With a rattle of wheels and a clickety-clack of hoofs the coach bore down upon us, its yellow body swaying drunkenly upon its leathern springs. It was a welcome sight, for since early morning we had been journeying through a region sans sign-posts, sans houses, sans people, sans everything. I threw up my hand, palm outward, which is the recognised halt sign of the plains, and in obedience to the signal the sombreroed driver pulled his wheelers back on their haunches and jammed his brakes on hard. Half a dozen bearded faces peered from the dim interior of the vehicle to ascertain the reason for the sudden stop.

“Are we right for the Columbia?” I asked.

“You betcha, friend,” said the driver, squirting a jet of tobacco juice with great dexterity between the portals of his drooping moustache. “All ye’ve got to do is keep ’er headed north an’ keep agoin’. You’re not more nor sixty mile from the river now. How fur’ve ye come with that there machine, anyway?”

“From Mexico,” I replied a trifle proudly.

“The hell you say!” he responded with open admiration. “An’ where ye bound fur, ef I might make so bold’s to ask?”

“As far north as we can get,” I answered. “To Alaska, if the roads hold out.”

“Waal, don’t it beat the Dutch what things is acomin’ to anyway,” he ejaculated, “when ye kin git into a waggin like that there an’ scoot acrost the country same’s ye would on a railroad train? I’ve druv this old stage forty year come next December, but the next thing ye know they’ll be wantin’ an autermobile, an’ me an’ the critters’ll be lookin’ fer another job. But that’s progress, an’ ’tain’t no manner o’ use tryin’ to buck it. These old Concords hev done a heap toward civilisin’ the West, but their day’s about over, I reckon, an’ the autermobile will come along an’ take up the job where they left off. Come to think on it, it’s sorter ’s if the old style was shakin’ hands an’ sayin’, ‘Glad tew meet you’ to the new. But I’ve got your Uncle Sam’l’s mail to deliver an’ I can’t be hangin’ ’round here gossipin’ all day.”

He kicked off his brake, and his long whip-lash, leaping forward like a rattlesnake, cracked between the ears of his leaders. “Get to work there, ye lazy, good-fer-nothin’ sons o’ sea-cooks, you!” he bellowed.

“S’long, friend, an’ good luck to ye,” he called over his shoulder. The whip-lash cracked angrily once more, wheelers and leaders settled into their collars, and the coach tore on amid a rolling cloud of dust.

“That was perfectly wonderful,” said the Lady, with a little gasp of satisfaction. “That was quite the nicest thing we’ve seen since we left Mexico. I didn’t know that that sort of thing existed any more outside of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.”

“It won’t exist much longer,” said I. “This Oregon hinterland is the last American frontier, but the railway is coming and in a few more years the only place you will be able to see a Concord coach like the one we just met will be in a museum or on a moving-picture screen. The old fellow was perfectly right when he said that our meeting typified the passing of the old and the coming of the new.”

“I’m awfully sorry for them,” remarked the Lady abstractedly.

“Sorry for whom?” I asked.

“Why,” she answered, “for the people who can only see this wonderful West on moving-picture screens.”

We took the back-stairs route to Oregon. When we turned the bonnet of the car northward from Lake Tahoe, we had the choice of two routes to the Columbia. One of these, which we would have taken had we followed the advice of every one with whom we talked, would have necessitated our retracing our steps across the High Sierras to Sacramento, where we would have struck the orthodox and much-travelled highway that runs northward through the Sacramento Valley, via Marysville and Red Bluff and Redding, enters the Siskiyous at Shasta and leaves them again at Grant’s Pass, and keeps on through the fertile and thickly settled valleys of the Rogue, the Umpqua, and the Willamette, to Portland and its rose gardens. The other route, which is ignored by the road-books and of which those human road-books who run the garages seemed to be in total ignorance, strikes boldly into the primeval wilderness that lies to the north of Tahoe, parallels for close on two hundred miles the western boundary of Nevada, crosses the Oregon border at Lower Klamath Lake, and then, hugging the one hundred and twenty-second parallel like a long-lost brother, climbs up and up and up over the savage lava beds, through the country of the Warm Springs Indians, across the fertile farm lands of the Inland Empire, and so down the Cañon of the Deschutes to where the rocky barrier of The Dalles says to the boats upon the Columbia: “You can go no further.” This is the famous Oregon Trail, which lies like a long rope thrown idly on the ground, abandoned by the hand that used it. Though the people with whom we talked urged us not to take it, prophesying long-neglected and impassable roads and total lack of accommodation and all manner of disaster, we stubbornly persisted in our choice, lured by the romantic and historic memories that hover round it; for was it not, in its day, one of the most famous of all the routes followed by mankind in its migrations; was it not the trail taken by those resolute frontiersmen who won for us the West?

We were warned repeatedly, by people who professed to know whereof they spoke, that, if we persisted in taking this unconventional and therefore perfectly ridiculous route, we would experience great difficulty in crossing the mountains, and, as some of our informants cheeringly observed, it was dollars to doughnuts that we wouldn’t be able to cross them at all. But as we had had experiences with these brethren of calamity howlers while motoring in Rhodesia and in Grande Kabylie and in the Anti-Lebanon, their mournful prognostications did not trouble us in the least. In fact, they but served to whet our appetites for the anticipated adventures. As a matter of fact, throughout the entire thousand miles that our speedometer recorded between Tahoe and The Dalles, not once did we cross any mountains worthy of the name, for our route, which had been carefully selected for its easy gradients long years before our time by men who traversed it in prairie-schooners instead of motor-cars and whose motive power was oxen instead of engines, lay along the gently rolling surface of that great mile-high plateau which parallels the eastern face of the Cascade Range and comes to a sudden termination in the precipitous cliffs which turn the upper reaches of the Columbia into a mighty gorge.

Turning our tonneau upon Truckee and its brawling trout-stream, we struck into the forest as the compass needle points, with Susanville one hundred and fifty miles away, as our day’s objective. (Who Susan was I haven’t the remotest idea, unless she was the lady that they named the black-eyed daisies after.) For hour after hour the road wound and turned and twisted through the grandest forest scenery that can be found between the oceans. To our left, through occasional breaks in the giant hedge of fir and spruce and jack-pine, we caught fleeting glimpses of Pilot Peak, whose purple summit has doubtless served as a sign-post for many an Oregon-bound band of pioneers. To us, who had seen only the tourist California and the highly cultivated valleys of the interior, these Californian highlands proved a constant source of joy and self-congratulation. We felt as though we were explorers and, so far as motoring for pleasure in that region is concerned, we were. But the greatest revelation was the road. We had expected to need the services of an osteopath to rejoint our dislocated vertebræ and, to modify the anticipated jolts, I had had the car equipped with shock-absorbers and had taped the springs. We could, however, have gone over that road with no great discomfort in a springless wagon, for, upon a roadbed undisturbed for close on half a century by any traffic worthy of the name, had fallen so thick and resilient a blanket of pine-needles that we felt as though a strip of Brussels carpet had been laid for our benefit, as they do in Europe when royalty has occasion to set foot upon the ground. The sunbeams, slanting through the lofty tree tops, dappled the tawny surface of the road with golden splotches and fleckings, squirrels chattered at us from the over-arching boughs; coveys of grouse, taken unaware by the stealth of our approach, rocketed into the air, wings whirring like machine guns, only to settle unconcernedly as soon as we had passed; an antlered stag bounded suddenly into the road, stood for an instant motionless as though cast from iron, with wide-open, startled eyes, and disappeared in panic-stricken flight; once, swinging silently around a turning, we came upon a black bear gorging himself at the free-lunch counter that the wild blackberries provide along the road; but before we could get our rifles out of their cases he had crashed his way into underbrush too dense for us to follow. Nor did we have any great desire to follow. The smoothness and silence of the road were too enchanting. Hour after hour we sped noiselessly along without a glimpse of a human being or a human habitation. There were no sign-posts to point the way and we wanted none.

But all good things must end in time, and our pine-carpeted road debouched quite unexpectedly into the loveliest valley that you ever saw. Perhaps it is because its sylvan serenity is undisturbed as yet by the jeering screech of the locomotive, but you will need to use much gasoline and wear out many tires before you will happen upon anything more idyllic than those cloistered and incredibly fertile acres that sweep down from the summit of the Iron Hills to the margin of Honey Lake. The trim white farmhouses that peep coquettishly, like bashful village maidens, from amid the fragrant orchards at the passer-by; the fields green-carpeted with sprouting grain; the barns whose queer hip-roofs made them look as though they were aburst with stored-up produce, as, indeed, they are; the sleek cattle, standing knee-deep in a lake as clear as Circe’s mirror—all these things spell p-r-o-s-p-e-r-i-t-y so plainly that even those who whirl by, as we did at forty miles an hour, may read.

Susanville, which is built on a hill at the end of Honey Lake Valley, very much as the Italian hill towns command the tributary countryside, is a quiet rural community that has been stung by the bee of progress and is running around in circles in consequence. When we were there a railroad was in course of construction for the purpose of tapping the wealth of this rich but hitherto unexploited region, and the main street of the town, which we reached on a Saturday evening, was alive with farmers who had come in to do their week-end shopping, cow-punchers in gaudy neckerchiefs and Angora chaps, fresh from the ranges, engineers in high-laced boots and corduroy trousers, sun-tanned labourers from all four corners of Europe and the places in between. As a result of this week-end influx, the only hotel that Susanville possessed was filled to the doors.

“I can’t even fix you up with a pool-table, gents,” said the shirt-sleeved proprietor, mopping the perspiration from his forehead with a violent-hued bandana; “and what’s more, every blame boardin’-house in town’s just as full up as we are.”

“But we must find some place to sleep,” I asserted positively. “We’ve a lady with us, you see, and she can’t very well sleep in the open—or on a pool-table either, can she?”

“A lady? God bless my soul! Why didn’t you say so? Well, now, that’s too durned bad. But hold on a minute, friends. I wouldn’t be s’prised if Bill Dooling, the barber, could fix you up. He’s got a cottage down the road a piece and I’ll send a boy along with you to show you where he lives.”

Bill the barber and his family, which consisted of his wife, his mother—known as granmaw—nine children who had reached the age of indiscretion, and a baby, dwelt in a vine-clad cottage as neat as the proverbial beeswax and about as roomy as a limousine.

“Sure,” said he cordially, when I had explained our predicament, “we’ve got slathers of room. We’ll fix you up and welcome. You and the lady can have Rosamond Clarissa’s room, and your friend here can have the boys’ room across the hall, and your showfer can sleep in Ebenezer’s bed. Me and the wife’ll fix ourselves up on the porch, and granmaw she’ll go acrost the street to a neighbour’s, and Abel and Absalom and David and Rosamond Clarissa and Ebenezer and Elisha and Gwendoline Hortensia and Hiram and Isaiah’ll sleep in the tent. Sure, we’ve got all the room you want.”

“You must have almost as much trouble in finding names for your children,” the Lady remarked, “as the Pullman Company does in naming its sleeping-cars.”

“Well, it’s this way, ma’am,” he explained. “Me and maw have a sort of an agreement. She names the girls and gets the names out of the magazines. I name the boys and get the names out of the Bible. She hoped that the baby’d be a girl so’s she could name her Patricia Penelope, but seeing as it’s a boy it’s up to me, and I haven’t been able to make up my mind yet between Jabez, Josiah, and Jeremiah.”

Barring the fact that we were awakened at a somewhat unseasonable hour by a high-voiced discussion between Rosamond Clarissa and Gwendoline Hortensia as to which should have the privilege of washing the baby, we were very comfortable indeed—very much more so, I expect, than if we had been able to obtain quarters at the hotel—and, after a breakfast of berries with cream that was not milk incognito, and coffee, and hot cakes, and eggs that tasted as though they might have originated with a hen instead of a cold-storage vault, we rolled away with the hospitable barber and his brood waving us Godspeed from the doorstep.

It is in the neighbourhood of two hundred and fifty miles from Susanville to the Oregon line, the earlier portion of the journey taking us through a forest that had evidently never known the woodsman’s axe. North of Dry Lake Ranch, which is the only place in between where a motorist can count on finding a bed to sleep in or a bite to eat, a grazing country of remarkable fertility begins, much of it having been taken up by Czechs from Bohemia: a stolid, sturdy, industrious folk who work themselves and their patient families and the ground unremittingly and whose prosperity, therefore, passes that of their more shiftless neighbours at a gallop. This fringe of farming communities, although in California, really mark the beginning of that great, rich agricultural region comprising the back country of Oregon which, because of its prosperity, its extent, and its wealth of resources, is known as the Inland Empire.

A few miles beyond these Bohemian settlements we caught our first glimpse of Lower Klamath Lake, whose low and marshy shores, which lie squarely athwart the boundary between California and Oregon, forming a spring and autumn rendezvous for untold thousands of wild fowl, the government having set it aside as a sort of natural aviarium.

“Look!” suddenly exclaimed the Lady, pointing. “The shores of the lake are covered with snow!”

But what looked for all the world like an expanse of snow suddenly transformed itself, as we drew near, into a cloud of huge, ungainly birds with perfectly enormous bills, creating a racket like a thousand motor-cars with the beating of their wings.

“Pelicans, by Jove!” exclaimed my friend, and that is what they were—thousands, yes, tens of thousands of them. The pelican, as we learned later, is the symbol, as it were, of all this Klamath country, the really beautiful hotel at Klamath Falls being named The White Pelican, “perhaps,” as the Lady observed, “because of the size of its bill.” However this may be, it is a very excellent hotel, indeed, and if you ever chance to find yourself in that part of the country I would advise you to spend a night there, if for no other reason than to enjoy the novel experience of staying in a hostelry which would do credit to Fifth Avenue and looking out of your window on a frontier town. This, mind you, is casting no aspersions on Klamath Falls, which is a very prosperous and wide-awake little place indeed, although ten years ago you would have had some difficulty in finding it on the map, its mushroom growth being due to the development of the immense lumber territory of which, since the completion of the railway, it has become the centre. As a matter of fact, the hotel was not built so much for the convenience of the traveller as it was for the comfort of the handful of Eastern capitalists whose great lumber interests necessitate their spending a considerable portion of the year in Klamath Falls and who demanded the same luxuries and conveniences in this backwoods town that they would have on Broadway. That explains why it is that in this remote settlement in the wilderness you can get a room furnished in cretonne and Circassian walnut, with a white porcelain bathroom opening from it, and can sit down to dinner at a red-shaded table in a gold-and-ivory dining-room. I know a man who keeps a private orchestra of thirty pieces, year in and year out, for his own amusement, but these Oregon lumber kings are the only men I have ever heard of who have built a great city hotel purely for their personal convenience.

The late E. H. Harriman, knowing the continent and having the continent to choose from, built a shooting lodge on the shores of Upper Klamath Lake, to which he was wont to retreat, after the periodical strikes and railroad mergers and congressional investigations which punctuated his career, for rest and recreation. After the death of the great railway builder the lodge was purchased by the same group of men who built The White Pelican Hotel and has been converted into a sort of sporting resort de luxe. They call it Pelican Bay Lodge, and I know of nothing quite like it anywhere. It consists of perhaps a dozen log cabins, externally as rough as any frontiersman’s dwelling, but steam-heated, luxuriously furnished, and liberally bathtubised.

Pelican Bay Lodge is the most convenient starting-point for that mountain mystery known as Crater Lake, which lies forty miles to the north of it and six thousand feet above it, in the heart of the Cascade Range. It took us five hours of steady running to cover those forty miles, and we didn’t stop to pick wild flowers either. The road is a very beautiful one, winding steadily upward through one of the finest pine forests on the continent. The last mile is more like mountaineering than motoring, however, for the road, in order to attain the rim of the lake, suddenly shoots upward at a perfectly appalling angle—I think they told me that at one place it had a grade of thirty-eight per cent—and more than once it seemed to us who were sitting in the tonneau that the car would tip over backward, like a horse that rears until it overbalances itself. Crater Lake is one of those places where the most calloused globe-trotter, from, whom neither the Pyramids nor the Taj Mahal would wring an exclamation of approval, gives, perforce, a gasp of real astonishment and admiration. Part of this is due, no doubt, to the startling suddenness with which you come upon it and to its dramatic situation; the rest to its surpassing beauty and its extraordinary colour. The lake, which occupies the crater of an extinct volcano the size and height of Mount Shasta, is almost circular, half a mile deep, five miles in circumference, and nearly a mile and a half above sea-level, the rocky walls which surround it being in places two thousand feet high and as sheer and smooth as the side of an upright piano. But its outstanding feature is its colour, for it is the bluest blue you ever saw or dreamed of: as blue as lapis lazuli, as a forget-me-not, as an Italian sky, as a baby’s eyes (provided, of course, that it is a blue-eyed baby), or as a Monday morning. It looks, indeed, like a gigantic wash-tub, filled with bluing, in which some weary colossus has been condemned to wash the clothing of the world.

Nothing that we had seen since leaving Mexico so profoundly stirred my imagination as that portion of our road which stretched northward from Crater Lake, through Crescent and Shaniko, to The Dalles. Every few miles we passed groups of dilapidated and decaying buildings, with sunken roofs and boarded windows, which must once have been busy road-houses and stage stations, for near them were the remains of great barns and tumble-down corrals, now long since disused—melancholy reminders of those days, half a century agone, when down this lonely road that we were following plodded mile-long wagon-trains, the heads of women and children at every rent and loophole of the canvas tops, the men, rifle on shoulder, marching in the dust on either hand. Few, indeed, of these pioneers were rich in anything save children, affluent except in expectations; yet weather, roads, fare, mishaps—nothing daunted them, for they were “going West.”

Roughly speaking, it is a hundred miles from Shaniko to The Dalles, over a road most of which is back-breakingly rough and all of which is so intolerably dusty that we felt as though we were covered with sandpaper instead of skin. But the scenery of the last half dozen miles caused us to forgive, if not to forget, the discomforts and the monotony of those preceding, for in them we dropped down through the wild and winding gorge which the Deschutes follows on its way to join hands with its big sister, the Columbia. The nearer we drew to the mighty river the higher our expectations grew, and every time we topped a rise or swung around a granite shoulder we searched for it eagerly, just as our migrating predecessors must have done. But, owing to the high, sheer cliffs that wall it in, we caught no glimpse of it whatever until, our road emerging from the cañon’s mouth upon the precipice’s brink, we suddenly found ourselves looking down upon it as it lay below us in all its shimmering and sinuous beauty, its silvery length winding away, away, away: eastward to its birthplace in the country of the Kootenai: westward to Astoria and its mother, the sea. Far below us, so far below that it looked like the little wooden villages you see in the windows of toy stores, the white houses of The Dalles were clustered upon the river’s banks.

The highroad, which had been palpably ailing for some time, took a sudden turn for the worse a few miles south of The Dalles, so that, when it found the great, peaceful, silent-flowing Columbia athwart its path, the temptation became too great to resist and it ended its misery in the river, leaving us, its faithful friends, who had borne it company all the way from Mexico, disconsolate upon the bank. Thus it befell that we were compelled to put the car and ourselves aboard a boat and trust to steam, instead of gasoline, to bear us over the ensuing section of our journey. It was a humiliating thing for motorists to have to do, of course—but what would you? There were no more roads. We were in the deplorable position of the man who told his wife that he came home because all the other places were closed. And think how keenly the veteran car—

—must have felt the disgrace of being turned over to a crew of stevedores and a ruffianly, tobacco-chewing second mate, who unceremoniously sandwiched it between a pile of milk-cans and a crate of cabbages on the lower deck of a chug-achug-chugging stern-wheel river boat.

But before the rickety deck chairs had ceased their creaking complaints about the burden we had imposed on them we were congratulating ourselves on the circumstance that had forced us to exchange a hot and dusty highroad for a cool and silent waterway. To me there is something irresistibly fascinating and seductive about a river. I always find myself wondering where it comes from, and what strange things it has seen along its course, and where it is going to, and I invariably have a hankering to take ship and keep it company. And the greater the stream, the greater its fascination, because, of course, it has travelled so much farther. Now the Columbia, as that friend of our boyhood, Huck Finn, would have put it, is no slouch of a river. If its kinks and twists were carefully straightened out it would reach half-way across the continent, or as far as from New York to Kansas City. It is somewhat disturbing for one who visits the valley of the Columbia for the first time, with the purpose of writing about it, to have these facts suddenly thrown, as it were, in his face, particularly if, like myself, he has been brought up in that part of the country where the Hudson is regarded as the only real river in America—doubtless because it washes the shores of Manhattan—and where all other waterways are looked upon as being not much better than creeks. I felt like apologising to somebody, and when, on top of all this, I was told that the Columbia and its tributaries drain a region equal in area to all the States along our Atlantic seaboard put together, I had a sudden desire to go ashore at the next landing and take a train back home.

Though of British birth, for it has its source above the Canadian line in the country of the Kootenai, the Columbia emends this unfortunate circumstance by becoming naturalised when it is still a slender stripling, dividing its allegiance, however, between Oregon and Washington, for which it serves as a boundary for upward of four hundred miles. It is not only the father of Northwestern waters, but it is the big brother of all those streams, from the Straits of Behring to the Straits of Magellan, which call the Pacific Ocean “grandpa.” By white-hulled river steamer, by panting power-boat, by produce-laden barge, by bark canoe, by the goatskin raft called kelek, I have loitered my leisurely way down many famous rivers—the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Mississippi, the Fraser, the Skeena, the Rio Balsas, the Rhine, the Danube, the Volga, the Euphrates, the Ganges, the Zambesi, the Nile—and I assert, after having duly weighed my words, that in the continuity and grandeur of its scenery the Columbia is the superior of them all. If you think that I am carried away by enthusiasm you had better go and see it for yourself.

It was Carlyle—was it not?—who remarked that all great works produce an unpleasant impression on first acquaintance. It is so with the Columbia. We saw it first on a broiling August day from the heights above Celilo—the great, silent, mysterious river winding away into the unknown between banks of lava as sinister and forbidding as the flanks of Etna, and with a sun beating down upon it from a sky of molten brass. There were no grassy banks, no trees, no flowers, no vegetation of any kind, none of the things that one usually associates with a river. But when the steamer bears you around the first of those frowning cliffs that rise sheer from the surface of the river below The Dalles—ah, well, that is quite another matter.

Since Time began, the sheets of lava which give The Dalles its name, by compressing the half-mile-wide river into a channel barely sixscore feet across, have effectually obstructed continuous navigation upon the Upper Columbia. But, as towns multiplied and population increased along the upper reaches of the great river and its tributaries in Washington and Oregon, in Montana and Idaho, this hinderance to the navigation of so splendid a waterway became intolerable, unthinkable, absurd. At last the frock-coated gentlemen in Congress were prodded into action, and the passage of a bill for the construction of a canal around The Dalles, at Celilo, was the result. Came then keen-eyed, self-reliant men who, jeering at the obstacles which Nature had heaped in their path, proceeded to slash a canal through eight miles of shifting sands and basalt rock, so that hereafter the fruit growers and farmers and ranchers as far inland as Lewiston, in Idaho, can send their produce down to the sea in ships.

“The trouble with the Columbia,” complained the Lady, “is that it’s all scenery and no romance. It’s too big, too prosaic, too commercial. It doesn’t arouse any overwhelming enthusiasm in me to be told that this river irrigates goodness knows how many thousand square miles of land, or that the top of that mountain over there is so many thousand feet above the level of the sea, or that so many thousand barrels of apples were grown last year in the valley we just passed and that they brought so many dollars a barrel. Facts like those are all well enough in an almanac, because no one ever reads almanacs anyway, but they don’t interest me and I don’t believe that they interest many other visitors, either. If a river hasn’t any romance connected with it, it isn’t much better than a canal. Don’t you remember that rock in the Bosphorus, near Scutari, to which Leander used to swim out to see Hero, and how when we passed it the passengers would all rush over to that side of the deck, and how the steamer would list until her rail was almost under water, and how the Turkish officers would get frightened half to death and shove the people back? You don’t see the passengers on this boat threatening to capsize it because of their anxiety to see something romantic, do you? I should say not. Do you remember Kerbela, that town on the Euphrates, where all Persians hope to be buried when they die, and how, long before we reached there, we could smell the Caravans of the Dead which were carrying the bodies there from across the desert? And those crumbling, ivy-covered castles along the Rhine, with their queer legends and traditions and superstitions? That’s what I mean by romance, and you know as well as I do that there is nothing romantic about apple orchards and salmon canneries and sawmills. Is there?”

“Pardon me, madam,” said a gentleman who had been seated so close to us that he could not help overhearing what she said and who had been unable to conceal his disagreement with the views she had expressed, “but do you see that island over there near the Washington shore? The long, low one with the little white monument sticking up at the end of it. That is Memaloose—the Island of the Dead. It is the Indian Valhalla. Talk about the Persians whose bodies are borne across the desert to be buried at Kerbela! Did you happen to know that on the slopes of that island are buried untold thousands of Chinooks, whose bodies were brought on the backs of men hundreds of miles through the wilderness or in canoes down long and lonely rivers that they might find their last resting-places in its sacred soil? And the monument that you see marks the grave of a frontiersman who was as romantic a character as you will find in the pages of Fenimore Cooper. His name was Victor Trevet; he knew and liked the Indians; and he asked to be buried on Memaloose that his bones might lie among those of ‘honest men.’ Is it legend and tradition that you say the river lacks? A few miles ahead of us, at the Cascades, the river was once spanned, according to the Indian legend, by a stupendous natural bridge of rock. The Indians called it the Bridge of the Gods. The great river flowed under it, and on it lived a witch woman named Loowit, who had charge of the only fire in the world. Seeing how wretched was the lot of the fireless tribes, who had to live on uncooked meats and vegetables, she begged permission of the gods to give them fire. Her request was granted and the condition of the Indians was thus enormously improved. So gratified were the gods by Loowit’s consideration for the welfare of the Indians that they promised to grant any request that she might make. Womanlike, she promptly asked for youth and beauty. Whereupon she was transformed into a maiden whose loveliness would have caused Lina Cavalieri to go out of the professional beauty business. The news of her beauty spreading among the tribes like fire in summer grass, there came numberless youths who pleaded for her hand, or, rather, for the face and figure that went with it. Among them were two young chieftains: Klickitat from the north and Wiyeast from the west. As she was unable to decide between them, they and their tribesmen decided to settle the rivalry with the tomahawk. But the gods, angry at this senseless waste of lives over a pretty woman, put Loowit and her two gentlemen friends to death and sent the great bridge on which she had dwelt crashing down into the river. But as they had all three been good to look upon in life, so the gods, who were evidently æsthetic, made them good to look upon even in death by turning them into snow peaks. Wiyeast became the mountain which we palefaces call Mount Hood; Klickitat they transformed into the peak we know as Mount Adams; while Mount Saint Helens is the beautiful form taken by the fair Loowit. Thus was the wonderful Bridge of the Gods destroyed and the Columbia dammed by the débris which fell into it. In a few minutes we will be at the Cascades and you can see the ruins of the bridge for yourself. And, if you still have any lingering doubts as to the truth of the story, why, there is Klickitat in his white blanket rising above the forests to the right, and Wiyeast is over there to your left, and ahead of us, down the river, is the Loowit lady disguised as Mount Saint Helens. So you see there is no room for doubt.

“You assert that the Columbia is lacking in romance because, forsooth, no Leander has swum across it to see a Hero. Good heavens, my dear young lady, I can tell you a story that has more all-wool-and-a-yard-wide romance in it than a dozen such Hellespontine fables. Did you never hear of Whitman the missionary, who, instead of crossing a measly strait to win a woman, crossed a continent and won an empire?

“In the early forties Whitman established a mission station near the present site of Walla Walla. Hearing rumours that our government was on the point of accommodatingly ceding the Valley of the Columbia to England in return for some paltry fishing rights off the banks of Newfoundland—the government officials of those days evidently preferred codfish to salmon—he rode overland to Washington in the dead of winter, through blinding snow-storms, swimming icy rivers, subsisting on his pack-mules and his dogs when his food ran out, facing death by torture at the hands of hostile Indians. Gaining admission to the White House in his dress of furs and buckskin, with his feet and fingers terribly frozen, he so impressed President Tyler and Secretary of State Webster by his vivid description of the richness and fertility of the region which they were on the point of ceding to England that he saved the entire Pacific Northwest to the Union. If that isn’t sufficient romance for you, then I’m afraid you’re hard to please.”

“I surrender,” said the Lady. “Your old Columbia has plenty of romance, after all. The trouble is that tourists don’t know these interesting things that you’ve just been telling us and they do know all about the Danube and the Rhine.”

“That’s easily remedied,” said I. “I’ll tell them about it myself.”

And that, my friends, is precisely what I have just been trying to do.

“Next stop Hood River!” bawled the purser.

“That’s where the apples come from,” remarked our deck acquaintance, who had turned himself into a guide-book for our benefit. “In some of the orchards up the valley you’ll find apples with paper letters pasted on them: ‘C de P’ for the Café de Paris, you know, and ‘W-A’ for the Waldorf-Astoria, and ‘G R & I’ for Georgius Rex et Imperator—which is not the name of the restaurant. They paste the letters on quite carefully when the apples are still green upon the tree, and when they ripen the paper is torn off, leaving the yellow initials on the bright red fruit. Those are the apples that they serve at royal banquets and that they charge a dollar apiece for in the smart restaurants in Europe. I don’t mean to imply that all of the Hood River apples are thus initialled to order, but some of them are. The average value of the land in that valley, cultivated and uncultivated, is three hundred and forty dollars an acre, and if a man wanted to purchase an orchard in bearing he would have to pay at least four thousand dollars an acre for it. Some people think that it was the original Garden of Eden. If it was, I don’t blame Eve for stealing the apple. I’d steal a Hood River apple myself if I got the chance.”

Had the second mate been a little more obliging, and had there not been so formidable a barricade of crates and milk cans about the car, I would have had it run ashore then and there and would have taken a whirl through the famous apple orchards which cover the lower slopes of Mount Hood and have kept on up the zigzag mountain road as far as the cosy little hostelry called Cloud Cap Inn, which some public-spirited Portlander has built upon the snow-line. Perhaps it was just as well we didn’t, however, for I learned afterward that the famous valley is only about twenty miles long, so, if we had not put on the emergency brake before we started, we would have run through it before we could have stopped and would not have seen it at all. Nowhere in Switzerland do I recall a picture of such surpassing splendour as that which stood before us, as though on a titanic easel, as, from the vantage of the steamer’s upper deck, we looked up the vista formed by this fragrant, verdant valley toward the great white cone of Mount Hood. It is, indeed, so very beautiful that those Americans who know and love the world’s white rooftrees can find scant justification for turning their faces toward the Alps when here, in the upper left-hand corner of their own country, are mountains which would make the ghost of the great Whymper moan for an alpenstock and hobnailed boots. This startlingly sudden transition from orchards groaning with fruit to dense primeval forests, and from these forests to the stately, isolated snow peaks, is very different from Switzerland, of course. Indeed, to compare these mountains of the Pacific Northwest with the Alps, as is so frequently done, seems to me to be a grave injustice to them both. The Alps form a wild and angry sea of icy mountains, and we have nothing in America to which they can be fittingly compared. The Cascades, on the other hand, form a great system of lofty forest-wrapped ranges surmounted by the towering isolated peaks of snowy volcanoes, and Europe contains nothing to equal them. I am perfectly aware, of course, that the very large number of Americans who spend their summers in the ascent of the orthodox Swiss peaks—more often than not, if the truth were known, by means of funicular railways or through telescopes on hotel piazzas—look with scorn and contumely upon these mountains of the far Nor’west, which they regard as home-made and unfashionable and vulgar and not worth bothering about. Perhaps they are not aware, however, that no less an authority on mountaineering than James Bryce (I don’t recall the title that he has taken now that he has been made a peer, and no one would recognise him if I used it) said not long ago, in speaking of these sentinels that guard the Columbia:

“We have nothing more beautiful in Switzerland or Tyrol, in Norway or the Pyrenees. The combination of ice scenery with woodland scenery of the grandest type is to be found nowhere in the Old World, unless it be in the Himalayas, and, so far as we know, nowhere else on the American continent.”

Which but serves to point the truth that foreigners are more appreciative of the beauties and grandeurs of our country than we are ourselves.

At the Cascades the Columbia takes a drop of half a hundred feet and we had, perforce, to bide our time in the locks, by means of which the rapids have been circumvented, until the waters found their level. It is not until the Cascades are passed that the scenery for which the Columbia is famous begins in all its sublimity and grandeur. The Great Artist has painted pictures more colourful, more sensational, perhaps, as the Grand Cañon, for example, the Yellowstone, and the Sahara, but none which combines the qualities of strength and restfulness as this mighty river, flowing swiftly, silently between the everlasting hills. From the shores the orchards and the gardens rise, terrace above terrace, until they become merged in the forest-covered ranges, and above the ranges rise the august snow peaks, solitary, silent, like a line of sentries strung along the horizon. At times, particularly in the early morning and again at sunset, these snow mountains present that singular appearance familiar to the traveller in the Himalayas and the Cordilleras, when the snowy cone seems to be floating ethereally upon a sea of mist which completely shrouds the hills and forests at its base. Immediately below the Cascades commences the series of waterfalls for which the lower reaches of the Columbia are famous, the granite cliffs which, for nearly twoscore miles border the Oregon shore with a sheer wall of rock, being scored at frequent intervals by what seem, from a distance, to be ribbons of shining silver. As the boat draws nearer, however, you see that what looked like ribbons are really mountain streams which are so impatient to join their mother, the Columbia, that, instead of taking the more sedate but circuitous route, they fling themselves tempestuously over the brink of the sheer cliff into the arms of the parent stream. First come the Horsetail Falls, whose falling waters, blown by the wind into silvery strands, are suggestive of the flowing tail of a white Arab; then, in quick succession, the Oneonta Falls, at the end of a narrow gorge which penetrates the cliffs for a mile or more; the nine-hundred-feet-high Multnomah, the highest falls in all the northwest country if not, indeed, on the entire Pacific Coast; the Bridal Veil, as radiantly beautiful as its namesake of the Yosemite; and finally, just below the great monolith rising from the river known as Rooster Rock, the Falls of Latourelle. On the opposite shore the mighty promontory known as Cape Horn rises five hundred feet above the surface of the river, and, a few miles farther up-stream, Castle Rock, whose turreted crags bear a striking resemblance to some stronghold of the Middle Ages, attains to twice that height. By the time the steamer reaches the mighty natural gateway known as the Pillars of Hercules, the traveller is actually surfeited with grandeur and is quite ready for the simple, friendly, pastoral scenes again, just as one after a season of Wagnerian opera welcomes the simple airs and the old-fashioned songs.

As I do not chew popcorn, peanuts, gum, or candy, nor munch dripping ice-cream cones, and as I have an unconquerable aversion to other people doing those unpleasant things in my immediate vicinity, I left the others, who did not seem to mind such minor annoyances, among the excursionists upon the upper deck and made my way below. After clambering over great piles of crates, sacks, and barrels filled with Columbia River produce, I finally succeeded in finding a secluded spot in the vessel’s bows, whence I could watch, undisturbed by sticky-fingered youngsters or idle chatter, the varied commerce of the mighty water road. Stern-wheel, twin-funnelled passenger boats zigzagged from shore to shore to pick up the passengers and freight that patiently awaited their coming; rusty freighters scuttled down-stream laden with fruit for the coast towns and salmon for the Astoria canneries; spick-and-span pleasure craft, with shining brass work and graceful, tapering spars, daintily picked their way through the press of river traffic as a pretty girl picks her way along a crowded street; grimy fishing craft, their sails as weather-beaten as the faces of the men that raise them, danced by us, eager for home and supper and the evening fire; great log rafts wallowed by, sent down by the forests to propitiate the greedy sawmills, whose sharp-toothed jaws devour the sacrifice and scream for more.

Perhaps the most interesting and characteristic feature of the landscape along the lower Columbia are the fish-wheels—ingenious contrivances, twenty to forty feet in diameter and six to eight feet across, which look like pocket editions of the passenger-carrying Ferris wheel at the Chicago Exposition. The wheels, which are hung in substantial frameworks close to the banks, where the salmon run the thickest, are revolved by the current, which keeps the wire-meshed scoops with which each pair of spokes are fitted for ever lifting from the water. The great schools of salmon are guided toward the wheel by means of a lattice dam which reaches out into the river like the arm of a false friend, and, before the unsuspecting fish know what has happened to them, they are hoisted into the air in the wire scoops and dumped into an inclined trough, down which they slide into a fenced-in pool, where the fishermen can get them at their leisure. They are then strung on wires and attached to a barrel which acts as a buoy, the barrel, sometimes with a ton of fish trailing behind it like the tail to a kite, floating down-stream to the nearest cannery, where a man in a launch is on the lookout and tows them ashore. Months later, in Pekin or Peoria, in Rome or Rumford Falls, or wherever else you may happen to be dining, you will see the item “Columbia River Salmon” on the hotel menu.

As I hung over the steamer’s bow, with the incomparable landscape slipping past me as though on Burton Holmes’s picture screen, and no sound save the muffled throbbing of the engines and the ripple of the water running aft along the hull, I unconsciously yielded to the Columbia’s mystic spell. I closed my eyes and in a moment the surface of the river seemed peopled with the ghosts of the history makers. Nez Percés, in paint and feathers, slipped silently along, in the shadow of yonder wooded bank, in their barken war canoes. Two lean and sun-bronzed white men, clad in the fringed buckskin of the adventuring frontiersman, floated past me down the mighty stream which they had trekked across a continent to find. Half-breed trappers, chanting at the paddles, descended with precious freights of fur. A square-rigged merchantman poked its inquisitive bowsprit around a rocky headland, and as she passed I noted the words Columbia, of Boston, in raised gilt letters on her stern, and I remembered that it was from this same square-rigged vessel that the river took its name. A warship, flying the flag of England and with the black muzzles of guns peering from its rows of ports, cautiously ascended, the leadsmen in the shrouds sounding for river bars. Log forts and trading-posts and mission stations once again crowned the encircling hills. Forgotten battles blew by on the evening breeze. A yellow dust cloud rose above the river bank and out of it emerged a plodding wagon-train. The smoke of pioneer camp-fires spiralled skyward from those rich valleys where in reality the cattle browse and the orchards droop with fruit. From the vantage of a rocky promontory a ghostly war party peered down upon me—a paleface—taking a summer’s holiday along that mighty stream upon whose bosom of old went forth the bepainted fighting men. The furtive twilight slipped behind night’s velvet curtain. The mountains changed from jade to coral, from coral to sapphire, from sapphire to amethyst. The snow peaks gleamed luminously, like sheeted ghosts, against the purple velvet of the sky. The night-breeze rose and I shivered. The steamer swung silently around a bend in the river and, all suddenly, the darkness ahead was sprinkled with a million blinking fireflies. At least they looked like fireflies.

“Portland!” shouted a raucous voice, far off somewhere, on the upper deck. “Portland! All ashore!”

I felt a hand upon my shoulder. It was the Lady.

“Where on earth have you been?” she asked. “We have been hunting for you everywhere.”

“I’ve been on a long journey,” said I.