As if lifting a veil the boat swept around the willows and the Indian waved his hand.
"Multnomah!"
Before them, vast and deep, a river rolled its smooth volume into the Columbia. At the same moment five snow peaks burst into view,—Rainier, Hood, St. Helens, Adams, and to the southeast another snowy cone which Clark at once saluted, "Mount Jefferson!"
For the first recorded time a white man gazed on the river Willamette.
This sudden vision of emerald hills, blue waters, and snowy peaks forced the involuntary exclamation, "The only spot west of the Rocky Mountains suitable for a settlement!" The very air of domestic occupation gleamed on the meadows flecked with deer and waterfall. Amid the scattered groves of oak and dogwood, bursting now into magnolian bloom, Clark half expected to see some stately mansion rise, as in the park of some old English nobleman. The ever-prevailing flowering currant lit the landscape with a hue of roses.
A dozen miles or more Clark pressed on, up the great inland river, and slept one night near the site of the present Portland. He examined the soil, looked at the timber, and measured a fallen fir three hundred and eighteen feet as it lay.
Watching the current rolling its uniform flow from some unknown distant source, the Captain began taking soundings.
"This river appears to possess water enough for the largest ship. Nor is it rash to believe that it may water the country as far as California." For at least two-thirds of the width he could find no bottom with his five-fathom line.
Along that wide deep estuary, the grainships of the world to-day ride up to the wharves of Portland. The same snow peaks are there, the same emerald hills, and the bounteous smile of Nature blushing in a thousand orchards.
All along the shores were deserted solitary houses of broad boards roofed with cedar bark, with household furniture, stone mortars, pestles, canoes, mats, bladders of train oil, baskets, bowls, trenchers—all left. The fireplaces were filled with dead embers, the bunk-line tiers of beds were empty. All had just gone or were going to the fisheries.