COLUMBIA GORGE

The shivering pioneer woman about whom I wrote in the former post today could visit an overlook of the Columbia River Gorge, looking eastward, by driving her car up to the Vista House on the south shore (Oregon side). The river has been tamed considerably, too, by the 14 dams that interrupt its current.

One reason for installing the dams on the upper river, north of the US border, was to control seasonal high water periods. Imagine Portland residents far down river from Canada traveling the city streets in rowboats Yes, that did occur.

The pioneers who began their journey in Nebraska to and through the Columbia Gorge to the greenery of Oregon came down the waters above by raft and makeshift boats and left to trek a bit south of Portland to the pasture-like lands they settled. Others had abandoned river travel and struggled, wagons and all, over the Cascades Mountains south of the Columbia, so steep near Mount Hood that some fastened entire trees to the backs of the wagon to slow their descent into western Oregon lands.

Today western Oregon is a verdant plain from the Columbia south to about the city of Eugene, after which smaller mountains blocked southward travel intermittently all the way to California's valleys. Refer to a map of modern Interstate 5, the north-south freeway that runs from Canada to Mexico for orientation. The California bound pioneers that had split off way back in Nebraska approached it over mountain ranges, as well, such as the towering Sierras.  Pioneers were not a faint-hearted lot. In my book, Columbia River (Caxton, 2013) you may read about real people of that time traveling westward or down the entire river, including the first 440 miles in Canada from birth to when it entered the United States.