Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/409

 From Youth to Age As An American. 381 light; Aeolian harps are nothing in comparison to a feeling stock o^^^ler. My description may be indefinite, but it is known up to and over the passes of the Rocky Mountains, 800 miles. I understand, reaching the head of the cold, rich, Sas- katchewan Valley. This wind, robbed of most of its rain by the Coast and Cascades, takes the snow off the country like a charm. But this is not all: the "Oregon," the "Columbia," the ''River of the West," second in size only to the Mississippi, is sand and gravel-making until it passes The Dalles, 200 miles from the ocean. From Cape Horn Rock, about 125 miles from the Columbia bar, the Chinook is an up-stream wind; some- times so strong that it compels the largest river steamers to tie up. The writer has seen it take the water from the river in sheets, and throw it up as spray, fog, and cloud. From <^ape Horn to Wind Mountain must be twenty-five or thirty miles of the grandest river and mountain scenery in the world. When not charged with rain, this Chinook charges itself with dry dust, sand, silt, and volcanic ash, and from weatherings of the broken basaltic rocks that largely line the grand gorge which this grand river makes through the Cascades; and de- posits it in recesses like the Hood River and White Salmon val- leys, but often at bends of its canyon, taking it up as an imperceptible dust, and laying it on the Klickitat, Wasco, and Sherman County Plains. In some places this action is so strong as to form sand dunes, as at Celilo, the mouth of the Deschutes, or extensive plains, as at Umatilla ; but this will be found true : that slopes declining from the forces of the Chi- nook wind are the best grain lands. The wind movement is generally opposite to the stream. The effect of this wind has been going on in the water courses as they have been formed in the uncounted years since the last volcanic era, widening the valleys as the wear of the