Page:The Columbia River - Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery Its Commerce.djvu/346

278 tourist travel passes by Golden, not realising that between that pretty town and the lakes lie some of the most charming scenes in all the vast play-ground of British Columbia.

We find at Golden several steamboats in command of captains who are very princes of good fellows, as Captain Armstrong of the Ptarmigan and Captain Blakeney of the Isabel, with whom we may journey from Golden to Lake Windermere. Over the hundred miles between these two points the Columbia is a slack-water stream, having a descent of but fifty feet in the distance from the extreme head waters to Golden. Over considerable part of this distance the River runs in bayous. These bayous or channels wind their serpentine courses through low flats, flooded at high water, and exposing fair expanses of vivid green at the subsidence of the waters.

Professor Dawson, the eminent Canadian geologist, made a study of this section of the River some years before his death, and as a result expressed the opinion that the section of the Columbia above the mouth of Blue River, some thirty miles below Golden, formerly united with the Kootenai. But owing to some convulsion of nature, the surface was tilted just sufficiently to turn the section of the stream from Columbia Lake toward the north instead of the south, with the result that we have this slack-water system of lagoons and lakes constituting this marvellously picturesque division of the River. Now in confirmation of this theory of Professor Dawson we have in the relations of the Columbia and Kootenai the singular geographical phenomenon already referred to in an earlier chapter. The Kootenai runs through "Canal