Page:The Columbia River - Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery Its Commerce.djvu/303

Rh as twenty-five hundred miles, in which he probably included the lakes. Generally speaking, the rivers of the Pacific slope descend from high altitudes in comparatively short distances, and are necessarily swift. Hence we can expect no such vast extent of navigable water on them as the Mississippi and its affluents offer. Aside from the Columbia itself, the main streams, east of the Cascade Mountains offering steamboat transportation, are the Snake, Okanogan, and Kootenai, together with Lakes Pend Oreille, Chelan, Cœur d'Alene, Flathead, Okanogan, Kootenai, Arrow, Christina, and Slocan. On the west side are the Willamette, Cowlitz, and Lewis rivers.

It would fill a volume to narrate even a tithe of the thrilling tales of daring and tragedy which gather around the subject of boating in all its forms on the Columbia.

One of the most remarkable steamboat journeys was that elsewhere described in this work, under command of Captain F. P. Armstrong, of the North Star, from Jennings, Montana, on the Kootenai to Canal Flats and thence through the canal to Lake Columbia. With that should be coupled as equally daring and more difficult, the trip down Snake River, from the Seven Devils to Lewiston, in a steamer piloted by Captain W. P. Gray.

Undoubtedly the most remarkable journey in any other sort of craft than a steamboat was that undertaken by a party of eighteen miners in 1865. They built a large sailing boat at Colville and in her ran up the entire course of the River, never having their boat entirely out of water, though our informant says that they must have had her on skids part of