Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/50

30 when he weighed anchor, sailed out and southward to the point where he had struck the outflow of the great river, and then on May 11, 1792, succeeded in sailing in over the bar and up the river for twenty-five miles—and named the river after his ship—"The Columbia,"—our great Columbia.

From the log book of the Columbia, we take the following extracts: "At four o'clock in the morning of the nth, we beheld our desired port, bearing eastsoutheast, distant six leagues. At eight A. M. being a little to the windward of the entrance of the harbor, bore away, and ran in east-northeast, between the breakers, having from five to seven fathoms of water. When we were over the bar, we found this to be a large river of fresh water, up which we steered. Many canoes came alongside. At one P. M. came to, with the small bower, in ten fathoms, black and white sand. The entrance between the bars bore westsouthwest ten miles; the north side of the river, distant a half mile from the ship, the south side of the same, two and a half miles distant, a village on the north side of the river, west by north, distant three quarters of a mile. Vast numbers of the natives came alongside; people employed pumping the salt water out of our water-casks in order to fill with fresh, while the ship floated in. So ends."

"No, not so ends, Oh, modest Captain Gray of the ship Columbia (says Mrs. Victor), the end is not yet, nor will it be until all the vast territory, rich with every production of the earth, which is drained by the waters of the new found river shall have yielded up its illimitable wealth to distant generations."

And to this Yankee skipper from Boston, the American, Robert Gray, more honors—came in the exploration of the northwest—than to any other man. He was not only the first to sail a ship through the Straits of Fuca,—the discoverer of the Columbia river, but he was the first American to circumnavigate the globe under the national flag, which he did in 1790, by the way of Good Hope, trading his furs to the Chinese at Canton for a cargo of tea.

Here our record of the explorations of the northwest from the seacoast comes to a close. We have given enough to enable the reader to follow the story and see how these explorations gradually concentrated to the point of discovering the river which drains the empire which is building this city. The foundation of our title to the whole northwest clear up to the Alaskan boundary, and the natural selection of this point for the central and chief city of all this vast region will be better understood when reading future chapters after having read this chapter through.