kipper lost, and "Multnomah,"
which was the old Indian name for the place and means "Down the Waters,"
became prosaic Portland. Because some Methodist missionaries preferred a
name with a Biblical twang to the Indian "Chemeketa," meaning the "Place
of Peace," Oregon's capital of to-day became Salem and the title which
the red men gave their council ground was abandoned.

The Great River was first known as the Oregon, just why no authority
seems to tell us reliably but later became the Columbia when the ship of
that name sailed across its bar. Jonathan Carver's choice in names,
however, if no longer bestowed upon the river, soon became that of all
its lower regions, and they acquired the lasting title of the Oregon
Country.

The old Oregon, the Columbia of to-day, was the gateway to the Pacific
for the explorers and the immigrants of yesterday. For Lewis and Clark
it opened a friendly passageway through the mountain ranges, and
likewise for the human stream of immigration which later followed its
banks from the East. So is it too a modern portal of prosperity for
Portland, as this greatest river of the West concentrates the tonnage of
much of three vast states by water grades at Portland's door, and two
transcontinental railroads follow its banks, draining the wealth of the
Inland Empire while enriching it, just as the river itself physically
drains and adds wealth to the territory it traverses.

[Illustration: Mount Hood from Lost Lake

Copyrighted photo by W. A. Raymond, Moro, Ore.]

To us the Columbia was a gateway to the hinterland, for our pilgrimage
upon it was easterly, up into the land of sunshine beyond Mount Hood
and the Cascade mountain range, starting, on an impulse, after viewing
the snow-covered barriers from the heights of Portland. And as we
journeyed easterly up the great river, whose water came from lakes of
the Canadian Rockies distant fourteen hundred miles, we found ourselves
at once in a region of surpassing scenery and a land of quaint Indian
legends.

A great wall of mountains shuts off the coastal regions from eastern
Oregon and Washington. The two divisions are as dissimilar in climate
and vegetation as night and day. To the west is rain and lush growth; to
the east, drought and semi-arid desert. West of the Cascades are fir
forests cluttered with underbrush and soggy with springs, while east are
dry pine lands, park-like in their open beauty. The high plains of the
hinterland are yellow