A college of artists could not have devised a more beautiful location for a city. It is set in a gigantic amphitheatre two thousand feet above sea level. High walls of basalt, picturesque with spruce and cedar and pine, form the city's rim. Against this background have been built mansions that would adorn Fifth Avenue or the Circles of the national capital. Forming the city's southern border winds an abysmal gorge, and along its brink has been built one of the city's fashionable boulevards. The cataracts of the Spokane some day must inspire poets. In some parts of the city, affording adornments for numberless gardens, are volcanic, pyramidal rocks. The Indians say that these columns are the petrified forms of amazons who, issuing from the woods, were about to plunge into the river for a bath, ignorant of the water demon, when Speelyai to save them turned them into stone.
It is significant of the lure of Spokane that men who have accumulated millions and sold their mines still make it their place of permanent residence. Though the city as it is to-day has been built in the dozen years that have elapsed since its great fire, there is no hint of hasty development within its boundaries. Singular fertility in its soil has so fostered its shade trees and its gardens that a sense is conveyed of years of affluent ease and attention to æsthetic detail. Spokane is in many respects the most consummate embodiment on the continent of that typical American genius that has redeemed the wilderness of the frontier.
PORTLAND
THE METROPOLIS OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST
"Where rolls the Oregon."—Bryant.
By THOMAS L. COLE
ONE autumn evening in 1843, A.M. Overton and A.L. Lovejoy, two residents of Oregon City, on their way home from Vancouver, landed from their canoe and pitched their tent for the night under the pine trees upon the west bank of the Willamette River. Before they resumed their journey, the next day, they had projected a town upon the site of their encampment. Within a few months, a clearing was made and a log cabin built. From this beginning grew the present city of Portland.
But our story must go back of this beginning, for the historical significance of Portland lies not so much in the fact that it is to-day the great metropolis of that vast territory, once all called Oregon, and now divided into the States of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of Wyoming and Montana, not to mention British Columbia; but its significance is rather to be sought in the consideration that in Portland culminated and found final form the metropolitan life of Oregon Territory, which, in its earlier and richer historical period, found expression successively in Astoria, Vancouver, and Oregon City. Thus, for the essential beginning of the history of the metropolis of the Pacific Northwest, we must go back to the embryo metropolis established by Astor at the mouth of the Columbia River. This point of departure, while relatively remote, yet carries us back over less than a century of time.