CHAPTER V 



WHERE the milky green waters of the Columbia 

 River roll steadily or churn into impatient rapids south- 

 westward in mid- Washington, looking for an opening in 

 the great Cascade Range that they may break through 

 to the Pacific, lies a land not many years ago a desert, 

 but now producing magnificent apples, apricots, and 

 cherries from its one-time seemingly hopeless soil. It is 

 a narrow land between high, basaltic cliffs and jagged 

 mountain walls, into which the river has cut still 

 deeper, a land of naked rock, of gray volcanic dust and 

 green sage brush, an arid land for all the water surging 

 by, water almost the exact colour of the sage. Before 

 man came the landscape was forbidding, dismal, a 

 thing of rock nakedness, of sage-green and dusty gray. 

 Only the eternal sweep of the great river and the 

 occasional glimpses of the far blue mountains whitened 

 with snow redeemed it from the sense of some primal 

 curse. Then man arrived, to build irrigation basins up 

 in the hills where the winter snows lay late, to run 

 pipe lines down to the flats of gray volcanic ash and 



67 



