grain fields chiefly, and irrigation is the right
hand of agriculture; in the Willamette Valley, nature brings forth all
things in a revel of productivity.

The Columbia cleaves this great wall asunder, breaking through the
mountains in a gorge some three thousand feet deep. Here was the
mythical bridge of the gods, which, legend narrates, once spanned the
river from one mountainous bank to the other until ultimately it fell
and dammed the stream. You come upon the site of the legendary bridge
where Government locks now circumnavigate the cascades, a fall in the
river of wondrous beauty, hemmed in on north and south by timbered
mountains. Sunken forests hereabout indicate that at one time the
river's course was checked by some great dam or volcanic convulsion, and
every evidence in the geological surroundings points to stupendous
natural cataclysms which distorted the face of nature leaving the
sublime formations of the present.

As the train or boat bound up the Columbia progresses through this weird
portal, fortunate you are if told the myths of this region which so
truly is a land of legends, as we were; of the mythical struggle between
Mount Hood on the south and Mount Adams on the north, in whose progress
Hood hurled a vast bowlder at his adversary which fell short of its
intended mark, destroying the bridge; of the quaint fire legend of the
Klickitats which later I chanced upon in print in Dr. Lyman's
entertaining book _The Columbia River_.

[Illustration: Natives spearing salmon on the Columbia

Copyright 1901 by Benj. A. Gifford, The Dalles, Ore.]

[Illustration: Coasting on Mount Hood

From a photograph by Weister Co., Portland, Ore.]

A father and two sons came from the East to the land along the
Columbia, and the boys quarreled over the division of their chosen
acres. So, to end the dispute, the father shot an arrow to the west and
one to the north, bidding his sons make their homes where the arrows
fell. From one son sprang the tribe of Klickitats, while the other
founded the nation of Multnomah. Then Sahale, the Great Spirit, erected
the Cascade Range as a barrier wall between them to prevent possibility
of friction. The remainder of Dr. Lyman's pretty myth is best told in
his own words:

But for convenience' sake, Sahale had created the great tamanous
bridge under which the waters of the Columbia flowed, and on this
bridge he had stationed a witch woman called Loowit, who was to