Umatilla River

“ Throughout the whole of its length the Rio de la Pasion must be a very sluggish stream. In its westerly course before its junction with the Chixoy there are reaches of the river where during the dry season hardly any current it is perceptible, and after heavy rains the flood-waters extend for so many miles through the forest that one is almost led to think that this region from the mouth of the Chajmaic northward may at one time have formed the bed of a great lake. ”

“ A laborious day, which had advanced us only six miles on the road, brought us in the afternoon to an opening in the forest, in which there was a fine mountain meadow, with good grass, and a large clear-water stream--one of the head branches of the Umatilah river. During this day's journey, the barometer was broken; and the elevations above the sea, hereafter given, depend upon the temperature of boiling water. Some of the white spruces which I measured to-day were twelve feet in circumference, and one of the larches ten ”

“ A few miles below the junction with the latter a low range of hills almost bars its course, and for a short distance the water with its surface slowly twisted in great oily-looking swirls, swings through a narrow pass between cliffs not more than forty feet apart. During the heavy autumn rains the flood-water rises rapidly above this narrow passage and tears through it with tremendous force. When I descended the river in a canoe from the Paso Real to the ruins of Menché Tinamit in 1884 I saw huge mahogany logs lying stranded thirty or forty feet up the banks, and my companion Mr. ”

“ Batavia, built almost in a swamp, surrounded by marshes in all directions, trees and jungles, which prevent the exhalations being carried off by a free circulation of air, is peculiarly obnoxious from this cause. Opposite the mouth of the river, and extending a great way to the westward, is a mud-bank, which, in many parts at low water, is uncovered by the sea, and is daily accumulating from the quantities of mud and animal and vegetable matter carried down by the river during its reflux. ”

“ The channel of the Nile is much broken by rocks and islands, and the rapids follow one another in constant succession. Both banks are fringed with a dense belt of bush and high reeds. Looking down any one of these reaches, the tumbling, indigo-coloured water, streaked with foamy threads of white, the purple background of hill and mountain, the sombre greens of the forests and the lighter tints of the reeds, with the brilliant blue of the sky overhead, present a combination of wild river scenery not often to be met with, and not easily to be forgotten. ”

“ Towards the embouchure, the banks rise ten feet high, the river expands into a muddy sea, and a long swell rolls in, to the disquiet of our fresh-water boatmen. Low islands of sand and mud stretch along the horizon: which, together with the ships, distorted by extraordinary refraction, flicker as if seen through smoke. Mud is the all prevalent feature; and though the water is not salt, we do not observe in these broad deltas that amount of animal life (birds, fish, alligators, and porpoises) , that teems in the narrow creeks of the western Sunderbunds. ”

“ Some fifty miles west of St. John, the Peace River issues from the cañon through which it passes the outer range of the Rocky Mountains. No boat, canoe, or craft of any kind has ever run the gauntlet of this huge chasm; for five-and-thirty miles it lies deep sunken through the mountains; while from its depths there ever rises the hoarse roar of the angry waters as they dash furiously against their rocky prison. A trail of ten miles leads across this portage, and at the western end of this trail the river is reached close to where it makes its first plunge into the rock-hewn chasm. ”

“ We traveled about sixteen miles this day, which brought us to Umatillo river. Here is an Indian town, the residence of the principal chiefs of the Caäguas. [96] At this time they were mostly in the mountains hunting. The road has been good; the first twelve miles led us through a well timbered country, the last four miles over prairie; the country has a dry appearance; the banks of the streams are lined with cottonwood, balm of gilead, choke cherries and every variety of bushes. The Indians have a few cultivated fields along this stream ”

“ The gathered floods swept on down the cañon and formed another great lake in the region now known as the Kittitas Valley.
But the struggle between Wishpoosh and Speelyei did not end, and the former in his mad fury went on thrashing around in this greater lake. For a long time the rocky barriers of the Umtanum restrained the flood, but at last they gave way before the onslaughts of the wrathful beaver, and the loosened waters swept on down and filled the great basin now occupied by the fruit and garden ranches of the Cowiche, Natchees, and Atahnum. ”

“ From fertile hillsides and deep-loamed prairies its tributaries carried fine particles of earth in their water and dropped it as they went along the channel until there was a deposit of mud in the center of the valley much higher than the surrounding country. The old river has made itself a bed where it can overlook the valley. There it still turns and twists, with never-ending restlessness. All the banks of mud are soft. ”

“ The Gwelo River itself is not a pleasing one; it is chiefly a bed of hard, black mud, lying between black, shiny rocks, with a few pools here and there, with an unpleasant smell about it. The sun, too, is now very powerful, and we are all feeling tired. ”

“ The Green River is the Rio Verde of the Spaniards, who named it from its timbered shores and grassy islets: it is called by the Yuta Indians Piya Ogwe, or the Great Water; by the other tribes Sitskidiágí, or “Prairie-grouse River.” It was nearly at its lowest when we saw it; the breadth was not more than 330 feet. In the flood-time it widens to 800 feet, and the depth increases from three to six. During the inundation season a ferry is necessary, and when transit is certain the owner sometimes nets $500 a week, which is not unfrequently squandered in a day. ”

“ One arm of the river must always have taken the present lower and deeper course; while the other must of necessity have run low—perhaps very nearly dry—as the inundation subsided every spring.
There remains no monumental record of this event; but the facts speak for themselves. The great channel is there. The old Nile mud is there—buried for the most part in sand, but still visible on many a rocky shelf and plateau between Assûan and Philæ. There are even places where the surface of the mass is seen to be scooped out, as if by the sudden rush of the departing waters. ”

“ The country was wild and totally uninhabited, excepting by scattered families of the Indians, and here and there by some few of the more adventurous white settlers, in the neighborhood of Unadilla. The sudden swelling of the river, therefore, bearing upon its surge a flotilla of more than two hundred vessels, through a region of primitive forests, and upon a stream that had never before wafted upon its bosom any craft of greater burthen than a bark canoe, was a spectacle which might well appall the untutored inhabitants of the regions thus invaded. ”

“ And standing beside the white waters with the ground shaking underfoot to the tune of their mighty onrush, with the meadows, trees, and flowers round about, the awesome cliffs for guardians, and the bright blue sky over all, it requires no visionary to conjure up legendary cities at this river's end, for but half lend yourself to the notion and the glorious Sierran stream becomes a beckoning highway to a land of pleasant dreams. ”

“ Umatilla is the sort of a rapid that hasn’t quite the teeth to get the best of a carefully handled boat that is running in good luck, but which has the power, with a mile to spare, to grind to match-wood any craft that gets into trouble on its own account. It was an eerie run that—with the snarling cascade of the reef on one side, the ghostly dance of the rollers on the other, and the impenetrable grey curtain of the mist blanking everything beyond a radius of a hundred feet ”

“ The deep barrancas surrounding the whole site formed a natural moat and made the position easily defensible.
We spent an hour rambling amongst these ruins, and then rode on to overtake our pack-mules, which, as the country was open, we could still distinguish some miles ahead of us by the little cloud of dust that marked their progress. About four o’clock we came to the edge of the gorge of the Rio Negro and began a steep descent of twelve or thirteen hundred feet to the bridge over the river. The views which opened before us as we descended were very fine and of a peculiar character. ”

“ By the time the Rhone has reached Arles all its gravel has been champed up and reduced to impalpable mud. That blue crystalline flood that gushed from the Lake of Leman, unsullied by a particle of earth, is now a river of brown mud—thick as pea-soup, and as nutritious. The stones that would have killed all vegetation have been pounded into a condition so attenuated, that they form rich alluvial matter. The river now seeks to deposit all this mud. ”

“ Again, some years ago, at Black Cañon, on the South Fork of the Thompson, when that clear blue stream was at a low stage, there was a great landslip, which for some eighty minutes dammed back the waters into a lake. The whole country side gathered there with carts and buckets, scraping up the mud and gold from the bottom. Many thousands of dollars were taken out of the dry river bed before the dam gave way to the rising waters. ”

“ One day we hired a dug-out canoe from a man who was also the possessor of a casting-net, and set off at dawn on a fishing-expedition. After paddling and poling up the river for about a league, we came to the mouth of a small stream with muddy banks half hidden in giant reeds. A few hundred yards from its mouth the stream broadened out into a pool about eighty yards long and forty wide, and here I counted sixteen alligators, some sunning themselves on the bank, others basking on the top of the water. ”

“ The natives who frequent the banks of the river, for the salmon fishery, have no other wood but that which they take floating down. We passed several rapids, and a small stream called Utalah, which flows from the southeast. ”

“ It is so called from the yellowness of its water, caused by the vast quantity of mud which is swept down by its rapid current to the sea; hence, the common saying, "When the Yellow River runs clear," as an equivalent of the Greek Kalends. The huge embankments, built to confine it to a given course, are continually being forced by any unusual press of extra water, with enormous damage to property and great loss of life, and from time to time this river has been known to change its route altogether, suddenly diverging, almost at a right angle. ”

“ There are now 1,538 miles of levees on both sides of the Mississippi from Cape Girardeau to the passes. These levees, of course, are still inadequate to the security of the planters against these inundations. Carrying 406 million tons of mud a year, the river becomes a dangerous stream subject to change, abandoning its old bed to cut for itself a new channel, transferring property from one State to another, isolating cities and leaving once useful levees marooned in the landscape like old Indian mounds or overgrown intrenchments. ”

“ On one side of the rampart lay the scurrying river and the valley of the Deepwater, rolling, sparsely timbered and heavily grassed, placid, peaceful, restful; on the other, seeming to leap against the horizon, lay the grandeur of chaos, wild and forbidding.
Highest above all that jagged western skyline, shouldering up above all other buttes and plateaus, Twin Buttes peremptorily challenged attention. Remarkably alike from all sides, when viewed from the CL ranch-house they seemed to have been cast in the same mold ”

“ Leaving Nutshucc, which I make to be about 8000 feet above sea-level, the road lays up a very narrow quebrada, or ravine, at the head of which a steep ascent, or cuesta, called El Cruzero, has to be ascended to a height of nearly 9000 feet above sea-level, from whence the track rapidly falls again, until, after passing a small village called Calara, the river Pilcomayo is reached. The altitude has then fallen to about 7000 feet, and the river, which flows through a valley about a mile in width, in flood-time is impassable ”

“ During the inundation the river is exceedingly turbid, from the great quantity of vegetable substances and mud brought down by it:—the velocity of the stream in the higher and narrower parts of the river at first prevents their deposition, but as it approaches the lower lands, or pampas, where it overflows its bed, these substances are spread over the face of the land, forming a grey slimy soil, which, on the abatement of the waters, is found to increase vegetation in a surprising degree. ”

“ It took him a day and a half of most laborious traveling to reach their first village, for they had to row up stream against the current, which is always strong and in some places terrible. The river runs between high mountains on both sides and in the middle of the stream there are great rocks, which make it very dangerous to go up—and still more so to go down, because the rapid current carries the boat against the rocks. ”

“ A steamer could ply on its placid, unobstructed flood, a child could navigate it anywhere. The heavenly beauty of the shores, with virgin forest of fresh, green spruces towering a hundred feet on every side, or varied in open places with long rows and thick-set hedges of the gorgeous, wild, red, Athabaska rose, made a stream that most canoemen, woodmen, and naturalists would think without a fault or flaw, and with every river beauty in its highest possible degree. ”