Sunset at the mouth of the Columbia. Cape Hancock on right, Point Adams on left. View from river off Astoria.

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"The Coming of the White Man" and "Sacajawea," statues in Portland City Park which commemorate the aboriginal Americans.

Wide as was the prospect, however, it called the imagination to a still broader view; to look back, indeed,—how many millions of years?—to an earlier dawn, bounded by the horizons of geological time. Let us try to realize the panorama thus unfolded. As we look down from some aerial viewpoint, behold! there is no Mount Hood and no Cascade Range. The volcanic snow-peaks of Oregon and Washington are still embryo in the womb of earth. We stand face to face with the beginnings of the Northwest.

Far south and east of our castle-in-the-air, islands rise slowly out of a Pacific that has long rolled, unbroken, to the Rocky Mountains. We see the ocean bed pushed above the tide in what men of later ages will call the Siskiyou and the Blue Mountains, one range in southwestern, the other in eastern, Oregon. A third uptilt, the great Okanogan, in northern Washington, soon appears. All else is sea. Upon these primitive uplands, the date is written in the fossil archives of their ancient sea beaches, raised thousands of feet above the former shore-line level. At a time when all western Europe was still ocean, and busy foraminifers were strewing its floor with shells to form the chalk beds of France and England, these first lands of our Northwest emerged from the great deep. It is but a glimpse we get into the immeasurable distance of the Paleozoic. Its time-units are centuries instead of minutes.

Sunset on Vancouver Lake, near Vancouver, Washington.