The Columbia River basin, alone of all the territories which the United States has added to its original area, was neither bought with money nor annexed by war. Its acquisition was a triumph of the American pioneer. Many nations looked with longing to this Northwest, but it fell a prize to the nation that neglected it. Spain and Russia wished to own it. Great Britain claimed and practically held it. The United States ignored it. For nearly half a century after the discovery of the river by a Yankee ship captain, Robert Gray, in 1792, and its exploration by Jefferson's expedition under Lewis and Clark, in 1805, its ownership was in question. For several decades after an American merchant, John Jacob Astor, had established the first unsuccessful trading post, in 1811, the country was actually ruled by the British through a private corporation. The magic circle drawn about it by the Hudson's Bay Company seemed impenetrable. Held nominally by the American and British governments in joint occupancy, it was in fact left to the halfbreed servants of a foreign monopoly that sought to hold an empire for its fur trade, and to exclude settlers because their farms would interfere with its beaver traps. Congress deemed the region worthless. [Illustration: Mount Adams, seen from Eagle Peak in the Rainier National Park. View shows some of the largest earth-folds in the Cascade Range, with the great canyon of the Cowlitz, one of the tributaries of the Columbia River. Elevation of camera 6,000 feet.] [Illustration: A clearing in the forest. Mount Hood from Sandy, twenty-five miles west of the peak.] But while sleepy diplomacy played its game of chess between Washington and London, the issue was joined, the title cleared and possession taken by a breed of men to whom the United States owes more than it can ever pay. From far east came the thin vanguard of civilization which, for a century after the old French and Indian war, pushed our boundaries resistlessly westward. It had seized the "dark and bloody ground" of Kentucky. It had held the Ohio valley for the young republic during the Revolution. It had built states from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi. And now, dragging its wagons across the plains and mountains, it burst, sun-browned and half-starved, into Oregon. Missionaries and traders, farmers, politicians and speculators, it was part of that army of restless spirits who, always seeing visions of more fertile lands and rising cities beyond, stayed and long in no place, until at last they found their way barred by the Pacific, and therefore stayed to build the commonwealths of Oregon, Washington and Idaho. [Illustration: An Indian Madonna and Child. Umatilla Reservation.] [Illustration: Finished portion of Canal at Celilo, which the Government is building around Tumwater Falls and The Dalles.]