Meares, in 1788, gave the name of Cape Disappointment to the northern point, owing to his not being able to make the entrance of the river, and the mouth he called Deception Bay, and asserted that there was no such river as the St. Roc, as laid down in the Spanish charts.
Vancouver also, when exploring the Pacific coast in 1792, passed by this great stream, without suspecting that there was a river of any importance there. He noticed the line of breakers, and concluded, that, if there was any river, it must be unnavigable, from shoals and reefs. He had made up his mind, that all the streams flowing into the Pacific between the fortieth and forty-eighth parallels of latitude were mere brooks, insufficient for vessels to navigate, and not worthy his attention.
Capt. Grey, who reached the place shortly after, with keener observation and deeper in-sight, saw the indications of a great river there, and after lying outside for nine days, waiting a favorable opportunity to enter, succeeded in doing so on the 11th of May, 1792, being the first to accomplish that feat, and explored the lower portion of it. He gave to the river and to the southern point the names they now bear.
Vancouver failed in the same way to discover the Fraser, the great river of British Columbia, although he actually entered the delta of the river, and sailed about among the sand-banks, naming one of them Sturgeon Bank; while the Spanish explorers, who were there about the same time, recognized the fact of its existence far out at sea, in the irregular currents, the sand-banks, the drift of trees and logs, and also in the depression in the Cascade Mountains, which marks its channel.
In 1805 Lewis and Clarke, who reached the mouth of the Columbia that year, found that the Indians called the river "Shocatilcum" (friendly water).
Tourists have not yet discovered what a wonderful country this is for sight-seeing, fortunately for us. On our passage up the Columbia, after leaving Portland, we sat for two or three days, almost alone, on the deck of the steamer, with nothing to break the silence but the deep breathing of the boat, which seemed like its own appreciation of it; and sailed past the great promontories, some of them a thousand feet high, and watched the slender silver streams that fall from the rocks, and felt that we were in a new world,—new to us, but older and grander than any thing we had ever seen.
We were shown a high, isolated rock, rising far above the water, on which was a scaffolding, where, for many generations, the Indians had deposited their dead. They were wrapped in skins, tied with cords of grass and bark, and laid on mats. Their most precious possessions were placed beside them, first made unserviceable for the living, to secure their remaining undisturbed. The bodies were always laid with the head toward the west, because the memaloose illahie (land of the dead) lay that way.
In the instincts of children and of uncivilized people, there seems something to trust. This idea of Heaven's lying toward the west appears to have been held by the New-England Indians also, and is expressed in Whittier's lines,—
"O mighty Sowanna!
Thy gateways unfold,
From thy wigwam of sunset
Lift curtains of gold!
Take home the poor spirit whose journey is o'er—
Mat wonck kunna-monee! We see thee no more!"
The Chinese have also the "peaceful land in the west," lying far beyond the visible universe.