# The Columbia River: Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery, Its Commerce/Part 2/Chapter 3

CHAPTER III
In the Land of Wheat-field, Orchard, and Garden
Increasing Population and Cultivation as we go South—Chelan and Wenatchee Orchards—The Wheat-plains East of Wenatchee to Spokane—Spokane, the Metropolis of the Inland Empire—The Falls and their Power—Interesting Points in and around Spokane—The Palouse Farming Country—Snake River and its Orchards—Vast Irrigating Enterprises of the Upper Snake—Shoshone Falls—Walla Walla—Waiilatpu and Whitman Monument—Whitman College—Pendleton and its Wheat-fields and Historical Characters—Wallowa Lake—From Wenatchee to Priest Rapids—Origin of Name of Priest Rapids—Irrigating Enterprises below Priest Rapids—By Steamboat from Priest Rapids to Pasco—The Yakima Valley, its Fruits and Towns—Pasco and Kennewick and the Meeting of the Waters—Prospects of the Future for the Irrigable Country—From Pasco to Celilo—The Umatilla Palisades—Umatilla Rapids—Tumwater Falls—The Canal and Locks at Celilo—What Will be Accomplished by them for the Inland Empire—The Dalles—Its Historic Interest—Its Wool Business, its Horticultural and Agricultural Resources, its Scenery.
OUR journey on the River thus far has been mainly in those sections where scenery is the greatest product, and where the country, scantily inhabited, has almost as primitive an appearance as when the gay songs of the voyageurs raised the echoes against the rock-walls of the lakes, while paddles and bateau-prows started correspondent ripples on the clear surface.
But as we proceed southward into the State of ​Washington, we find more and more evidences of cultivation and inhabitancy. At the mouths of the streams and on the frequent "benches" and islands, orchards and gardens attest the enterprise and patience of the settlers. Around the lower end of Lake Chelan the big red apple, luscious peaches, plethoric pears, huge bunches of grapes, like the grapes of Eschol, make a picture of fruitfulness and delight. When we reach Wenatchee on the Columbia,—a river, a lake, and a town of the same name, meaning in the native tongue the "butterfly,"—we find ourselves in the uppermost of those belts of fruit land which have made the River so famous. As we stroll through these model orchards and vines and berry patches and gardens, and see the wonders wrought on the arid soil by the life-giving waters of the Wenatchee, we are almost ready to join the throng that are continually accepting the invitation to "be independent on ten acres of land and find health, wealth, and happiness in Wenatchee." In truth, these irrigated lands are marvels of productiveness. The valley of the Wenatchee is small, and not over twelve thousand acres are yet in productive bearing; but in 1907 not less than five hundred carloads of fruit and vegetables were shipped.
One must necessarily visit Spokane on a journey through the great wheat country. Spokane, the metropolis and the pride of Eastern Washington, is a wonder to the Eastern tourist. Such a city, over one hundred thousand people, with costly brick and stone buildings, four, six, ten stories high, impressive public buildings, schools, churches, hotels, hundred-foot avenues well-paved, private dwellings of architectural excellence,—and hardly a soul there thirty years ago!
A grand spectacle the falls offered the eye in old Spokane, but now, alas, so cribbed and cabined is the noble stream by the march of industrial and electrical power that its wild energy is well-nigh gone except at the highest water. The total fall in the Spokane River is one hundred and forty-six feet, and the horse-power capacity at low water is forty thousand, at high water over half a million.
Many points of interest must be hastily passed. The author feels great reluctance to omit a visit to the State College of Washington at Pullman, and the University of Idaho at Moscow. There are also historic spots, as one at Rosalia where a monument has recently been erected in commemoration of the Steptoe defeat in 1858, and the site of the first church in Eastern Washington on Walker's Prairie, where Eells and Walker started a mission for the Spokane Indians in 1838. There is also at the junction of the Spokane and Little Spokane, the site of Spokane House, a post ​of the Hudson's Bay Company, started in 1811. One might also well desire to visit the location of the old Spokane Bridge, where Colonel Wright crushed forever the pride and power of the Spokanes by killing eight hundred of their choicest horses.
On whatever side viewed, either past or present, or in the forecast of the future, Spokane is worthy of careful study. Its extensive railroad system and its network of electric lines reaching the many lakes, garden and fruit tracts, and rapidly developing suburbs, are concentrating the interests of a vast and wealthy region. But there are other cities to see and other boomers to hear and other bright futures to forecast, and so we turn our faces southward on the line of the O. R. & N. Railway, passing through vale after vale between the swelling prairies, with wheat, wheat, wheat, oats, oats, oats, hay, hay, hay, cattle, horses, hogs, apple trees, and sugar beets, elegant farmhouses on the knolls and spacious barns in the hollows,—the great Palouse farming country, one of the most productive in the world. Whitman County has produced eight million bushels of wheat in a season, besides vast quantities of other products.
No one could consider that he had really seen Snake River unless he had visited the Great Shoshone Falls, or "Pahchulaka." This sublime manifestation of nature's power is about forty miles from the town of Shoshone on the Oregon Short Line. The total descent is nearly three hundred feet, of which eighty consists of cataracts and chutes broken by rocky islands, while the entire stream unites in the one final plunge of two hundred and twelve feet. It is ten hundred and fifty feet wide, and the walls of basaltic rock rise perpendicularly a thousand feet. Niagara is the only waterfall on the American continent that can be compared with Shoshone. Niagara is much ​wider but not so high. Its banks are tame, while those of Shoshone are wildly sublime.
The spectres of history rise up at every stage of a journey along Snake River. But we cannot pause. We pass on from the crossing of Snake River and soon find ourselves approaching Walla Walla. This is the most historic city of the Inland Empire and the oldest of the entire State of Washington, with the exception of Vancouver. The pleasant-sounding name signifies in the native tongue "Many Waters," though more literally, as the author has been told by an old Cayuse Indian, "Place where four creeks meet." The city of Walla Walla is thirty-two miles from the Columbia River in the midst of a broad and fertile valley, through which dozens of clear rivulets issuing from springs make their way through the birches and cottonwoods. The warm climate, rich soil, and abundant water, with multitudes of trees, give the "Garden City" an appearance of almost tropical luxuriance. On all sides for many miles stretch the wheat-fields, orchards, gardens, and alfalfa-fields. It is a land of plenty. It is commonly said that Walla Walla has more automobiles, more bicycles, more pianos, more flowers, and more pretty girls in proportion to population, than any other town in the North-west.
From Walla Walla we take a flying trip through the continued wheat belt on the Umatilla and its branches in Northern Oregon, a region similar to that around Walla Walla, rich and fruitful. Of this part of Oregon, Pendleton on the Umatilla is the metropolis. The Umatilla Indian Reservation, one of the most important in the history of this country, adjoins it. One of the most interesting persons in North-west history, now deceased, lived at Pendleton many years, Dr. William C. McKay, the son of Thomas McKay, and grandson of Alexander McKay, the last named being that one of the Astor company who lost his life on the Tonquin. Dr. William McKay was a three-quarter-blood Indian, but he was well educated and ​one of the most interesting men in our history. Another noted man, still living in the prime of life, is Major Lee Moorehouse, famous in earlier times as an Indian fighter and agent, and more recently as one of the most successful students and photographers of Indian life. Some of his pictures have gained national fame, and the publishers of this volume are indebted to his courtesy for their appearance here. Another interesting fact in connection with Pendleton is that here the Pendleton Indian robes and blankets are manufactured, and these have borne the name of their home place to all parts of the United States and even the world.
While in this part of Oregon we must take advantage of the opportunity to visit Lake Wallowa, with its tragic and pathetic memories of Indian war and early settlement and with its glorious scenery, almost equal to that of Chelan. Right over the lake, deep-set in precipitous mountain walls, towers the battlemented crest of Eagle Cap, which the people of Wallowa now declare to be the highest mountain in Oregon, 12,000 feet in elevation. Wallowa Lake is the veritable jewel of the Blue Mountains, a chain which, while not in general equal to the Cascades for height, grandeur, and variety, possesses in the Wallowa Basin a group of attractions not surpassed in any part of the North-west.
The country around Priest Rapids is barren and unpromising in its natural state, but just below the foot of the rapids is one of the most interesting irrigation projects in the State. Along the west side of the River for twenty-five miles extends a belt of the most fertile land. An immense pumping plant run by electricity, which in turn is generated by the current, has been put in at the foot of the rapids. By this the water is conducted over the twenty thousand or more acres of land available, and it is the expectation that within a few years a dense population will line the river bank and repeat on a larger and finer scale the miracle of redemption by water already performed at various points on the River and its tributaries. Several town sites, of which the chief is Hanford, named from the president of the company, have already been laid out, and investments both in town property and orchard land are being rapidly made. The same process of irrigating is becoming inaugurated at many points from Hanford for a hundred and fifty miles down the River. It is plain to the observer that it is but a question of time when the shores of the River in this arid section will bloom and blossom like the rose, and repeat the history of Old Nile in massing of population and creation of cities and towns. It has been estimated that there are about a million acres of irrigable land contiguous to the River between Chelan and The Dalles. Since from five to twenty acres of irrigated land are ample to maintain a family, and since cities and villages are ​bound to grow on such tracts commensurate with their productive capacity, it seems probable that a million people will sometime live on this long belt of fertile soil redeemed by the River.
The beauty of irrigation on the Columbia is that it can be made to pump itself. For by taking advantage of such a fall as that of Priest Rapids (a half million horse-power at ordinary water), electric power can be generated by which limitless water can be raised sufficiently to cover any desired amount of land. Some have expressed the opinion that this process would exhaust the River, but this is hardly possible. For the great demands are in June and July when the River is at its flood. It has been estimated that at low water the Columbia at Celilo discharges 125,000 cubic feet per second, and at extreme high water, 1,600,000 cubic feet per second. Such a prodigious volume of water would be scarcely at all affected by any possible withdrawals.
The productive capacity of these fat lands when softened with an irrigating ditch and tickled with a hoe or cultivator is almost beyond belief. In 1907 an orchardist in what is known as Parker Bottom in the Yakima Valley raised on fifty-eight pear trees a crop of pears which was sold for over three thousand dollars. This statement is well attested, extraordinary as it sounds. It should be understood that such production does not represent an average yield. The trees were of large size and of the choicest variety, while conditions of production, price, and sale were of the best. Yet similar records may be found in Wenatchee, Hood River, Walla Walla, and others of the fine fruit-producing regions of the Columbia Valley. A man in the Touchet Valley near Dayton, who had been for twenty years a teacher at an average salary of a thousand a year, became discontented with his narrow conditions, and by making credit arrangements for a rich body of land has devoted himself for some years to the development of an apple orchard. He has a hundred acres of trees, young and of choice varieties, from which in the year 1907 he sold thirty-four thousand boxes of fruit for approximately fifty thousand dollars.
​But while we have been flying in imagination over the spacious valley of the Yakima, our steamer has been speeding down the broad River, and we are now within sight of a vast prairie stretching east and south, bounded on the southern horizon by the azure wall, ridged with white, of the Blue Mountains. To the east, this great plain melts into the sky. In fact it extends to the Bitter Root Mountains, a distance of over two hundred miles. On the west bank of the River we see a narrower plain bounded by a steep treeless ridge. On either bank we see taking shape before us houses and trees, while extended over the River, like threads of gossamer in the distance, a bridge is outlined against the sky. We soon discover that we are near Pasco on the east bank and Kennewick on the west bank of the River. The bridge is that of the Northern Pacific and Spokane, Portland, and Seattle Railroads. A mile below the bridge the Snake River joins its greater brother.
It is, in fact, obvious at a glance that here at the junction of the Columbia and Snake Rivers, at the crossings of the great railroads, and at the point of the greatest area of irrigable land in one body, with every advantage of soil, climate, and transportation, there is bound to be in the near future a large city. Already on the west side of the Columbia the beautiful little town of Kennewick, of three thousand inhabitants, where six years ago the jack-rabbits, coyotes, and sage-hens held sway, shows what can be done with water. For at that point the first irrigating canal was put through the waste, and the traveller can now see the results.
Other irrigating enterprises are now in progress, and by the time the readers of this volume come to descend the River in the splendid steamboats which will sometime run through canals and locks the whole length from Revelstoke to the ocean, there will be one of the most splendid cities in the North-west at this meeting of the waters. Pasco is likely to be the location of the big city. From Pasco there are steamers running to Celilo, conveying wheat. The traveller who desires to know the River from its surface should take passage on such a steamer. We see the same characteristic features of the inauguration of irrigating enterprises from point to point, but mainly the shores are still uninhabited and barren, and the River, mainly untouched by sail or steamer, sweeps on its swift course, as lonely as when Lewis and Clark first turned their canoe prows westward.
As we pass the desolate sand heaps near the ​disconsolate little old town of Wallula, we can recall the old Hudson's Bay fort, the Indian wars, the struggle for possession, the missions, the incoming immigrants, all the tragedy and striving which marked the century just closed. Below Wallula the Umatilla highlands throw a barrier eight hundred feet high athwart the course of the stream, and the bold escarpments of rock, palisades grander than those of the Hudson, attest the energy with which the River fulfilled his mission of cleaving the intercepting barrier in two. Below these palisades, a vast plain extends many miles on the south to where the purple line of the Blue Mountains cuts the horizon. On the margin of this plain the little town of Irrigon (where is published a paper with the alliterative title of the Irrigon Irrigationist of Irrigon, Oregon), green and flowery in the wide aridity, shows us again what part water plays in reclamation of land. Of similar interest is Blalock Island, commemorating the name of Dr. N. G. Blalock of Walla Walla, whom the North-west honours as the father of great enterprises.
This is the beginning of the greatest series of obstructions on the River and the point where the Government is now constructing a canal, by means of which the entire upper course of the River will be brought into connection with the lower. In the distance of twelve miles the River falls eighty-one feet at low water and sixty feet at high water. The Tumwater Falls at the head of this series of obstructions has a descent of twenty feet at low water, but at high water the volume of the River is so great that it passes directly over the fall and a boat can shoot over the steep slope. Here was one of the most famous places in early history. On the north side was the Wishram village, noted in Irving's Astoria. This, too, was the greatest place for fishing on the upper River. Even now the Indians gather in autumn in great numbers and can be seen spearing the salmon. Several immense fish-wheels also can be seen upon the verge of the falls.
The most remarkable of all these obstructions is Five-Mile Rapids. This is the place to which in the first place the French voyageurs applied the name Dalles, meaning a trough through the flat plates of rock. It is sometimes called the "Big Chute."
It is planned by the Government to overcome these obstructions by a canal and locks. The expense is estimated at four and a half million dollars. The ​sulting advantages will be vast. The greater part of the Inland Empire will be thrown open to steamer competition with the railroads. The freight tariff at the present time is heavier than in any other part of the United States. If the productive capacity of the region were not extraordinary, it could not have developed as it has with such a handicap. It is estimated that by the reduction of freight which will follow steamboat navigation, the Inland Empire will save not less than two million dollars annually. In the tremendous movement now sweeping over our country to improve waterways, the Columbia will bear its part and receive its improvement. It will be a great day for the storied and scenic River of the West when some magnificent excursion steamer descends the thousand miles from Revelstoke to the outer headlands. And with canals at Celilo, Priest Rapids, and Kettle Falls, with some improvements at minor points, at no immoderate expense, the thing can be done.
The scenery about The Dalles, with the majestic River, the great white cones of Hood and Adams, and wide sweeps of rolling prairie and hollowed hills, is noble and inspiring. It may be considered the gateway of the open prairie to the east and the passage of the Cascade Mountains by the River to the west.