mother—known as granmaw—nine children who had reached the age of
indiscretion, and a baby, dwelt in a vine-clad cottage as neat as the
proverbial beeswax and about as roomy as a limousine.
“Sure,” said he cordially, when I had explained our predicament, “we’ve
got slathers of room. We’ll fix you up and welcome. You and the lady can
have Rosamond Clarissa’s room, and your friend here can have the boys’
room across the hall, and your showfer can sleep in Ebenezer’s bed. Me
and the wife’ll fix ourselves up on the porch, and granmaw she’ll go
acrost the street to a neighbour’s, and Abel and Absalom and David and
Rosamond Clarissa and Ebenezer and Elisha and Gwendoline Hortensia and
Hiram and Isaiah’ll sleep in the tent. Sure, we’ve got all the room you
want.”
“You must have almost as much trouble in finding names for your
children,” the Lady remarked, “as the Pullman Company does in naming its
sleeping-cars.”
“Well, it’s this way, ma’am,” he explained. “Me and maw have a sort of an
agreement. She names the girls and gets the names out of the magazines.
I name the boys and get the names out of the Bible. She hoped that the
baby’d be a girl so’s she could name her Patricia Penelope, but seeing as
it’s a boy it’s up to me, and I haven’t been able to make up my mind yet
between Jabez, Josiah, and Jeremiah.”
Barring the fact that we were awakened at a somewhat unseasonable hour
by a high-voiced discussion between Rosamond Clarissa and Gwendoline
Hortensia as to which should have the privilege of washing the baby, we
were very comfortable indeed—very much more so, I expect, than if we
had been able to obtain quarters at the hotel—and, after a breakfast
of berries with cream that was not milk incognito, and coffee, and hot
cakes, and eggs that tasted as though they might have originated with a
hen instead of a cold-storage vault, we rolled away with the hospitable
barber and his brood waving us Godspeed from the doorstep.
It is in the neighbourhood of two hundred and fifty miles from Susanville
to the Oregon line, the earlier portion of the journey taking us through
a forest that had evidently never known the woodsman’s axe. North of
Dry Lake Ranch, which is the only place in between where a motorist can
count on finding a bed to sleep in or a bite to eat, a grazing country of
remarkable fertility begins, much of it having been taken up by Czechs
from Bohemia: a stolid, sturdy, industrious folk who work themselves and
their patient families and the ground unremittingly and whose prosperity,
therefore, passes that of their more shiftless neighbours at a gallop.
This fringe of farming communities, although in California, really mark
the beginning of that great, rich agricultural region comprising the back
country of Oregon which, because of its prosperity, its extent, and its
wealth of resources, is known as the Inland Empire.
A few miles beyond these Bohemian settlements we caught our first glimpse
of Lower Klamath Lake, whose low and marshy shores, which lie squarely
athwart the boundary between California and Oregon, forming a spring
and autumn rendezvous for untold thousands of wild fowl, the government
having set it aside as a sort of natural aviarium.
“Look!” suddenly exclaimed the Lady, pointing. “The shores of the lake
are covered with snow!”
But what looked for all the world like an expanse of snow suddenly
transformed itself, as we drew near, into a cloud of huge, ungainly
birds with perfectly enormous bills, creating a racket like a thousand
motor-cars with the beating of their wings.
“Pelicans, by Jove!” exclaimed my friend, and that is what they
were—thousands, yes, tens of thousands of them. The pelican, as we
learned later, is the symbol, as it were, of all this Klamath country,
the really beautiful hotel at Klamath Falls being named The White
Pelican, “perhaps,” as the Lady observed, “because of the size of its
bill.” However this may be, it is a very excellent hotel, indeed, and
if you ever chance to find yourself in that part of the country I would
advise you to spend a night there, if for no other reason than to enjoy
the novel experience of staying in a hostelry which would do credit to
Fifth Avenue and looking out of your window on a frontier town. This,
mind you, is casting no aspersions on Klamath Falls, which is a very
prosperous and wide-awake little place indeed, although ten years ago you
would have had some difficulty in finding it on the map, its mushroom
growth being due to the development of the immense lumber territory of
which, since the completion of the railway, it has become the centre. As
a matter of fact, the hotel was not built so much for the convenience
of the traveller as it was for the comfort of the handful of Eastern
capitalists whose great lumber interests necessitate their spending a
considerable portion of the year in Klamath Falls and who demanded the
same luxuries and conveniences in this backwoods town that they would
have on Broadway. That explains why it is that in this remote settlement
in the wilderness you can get a room furnished in cretonne and Circassian
walnut, with a white porcelain bathroom opening from it, and can sit down
to dinner at a red-shaded table in a gold-and-ivory dining-room. I know a
man who keeps a private orchestra of thirty pieces, year in and year out,
for his own amusement, but these Oregon lumber kings are the only men I
have ever heard of who have built a great city hotel purely for their
personal convenience.
[Illustration: Crater Lake: “It looks like a gigantic wash-tub filled
with blueing.”
A flock of young pelicans on the shores of Lower Klamath Lake.
IN THE OREGON HINTERLAND.]
The late E. H. Harriman, knowing the continent and having the continent
to choose from, built a shooting lodge on the shores of Upper Klamath
Lake, to which he was wont to retreat, after the periodical strikes and
railroad mergers and congressional investigations which punctuated his
career, for rest and recreation. After the death of the great railway
builder the lodge was purchased by the same group of men who built The
White Pelican Hotel and has been converted into a sort of sporting resort
_de luxe_. They call it Pelican Bay Lodge, and I know of nothing quite
like it anywhere. It consists of perhaps a dozen log cabins, externally
as rough as any frontiersman’s dwelling, but steam-heated, luxuriously
furnished, and liberally bathtubised.
Pelican Bay Lodge is the most convenient starting-point for that mountain
mystery known as Crater Lake, which lies forty miles to the north of it
and six thousand feet above it, in the heart of the Cascade Range. It
took us five hours of steady running to cover those forty miles, and we
didn’t stop to pick wild flowers either. The road is a very beautiful
one, winding steadily upward through one of the finest pine forests on
the continent. The last mile is more like mountaineering than motoring,
however, for the road, in order to attain the rim of the lake, suddenly
shoots upward at a perfectly appalling angle—I think they told me that at
one place it had a grade of thirty-eight per cent—and more than once it
seemed to us who were sitting in the tonneau that the car would tip over
backward, like a horse that rears until it overbalances itself. Crater
Lake is one of those places where the most calloused globe-trotter, from,
whom neither the Pyramids nor the Taj Mahal would wring an exclamation
of approval, gives, perforce, a gasp of real astonishment and admiration.
Part of this is due, no doubt, to the startling suddenness with which you
come upon it and to its dramatic situation; the rest to its surpassing
beauty and its extraordinary colour. The lake, which occupies the crater
of an extinct volcano the size and height of Mount Shasta, is almost
circular, half a mile deep, five miles in circumference, and nearly a
mile and a half above sea-level, the rocky walls which surround it being
in places two thousand feet high and as sheer and smooth as the side of
an upright piano. But its outstanding feature is its colour, for it is
the bluest blue you ever saw or dreamed of: as blue as lapis lazuli,
as a forget-me-not, as an Italian sky, as a baby’s eyes (provided, of
course, that it is a blue-eyed baby), or as a Monday morning. It looks,
indeed, like a gigantic wash-tub, filled with bluing, in which some weary
colossus has been condemned to wash the clothing of the world.
Nothing that we had seen since leaving Mexico so profoundly stirred my
imagination as that portion of our road which stretched northward from
Crater Lake, through Crescent and Shaniko, to The Dalles. Every few miles
we passed groups of dilapidated and decaying buildings, with sunken roofs
and boarded windows, which must once have been busy road-houses and stage
stations, for near them were the remains of great barns and tumble-down
corrals, now long since disused—melancholy reminders of those days, half
a century agone, when down this lonely road that we were following
plodded mile-long wagon-trains, the heads of women and children at
every rent and loophole of the canvas tops, the men, rifle on shoulder,
marching in the dust on either hand. Few, indeed, of these pioneers were
rich in anything save children, affluent except in expectations; yet
weather, roads, fare, mishaps—nothing daunted them, for they were “going
West.”
Roughly speaking, it is a hundred miles from Shaniko to The Dalles, over
a road most of which is back-breakingly rough and all of which is so
intolerably dusty that we felt as though we were covered with sandpaper
instead of skin. But the scenery of the last half dozen miles caused us
to forgive, if not to forget, the discomforts and the monotony of those
preceding, for in them we dropped down through the wild and winding
gorge which the Deschutes follows on its way to join hands with its big
sister, the Columbia. The nearer we drew to the mighty river the higher
our expectations grew, and every time we topped a rise or swung around
a granite shoulder we searched for it eagerly, just as our migrating
predecessors must have done. But, owing to the high, sheer cliffs that
wall it in, we caught no glimpse of it whatever until, our road emerging
from the cañon’s mouth upon the precipice’s brink, we suddenly found
ourselves looking down upon it as it lay below us in all its shimmering
and sinuous beauty, its silvery length winding away, away, away: eastward
to its birthplace in the country of the Kootenai: westward to Astoria and
its mother, the sea. Far below us, so far below that it looked like the
little wooden villages you see in the windows of toy stores, the white
houses of The Dalles were clustered upon the river’s banks.
* * * * *
The highroad, which had been palpably ailing for some time, took a sudden
turn for the worse a few miles south of The Dalles, so that, when it
found the great, peaceful, silent-flowing Columbia athwart its path, the
temptation became too great to resist and it ended its misery in the
river, leaving us, its faithful friends, who had borne it company all the
way from Mexico, disconsolate upon the bank. Thus it befell that we were
compelled to put the car and ourselves aboard a boat and trust to steam,
instead of gasoline, to bear us over the ensuing section of our journey.
It was a humiliating thing for motorists to have to do, of course—but
what would you? There were no more roads. We were in the deplorable
position of the man who told his wife that he came home because all the
other places were closed. And think how keenly the veteran car—
“Me that ’ave been what I’ve been,
Me that ’ave gone where I’ve gone,
Me that ’ave seen what I’ve seen”
—must have felt the disgrace of being turned over to a crew of stevedores
and a ruffianly, tobacco-chewing second mate, who unceremoniously
sandwiched it between a pile of milk-cans and a crate of cabbages on the
lower deck of a chug-achug-chugging stern-wheel river boat.
But before the rickety deck chairs had ceased their creaking complaints
about the burden we had imposed on them we were congratulating ourselves
on the circumstance that had forced us to exchange a hot and dusty
highroad for a cool and silent waterway. To me there is something
irresistibly fascinating and seductive about a river. I always find
myself wondering where it comes from, and what strange things it has
seen along its course, and where it is going to, and I invariably have a
hankering to take ship and keep it company. And the greater the stream,
the greater its fascination, because, of course, it has travelled so much
farther. Now the Columbia, as that friend of our boyhood, Huck Finn,
would have put it, is no slouch of a river. If its kinks and twists were
carefully straightened out it would reach half-way across the continent,
or as far as from New York to Kansas City. It is somewhat disturbing for
one who visits the valley of the Columbia for the first time, with the
purpose of writing about it, to have these facts suddenly thrown, as it
were, in his face, particularly if, like myself, he has been brought up
in that part of the country where the Hudson is regarded as the only real
river in America—doubtless because it washes the shores of Manhattan—and
where all other waterways are looked upon as being not much better than
creeks. I felt like apologising to somebody, and when, on top of all
this, I was told that the Columbia and its tributaries drain a region
equal in area to all the States along our Atlantic seaboard put together,
I had a sudden desire to go ashore at the next landing and take a train
back home.
Though of British birth, for it has its source above the Canadian
line in the country of the Kootenai, the Columbia emends this
unfortunate circumstance by becoming naturalised when it is still a
slender stripling, dividing its allegiance, however, between Oregon
and Washington, for which it serves as a boundary for upward of four
hundred miles. It is not only the father of Northwestern waters, but it
is the big brother of all those streams, from the Straits of Behring
to the Straits of Magellan, which call the Pacific Ocean “grandpa.” By
white-hulled river steamer, by panting power-boat, by produce-laden
barge, by bark canoe, by the goatskin raft called _kelek_, I have
loitered my leisurely way down many famous rivers—the St. Lawrence, the
Hudson, the Mississippi, the Fraser, the Skeena, the Rio Balsas, the
Rhine, the Danube, the Volga, the Euphrates, the Ganges, the Zambesi,
the Nile—and I assert, after having duly weighed my words, that in the
continuity and grandeur of its scenery the Columbia is the superior of
them all. If you think that I am carried away by enthusiasm you had
better go and see it for yourself.
It was Carlyle—was it not?—who remarked that all great works produce an
unpleasant impression on first acquaintance. It is so with the Columbia.
We saw it first on a broiling August day from the heights above
Celilo—the great, silent, mysterious river winding away into the unknown
between banks of lava as sinister and forbidding as the flanks of Etna,
and with a sun beating down upon it from a sky of molten brass. There
were no grassy banks, no trees, no flowers, no vegetation of any kind,
none of the things that one usually associates with a river. But when the
steamer bears you around the first of those frowning cliffs that rise
sheer from the surface of the river below The Dalles—ah, well, that is
quite another matter.
Since Time began, the sheets of lava which give The Dalles its name,
by compressing the half-mile-wide river into a channel barely sixscore
feet across, have effectually obstructed continuous navigation upon the
Upper Columbia. But, as towns multiplied and population increased along
the upper reaches of the great river and its tributaries in Washington
and Oregon, in Montana and Idaho, this hinderance to the navigation of
so splendid a waterway became intolerable, unthinkable, absurd. At last
the frock-coated gentlemen in Congress were prodded into action, and the
passage of a bill for the construction of a canal around The Dalles,
at Celilo, was the result. Came then keen-eyed, self-reliant men who,
jeering at the obstacles which Nature had heaped in their path, proceeded
to slash a canal through eight miles of shifting sands and basalt rock,
so that hereafter the fruit growers and farmers and ranchers as far
inland as Lewiston, in Idaho, can send their produce down to the sea in
ships.
“The trouble with the Columbia,” complained the Lady, “is that it’s all
scenery and no romance. It’s too big, too prosaic, too commercial. It
doesn’t arouse any overwhelming enthusiasm in me to be told that this
river irrigates goodness knows how many thousand square miles of land,
or that the top of that mountain over there is so many thousand feet
above the level of the sea, or that so many thousand barrels of apples
were grown last year in the valley we just passed and that they brought
so many dollars a barrel. Facts like those are all well enough in an
almanac, because no one ever reads almanacs anyway, but they don’t
interest me and I don’t believe that they interest many other visitors,
either. If a river hasn’t any romance connected with it, it isn’t much
better than a canal. Don’t you remember that rock in the Bosphorus, near
Scutari, to which Leander used to swim out to see Hero, and how when we
passed it the passengers would all rush over to that side of the deck,
and how the steamer would list until her rail was almost under water, and
how the Turkish officers would get frightened half to death and shove the
people back? You don’t see the passengers on this boat threatening to
capsize it because of their anxiety to see something romantic, do you?
I should say not. Do you remember Kerbela, that town on the Euphrates,
where all Persians hope to be buried when they die, and how, long before
we reached there, we could smell the Caravans of the Dead which were
carrying the bodies there from across the desert? And those crumbling,
ivy-covered castles along the Rhine, with their queer legends and
traditions and superstitions? That’s what I mean by romance, and you know
as well as I do that there is nothing romantic about apple orchards and
salmon canneries and sawmills. Is there?”
“Pardon me, madam,” said a gentleman who had been seated so close to us
that he could not help overhearing what she said and who had been unable
to conceal his disagreement with the views she had expressed, “but do
you see that island over there near the Washington shore? The long, low
one with the little white monument sticking up at the end of it. That is
Memaloose—the Island of the Dead. It is the Indian Valhalla. Talk about
the Persians whose bodies are borne across the desert to be buried at
Kerbela! Did you happen to know that on the slopes of that island are
buried untold thousands of Chinooks, whose bodies were brought on the
backs of men hundreds of miles through the wilderness or in canoes down
long and lonely rivers that they might find their last resting-places
in its sacred soil? And the monument that you see marks the grave of a
frontiersman who was as romantic a character as you will find in the
pages of Fenimore Cooper. His name was Victor Trevet; he knew and liked
the Indians; and he asked to be buried on Memaloose that his bones might
lie among those of ‘honest men.’ Is it legend and tradition that you say
the river lacks? A few miles ahead of us, at the Cascades, the river was
once spanned, according to the Indian legend, by a stupendous natural
bridge of rock. The Indians called it the Bridge of the Gods. The great
river flowed under it, and on it lived a witch woman named Loowit, who
had charge of the only fire in the world. Seeing how wretched was the lot
of the fireless tribes, who had to live on uncooked meats and vegetables,
she begged permission of the gods to give them fire. Her request was
granted and the condition of the Indians was thus enormously improved.
So gratified were the gods by Loowit’s consideration for the welfare
of the Indians that they promised to grant any request that she might
make. Womanlike, she promptly asked for youth and beauty. Whereupon she
was transformed into a maiden whose loveliness would have caused Lina
Cavalieri to go out of the professional beauty business. The news of
her beauty spreading among the tribes like fire in summer grass, there
came numberless youths who pleaded for her hand, or, rather, for the
face and figure that went with it. Among them were two young chieftains:
Klickitat from the north and Wiyeast from the west. As she was unable
to decide between them, they and their tribesmen decided to settle the
rivalry with the tomahawk. But the gods, angry at this senseless waste of
lives over a pretty woman, put Loowit and her two gentlemen friends to
death and sent the great bridge on which she had dwelt crashing down into
the river. But as they had all three been good to look upon in life, so
the gods, who were evidently æsthetic, made them good to look upon even
in death by turning them into snow peaks. Wiyeast became the mountain
which we palefaces call Mount Hood; Klickitat they transformed into the
peak we know as Mount Adams; while Mount Saint Helens is the beautiful
form taken by the fair Loowit. Thus was the wonderful Bridge of the Gods
destroyed and the Columbia dammed by the débris which fell into it. In
a few minutes we will be at the Cascades and you can see the ruins of
the bridge for yourself. And, if you still have any lingering doubts as
to the truth of the story, why, there is Klickitat in his white blanket
rising above the forests to the right, and Wiyeast is over there to your
left, and ahead of us, down the river, is the Loowit lady disguised as
Mount Saint Helens. So you see there is no room for doubt.
“You assert that the Columbia is lacking in romance because, forsooth,
no Leander has swum across it to see a Hero. Good heavens, my dear young
lady, I can tell you a story that has more all-wool-and-a-yard-wide
romance in it than a dozen such Hellespontine fables. Did you never hear
of Whitman the missionary, who, instead of crossing a measly strait to
win a woman, crossed a continent and won an empire?
“In the early forties Whitman established a mission station near the
present site of Walla Walla. Hearing rumours that our government was
on the point of accommodatingly ceding the Valley of the Columbia to
England in return for some paltry fishing rights off the banks of
Newfoundland—the government officials of those days evidently preferred
codfish to salmon—he rode overland to Washington in the dead of winter,
through blinding snow-storms, swimming icy rivers, subsisting on his
pack-mules and his dogs when his food ran out, facing death by torture at
the hands of hostile Indians. Gaining admission to the White House in his
dress of furs and buckskin, with his feet and fingers terribly frozen,
he so impressed President Tyler and Secretary of State Webster by his
vivid description of the richness and fertility of the region which they
were on the point of ceding to England that he saved the entire Pacific
Northwest to the Union. If that isn’t sufficient romance for you, then
I’m afraid you’re hard to please.”
“I surrender,” said the Lady. “Your old Columbia has plenty of romance,
after all. The trouble is that tourists don’t know these interesting
things that you’ve just been telling us and they _do_ know all about the
Danube and the Rhine.”
“That’s easily remedied,” said I. “I’ll tell them about it myself.”
And that, my friends, is precisely what I have just been trying to do.
* * * * *
“Next stop Hood River!” bawled the purser.