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.
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