of
the western flanks of the Cascades, winds the great river. The banks
become steeper, the mountains behind them more rugged. Fairy threads of
silver, falling water, flutter down from cliffs. Grotesque rocks, mighty
monuments erected by a titan fire god when the world was young, rise
sheer from the river's edge. Cumbersome fish wheels revolve sedately
where the silver-sided salmon run in the springtime. The railroads cling
close to the stream, perforce tunneling where nature has provided no
passageway, and the boat ploughs against the current which here and
there is swift and swirling as the cascades are approached. Then through
the locks you go, or by them if you travel by the steel highways, and
quickly the scenes change, these new ones painted in a vastly different
vein from those that have gone before.

The lofty, steep-walled hills become more gentle, and their cloak of
green timber merges into brown grass. The river rolls between banks of
barrenness as we emerge on the western rim of the land of little rain,
for the moisture-laden clouds from the Pacific are thwarted in their
eastern progress by the mountain barrier, along whose summits they
cluster weeping, in their baffled anger, upon the wet westerly slopes,
while the dry sunny eastland mocks their dour grayness. Close beside
the river is the harshest of all this rainless land; sand blows, the
cliffs are bare and black, the hillsides bleak and brown. But ever so
little away from the barren valley bottom are rich regions of orchards
and green fields, and easterly, in the countries of Walla Walla,
Palouse, and John Day, far-reaching fields of grain abound. Farming is
upon a bonanza basis, and the bigness of it all is reminiscent of the
Dakotas, were it not for the majestic mountain skylines, blessed visual
reliefs lacking altogether in the continental mid-regions. The volume
then, is bound misleadingly, and those who see naught but its
unprepossessing exterior gain no inkling of its charming hidden
chapters.

Then come The Dalles of the Columbia, close to the town of the same
name, where the river, a sane waterway for a half a thousand miles
above, suddenly goes mad for a brief space of lawless waterfall and
rock-rimmed cascades. At Walla Walla--whose very name means "where the
waters meet"--the two chief forks of the old Oregon River converge, the
Columbia proper and the Snake, the one draining a northern empire, the
other swinging southerly through Idaho, "