About thirty-five miles below the mouth of Clark’s Fork the Columbia is joined by the Ne-whoi-al-pit-ku River from the northwest.  Here too are the great Chaudiere, or Kettle, Falls on the main river, with a total descent of about fifty feet.  Fifty miles farther down, the Spokane River, a clear, dashing stream, comes in from the east.  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.