The Columbia River: Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery, Its Commerce

by William Denison Lyman

Fort Vancouver in 1845.

At Vancouver the newly-built “North Bank” Railroad (Spokane, Portland, and Seattle) has constructed across the Columbia a bridge a mile and three quarters in length, said to be the largest and costliest of its kind in the world. This same railroad has also bridged the Willamette a few miles west of Vancouver, thus effecting an entrance to Portland. This railroad is one of the most interesting and remarkable undertakings of the age. It is said that its cost from Spokane to Portland exceeded forty million dollars. Vancouver expects much from this road, even anticipating that much of the shipping hitherto centring in Portland will be diverted to the larger river. However that may prove, it is plain that Vancouver has the promise as well as the memory of great things.

Six miles west of Vancouver is one of those imposing scenes in which our River so abounds. This is the junction of the Willamette with the Columbia. This spot was noted by Broughton in 1792 as one of exceptional beauty, and to it he attached the name Belle Vue Point. It is indeed a combination of both historical and scenic interest. The Willamette steals shyly and coquettishly through green islands to fall into the strong arms of the stately Columbia. The western arm of the Willamette, commonly called the “Slough,” joins the Columbia eighteen miles below at the picturesque little town of St. Helens. Between the Columbia and the Slough lies Sauvie’s Island, named from a Hudson’s Bay man, and famous throughout Hudson’s Bay times as well as Indian times. The island was the seat of power of the Multnomah tribe. The scene of the book known as the Bridge of the Gods by Frederick Balch is mainly upon this island, and in that book will be found some glowing descriptions of this beauty spot. To the Indians it was known as Wapatoo Island. In the ponds grew the plant called the wapatoo, an onion-like root, very nutritious and palatable, and, with salmon, constituting the chief food of the natives. Not only so, but the Multnomah Indians used the wapatoo as a commercial stock, carrying on regular trade with both the coast and the up-river tribes.

According to the early explorers there were great annual fairs on Wapatoo Island, when Indians from ocean beach, from valley, from mountains, and from River, both up and down, would gather to exchange products, to gamble, race horses and boats, and have a general period of hilarity and good fellowship.

The gathering of the wapatoos developed upon the patient “klootchmen” (women) of the tribe. They would go out in canoes to the shallow water where the roots grew and then, stripping naked, would hang over the side of the boat and dislodge the wapatoos with their toes from the soft mud. Soon the surface would be covered with the floating roots. The squaws would gather these into the canoes. Then they would move to another place for another load. Sometimes they would spend almost the whole day in the water. The wapatoo still grows in the ponds and lagoons of the island. These ponds formerly abounded in ducks and geese and cranes and swans. Even yet there is fine hunting. During the damp soft days of the Oregon winter, the Nimrods of Portland betake themselves thither in great numbers.

Lone Rock, Columbia River, about Fifty Miles East of Portland.
Photo. by E. H. Moorehouse, Portland.

From the steamer, as we enter the mouth of the Willamette, or from the greater elevation of the lighthouse, one may command one of the lordliest views that even this land of lordly views affords. Five snow-peaks, Hood, Rainier-Tacoma, St. Helens, Adams, and Jefferson, rise snow white from the purple forests of the Cascade Range. Up the Columbia the great gorge through which we have passed stands open to view, while down-river the sinuous and hazy lines of low-lying shore betoken the nearer proximity of the ocean. Up the Willamette, enchanting islands, with low watery shores, occupy the foreground, while a short distance back from the western bank, a chain of picturesque hills, heavily timbered, encloses the vista. On the east side a low bench with bluffy promontories, crowned with the beautiful smooth-barked madrona tree, rises from the green meadows.

If we could, from so fair an entrance, ascend the Willamette to its source in the Cascade Mountains two hundred miles away, and if we could turn into the Tualatin, the Yamhill, the Clackamas, the Molalla, the La Creole, the Santiam, the Calapooia, affluents worthy of union with the Willamette, and if we could tarry among the vales and meadows and oak-crowned hills and distant Coast and Cascade ranges of mountains, all across that superb valley, fifty miles wide by a hundred and fifty long, as beautiful as Greece or Italy,—we would then all agree that the Willamette deserves a volume by itself and that it is almost a crime to introduce it so briefly here. Every old Oregonian, in thinking of the Willamette, at once associates it with the apostrophe to it by S. L. Simpson, the gifted and unfortunate poet of Oregon, whose genius deserved a wider recognition than it ever received. The first stanza of his poem is this: