Astoria in 1813, showing the trading post established by John Jacob Astor.
COPYRIGHT, G. M. WEISTER
Swiftly the dawn marched westward. The sun, breaking across the eastern ridges, sent long level beams to sprinkle the cloud-sea with silver. Its touch was magical. The billows broke and parted. The mists fled in panic. Cloud after cloud arose and was caught away into space. The tops of the Cascade ranges below came, one by one, into view. Lower and lower, with the shortening shadows, the wooded slopes were revealed in the morning light. Here and there some deep vale was still white and hidden. Scattered cloud-fleeces clung to pinnacles on the cliffs. Northward, the snow-peaks in Washington towered higher. Great banks of fog embraced their forested abutments, and surged up to their glaciers. But the icy summits smiled in the gladness of a new day. The reign of darkness and mist was broken.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor valley, rock or hill.
Clearer and wider the picture grew. Below us, the orchards of Hood River caught the fresh breezes and laughed in the first sunshine. The day reached down into the nearer canyons, and saluted the busy, leaping brooks. Noisy waterfalls filled the glens with spray, and built rainbows from bank to bank, then hurried and tumbled on, in conceited haste, as if the ocean must run dry unless replenished by their wetness ere the sun should set again. Rippling lakes, in little mountain pockets, signaled their joy as blankets of dense vapor were folded up and quickly whisked away.
Columbia Slough in Winter, near the mouth of the Willamette.
