It Is
About One Hundred And Twenty Miles Long, And Takes Its Rise In The
Beautiful Lake Coeur D'Alene, In Idaho, Which Receives The Drainage Of
Nearly A Hundred Miles Of The Western Slopes Of The Bitter Root
Mountains, Through The St. Joseph And Coeur D'Alene Rivers.
The lake
is about twenty miles long, set in the midst of charming scenery, and,
like Pend d'Oreille, is easy of access and is already attracting
attention as a summer place for enjoyment, rest, and health.
The famous Spokane Falls are in Washington, about thirty miles below
the lake, where the river is outspread and divided and makes a grand
descent from a level basaltic plateau, giving rise to one of the most
beautiful as well as one of the greatest and most available of water-powers in the State. The city of the same name is built on the
plateau along both sides of the series of cascades and falls, which,
rushing and sounding through the midst, give singular beauty and
animation. The young city is also rushing and booming. It is founded
on a rock, leveled and prepared for it, and its streets require no
grading or paving. As a power to whirl the machinery of a great city
and at the same time to train the people to a love of the sublime and
beautiful as displayed in living water, the Spokane Falls are
unrivaled, at least as far as my observation has reached. Nowhere
else have I seen such lessons given by a river in the streets of a
city, such a glad, exulting, abounding outgush, crisp and clear from
the mountains, dividing, falling, displaying its wealth, calling aloud
in the midst of the busy throng, and making glorious offerings for
every use of utility or adornment.
From the mouth of the Spokane the Columbia, now out of the woods,
flows to the westward with a broad, stately current for a hundred and
twenty miles to receive the Okinagan, a large, generous tributary a
hundred and sixty miles long, coming from the north and drawing some
of its waters from the Cascade Range. 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. The
John Day River also heads in the Blue Mountains, and flows into the
Columbia sixty miles below the mouth of the Umatilla. Its valley is
in great part fertile, and is noted for the interesting fossils
discovered in it by Professor Condon in sections cut by the river
through the overlying lava beds.
The Deschutes River comes in from the south about twenty miles below
the John Day. It is a large, boisterous stream, draining the eastern
slope of the Cascade Range for nearly two hundred miles, and from the
great number of falls on the main trunk, as well as on its many
mountain tributaries, well deserves its name. It enters the Columbia
with a grand roar of falls and rapids, and at times seems almost to
rival the main stream in the volume of water it carries.
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