The Columbia River Part 14

Population and Productions of the Region on the River and its Tributaries--Extent of its Navigability--Improvements Needed--Kinds of Traffic--Local Traffic--Transcontinental Traffic--World Traffic--Advantages of the River Route for these Kinds of Traffic--The Bar--The Compet.i.tion of Puget Sound--The Combination of River Route and Sound Route.

We have traced the successive eras which have brought the land of the Oregon from a wilderness to a group of powerful young American States, abounding in resources and filled to the brim with hope and enthusiasm. We have followed the River through its eras of canoe, bateau, flatboat, sail-s.h.i.+p, and steamboat, and we have seen railroads built along its banks. It remains only to cast a brief final glance at the River in its present age, and to forecast something of what seems its sure future.

It may be said that the population of those parts of Oregon, Was.h.i.+ngton, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, which are embraced in the watershed of the Columbia, is probably nearly a million and a quarter. The population of the area in British Columbia is scanty, but rapidly increasing.

The productive capacity is very great. A rough estimate of production in the valley of the Columbia for the year 1908 would probably give a grain production of seventy million bushels, a lumber output of three billion feet, a mineral output worth sixty million dollars, and a combined output of pastoral, horticultural, fis.h.i.+ng, and miscellaneous industries of fifty millions of dollars.

Such figures indicate that the Columbia River is already a factor in world commerce. Yet its development is but begun. What is to be its part in the world commerce of the future?

Inspection of a map will show that the Columbia possesses the only water-level route from the vast productive regions of the Inland Empire to the seaboard. As has been shown in the course of this volume, the River is navigable throughout the larger part of its course from Revelstoke in British Columbia to the ocean. In that distance there is one ca.n.a.l, with locks. That is at the Cascades, sixty-five miles from Portland. Before the River can be continuously navigable it will be necessary that a ca.n.a.l be constructed to overcome the obstructions at the Dalles, a few miles above the city of that name, another at Priest Rapids, seventy miles above Pasco, and still another at Kettle Falls. The Government is already engaged in the first of these works. The second seems comparatively near of accomplishment by reason of work done and projected by a powerful irrigation company. Nothing has yet been done at Kettle Falls, but it would be comparatively a light task to provide ca.n.a.l and locks at that point. Besides these larger obstructions there are several rapids at points between Kettle Falls and the Dalles which impede navigation at certain stages of water. The Government has made surveys of these sections of the River, and has announced that with comparatively small outlay the rocks and reefs may be removed, the channels deepened and straightened, and the River made navigable. One thing may be emphasised in this connection, and this is that the Columbia River has mainly a rocky bed, and hence work on the channels is permanent. It will not cut and fill, nor pile up islands and bars as does the Missouri.

In view of the capability of the River to carry great water traffic, and in view of the fact that railroad traffic is seeking and will still more seek the down-hill grade to the sea, it becomes a question of great interest what the future commerce of the River will be.

It is evident that there will be three kinds of traffic: local, transcontinental, world-wide. Each is bound to be vast beyond the calculations or even the imagination of the present. The local traffic is sure to be immense, for it is estimated that there is a million acres of land immediately contiguous to the River, irrigable and adapted to intensive farming. Present experience shows that five or ten acres of such land are sufficient to support a family. Many cities and towns are sure to grow upon the banks of the River. Its banks will sometime become populated like those of ancient Nile. Besides the immediate region of the River, there are millions upon millions of acres of land more remote, the great wheat fields and stock ranges and valley lands of tributary streams, and these broad areas will seek the river route. Much of this immense local traffic of the future will be conveyed by steamboats and barges.

The second cla.s.s of traffic will be the transcontinental. All the railroads across the continent, except those down the Columbia, are obliged to climb the Cascade Mountains, four thousand feet or more in height. With difficulty two powerful locomotives pull a freight train of forty cars up the grades, and at some points even a third is needed. But a single locomotive will pull eighty cars on the level grades of the River roads. In the even keener compet.i.tion bound to come, this advantage of grades and curves will be a factor of immense importance.

The third cla.s.s of future commerce is the world-wide. No western American can contemplate the future of the world without being persuaded that the Pacific Ocean and its sh.o.r.es will be the scene of the greatest problems of the twentieth century. If this prove true, that world commerce of the Pacific will seek that point of the American continent which most swiftly and cheaply communicates with the eastern side of the continent and with Europe. Granting that a large part of world commerce will pa.s.s through the Panama Ca.n.a.l, there will still be, without question, an immense trade between the Orient and such points in our own country as are so far from the Atlantic seaboard that a transcontinental route is a necessity.

Moreover, even for our Atlantic seaboard and for Europe, there will be large amounts of products, for the transit of which time will be a great object. Hence we may be sure that there will be extensive world commerce across the American continent. If so, where will it cross? Inspection of a globe demonstrates that the Columbia River route is shortest, and, for reasons already given, it is cheapest of all.

Puget Sound is its only present compet.i.tor. But the water-grade through the Cascade Mountains, along the banks of the Columbia, const.i.tutes an advantage beyond the reach of permanent compet.i.tion. Here, however, the critic comes in and claims that the Bar at the mouth of the River forbids entrance of the largest s.h.i.+ps. This in a measure is true, though the difficulties of the Columbia Bar have been grossly exaggerated. There are over twenty-five feet of water on the Bar at the lowest tide. The flood-tide adds from six to twelve feet. In any ordinary weather, forty feet of water is safe enough for any vessel. But if marine architecture is going to keep pace with growing commerce, we may soon have s.h.i.+ps drawing forty or fifty feet of water. If so, the Bar may indeed seriously block the heaviest commerce. Some observers have, therefore, believed that the big freights of the future will enter the Straits of Fuca, go to some one of the Puget Sound ports, thence pa.s.s by rail across the low tract of country between the Sound and the Columbia River, and proceed thence by the River route to the interior and eastward. This would combine the advantages of the two great routes of the Pacific North-west, abundant depth of water, low alt.i.tudes, and easy grades. This would, in truth, come nearest to realising the dream of the old navigators, the Strait of Anian.

In any event, the future world will look to our River as the goal of markets as well as of vision, and as a highway of nations both for freights and for tourists.

PART II

A Journey Down the River

CHAPTER I

In the Heart of the Canadian Rockies

Extent of Navigation on the River--Attractions of a Canoe Journey--The Canadian Pacific Railroad--Banff and Lake Louise--Summit of the Rockies--The Continental Divide and its Western Descent--Field and the Wapta River--Golden and the Upper Columbia--Peculiar Interlocking of the Columbia and the Kootenai, and Professor Dawson's Explanation of this--Views of the Selkirks and the Rockies--Some Steamboat Men and their Tales--Captain Armstrong's Adventures on the Kootenai--The Picture Rocks--Lake Windermere--The Location of the Old Thompson Fort--Baptiste Morigeau and his Stories of Pioneer Days--The War between the Shuswaps and the Okanogans--Down the River from Golden--Rapids and Navigation--By the Canadian Pacific through the Selkirks--Glacier and the Illecillewaet--Revelstoke and the River again--Wise Management of the Canadian Government and the Railroad.

A journey upon the River may best begin with its source and end with the ocean. It is about fourteen hundred miles by the windings of the stream from its origin in the upper Columbia Lake to the Pacific. It descends twenty-five hundred feet in that distance. It is therefore swift in many places. Yet it would be possible to descend almost the entire length of the River in a small boat. Nor can one imagine a more fascinating journey, especially if he could conjure back the shades of the great _voyageurs_ of seventy years ago, as Monique and Charlefoux, famous in Dr. McLoughlin's time, and listen to their gay song, mingling with the plash of oars:

Rouli, roulant, ma boule roulant, En roulant, ma boule roulant.

The way of approach for the Eastern tourist to a journey down the Columbia is by the Canadian Pacific Railway, a magnificent road in a gallery of masterpieces. Wonders begin before he reaches the western watershed. He will see Banff, with its hot springs, its immense hotel, its Bow River and Falls and Valley. He will see the gem of the Canadian Rockies, one of the gems of the earth, Lake Louise. Imagine a glistening wall of purest white, Mts. Lefroy and Victoria, with a vast glacier descending from them, great bastions of variously tinted rock closing on either side as a frame of the snowy picture, and in front a lake, small indeed, but of perfect form, a mirror in which the snowy wall, the glacier, the rocky ramparts, find a duplication as distinct as themselves.

A few miles farther west, and the traveller will find himself at one of the most significant of all places, the Continental Divide. Eastward the water flows into the Bow, thence into the Saskatchewan, and ultimately into the Atlantic. Westward the springs find their way to the branches of the Wapta, thence to the Columbia and the Pacific. The long westward ascent which we have followed all the way from Winnipeg ends at last. The track becomes level. We are at the summit. Looking southward we can see descending the steep slope, a clear mountain stream, which is parted into two branches by a little wall of stone. One branch goes east to the Atlantic, the other west to the Pacific.

It must have been of some such place, though farther north, that Holmes was imagining when he wrote:

Yon stream, whose sources run Turned by a pebble's edge, Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun, Through the cleft mountain-ledge.

The slender rill had strayed But for the slanting stone, To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid Of foam-flecked Oregon.

At the parting of the streams, a pretty rustic framework has been erected, bearing the words, "The Continental Divide."

We are now on the Columbia's waters. We are also in the heart of the Canadian Rockies, and in the midst of a perfect sea of mountains. It has been said that British Columbia is "fifty or sixty Switzerlands rolled into one." Here are five distinct ridges, up and down, and through and around which, the Columbia and its affluents chase each other in a dizzy dance.

The descent of the west side of the Divide is appallingly steep. From Stephen to Field is a drop of one thousand two hundred and fifty-seven feet in ten miles. In that distance are several places which reach two hundred and thirty-six feet to the mile. Most explicit directions are given to engineers in respect to handling trains on this grade. A speed of only six miles an hour is allowed, and frequent stops and tests of air-brakes and signals are required. By reason of the exceeding care, no serious accident has ever occurred. In ascending three locomotives are required for an ordinary train.

There are several splendid resorts on the line of the Canadian railroad.

Banff and Lake Louise are the resorts on the east side of the Divide. The first one west of that point is Field. There, as at all the other resorts, the hotels are managed by the Canadian Pacific Railroad Company. They are conducted with great skill and elegance, and may well be regarded as a tribute to the business ability and artistic taste of the managers.

As we descend the steep grade from Stephen to Field, we catch glimpses of peak after peak, range after range, valley after valley, glacier after glacier, purple, saffron, red, dazzling white, glistening greens and blues. Mt. Stephen lifts its great wall over a mile of almost perpendicular height, and nearly opposite is the spire of Mt. Burgess.

Mountain wonders and attractions of every sort lie in all directions from Field. Perhaps the finest is Yoho Valley. There are the Takkakaw Falls, twelve hundred feet high. There is the Wapta Glacier, itself a part of a prodigious ice-field, known as Wahputekh, lying between the towering heights of Mts. Gordon, Balfour, and Tralltinderne.

Leaving Field, the road runs between two chains of mountains, the Ottertail on the north and the Van Horne on the south. The former is bold and spire-like in outline, with the snow-fields and ice pinnacles of Mt.

Goodwin closing the vista. The latter is less bold in contour, but has a colouring of yellow rock-slopes in beautiful contrast with the rich purple of the lower forests.

Pa.s.sing between those sublime mountain chains, we soon plunge into the Wapta canon, with its perpendicular walls of rock rising hundreds of feet on either side. The Wapta is more commonly known as the Kicking Horse. It received that name in this wise. The Palliser exploring expedition of 1858 had been seeking unsuccessfully a feasible route through the Rockies. In the progress of the search, Sir James Hector, then in charge of the party, pitched camp on the Wapta. While there a vicious horse kicked him with such effect that he was left on the ground apparently dead. The three Indians with him had, in fact, dug his grave.

But while they were conveying him to it, he suddenly came to himself.

Having recovered, he became curious to follow the stream where he had met with the disaster. As a result he discovered the canon and a short route through the main chain. Upon the pa.s.s he bestowed the name of "Kicking Horse," and this has latterly been bestowed upon the river itself. The river is one of the most remarkable of the tributaries of the upper Columbia. It drains a cordon of glaciated peaks, from which it bears a vast volume of water, foaming and frothing with frequent cataracts down the steep descent, from fifty to a hundred feet to the mile.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Natural Bridge Kicking Horse or Wapta River, and Mt.

Stephen, B. C. Photo. by C. F. Yates.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Sunrise on Columbia River, near Washougal. (Copyright, 1902, by Kiser Photograph Co.)]

Forty-five miles west of the Divide we reach Golden on the Columbia. It is indeed a thrilling moment to the traveller when he first sets eyes upon these head-waters of the River of the West. Golden is a pleasant little town, a hundred and fifty miles below the upper Columbia Lake and twelve hundred and fifty by the windings of the River from its destination in the Pacific.

At Golden we must pause and make ready for our first journey on the River.

The greater part of the tourist travel pa.s.ses by Golden, not realising that between that pretty town and the lakes lie some of the most charming scenes in all the vast play-ground of British Columbia.

We find at Golden several steamboats in command of captains who are very princes of good fellows, as Captain Armstrong of the _Ptarmigan_ and Captain Blakeney of the _Isabel_, with whom we may journey from Golden to Lake Windermere. Over the hundred miles between these two points the Columbia is a slack-water stream, having a descent of but fifty feet in the distance from the extreme head waters to Golden. Over considerable part of this distance the River runs in bayous. These bayous or channels wind their serpentine courses through low flats, flooded at high water, and exposing fair expanses of vivid green at the subsidence of the waters.

Professor Dawson, the eminent Canadian geologist, made a study of this section of the River some years before his death, and as a result expressed the opinion that the section of the Columbia above the mouth of Blue River, some thirty miles below Golden, formerly united with the Kootenai. But owing to some convulsion of nature, the surface was tilted just sufficiently to turn the section of the stream from Columbia Lake toward the north instead of the south, with the result that we have this slack-water system of lagoons and lakes const.i.tuting this marvellously picturesque division of the River. Now in confirmation of this theory of Professor Dawson we have in the relations of the Columbia and Kootenai the singular geographical phenomenon already referred to in an earlier chapter. The Kootenai runs through "Ca.n.a.l Flats," in which the upper Columbia Lake is situated, and comes within a mile of that lake. It is nine feet higher than the lake, but there is no high land there, and at one time a ca.n.a.l joined the Kootenai with the lake. This ca.n.a.l was wrecked in the great flood of 1894, but steamboats had run through it from the Kootenai to the Columbia, and it would be entirely feasible to reconstruct it. After having thus pa.s.sed within a mile of each other and evidently having once been actually connected, the two rivers part company. The Columbia flows north and the Kootenai south. Each makes a vast bend. Again they reverse directions, the Columbia flowing south and the Kootenai north, and then come together many miles from their point of separation.

Aside from the unique beauty of the lagoons and the gra.s.sy sh.o.r.es, the eye of the traveller is delighted with the two mountain chains which confront each other across those gla.s.sy channels throughout the entire stretch from Golden to Windermere. On the east side is the main chain of the Rockies, and on the west are the Selkirks.

As we proceed on the deep, still stream, gliding from channel to channel, we may find ourselves mightily entertained by the conversation of such a navigator as Captain Armstrong or Captain Blakeney. For each can command a fund of historical and descriptive matter of rare interest.

Captain Armstrong was one of the earliest pilots on the Kootenai. In 1894 he built the _North Star_ at Jennings, Montana, ran her up the wild stream to Ca.n.a.l Flats, thence through the ca.n.a.l to the Columbia lakes, and into the River itself. A more exquisite stretch of river navigation than that through Columbia Lake, Lake Adela, and Lake Windermere, and from them into the lagoons of the River, can scarcely be found or even imagined, and it was the lot of the _North Star_ to ply upon that route until her unhappy destruction by fire in 1900.

There is little danger of accident on the placid water of the uppermost Columbia, but it is far different on the Kootenai. We heard many a tale of steamboating adventure from these pilots.

One of these so well ill.u.s.trates those old-time conditions that we repeat here its chief points. Captain Armstrong owned two steamers, the _Ruth_ and the _Gwendoline_. Both were engaged in transporting freight by way of Jennings to Fort Steele and the various mining camps in that district. The business was enormously profitable, for the boats received two and one half cents a pound. At that particular time there were twenty-six cars on the Great Northern Railway awaiting s.h.i.+pments.

From his two steamers Captain Armstrong sometimes made two thousand dollars a day in gross receipts. But though profitable, the business was also correspondingly risky. The Jennings Canon, above Bonner's Ferry, is, perhaps, the worst piece of water that has ever been navigated on the Columbia or its tributaries. A strip of water, foaming-white, down-hill almost as on a steep roof, hardly wider than the steamboat, savage-looking rocks waiting to catch hold of any unwary craft that might venture through,--so forbidding in fact was that route that Captain Armstrong found no insurance agent that felt disposed to insure his boats and cargo.