As The Willamette Is One Of The Most Foodful Of Valleys, So Is The
Columbia One Of The Most Foodful Of Rivers.
During the fisher's
harvest time salmon from the sea come in countless millions, urging
their way against falls, rapids,
And shallows, up into the very heart
of the Rocky Mountains, supplying everybody by the way with most
bountiful masses of delicious food, weighing from twenty to eighty
pounds each, plump and smooth like loaves of bread ready for the oven.
The supply seems inexhaustible, as well it might. Large quantities
were used by the Indians as fuel, and by the Hudson's Bay people as
manure for their gardens at the forts. Used, wasted, canned and sent
in shiploads to all the world, a grand harvest was reaped every year
while nobody sowed. Of late, however, the salmon crop has begun to
fail, and millions of young fry are now sown like wheat in the river
every year, from hatching establishments belonging to the Government.
All of the Oregon waters that win their way to the sea are a tributary
to the Columbia, save the short streams of the immediate coast, and
the Umpqua and Rogue Rivers in southern Oregon. These both head in
the Cascade Mountains and find their way to the sea through gaps in
the Coast Range, and both drain large and fertile and beautiful
valleys. Rogue River Valley is peculiarly attractive. With a fine
climate, and kindly, productive soil, the scenery is delightful.
About the main, central open portion of the basin, dotted with
picturesque groves of oak, there are many smaller valleys charmingly
environed, the whole surrounded in the distance by the Siskiyou,
Coast, Umpqua, and Cascade Mountains. Besides the cereals nearly
every sort of fruit flourishes here, and large areas are being devoted
to peach, apricot, nectarine, and vine culture. To me it seems above
all others the garden valley of Oregon and the most delightful place
for a home. On the eastern rim of the valley, in the Cascade
Mountains, about sixty miles from Medford in a direct line, is the
remarkable Crater Lake, usually regarded as the one grand wonder of
the region. It lies in a deep, sheer-walled basin about seven
thousand feet above the level of the sea, supposed to be the crater of
an extinct volcano.
Oregon as it is today is a very young country, though most of it seems
old. Contemplating the Columbia sweeping from forest to forest,
across plain and desert, one is led to say of it, as did Byron of the
ocean, -
"Such as Creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now."
How ancient appear the crumbling basaltic monuments along its banks,
and the gray plains to the east of the Cascades! Nevertheless, the
river as well as its basin in anything like their present condition
are comparatively but of yesterday. Looming no further back in the
geological records than the Tertiary Period, the Oregon of that time
looks altogether strange in the few suggestive glimpses we may get of
it - forests in which palm trees wave their royal crowns, and strange
animals roaming beneath them or about the reedy margins of lakes, the
oreodon, the lophiodon, and several extinct species of the horse, the
camel, and other animals.
Then came the fire period with its darkening showers of ashes and
cinders and its vast floods of molten lava, making quite another
Oregon from the fair and fertile land of the preceding era. And
again, while yet the volcanic fires show signs of action in the smoke
and flame of the higher mountains, the whole region passes under the
dominion of ice, and from the frost and darkness and death of the
Glacial Period, Oregon has but recently emerged to the kindly warmth
and life of today.
XXIV
The Grand Canyon of the Colorado
Happy nowadays is the tourist, with earth's wonders, new and old,
spread invitingly open before him, and a host of able workers as his
slaves making everything easy, padding plush about him, grading roads
for him, boring tunnels, moving hills out of his way, eager, like the
Devil, to show him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory and
foolishness, spiritualizing travel for him with lightning and steam,
abolishing space and time and almost everything else. Little children
and tender, pulpy people, as well as storm-seasoned explorers, may now
go almost everywhere in smooth comfort, cross oceans and deserts
scarce accessible to fishes and birds, and, dragged by steel horses,
go up high mountains, riding gloriously beneath starry showers of
sparks, ascending like Elijah in a whirlwind and chariot of fire.
First of the wonders of the great West to be brought within reach of
the tourist were the Yosemite and the Big Trees, on the completion of
the first transcontinental railway; next came the Yellowstone and icy
Alaska, by the northern roads; and last the Grand Canyon of the
Colorado, which, naturally the hardest to reach, has now become, by a
branch of the Santa Fe, the most accessible of all.
Of course, with this wonderful extension of steel ways through our
wildness there is loss as well as gain. Nearly all railroads are
bordered by belts of desolation. The finest wilderness perishes as if
stricken with pestilence. Bird and beast people, if not the dryads,
are frightened from the groves. Too often the groves also vanish,
leaving nothing but ashes. Fortunately, nature has a few big places
beyond man's power to spoil - the ocean, the two icy ends of the globe,
and the Grand Canyon.
When I first heard of the Santa Fe trains running to the edge of the
Grand Canyon of Arizona, I was troubled with thoughts of the
disenchantment likely to follow. But last winter, when I saw those
trains crawling along through the pines of the Coconino Forest and
close up to the brink of the chasm at Bright Angel, I was glad to
discover that in the presence of such stupendous scenery they are
nothing.
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