CHAPTER XIV

THE HOME STRETCH

The Dalles was the largest town I touched on the Columbia, and one of the most attractive. Long one of the largest wool-shipping centres of the United States, it has recently attained to considerable importance as a fruit market. It will not, however, enter into anything approaching the full enjoyment of its birthright until the incalculably enormous power possibilities of Celilo Falls and the Dalles have been developed. So far, as at every other point along the Columbia with the exception of a small plant at Priest Rapids, nothing has been done along this line. When it is, The Dalles will be in the way of becoming one of the most important industrial centres of the West.

In the days of the _voyageurs_ The Dalles was notorious for the unspeakably treacherous Indians who congregated there to intimidate and plunder all who passed that unavoidable portage. They were lying, thieving scoundrels for the most part, easily intimidated by a show of force and far less prone to stage a real fight than their more warlike brethren who disputed the passage at the Cascades. That this "plunderbund" tradition is one which the present-day Dalles is making a great point of living down, I had conclusive evidence of through an incident that arose in connection with my hotel bill. I had found my room extremely comfortable and well appointed, so that the bill presented for it at my departure, far from striking me as unduly high, seemed extremely reasonable. I think I may even have said something to that effect; yet, two days later in Portland, I received a letter containing an express order for one dollar, and a note saying that this was the amount of an unintentional over-charge for my room. That was characteristic of the treatment I received from first to last in connection with my small financial transactions along the way. I never dreamed that there were still so many people in the world above profiteering at the expense of the passing tourist until I made my Columbia voyage.

I had intended, by making an early start from The Dalles, to endeavour to cover the forty odd miles to the head of the Cascades before dark of the same day. Two things conspired to defeat this ambitious plan: first, some unexpected mail which had to be answered, and, second, my equally unexpected booking of a passenger--a way passenger who had to be landed well short of the Cascades. Just as I was cleaning up the last of my letters, the hotel clerk introduced me to the "Society Editor" of The Dalles _Chronicle_, who wanted an interview. I told her that I was already two hours behind schedule, but that if she cared to ride the running road with me for a while, she could have the interview, with lunch thrown in, on the river. She accepted with alacrity, but begged for half an hour to clean up her desk at the _Chronicle_ office and change to out-door togs. Well within that limit, she was back again at the hotel, flushed, pant-ing and pant-ed, and announced that she was ready. Picking up a few odds and ends of food at the nearest grocery, we went down to the dock, where I launched and loaded up _Imshallah_ in time to push off at ten o'clock. I had, of course, given up all idea of making the Cascades that day, and reckoned that Hood River, about twenty-five miles, would be a comfortable and convenient halting place for the night. And so it would have been....

I don't remember whether or not we ever got very far with the "interview," but I do recall that Miss S---- talked very interestingly of Johan Bojer and his work, and that she was in the midst of a keenly analytical review of "The Great Hunger" when a sudden darkening of what up to then had been only a slightly overcast sky reminded me that I had been extremely remiss in the matter of keeping an eye on the weather. Indeed, up to that moment the menace of storms on the river had been of such small moment as compared to that of rapids that I had come to rate it as no more than negligible. Now, however, heading into the heart of the Cascades, I was approaching a series of gorges long notorious among river _voyageurs_ as a veritable "wind factory"--a "storm-breeder" of the worst description. After all that I had read of the way in which the early pioneers had been held up for weeks by head winds between the Dalles and the Cascades, there was no excuse for my failure to keep a weather eye lifting at so treacherous a point. The only _alibi_ I can think of is Adam's: "The woman did it." Nor is there any ungallantry in that plea. Quite the contrary, in fact; for I am quite ready to confess that I should probably fail to watch the clouds again under similar circumstances.

There were a few stray mavericks of sunshine shafts trying to struggle down to the inky pit of the river as I turned to give the weather a once-over, but they were quenched by the sinister cloud-pall even as I looked. The whole gorge of the river-riven Cascades was heaped full of wallowing nimbus which, driven by a fierce wind, was rolling up over the water like an advancing smoke-barrage. The forefront of the wind was marked by a wild welter of foam-white water, while a half mile behind a streaming curtain of gray-black indicated the position of the advancing wall of the rain. It would have been a vile-looking squall even in the open sea; here the sinister threat of it was considerably accentuated by the towering cliffs and the imminent outcrops of black rock studding the surface of the river. I had no serious doubt that _Imshallah_, after all the experience she had had in rough water, would find any great difficulty in riding out the blow where she was, but since it hardly seemed hospitable to subject my lady guest to any more of a wetting than could be avoided, I turned and headed for the lee shore. Miss S---- was only about half muffled in the rubber saddle _poncho_ and the light "shed" tent I tossed to her before resuming my oars when the wall of the wind--hard and solid as the side of a flying barn--struck us full on the starboard beam. It was rather careless of me, not heading up to meet that squall before it struck; but the fact was that I simply couldn't take seriously anything that it seemed possible _could_ happen on such a deep, quiet stretch of river. The consequence of taking that buffet on the beam was quite a merry bit of a mix-up. The shower-bath of blown spray and the dipping under of the lee rail were rather the least of my troubles. What did have me guessing for a minute, though, was the result of the fact that that confounded fifty-miles-an-hour zephyr got under the corners of the tent and, billowing it monstrously, carried about half of it overboard; also a somewhat lesser amount of Miss S----, who was just wrapping herself in it. I had to drop my oars to effect adequate salvage operations, and so leave the skiff with her port gunwale pretty nearly hove under. As soon as I got around to swing her head up into the teeth of the wind things eased off a bit.

The river was about a mile wide at this point--ten miles below The Dalles and about opposite the station of Rowena--and, save for occasional outcroppings of black bedrock, fairly deep. The north shore was rocky all the way along, but that to the south (which was also the more protected on account of a jutting point ahead) was a broad sandy beach. That beach seemed to offer a comparatively good landing, and, as it extended up-stream for half a mile, it appeared that I ought to have no great difficulty in fetching it. The first intimation I had that this might not be as easy as I had reckoned came when, in spite of the fact that I was pulling down-stream in a three or four-mile current, the wind backed the skiff up-stream past a long rock island at a rate of five or six miles an hour. That was one of the queerest sensations I experienced on the whole voyage--having to avoid bumping the _lower_ end of a rock the while I could see the riffle where a strong current was flowing around the _upper_ end.

I settled down to pulling in good earnest after that rather startling revelation, trying to hold the head of the skiff just enough to the left of the eye of the wind to give her a good shoot across the current. Luckily, I had been pretty well over toward the south bank when the wind struck. There was only about a quarter of a mile to go, but I was blown back just about the whole length of that half mile of sandy beach in making it. The last hundred yards I was rowing "all out," and it was touch-and-go as to whether the skiff was going to nose into soft sand or the lower end of a long stretch of half-submerged rocks. I was a good deal relieved when it proved to be the beach--by about twenty feet. We would have made some kind of a landing on the rocks without doubt, but hardly without giving the bottom of the boat an awful banging.

The sand proved unexpectedly soft when I jumped out upon it, but I struck firm bottom before I had sunk more than an inch or two above my boot tops and managed to drag the skiff up far enough to escape the heaviest of the wash of the waves. It was rather a sodden bundle of wet canvas that I carried out and deposited under a pine tree beyond high-water mark, but the core of it displayed considerable life after it had been extracted and set up to dry before the fire of pitchy cones that I finally succeeded in teasing into a blaze. To show Miss S---- that the storm hadn't affected my equanimity, I asked her to go on with her review of "The Great Hunger;" but she replied her own was more insistent, and reminded me that I hadn't served lunch yet. Well, rain-soaked biscuit and milk chocolate are rather difficult to take without a spoon; but a pound of California seedless raisins, if munched slowly, go quite a way with two people.

The worst of the squall was over in half an hour, and, anxious to make hay while the sun shone, I pushed off again in an endeavor to get on as far as I could before the next broadside opened up. Miss S---- and I landed at the Rowena Ferry, to catch the afternoon train back to The Dalles. She was a good ship-mate, and I greatly regret she had the bad luck to be my passenger on the only day I encountered a really hard blow in all of my voyage.

There was another threatening turret of black cloud beginning to train its guns as I pulled out into the stream beyond Rowena, and it opened with all the big stuff it had before I had gone a mile. While it lasted, the bombardment was as fierce as the first one. Fortunately, its ammunition ran out sooner. I kept the middle of the current this time, pulling as hard as I could against the wind. I got a thorough raking, fore-and-aft, for my temerity, but, except at the height of the wind, I managed to avoid the ignominy of being forced back against the stream.

The third squall, which opened up about three-thirty, was a better organized assault, and gave me a pretty splashy session of it. When that blow got the range of me I was just pulling along to the left of a desolate tongue of black basalt called Memaloose Island. For many centuries this rocky isle was used by the Klickatats as a burial place, which fact induced a certain Indian-loving pioneer of The Dalles, Victor Trevett by name, to order his own grave dug there. A tall marble shaft near the lower end of the island marks the spot. Now I have no objection to marble shafts in general, nor even to this one in particular--as a shaft. I just got tired of seeing it, that was all. If any skipper on the Columbia ever passed Vic Trevett's monument as many times in a year as I did in an hour, I should like to know what run he was on.

Swathed in oilskins, my potential speed was cut down both by the resistance my augmented bulk offered to the wind and the increased difficulty of pulling with so much on. Down past the monument I would go in the lulls, and up past the monument I would go before the gusts. There, relentless as the _Flying Dutchman_, that white shaft hung for the best part of an hour. I only hope what I said to the wind didn't disturb old Vic Trevett's sleep. Finally, a quarter of an hour's easing of the blow let me double the next point; and then it turned loose with all its guns again. Quite gone in the back and legs, I gave up the unequal fight and started to shoot off quartering toward the shore. Glancing over my shoulder in an endeavour to get some kind of an idea of where, and against what, I might count on striking, an astounding sight met my eyes, a picture so weird and infernal that I had to pause (mentally) and assure myself that those raisins I had for lunch had not been "processed."

Of all the sinister landscapes I ever saw--including the lava fields of a good many volcanoes and a number of the world's most repulsive "bad lands"--that which opened up to me as I tried to head in beyond that hard-striven-for point stands alone in my memory for sheer awesomeness. The early winter twilight had already begun to settle upon the gloomy gorge, the duskiness greatly accentuating the all-pervading murk cast upon the river by the pall of the sooty clouds. All round loomed walls of black basalt, reflecting darkly in water whose green had been completely quenched by the brooding purple shadows. The very pines on the cliffs merged in the solid opacity behind their scraggly forms, and even the fringe of willows above high-water-mark looped round the crescent of beach below like a fragment of mourning band. And that stretch of silver sand--the one thing in the whole infernal landscape whose whiteness the gloom alone could not drown: how shall I describe the jolt it gave me when I discovered that six or seven black devils were engaged in systematically spraying it with an inky liquid that left it as dark and dead to the eye as a Stygian strand of anthracite? It was a lucky thing those raisins had _not_ been "processed;" else I might not have remembered readily what I had heard of the way the "South-Bank" railway had been keeping the sand from drifting over its tracks by spraying with crude oil the bars uncovered at low water.

With that infernal mystery cleared up, my mind was free to note and take advantage of a rather remarkable incidental phenomenon. The effect of oil on troubled waters was no new thing to me, for on a number of occasions I had helped to rig a bag of kerosene-soaked oakum over the bows of a schooner hove-to in a gale; but to find a stretch of water already oiled for me at just the time and place I was in the sorest need of it--well, I couldn't see where those manna-fed Children of Israel wandering in the desert found their advance arrangements looked to any better than that. The savage wind-whipped white-caps that were buffeting me in mid-stream dissolved into foam-streaked ripples the moment they impinged upon the broadening oil-sleeked belt where the petroleum had seeped riverward from the sprayed beach. A solid jetty of stone could not have broken the rollers more effectually. On one side was a wild wallow of tossing water; on the other--as far as the surface of the river was concerned--an almost complete calm.

It was a horrible indignity to heap upon _Imshallah_ (and, after the way she had displayed her resentment following her garbage shower under the Wenatchee bridge, I knew that spirited lady would make me pay dear for it if ever she had the chance); still--dead beat as I was--there was nothing else to do but to head into that oleaginous belt of calm and make the best of it. The wind still took a deal of bucking, but with the banging of the waves at an end my progress was greatly accelerated. Hailing the black devils on the bank, I asked where the nearest village was concealed, to learn that Moosier was a couple of miles below, but well back from the river. They rather doubted that I could find my way to the town across the mudflats, but thought it might be worth trying in preference to pushing on in the dark to Hood River.

Those imps of darkness were right about the difficulty of reaching Moosier after nightfall. A small river coming in at that point seemed to have deposited a huge bar of quicksand all along the left bank, and I would never have been able to make a landing at all had not a belated duck-hunter given me a hand. After tying up to an oar, he very courteously undertook to pilot me to the town through the half-overflowed willow and alder flats. As a consequence of taking the lead, it was the native rather than the visitor who went off the caving path into the waist-deep little river. Coming out of the woods, a hundred-yards of slushing across a flooded potato-patch brought us to the railway embankment, and from there it was comparatively good going to the hotel. Luckily, the latter had a new porcelain tub and running hot water, luxuries one cannot always be sure of in the smaller Columbia River towns.

It was just at the close of the local apple season, and I found the hotel brimming over with departing packers. Most of the latter were girls from Southern California orange-packing houses, imported for the season. Several of them came from Anaheim, and assured me that they had packed Valencias from a small grove of mine in that district. They were a good deal puzzled to account for the fact that a man with a Valencia grove should be "hobo-ing" round the country like I was, and seemed hardly to take me seriously when I assured them it was only a matter of a year or two before all farmers would be hobos. It's funny how apple-packing seems to bring out all the innate snobbery in a lady engaging in that lucrative calling; they didn't seem to think tramping was quite respectable. I slept on the parlour couch until three in the morning, when I "inherited" the room occupied by a couple of packettes departing by the Portland train. As they seem to have been addicted to "_attar of edelweiss_," or something of the kind, and there hadn't been time for fumigation, I rather regretted making the shift.

When I had splashed back to the river in the morning, I found that _Imshallah_ anxious to hide the shame of that oil-bath, had spent the night trying to bury herself in the quicksand. Dumping her was out of the question, and I sank mid-thigh deep two or three times myself before I could persuade the sulking minx even to take the water. I knew she would take the first chance that offered to rid herself of the filth, just as she had before; but, with no swift water above the Cascades, there seemed small likelihood of her getting out-of-hand. Knowing that she was quite equal to making a bolt over the top of that terrible cataract if she hadn't managed to effect some sort of purification before reaching there, I made an honest attempt at conciliation by landing at the first solid beach I came to and giving her oily sides a good swabbing down with a piece of carpet. That seemed to mollify the temperamental lady a good deal, but just the same I knew her too well to take any chances.

Of all the great rivers in the world, there are only two that have had the audacity to gouge a course straight through a major range of mountains. These are the Brahmaputra, which clove a way through the Himalaya in reaching the Bay of Bengal from Tibet, and the Columbia, which tore the Cascades asunder in making its way to the Pacific. But the slow process of the ages by which the great Asian river won its way to the sea broke its heart and left it a lifeless thing. It emerges from the mountains with barely strength enough to crawl across the most dismal of deltas to lose its identity in the brackish estuaries at its many insignificant mouths. The swift stroke by which the Cascades were parted for the Columbia left "The Achilles of Rivers" unimpaired in vigour. It rolls out of the mountains with a force which endless æons have not weakened to a point where it was incapable of carrying the silt torn down by its erosive actions far out into the sea. It is the one great river that does not run for scores, perhaps hundreds, of miles through a flat, monotonous delta; the one great stream that meets the ocean strength for strength. The Nile, the Niger, the Amazon, the Yangtse, the Mississippi--all of the other great rivers--find their way to the sea through miasmic swamps; only the Columbia finishes in a setting worthy of that in which it takes its rise. Nay, more than that. Superlative to the last degree as is the scenery along the Columbia, from its highest glacial sources in the Rockies and Selkirks right down to the Cascades, there is not a gorge, a vista, a panorama, a cascade of which I cannot truthfully say: "That reminds me of something I have seen before." The list would include the names of most of the scenic wonders that the world has come to know as the ultimate expression of the grand and the sublime; but in time my record of comparisons would be complete. But for the distinctive grandeur of that fifty miles of cliff-walled gorge where the Columbia rolls through its Titan-torn rift in the Cascades, I fail completely to find a comparison. It is unique; without a near-rival of its kind.

Because so many attempts--all of them more or less futile--have been made to describe the Cascade Gorge of the Columbia, I shall not rush in here with word pictures where even railway pamphleteers have failed. The fact that several of the points I attained in the high Selkirks are scarcely more than explored, and that many stretches I traversed of the upper river are very rarely visited, must be the excuse for such essays at descriptions as I have now and then been tempted into in the foregoing chapters. That excuse is not valid in connection with the Cascade Gorge, and, frankly, I am mighty glad of the chance to side-step the job. I must beg leave, however, to make brief record of an interesting "scenic coincidence" that was impressed on my mind the afternoon that I pulled through the great chasm of the Cascades.

It was a day of sunshine and showers, with the clouds now revealing, now concealing the towering mountain walls on either hand. The almost continuous rains of the last four days had greatly augmented the flow of the streams, and there was one time, along toward evening, that I counted seven distinct waterfalls tumbling over a stretch of tapestried cliff on the Oregon side not over two miles in length. And while these shimmering ribbons of fluttering satin were still within eye-scope, a sudden shifting of the clouds uncovered in quick succession three wonderful old volcanic cones--Hood, to the south, Adams, to the north, and a peak which I think must have been St. Helens to the west. Instantly the lines of Tennyson's _Lotos Eaters_ came to my mind.

"A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke, Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go; And some thro' wavering lights and shadows broke, Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below. They saw the gleaming river seaward flow From the inner land: far off, three mountain-tops, Three silent pinnacles of aged snow, Stood sunset-flushed; and, dew'd with showery drops, Up-clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse."

Tennyson, of course, was writing of some tropic land thirty or forty degrees south of Oregon, for in the next verse he speaks of palms and brings the "mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters" swimming about the keel; and yet there is his description, perfect to the last, least word, of what any one may see in a not-too-cloudy day from the right point on the lower Columbia.

The Hood and the White Salmon flow into the Columbia almost opposite each other, the former from Mount Hood, to the south, and the latter from Mount Adams, to the north. White Salmon, perched on the mountains of the Washington side, is, so far as I can recall, the "Swiss-iest" looking village in America. At close range it would doubtless lose much of its picturesqueness, but from the river it is a perfect bit of the Tyrol or the Bernese-Oberland. The Hood River Valley is one of the very richest in all the West, running neck-and-neck with Yakima and Wenatchee for the Blue Ribbon honours of Northwestern apple production. It is also becoming a dairying centre of considerable importance. I was genuinely sorry that my "through" schedule made it impossible to visit a valley of which I had heard so much and so favourably.

Nearing the Cascades, I headed over close to the Oregon bank for a glimpse of the famous "sunken forest." This is one of the strangest sights on the lower river. For a considerable distance I pulled along the stumps of what had once been large forest trees, the stubby boles showing plainly through the clear water to a very considerable depth. There is some division of opinion as to whether these trees were submerged following the damming up of the river by the slide which formed the Cascades, or whether they have slid in from the mountainside at a later date. As there is still enough of a riverward earth-movement to necessitate a realignment of the rails on the south bank of the Cascades, it is probable that the latter is the correct theory. The self-preservative character of Oregon pine is proverbial, but it hardly seems reasonable to believe that it would last through the very considerable geologic epoch that must have elapsed since the Cascades were formed.

Hugging the Oregon shore closely, I pulled down toward the head of the Cascades canal. The water continued almost lake-like in its slackness even after the heavy rumble of the fall began to beat upon the air. I was taking no chances of a last-minute bolt from the still restive _Imshallah_, however, and skirted the sandy bank so closely that twice I found myself mixed up in the remains of the past season's salmon-traps. Passing a big sawmill, I entered the canal and kept rowing until I came plump up against the lofty red gates. An astonishingly pretty girl who peered down from above said she didn't know what a lock-master was (being only a passenger waiting for the steamer herself), but thought a man hammering on the other side of the gate looked like he might be something of that kind. She was right. The lock-master said he would gladly put me through, but would be greatly obliged if I would wait until he locked down the steamer, as he was pretty busy at the moment. That would give me half an hour to go down and size up the tail of the Cascades, which I would have to run immediately on coming out at the foot of the lock.

There is a fall of twenty-five feet at the Cascades, most of it in the short, sharp pitch at the head. It is this latter stretch that is avoided by the canal and locks, the total length of which is about half a mile. The two lock chambers are identical in dimensions, each being ninety feet by four hundred and sixty-five in the clear. They were opened to navigation in 1896, and were much used during the early years of the present century. With the extension of the railways, (especially with the building of the "North-bank" line), and the improvement of the roads, with the incidental increase of truck-freighting, it became more and more difficult for the steamers to operate profitably even on the lower river. One after another they had been taken off their runs, until the _J. N. Teal_, for which I was now waiting, was the last steamer operating in a regular service on the Columbia above Portland.

Opening the great curving gates a crack, the lock-master admitted _Imshallah_ to the chamber, from where--in the absence of a ladder--I climbed up fifty feet to the top on the beams of the steel-work. That was a pretty stiff job for a fat man, or rather one who had so recently been fat. I was down to a fairly compact two hundred and twenty by now, but even that required the expenditure of several foot-tons of energy to lift it out of that confounded hole. The main fall of the Cascades was roaring immediately on my right, just beyond the narrow island that had been formed when the locks and canal were constructed. It was indeed a viciously-running chute, suggesting to me the final pitch of the left-hand channel of Rock Island Rapids rather than Grand Rapids, to which it is often compared. I had heard that on rare occasions steamers had been run down here at high water; at the present stage it looked to me that neither a large nor a small boat would have one chance in a hundred of avoiding disaster.

The canal and locks avoided that first heavy fall of the Cascades completely, but the swift tumble of waters below was quite rough enough to make a preliminary survey well worth while. The steamer channel was on the Washington side, so that it was necessary for a boat to head directly across the current immediately on emerging from the lower lock chamber. The Oregon side of the river was thick with rocks right away round the bend, with not enough clear water to permit the passage of even a skiff. My course, therefore, would have to be the same as that of the steamer--just as sharply across to the opposite side as oars would take me. I had put _Imshallah_ through worse water than that a score of times, and, while it wasn't the sort of a place where one would want to break an oar or even catch a "crab," there was no reason to believe that we should have the least trouble in pulling across the hard-running swirls. Of course, if _Imshallah_ really was still smarting under the indignity of that oil-bath.... But no--I honestly think there was nothing of distrust of my well-tried little skiff behind my sudden change of plans. Rather, I should say, it was due to the fact that a remark of the lock-master had brought me to a sudden realization that I now arrived at what I had always reckoned as my ultimate objective--tide-water.

I had been planning to run on four miles farther to Bonneville that afternoon, in the hope of being able to pull through the forty miles of slackening water to Vancouver the following day. There I would get a tug to take the skiff up the Willamette to Portland, where I intended to leave her. As some of the finest scenery on the Columbia is passed in the twenty miles below the Cascades, this promised me another memorable day on the river--provided that there was only an occasional decent interval between showers. It was the lock-master's forecast of another rainy day, together with his assurance that the foot of the locks was generally rated as the head of tide-water, that prompted me to change my mind a few moments before I was due to pull out again to the river, and book through to Portland on the _Teal_.

With the idea of avoiding the wash of the steamer, I pulled down to the extreme lower end of the locks before she entered, taking advantage of the interval of waiting to trim carefully and look to my oars for the pull across the foot of the Cascades. I was intending to let the _Teal_ lock out ahead of me, and then pull as closely as possible in her wake, so as to have her below me to pick up the pieces in case anything went wrong. It was close to twilight now, with the sodden west darkening early under the blank grey cloud-mass of another storm blowing up-river from the sea. If that impetuous squall could have curbed its impatience and held off a couple of minutes longer, it might have had the satisfaction of treating me to a good soaking, if nothing more. As it was, I flung up my hands and _kamerad-ed_ at the opening pelt of the big rain-drops. Speaking as one Columbia River skipper to another, I hailed the Captain of the _J. N. Teal_ and asked him if he would take me and my boat aboard.

"Where bound?" he bawled back.

"Portland," I replied.

"Aw right. Pull up sta'bo'd bow lively--'fore gate open!"

A dozen husky roustabouts, urged on by an impatient Mate, scrambled to catch the painter and give us a hand-up. I swung over the side all right, but _Imshallah_, hanging back a bit, came in for some pretty rough pulling and hauling before they got her on deck. The two or three of her planks that were started in the melée constituted about the worst injury the little lady received on the whole voyage.

And so _Imshallah_ and I came aboard the _J. N. Teal_ to make the last leg of our voyage as passengers. The gates were turning back before I had reached the upper deck, and a few minutes later the powerfully-engined old stern-wheeler went floundering across the foam-streaked tail of the Cascades and off down the river. Castle Rock--nine hundred feet high and sheer-walled all around--was no more than a ghostly blur in the darkness as we slipped by in the still rapidly moving current. Multnomah's majesty was blanked behind the curtain of night and a driving rain, and only a distant roar on the port beam told where one of the loveliest of American waterfalls took its six-hundred-foot leap from the brink of the southern wall of the river. Cape Horn and Rooster Rock were swathed to their foundations in streaming clouds.

Once the _Teal_ was out on the comparatively open waters of the lower river, the Captain came down for a yarn with me--as one Columbia skipper to another. He had spent most of his life on the Snake and lower Columbia, but he seemed to know the rapids and canyons below the Canadian line almost reef by reef, and all of the old skippers I had met by reputation. He said that he had never heard of any one's ever having deliberately attempted to run the Cascades in anything smaller than a steamer, although an endless lot of craft had come to grief by getting in there by accident. The only time a man ever went through in a small boat and came out alive was about ten years ago. That lucky navigator, after drinking most of a Saturday night in the town, came down to the river in the dim grey dawn of a Sunday, got into his boat and pushed off. It was along toward church-time that a ferry-man, thirty miles or more down river, picked up a half filled skiff. Quietly sleeping in the stern-sheets, with nothing but his nose above water, was the only man that ever came through the Cascades in a small boat.

The Captain looked at me with a queer smile after he told that story. "I don't suppose you were heeled to tackle the Cascades just like that?" he asked finally.

And so, for the last time, I was taken for a boot-legger. But no--not quite the last. I believe it was the porter at Hotel Portland who asked me if--ahem!--if I had got away with anything from Canada. And for all of that incessant trail of smoke, no fire--or practically none.

The day of my arrival in Portland I delivered _Imshallah_ up to the kindest-faced boat-house proprietor on the Willamette and told him to take his time about finding her a home with some sport-loving Oregonian who knew how to treat a lady right and wouldn't give her any kind of menial work to do. I told him I didn't want to have her work for a living under any conditions, as I felt she had earned a rest; and to impress upon whoever bought her that she was high-spirited and not to be taken liberties with, such as subjecting her to garbage shower-baths and similar indignities. He asked me if she had a name, and I told him that she hadn't--any more; that the one she had been carrying had ceased to be in point now her voyage was over. It had been a very appropriate name for a boat on the Columbia, though, I assured him, and I was going to keep it to use if I ever made the voyage again.

Portland, although it is not directly upon the Columbia, has always made that river distinctively its own. I had realized that in a vague way for many years, but it came home to me again with renewed force now that I had arrived in Portland after having had some glimpse of every town and village from the Selkirks to the sea. (Astoria and the lower river I had known from many steamer voyages in the past.) Of all the thousands living on or near the Columbia, those of Portland still struck me as being the ones who held this most strikingly individual of all the world's rivers at most nearly its true value. With Portlanders, I should perhaps include all of those living on the river from Astoria to The Dalles. These, too, take a mighty pride in their great river, and regard it with little of that distrustful reproach one remarks so often on the upper Columbia, where the settlers see it bearing past their parched fields the water and the power that would mean the difference to them between success and disaster. When this stigma has been wiped out by reclamation (as it soon will be), without a doubt the plucky pioneers of the upper Columbia will see in their river many beauties that escape their troubled eyes to-day.

The early Romans made some attempt to give expression to their love of the Tiber in monuments and bridges. It would be hard indeed to conceive of anything in marble or bronze, or yet in soaring spans of steel, that would give adequate expression to the pride of the people of the lower Columbia in their river; and so it is a matter of felicitation that they have sought to pay their tribute in another way. There was inspiration behind the conception of the idea of the Columbia Highway, just as there was genius and rare imagination in the carrying out of that idea. I have said that the Cascade Gorge of the Columbia is a scenic wonder apart from all others; that it stands without a rival of its kind. Perhaps the greatest compliment that I can pay to the Columbia Highway is to say that it is worthy of the river by which it runs.

(THE END)

* * * * *

TRANSCRIBER NOTES:

Alternate spellings and archaic words have been retained.

page 82: "experienced" changed to "inexperienced" (Roos was young and inexperienced).

page 96: added closing quotation mark which was missing in the original ("... than some the old girl's had.").

page 147: "rifflles" changed to "riffles" (four or five riffles below).

page 160: "Lientenant" changed to "Lieutenant" (Lieutenant Thomas W. Symons).

page 163: "avenue" changed to "Avenue" (Fifth Avenue).

page 300: "spilts" changed to "splits" (the river splits upon).

page 315: "goddes" changed to "goddess" (this goddess of the Columbia).

page 320: "staight" changed to "straight" (straight on through to).

page 331: "a" added to sentence for continuity (We were going to have a run for our money).

page 366: added "and" (Miss S---- and I).

page 380: "of" changed to "or" (The two or three of her planks).

page 380: "mélee" changed to "melée" (that were started in the melée).