More Than Half Its Course Is
Through A Chain Of Lakes, The Largest Of Which At The Head Of The
River Is Over Sixty Miles In Length.
From its confluence with the
Okinagan the river pursues a southerly course for a hundred and fifty
miles, most of the way through a dreary, treeless, parched plain to
meet the great south fork.
The Lewis, or Snake, River is nearly a
thousand miles long and drains nearly the whole of Idaho, a territory
rich in scenery, gold mines, flowery, grassy valleys, 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.
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