One Never Tires Of This Bright Spark Of
Life, The Brave Little Voice Crying In The Wilderness.
His varied,
piney gossip is as savory to the air as balsam to the palate.
Some of
his notes are almost flutelike in softness, while other prick and
tingle like thistles. He is the mockingbird of squirrels, barking
like a dog, screaming like a hawk, whistling like a blackbird or
linnet, while in bluff, audacious noisiness he is a jay. A small
thing, but filling and animating all the woods.
Nor is there any lack of wings, notwithstanding few are to be seen on
short, noisy rambles. The ousel sweetens the shady glens and canyons
where waterfalls abound, and every grove or forest, however silent it
may seem when we chance to pay it a hasty visit, has its singers, - thrushes, linnets, warblers, - while hummingbirds glint and hover about
the fringing masses of bloom around stream and meadow openings. But
few of these will show themselves or sing their songs to those who are
ever in haste and getting lost, going in gangs formidable in color and
accoutrements, laughing, hallooing, breaking limbs off the trees as
they pass, awkwardly struggling through briery thickets, entangled
like blue-bottles in spider webs, and stopping from time to time to
fire off their guns and pistols for the sake of the echoes, thus
frightening all the life about them for miles. It is this class of
hunters and travelers who report that there are "no birds in the woods
or game animals of any kind larger than mosquitoes."
Besides the singing birds mentioned above, the handsome Oregon grouse
may be found in the thick woods, also the dusky grouse and Franklin's
grouse, and in some places the beautiful mountain partridge, or quail.
The white-tailed ptarmigan lives on the lofty snow peaks above the
timber, and the prairie chicken and sage cock on the broad Columbia
plains from the Cascade Range back to the foothills of the Rocky
Mountains. The bald eagle is very common along the Columbia River, or
wherever fish, especially salmon, are plentiful, while swans, herons,
cranes, pelicans, geese, ducks of many species, and water birds in
general abound in the lake region, on the main streams, and along the
coast, stirring the waters and sky into fine, lively pictures, greatly
to the delight of wandering lovers of wildness.
XXIII
The Rivers of Oregon
Turning from the woods and their inhabitants to the rivers, we find
that while the former are rarely seen by travelers beyond the
immediate borders of the settlements, the great river of Oregon draws
crowds of enthusiastic admirers to sound its praises. Every summer
since the completion of the first overland railroad, tourists have
been coming to it in ever increasing numbers, showing that in general
estimation the Columbia is one of the chief attractions of the Pacific
Coast. And well it deserves the admiration so heartily bestowed upon
it. The beauty and majesty of its waters, and the variety and
grandeur of the scenery through which it flows, lead many to regard it
as the most interesting of all the great rivers of the continent,
notwithstanding the claims of the other members of the family to which
it belongs and which nobody can measure - the Fraser, McKenzie,
Saskatchewan, the Missouri, Yellowstone, Platte, and the Colorado,
with their glacier and geyser fountains, their famous canyons, lakes,
forests, and vast flowery prairies and plains. These great rivers and
the Columbia are intimately related. All draw their upper waters from
the same high fountains on the broad, rugged uplift of the Rocky
Mountains, their branches interlacing like the branches of trees.
They sing their first songs together on the heights; then, collecting
their tributaries, they set out on their grand journey to the
Atlantic, Pacific, or Arctic Ocean.
The Columbia, viewed as one from the sea to the mountains, is like a
rugged, broad-topped, picturesque old oak about six hundred miles long
and nearly a thousand miles wide measured across the spread of its
upper branches, the main limbs gnarled and swollen with lakes and
lakelike expansions, while innumerable smaller lakes shine like fruit
among the smaller branches. The main trunk extends back through the
Coast and Cascade Mountains in a general easterly direction for three
hundred miles, when it divides abruptly into two grand branches which
bend off to the northeastward and southeastward.
The south branch, the longer of the two, called the Snake, or Lewis,
River, extends into the Rocky Mountains as far as the Yellowstone
National Park, where its head tributaries interlace with those of the
Colorado, Missouri, and Yellowstone. The north branch, still called
the Columbia, extends through Washington far into British territory,
its highest tributaries reaching back through long parallel spurs of
the Rockies between and beyond the headwaters of the Fraser,
Athabasca, and Saskatchewan. 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.
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