The Guardians of the Columbia / Mount Hood, Mount Adams and Mount St. Helens - John H. Williams

This noteworthy myth, fit to rank with the folk-lore masterpieces of any primitive people, Greek or Gothic, is of course only a legend. The Indian was not a geologist. True, we see the submerged forests to-day, at low water. But their slowly decaying trunks were killed, perhaps not much more than a century ago, by a rise in the river that was not caused by the fall of a natural bridge, but by a landslide from the mountains.

A Late Winter Afternoon. View across the Columbia from White Salmon to the mouth of Hood River, showing the Hood River Valley with Mount Hood wrapped in clouds.

There is a slow and glacier-like motion of the hillsides here which from time to time compels the railways on either bank to readjust their tracks. The rapids at the Cascades, with their fall of nearly forty feet, are doubtless the result of comparatively recent volcanic action. Shaking down vast masses of rock, this dammed the river, and caused it to overflow its wooded shores above. But to the traveler on a steamboat breasting the terrific current below the government locks, as he looks up to the towering heights on either side of the narrowed channel, the invention of poor Lo's untutored mind seems almost as easy to believe as the simpler explanation of the scientist.

"Gateway to the Inland Empire." Towering cliffs of stratified lava that guard the Columbia on each bank at Lyle, Washington.