who had turned himself into a guide-book for our benefit. “In some of
the orchards up the valley you’ll find apples with paper letters pasted
on them: ‘C de P’ for the Café de Paris, you know, and ‘W-A’ for the
Waldorf-Astoria, and ‘G R & I’ for Georgius Rex et Imperator—which is
_not_ the name of the restaurant. They paste the letters on quite
carefully when the apples are still green upon the tree, and when they
ripen the paper is torn off, leaving the yellow initials on the bright
red fruit. Those are the apples that they serve at royal banquets
and that they charge a dollar apiece for in the smart restaurants in
Europe. I don’t mean to imply that all of the Hood River apples are thus
initialled to order, but some of them are. The average value of the land
in that valley, cultivated and uncultivated, is three hundred and forty
dollars an acre, and if a man wanted to purchase an orchard in bearing
he would have to pay at least four thousand dollars an acre for it. Some
people think that it was the original Garden of Eden. If it was, I don’t
blame Eve for stealing the apple. I’d steal a Hood River apple myself if
I got the chance.”
Had the second mate been a little more obliging, and had there not
been so formidable a barricade of crates and milk cans about the car,
I would have had it run ashore then and there and would have taken a
whirl through the famous apple orchards which cover the lower slopes of
Mount Hood and have kept on up the zigzag mountain road as far as the
cosy little hostelry called Cloud Cap Inn, which some public-spirited
Portlander has built upon the snow-line. Perhaps it was just as well we
didn’t, however, for I learned afterward that the famous valley is only
about twenty miles long, so, if we had not put on the emergency brake
before we started, we would have run through it before we could have
stopped and would not have seen it at all. Nowhere in Switzerland do I
recall a picture of such surpassing splendour as that which stood before
us, as though on a titanic easel, as, from the vantage of the steamer’s
upper deck, we looked up the vista formed by this fragrant, verdant
valley toward the great white cone of Mount Hood. It is, indeed, so
very beautiful that those Americans who know and love the world’s white
rooftrees can find scant justification for turning their faces toward
the Alps when here, in the upper left-hand corner of their own country,
are mountains which would make the ghost of the great Whymper moan for
an alpenstock and hobnailed boots. This startlingly sudden transition
from orchards groaning with fruit to dense primeval forests, and from
these forests to the stately, isolated snow peaks, is very different
from Switzerland, of course. Indeed, to compare these mountains of the
Pacific Northwest with the Alps, as is so frequently done, seems to me
to be a grave injustice to them both. The Alps form a wild and angry
sea of icy mountains, and we have nothing in America to which they can
be fittingly compared. The Cascades, on the other hand, form a great
system of lofty forest-wrapped ranges surmounted by the towering isolated
peaks of snowy volcanoes, and Europe contains nothing to equal them. I
am perfectly aware, of course, that the very large number of Americans
who spend their summers in the ascent of the orthodox Swiss peaks—more
often than not, if the truth were known, by means of funicular railways
or through telescopes on hotel piazzas—look with scorn and contumely
upon these mountains of the far Nor’west, which they regard as home-made
and unfashionable and vulgar and not worth bothering about. Perhaps they
are not aware, however, that no less an authority on mountaineering than
James Bryce (I don’t recall the title that he has taken now that he has
been made a peer, and no one would recognise him if I used it) said not
long ago, in speaking of these sentinels that guard the Columbia:
“We have nothing more beautiful in Switzerland or Tyrol, in Norway or
the Pyrenees. The combination of ice scenery with woodland scenery of
the grandest type is to be found nowhere in the Old World, unless it be
in the Himalayas, and, so far as we know, nowhere else on the American
continent.”
Which but serves to point the truth that foreigners are more appreciative
of the beauties and grandeurs of our country than we are ourselves.
* * * * *
At the Cascades the Columbia takes a drop of half a hundred feet and
we had, perforce, to bide our time in the locks, by means of which the
rapids have been circumvented, until the waters found their level. It
is not until the Cascades are passed that the scenery for which the
Columbia is famous begins in all its sublimity and grandeur. The Great
Artist has painted pictures more colourful, more sensational, perhaps, as
the Grand Cañon, for example, the Yellowstone, and the Sahara, but none
which combines the qualities of strength and restfulness as this mighty
river, flowing swiftly, silently between the everlasting hills. From the
shores the orchards and the gardens rise, terrace above terrace, until
they become merged in the forest-covered ranges, and above the ranges
rise the august snow peaks, solitary, silent, like a line of sentries
strung along the horizon. At times, particularly in the early morning and
again at sunset, these snow mountains present that singular appearance
familiar to the traveller in the Himalayas and the Cordilleras, when
the snowy cone seems to be floating ethereally upon a sea of mist which
completely shrouds the hills and forests at its base. Immediately below
the Cascades commences the series of waterfalls for which the lower
reaches of the Columbia are famous, the granite cliffs which, for nearly
twoscore miles border the Oregon shore with a sheer wall of rock, being
scored at frequent intervals by what seem, from a distance, to be ribbons
of shining silver. As the boat draws nearer, however, you see that what
looked like ribbons are really mountain streams which are so impatient to
join their mother, the Columbia, that, instead of taking the more sedate
but circuitous route, they fling themselves tempestuously over the brink
of the sheer cliff into the arms of the parent stream. First come the
Horsetail Falls, whose falling waters, blown by the wind into silvery
strands, are suggestive of the flowing tail of a white Arab; then, in
quick succession, the Oneonta Falls, at the end of a narrow gorge which
penetrates the cliffs for a mile or more; the nine-hundred-feet-high
Multnomah, the highest falls in all the northwest country if not, indeed,
on the entire Pacific Coast; the Bridal Veil, as radiantly beautiful as
its namesake of the Yosemite; and finally, just below the great monolith
rising from the river known as Rooster Rock, the Falls of Latourelle. On
the opposite shore the mighty promontory known as Cape Horn rises five
hundred feet above the surface of the river, and, a few miles farther
up-stream, Castle Rock, whose turreted crags bear a striking resemblance
to some stronghold of the Middle Ages, attains to twice that height. By
the time the steamer reaches the mighty natural gateway known as the
Pillars of Hercules, the traveller is actually surfeited with grandeur
and is quite ready for the simple, friendly, pastoral scenes again, just
as one after a season of Wagnerian opera welcomes the simple airs and the
old-fashioned songs.
[Illustration: “WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON.”
The Columbia from Saint Peter’s Dome, with Mount Adams in the distance.
“The Great Artist has painted pictures more colorful, more sensational,
perhaps, but none which so combine the qualities of strength and
restfulness as this mighty river.”]
As I do not chew popcorn, peanuts, gum, or candy, nor munch dripping
ice-cream cones, and as I have an unconquerable aversion to other
people doing those unpleasant things in my immediate vicinity, I left
the others, who did not seem to mind such minor annoyances, among the
excursionists upon the upper deck and made my way below. After clambering
over great piles of crates, sacks, and barrels filled with Columbia River
produce, I finally succeeded in finding a secluded spot in the vessel’s
bows, whence I could watch, undisturbed by sticky-fingered youngsters or
idle chatter, the varied commerce of the mighty water road. Stern-wheel,
twin-funnelled passenger boats zigzagged from shore to shore to pick up
the passengers and freight that patiently awaited their coming; rusty
freighters scuttled down-stream laden with fruit for the coast towns
and salmon for the Astoria canneries; spick-and-span pleasure craft,
with shining brass work and graceful, tapering spars, daintily picked
their way through the press of river traffic as a pretty girl picks
her way along a crowded street; grimy fishing craft, their sails as
weather-beaten as the faces of the men that raise them, danced by us,
eager for home and supper and the evening fire; great log rafts wallowed
by, sent down by the forests to propitiate the greedy sawmills, whose
sharp-toothed jaws devour the sacrifice and scream for more.
Perhaps the most interesting and characteristic feature of the landscape
along the lower Columbia are the fish-wheels—ingenious contrivances,
twenty to forty feet in diameter and six to eight feet across, which
look like pocket editions of the passenger-carrying Ferris wheel at the
Chicago Exposition. The wheels, which are hung in substantial frameworks
close to the banks, where the salmon run the thickest, are revolved by
the current, which keeps the wire-meshed scoops with which each pair of
spokes are fitted for ever lifting from the water. The great schools
of salmon are guided toward the wheel by means of a lattice dam which
reaches out into the river like the arm of a false friend, and, before
the unsuspecting fish know what has happened to them, they are hoisted
into the air in the wire scoops and dumped into an inclined trough, down
which they slide into a fenced-in pool, where the fishermen can get them
at their leisure. They are then strung on wires and attached to a barrel
which acts as a buoy, the barrel, sometimes with a ton of fish trailing
behind it like the tail to a kite, floating down-stream to the nearest
cannery, where a man in a launch is on the lookout and tows them ashore.
Months later, in Pekin or Peoria, in Rome or Rumford Falls, or wherever
else you may happen to be dining, you will see the item “Columbia River
Salmon” on the hotel menu.
As I hung over the steamer’s bow, with the incomparable landscape
slipping past me as though on Burton Holmes’s picture screen, and no
sound save the muffled throbbing of the engines and the ripple of
the water running aft along the hull, I unconsciously yielded to the
Columbia’s mystic spell. I closed my eyes and in a moment the surface
of the river seemed peopled with the ghosts of the history makers.
Nez Percés, in paint and feathers, slipped silently along, in the
shadow of yonder wooded bank, in their barken war canoes. Two lean and
sun-bronzed white men, clad in the fringed buckskin of the adventuring
frontiersman, floated past me down the mighty stream which they had
trekked across a continent to find. Half-breed trappers, chanting at
the paddles, descended with precious freights of fur. A square-rigged
merchantman poked its inquisitive bowsprit around a rocky headland,
and as she passed I noted the words _Columbia, of Boston_, in raised
gilt letters on her stern, and I remembered that it was from this same
square-rigged vessel that the river took its name. A warship, flying the
flag of England and with the black muzzles of guns peering from its rows
of ports, cautiously ascended, the leadsmen in the shrouds sounding
for river bars. Log forts and trading-posts and mission stations once
again crowned the encircling hills. Forgotten battles blew by on the
evening breeze. A yellow dust cloud rose above the river bank and out
of it emerged a plodding wagon-train. The smoke of pioneer camp-fires
spiralled skyward from those rich valleys where in reality the cattle
browse and the orchards droop with fruit. From the vantage of a rocky
promontory a ghostly war party peered down upon me—a paleface—taking a
summer’s holiday along that mighty stream upon whose bosom of old went
forth the bepainted fighting men. The furtive twilight slipped behind
night’s velvet curtain. The mountains changed from jade to coral, from
coral to sapphire, from sapphire to amethyst. The snow peaks gleamed
luminously, like sheeted ghosts, against the purple velvet of the sky.
The night-breeze rose and I shivered. The steamer swung silently around
a bend in the river and, all suddenly, the darkness ahead was sprinkled
with a million blinking fireflies. At least they looked like fireflies.
“Portland!” shouted a raucous voice, far off somewhere, on the upper
deck. “Portland! All ashore!”
I felt a hand upon my shoulder. It was the Lady.
“Where on earth have you been?” she asked. “We have been hunting for you
everywhere.”
“I’ve been on a long journey,” said I.
XI
A FRONTIER ARCADY
“Oh, woods of the West, I am sighing to-day
For the sea songs your voices repeat,
For the evergreen glades, for the glades far away
From the stifling air of the street.
“And I long, ah, I long to be with you again,
And to dream in that region of rest,
Forever apart from this warring of men—
Oh, wonderful woods of the West.”
XI
A FRONTIER ARCADY
“_Arcady—the home of piping shepherds and coy shepherdesses, where rustic
simplicity and plenty satisfied the ambition of untutored hearts and
where ambition and its crimes were unknown._”
Some pamphlet writer with a gift for turning phrases has called
Oregon “The Land That Lures.” And, so far as home and fortune seekers
are concerned, it is. Whether it is the spirit of romance that our
people have always associated with the great Northwest; whether it is
the glamour of its booming rivers and its silent, axe-ripe forests
or the appeal of its soft and balmy climate; or whether it is the
extraordinary opportunities it offers for the acquirement of modest
fortunes before one is too old to enjoy them, I do not know, but the
undeniable fact remains that no region between the Portlands exercises
so irresistible a fascination for the man who knows the trick of coaxing
a fortune from the soil as this great, rich, hospitable, unfenced,
forest-and-mountain-and-stream, meadow-and-orchard-and-home land that
stretches from the Columbia south to the Siskiyous. It may be that
California holds more attractions for the man who has already made his
fortune, but certainly Oregon is the place to make the fortune in. No
Western State is essentially less “Western” in the accepted sense of
the term. This is due in part, no doubt, to the fact that it has been
longer settled by Americans than any other portion of the Pacific Coast.
Portland was a thriving city, remember, when St. Paul and Minneapolis
were little more than trading-posts on the frontier. Settlers from the
Atlantic seaboard and from the Middle West find themselves, upon reaching
Oregon, in the midst of “home folks” and all the friendly, kindly,
homely things that the term implies: ice-cream sociables and grange
meetings and church picnics and literary societies and debating clubs and
county fairs. The name of the State capital is inseparably associated
with Puritan New England, one of its largest cities is named after the
Massachusetts town which gave its name to rum, and I can show you a
score of towns whose peaceful, elm-shaded streets and white-porticoed,
red-brick houses might almost—but hot quite—deceive you into thinking
that you are in Cooperstown, N. Y., or Newburyport, Mass., or Biddeford,
Me. Almost, as I have said, but not quite, for all of these Oregonian
towns, despite the staidness and sobriety of their appearance, are
animated by an enthusiasm, an up-to-dateness, by an unshakable faith in
their future, that is essentially a characteristic of the West.
The orthodox way of entering Oregon from the south is by way of Ashland,
Medford, and Grant’s Pass, and so northward, through Roseburg and
Eugene and Albany and Salem, to Portland. But, as I have related in the
preceding chapter, we deliberately chose the back-stairs route, crossing
the California-Oregon line at Klamath Lake and motoring northward, along
the trail of the Lewis and Clark expedition, via Crater Lake and the
valley of the Deschutes to The Dalles, and thence down the Columbia to
Portland. We prided ourselves on having thus obtained an extraordinarily
comprehensive idea of the State and its resources, not to mention having
traversed a region which is quite inaccessible to the tourist unless he
travels, as we did, by motor-car, but when we came to talk with some
people from western Oregon we found that we didn’t know nearly as much
about the State as we thought we did.
“How did you find the roads in the Willamette Valley?” inquired a friend
with whom we were dining one night in Portland.
“We haven’t seen the Willamette Valley,” I explained. “You see, we came
round the other way.”
“I suppose you’ve been down to Salem, though—nice city, Salem.”
“No,” I was forced to admit, “we haven’t been to Salem.”
“What did you think of the Marble Halls? Many people claim they’re finer
than the Mammoth Cave.”
“The Marble Halls? Where are they? What are they? I never heard of them.”
“I suppose you had some fine fishing in the Grant’s Pass country. I hear
that the trout are running big down there this season.”
“No, we didn’t come through Grant’s Pass.”
“Well, you surely don’t mean to tell me that you didn’t visit the Rogue
River Valley—the apple-cellar of the world?”
“Sorry to say we didn’t.”
“Nor the valley of the Umpqua?”
“No.”
“Well,” after a long and painful pause, “what in the name of Heaven
_have_ you seen?”
“I think,” said I, turning to the others, “that the thing for us to do is
to turn the car south again and see Oregon. Else we shall never be able
to hold up our heads and look an Oregonian in the eye. The thousand miles
or so of the State that we’ve just come through apparently don’t count.”
Though I made the remark facetiously, it contained a good-sized germ
of truth. Just now the back country of Oregon, the hinterland, as our
Teutonic friends would call it, doesn’t count for very much. It is going
to count tremendously, mind you, in the not far distant future, when
the railroads now under construction have opened it up to civilisation
and commerce and when it is settled by the European hordes that will
pour into it through the gateway of Panama. As things stand at present,
however, the wealth and prosperity of Oregon are concentrated in that
comparatively narrow but incredibly fertile zone which lies between the
sea and the mile-high mountain wall formed by the Cascades, and whose
farms and orchards are watered by the Willamette, the Umpqua, and the
Rogue.
It was one of those autumn days so characteristic of the Pacific
Northwest, which seem to be a combination of an Italian June and a
Devonshire September, when we slipped out of Portland’s rush and bustle
and turmoil and turned our front tires toward the south and the open
country. For a dozen miles or more our road, built high on the hill slope
above the broad reaches of the lower Willamette, commanded as entrancing
a vista of beautiful homes as I have ever seen. For six solid miles south
of Portland the banks of the Willamette are bordered by country houses of
shingle, stone, and stucco, rising from the most beautiful rose gardens
this side of Persia (Portland, you know, is called “The City of Roses”)
and with shaven lawns sweeping gently down, like unrolled carpets, to the
river’s edge. Through gaps in the screen of shrubbery which lines the
highway we caught fleeting glimpses, as we whirled past, of vine-covered
garages housing shiny motor-cars, while along the river front were moored
lean power-boats, every line of them bespeaking speed, for those who are
fortunate enough—and wealthy enough—to own homes upon the Willamette are
able to run in to their offices in the city either by road or river.
Far in the distance the Fujiyama-like cone of Mount Saint Helens rose
above the miles of intervening forest, and, farther to the southward,
the hoary head of Mount Hood. About this portion of residential Portland
which lies along the banks of the Willamette there is a suggestion of
the Thames near Hampton Court, a hint of the Seine near Saint Cloud, a
subtle reminder of those residences which have been built by the rich
of Budapest along the Danube, but most of all it recalls Stockholm. This
is due, I suppose, to the proximity of the forests which surround the
city, to the snow-capped mountains which loom up behind them, and to the
ever-present scent of balsam in the air.
It is fifty miles or thereabout from Portland to Salem, which is the
capital of the State, and when the roads are dry you can leave one city
after an early dinner and reach the other before the theatre curtains
have gone up for the first act. After a rain, however, it is a different
matter altogether, for the roads, which leave a great deal to be desired,
are for the most part of red clay, and so slippery that a car, even with
chains on all four wheels, slips and slides and staggers like a Scotchman
going home after celebrating the birthday of Robert Burns. Salem is
as pleasing to the eye as a certified cheque. It is asphalted and
electric-lighted and landscaped to the very limit. Though the residential
architecture of the city shows unmistakable traces of the influence of
both Queen Anne and Mary Anne, their artistic deficiencies are more than
counter-balanced by the pleasant, shady lawns and the broad, hospitable
piazzas, which seem to say to the passer-by: “Come right up, friend,
and sit down and make yourself to home.” That’s the most striking
characteristic of the place—hospitality.
The gates of the State Fair were thrown open the same day that we
arrived in Salem, though I do not wish to be understood as intimating
that the two events bore any relation to each other. Now, a fair is
generally a pretty reliable index to the agricultural condition of a
region. The first thing that strikes the visitor upon entering the
gates of a New England fair is the extraordinary number of ramshackle,
mud-stained, “democrat” wagons lined up along the fence, the horses
munching contentedly in their nose-bags. The first thing that struck me
as we entered the grounds of the Oregon State Fair was the extraordinary
number of shiny new automobiles. Save en route to a Vanderbilt Cup
Race, I don’t recall ever having seen so many motor-cars on one stretch
of road as we encountered on our way to the fair-grounds. They made a
noise like the droning of a billion bumblebees. Though there was, of
course, a preponderance of little cars, there were also any number of big
six-cylinder seven-passenger machines, for your Oregonian is nothing if
not up to the minute. Instead of jogging in from the farm in rattletrap
wagons, they came tearing down the pike in shiny, spick-and-span
automobiles; pa at the steering-wheel, hat on the back of his head and
whiskers streaming, ma in her new bonnet sitting proudly beside him,
and grandma and the youngsters filling up the tonneau. It did my heart
good to see them. There is an intangible something about a motor-car
that seems to give the most hidebound old farmer in the community a new
lease of life. A year or so ago a weekly magazine published a picture of
a group of cars at some rural gathering in the Northwest, and unwisely
labelled it: “Where the old cars go to.” It elicited a wave of indignant
letters from automobile dealers and automobile owners in that section
of the country that made the editor feel as though he had stepped on a
charged wire. That gentleman learned, at the cost of several cancelled
subscriptions, that, wherever else the second-hand cars go, they
certainly do not go to the Northwest, whose people might well take as
their motto: “The best is none too good for us.”