Once the Teal was out on the comparatively open waters of the lower river, the Captain came down for a yarn with me—as one Columbia skipper to another. He had spent most of his life on the Snake and lower Columbia, but he seemed to know the rapids and canyons below the Canadian line almost reef by reef, and all of the old skippers I had met by reputation. He said that he had never heard of any one’s ever having deliberately attempted to run the Cascades in anything smaller than a steamer, although an endless lot of craft had come to grief by getting in there by accident. The only time a man ever went through in a small boat and came out alive was about ten years ago. That lucky navigator, after drinking most of a Saturday night in the town, came down to the river in the dim grey dawn of a Sunday, got into his boat and pushed off. It was along toward church-time that a ferry-man, thirty miles or more down river, picked up a half filled skiff. Quietly sleeping in the stern-sheets, with nothing but his nose above water, was the only man that ever came through the Cascades in a small boat.
The Captain looked at me with a queer smile after he told that story. “I don’t suppose you were heeled to tackle the Cascades just like that?” he asked finally.
And so, for the last time, I was taken for a boot-legger. But no—not quite the last. I believe it was the porter at Hotel Portland who asked me if—ahem!—if I had got away with anything from Canada. And for all of that incessant trail of smoke, no fire—or practically none.
The day of my arrival in Portland I delivered Imshallah up to the kindest-faced boat-house proprietor on the Willamette and told him to take his time about finding her a home with some sport-loving Oregonian who knew how to treat a lady right and wouldn’t give her any kind of menial work to do. I told him I didn’t want to have her work for a living under any conditions, as I felt she had earned a rest; and to impress upon whoever bought her that she was high-spirited and not to be taken liberties with, such as subjecting her to garbage shower-baths and similar indignities. He asked me if she had a name, and I told him that she hadn’t—any more; that the one she had been carrying had ceased to be in point now her voyage was over. It had been a very appropriate name for a boat on the Columbia, though, I assured him, and I was going to keep it to use if I ever made the voyage again.
Portland, although it is not directly upon the Columbia, has always made that river distinctively its own. I had realized that in a vague way for many years, but it came home to me again with renewed force now that I had arrived in Portland after having had some glimpse of every town and village from the Selkirks to the sea. (Astoria and the lower river I had known from many steamer voyages in the past.) Of all the thousands living on or near the Columbia, those of Portland still struck me as being the ones who held this most strikingly individual of all the world’s rivers at most nearly its true value. With Portlanders, I should perhaps include all of those living on the river from Astoria to The Dalles. These, too, take a mighty pride in their great river, and regard it with little of that distrustful reproach one remarks so often on the upper Columbia, where the settlers see it bearing past their parched fields the water and the power that would mean the difference to them between success and disaster. When this stigma has been wiped out by reclamation (as it soon will be), without a doubt the plucky pioneers of the upper Columbia will see in their river many beauties that escape their troubled eyes to-day.
The early Romans made some attempt to give expression to their love of the Tiber in monuments and bridges. It would be hard indeed to conceive of anything in marble or bronze, or yet in soaring spans of steel, that would give adequate expression to the pride of the people of the lower Columbia in their river; and so it is a matter of felicitation that they have sought to pay their tribute in another way. There was inspiration behind the conception of the idea of the Columbia Highway, just as there was genius and rare imagination in the carrying out of that idea. I have said that the Cascade Gorge of the Columbia is a scenic wonder apart from all others; that it stands without a rival of its kind. Perhaps the greatest compliment that I can pay to the Columbia Highway is to say that it is worthy of the river by which it runs.
(THE END)
TRANSCRIBER NOTES:
Alternate spellings and archaic words have been retained.
page 82: "experienced" changed to "inexperienced" (Roos was young and inexperienced).
page 96: added closing quotation mark which was missing in the original ("... than some the old girl’s had.").
page 147: "rifflles" changed to "riffles" (four or five riffles below).
page 160: "Lientenant" changed to "Lieutenant" (Lieutenant Thomas W. Symons).
page 163: "avenue" changed to "Avenue" (Fifth Avenue).
page 300: "spilts" changed to "splits" (the river splits upon).
page 315: "goddes" changed to "goddess" (this goddess of the Columbia).
page 320: "staight" changed to "straight" (straight on through to).
page 331: "a" added to sentence for continuity (We were going to have a run for our money).
page 366: added "and" (Miss S—— and I).
page 380: "of" changed to "or" (The two or three of her planks).
page 380: "mélee" changed to "melée" (that were started in the melée).