The lesson we have really been learning to-day, however, is not so much of Portland as of the river Columbia, the really "mighty Columbia."
At 9:30 we took a train on the Oregon Shortline Railway up along the Columbia--south shore--to the locks at the Cascades, a three hours' run, and then came down again upon a powerful steamboat of the Yukon type, though not so large. It took us about four and one-half hours with only three landings and with the current. The last fifteen or twenty miles of the trip the river was fully two miles wide, although at the Cascades it had narrowed to be no broader than the Kanawha. On either side the valley was generally occupied by farms and meadows, grazing cattle, many orchards, substantial farmsteads. A long-time settled country and naturally fertile. And along either shore, at intervals of not more than a quarter of a mile, were the fish-traps, the wheels, the divers handy contrivances of man, to catch the infatuated salmon. Until I saw the swarming waters of that creek of Ketchikan, my mind had failed to comprehend the fatuity of these fish. This year, owing, they say, to the influence of the hatcheries established by the Government, the catch of salmon here has been enormous; so great, in fact, that "hundreds of _tons_" of the salmon had to be thrown away, owing to the inability of the canneries to handle them before they had spoiled.
[Illustration: ALONG THE COLUMBIA RIVER.]
The Portland people whom I have met and talked with all tell me that even though Seattle secures the Alaskan trade, even though Seattle and Tacoma obtain the lion's share of the waxing commerce of China and Japan, yet will Portland be great, because she must ever remain the mistress of the trade of that vast region drained by the Columbia and the Willamette, all of whose products come to her by water, or by a rail haul that is wholly downgrade. And when I realize that the Columbia is plied by steamboats even up in Canada, a thousand miles inland, where we traversed its valley on the Canadian Pacific Railway, and that when Uncle Sam has built a few more locks, these same boats can then come down to Portland, and Portland boats ascend even to the Canadian towns, as well as traverse Washington and enter Idaho and Montana, then is it that I realize that the future of this fine city is most certainly well assured.