Here, The Rocks Were
Piled In The Most Fantastic Crags And Precipices; And In Another
Place, They Were Succeeded By Delightful Valleys Carpeted With
Green-Award.
The whole of this wild and varied scenery was
dominated by immense mountains rearing their distant peaks into
the clouds.
"The grandeur and originality of the views, presented
on every side," says Captain Bonneville, "beggar both the pencil
and the pen. Nothing we had ever gazed upon in any other region
could for a moment compare in wild majesty and impressive
sternness, with the series of scenes which here at every turn
astonished our senses, and filled us with awe and delight."
Indeed, from all that we can gather from the journal before us,
and the accounts of other travellers, who passed through these
regions in the memorable enterprise of Astoria, we are inclined
to think that Snake River must be one of the most remarkable for
varied and striking scenery of all the rivers of this continent.
From its head waters in the Rocky Mountains, to its junction with
the Columbia, its windings are upward of six hundred miles
through every variety of landscape. Rising in a volcanic region,
amid extinguished craters, and mountains awful with the traces of
ancient fires, it makes its way through great plains of lava and
sandy deserts, penetrates vast sierras or mountainous chains,
broken into romantic and often frightful precipices, and crowned
with eternal snows; and at other times, careers through green and
smiling meadows, and wide landscapes of Italian grace and beauty.
Wildness and sublimity, however, appear to be its prevailing
characteristics.
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