More Than Half Its Course Is
Through A Chain Of Lakes, The Largest Of Which At The Head Of The
River Is Over Sixty Miles In Length.
From its confluence with the
Okinagan the river pursues a southerly course for a hundred and fifty
miles, most of the way through a dreary, treeless, parched plain to
meet the great south fork.
The Lewis, or Snake, River is nearly a
thousand miles long and drains nearly the whole of Idaho, a territory
rich in scenery, gold mines, flowery, grassy valleys, and deserts,
while some of the highest tributaries reach into Wyoming, Utah, and
Nevada. Throughout a great part of its course it is countersunk in a
black lava plain and shut in by mural precipices a thousand feet high,
gloomy, forbidding, and unapproachable, although the gloominess of its
canyon is relieved in some manner by its many falls and springs, some
of the springs being large enough to appear as the outlets of
subterranean rivers. They gush out from the faces of the sheer black
walls and descend foaming with brave roar and beauty to swell the
flood below.
From where the river skirts the base of the Blue Mountains its
surroundings are less forbidding. Much of the country is fertile, but
its canyon is everywhere deep and almost inaccessible. Steamers make
their way up as far as Lewiston, a hundred and fifty miles, and
receive cargoes of wheat at different points through chutes that
extend down from the tops of the bluffs. But though the Hudson's Bay
Company navigated the north fork to its sources, they depended
altogether on pack animals for the transportation of supplies and furs
between the Columbia and Fort Hall on the head of the south fork,
which shows how desperately unmanageable a river it must be.
A few miles above the mouth of the Snake the Yakima, which drains a
considerable portion of the Cascade Range, enters from the northwest.
It is about a hundred and fifty miles long, but carries comparatively
little water, a great part of what it sets out with from the base of
the mountains being consumed in irrigated fields and meadows in
passing through the settlements along its course, and by evaporation
on the parched desert plains. The grand flood of the Columbia, now
from half a mile to a mile wide, sweeps on to the westward, holding a
nearly direct course until it reaches the mouth of the Willamette,
where it turns to the northward and flows fifty miles along the main
valley between the Coast and Cascade Ranges ere it again resumes its
westward course to the sea. In all its course from the mouth of the
Yakima to the sea, a distance of three hundred miles, the only
considerable affluent from the northward is the Cowlitz, which heads
in the glaciers of Mount Rainier.
From the south and east it receives the Walla-Walla and Umatilla,
rather short and dreary-looking streams, though the plains they pass
through have proved fertile, and their upper tributaries in the Blue
Mountains, shaded with tall pines, firs, spruces, and the beautiful
Oregon larch (Larix brevifolia), lead into a delightful region.
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