Now lift your eyes and let them carry past the town and the black gloom of the river, over the nearest encirclings of the fir-clad hills and see the day die in the most high place. You see it now—a peculiar pink cloud, which is not a cloud at all, but a snow-capped cone-shaped peak rising into the darkening heavens. Mount Hood is an asset for Portland, because for any habitation of man it would be an inspiration. And beyond Mount Hood—fifty miles distant—but further to the north are Mount Adams, Mount St. Helen's and sometimes on a fine clear evening Rainier bidding alike brilliant farewells to the dying day.
Belasco might have staged Seattle
This then is the city into which a traveler may enter on an autumn day to find the innumerable cedars and firs, the changing brilliancy of the maple leaves proclaiming it North, with the gaily blossoming rose-bushes and the home-grown strawberries of October telling a paradoxical story and locating the Oregon metropolis to the South. The publicity experts of the town can—and do—sound its praises in no faint terms. They will tell you of a single day when twenty-two wheat vessels were at Portland docks gathering the food-stuffs for a hungry Orient, they will reel off statistics as to the shipping powers of the great lumber port in all the world and then, without a lessening of the pride, will go further and explain Portland's hopes for the further inland navigation of the streams that make her an important ocean port although fifty miles distant from the sight of the sea. The Columbia river is already navigable for four hundred miles inland and Portland is today coöperating with the Canadian authorities in British Columbia for extending the waterway's availability as a carrier for another four hundred miles. A great work has been performed in pulling the teeth of the mighty Columbia where it meets the sea—in building jetties at the mouth of the river. The government with unusual energy is making new locks at the impressive Cascades. Portland has good reason for her faith in the future. Her railroad systems are in their infancy; a part of Central Oregon as large as the state of Ohio is just now being reached by through routes from Portland. What future they shall bring her no man dares to predict.
But we, for ourselves, shall like to continue to think of Portland as a gentle American town set between guardian fir-clad hills and sentineled by snow-capped peaks; we shall enjoy remembering the yellow and red leaves of Autumn, the luxuriant roses, the strawberries and the crisp October nights in one delightful paradoxical jumble.
*****
To make a great seaport city out of a high-springing ridge of volcanic origin was a truly herculean task, but Seattle sprang to it with all the enthusiasm of her youth. "Re-grading" is what she has called it, and because even armies of men with pick and with shovel could not work fast enough for her own satisfaction, she borrowed a trick from the old-time gold miners and put hose-men at work. Hydraulic science supplanted men and teams and picks and even the big steam shovels. The splashing hose wore down the crest of the great hills until sturdy buildings teetered on their foundations and late moving tenants had to come and go up and down long ladders.
In 1881 President Hayes came to this strange little lumbering town and spoke from the platform of the two-storied Occidental Hotel in the center of the village to its entire population—some five hundred persons. The Occidental Hotel was gone within ten years, to be replaced by a hostelry that in 1890 was big and showy for any town and that in 1912, Seattle regarded almost as a relic of past ages. And stranger still, the hills—the eternal hills, if you please—that looked upon the Occidental Hotel only yesterday, have gone. Not that Seattle will not always be a side-hill town, that the cable cars will not continue to climb up Madison street from the waterfront like flies upon a window-glass, but that a tremendous reformation has been wrought, with the aid of engineers' skill and the famous "hard money" of the Pacific coast.
For here was a town that decided almost overnight to be a seaport of world-wide reputation. She looked at her high hills ruefully. Then she called for the hose-men. The hills were doomed.
There was Denny hill, with a park of five acres capping it. The surveyors set their rival stakes five hundred feet below the lowest level of the little park and a matter of almost a million cubic yards of earth went sploshing down the long hydraulic sluices to make the tide-water flats at the bottom of the hills into solid footing for future factories and warehouses. And when the "regraders" were done the architects and the builders were upon their heels.