We have been favored by Mr. H. H. Shank, of Hagerstown, Md., with the accompanying photographs and some notes of characteristic scenes on the Columbia River, Oregon, which were gathered during a recent tour in the far Western States.
     The traveled American whose journeyings have not been confined to the Old World, but include (as they too seldom do) a tour among the natural wonders of his native land, is impressed with the inconsistency of those people who roam, year by year, among the mountains, lakes and rivers of Europe, and neglect the natural beauties of their native land.  Majestic and impressive as the Alps may be, they do not lift their heads any more grandly than the summits of the Rockies, the Cascades or the Sierras; and nowhere are they clad with such a wealth of noble verdure as is spread about the base of our Western mountains.  The Rhine may seem to sweep in stately fashion beneath beetling cliffs and hills that soar loftily above its waters, but in the presence of the awe-inspiring heights and depths and changing shadows of the “Gorge of the Columbia River,” the Rhine becomes an insignificant memory, and the mind’s sense of dimension is baffled in the effort to take in this infinitely greater, nobler and more majestically beautiful Rhine of our native land.
     All too little known by the tourist is the land “where rolls the Oregon;” and those Eastern travelers who chance to spend a few weeks under its cloudless summer skies, where the atmosphere is so clear that mountain peaks which are over one hundred and fifty miles distant from the spectator stand out with clear cut profile, and on every side the eye roams easily over unwonted breadth and distance of landscape -- -- such travelers experience a sense of novelty and change which the mere summer trip to Europe can never awaken.
     “The Gorge of the Columbia” is the name given to a great natural rent in the wall of the Cascade Mountains, through which the Columbia River finds its way to the Pacific Ocean.  It places the towering walls of rock rise for thousands of feet all but perpendicularly from the edge of the waters.  Elsewhere the slope is more gradual and the inclination will be maintained with remarkable regularity from the shores of the river to an altitude of many thousands of feet.  Elsewhere again the sides of the gorge are rent into fantastic and colossal shapes.  Two of the most noted of these are shown in the accompanying illustration.  They are situated on the Oregon or southern side of the river, and stand out apart from the parent cliffs in solitary grandeur, guarding like a pair of giant sentinels, the line of the Transcontinental Railroad that threads its way between them.  On the very crest of the larger rock stands a solitary pine, secure from the woodman's ax.  In some respects the journey by this railroad is one of the most picturesque in the world.  It follows the torturous course of the river through the gorge, finding a precarious footing between beetling cliffs and foaming torrent, with the occasional variation of a long viaduct or “trestle” of timber to carry it across the bed of a mountain waterfall.  Of the latter there are several, the most notable being Latourelle Falls, a few miles down the river, where the stream leaps over 400 feet from the overhanging precipice, and the Multnomah Falls with its unbroken fall of  850 feet.

     About sixteen miles below The Dalles, an important river shipping point for the produce of Eastern Oregon, is Meneluse Island, situated well out in the middle of the river.  Memeluse is the Indian name for dead, and this island of the dead was formerly used by several of the local tribes as the last resting place for the bodies of their memeluse friends whose spirits had embarked for the happy hunting ground.  The Indians do not inture their dead, but place the body upon a raised staging, upon which are also placed certain of the belongings of the deceased.  It takes but a few years exposure to the elements to reduce such a burial ground to the condition shown in this weird reproduction of the camera.

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©  Jeffrey L. Elmer