The arena of their peaceful contest was worthy of their daring. "'A land of old upheaven from the abyss,' a land of deepest deeps and highest heights, of richest verdure here, and barest desolation there, of dense forest on one side, and wide extended prairies on the other; a land of contrasts, contrasts in contour, hues, productions, and history,"--thus Professor Lyman describes the stage which the pioneers found set for them. The tremendous problems of its development, due to its topography, its remoteness, its magnificent distances, and its lack of transportation, demanded men of sturdiest fiber and intrepid leading. No pages of our history tell a finer story of action and initiative than those which enroll the names of McLoughlin, the great Company's autocratic governor, not unfitly called "the father of Oregon," and Whitman, the martyr, with the frontier leaders who fashioned the first ship of state launched in the Northwest, and their contemporaries, the men who built the first towns, roads, schools, mills, steamboats and railways. [Illustration: COPYRIGHT G. M. WEISTER The grim sentinels of "the Wallula Gateway," huge basaltic pillars that rise on the south bank of the river, where it crosses the Washington-Oregon line. View looking south.] [Illustration: COPYRIGHT, KISER PHOTO CO. Tumwater, the falls of the Columbia at Celilo; total drop, twenty feet at low water. In Summer, when the snow on the Bitter Root and Rocky Mountains is melting, the river rises often more than sixty feet. Steamboats have then passed safely down. Wishram, an ancient Indian fishing village, was on the north bank below the falls, and Indians may often still be seen spearing salmon from the shores and islands here.] Macaulay tells us that a people who are not proud of their forebears will never deserve the pride of their descendants. The makers of Old Oregon included as fair a proportion of patriots and heroes as the immigrants of the Mayflower. We who journey up or down the Columbia in a luxurious steamer, or ride in a train _de luxe_ along its banks, are the heirs of their achievement. Honor to the dirt-tanned ox-drivers who seized for themselves and us this empire of the river and its guardian snow-peaks! A lordly river, broad and deep, With mountains for its neighbors, and in view Of distant mountains and their snowy tops. [Illustration: COPYRIGHT. G. M. WEISTER Summit of Mount Hood, viewed from western end of the ridge, showing north side of the peak in July.] [Illustration: COPYRIGHT, KISER PHOTO CO. Columbia River and Mt. Hood, seen from White Salmon, Washington. "Beloved mountain, I Thy worshiper, as thou the sun's, each morn My dawn, before the dawn, receive from thee; And think, as thy rose-tinted peak I see, That thou wert great when Homer was not born, And ere thou change all human song shall die."--Helen Hunt Jackson.]