This wonderful and majestic river whose history is enhanced with legend, offers the exploring tourist or curious sight-seer unusual opportunities to indulge his unbounded imagination and to satisfy his desire for the spectacular in nature. Upon its banks were enacted events of greatest importance in northwest history, while interwoven with the incontrovertible happenings is many a fascinating Indian story and song. Overlooking its waters were the first settlements of the Pacific northwest, upon whose sites are now built, within easy hearing of its persistent dashings, some of the proudest and most prosperous cities of the country.

One of the largest rivers on the American continent, with many important tributaries, it drains a territory equal to five times the area of the state of Washington. By a series of cataracts, falls, cascades, and bold turns, it flows nearly 1,400 miles with a total drop of 2,500 feet, before finally delivering the waters gathered from many sources to the great Pacific ocean.

Like other great rivers, some portions have needed vast expenditures to increase its value as a navigable stream. Near Stevenson the government has built locks at a cost of several million dollars, enabling large vessels to reach The Dalles, at present the head of navigation. At Celilo, two hundred miles from its mouth, where, in twelve miles distance, the river falls eighty-one feet at low tide, other locks are being constructed. When these are completed, merchant vessels can go direct from the sea as far as Priest Rapids, a distance of over four hundred miles. As many miles additional are navigable, but broken in places by rapids and falls.

[INDIAN CANOE RACE.]

Important as this river is from a commercial and geographic standpoint, the greatest interest by far centers in the phenomena that are of its own creation, visible every mile from its mouth to its source. A journey upon its surface rivals one along the historic Rhine, the picturesque Hudson, or the beautiful St. Lawrence. The panorama includes besides the wilder grandeurs, economic scenes suggesting the fecundity of the earth and the industry of the husbandman. To enumerate and describe these ever so briefly would require an entire volume. This short chapter is a suggestion only that "By reason of scenic grandeur, absorbing interest of physical features, the majesty and mystery of its flow through some of the wildest as well as some of the most beautiful regions of the globe, and at the last by the peculiar grandeur of its entrance into the greatest of the oceans, this 'Achilles of Rivers' attracts alike historian, scientist, poet, statesman, and lover of nature."

In many places the natural appearances are the same now as when Gray, Lewis and Clarke, the Astorians and the Northwest and Hudson's Bay Company men first viewed its banks, with the exception that the shores have in places been denuded of their largest timber and either a younger growth has inherited the dominion or portions have been claimed for the agriculturist.