nd along the
coast, stirring the waters and sky into fine, lively pictures, greatly
to the delight of wandering lovers of wildness.

XXIII. The Rivers of Oregon

Turning from the woods and their inhabitants to the rivers, we find
that while the former are rarely seen by travelers beyond the immediate
borders of the settlements, the great river of Oregon draws crowds
of enthusiastic admirers to sound its praises. Every summer since the
completion of the first overland railroad, tourists have been coming to
it in ever increasing numbers, showing that in general estimation the
Columbia is one of the chief attractions of the Pacific Coast. And well
it deserves the admiration so heartily bestowed upon it. The beauty
and majesty of its waters, and the variety and grandeur of the scenery
through which it flows, lead many to regard it as the most interesting
of all the great rivers of the continent, notwithstanding the claims of
the other members of the family to which it belongs and which nobody can
measure--the Fraser, McKenzie, Saskatchewan, the Missouri, Yellowstone,
Platte, and the Colorado, with their glacier and geyser fountains, their
famous canyons, lakes, forests, and vast flowery prairies and plains.
These great rivers and the Columbia are intimately related. All draw
their upper waters from the same high fountains on the broad, rugged
uplift of the Rocky Mountains, their branches interlacing like the
branches of trees. They sing their first songs together on the heights;
then, collecting their tributaries, they set out on their grand journey
to the Atlantic, Pacific, or Arctic Ocean.

The Columbia, viewed as one from the sea to the mountains, is like a
rugged, broad-topped, picturesque old oak about six hundred miles long
and nearly a thousand miles wide measured across the spread of its upper
branches, the main limbs gnarled and swollen with lakes and lakelike
expansions, while innumerable smaller lakes shine like fruit among the
smaller branches. The main trunk extends back through the Coast and
Cascade Mountains in a general easterly direction for three hundred
miles, when it divides abruptly into two grand branches which bend off
to the northeastward and southeastward.

The south branch, the longer of the two, called the Snake, or Lewis,
River, extends into the Rocky Mountains as far as the Yellowstone
National Park, where its head tributaries interlace with those of the
Colorado, Missouri, and Yello