Hail Columbia

“ The Columbia is a rolling flood of silver, and the gigantic trees of the centuries become a ghostly and shadowy splendor. There is a deep and reverent silence everywhere, save the cry of the water-fowl in the high air and the plash of the Cascades. Even the Chinook winds cease to blow, and the pine-tops to murmur.
It was such a night that the Potlatch began. On an open plateau overlooking the Columbia the old chief had caused a large platform to be built, and on this were piled all his canoes, his stores of blankets, his wampum, and his regal ornaments and implements of war. ”

“ He considered his projected establishment at the mouth of the Columbia as the emporium to an immense commerce; as a colony that would form the germ of a wide civilization; that would, in fact, carry the American population across the Rocky Mountains and spread it along the shores of the Pacific, as it already animated the shores of the Atlantic. ”

“ The scenery of the Columbia, between Fort Vancouver and the Dalles, is a sublime monotone. Its banks are basaltic crags or mist-wrapt domes, averaging below the cataract from twelve to fifteen hundred feet in height, and thence decreasing to the Dalles, where the escarpments, washed by the river, are low trap bluffs on a level with the steamer's walking-beam, and the mountains have retired, bare and brown, like those of the great continental basin farther south, toward Mount Hood in that direction, and Mount Adams on the north. ”

“ The Government, in fact, exercises entire control, but grants concessions to the railroad company in the matter of hotels and other conveniences.
As we bid good-bye to the Canadian Rockies, we may say that perhaps the world offers nowhere else such a sea of mountains, such knots and clusters and cordons of elevations, as in this strange and sublime region where the Columbia and its tributaries, the Kootenai, the Illecillewaet, the Wapta, the Beaver, the Canoe, seem to be playing hide-and-seek with the Thompson and the Fraser. ”

“ But out of the struggles of that century, French, English, and American, out of the final distribution of territory, by which England retained Canada and with it a large French and Indian population, mingled with English and Scotch,—out of these curious comminglings, economic, commercial, political, religious, and ethnic, grew the great English fur companies, whose history was largely wrought out on the shores of the Columbia, and from whose juxtaposition with the American State-builder the romance and epic grandeur of the history of the River largely comes. ”

“ One century scarce perform'd its destined round,
30 When Gallic powers Columbia's fury found;
And so may you, whoever dares disgrace
The land of freedom's heaven-defended race!
Fix'd are the eyes of nations on the scales,
For in their hopes Columbia's arm prevails.
35 Anon Britannia droops the pensive head,
While round increase the rising hills of dead.
Ah! cruel blindness to Columbia's state!
Lament thy thirst of boundless power too late. ”

“ Declining therefore a dissertation on the principles of civil polity, you will indulge me in slightly sketching on those events, which have originated, nurtured, and raised to its present grandeur the empire of Columbia.
As no nation on the globe can rival us in the rapidity of our growth, since the conclusion of the revolutionary war—so none, perhaps, ever endured greater hardships, and distresses, than the people of this country, previous to that period.
We behold a feeble band of colonists, engaged in the arduous undertaking of a new settlement, in the wilds of North America. ”

“ The Nile, the Niger, the Amazon, the Yangtse, the Mississippi—all of the other great rivers—find their way to the sea through miasmic swamps; only the Columbia finishes in a setting worthy of that in which it takes its rise. Nay, more than that. Superlative to the last degree as is the scenery along the Columbia, from its highest glacial sources in the Rockies and Selkirks right down to the Cascades, there is not a gorge, a vista, a panorama, a cascade of which I cannot truthfully say: “That reminds me of something I have seen before.” ”

“ No point in the whole length of the Columbia, not even Astoria, has associations more calculated to stir the imagination than this tiny patch of silt-covered overflow flat which has been formed by the erosive action of three torrential rivers tearing at the hearts of three great mountain ranges. Sand and soil of the Rockies, Selkirks and the Gold Range, carried by the Columbia, Canoe and Wood rivers, meet and mingle to form the remarkable halting place, where the east and westbound pioneering traffic of a century stopped to gather breath for the next stage of its journey. ”

“ It has lifted us to the throne, and has set on our brow the name of the Great Republic. It has taught us to demand nothing wrong and to submit to nothing wrong; it has made our diplomacy sagacious, wary, and accomplished; it has opened the iron gate of the mountain, and planted our ensign on the great tranquil sea. It has made the desert to bud and blossom as the rose; it has quickened to life the giant brood of useful arts; it has whitened lake and ocean with the sails of a daring, new, and lawful trade ”

“ The British proposition of compromise, which would make the Columbia the line south of 49°, with a trifling addition of detached territory to the United States north of that river, and would leave on the British side two-thirds of the whole Oregon Territory, including the free navigation of the Columbia and all the valuable harbors on the Pacific, can never for a moment be entertained by the United States without an abandonment of their just and dear territorial rights, their own self-respect, and the national honor. ”

“ It is our own Columbia, which has been paying her Majesty's American land a short visit before it sweeps with majesty towards the Pacific. We cross this and enter upon a wealth of mountain scenery, which belittles what we have passed through, though we thought it so fine. High to the right lifts a monarch capped with snow. High to our left is a huge pair of twins, the double head of a monster.
Our iron horse pants along a rushing river cutting with foaming torrent through chasms so narrow that the father of our land could have leaped across them in the spring-tide of his manhood. ”

“ Winding up from the south comes the Willamette, its fine valley narrowed here by the hills, where the river forms Portland's harbor, and is lined on either side with mills and shipping. Ten miles beyond, the Columbia flows down from its canyon on the east, and turns northward, [58] an expanding waterway for great vessels, to its broad pass through the Coast Range. In every direction, city and country, farm and forest, valley and mountain, stretches a noble perspective. ”

“ It was in truth a manifold question, and in its final solution we read some of the most vital of American traits and movements. Out of it all the settlers of the River may justly be said to have emerged with highest credit. The American home-builder, the great Democracy of the West, the inborn impulse to expand and to nationalise,—these were the essential factors in the triumph. The settlers on the Willamette, the constitution-makers of Champoeg, the immigrants and the missionaries, had already gained the day before diplomacy took it up. ”

“ An Entrance A wall of terrible breakers marks the mouth of the Columbia, Achilles of rivers.
Other mighty streams may swim feebly away seaward, may sink into foul marshes, may trickle through the ditches of an oozy delta, may scatter among sand-bars the currents that once moved majestic and united. But to this heroic flood was destined a short life and a glorious one, — a life all one strong, victorious struggle., from the mountains to the sea. It has no infancy, — two great branches collect its waters up and down the continent. They join, and the Columbia is born to full manhood. ”

“ Village of Indian Tepees, Umatilla Reservation, near Pendleton, Oregon. Many of these Indians are rich landowners, but they prefer tents to houses.
The Columbia River basin, alone of all the territories which the United States has added to its original area, was neither bought with money nor annexed by war. Its acquisition was a triumph of the American pioneer. Many nations looked with longing to this Northwest, but it fell a prize to the nation that neglected it. ”

“ Storm-swept White-bark Pines on Mount Hood.
STAND upon the icy summit of any one of the Columbia's snow-peaks, and look north or west or south across the expanse of blue-green mountains and valleys reaching to the sea; your eyes will rest upon the greatest forest the temperate zone has produced within the knowledge of man. Save where axe and fire have turned woodland into field or ghostly "burn," the mantle is spread. Along the broad crests of the Cascades, down the long spurs that lead to the valleys, and across the Coast Range, lies a wealth of timber equaled in no other region. ”

“ A few months later, Broughton, a lieutenant of the explorer Vancouver, to whose incredulous ears Gray had communicated his discovery, entered the Columbia, and in turn claimed everything in the name of King George. These conflicting claims furnish a key to the critical period in the history of the Columbia River territory. For a long time neither America nor Great Britain forced a determination [538] of its claim, and a succession of treaties gave to the citizens of both countries equal rights in the territory. ”

“ But whatever course may be taken from the Atlantic, the Columbia is the line of communication from the Pacific Ocean, pointed out by nature, as it is the only navigable river in the whole extent of Vancouver's minute survey of that coast: its banks also form the first level country in all the Southern extent of continental coast from Cook's entry, and, consequently, the most Northern situation fit for colonization, and suitable to the residence of a civilized people. ”

“ It is not that one is longer or shorter, or wider or deeper, than another: it is that each conveys a thought of the country, the people, the history, and the commerce of its own peculiar region.
In comparison with other rivers of equal size and geographical importance, the Columbia is little known. That generation has not yet passed away which was taught that the whole of the Northwest Territory was Oregon, that it had one river, the Columbia, and one town, Portland, situated on the Columbia. ”

“ The way of approach for the Eastern tourist to a journey down the Columbia is by the Canadian Pacific Railway, a magnificent road in a gallery of masterpieces. Wonders begin before he reaches the western watershed. He will see Banff, with its hot springs, its immense hotel, its Bow River and Falls and Valley. He will see the gem of the Canadian Rockies, one of the gems of the earth, Lake Louise. ”

“ The Columbia is an enormous 482 river, over twelve hundred miles long, rising in Otter Lake, just north of the Dominion boundary, making a long loop up into British America, then coming down into the United States between the Rockies and the Cascades with another broad western loop, and swinging around to the southeast, finally turning westward to form the boundary between Oregon and Washington State to the Pacific. ”

“ Columbia's aim is industrial, not agricultural, and most of the land there is rock and forest. They're cut off from the Pacific States by the tariff, and naturally they'll turn to us across the Rockies. ”

“ Each of these homes presents its own epic, each family tracing it to the chosen spot from somewhere in Eastern Canada—Nova Scotia, Quebec or Ontario—or coming here to this Alpine region of the Dominion from somewhere over-seas, the British Islands, France, and indeed, all other countries of Old Europe, even reaching a finger into Asia at India and Japan. Truly the human-interest element of British Columbia is as big as its outlook. ”

“ Most of the American trading companies confined their operations to the east side of the Rocky Mountains. But the Missouri Fur Company of St. Louis, composed of a miscellaneous group of Americans and Hispano-Gallo-Americans, under the presidency of Manuel Lisa, a bold and enterprising Spaniard, took a step over the crest of the mountains and established the first trading post upon the waters of the Columbia. This was in 1809. Andrew Henry, one of the partners of the aforesaid company, crossed the mountains in that year and a year later built a fort on a branch of Snake River. ”

“ An amicable settlement, however, was brought about and the present boundary between Washington and British Columbia was fixed.
A petition was sent to Congress praying for closer relationship in the Union, and in 1853 the Territory of Oregon was organized. The flux of immigration fast settled the attractive sylva on the Sound and the rolling prairies east of the Cascades. The Territory being too large, and the country north of Columbia was sliced off and made to struggle for itself. ”

“ At Walla-walla, two great rivers, Clarke's and Lewis's, drainers of the continent north and south, unite to form the Columbia. It flows furiously for a hundred and twenty miles westward. When it reaches the dreary region where the outlying ridges of the Cascade chain commence, it finds a great, low surface, paved with enormous polished sheets of basaltic rock. These plates, in French, dalles, give the spot its name. ”

“ A sky-line of brown [Pg 327] mountains, with a double-turreted butte as their most conspicuous feature, marks the point where the Columbia finally turns west for its assault on the Cascades and its plunge to the Pacific. That bend is the boundary of the fertile plains extending from the Yakima to the Walla Walla, and the beginning of a new series of gorges, in some respects the grandest of all. The matchless panorama of the Cascade gorges is a fitting finale to the stupendous scenic pageant that has been staged all the way from the glacial sources of the Columbia. ”