For eighty miles from Portland the flora indicates a somewhat moist climate, but on passing east of the Cascade Range everything is as dry as at Kamloops. We are informed that no rain has fallen for four months. We see bunch grass on the hills. The rocks are balsaltic, and the indications suggest that the geology of the Thompson extends to this locality. One of the most characteristic features of the landscape are the basaltic columns which stand out prominently on both sides of the river.
Before twelve we reach the Dalles at the eighty-seventh mile. I have kindly recollections of this place, for we broke our fast here. It was dinner hour for the passengers, and what was served was very good. Our hostess was an Ontario woman from Kingston, and the landlord one of those genial, imperturbable geniuses whom our neighbours so often produce, who have been everywhere and learned much. In his wanderings he had been in Canada, whence he had carried away his wife. He had so much to tell us of the Dominion that we looked upon him as a countryman. Dalles, in Indian phraseology, we learn from him, means “swift water,” or rapids.
We continue the ascent of the southern bank of the Columbia. The valley is generally from two to three miles wide, in the centre of which the stream flows in its placid course. The banks are hilly and appear broken frequently by trap and balsaltic rock. For miles not a tree is to be seen. The light, dry sand is drifted with the wind, like snow in winter, and sand is often formed during storms into mounds and banks, which are more troublesome to the company than snow itself. We were told that the trains were often seriously delayed by it. From the car windows we could see the “dunes” which have accumulated in many places. An occasional house is visible, with the sand half concealing the windows; sometimes cast up to the very eaves. Persevering efforts have been made to arrest its progress by planting trees, and to prevent the saplings from being blown away the roots have been covered with paving stones. At other places the surface is shingled with boards to hold down the sand, so that it will not be blown on the railway track. The landscape has a dreary and forlorn look, which even the river fails fully to relieve.
About one hundred and fifty miles from Portland the high river banks have disappeared. We run through a flat, level, barren country covered with sage brush, and we are probably less than three hundred feet above tide water.
Umatilla, one hundred and ninety miles from Portland, is the ghost of a once flourishing centre, which existed when gold digging in the Blue Mountains was actively followed. To-day it is a picture of desolation, with deserted streets, with dilapidated wooden buildings surrounded by a desert of sage brush. There is one marked memorial of its prosperity: a graveyard, where many a poor miner lies in his last home. The fence which encloses it is maintained, and what makes it more remarkable, it is the only fence to be seen for many a mile.
At Wallula Junction we have supper. There is at this place a branch to Walla-Walla, thirty-one miles distant. On the side track there is an excursion train full of “Oregon pioneers” travelling towards St. Paul. They left Portland seventeen hours before us and had been detained by an obstruction. As a regular train we take precedence and arrived at Snake River about seven, a little way above its junction with the Columbia at Ainsworth. Snake River is one of the chief tributaries of the Columbia; it takes its rise five hundred miles to the south-east. It is as yet unbridged, and we cross to the opposite shore by a ferry; passengers, mails and baggage being transferred to the train, attached to which, for the first time, we find the Pullman.
We have followed the valley of the River Columbia from Kalama to this point, generally on an easterly course, south of the 46th parallel, ascending its great current flowing westerly. It runs in a southerly course directly from 49° lat. to this place; and now we leave this magnificent river to see it no more on our journey.
The railway has followed the south or Oregon bank of the Columbia from Portland. As a Canadian I could not but feel a deep interest in looking across on the opposite bank to Washington Territory. I reverted to the settlement by treaty of the Oregon question in 1846. Great Britain most justly claimed the whole territory north of the 42° parallel. The claims of the United States as set forth by them were only limited by Alaska. At that date the fact is undoubted that there was not a single citizen of the United States established north of the Columbia River. The country was occupied only by the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Columbia was the thoroughfare of that Company to the Boat Encampment, already alluded to, at the extreme north of the Selkirk Range. This river would have made a good natural boundary line, and in itself would have been a compromise most favourable to the United States. It would have given them Astoria and all the discoveries of Lewis and Clark, but the treaty of 1846 was simply a capitulation even more inglorious than the Ashburton Treaty of four years earlier date, and will so live in history. Six degrees of latitude by three degrees of longitude of British Territory were deliberately abandoned by the Imperial diplomatists, and what is more remarkable the settlement was so ill-defined as, some years afterwards, to cause the San Juan difficulty, which raised great trouble and much ill-feeling.
At six next morning we arrive at Spokane Falls, a well built town with a population of fifteen hundred. The soil is light and gravelly, with groves of pine. We reach Rathdrum, thirty miles distant, described in the guide book as an agricultural centre in the best portion of the valley. The train remains here twenty minutes. We learn that no rain has fallen since early in May, and that the crops are almost a failure. All the soil we have looked upon for three hundred miles is sandy and gravelly, and without rain good crops can scarcely be looked for.
At nine we reach Sand Point, four hundred and forty-five miles from Portland. From Ainsworth we have been running in a north-easterly direction and we are now fifty miles south of the Boundary Line. The mouth of the Kicking-Horse River is two hundred miles from us, nearly due north. I looked on Sand Point with some interest, for if we had been driven at the Ille-celle-waet to abandon our journey through the Eagle Pass, it was at this spot we would have reached the Northern Pacific Railway on our descent by the Columbia past Fort Colville.