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