Each Of These Main Branches, Dividing Again And Again, Spreads A Network Of Channels Over The Vast Complicated Mass Of

The great range throughout a section nearly a thousand miles in length, searching every fountain, however small or great, and

Gathering a glorious harvest of crystal water to be rolled through forest and plain in one majestic flood to the sea, reinforced on the way by tributaries that drain the Blue Mountains and more than two hundred miles of the Cascade and Coast Ranges. Though less than half as long as the Mississippi, it is said to carry as much water. The amount of its discharge at different seasons, however, has never been exactly measured, but in time of flood its current is sufficiently massive and powerful to penetrate the sea to a distance of fifty or sixty miles from shore, its waters being easily recognized by the difference in color and by the drift of leaves, berries, pine cones, branches, and trunks of trees that they carry.

That so large a river as the Columbia, making a telling current so far from shore, should remain undiscovered while one exploring expedition after another sailed past seems remarkable, even after due allowance is made for the cloudy weather that prevails hereabouts and the broad fence of breakers drawn across the bar. During the last few centuries, when the maps of the world were in great part blank, the search for new worlds was fashionable business, and when such large game was no longer to be found, islands lying unclaimed in the great oceans, inhabited by useful and profitable people to be converted or enslaved, became attractive objects; also new ways to India, seas, straits, El Dorados, fountains of youth, and rivers that flowed over golden sands.

Those early explorers and adventurers were mostly brave, enterprising, and, after their fashion, pious men. In their clumsy sailing vessels they dared to go where no chart or lighthouse showed the way, where the set of the currents, the location of sunken outlying rocks and shoals, were all unknown, facing fate and weather, undaunted however dark the signs, heaving the lead and thrashing the men to their duty and trusting to Providence. When a new shore was found on which they could land, they said their prayers with superb audacity, fought the natives if they cared to fight, erected crosses, and took possession in the names of their sovereigns, establishing claims, such as they were, to everything in sight and beyond, to be quarreled for and battled for, and passed from hand to hand in treaties and settlements made during the intermissions of war.

The branch of the river that bears the name of Columbia all the way to its head takes its rise in two lakes about ten miles in length that lie between the Selkirk and main ranges of the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia, about eighty miles beyond the boundary line. They are called the Upper and Lower Columbia Lakes. Issuing from these, the young river holds a nearly straight course for a hundred and seventy miles in a northwesterly direction to a plain called "Boat Encampment," receiving many beautiful affluents by the way from the Selkirk and main ranges, among which are the Beaver-Foot, Blackberry, Spill-e-Mee-Chene, and Gold Rivers.

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