Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III WASHINGTON In company with Warren I followed the course of the Snake from about the junction of the Powder Creek to the point where it joins the Columbia in Washington territory; and I have seldom had a harder or more adventurous ride. The ground is intersected by numerous creeks, some of them large, with fiercely roaring currents, which it is impossible to cross; and all running at the bottom of deep canons, varying in depth from 1000 to 2000 feet. These had to be headed at the cost sometimes of going 100 miles out of the direct course, for no horseman could possibly descend into them. Within a few miles of the frontiers of the two States a great change comes over the characteristics of the Snake. The stream quiets down very much so that boats and canoes can navigate it, though every here and there one meets with a deep and dangerous rapid—rapids which the Indians and others shoot without hesitation in spite of the great risk. Small steamers, and boats of larger size, however, in skilful hands, can negotiate these rapids in safety. The river still runs at the bottom of a pretty deep canon ; but to those who have seen the upper reaches it has lost its picturesqueness, and there is now no Chap, in.] COLUMBIA RIVER 99 difficulty in reaching the actual bank of the stream; indeed there was already a baby "city" or two on its very margin—cities that would, at this moment, be terrible outraged by comparison with babyhoodism. The general appearance of the banks, which are retired, as a rule, from i to 5 miles on either side, is that of bluffs rather than the walls of a canon, and trees are very sparsely scattered about them ; but the fell feller has had much to do with producing that scarcity. The waggon had been sent on weeks before my arrival, under cha...