Page:The Columbia River - Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery Its Commerce.djvu/544

380 the Tualatin, the Yamhill, the Clackamas, the Molalla, the La Creole, the Santiam, the Calapooia, affluents worthy of union with the Willamette, and if we could tarry among the vales and meadows and oak-crowned hills and distant Coast and Cascade ranges of mountains, all across that superb valley, fifty miles wide by a hundred and fifty long, as beautiful as Greece or Italy,—we would then all agree that the Willamette deserves a volume by itself and that it is almost a crime to introduce it so briefly here. Every old Oregonian, in thinking of the Willamette, at once associates it with the apostrophe to it by S. L. Simpson, the gifted and unfortunate poet of Oregon, whose genius deserved a wider recognition than it ever received. The first stanza of his poem is this:

And now that we have fairly entered the Willamette, it becomes speedily evident that we are in the near vicinity of a large and prosperous city. Steamboats, an occasional steamship, sailing ships, sometimes huge four-masted steel ships towed by coughing tugs, long booms of logs in tow of some spluttering stern-wheeler, scows of every description, gasoline launches, rowboats,—a motley fleet, they seem to be making they way with all possible haste upon the stream.