Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14.djvu/714

704 the most magnificent views in all earthly scenery. Within a single sweep of vision were seven snow-peaks, the Three Sisters, Mount Jefferson, Mount Hood, Mount Adams, and Mount St. Helen's, with the dim suggestion of an eighth colossal mass, which might be Rainier. All these rose along an arc of not quite half the horizon, measured between ten and eighteen thousand feet in height, were nearly conical, and absolutely covered with snow from base to pinnacle. The Three Sisters, a triplet of sharp, close-set needles, and the grand masses of Hood and Jefferson, showed mountainesque and earthly; it was at least possible to imagine them of us and anchored to the ground we trod on. Not so with the others. They were beautiful, yet awful ghosts,—spirits of dead mountains buried in old-world cataclysms, returning to make on the brilliant azure of noonday blots of still more brilliant white. I cannot express their vague, yet vast and intense splendor, by any other word than incandescence. It was as if the sky had suddenly grown white-hot in patches. When we first looked, we thought St. Helen's an illusion,—an aurora, or a purer kind of cloud. Presently we detected the luminous chromatic border,—a band of refracted light with a predominant orange-tint, which outlines the higher snow-peaks seen at long range,—traced it down, and grasped the entire conception of the mighty cone. No man of enthusiasm, who reflects what this whole sight must have been, will wonder that my friend and I clasped each other's hands before it, and thanked God we had lived to this day.

We had followed down the beautiful valley of the Willamette to Portland, finding everywhere glimpses of autumnal scenery as delicious as the hills and meadows of the Housatonic. Putting up in Portland at the Dennison House, we found the comforts of civilization for the first time since leaving Sisson's, and a great many kind friends warmly interested in furthering our enterprise. I have said that I do not know why Portland was built on the Willamette. The point of the promontory between the Willamette and the Columbia seems the proper place for the chief commercial city of the State; and Portland is a dozen miles south of this, up the tributary stream. But Portland does very well as it is,—growing rapidly in business-importance, and destined, when the proper railway-communications are established, to be a sort of Glasgow to the London of San Francisco. When we were there, there was crying need of a telegraph to the latter place. That need has now been supplied, and the construction of the no less desirable railroad must follow speedily. The country between Shasta Peak and Salem is at present virtually without an outlet to market. No richer fruit and grain region exists on the Pacific slope of the continent. No one who has not travelled through it can imagine the exhaustless fertility which will be stimulated and the results which will be brought forth, when a continuous line of railroad unites Sacramento or even Tehama with the metropolis of Oregon.

Among the friends who welcomed us to Portland were Messrs. Ainsworth and Thompson, of the Oregon Steamship Company. By their courtesy we were afforded a trip up the Columbia River, in the pleasantest quarters and under the most favorable circumstances.

We left Portland the evening before their steamer sailed, taking a boat belonging to a different line, that we might pass a night at Fort Vancouver, and board the Company's boat when it touched at that place the next morning. We recognized our return from rudimentary society to civilized surroundings and a cultivated interest in art and literature, when the captain of the little steamer Vancouver refused to let either of us buy a ticket, because he had seen Bierstadt on the upper deck at work with his sketch-book, and me by his side engaged with my journal.

The banks of the Willamette below Portland are low and cut up by small