cherishing sunshine, where the emeralds and jades of the valleys quickly give place to the bluer greens of evergreen forests that cover the hill country; and these, in turn, as distance grows, shade into the lavenders and grays of the successive ranges. The white peaks complete the picture with its most characteristic note. They give it distinction.

Lower end of Eliot glacier, seen from Cooper Spur, and showing the lateral moraines which this receding glacier has built in recent years.

Snout of Eliot glacier, its V-shaped ice front heavily covered with morainal debris.

Such a panorama justifies Ruskin's bold assertion: "Mountains are the beginning and end of all natural scenery." Without its mountains, the view from Council Crest would be as uninteresting as that from any tower in any prairie city. But all mountains are not alike. In beginning our journey to the three great snow-peaks which we have viewed from Portland heights, it is well to define, if we may, the special character of our Northwestern scene. We sometimes hear the Cascade district praised as "the American Switzerland." Such a comparison does injustice alike to our mountains and to the Alps. As a wild, magnificent sea of ice-covered mountain tops, the Alps have no parallel in America. As a far-reaching system of splendid lofty ranges clothed in the green of dense forests and surmounted by towering, isolated summits of snowy volcanoes, the Cascades are wholly without their equal in Europe. This is the testimony of famous travelers and alpinists, among them Ambassador Bryce, who has written of our Northwestern mountain scenery:

We have nothing more beautiful in Switzerland or Tyrol, in Norway or in 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.

Cone of Mount Hood, seen from Cooper Spur on northwest side. A popular route to the summit leads along this ridge of volcanic scoriæ and up the steep snow slope above.

Cloud Cap Inn, north side of Mount Hood. Elevation 5,900 feet.

In his celebrated chapter of the "Modern Painters" which describes the sculpture of the mountains, Ruskin draws a picture of the Alps that at once sets them apart from the Cascades:

The longer I stayed among the Alps, the more I was struck by their being a vast plateau, upon which nearly all the highest peaks stood like children set upon a table, removed far back from the edge, as if for fear of their falling. The most majestic scenes are produced by one of the great peaks having apparently walked to the edge of the table to look over, and thus showing itself suddenly above the valley in its full height. But the raised table is always intelligibly in existence, even in these exceptional cases; and for the most part, the great peaks are not allowed to come to the edge of it, but remain far withdrawn, surrounded by comparatively level fields of mountain, over which the lapping sheets of glacier writhe and flow. The result is the division of Switzerland into an upper and lower mountain world; the lower world consisting of rich valleys, the upper world, reached after the first steep banks of 3,000 to 4,000 feet have been surmounted, consisting of comparatively level but most desolate tracts, half covered by glacier, and stretching to the feet of the true pinnacles of the chain.

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Nothing of this in the Cascades! Instead, we have fold upon fold of the earth-crust, separated by valleys of great depth. The ranges rise from levels but little above the sea. For example, between Portland and Umatilla, although they are separated by the mountains of greatest actual elevation in the United States, there is a difference of less than two hundred and fifty feet, Umatilla, east of the Cascades, being only two hundred and ninety-four feet above tide. Trout Lake, lying below Mount Adams, at the head of one of the great intermountain valleys, has an elevation of less than two thousand feet.

Portland Snow-shoe Club members on Eliot glacier in winter.

Thus, instead of the Northwestern snow-peaks being set far back upon a general upland and hidden away behind lesser mountains, to be seen only after one has reached the plateau, thousands of feet above sea level, they actually rise either from comparatively low peneplanes on one side of the Cascades, as in the case of St. Helens, or from the summit of one of the narrow, lofty ridges, as do Hood and Adams. But in either case, the full elevation is seen near at hand and from many directions—an elevation, therefore, greater and more impressive than that of most of the celebrated Alpine summits.

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COPYRIGHT, G. M. WEISTER

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Famous as is the valley of Chamonix, and noteworthy as are the glaciers to which it gives close access, its views of Mont Blanc are disappointing. Not until the visitor has scaled one of the neighboring aiguilles, can he command a satisfactory outlook toward the Monarch of the Alps. And nowhere in Switzerland do I recall a picture of such memorable splendor as greets the traveler from the Columbia, journeying either southward, up the Hood River Valley toward Mount Hood, or northward, up the White Salmon Valley toward Trout Lake and Mount Adams. Here is unrolled a wealth of fertile lowlands, surrounded by lofty ranges made beautiful by their deep forests and rising to grandeur in their snow-peaks.

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Butterfly on the summit of Mount Hood.

Leaving the canyon of the Columbia, in either direction the road follows swift torrents of white glacial water that tell of a source far above. It crosses a famous valley, among its orchards and hayfields, but always in view of the dark blue mountains and of the snow-covered volcanoes that rise before and behind, their glaciers shining like polished steel in the sunlight. So the visitor reaches the foot of his mountain. Losing sight of it for a time, he follows long avenues of stately trees as he climbs the benches. In a few hours he stands upon a barren shoulder of the peak, at timber line. A new world confronts him. The glaciers reach their icy arms to him from the summit, and he breathes the winds that sweep down from their fields of perennial snow.

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Fumarole, or gas vent, near Crater Rock.

It is all very different from Switzerland, this quick ascent from bending orchards and forested hills to a mighty peak standing white and beautiful in its loneliness. But it is so wonderful that Americans who love the heights can no longer neglect it, and each year increasing numbers are discovering that here in the Northwest is mountain scenery worth traveling far to see, with very noble mountains to climb, true glaciers to explore, and the widest views of grandeur and interest to enjoy. Such sport combines recreation and inspiration.

Looking across the head of Eliot glacier from near the summit of Mount Hood.

The traveler from Portland to either Mount Hood or Mount Adams may go by rail or steamer to Hood River, Oregon, or White Salmon, Washington. These towns are on opposite banks of the Columbia at its point of greatest beauty. Thence he will journey by automobile or stage up the corresponding valley to the snow-peak at its head. If he is bound for Mount Hood his thirty-mile ride will bring him to a charming mountain hotel, Cloud Cap Inn, placed six thousand feet above the sea, on a ridge overlooking Eliot glacier, Hood's finest ice stream.

Mount Hood at night, seen from Cloud Cap Inn. This view is from a negative exposed from nine o'clock until midnight.

If Mount Adams be his destination, a ride of similar length from White Salmon will bring him merely to the foot of the mountain. The stages run only to Guler, on Trout Lake, and to Glenwood. Each of these villages has a comfortable country hotel which may be made the base for fishing and hunting in the neighborhood. Each is about twelve miles from the snow-line. At either place, guides, horses and supplies may be had for the trip to the mountain. Glenwood is nearer to the famous Hellroaring Canyon and the glaciers of the southeast side. Guler is a favorite point of departure for the south slope and for the usual route to the summit.

Another popular starting point for Mount Adams is Goldendale, reached by a branch of the North Bank railway from Lyle on the Columbia. This route also leads to the fine park district on the southeastern slope, and it has a special attraction, as it skirts the remarkable canyon of the Klickitat River. Many parties also journey to the mountain from North Yakima and other towns on the Northern Pacific railway. Hitherto, all such travel from either north or south has meant a trip on foot or horseback over interesting mountain trails, and has involved the necessity of packing in camp equipment and supplies. During the present summer, a hotel is to be erected a short distance from the end of Mazama glacier, at an altitude of about sixty-five hundred feet, overlooking Hellroaring Canyon on one side, and on the other a delightful region of mountain tarns, waterfalls and alpine flower meadows. Its verandas will command the Mazama and Klickitat glaciers, and an easy route will lead to the summit. With practicable roads from Goldendale and Glenwood, it should draw hosts of lovers of scenery and climbing, and aid in making this great mountain as well known as it deserves to be.

Visitors going to Mount Hood from Portland have choice of a second very attractive hotel base in Government Camp, on the south slope at an altitude of thirty-nine hundred feet. This is reached by automobiles from the city, over a fair road that will soon be a good road, thanks to the Portland Automobile Club. The mountain portion of this highway is the historic Barlow road, opened in 1845, the first wagon road constructed across the Cascades. As the motor climbs out of the Sandy River valley, and grapples the steep moraines built by ancient icefields, the traveler gets a very feeling reminder of the pluck of Captain Barlow and his company of Oregon "immigrants" in forcing a way across these rugged heights. But the beauty of the trip makes it well worth while, and Government Camp gives access to a side of the peak that should be visited by all who would know how the sun can shatter a big mountain with his mighty tools of ice.

North side of Mount Hood, seen from moraine of Coe glacier. This glacier flows down from the summit, where its snow-field adjoins that of Eliot glacier (left). West of the Coe, the Ladd glacier is seen, separated from the former by Pulpit Rock, the big crag in the middle distance, and Barrett Spur, the high ridge on the right.

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Summit of Mount Hood, from Mazama Rock, showing the sun-cupped ice of midsummer.

The hotel here was erected in 1900 by O. C. Yocum, under whose competent guidance many hundreds of climbers reached the summit of Mount Hood. The Hotel is now owned by Elisha Coalman, who has also succeeded to his predecessor's office as guide. During the last year he has enlarged his inn, and he is now also building comfortable quarters for climbers at a camp four miles nearer the snow line, on the ridge separating White River glacier from Zigzag glacier.