s, and deserts, while some of the highest tributaries reach
into Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada. Throughout a great part of its course it
is countersunk in a black lava plain and shut in by mural precipices a
thousand feet high, gloomy, forbidding, and unapproachable, although the
gloominess of its canyon is relieved in some manner by its many falls
and springs, some of the springs being large enough to appear as the
outlets of subterranean rivers. They gush out from the faces of the
sheer black walls and descend foaming with brave roar and beauty to
swell the flood below.

From where the river skirts the base of the Blue Mountains its
surroundings are less forbidding. Much of the country is fertile, but
its canyon is everywhere deep and almost inaccessible. Steamers make
their way up as far as Lewiston, a hundred and fifty miles, and receive
cargoes of wheat at different points through chutes that extend down
from the tops of the bluffs. But though the Hudson's Bay Company
navigated the north fork to its sources, they depended altogether on
pack animals for the transportation of supplies and furs between the
Columbia and Fort Hall on the head of the south fork, which shows how
desperately unmanageable a river it must be.

A few miles above the mouth of the Snake the Yakima, which drains a
considerable portion of the Cascade Range, enters from the northwest.
It is about a hundred and fifty miles long, but carries comparatively
little water, a great part of what it sets out with from the base of
the mountains being consumed in irrigated fields and meadows in passing
through the settlements along its course, and by evaporation on the
parched desert plains. The grand flood of the Columbia, now from half a
mile to a mile wide, sweeps on to the westward, holding a nearly direct
course until it reaches the mouth of the Willamette, where it turns to
the northward and flows fifty miles along the main valley between the
Coast and Cascade Ranges ere it again resumes its westward course to
the sea. In all its course from the mouth of the Yakima to the sea, a
distance of three hundred miles, the only considerable affluent from the
northward is the Cowlitz, which heads in the glaciers of Mount Rainier.

From the south and east it receives the Walla-Walla and Umatilla, rather
short and dreary-looking streams, though the plains they pass through
have proved fertile, and their upper tributaries in the Blue Mountains,
shaded with tall pine